Unlikely Stories Mostly

by Alasdair Gray

  I had never known such space. The pure dark blueness was unstained by the faintest wisp of cloud. I lay flat on the planks with my head over the platform edge, trying to see the sunset on the horizon, but the golden shine of it was cut small by the web of bridges linking the summits lower down. I felt like a fly clinging to the tip of an arrow, the first of a flight of them soaring through infinite air. Lights were blinking on the tips of summits below. These were the signals of college men who would observe our experiments with lens and theodolite. The chief signalled back at them with a hand-lamp. He even blinked at the spiky summit of the great co-operative, which was nearest. This was a joke, because the co-operative pretended to ignore the work of our college, while watching it very closely.

  The chief set the tube to launch a rocket vertically for a quarter of a mile: the colour and length of the fiery tail would show the nature of the air it travelled through. All being ready, he told me to start the water clock, then lit the short fuse. My eyes, of course, were on the clock, which ticked off only four drops before I heard an explosion. Looking up I saw a great shower of sparks. Our rocket had broken at a height of sixty feet. “A dud,” said the chief, and fired another, which also broke up too soon.

  “Sir!” I said, staring at the clock. “It has exploded at exactly the same height.”

  “Coincidence!” grunted the chief, but checked the third rocket very carefully before firing, and that also broke at the same height. I trembled and the chief was sweating. With great precision he angled the tube and fired the fourth rocket upward along the diagonal of a square. It exploded six drops later. We fired the remaining rockets at the same angle in twenty different directions with the same result. Which showed there was a very wide obstruction sixty feet above our heads.

  You cannot understand our feelings unless you realize that for several centuries men had stopped believing that the world hung like a yolk inside an eggshell of sky. Holy people still thought the sky was God’s home, and in wartime the heads of most big companies declared their tower was closest to God’s original plan and would reach heaven first. But clearly the various companies were not building to reach anywhere but to surpass each other for financial and military reasons. So educated men regarded the universe as an infinite space only measurable by the distance between the bodies it contained. We thought we could go on building for ever.

  The chief and I stared upward. It was hard to believe that these starry globes we had studied from infancy (some shining with reflected light, some composed of it) were on the far side of a barrier. We were roused by a breath of breeze. Lights on the lower summits were blinking frantic questions at us. The chief took his lamp and signalled that he would confer on the matter soon, then led me down the ladder to the lift. He said, “I believe you spy for the directors of this tower. How can I obtain an immediate interview with its president?” I told him the president could be most quickly contacted through his generals. We descended to the military level where the officer in charge let the chief write this note, and took us into custody while it was delivered.

  Sir: Shortly before midnight I conducted tests which show there is a vast obstruction sixty feet above the top platform of your tower. This is either a zone of intense heat or the under-surface of that great transparent ceiling our ancestors called the sky. Please allow me to supervise the final stage of your building and test the nature of the barrier it will strike. As professor of air, director of international climate and inventor of the smokelift I am clearly qualified to do this.

  We were taken to the president’s office soon after dawn. He sat at the head of a long table with directors and generals down each side, and we stood at the foot of it, but were not greatly impressed. This was the most powerful committee in the world but it had the exhausted, unshaven look of men who had been arguing all night, and compared with his official portraits the president seemed small and furtive. Without raising his eyes from a paper on the table he read these words in a quick monotone.

  “By virtue of the powers invested in me by this great Company I grant your request to supervise the final stage of the work. You are allocated a director’s salary, office, and apartments at the highest executive level of our summit, and your employment commences upon signing your agreement of the following conditions.

  FIRSTLY Your superior in this project is the commander of the armed forces. All requests for materials and assistance, all orders and all communications with the world below will pass through his office.

  SECONDLY You will create as soon as possible a thick cloud to hide our building operation from other summits, and will give scientific reasons for this which raise no political, financial or religious speculations in the management of other summits or in the general public.

  THIRDLY On reaching the sky you will conduct tests for the purpose of answering these questions: How thick is it?

  Can it be penetrated?

  Is the substance of it commercially useful?

  Does the upper surface support life?

  If so, is that life intelligent and/or belligerent and/or commercially useful?

  Can the upper surface support men?

  Is it strong enough to support big buildings?

  LASTLY All your activities, and the reasons for them, and any discoveries you make, are official secrets, and from the present moment in time any failure to fulfil these conditions is a treasonable act punishable by life imprisonment or death without public trial as stipulated in the Company Laws Employees Protection Section paragraph 73 clause 19.”

  The president raised his eyes and we all looked at the chief, who nodded thoughtfully then said, “I am grateful for the trust you have placed in me, sir, and will try to deserve it. But secrecy is impossible. My tests last night were observed by experts on all the adjacent summits. Several hours have passed since then, and although this is a holiday I see that our neighbour in the east is already shifting large amounts of building material onto his upper platform.”

  One wall of the room was a single sheet of glass and the directors and generals sprang up and crowded to it. The co-operative summit had become very dark and distinct against the brightness of the ascending sun and there was spiderlike activity among the bristling cranes at the top. The commander of the armed forces punched one hand with the other and cried, “If they want to make a race of it they haven’t a hope in hell! We’ve sixty feet to go, they’ve six hundred. Professor, I’ll see you later.” He strode from the room. After a variety of exclamations the rest of the company stared at the president who had sunk into his chair looking very tired and cross. At last he sighed and said, “Well, if other governments know the facts already we can show we have nothing to hide by announcing them publicly. But God knows how the stock exchange will react. On second thoughts, no public announcements. I bind everyone here to the strictest secrecy. I will pass the information to other heads of state in a private memorandum. I’m sure that even old –” (he named the chairman of the co-operative) “– will see the value of keeping his people ignorant. So sign the agreement, professor, and get on with the job.”

  Three days later I stood with the chief on top of a strong, prefabricated silver pylon, and the sky was a few inches above my upturned face. It was too transparent to be seen directly, but glanced at sideways the lucid blue was rippled by rainbow glimmerings like those golden lines cast by sunlight on sand under shallow water. The ripples came from the point in the sky where the sun’s rays pierced most directly, and their speed and tints changed throughout the day. At dawn they were slow and tinted with saffron, quickening toward noon with glints of gold, green and crimson, then gradually toward purple-blue in the gloaming. It took a while to recognize this. The summit was swaying through a wide circle, so the ripples crossed our vision in a cataract of broken dazzlings until the pylon started travelling in the same direction, and then they only became clear for five minutes. At these times I did not feel I was looking up. The whole axletree seemed a long rope tied to my heels. I felt I
was hanging above a heavenly floor from a world as remote as the moon. Yet I was not dizzy. I liked this immensity. I wanted the axletree to break and let me fall into it. As gently as possible I stretched out my hand and touched. The sky was cool and silken-smooth with an underlying softness and warmth. I felt it with my whole body. The feeling was not sexual, for it excited no part more than the rest, not even the fingertips touching the slender rippling rainbows. The sway of the tower began diverging from the flow of the ripples, which took on a broken look. Fearing that the loveliness was escaping, my hand pressed instinctively harder and a tide of blood flowed down from the fingertips, staining the arm to the elbow. I stared at it, still pressing hard and feeling no pain until the chief struck my arm down and I fainted.

  I woke with a bandaged hand and four fingers shortened by the length of the nails. It was late afternoon and the chief was poking the sky with little rods. He stopped when he saw I was conscious, asked about my exact sensations before fainting, wrote them down, then pointed east and said, “We are no longer alone.”

  Several towers had sprouted surprisingly in the last three days. One of them, by employing acrobats as construction workers, had gained a mile-high superstructure of bamboo canes. But the big co-operative summit, though still the second highest, had grown very little in spite of its early start. And now the vastest smokelift I have ever seen was tethered to the top of that summit by many cables. The bag was shaped like an upside-down pyramid. The top surface was level with our platform, and in the centre a crouching figure handled something which flared and sparkled. We heard a brief humming of almost painful intensity and above the lift appeared a white mark which sped across the sky and curved down into a cloud which hid the horizon. The chief said, “He’s started testing it with fire. I’m leaving that till last.”

  Next day the company’s directors came up to the platform and stared at the sky with all the expressions of men faced by a beautiful woman. The eyes and mouths of many gaped very wide and a few were moved to tears. The president kept sighing and nodding as if the sky was defeating him in a crucial argument. The commander of the armed forces frowned and fidgeted as if it was wasting his time; he was more interested in the co-operative lift, on which a group of men like our own had gathered. Only the chief looked eager and happy. He grinned determinedly upward as if saying, “Yes, sky, you dazzle and baffle other men, but not me. You won’t be able to keep anything from me.”

  We went down to the president’s office, sat round the table, and the chief read out this report.

  “Gentlemen, you have just seen a transparent surface which encloses the earthly globe at an altitude of 22 parasangs, or 572 stadia, or 62,920 fathoms. Although this surface is in rapid movement it feels beguilingly smooth, soft and lukewarm if touched gently, but repels anything solid which presses hard, dissolving flesh, crumbling bone and wood to powder, and making stones, metal and crystals explode with a violence growing greater with the density of the mineral and the force driving it into contact. These explosions exert downward with no effect upon the heavenly surface, a fact with political consequences. Less advanced summits are building catapults at their tops with the clear intention of testing the sky from a distance by throwing things at it. This will cause blasts big enough to damage the advanced summits. We should make it plain that we will regard such tests as acts of war. When jets of water, ink, acid, mercury and molten metal strike the surface it absorbs them without stain or alteration, but a strong flame leaves a white scar which allows us to observe and measure the surface movement. Above our summit the heavenly continent is turning westward at 7¾ parasangs per hour. The play of prismatic colours across the surface is an effect of the sunlight, and quite unrelated to the real movement of the heavenly sphere, which is regular, continuous, and takes 27⅓ days to turn round the earthly sphere. In other words, it rotates with the moon.

  “You have asked me questions about the heavenly continent: how thick, if pierceable etcetera. At least one more test is needed before I can answer accurately, but I can now tell you what is imaginable and what is likely.

  “Classical astronomy would regard the heavenly firmament as the inner surface of a glassy shell carrying the moon. But a rigid shell would be shattered by the speed of its rotation and our air would not stop a liquid shell falling to the earth below. The classical model only holds good if the sky is made of transparent vapour, at once lighter than air and as dense as molten metal. Such a vapour is impossible.

  “So let us imagine there is a dense, transparent fluid filling the entire universe. Our earth occupies a bubble of air in this fluid, a bubble at the centre of a whirlpool. The heavenly bodies are floating round us in different currents at different speeds, the nearest current carrying the moon. This idea is both attractive and convincing: until we remember that the light of the farthest and steadiest stars would be reaching us through fluid moving in different speeds and directions. This would give the highest heavens a warped and shifting aspect they do not possess.

  “I offer you a third model. You perhaps know that all water has a skin protecting it from air. This skin is invisible to the human eye, impalpable to human touch, yet tough enough for small insects to hang from, walk across, and build upon. Imagine, then, that there is a light vapour which lies upon air as air lies upon water, and reacts with air to create a tense surface, perhaps only a few atoms thick. This surface has properties which human insects cannot understand before they have sampled the vapour on the far side, but it moves with the moon because the moon pulls it along as it pulls the oceans of the world below. The greater speed is explained by the absence of shores and a solid bottom.

  “This is the likeliest model of the world we occupy, and I ask leave to test it by the following means.

  “Only flame impresses the heavenly surface, so let us build in our summit a furnace with a ring of burners, and let us direct against the sky a circle of flame five feet in diameter. If this does not cut a hole into the upper universe let us keep the furnace burning for a lunar month of 28 days. This should engrave a fault-line round the inside of the cosmic egg-shell, perhaps splitting it open long enough for us to grab a sample of what lies beyond.

  “This test should endanger nobody, unless, perhaps, those beside the burners, foremost of whom will be myself. The sky will suffer no great injury. Flames mark it, yes, but since the start of the world it has been pierced from above, every night, by jagged meteorites of white-hot stone and iron. The heavenly surface would be scarred all over if these had done lasting damage. You can authorize my test in the knowledge that the natural forces maintaining the sky will start repairing it as soon as we relax our efforts. Man can no more destroy the sky than he can destroy the ocean.”

  The chief laid his paper on the table. The president muttered, “You shouldn’t have mentioned the ocean. The excrement from our factories and refineries has poisoned most of it.”

  The chief seemed not to hear. He folded his arms, leaned back in his chair and remarked conversationally, “Our utmost skill, of course, may fail to pierce this barrier. In which case your great summit will soon be equalled by all the others in the work.”

  There was a long silence. The eyes of nearly everyone round the table seemed to be staring inside themselves. Then a director spoke in a low voice which gradually grew very loud.

  “I am a religious man. That sky we gazed upon less than an hour ago – that moving sea of heavenly blossom — was the loveliest work of God’s hand I have ever beheld. I am certain that this sky, like everything else men have not corrupted, exists for a great good reason. Humanity has lived beneath this dome, been sheltered by this dome from the dawn of creation. And you, professor, ask us to rip it open tomorrow like a can of beans? You have given us three little toy pictures of the universe, and told us to believe in the safest one, and asked permission to test it. The fact that you need to test it shows your ignorance. Your test may destroy something essential and beautiful which you did not make and cannot replace. Mankin
d has taken the whole of human history to reach this height. Why should we not pause for a couple of years and consider the situation carefully?”

  “Because of the co-ops!” cried the commander of the armed forces. “And because of our so-called allies. Believe me, that sky is going to be shafted by someone sooner or later, and whoever reaches the far side first will have a colossal military advantage. Just now the advantage is ours. The co-ops know everything we know, but they can’t float a furnace on a smoke-filled envelope. Give them a month or two, though, and they’ll carve their way through and claim the upper surface for themselves. We’ve got to get there first and claim it for free people everywhere. Then we can hold it against all comers.”