"People started good-mouthing you just a few weeks after you disappeared in the Whorl, Mark. Your superduper warp drive made the physicists take a look at your report on Lumon's Star, which they decided was a terrific piece of work. Some of them objected to the subjective stuff about Avalon you had in that report, but—"
"That was factual reporting about Avalon," Keaflyn interrupted, irritated. "I visited that planet and reported what I saw and heard."
"Don't jump on me about it," grinned Felston. "They said it was subjective because your ship's recording instruments showed Avalon to be nothing more than an undeveloped Terra-type world. You know how physicists are, Mark, being one yourself. They trust their instruments more than their senses. If you say you discovered the heaven-world and hobnobbed with some famous backtrackers there, I'll take your word for it."
"Well . . . physicists do have to maintain rigorous standards of proof," Keaflyn agreed, conscious that he wasn't behaving at all gracefully. "Of course I was aware while on Avalon that my senses were reporting on a level of reality other than that of the normal universe, but that isn't the same as saying my senses were deceived. The inhabitants of Avalon are stabilities, and the planet is something of a stability itself. It's real, and they're real, but not on our level of reality or my ship's. So I hardly felt a need to limit my report to those scanty observations my ship could verify."
Felston nodded agreeably. "The criticism over that didn't last long, anyway. You really opened up some horizons, pardner! You broadened our views so much that . . . well, you can read the details in the stuff I'm feeding to your ship. I don't want to talk you to death, with you looking so damned poorly." His voice took on a tone of concern. "You could use some therapy, man."
"That's why I came—one reason, anyway. And found out after I got here that I can't land. I figured Tinker could clean out a lot of that mess the Senior Sibling loaded me with."
"Tinker could," nodded Felston. "What's this about not being able to land?"
"Kelly and I came out of the Whorl carrying a twelveyear charge of temporal energy," Keaflyn replied tonelessly. "That's enough to make us a few hundred times as reactive as a fusion bomb of the same mass." He described the effects of dust on the ship's hull and the experimental destruction of the asteroid.
"All that's in the report you're feeding down?" Felston asked.
"Yeah. Kelly put in all the pertinent data."
"Well," said Felston, "I'll get that report into distribution right away. Maybe somebody can figure something out from it."
"You think you can get it through Science Reporting Service?" Keaflyn asked anxiously.
Felston laughed. "Who's going to fool with Science Reporting Service?" he snorted. "Who do you think you aren't, old buddy? Anything from Mark Keaflyn, or his ship, rates top priority on the triple-A comm circuit!" Keaflyn blinked and shook his head. Presumably Felston knew what he was talking about, but the former cowpoke's words stirred feelings of unreality in him. Dazedly, he said, "Handle it however you think best, Alo. In the meantime, do you have any suggestions on what I ought to do?"
"Yeah. Just one. If your ship's consumables are in good enough shape, hightail it to Rimni and let Tinker get to work on you! You don't have to land. She can do pretty competent therapy via comm, if you're not too far away."
"Any hope of reaching and blowing my pleasureimpress?" Keaflyn asked—although he was reasonably certain he knew the answer already from Felston's speech nuances.
Felston verified that: "No. We've made real progress, Mark, but that goal still looks a couple of lifetimes of hard research away."
Keaflyn shrugged. At best, then, all he could expect from therapy was that the speed of his degradation would be slowed. It would be a halfway measure, in a situation where such measures were of little help. But at least he would be in comm with Tinker, and therapy would make his remaining weeks in this lifetime endurable.
"Okay," he agreed. "I'm off to Rimni, as soon as our computers complete their exchange of information."
"The exchange is complete, Mark," the ship informed him.
"Thanks. Alo . . . "
"Yes, Mark?"
He forced a smile. "Be kind to dumb animals, Alo. One of them might be your wife's ex-husband."
Felston returned the smile. "I will, Mark. So will Tinker. Out."
"Out."
After a moment Keaflyn said, "Warp for the Rimni system, Kelly. And let me have some aspirin."
Chapter 16
He slept for several hours, then ate breakfast. After that, he began reading the material Felston had fed to his ship. Much of it was beyond his comprehension—the research reports on stability investigations in particular. But it was gratifying to learn that such investigations had been made in great number. And nearly every one cited his papers on Lumon's Star and the Loci as key references. Obviously, he had started something . . .
The reports on Tinker's ego-field research were, superficially, more understandable. At least they did not include page after page of involved mathematics. But after wading through the ones of most recent date, Keaflyn gave up on them as well. He had gathered that the investigators had achieved the rather remarkable goal of lifting certain types of trauma from the ego-fields of such animals as dogs, pigs, and goats—quite a feat, considering that means of communicating with these animals had to be established first.
Maybe there was a glimmer of hope there . . . if he could remain a fairly high-type animal for a few lifetimes. Maybe he could hang on in that manner until a way of blowing pleasure-impresses was discovered, and then get himself into an animal being treated by Tinker's investigators. Obviously, with trillions of animals in existence, that would take more than a little luck. But it was a hope to hang onto; purely for the sake of hope.
Finally he turned to the popular accounts Felston had included and was chagrined to find these over his head, too. Even lowest-common-denominator expositions were too heavy for his restricted intelligence. But after a struggle, he gleaned a few salient points and began to grasp the change that twelve years and five months had brought:
—Exploration of the galaxy as a whole. With the fast and more efficient warp drive, ships had gone far from the galactic arm segment he had known. Five other human realms had been found and communication established with them. Much was written about resulting cross-cultural progression that Keaflyn could not follow at all.
—General recognition of Negs and the contrauniverse as forces in opposition to enhanced existence and reality. The Sect Dualers, Keaflyn gathered vaguely, had disbanded.
—Enhanced reality? That, as near as he could make out, was what several of the accounts were talking about. It had something to do with conscious endorsement of the universe and particularly of the stabilities. The old game of Null the Globe had never been resumed. Just the opposite kind of game—Validate the Globe—was now the custom on Bensor.
—Mind over matter. This fit in with enhanced reality, he gathered, and with the recognition that mind was indeed senior to the physical universe, even senior to the stabilities. The whole field of "psi" abilities was being replotted and expanded.
All of that from nothing more than his hurried and harried probings of a few stabilities? he wondered in astonishment. So it seemed. Time after time he found himself mentioned in the accounts, in such phrases as " . . . the pioneering studies of Mark Keaflyn . . . " or
" . . . was suggested by Keaflyn's findings on . . . " or " . . . of course draws heavily on Keaflyn's speculations concerning . . . "
He recalled Alo Felston's amused reaction to his anxiety over whether his Whorl report would be accepted for publication. "Who do you think you aren't?" Felston had demanded joshingly.
"I aren't that Mark Keaflyn," he now replied aloud.
"Was that addressed to me, Mark?" his ship asked.
"No, Kelly. Just my extremely retarded reply to something Alo Felston said yesterday."
Indeed, he wasn't that Mark Keaflyn. Not any longer. Tha
t Mark Keaflyn was dead, in the old, finalistic, backtrack sense of the word. He no longer existed. The present Mark Keaflyn was a shrunken thing, too reduced to understand, much less find gratification from the accomplishments of his former self.
How, for example, was he to comprehend "enhanced reality?" He stared about the cabin of his ship, at the bulkheads, the instruments, the viewscreen, the glass of bourbon he had ordered but decided not to drink. Was anything enhanced?
"Give me a clear view, Kelly," he said.
The viewscreen blackened and sparkled with stars as the Kelkontar duplicated on it a naked-eye view of the stars visible from the ship's present location on the way to Rimni. Keaflyn gazed at the image long and thoughtfully. Well, perhaps the effect was somehow different than he had ever noticed before. Though the stars were still points of light, those points had a feel of solidity—of huge masses the stars really were, scattered through the depths of space.
He was not sure, but the impression came to him that the most ignorant savage, gazing up from a wilderness world at a sky like that, could never mistake it for a lightspangled roof around his world, a few thousand miles up. It was a sky of depth, a sky that went on and on and on . . .
He looked away from it, half intimidated by the sight. He had gained a glimmering of what "enhanced reality" meant.
At the edge of the Rimni system, light-hours away from the central planets, he halted the ship. "We'd better park out here, where the dust is thin," he said to his ship. "Get . . . get Tinker on comm . . . Mrs. Marianne Felston, I suppose that is . . . "
Moments later her face appeared on the screen. Her eyes—beautiful eyes—widened with concern as she studied him. "Oh, Mark! What a mess you are!"
"Yeah, I've picked up a few problems, Tinker," he said, feeling extremely dull-witted and aware, for the first time, that the sluggishness of his speech and clumsiness of his gestures must make him the least sexually-attractive man in existence.
She had called him Mark, whereas Jack had been his mate-name through all his lives with Tinker. He didn't need more IQ than he had to understand that. Tinker was no longer, his—except perhaps as a therapist.
"Mark, if I had known you were alive and would be returning in any shape or form, I would have waited," she was saying. "You know that, don't you?"
He shrugged, angry without knowing why. "It doesn't matter, Tinker—Marianne—because I'm not really back," he said thickly. "Didn't Alo comm you about the temporal charge I'm carrying?"
"Yes, and of course I got the complete explanation from the triple-A comm circuit. Everybody did, Mark! Thousands of scientists are hard at work right now, on hundreds of worlds, trying to find a way to help you. So please don't go on thinking your position is hopeless. It isn't!"
He thought about it and found some encouragement. If so many able people were so concerned about his fate, well, maybe they could do something. It was comforting to have his betters looking after him. He might as well let them do the worrying . . . except for one thing. In their way, his betters were even slower than he was! Sure, thousands were trying to find a way to deal with temporal charge; sure, Tinker and Alo and their outfit were digging for techniques that would break a pleasureimpress . . . but with what deadlines in mind?
No deadlines at all!
He remembered how it had been at Bensor-onBensor. Only because Keaflyn was an old friend had John Donflannis agreed—grudgingly—to try to complete a special probe for the examination of the Lumon's Star warpicles within three years. And that was a fairly straightforward job of engineering! Donflannis would have preferred to take three decades instead of three years . . . or carry the project over to the next lifetime. Keaflyn had found it necessary to point out that for him this lifetime was it!
People who had all the time there was just couldn't gear themselves to the schedule imposed upon a onelifetime man. They could not grasp the sense of urgency he lived with. Certainly not in dealing with such a marvelous intellectual challenge as temporal charge.
He could imagine some distinguished thinker reproving him, as he gasped on the last whiff of oxygen left in the Kelkontar: "Patience, Mr. Keaflyn, patience! Scientific enquiry mustn't be rushed."
Oh yes, they were looking for the answer to his problem and might find it in a century or two!
To Tinker he said, "Maybe I should take another turn through the Whorl, a slow trip that'll consume a hundred years."
She looked thoughtful, as if she were seriously considering his suggestion.
"That was a joke," he added, annoyed. "I don't think I could take the Whorl again."
"I understood, Mark. My thought was of the lack of haste your joke was aimed at. I do all I can to spur people along."
"I'm sure you do, T—uh—Marianne, and I appreciate it. But I doubt if you can have much effect on them."
"Yes, I can, too, on some of them . . . I'm still Tinker, Mark."
"Okay, you're Tinker," he snapped back. "But I'm no longer Jack."
"You're no longer Jack, but only because you are so entirely Mark Keaflyn. Jack had to be crowded out and left behind, Mark."
Keaflyn shook his head in puzzlement. Tinker's eyes flared angrily.
"What am I supposed to do, Mark? Apologize for thinking you were wiped out?" she demanded stingingly.
"Do you want me to come wipe your nose and change your diaper? You're so damned busy being traumatized and sorry for yourself that you can't understand a thing you're told! Snap out of it!"
"Don't you think I'm trying?" he glared back.
"Not very hard, you're not! Men lived with trauma and confronting death for trillions of years without going to pieces. Or is courage too much to ask?"
He was startled, both by Tinker's manner and her remark. Courage? Hell, he hadn't even heard that word used in three hundred years! Who needed to think about courage when everyone had it? Or had an absence of fear, which came to the same thing?
But it was something he needed now. Fear had been pounded into him—a little of it when the Sect Dualers stuck him with a pleasure-impress and an overwhelming burden of it when Berina Arlan had put him through her torture mill. He needed to look wherever it was untold generations of men had looked, each man isolated within himself and constricted within the brief span from birth and death, imprisoned in ignorance. They had found the will to carry on with the business of life and had managed to cling to their hard-pressed sanity while they were doing it.
They had looked and found courage. Keaflyn looked now and found the same. Guts. Grit. A proud stubbornness. It was there, this something that boomed deeply and soundlessly: I am man! Defeat me, and I remain man!
He raised his face to the viewscreen. "Okay, Tinker. I came to ask you for therapy, and you just gave me the first dose. I'm ready to continue when you are."
"Good, Mark!" she applauded. "Just one more matter, concerning our personal relationship, to clear away before we begin. Alo Felston is a very gentle, lovable, and remarkable man. He and I work well together . . . and love well together. What he and I have isn't what you and I had and might have again. But I want you to understand this, Mark: you're not going to get me back without working at it and working hard! I'm quite content with Alo, and if you want to shrug your shoulders and walk away, I'll stay content. All clear?"
He grinned. "Sure! I've got to woo you to win you. That's fair enough. It was fun the last time I tried it." She smiled at him. "It was for me, too. Okay, let's get to work."
Not until later did Keaflyn realize that the talk of wooing-and-winning had led him to set aside, for the moment, the tremendous barriers that lay between the present and that hypothetical idyllic future in which his most serious problem would be of a romantic nature.
Tinker had dangled a carrot in front of him, but from across a deep chasm. In so doing, she had succeeded in pulling his attention up from the depths of that chasm—precisely what she had intended to do.
She asked, "Are you ready to look at your second visit aboard the Calcutta?"
He winced. "Yeah."
"Good. When does it start?"
"Well, there's no point in looking at going aboard. That was all harmless enough. It started in Berina Arlan's office. I went in and knew I walked into a trap as soon as she spoke. She had mayhem in her voice." Keaflyn was aware that he was starting to quiver as he recounted the experience. That was good, he thought approvingly. You have to re-experience these things to blow them. Can't just see them from a safe distance . . .
"When she told me to sit down, my damned Neg made me too tired to keep standing. So I sat, and the chair strapped me down before I could get up again. I ought to have told her my Neg was giving her a hand, but that might not have impressed her. Anyway, I didn't think of it at the time . . . "
"Go on," Tinker encouraged.
"Well, we talked for a while. She dressed me down for being irresponsible, for giving the Neg one opportunity after another to attack stabilities. I said I'd leave the stabilities alone, quit my research, and said she should cut out the backtrack stuff and let's go for a swim. She said"—Keaflyn frowned in an effort to concentrate. Recall was becoming more difficult, the closer he came to the moment he was placed in the field of the first of the machines—"she said that would just be postponing what had to be done. I can't see anything after that. But I know what happened."
"Okay. Just tell me what happened till you get to a point where you can see it again," suggested Tinker.
He told of his chair carrying him from machine to machine, his voice a dull monotone.
"Then it stopped, and she was just standing there."
He shuddered. "I can see this part, but I don't like it."
"All right," said Tinker. "Go ahead."
"It scared me to look at her . . . Ugh . . . She said something too fast for me to understand. Then she said it again, and I said something back to her. After that she talked more slowly, and . . . God! It's awful to feel as helpless as I did! She said she was stopping the procedure for a while because something had come up. What she meant was that she had just noticed her Neg hadn't been bugging her during all this, as if it approved of what she did. I found out that later, though."
A Sense of Infinity Page 27