Then suddenly, the camera angle changed wildly, as if the probe had violently rolled. Blue sky, fleecy white clouds filled the screen, and then. …
A shiny, red, metallic ovoid suddenly filled the screen. The front end seemed to be somehow translucent, there was a ring of ports or nozzles or lenses girding its middle, and a short coil of some blue metal at the rear end. …
Then the screen went blank.
“Do you all realize what this means?” Ching exclaimed.
“Of course!” said Schneeweiss. “An alien civilization, and a very high one too! The most—”
“Much more than that!” Ching said. “Consider: we’ve just discovered sentient beings in the first solar system we’ve investigated, a close neighbor of ours, in Galactic terms. Don’t you see what this implies? It means that the Galaxy must swarm with intelligent races, hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of them! Chaos, Brothers, Ultimate Chaos! A vast Chaotic concourse of civilizations, millions of them and each one unique. Random Factors beyond counting! The true face of Chaos—an infinite universe with an infinity of civilizations, no two alike!”
“Chaos!” “Chaos indeed!” “The end of the Hegemony!” “The final defeat of Order!” Everyone was shouting at once. “Yes,” said Robert Ching, “and—”
Suddenly a shrill, jarring siren-sound filled the room. The alarm! Something was approaching the asteroid. Has the Hegemony at last discovered this base? Ching wondered.
“The alarm!” N’gana shouted. “Of all the times tote discovered by the Hegemony!”
“Quickly!” Ching shouted. “To the observation room!”
They rushed from the auditorium and down the corridor as the siren continued its warning wail, and into another droptube which lowered them down to the very core of the asteroid near the heavily shielded room.
The droptube seemed to end in empty space itself. Ching and the others floated out at the bottom of the tube into a black, gravityless void; they were surrounded on all sides, top and bottom, by the black of space and the piebald jewels that were the stars. Only the opening of the droptube itself, a Weird “hole in space” above them betrayed the fact that they were really still in the asteroid, that the black, star-filled space in which they seemed to float was but an illusion, an illusion created by the great globular viewscreen in which they floated, at the gravity-less core of the asteroid, like embryoes in some huge transparent egg.
Illusion or not, Robert Ching felt an exhilarating, oceanic vertigo as he floated in “space” scanning the image of the stars all around him for the intruder, whatever it was. He always felt close to Truth here, close to Chaos. Many were the hours he spent alone in the observation room, contemplating the infinity of the universe, feeling it, seeing it all around him, a vast ocean of primal Chaos before which Man was dwarfed, and being dwarfed transfigured. …
But this, the still-wailing siren reminded Ching, was no time for contemplation. “What is it?” he said into seemingly-empty space. “Have you fixed the trajectory yet?”
From speakers behind the Viewscreen panels, a voice sounded as if from the stars themselves: “Unknown located, First Agent.”
A red circle appeared around a point of light in the black pseudo-space. Ching now saw that the point of reddish light he had taken for a star was actually waxing, forming a disc, rapidly approaching the asteroid. But … but not from sunward, from the dtion of Earth! It was coming from outward, from the direction of Saturn or Jupiter. If the Hegemony were searching for the Brotherhood headquarters, the ship should almost certainly be coming from sunward, not from the Outer Satellites. …
“Where is it coming from?” Ching said.
“We’re not sure, First Agent,” the disembodied voice said. “From Plutoward, in general, but we’ve backtracked its path clear beyond Pluto’s orbit, and it intersects no planet or moon. It … it seems to be coming from nowhere—unless it’s been taking evasive action—or from … from interstellar space. …”
Ching stared at the others floating beside him, stared particularly at Schneeweiss. The physicist was in turn staring at the object approaching the asteroid, which now showed an unmistakeable disc; which was so close that the disc could be seen to grow, second by second.
How big is it? Ching wondered. Impossible to tell, of course, without knowing the range.
“What’s the range on it?” he inquired.
“Two miles, First Agent,” the voice of the tracker said.
“Impossible!” exclaimed Schneeweiss. “At that range, the thing couldn’t be more than ten yards in diameter at this magnification. Check your figures!”
There was a period of silence, during which the course of the intruder changed. It no longer appeared to be growing larger; it had apparently swung into orbit about the asteroid, perhaps one mile out. The red ovoid swung over their heads, down behind their backs, under their feet, up in front of them again, overhead, behind, below. … An unnaturally fast orbit, Ching thought, one that can’t be accounted for by the neutral laws of astrophysics.
“Range—.97 miles,” the voice of the tracking officer said. “We’ve doubled-checked. It’s in orbit around the asteroid, and a damned fast orbit too. It must be powered. It’s got to be a ship.”
“It can’t be a ship!” Schneeweiss insisted. “It’s far too small.”
“Give us maximum screen magnification,” Robert Ching ordered.
For a vertiginous moment, the “space” in which they floated seemed to swirl, go vague. Then the viewscreen image coalesced again. The far-off stars were still points of light, the empty black of space was still black emptiness. Nothing seemed to have changed, except. …
Except that the thing orbiting the asteroid was now revealed as a metallic red ovoid, perhaps twelve yards in diameter, with a ring of lenses circling its middle and a short coil of blue metal at its rear end.
“Do you realize what that is?” Schneewess shouted as the metallic egg swung beneath their feet again, in front, overhead. … “It’s the same kind of craft we saw on the probe film, but much smaller. It must’ve followed our probe back!”
“From Cygnus!” Felipe exclaimed.
“From the stars!”
“We’re getting something on the radio,” the voice of the tracking officer said. “On the hydrogen wave-length band.”
“The logical universal wave-length for interstellar contact!” Schneeweiss exclaimed.
“Pipe it in here,” Ching ordered.
Crackles, hisses, and then a strange, irregular pulsing, a series of beeps and pauses, could be heard as the red ovoid continued to circle them. Ching had the uncanny feeling, caused, he realized, by the illusion that this room at the core of the asteroid was actually in empty space, that the thing was watching them as they listened to its radio pulsing.
“Beep-beep-beep. Pause. Beep. Pause. Beep-beep-beep-beep. Pause. Beep. Pause. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.” Then a much longer pause. And then the pattern repeated. “Beep-beep-beep. Pause. Beep. Pause. Beep-beep-beep-beep. Pause. Beep. Pause. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.” Another longer pause, and the pattern began repeating again.
“What is it?” Ching said. “It sounds somehow familiar. …”
“Three … one … four … one—six. …” Schneeweiss muttered distractedly to himself. “Three, one, four, one, six! Of course!” he shouted. “It’s pi! Pi to four decimal places, repeated over and over again. The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter! It’s telling us it understands our mathematics! It’s telling us it knows our number system has a decimal base.”
“It’s telling us it exists and is the product of intelligence,” Robert Ching said. “It’s telling us it knows we’re sentient beings too.”
Suddenly, the red ovoid broke orbit, began to accelerate rapidly, outward toward the orbit of Pluto. The disc rapidly shrank as the alien probe receded. Ching did not have to ask to know that it was receding in the direction of the 61 Cygni system.
Then, abruptly, while still
showing a discernible disc, the red alien seemed to shimmer for a moment, then vanished.
They were alone, alone with the images of the thousands of stars that filled the blackness in which they floated.
But alone no longer, Robert Ching thought as he stared at the thousands of points of light, red, blue, white, yellow, that were the stars. It was as if each point of light were an eye looking at him—and he knew that the illusion was not far from the truth. For now those p of light were dead shining things no longer. They were the abodes of thousands of civilizations as far as he could see, and further, civilization upon civilization, forever, without end.
The universe had at last revealed its true face to Man, a face with a million eyes, a countenance vast and infinite, a face of limitless wonder, infinite variety. …
Robert Ching gazed upon the face of the universe.
And the face he saw, the face that stared back, the glorious, infinite face, was the Face of Chaos.
“The servant of Order, by the very fact that he strives to maintain an eddy of decreased Social Entropy in a hostilely Chaotic universal context must imagine dangers lurking around every corner. The servant of Chaos does not imagine such dangers; he knows that they are there.
—Gregor Markowitz, The Theory of
Social Entropy
8
BORIS JOHNSON, dressed in anonymous Maintenance coveralls, stood in the square of greenery immediately across the small static street from the entrance to the Mercurian Ministry of Guardianship building. The Ministry itself was the tallest structure on Mercury, except for the environment dome itself, and its white plasteel facade soared nearly to the heavily polarized permaglaze of the dome above it, outside of which the thin but caustic Mercurian atmosphere raged—instant death lurking outside the dome, making it a cage far more perfect than anything the Hegemony alone could construct. With this area of the planet now on the dayside, where it would remain for the next Sixty days as Mercury completed its leisurely revolution about its own axis, not much shorter in duration than its orbit around the sun, the blazing solar furnace, so nearby, could dimly be seen even through the all-but-opaqued permaglaze, reminding all within the dome how frail and isolated they were, how totally confined and artificial their bubble of safety was.
The square in which Johnson stood was itself an attempt by the Hegemony to counter that feeling of impending destruction, of artificiality; a caged feeling that verged on claustrophobia. Only sixty yards by seventy, the square was an expanse of real glass, rimmed by two score genuine oak trees, both brought from Earth, planted and maintained at tremendous expense. It was no esthetic frill, but a psychological necessity on Mercury, this bucolic illusion in the permaglaze cage.
The park was jammed with Wards. It seemed to Johnson that every Ward not otherwise occupied in the dome was huddled there amidst the greenery, trying for the moment to forget that they were trapped in this cage on the most hostile planetary surface in the Solar System, with the exception of the gas giants.
And all to the good, Johnson thought as he felt the bulge of his lasegun in one coverall pocket, the smaller shape of the vial of nerve gas concentrate in another. There were perhaps three hundred Wards milling aimlessly about the park. Nearly a hundred andfifty of them were League agents, committed to risking their lives against terrible odds in the diversionary frontal attack on the Ministry building, designed to force the Hegemonic Council to seal off the Council Chamber and thus render themselves vulnerable to the real attack from within the Ministry itself.
Half an hour ago, there had been still more League agents among the Wards in the square, a good fifty more—men who were going willingly to certain death.
The wide plastomarble steps leading up to the Ministry had a constant trickle of Wards coming and going up and down them, for the Ministry was the busiest building on Mercury, with hundreds of Wards coming and going on one errand or another all day: obtaining travel passes, work permits, domicile authorizations—negotiating the maze of red tape which festooned the life of every Ward of the Hegemony from birth till death.
So it had been easy for those fifty agents to enter the building over a period of half an hour, one by one, among dozens of ordinary Wards. Now another agent entered the Ministry, Guilder, one of the six: agents Johnson had picked to lead against the pumproorn after the diversionary attacks began.
While the agents in the square attacked the Ministry from without, the fifty agents in the building would sacrifice their lives to the lethal Beams by attacking the corridors surrounding the Council Chamber itself—a diversion within a diversion.
Boris Johnson didn’t like sending fifty men to certain death, and had in fact kept this part of the plan secret from all but those who absolutely had to know, but with the stakes this high, there was just no room for squeamishness. The attack on the exterior of the building would be so obviously futile that the Council and the Guards would be sure to see it for the diversion that it was, and be on the lookout for a second, earnest, attack. They would take the sacrificial attack by the fifty men on the Council Chamber area as the true assassination attempt, and concentrate their attention on it.
They would not be likely to realize that this too was a diversion from the real assassination attempt until it was much too late. …
Fifty men would pay with their lives to destroy the Hegemonic Council, but Boris Johnson, while he felt regret, felt no guilt. Like everyone else involved with the mission, they were volunteers who knew exactly what they were doing.
Besides, Johnson had no illusions about his own chances of seeing another day. It would be possible to get into the pumproom, assassinate the Council, but after that … escape would be not much less than impossible.
But it would be well worth it. In one stroke, the entire leadership of the Hegemony would be destroyed. There would be chaos; in the confusion it might just be possible to escape. But everyone on this mission had to consider himself a dead man until the Council was dead. There was a certain freedom to be gained by considering yourself already dead. Every man had to die someday, and by thinking of today as that day, one was free to think of giving one’s death meaning, of making it count. … Thoughts of survival could only be afforded after the mission was completed.
Now Johnson saw yet another League agent climb the Ministry steps and enter the building.
He checked his watch. The timing was critical and had to be precise. In twenty-seven minutes, the attack on the Ministry would begin. Two minutes later, the fifty agents scattered now throughout the Ministry to avoid notice would have to converge, by timing alone, on the ring of corridors surrounding the Council Chamber and launch the second diversion. At that moment, the attention of the Guards would be split between the frontal assault and the attack on the Council Chamber.
At that moment, Johnson and his six men would have to converge on the pumproom, innocuously, from different directions, without even hinting at an Unpermitted Act.
While inside the pumproom, Jeremy Daid would have to get the Guards to open the door no more than a few seconds after the agents converged outside—no more than five seconds after the convergence itself caused the Beams in the corridor to pop.
The need for utter precision, a precision that each man would have to achieve independently, was terrifying if you thought too hard about it. One piece of bad timing and the whole thing would be blown—the Guards would pop every Beam in the building manually if the Guardian didn’t do it first.
Johnson checked his watch again. Twenty-five minutes to zero. He had estimated that it would take him nineteen minutes, proceeding with the necessary casualness, to get from the square to the pumproom door. Which meant that he should begin exactly six minutes from now. …
Johnson felt the tension rise within him as the seconds ticked slowly by. The plan demanded absolute perfection, and there were so many men involved, so many factors. It required an order more absolute than that of the Hegemony itself. …
Three minutes to go.
One minute.
Johnson glanced up at the permaglaze dome high above him, saw the sun barely leaking through the nearly opaque plastic and knew that it was highly unlikely that he would ever see it again.
Now!
Boris Johnson sauntered slowly out of the square, crossed the street and began climbing the broad flight of steps that led up to the entrance of the Ministry of Guardianship. As he climbed, he took care not to move faster than the dozen or so Wards climbing the steps with him.
He reached the wide entrance portal at the top of the steps where two Guards stood to either side of the entranceway, sullenly studying the Wards as they entered the building. Johnson held his breath as he stepped past the Guards—a papers check at this point would throw the whole timing off. …>
But the Guards looked through him as if he did not exist, and for once he was glad of their arrogant indifference.
Now he was in the big main lobby. There were two banks of elevators close by the entrance, both marked “Authorized Personnel only.” Eyes glared down at him from above the elevator banks. Beams sat there menacingly. Eyes and Beams ran along all four walls of the lobby at ten foot intervals. He had to check his watch to see if his timing was right, but it had to be a casual gesture.
He reached up, scratched his nose, passing his watch quickly before his eyes as he did so. Sixteen minutes to zero. So far, so good.
He walked slowly towards the big escalator at the rear of the lobby. Should use up two minutes now, he thought. He walked past Guards hurrying towards the elevators, ordinary Wards coming from the escalator, nodded to two Maintenance men as they passed him, and then he was at the escalator.
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