by James Blish
“Then what about you, and Retma?”
“Retma is a scientist; that is perhaps sufficient explanation. As for me, Mayor Amalfi, as you very well know, I am an anachronism. I no more share the major value system of He than you do of New Earth.”
Amalfi was answered, and he was sorry that he had asked.
“How close do you think we are?” he said.
“Very close now,” Schloss answered from the control desk. Outside the huge windows, which completely encircled the room, there was still little to be seen but the all-consuming and perpetual night If one had sharp eyes and stood outside for half an hour or so to become dark-adapted, it was possible to see as many as five galaxies of varying degrees of faintness, for this near the center the galaxy density was higher than it was anywhere else in the universe; but to the ordinary quick glance the skies appeared devoid of as much as a single pinprick of light.
“The readings are falling off steadily,” Retma agreed. “And there is something else odd: locally we are getting too much power on everything. We have been throttling down steadily for the past week, and still the output rises—exponentially, in fact. I hope that the curve does not maintain that shape all the way, or we shall simply be unable to handle our own machines when we reach our destination.”
“What’s the reason for that?” Hazleton said. “Has Conservation of Energy been repealed at the center?”
“I doubt it,” Retma said. “I think the curve will flatten at the crest—”
“A Pearl curve,” Schloss put in. “We ought to have anticipated this. Naturally anything that happens at the center will work with much more efficiency than it could anywhere else, since the center is stress free. The curve will begin to flatten as the performance of our machines begins to approximate the abstractions of physics—the ideal gas, the frictionless surface, the perfectly empty vacuum and so on. All my life I’ve been taught not to believe in the actual existence of any of those ideals, but I guess I’m going to get at least a fuzzy glimpse of them!”
“Including the gravity-free metrical frame?” Amalfi said worriedly. “We’ll be in a nice mess if the spindizzies have nothing to latch onto.”
“No, it cannot possibly be gravity-free,” Retma said. “It will be gravitationally neutral—again making for unprecedented efficiency—but only because all the stresses are balanced. There cannot be any point in the universe that is gravitationally unstressed, not so long as a scrap of matter is left in it.”
“Suppose the spindizzies did quit,” Estelle said. “We’re not going anywhere after the center anyhow.”
“No,” Amalfi agreed, “but I’d like to maintain my maneuverability until we see what our competitors are doing—if anything. Any sign of them, Retma?”
“Nothing yet. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly what it is that we are looking for. But at least there are no other dirigible masses like ours anywhere in this vicinity; in fact, no patterned activity at all that we can detect.”
“Then we’re ahead of them?”
“Not necessarily,” Schloss said. “If they’re at the center right now, they could be doing a good many things we couldn’t detect, under a very low screen. However, they would already have detected us and done something about us if that were the case. Let’s assume we’re ahead until the instruments say otherwise; I think that’s a fairly safe assumption.”
“How much longer to the center?” Hazleton said.
“A few months, perhaps,” Retma said. “If we’re right in assuming that this curve has a flat spot on top of it.”
“And the necessary machinery?”
“The last installation will be in at the end of this week,” Amalfi said. “We can begin countdown the moment we arrive … providing that we can learn to handle equipment operating at ten or a hundred times its rated efficiency, without blowing some of it out in the process. We’d better start practicing the moment the system is complete.”
“Amen,” Hazleton said fervently. “Can I borrow your slide-rule? I’ve got a few setting-up exercises I’d better start on right now.” He left the room. Amalfi looked uneasily out at the night. He would almost have preferred it had the Web of Hercules been there ahead of them and promptly taken a sitting-duck shot at them; this uncertainty as to whether or not someone really was lurking out there—coupled with the totally unknown nature of their opponents—was more unsettling than open battle. However, there was no help for it; and if He really was first, it gave them a sizable advantage ….
And their only advantage. The only defenses Amalfi had been able to conceive and jury-rig for He depended importantly on actually being at the metagalactic center, able to make use of the almost infinite number of weak resultant forces that could be used there to produce major responses—the buttercup-vs.-Sirius effect Bonner had so characterized. In this area he found Miramon and the Hevian council oddly uncooperative, even flaccid, as though mounting a defense for the whole planet was too big a concept for them to grasp—a hard thing to believe in view of the prodigious concepts they had mastered and put to work since Amalfi had first met them as savages up to their knees in mud and violence. Well, if he did not yet understand them, he was not going to make his understanding perfect in a few months; and at least Miramon was perfectly willing to let Amalfi and Hazleton direct Hevian labor in putting together their almost wholly theoretical breadboard rigs.
“Some of these,” Hazleton had said, looking at a just-completed tangle of wires, lenses, antennae and kernels of metal with rueful respect, “ought to prove pretty potent in the pinch. I just wish I knew which ones they were.” Which, unfortunately, was a perfect précis of the situation.
But the needles recording the stresses and currents of space around He continued to fall; those recording the output of Hevian equipment continued to rise. On May 23rd 4004, both sets of meters rose suddenly to their high ends and jammed madly against the pegs, and the whole planet rang suddenly with the awful, tortured roar of spindizzies driven beyond endurance. Miramon’s hand flashed out for the manual master switch so fast that Amalfi could not tell whether it had been he or the City Fathers that cut the power. Maybe even Miramon did not know; at least he must have gotten to the cut off button within a hair of the automatic reaction.
The howl died. Silence. The Survivors looked at each other.
“Well,” Amalfi said, “we’re here, evidently.” For some reason, he felt wildly elated—a wholly irrational reaction, but he did not stop to analyze it.
“So we are,” Hazleton said, his eyes snapping. “Now what the hell happened to the metering? I can understand the local apparatus going wild—but why did the input meters from outside rise instead of dropping back to zero?”
“Noise, I believe,” Retma said.
“Noise? How so?”
“It takes power to operate a meter—not a great deal, but it consumes some. Consequently, the input meters ran as wild as the machines did, because operating at peak efficiency with no incoming signals to register, they picked up the signals generated by their own functioning.”
“I don’t like that,” Hazleton said. “Do we have any way of finding out on what level it’s safe to run any instrument under these circumstances? I’d like to see generation curves on the effect so we can make such a calculation—but there’s not much point in consulting the records if we just burn out the machine in the process.”
Amalfi picked up the only instrument on the Hevian board that was “his”—the microphone to the City Fathers. “Are you still alive down there?” he said.
“YES, MR. MAYOR,” the answer came promptly. Miramon looked startled; since everything of which he had any knowledge had gone dead, even the lights—they were sitting bathed only in the barely ascertainable glow of the zodiacal light, that belt of tenuous ionized gas in He’s atmosphere brought to life by He’s magnetic field, plus the even dimmer glow of the few nearby galaxies—the sudden voice of the speakers must have alarmed him.
“Good. What are you opera
ting on?”
“WET CELLS IN SERIES AT TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED VOLTS.”
“All of your
“YES, MR. MAYOR.”
Amalfi grinned in the virtual darkness. “All right, apply your efficiency figures to a set of standard instrumental situations.”
“DONE.”
“Give me an operating level for Mr. Miramon’s line down to you, allowing for pilot lights on his board so he can see his settings.”
“MR. MAYOR, THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. WE HAVE ALREADY RESET THE MASTER CUTOUT AT THE NECESSARY BLOWPOINT LEVEL. WE CAN RE-ACTUATE ALL THE CIRCUITS AT ONCE.”
“No, don’t do that, we don’t want the spindizzies back on too—”
“THE SPINDIZZIES ARE OFF,” the City Fathers said, with austere simplicity.
“Well, Miramon? Do you trust them? Or would you rather have them tie in to you first and print their data for you, so you can turn the planet back on piecemeal?”
He heard Miramon draw in his breath slightly to answer, but he was never to know what that answer would have been; for at the same moment, Miramon’s whole board came alive at once.
“Hey!” Amalfi squalled. “Wait for orders down there, dammit!”
“STANDING ORDERS, MR. MAYOR. AFTER COUNTDOWN BEGINS WE ARE TO ACT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE. COUNTDOWN BEGAN TWELVE HUNDRED SECONDS AGO, AND SEVEN SECONDS AGO OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE BECAME STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.”
“What do they mean?” Miramon said, trying to read every instrument on his board at once. “I thought I understood your language, Mayor Amalfi, but—”
“The City Fathers don’t speak Okie, they speak Machine,” Amalfi said grimly. “What they mean is that the Web of Hercules—if that’s who it is—is coming in on us. And coming in on us fast.”
With a single, circumscribed flip of his closed fingers, Miramon turned off the lights.
Blackness. Then, seeping faintly over the windows around the tower, the air-glow of the zodiacal light; then, still later, the dim pinwheels of island universes. On Miramon’s board, there was a single spearpoint of yellow-orange which was only the heater of a vacuum tube smaller than an acorn; in this central gloom at the heart and birthplace of the universe, it was almost blinding. Amalfi had to turn his back on it to maintain the profound dark-adaptation that his vision needed to operate at all in the tower on his mountain.
While he waited for his sight to come back, he wondered at the speed of Miramon’s reaction, and the motives behind it. Surely the Hevian could not believe that a set of pilot lights in a tower on top of a remote mountain could be bright enough to be seen from space; for that matter, blacking out even as large an object as a whole planet could serve no military purpose—it had been two millennia since any reasonably sophisticated enemy depended upon light alone to see by. And where in Miramon’s whole lifetime could he have acquired the blackout reflex? It made no sense; yet Miramon had restored the blackout with all the trained positiveness of a boxer riding with a punch.
When the light began to grow, he had his answer—and no time left to wonder how Miramon had anticipated it.
It began as though the destruction of the inter-universal messenger were about to repeat itself in reverse, encompassing the whole of creation in the process. Crawls of greenish-yellow light were beginning to move high up in the Hevian sky, at first as ghostly as auroral traces, then with a purposeful writhing and brightening which seemed as horrifyingly like life as the copulation of a mass of green-gold nematode worms seen under phase-contrast lighting. Particle counters began to chatter on the board, and Hazleton jumped to monitor the cumulative readings.
“Where is that stuff coming from—can you tell?” Amalfi said.
“It seems to come from nearly a hundred discrete point-sources, surrounding us in a sphere with a diameter of about a light year,” Miramon said. He sounded preoccupied; he was doing something with controls whose purpose was unknown to Amalfi.
“Hmm. Ships, without a doubt. Well, now we know where they get their name, anyhow. But what is it they’re using?”
“That’s easy,” Hazleton said grimly. “It’s anti-matter.”
“How can that be?”
“Look at the frequency analysis on this secondary radiation we’re getting, and you’ll see. Every one of those ships must be primarily a particle accelerator of prodigious size. They’re sending streams of stripped heavy anti-matter atoms right down the gravitational ingeodesics toward us—that’s what makes the paths the stuff is following look so twisted. They’ve found a way to generate and project primary cosmics made of anti-matter atoms, and in quantity. When they strike our atmosphere, both disintegrate—”
“And the planet gets a dose of high-energy gamma radiation,” Amalfi said. “And they must have known how to do it for a long time, since they’re named after the technique. Helleshin! What a way to conquer a planet! They can either sterilize the populace, or kill it off, at will, without ever even coming close to the place.”
“We’ve had the sterility dose already,” Hazleton said quietly.
“That can hardly matter now,” Estelle said, in an even softer voice.
“The killing dose won’t matter either,” Hazleton said. “Radiation sickness takes months to develop, even when it’s going to be fatal.”
“They could disable us quickly enough,” Amalfi said harshly. “We’ve got to stop this somehow. We need these last days!”
“What do you propose?” Hazleton said. “Nothing that we’ve set up will work in a globe at a distance of a light year … except—”
“Except the base surge,” Amalfi said. “Let’s use it, and quick.”
“What is this?” Miramon said.
“We’ve got your spindizzies set up for a single burn-out overload pulse. In the position we’re in, the resulting single wave-front ought to tie space into knots for—well, we don’t know how far the effect will carry, but a long way.”
“Maybe even all the way to the limits of the universe,” Dr. Schloss said.
“Well, what of it?” Amalfi demanded. “It’s due to be destroyed anyhow in only ten days—”
“Not if you destroy it first,” Schloss said. “If it isn’t here when the anti-matter universe passes through it, all bets are off; there’ll be nothing we can do.”
“It’ll still be here.”
“Not in any useful sense—not if the matter in it is tied up in billions of gravitational whirlpools. Better let the Web kill us than destroy the future evolution of two universes, Amalfi! Can’t you give over playing god, even now?”
“All right,” Amalfi said. “Look at those dosimeters, and look at that sky. What have you to suggest?”
The sky was now one even intensity of glow, like a full overcast lit by a dull sun. Outside, the lower mountains of the range stood with their tree-covered flanks, so completely without shadow as to suggest that the windows ringing the tower were actually parts of a flat mural done by an unskilled hand. The counters had given over chattering and were putting out a subdued roar.
“Only what I just suggested,” Schloss said hopelessly. “Load up on anti-radiation drugs, and hope we can stay on our feet for ten days. What else is there? They’ve got us.”
“Excuse me,” Miramon said. “That is not altogether certain. We have some resources of our own. I have just launched one; it may be sufficient.”
“What is it?” Amalfi demanded. “I didn’t know you mounted any weapons. How long will we have to wait before it acts?”
“One question at a time,” Miramon said. “Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now.”
“And that is?” Hazleton said tensely.
He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.
When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.
The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.
“What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?” Web asked.
“It will poison the circuits themselves,” Miramon said. “The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks.”
Amalfi let out a long, ragged sigh.
“No wonder you weren’t interested in our breadboard rigs,” he said. “With a thing like that, you could have become another Web of Hercules yourselves.”
“No,” Miramon said. “That we could never become.”
“Gods of all stars!” Hazleton said. “Is it over? As fast as that?”
Miramon’s smile was wintery. “I doubt that we will hear from the Web of Hercules again,” he said. “But what your City Fathers call the countdown continues. It is only ten days to the end of the world.”