Grimes was shouting down to his wife after a futile attempt to use his personal transceiver. Apparently the inhibitory field was as effective on the roof as inside the building. “Sonya, we want some timber. Yes, timber! Two good, strong logs, straight, each at lost two metres long and fifteen centimetres thick . . . Yes, use your laser to cut them!”
When she had gone, accompanied by the others, he determined the center of the flat roof by pacing out the diagonals. Where these intersected he put down his precious pipe as a marker. I brought him the laser cutter—one with a self-contained power pack. He held it like the oversized pistol that it resembled, directing the thin pencil of incandescence almost directly downward.
At first it seemed the surface of the roof was going to be impossible to cut; the beam flattened weirdly at the point of impact, spreading to a tiny puddle of intense light, dazzlingly bright even though it was in the full rays of the sun. And then, quite suddenly, without any pyrotechnics, without so much as a wisp of smoke, there was penetration.
After that it was easy. Grimes described a circle of about one-meter diameter but left a thirty-degree arc uncut. He switched off and put down the cutter, then retrieved his pipe. When it was safely back in his pocket he extended a cautious fingertip to the cut in the roof. He looked puzzled. “Cold, stone cold,” he whispered. “It shouldn’t be. But it saves time.”
I fetched the pinch bar and we got one end of it under the partially excised circle, then levered upwards. It came fairly easily, and did not spring back when the pressure was released. I took a firm hold on the smooth edge and held it while Grimes completed the cut.
When the disc was free it was amazingly light, even though it was all of four centimeters thick. I put it to one side and we looked down.
The altar—I may as well go on calling it that, although I was sure by now that it had no religious significance—was almost directly below us. Its alien geometry glimmered wanly. I’d been expecting, somehow, to find myself looking down into a hole, a very deep hole, but such was not the case. It was just as we had seen it from ground level, a distorted construct of slowly shifting planes of dim radiance. But we knew that if we fell into it we should keep on going.
Somebody was calling. It was Sonya, back from her wood-cutting expedition. We went to the edge of the roof. She and Sara were carrying one suitable looking log between them, the Thornes another. She shouted, “How do we get these up to you?”
Grimes did something to the winch handles of the sounding machine so that the wire ran off easily. He pulled as much as he needed off the reel, lowered the end of it over the edge of the roof to the ground. Sonya threw it around the first of the logs in a simple yet secure hitch. We pulled it up. It wasn’t all that heavy, but the thin wire bit painfully into the palms of our hands. Then we brought up the second one.
We used the laser cutter to trim the logs to square section, adjusting the beam setting carefully before starting work. We didn’t want to cut the roof from under our feet. Then we arranged the two baulks of timber so that they bridged the circular hole. We lifted the sounding machine and set so that it rested securely on the rough platform. Grimes shackled the heavy sinker to the end of the wire, left it dangling. “Mphm . . .” he grunted dubiously. He had found, clipped inside the frame of the winch, a small L-shaped rod of metal on a wooden handle. He asked, “Do you know how this works?”
I didn’t. I’m a spaceman, not seaman.
“This,” he told me, “is the feeler. Normally there’s a good lead from the sounding machine so the wire runs horizontally from the reel to a block on the taffrail or to the end of the sounding boom. Whoever’s working it holds the feeler in one hand, pressing down on the wire—and he knows when the sinker has hit bottom by the sudden slackening of tension. Then he brakes. Obviously we can’t do that here. So you, George, will have to exercise a lateral pull with the feeler. Yell out as soon as you feel the wire go slack.”
We took our positions, myself crouching and holding the feeler ready, he grasping both winch handles. He gave them a sharp half-turn forward and the sinker dropped, as the wire sang off the drum. It was plain that we hadn’t found bottom on the floor of the temple. Out ran the gleaming wire, out, out. . .
I heard Grimes mutter, “Fifty. One hundred . . . One fifty. . .” And what would happen when we came to the end of the wire?
It went slack suddenly. “Now!” I shouted as I went over backward! Somehow I was still watching Grimes and saw him sharply turn the handles in reverse, braking the winch. When I scrambled to my feet he was looking at the dial. “One hundred and seventy three fathoms,” he said slowly. “One hundred and seventy three fathoms straight down . . .” He grinned ruefully. “That was the easy part. Gravity was doing all the work. The hard part comes now!”
I didn’t know what he meant until we had to wind up all that length of wire by hand. We waited a little while, hoping that Mayhew and Clarisse would be able to attach a message of some kind to the sinker, and then we took a handle each and turned and turned and turned. The pointer moved anti-clockwise on the dial with agonizing slowness. We had both of us worked up a fine sweat and acquired blisters on the palms of our hands when, at long last, the plummet lifted slowly through the hole in the roof. There was more than just the sinker attached to the wire. There was a square of scarlet synthesilk that, I remembered, Clarisse had worn as a neckerchief at the throat of her khaki shirt. And knotted into it was the box of matches that Grimes had dropped into the altar.
There was something wrong with it. It took me a little time to realise what it was—and then I saw that in order to read the brand name—PROMETHEUS—one would require a mirror.
The Thornes had a pad and a stylus among their equipment. We used the sounding machine wire to bring these up to the roof, then attached them to the sinker and sent them down to wherever Mayhew and Clarisse were trapped. This time Grimes applied the brake when he had one hundred and sixty fathoms of wire down and walked out the rest by hand. Then we waited, Grimes smoking a pipe—his matches still worked in spite of the odd reversal—and myself a cigar. This would give the psionicists time to write their message and, in any case, we felt that we had earned a smoke.
We thought of asking Sonya to use the boat that we had left in the plaza to bring others of the party up to the roof to lend us a hand, then decided that, for the time being, it was better to have them standing by on the ground. To begin with, there was the problem of radio communication with the ship to be considered.
Our rest period over, we sweated again on what the commodore had so aptly called the Armstrong Patent machine. At last the sinker rose into view. Attached to it was a sheet torn from the pad. Grimes detached it carefully but eagerly, then grunted. Mayhew’s handwriting, at the best of times, was barely legible, and a mirror image of his vile calligraphy was impossible. And nobody had a mirror. I suggested that Grimes hold the sheet of plastic up against the sunlight. He did so, then muttered irritably, “Damn the man! If he can’t write, he should print!”
Squinting against the glare I looked over Grimes’s shoulder. At least, I thought, we should be thankful for small mercies; Mayhew had written on only one side of the sheet. I could just make out: Safe, so far, but no communication. It—the “it” was heavily underlined—will receive but not transmit. I can’t get inside its mind. It wants to know about us but does not want us to know about it. It’s draining us. Can you get us out?
(It took us far longer to read the message than it has taken you.)
“This piano wire is strong,” Grimes told me. “The weight of a human being is well below its safe working load, let alone its breaking strain. But I don’t fancy winching Ken or Clarisse—Clarisse especially—up by hand.”
I was inclined to agree.
Grimes wrote a short note to Mayhew, using the reverse side of the sheet on which the telepath’s message had been penned. He printed in large block capitals: HELP BEING ORGANIZED. GRIMES. We sent it down attached to the sinker.
/> And then Taylor appeared with additional equipment, bringing the boat down to a landing almost at the edge of the roof. Also with him were Thorne’s assistants—Trentham, Smith, Susan Howard and Mary Lestrange. The mousey quartet showed signs of pleasurable excitement. A few turns on the hand winch, I thought sourly, would wipe the silly grins off their faces. Betty was with them. She had brought a sound-powered telephone set, a large reel of light cable and a tape recorder. And there was the second sounding machine, to which a motor from the engineroom gantry had been attached. Porky Terrigal, the Reaction Drive Engineer, had come along with it to make sure that nobody misused his precious machinery. There were also thermocontainers of hot and cold drinks and boxes of sandwiches, a couple of coils of strong plastic line that Bindle had sent along thinking that they might come in useful (they did) and a spidery-looking folding ladder that would give us access from the roof to the ground, and vice versa.
The boat had to stay in position, as the power to the sounding machine winch would be fed from its fusion unit. Luckily the rooftop was wide enough to accommodate all the extra people and gear without crowding. Sonya and Sara came up to join the party, leaving the Thornes standing watch below.
Grimes turned the four young scientists to on the hand winch. By the time they got the sinker up to roof level they had lost their initial enthusiasm. The message was easier to read this time. To begin with, Mayhew had taken the hint and printed the words and, secondly, Susan Lestrange produced a small mirror from her shoulder bag. It said: WOULD LIKE A LITTLE MORE TIME. CAN YOU SEND TELEPHONE? KEN.
We sent the telephone, and with it some food and drink. Betty hooked an amplifier up to the instrument at our end of the line. We waited anxiously, far from sure that things would work. What if what had been happening to the written word also happened to the spoken word? Then, after what seemed an eternity of delay, we heard Mayhew’s voice. “Thanks for the tucker, John! It’s very welcome. All the others seem to have died of thirst and starvation . . .”
“What others?” asked Grimes.
“Clarisse here,” came the reply. “Ken can’t talk with his mouth full. We’re safe, so far. But I’ll try to put you in the picture. It feels like a huge control room, like a ship’s, but much, much bigger. Only there are no controls as we know them, no banks of familiar instruments . . . This is a great, cavernous space with lights shifting and pulsing. . . We know that it all means something, that it isn’t mere random activity, but what? But what? Maintaining stasis over uncountable millennia . . . Staying put in Time-and-Space while the Universe around it dies and is reborn . . .” A note of hysteria crept into her voice. “It . . . It has sucked us dry, of all we know, even of knowledge that we did not dream that we owned.”
“And now It isn’t interested in us anymore. We can take our places with the . . . others . . .”
“What others?” demanded Grimes.
Mayhew came back on the line. “There are bodies here. Not decayed but . . . desiccated. Sort of mummified. Some human. Some . . . not. There’s . . . something not far from us with an exoskeleton. Something not from this Universe. And there are two things like centaurs . . . The arthropod thing is holding a machine of some kind . . . It could be a complicated weapon . . . And there’s all the time the slow, regular pulse of the coloured lights washing over everything, and there’s something that’s like a gigantic pendulum, but not of metal, but of radiance . . . I can feel it rather than see it . . .” He paused. “It’s like being a tiny insect in the works of some vast clock, only the wheels and the gears and the pendulum aren’t material . . .”
Clarisse cried, interrupting, “But can you imagine a clock ticking backwards?”
Thorne had climbed up the rooftop. He said, “I heard all that. We must try to bring up some . . . specimens.”
“All that I’m concerned with,” Grimes told him, “is bringing our friends up.”
“It would be criminal,” said the scientist, “to miss this opportunity.”
“It will be criminal,” said Grimes, “to risk two lives any further. How do we know that the . . . gateway will stay open? No; we get Clarisse and Ken out of there now.”
The wire of the hand-powered sounding machine had been reeled in by this time and, under Grimes’s supervision, the one with the electric motor was set up in its place. To the sinker the commodore attached one of the coils of light plastic rope. He said into the telephone, “You remember that book of mine you borrowed on bends and hitches and knots and splices, Ken? You should be able to throw a secure bowline on the bight with the line I’m sending down to you . . . Yes, you sit in it . . .”
“But can’t he send up something, anything, first?” pleaded Thorne.
“No, Doctor.” Grimes was adamant.
“I overheard some of that,” came Mayhew’s voice. “I think we should. That lobster thing, and the contraption it’s holding in its claws . . . I could carry it up with me . . .”
“Mayhew is speaking sense,” commented the scientist.
There was a long wait. Then, “It’s heavy,” came the voice from the speaker. “Damned heavy. We can’t shift it.”
“Then leave it,” Grimes ordered. “The sinker and the plastic line are on their way down to you now. I’m using the electrically powered machine, so I’ll have you and Clarisse up in no time.”
“You have two machines?” asked Mayhew.
“Yes. Why?”
“I’ll send Clarisse up first. Send the wire down again, and I’ll have made a sling with what’s left of the line and put it round the . . . thing. Then you bring me up with the hand-powered winch, and you can use the stronger one to lift the specimen . . .”
“Well?” demanded Thorne.
“All right,” Grimes agreed reluctantly.
It took no time at all to extricate Clarisse. Grimes had sent Taylor down to the temple, accompanied by the two girl scientists, to pull her clear of the altar and then down to the floor as soon as she emerged. She joined us on the roof. I looked at her and tried to remember on which of her cheekbones that beauty spot had been . . .
We sent the wire down again. Mayhew telephoned that he had the end of it, was making it fast to the sling that he had managed to get around the body of the weird alien. We then shifted the electric winch to one side, replacing it with the hand-powered one. Grimes was worried that the two sounding wires might become entangled, but the sinker dropped with the same speed that it had done on the prior occasions.
Mayhew said that he was seated in the bowline and ready to come up. Trentham and Smith manned the winch handles. It was brutally hard work; the winch was not geared. After a while Grimes and I had to spell them. And then Thorne and Terrigal took a turn. Mayhew was bringing his end of the telephone up with him and was keeping us informed. “Like swimming up through a sort of gray fog . . .” he said. “I’m putting my hand out, but there’s nothing solid. . I can see the other wire . . . I can touch that, but it’s all that I can touch . . . Looking up, I can see a sort of distorted square of white light . . . It’s a long way off . . .”
Yes, it was a long way. A long way for him, and a bloody long way for those of us who were doing all the work. I hoped that Dr. Thorne was enjoying his turn at the winch; it had been his idea that a specimen be brought up. If he hadn’t insisted Mayhew would have been whisked to safety with the same speed as Clarisse.
We heard Taylor’s shout from below at last, just as Mayhew himself reported that he was being lifted into the temple. We came back on the winch after the Third Mate had caught his swinging feet and was lowering him safely to the floor. Once he was out of his harness he came up the ladder to join us on the rooftop.
Now that the operation was almost over I realized, suddenly, how time had flown. It was almost sunset, and a chill breeze was blowing from the east. In a matter of minutes it would be dark. Kinsolving has no moon and here, on the Rim, there would be precious little starlight.
Grimes said, “I think we should defer any further operatio
ns until tomorrow morning.”
Thorne said, “But there are lights in the boat. A searchlight . . .”
Mayhew said, “John, do we want that . . . thing? I’ve a feeling that the gateway may be closing again, at any second.”
“Oh, all right,” said Grimes resignedly. He turned to me, “Let’s get the electric winch back on to the platform.”
We did so. Then he told me, “It’s your equipment, George, operated by your personnel. Over to you.”
I thought, You buck-passing old bastard! But what he had said made sense. I gestured to Terrigal at the winch controls, made the Heave Away! signal. The piano wire tightened. I looked over Terrigal’s shoulder and could see the pointer on the dial begin to move. I visualised that bundle of—something—being dragged across the floor of the . . . Cavern? Control room? The winch hadn’t got the weight yet.
Then it took the strain and almost coincidentally the sun set. The light breeze was chillier still and there was almost no twilight. Somebody switched on the lights in the boat, including the searchlight, which flooded the rooftop with a harsh, white radiance. The winch groaned. Terrigal complained, “I can’t be held responsible for any damage to the machinery . . .”
“Keep her coming!” I told him. I was more concerned about the baulks of timber upon which the sounding machine was resting than with the machine itself. But engineers, in my experience, always tend to be slaves to rather than masters of their engines.
There was an acrid taint in the air from overheated metal and insulation and the wire, a filament of incandescent silver in the searchlight beam, was beginning to sing. But the pointer on the dial was moving—slowly, slowly, but moving.
Ride the Star Winds Page 83