Into the Alternate Universe

by A Bertram Chandler

  "I just sat there, in a sick, numb silence. I wanted to ask questions, but I couldn't in front of all those strangers. But there was nothing more. Nothing at all. Red Eagle had said his piece as far as I was concerned, and passed on all sorts of trivial messages to other members of the congregation. Bill Brown's grandmother was concerned because he wasn't wearing his long underwear, and Jimmy Smith's Aunt Susan wanted to tell him that trade would pick up next year, and so on, and so on.

  "After the . . . meeting? Service? After the service I stayed on to have a talk with the minister. He was very sympathetic, and arranged for me to have a private sitting with the medium. It wasn't very satisfactory. Red Eagle seemed to be somewhat peeved at being called away from whatever it was that he was doing, and just told me that I should search long and far, and that I should and should not find that for which I was searching. "And what can be made of that? "Shall I succeed in my search by becoming a ghost myself, before my time? I hope not. I'm too fond of life, John—life on this gross physical plane. I like good food and wine and tobacco and books and music and clothes and . . . and all the other things that make life, in spite of everything, so well worth living. There's far too much vagueness about what comes after. Oh, there are the stock protestations—'It is very beautiful here, and everybody is happy . . .'—but . . . It could be faulty transmission and reception, but I always get the impression that the After Life is lacking in character, and color and, but of course, the good, lusty pleasures of the flesh . . .

  "Even so, I was shaken. Badly shaken."

  "It could be explained by telepathy, Sonya."

  "No, John, it couldn't be. I was not thinking about Bill Maudsley at the time—not until that message came through, and even then I was thinking only about Derek Calver. I didn't know that Bill had shipped as his Mate. And as for . . . And as for the shocking manner of his death, that I did not know about. I did not know about it officially for a matter of months, which was the time it took for the news to drift in from the Rim. But I checked up. I ran all available data through one of our Master Computers, and got one of our Specialist Navigators to run his own check, and there were no two ways about the answer. Bill must have taken his own life at the very time that I was sitting in that dreary Meeting Hall in Dovlesville, on Dunglass . . . ."

  "It might be as well if you didn't attend the seance, Sonya," Grimes told her.

  "And leave the show to you lousy secessionists?" she flared, with a flash of her old spirit. "No sir!"

  IX

  When Grimes and Sonya Verrill went down to the wardroom they found that all was in readiness for the seance. The uncomfortable benches—it was fortunate, thought the Commodore, that the ship was falling free so that the only contact between buttocks and an unyielding surface was that produced by the gentle restriction of the seatbelts—had been arranged in rows, facing a platform on which were a table, three chairs and the harmonium. Calhoun, contriving to look like a nonconformist minister in spite of his uniform, occupied one of the chairs at the table. Mayhew, his usual dreaminess replaced by an air of acute embarrassment, sat in the other. Karen Schmidt was seated at the musical instrument.

  As soon as the Commodore and Sonya had taken a bench in the front row the engineer, unbuckling his seat belt, got carefully to his feet. His voice, as he made the initial announcement, was more of a street corner bray than a pulpit bleat. "Brethren," he said, "we are here as humble seekers, gathered in all humility, to beg that our loved ones on the Other Side will shed light on our darkness. We pray to Them for help—but we must, also, be prepared to help Them. We must cast out doubt, and replace it by childlike faith. We must believe." He went on in a more normal voice, "This, I assure you, is essential. We must put ourselves in a receptive mood, throwing our minds and our hearts open to the benevolent powers on the other side of the veil . . ." Then, the engineer briefly ascendant over the lay preacher, "We must strive to create the right conditions insofar as we are able . . ."

  Meanwhile, one of his juniors was making his way along the tiers of benches distributing mimeographed sheets. Grimes looked at his curiously. It was, he saw, a hymnal.

  "Brethren!" cried Calhoun, "we will join in singing the first hymn."

  Karen Schmidt was having trouble with the harmonium—the operation of treadles in the absence of a gravitational field requires a certain degree of concentration. At last, however, she got the thing going and suddenly and shockingly the introductory chords blared out.

  Then they were all singing to the wheezing, gasping accompaniment:

  "Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,

  "Lead Thou me on . . ."

  The hymn over, Calhoun prayed. Although himself an agnostic, Grimes was impressed by the sincerity of the man. He began to wish that he could believe in something.

  There was another hymn, and then the lights were dimmed until only the dull-glowing red globes remained. The lines and blobs of luminous paint picking out the simple apparatus—the speaking trumpet and the tambourine—on the table gleamed eerily. Suddenly it was very quiet in the wardroom; the muted noises of machinery, the sobbing of pumps and whizzing of fans, the thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive, accentuated the silence rather than diminished it. It was very quiet—and very cold.

  Physical or psychological? Grimes asked himself as he shivered.

  His eyes were becoming accustomed to the almost-darkness. He could see the dark forms of Calhoun and Mayhew, sitting motionless at the table, and Karen Schmidt hunched over the harmonium. He turned his head to look at Sonya. Her face was so pale as to seem almost luminous. He put out his hand to grasp hers, gave it a reassuring squeeze. She returned the pressure, and seemed reluctant to relinquish the physical contact.

  Mayhew cleared his throat. He said matter-of-factly, "There's something coming through . . . ."

  "Yes?" whispered Calhoun. "Yes?"

  Mayhew chuckled. "It's only a routine message, I'm afraid. Flora Macdonald . . ."

  "But you must have heard of her," insisted Calhoun in a low voice. "She lived in the eighteenth century, on Earth. She was a Jacobite heroine . . . ."

  Mayhew chuckled again. "Not this Flora Macdonald. She's a Waverley Royal Mail cargo liner, and she's off Nova Caledon . . . All the same, this is remarkable range I'm getting, with no amplifier. It must be that the brains of all you people, in these somewhat peculiar circumstances, are supplying the necessary boost . . . ."

  "Mr. Mayhew, you are ruining the atmosphere!"

  "Commander Calhoun, I consented to take part in this experiment on the understanding that it was to be treated as an experiment."

  Something tinkled sharply.

  At the table, forgetting this disagreement, Calhoun and Mayhew were staring at the tambourine. Grimes stared too, saw that something had broken its magnetic contact with the steel surface, that it had lifted and was drifting, swaying gently, carried by the air currents of the ventilation system.

  But the exhaust ducts were in the bulkhead behind the platform, and the thing, bobbing and jingling, was making its slow, unsteady way towards the intake ports, on the other side of the wardroom.

  Grimes was annoyed. This was no time for practical jokes. Telekinesis was an uncommon talent, for some reason not usually found among spacemen, but not so uncommon as all that. There was, the Commodore knew, one telekineticist in Faraway Quest's crew—and he would be on the carpet very shortly.

  But . . .

  But he was the Third Mate, and he was on watch and, in any case, all the tests that he had undergone had proven his incapability of any but the most trivial telekinetic feats.

  So this, after all, was no more than some freak of air circulation.

  The harmonium wheezed discordantly.

  Calhoun was on his feet, furious. "Can't you people take things seriously? This is a religious service! Miss Schmidt, stop that vile noise at once! Stop it, I say! Lights, somebody! Lights!"

  The incandescent tubes flared into harsh brilliance. The tambourin
e steadied and hung motionless, and then behaved in the normal manner of a small object floating loose in Free Fall, drifting very slowly with the air current towards the exhaust ducts. But at the harmonium Karen Schmidt still twitched and shuddered, her feet erratically pumping, her hands falling at random on the keyboard. Her eyes were glazed and her face vacant; her mouth was open and little globules of saliva, expelled by her sterntorous breathing, hung about her jerking head in a glistening cloud.

  Grimes unsnapped his seat belt and got to his feet. "Dr. Todhunter! See to Miss Schmidt, will you?"

  But all Calhoun's anger had evaporated.

  "No!" he shouted. "No! Be seated, everybody!"

  "Like that woman," Sonya Verrill was whispering tensely.

  "Let me pass!" It was Todhunter, trying to make his way through the packed rows of benches. "Let me pass."

  And then Karen Schmidt spoke.

  But it was not with her own voice. It was with the voice of a man—deep, resonant. At first the words seemed to be an unknown language—a strange but hauntingly familiar tongue. And then, with a subtle shift of stress and tempo, they were understandable.

  "Falling . . . falling . . .

  "Through the night and through the nothingness you seek and you fall . . .

  "But I am the onlooker; I care not if you seek and find, if you seek and fail.

  "I am the onlooker."

  Calhoun was taking charge. "Who are you?"

  "I am the onlooker."

  "Have you a message?"

  "I have no message." There was laughter that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. "Why should I have a message?"

  "But tell us. Shall we succeed?"

  "Why should I tell you? Why should you succeed? What is success, and what is failure?"

  "But there must be a message!" The initial awe in Calhoun's voice was being replaced by exasperation. Grimes was reminded of those primitive peoples, sincere believers, who maltreat the images of their gods should those deities fail to deliver the goods.

  Again the uncanny laughter. "Little man, what message do you want? Would you know the day and hour and manner of your death? Would you live the rest of your life in fear and trembling, striving to evade the unavoidable?" The hands of the medium swept over the keyboard, and the instrument responded—not discordantly, not wheezingly, but with the tones of a great organ. And the music was the opening bars of the "Dead March" in Saul. "Is this the message you crave?"

  Sonya Verrill, standing stiff and straight, cried, "Is this all you have for us? Is that the limit of your powers—to tell us all what we know already, that some day we must die?"

  For the last time there was the sound of laughter, and the voice said quietly, "Here is your message." And then came the shrilling of the alarm bells, the repetition of the Morse symbol A, short long, short long, short long . . . Action Stations.

  X

  She hung there on Faraway Quest's port beam, matching velocity and temporal precession rate, a big ship, conventional enough in design, nothing at all strange about her, except that both radar and mass proximity indicator screens remained obstinately blank. Already the oddly twisted directional antenna of the Quest's Carlotti apparatus was trained upon her, like the barrel of some fantastic gun, already the whine of the emergency generators, feeding power into the huge solenoid that was the ship, was audible over and above the still ringing alarm bells, the sounds of orderly confusion.

  "Nothing showing on the screens, sir," the Third Officer was reporting. "And the transceiver is dead."

  Swinton was already at the huge mounted binoculars. He muttered, "I think I can read her name . . . Rim Ranger . . ."

  "And that,", said Grimes, "is what I had in mind for the next addition to our fleet . . . . Interesting . . ."

  "Call her on the lamp, sir?"

  "No. If all goes well we shall soon be able to communicate through the usual channels. Ready, Mr. Renfrew?"

  "Ready and standing by, sir," answered the Survey Service lieutenant.

  "Good." And then Grimes found that he was groping for words in which to frame his order. He had almost said, "Fire!" but that was hardly applicable.

  "Make contact!" snapped Sonya Verrill.

  Renfrew, strapped into his seat at the controls of his apparatus, did look like a gunner, carefully laying and training his weapon, bringing the target into the spiderweb sights. One of his juniors was snapping meter readings: "Red twenty five, red fifty, red seventy five, eighty five . . . Red ninety, ninety-five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . ."

  There was a long pause and the men around the modified Carlotti gear were muttering among themselves. Swinton, who was still watching the other ship, announced, "She's flashing. Morse, it looks like . . ."

  "Stand by!" shouted Renfrew. "Now!"

  The Carlotti gear whined intolerably, whined and crackled, and the men serving it sneezed as arc-engendered ozone stung their nostrils. There was tension, almost unbearable strain, a psychological rending—and Grimes realized that he was seeing double, that every person, every piece of apparatus in the control room was visually duplicated. But it was more than a mere visual duplication—that was the frightening part. One image of Swinton was still hunched over the eyepieces of the binoculars, the other had turned to stare at Renfrew and his crew. One image of Renfrew still had both hands at the console of his apparatus, the other had one hand raised to stifle a sneeze. And there was a growing confusion of sound as well as of sight. It was—the old, old saying flashed unbidden into Grimes' mind—an Irish parliament, with everybody talking and nobody listening.

  And it was like being stretched on a rack, stretched impossibly and painfully—until something snapped.

  The other ship, Rim Ranger, was there still, looming large in the viewports, close, too close. A voice—it could have been Swinton's—was yelping from the transceiver, "What ship?" Then, "What the hell are you playing at, you fools?"

  Grimes realized that he was in the Captain's chair, although he had no recollection of having seated himself. His own control console was before him. There was only one way to avoid collision, and that was by the use of rocket power. (And he had given strict orders that the Reaction Drive was to be kept in a state of readiness at all times.) There was a microsecond of hesitation as his hand swept down to the firing key—the jettison of mass while the Mannschenn Drive was in operation could have unpredictable consequences. But it was the only way to avoid collision. Even with the solenoid cut off there was enough residual magnetism to intensify the normal interaction due to the gravitational fields of the two vessels.

  But he was gentle, careful.

  From aft there was only the gentlest cough, and acceleration was no more than a nudge, although heavy enough to knock unsecured personnel off balance and tumble them to the deck.

  And outside the viewports there was nothing—no strange ship, no convoluted, distorted Galactic lens, no dim and distant luminosities.

  This was the Ultimate Night.

  XI

  Some hours later they came to the unavoidable conclusion that they were alone in absolute nothingness. Their signaling equipment—both physical and parapsychological—was useless, as were their navigational instruments. There was nobody to talk to, nothing to take a fix on. Presumably they were still falling free (through what?)—still, thanks to the temporal precession fields of the Drive, proceeding at an effective velocity in excess of that of light. But here—whatever here was—there was no light. There was no departure point, no destination.

  After conferring with his senior officers Grimes ordered the Mannschenn Drive shut down. They had nowhere to go, and there was no point in wasting power or in subjecting the complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes to unnecessary wear and tear. And then he passed word for a general meeting in the wardroom.

  That compartment was, of course, still wearing its drab camouflage as a meeting house. The tin speaking trumpet adhered to the surface of the table still; the tambourine clung to the
bulkhead hard by one of the exhaust ducts. But this time it was Grimes who took the main platform seat, with Sonya Verrill at his side. Pale and shaken, still dazed after her involuntary mediumism, Karen Schmidt seated herself again at the harmonium. Grimes looked at her curiously, then shrugged. She might as well sit there as anywhere else.