A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  The graphic flashed on, and Keaflyn studied it owlishly. The Whorl lay off at a slight angle from Kelkontar's line of flight.

  "Kelly old pal," he announced, "we're going to make a little side-trip, just long enough to poke that old Whorl with a stick. Right?"

  "Whatever you say, Mark."

  "Right! Set warp for the Whorl, and let's get busy makin' ourselves a super-duper pokin' stick!"

  Chapter 14

  The new course had been established no more than a few seconds when the ship reported, "There's a hey-you call on the comm, Mark."

  Keaflyn frowned in alarm. "Aimed at us?"

  "Evidently so."

  "Well, let's hear it," he snapped.

  The comm screen remained dark, but the voice cut chillingly through Keaflyn's alcoholic daze. It was the voice of the Senior Sibling:

  "Hey-you! IQ 120! Resume and maintain your original course, or you're in trouble!"

  "H-h-how far away is she?" Keaflyn managed to ask, fighting to stave off the terror Berina's voice aroused. The graphic changed in response to his question. He studied it intently. "That witch must've been awake the whole time," he muttered. "She's been trailin' us, to make sure we did like Bartok told us. But we can beat her to the Whorl, can't we?"

  "Yes, Mark, by some eight minutes," Kelkontar replied.

  "And I better get to work on our stick. You got the plans ready?"

  "You will find them on the workbench," said the ship. Keaflyn hurried to the bench and peered at the three pages of specs. The stick, he saw after some study, was to be a small ball of steel with a tiny one-shot warp drive imbedded in its center. The drive unit looked awfully complex to him.

  "We got a drive unit like this in stock?" he asked.

  "Not assembled, Mark. We have the components for it. I am laying them out on the bench for you."

  Mark watched stupidly as one tiny package after another plopped out of the bench's supply tube. Dozens of them.

  Well, time to get busy. He began opening the packages and lining up their contents, trying to recognize each item as he did so and remember how it fitted in the diagrams he had just looked at. He couldn't place them all without referring back to the specs.

  He muttered in annoyance. This job was more complicated than it looked!

  "You better consult your files again, Kelly, and find something to sober me up. I got problems here."

  "All right, Mark. The remedy is ready for you, since I anticipated this as a possible need."

  "Good for you! Thanks!" Keaflyn grabbed the cup of dark liquid and emptied it with hurried gulps. He gagged over it for a few seconds. The taste of the stuff alone was bad enough to have a sobering effect.

  Kelkontar said, "There is another hey-you from the Senior Sibling, Mark."

  Keaflyn hesitated, staring at the components on the workbench. He was going to have all he could handle, getting the stick assembled, without being thrown into one tizzy after another by the voice of Berina Arlan. But . . . he had to know what she was saying.

  He sighed. "Okay, Kelly, let's hear it."

  Berina's voice came through: "Hey-you! IQ 120! Unless you resume your former course at once, I will be obliged to assume you are totally out of control of yourself. I will act on that assumption! Last warning! Out." It was some relief to hear she wouldn't call again. Out of control of himself? Obviously she meant the Neg had taken him over completely and was guiding his actions. Was she right?

  Keaflyn considered the question as he worked frantically and clumsily at the task of assembling the stick. The Neg was not in evidence. He could not sense the twisty bitterness by which he had previously been able to detect its presence. But that "feel" of the Neg had been a subtle sensation; maybe his mind was now too dull to detect it. And although he was beginning to feel awful, he was familiar enough with the kind of somatics the Neg hit him with to know this was different. This was very plainly the beginnings of a hangover.

  He did regret his decision to have one final go at the Whorl, now that he was sober. That decision had been brought on by the booze, not by the Neg. But what could he gain by backing down? He had already shown Berina Arlan that he could not be trusted to behave in what she considered a responsible manner. She would not again feign sleep while the Junior Sibling helped him escape . . . if indeed young Bartok would help him a second time.

  Probably she would not even take him prisoner again. Whether he went to the Whorl or changed course for Danolae, Berina would probably blow him out of space when the Calcutta came within blast-beam range.

  "We are now approaching the Whorl, Mark," his ship announced, "and will arrive on testing station in twentyfive seconds."

  Keaflyn blinked and stared in frustration at the halfcompleted tangle of components on the bench. IQ 120, indeed! he thought with chagrin. In other words, just plain stupid! The task of assembling the stick—ordinarily little more than a dexterity game for an infant—was too much for his benumbed mind and ineffectively directed hands.

  So . . . he was defeated even in his drunken gesture of defiance.

  He walked away from the bench and returned to the chair at the viewscreen. "I can't put it together in time, Kelly," he said tiredly as he collapsed in the chair.

  "Okay, Mark. What are your orders?" asked the ship. What orders?

  A good question. What orders could he give that would prevent man and ship from being blasted to dust within a very few minutes?

  Not that he would ordinarily object too strenuously to being killed. That had happened thousands of times before. Bodies were destroyed, and new bodies were inhabited.

  But his ego-field was now degraded far past the point where he could hope to inhabit a human body, with the nervous system necessary for intellectual activity, ever again. Death would add one more trauma to the load he already bore, pushing him still lower. His next life would be as an animal, and the life and death of the animal body would contain traumas to debase him further, so that the following life would be as a still lower animal, the traumas of which would bring him down to a still more degraded condition . . .

  A long downward spiral into darkness. An eternity of pain and ignorance.

  It was easy to see—the thought passed through Keaflyn's mind—where the ancients got their concept of hell. That, precisely, was what he faced.

  Nothingness would be infinitely preferable. But egofields did not vanish into nothingness. They were indestructible. An ego-field went on and on, while universes were created and destroyed. Perhaps, after sufficient eons of sufficiently brutal torture and humiliation, an ego-field could be squeezed down to near-nothing, to almost-extinction. That was what Alo Felston and Tinker thought, and they were experts. Alo by instinct, and Tinker by training and experience.

  In other words, an ego-field's approach to nothingness was asymptotic—coming nearer and nearer but never quite reaching it. There would always remain a tiny little knot of hurting awareness that had once been Mark Keaflyn . . .

  "Is there no way out?" he gibbered frantically. Call Berina and beg for mercy? Even if granted, it would merely delay his descent into the deeper reaches of hell by a few meaninglessly brief years.

  The pleasure-impress alone had assured his doom; Berina's torture machines had subsequently brought home with intimidating clarity just how horrible that doom was.

  The blackness of the Whorl on the viewscreen seemed symbolic of the darkness of his fate. But it was a pale symbol, because the Whorl had the blackness of nothingness, while he . . .

  "Kelly," he demanded suddenly, "haven't ships gone into the Whorl?"

  "It is presumed that three ships were lost in that manner when the Whorl was first discovered, Mark, and before its boundaries were accurately—"

  "What about the crews?" he broke in impatiently.

  "Were they ever heard from? I mean, did they have lives after that?"

  The ship was silent for several seconds. Then it reported, "A thorough search of my files finds no report of a past-life entry in
to the Whorl, Mark."

  "Which means the crew members didn't get back as ego-fields," Keaflyn babbled hurriedly, "which means they didn't even survive as such! Kelly, the Whorl destroys everything that enters it, including life-entities!"

  "That is one possibility, Mark. There could be alternative explanations for—"

  "Never mind. the alternatives! I'm going for nothingness! Warp into the Whorl!"

  "Okay, Mark."

  For a brief lucid instant Keaflyn was amused by the unsurprised, routine manner in which his ship accepted this ultimately outrageous order. And then . . .

  Then the Kelkontar warped into the Whorl.

  Strangeness and wrenching pain, but not nothingness.

  "Oh, damn," grunted Keaflyn in despair, the words hurting his vocal cords in a peculiar manner. "Turn around and get out of here, Kelly. No! DON'T!"

  His last two words were screams as the ship began to shift its course. The pain had nearly torn him apart.

  "K-keep going straight ahead," he managed to say when the pain eased. "What kind of p-place is this?"

  "The characteristics are similar to those experienced by pre-warp interstellar vessels, Mark," Kelkontar replied, its own voice sounding tinny and distorted. "As those ships approached the speed of light via straightpower acceleration, they and their crews discovered that relativistic contractions of time-space were experiential, as well as observable, phenomena. These effects placed a lower-than-expected limit on endurable warpless velocities and delayed frequent interstellar travel until the redevelopment of the warp in the year 2158 by—"

  "Okay, I know about that," grumbled Keaflyn. "Can you get our warp working again?"

  "Our warp is functioning, Mark, apparently normally," the ship told him.

  "If we're in warp, why do we feel contractions?" Keaflyn asked, wishing he could think of fewer words to ask the question with. Every utterance was a pain.

  "The contraction we're experiencing is imposed from outside, Mark. Also, it is characteristic of acceleration at a right angle to our line of warped flight. The indication is that this acceleration is moving us laterally through the disc of the Whorl. Meanwhile, our warp is, presumably, continuing us on course through the thickness of the disc."

  But the Whorl was only a few light-minutes thick, Keaflyn protested silently. If the warpdrive were working right in this peculiar Whorl-space, they ought to have emerged on the other side a split second after they entered. And this seemed to be lasting forever! Relativistic contractions, huh? He knew about them, knew how surprised everybody had been when they were experienced on ships approaching light-speed. Like the attainment of nonexistence by an ego-field, the speed of light was an asymptote for a ship under normal acceleration. It was unreachable, and the contractions were symptomatic of that. The accelerating ship would shorten; a yardstick pointed fore and aft would be less in length as the ship went faster and faster. Time, too, would contract; a second aboard a ship near the speed of light could be a minute in the normal universe. Thus, the ship would measure each added increment to its velocity—since acceleration is determined by feet per second per second—by multiplying a constantly shortening length by a constantly slowing unit of time, with a resultantly smaller gain in real velocity.

  Beneath his misery, Keaflyn took a modicum of pleasure from the fact that, stupefied though his mind obviously was, he could still understand the workings of relativity. Then he remembered that lots of 20th century men had understood that, so he had no cause for selfcongratulation.

  If the ship was being carried laterally by the Whorlinduced acceleration, that meant he was currently about as thick as a sheet of tissue paper from side to side . . . or was it head to toe? In any event, it wasn't from front to back, since that was the direction in which the warp was working. Presumably working, that is. Maybe although the warp was doing its job, the time contraction was making what should be a split-second stretch out into endlessness.

  Did a sidewise time contraction work like that? He tried to figure it out, but decided his 120 intelligence quotient wasn't quite as capable of handling relativity as he had thought. He could ask Kelkontar, but knowing the answer hardly seemed worth the pain of speaking. The trick was to be as motionless as possible. Any movement involved some turning, some change of portions of his body to the orientation of the lateral contraction, some strange stretching and twisting of muscles, bones, and nerve fibers. The beating of his heart and his careful shallow breathing were more than enough movement.

  How long would this go on? Did the ship have enough consumables to get them through? Let's see . . . fuel and oxygen and so on had been adequate for five weeks in full warp . . . food, too—not that he was likely to try eating anything! So the ship had fuel to keep going far longer than he was likely to stay alive.

  Staying alive! That same old problem again, even here in the Whorl, where he had looked for nonexistence. Neg thinking . . . that was what he was doing. Negs were supposed to be seeking nonexistence, just as normlife sought enhanced and extended existence. Which spoke pretty damn highly of Berina Arlan's skill as an ego-field degrader. In just a few hours she had pushed him so far down that his entire system of basic values could become inverted. Even awareness of that didn't keep nonexistence from seeming like a very desirable state . . .

  Wasn't anything happening?

  "Sense anything outside?" he asked the ship.

  "No, Mark."

  Keaflyn was suddenly aware that he was beginning to sense something inside the ship. It came as a desire to look over his shoulder, a feeling of other presences nearby. There was nothing mysterious about this sensation; it merely indicated that one was not alone, that someone else, whether in a body or not, was near.

  But . . . in the Whorl? Ego-fields here? Dozens of them?

  Why not? As Kelkontar had reminded him, ships had accidentally entered the Whorl, and the crew members had not made their presences known in civilization since. And as he had learned, the Whorl did not destroy an ego-field. So, the crews were still trapped here, and had now impinged themselves aboard his ship, to take a look at the newest rat in the trap.

  Hi fellers, he thought at them, not really expecting them to get the message. But he was sure they were there.

  All of them, he guessed, had left their bodies behind long ago. Strange though the behavior of time might be in this weird environment, physiological processes struggled to continue, and bodies doubtless wore and starved themselves to death within a very few subjective days. Days? It seemed to Keaflyn he had been here for weeks already! On the other hand, in terms of breaths and heartbeats, he knew hardly an hour had passed. But to his ego-field visitors—deprived of bodies to serve them as clocks, their inherent time sense doubtless as twisted by their surroundings as was his own—how long had their three or four trapped centuries seemed?

  Endless. What other word was there for it?

  Far more endless than the stars glittering at him from the viewscreen . . . More endless than the stabilities themselves . . . More endless than the power of thought to conceive of startings and stoppings.

  Stars glittering on the viewscreen . . .

  Keaflyn gasped. "Kelly We're out!"

  "That is correct, Mark. We have exited from the face of the Whorl opposite to our point of entry." He sat stunned for a moment, taking in his escape. He sensed he still had company . . . the ego-fields had ridden the ship out with him. Probably they had come aboard in hopes of just that. He had hardly finished the thought when the awareness came that he was now alone. His passengers had debarked.

  "Change course for Danolae, Kelly," he ordered, "and go all out! Maybe we can get out of detection range while the Calcutta is still on the other side of the Whorl."

  "I doubt that the Calcutta is anywhere in the vicinity, Mark," the ship said.

  "Why not? We probably weren't inside the Whorl as much as a second!"

  "The position of the Whorl relative to the nearer stars indicates otherwise, Mark. Its relative movemen
t since our entry is a distance requiring the passage of twelve years and five months."

  Keaflyn's mouth gaped open. "You're sure of that?"

  "I'm checking other stellar position changes now, Mark . . . Yes. It is now verified. By Earth reckoning, we are now in June of the year 2855."

  Well, what do you know!" exclaimed Keaflyn with a grin. "The Whorl's a time machine!"

  "Only in the loosest sense, Mark," the ship reproved.

  "Yeah, I know. But anyway, we learned something about it, didn't we?"

  "Yes, Mark."

  "I guess I'll never figure out exactly what it was we learned. That'll take a better mind than I've got left. But by damn, we showed 'em, Kelly! I can write a report on the Whorl . . . or you write it. You can do it better than I can now. And Kelly—"

  "What is it, Mark?"

  "Tinker's twenty-three years old! Marriageable age and more!"

  "That is correct, Mark."

  Chapter 15

  The Kelkontar's report on the trip through the Whorl was completed a few minutes later, and Keaflyn tried to read it. It was a frustrating experience.

  There were entire pages that left him feeling blank, and these were, he realized, the most important pages. That is, they contained the ship's mathematical analysis of the Whorl phenomenon. Keaflyn could recognize the symbols, could even define the meaning of each, but their relationships within a complex mathematical statement were a mystery to him.

  Was his intelligence that far down?, he asked himself with a sick feeling.

  "Kelly, let me see the report I did on Lumon's Star." The ship displayed the earlier paper, one he had written himself . . . and he had the same problem with the math. He could no longer comprehend equations he had originated.

  "I can't follow the math we've been using, Kelly," he admitted. "I suppose yours is all right. I can't criticize it, in any event."

  "I understand, Mark. However, you must sign my report if it is to receive publication."

  "Oh, yes. Computer reports aren't acceptable, are they?" Keaflyn considered the matter for several minutes. It would not be honest for him to pretend authorship of the Kelkontar report, and he had always been scrupulous in matters of scientific authorship. Besides, if his mental condition was public knowledge, and it might be after twelve years, everyone would know the report was beyond his capacity.