by James Blish
Web did not know whether this suited him or not. He was moderately content to be the only one on New Earth with the good sense to see that Estelle was beautiful, but sometimes his pride felt the lack of an occasional glance of frank envy; and sometimes he suspected that Estelle cared as little about this in the long run as everyone else on New Earth but Web himself. In the fullness of time, the love which existed between them had been spoken and acknowledged, and they were now a couple, with all the delights and the responsibilities which coupling provides and demands; but somehow, nobody had noticed. The oldsters were too busy building their artifact to notice, let alone care much one way or the other, that a small green weed of love had pushed itself up amid the tumbled stones of the last of all debacles.
Yet it was not difficult for Web to understand why what was for him a miracle was not even a nuisance to the busy godlings and their machines with whom he had to live. There was not much time left; hardly a hiccup for Amalfi and Miramon and Schloss and Dee and even for Carrel, who seemed to be a perpetually young man yet who had lived lifetimes and lifetimes and could be cut down in the midst of his latest without any valid claim that his death would be a grievous waste of whatever (and Web was convinced that it was rather scanty) he carried in his head. What little time remained would be nothing to
those people, who had lived so long already; but for Web and Estelle, it had been and would continue to be their growing up time, which would be half of each of their lives no matter how long they lived thereafter.
Certainly Amalfi never noticed them. He had long forgotten that he had ever been anything less than what he was: an immortal. Probably now the suggestion that he had once been a child would have baffled him entirely; in the abstract it was a truism, and he would be unable to think back far enough to think of it otherwise. Once given the administration of Doom, in any event, he prosecuted it single-mindedly, like any other job, leading toward any other destination; if he knew that there would be no other jobs and no other destinations after these, it did not seem to bother him. He was up and doing; that was enough.
In the meantime:
"I love you," Web said.
"I love you."
Around them the potsherds did not even give back an echo.
Amalfi had an excuse, had someone suggested to him that he needed one: the building of the missile had gone badly from the moment triggered by Estelle, though he did not remember this they had decided to give it priority. At the outset it had looked so much simpler than trying to settle all the theoretical questions a priori, and it had had the immediate appeal of action; but it is impossible to design an experiment without certain fundamental assumptions as to what the experiment is intended to test; which assumptions turned out to be largely absent in the supposedly practical matter of designing the antimatter missile.
As it eventually worked out, the inter-universal messenger had to be constructed from the submicroscopic level on up out of fundamental nuclear particles which came as close to being nothing at all as either universe would ever be likely to provide: zerospin particles with various charges and masses, and neutrinoIantineutrino pairs. Even detecting that the object was present at all after it had been built was an almost impossible task, for neutrinos and antineutrinos have no mass and no charge, consisting instead partly of spin, partly of energy of translation; it did no good to try to visualize such particles since like all the fundamental particles they were entirely outside of experience in the macroscopic world. Matter was so completely transparent to them that stopping an average neutrino in flight would require a lead barrier fifty light years thick.
Only the fact that these spindizzies exercised a firm control over the rotation and the magnetic moment of any given atomic particle hence their nickname made it possible to assemble the object at all, and to detect and direct it after it was finished. As assembled, the messenger was a stable, electrically neutral, mass less plasmoid, a sort of gravitational equivalent of ball lightning; it was derived theoretically, as Jake had proposed, from the Schiff theory of gravitation, which had been advanced as long ago as 1958 but had later been abandoned for its failure to satisfy three of the six fundamental tests which the then established theory general relativity seemed, to satisfy very well.
"Which from our point of view is a positive advantage," Jake had argued. "The objections from general relativity are one with the dodo anyhow, and in our special case an object which would be variant, as a Schiff object couldn't be, would be a drawback. Another thing: one of the tests the Schiff theory did pass was that of explaining the red shift in the spectra of distant galaxies; which we now know to have been a clock effect and not a fair test of a gravitational theory at all. We'd be better off re-evaluating the whole scholium in the light of our present knowledge."
The result was now before them all in the midst of the Okie city's ancient reception room in City Hall, which had once been Amalfi's communications center for complex diplomatic relations with client planets; it had been fitted out with an electronic network of considerable complexity so that multiple negotiations could be carried on at once while the city approached a highly developed, highly civilized star system; now that net had become, instead, a telemetering system for the inter-universal messenger.
Since the object itself was in effect little more than an intricately structured spherical spindizzy screen which screened nothing material, it would have been impossible to see it at all were it not for the small jet of artificial smoke which issued from the floor directly under it and was wreathed about it by convection currents, making it look a little like a huge bubble being supported in the middle of a fountain. Scattered throughout the interior of the bubble were steady hot pinpoints of colored light: concentrations of electron gas, of stripped nuclei, of thermal neutrons, of free radicals and of as many other basic test situations as the combined brains of two very different worlds had been able to contrive and to fit into so restricted a space for the sphere was only six feet in diameter. At the very heart, in a spindizzy eddy all its own, was the greatest triumph of all: one cubical crystal of anti-sodium anti-chloride about the size of a single grain of a fine grain photograph. This was Dr. Schloss's long dreamt of antimatter artifact; here it was, a miracle which was already minus two weeks "young" and had yet a week to go in its spindizzy vacuum before it would collide with the flying instant of the present and: decay; on the other side, it would be only a single crystal of common table salt, which might or might not lose its savor on the return journey should the messenger come back to them at all.
Amalfi watched the red hand of the clock the only hand it had tick its quarter seconds toward Zero. Nobody would launch the missile exact timing was far too critical to allow that but he had been given the privilege of holding down the key which kept the circuit closed against the moment when the red hand touched Zero and the impulse surged through the spindizzies and impelled the messenger on its way out of space, out of time, out of the humanly comprehensible entirely. No one knew what would happen then, least of all the designers. The missile would be unable to report back; once it had crossed the barrier, it would be incommunicado. It would have to come back to this great dark room before the tiny shining stars and the microscopic salt crystal inside it could report what had happened to them during the outward swing. How long that would take would depend upon the energy level on the opposite side, which was one of the things the messenger was being sent to find out; hence no transit time could be predicted.
"We ought to give it a name," Amalfi said, fidgeting slightly. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were beginning to ache; he realized that he had been pushing down on the key for a long time with far more pressure than was necessary, as though the universe would end at once were the straining of his hand and arm to falter for an instant. Nevertheless, he did not let up; he had the good sense to realize that fatigue had already made him unable to judge how much relaxation might result, and he was not going to risk breaking the contact. "Now that we hav
e it built, it doesn't look like anything. Let's christen it quick, before it gets away from us, it may never come back." l(
"I'd be afraid to give it a name," Gifford Bonner said, with a ghastly smile. "Any name we could give it would promise too much. How about a number? Back at the beginning of spaceflight, when the first unmanned satellites were going up, they numbered them like comets or other celestial objects, with the year date and a Greek letter; the first sputnik, for instance, was called Object 1957a."
"That appeals to me," Jake said. "Except for the Greek letter. This thing ought not to be indexed with any character that's ever been used before to label a known or knowable situation. How about using the transfinite integers?"
"Very good," Gifford Bonner said. "Who will do the honors?"
"I will," Estelle said. "She stepped forward. She did not dare to touch the object, but she raised her hand toward it. "I christen thee Object 4101Alephnull."
"The next one, presuming that we're so lucky," Jake said, "can be Object 4101C, which is the power of the continuum; and the next one"
There was a soft chime. Startled, Amalfi looked up at the clock. The red hand was just passing over the third quartile of the first second after Zero. In the center of the room, the smoke spun in a turbulent spiral; the bubble with the pinpoint lights had vanished.
Object 4101Alephnull had departed without anyone's seeing it go.
Some quartiles of a second later, he remembered to let go of the key. His millennium firmed right hand continued to tremble for the next fifteen minutes.
The suspense was dreadful. Certainly nobody expected the messenger to return within a few hours, or even within a few days; were that to happen, it would mean that the Ginnangu Gap itself would be right on its heels, leaving no time to analyze the colored stars or indeed do anything but fold one's hands and wait to be snuffed out. Yet the mere fact that that very possibility existed was enough to guarantee the maintenance of a deathwatch in the huge, dark old room a deathwatch enlivened by the discovery that all the instruments which had been watching the missile while it was still there had dropped back to nothing on the instant of its departure, having recorded no phenomenon of any kind about the departure itself. Not even the spindizzies as interpreted for by the City Fathers were prepared to say how the surge of power with which they had launched the messenger had been applied; which should have been reassuring, at least as negative evidence that the messenger had not been shoved off in some known and hence useless direction, but which under the circumstances only added to the gloom and tension. All that power shot; and where had it gone? Apparently nowhere at all.
Ordinarily Amalfi rarely dreamed (or rather, like most Okies, he dreamed most of every night, but remembered what he had dreamt in the morning less often than once every few years); but these nights were haunted by that spherical smoke wreathed ghost with the glowing Argus eyes, wandering in a maze of twisted ingeodesics from which it would never escape, in its center a tiny crystalline figurine piping in Amalfi's voice,
I grow not out of salt nor out of soil But out of that which pains me until the ingeodesics suddenly snapped into a strangling web which burned like fire, and in an explosion of light Amalfi saw that it was no, not morning yet, but time to go back to the deathwatch.
But he was already there; he had dozed off, and had been awakened by the clamor of the alarms. Now that he was more or less awake, the noise was ominously less loud than he knew it should be; there was an alarm for every star inside the messenger, and less than a third of them were ringing. The ghostly sphere floated again in the center of the room, now no bigger than a basketball, most of its Argus eyes out, and those that remained glowing as fitfully as corpse fires. For all Amalfi knew, this ghost of a ghost, with so many ashes cold and cruel on its internal hearths, was no more ominous than any other outcome of a scientific experiment; it might even be promising; but he could not rid himself this early of the dread which had informed the dream.
"That was fast," Jake's voice said.
"Pretty fast," Dr. Schloss's voice said. "But now that it's back home, it's got only about twenty-one hours of life left. Let's get those readings there's not much time."
"I'm counting down the probes now. The cameras are rolling."
Inside the ghost, another star died. There was a brief silence; then one of Dr. Schloss's technicians said, in a neutral voice: "Electron shower from the iron nucleus. Looks like a natural death. No not quite: high on the gamma side."
"Mark. The rhodium-palladium series should go next. Watch out for diagonal disintegration; it may cross with the iron series" A star flared and burst.
"There it goes!"
"Mark," Schloss said, squinting through a gamma ray polariscope.
"Got it. Gripes. It crossed at cesium; what does that mean?"
"Never mind, mark it. Don't stop to interpret, just record."
The ghost seemed to shiver and shrink a little. A pure piercing tone came from its heart, wavered, and died; but it died scooping upward toward the inaudible.
"First hour," Schloss said. "Twenty to go. How long did the pip take?"
There was no answer for several minutes; then another voice said: "We don't have it down to jiffies yet. But it was short by nearly forty microseconds, and it Dopplered the wrong way. It's decaying in time, Dr. Schloss, it may not last as long as ten hours."
"Give me the decay rate in jiffies on the next pip and don't miss it. If it's going that fast we'll have to recalculate all emission records on the decay curve. Jake, are you getting anything on the RF band?"
"Masses of stuff," Jake said, preoccupied. "Can't make anything of it yet. And it's scooping that's your decay rate again, I suspect. What a scramble!"
In this wise the second hour flew by, and then the third. Shortly thereafter, Amalfi lost track of them. The tension, the disorder, the accumulating fatigue, the utter strangeness of the experiment itself and its object, the forebodings all took their toll. These were certainly the worst possible conditions under which to gather even routine data, let alone take readings on an experiment of this degree of criticality, but once again the Okies had to make do with what they had.
"All right, everyone," Schloss said at last. "Closing
time." His brow was deeply furrowed; that frown had been growing line by line during most of the final twelve hours. "Stand well back; the artifact will be the last to go."
The investigators and spectators alike, or those few spectators whose interest had been intent enough to keep them there throughout the entire proceedings, drew back to the walls of the gloomy chamber. The spindizzy whine beneath them rose slightly in both pitch and volume, and the ghost that was Object 4101Alephnull disappeared behind a spindizzy screen polarized to complete opacity.
At first the spherical screen was mirrorlike, throwing back grotesquely distorted images of the silent onlookers. Then a pinprick of light appeared in its center, growing soundlessly to a painful bluewhite intensity. It threw out " long cobwebs and runners of glare, probing, anastomosing, flowing along the inner surface of the screen. Instinctively, Amalfi shielded his eyes and his genitals in an instinctive gesture of all mankind more than two millennia old. When he was able to look again, the light had died.
The spindizzies stopped and the screen went down. Air rushed into it. Object 4101Alephnull was gone, this time forever, destroyed by the death of a single crystal of salt
"Our precautions were insufficient; my fault," Schloss said, his voice harsh. "We are all well over our maximum permissible dose of hard radiation; everyone report to the hospital on the double for treatment. Troops, fall in!"
The radiation sickness was mild; bone marrow transfusions brought the blood forming system back into normal function before serious damage was done, and the nausea was reasonably well controlled by massive doses of meclizine, riboflavin, and pyridoxine. All the participants who had any hair to lose lost it, including both Dee and Estelle, but they all got it back in due course except for Amalfi and Jake.
The second degree sunburn was not mild. It held up the interpretation of the results for nearly a month, while the scientists, coated in anesthetic ointment, sat about on the wards in hospital robes and played bad poker and worse bridge. In between postmortems on the bridge hands, they speculated endlessly and covered square miles of paper with equations and ointment grease spots. Web, who had not lasted long enough to be present at the destruction of the crystal of salt, visited daily with bouquets for Estelle the stargods alone knew where and how he unearthed so antique a custom and fresh packs of cards for the men. He took away the spotted sheets of equations and fed them to the City Fathers, who invariably said: "NO COMMENT. THE DATA ARE INSUFFICIENT." Everyone knew that already.
At long last, however, Schloss and Jake and their crews were freed from their sticky pyjamas to tackle the mountains of raw information awaiting them. They worked long hours; Schloss in particular never remembered to eat, and had constantly to be reminded by his technicians that they had missed lunch and it was now past dinnertime. In Schloss's defense, however, it had to be admitted that his crew was the hungriest in the history of physics, and the lunch they had missed usually was just the formal meal they were accustomed to consuming after they had emptied the fat packages they brought into the laboratories; in proof of which, they all gained five or ten pounds while they were complaining the loudest.
A month after their discharge from the hospital, Schloss, Jake and Retma called a joint conference. Schloss had back the frown he had worn during the last twelve hours of the experiment, and even the traditionally impassive Hevian looked disturbed. Amalfi's heart turned over in his chest at his first glimpse of their expressions; they seemed to confirm every foggy apprehension of his dream. "We have two pieces of bad news, and one piece of news which is wholly ambiguous," Schloss said, without any preliminaries. "I don't myself know in exactly what order I ought to present them; in that, I'm being guided by Retma and Dr. Bonner. It is their judgment that you all ought first to know that we have competition."