Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Oh, well,” said Grimes, “at least you won’t have to carry it back to the ship. So you can have your rifle and machete back . . .”

  But there was one consolation. As I was fully occupied during the march in steering the model through the forest—I kept it below treetop level—I was exempt from the task of hacking a way through the undergrowth. We had expected that this would not be necessary, that we would be able to keep to the path that we had cleared on our way out to the city, but those vines, in a few hours, had repaired the damage that we had inflicted upon them. The severed ends had reunited themselves. The tangle was even worse than it had been before.

  We got back to the ship just before sunset. The others already knew what we had done and seen; Mayhew had been in contact with Clarisse throughout and she had passed on the information.

  They were all eager to see the model flying machine—and were all disappointed to discover that it could be handled by nobody except myself. The engineers, of course, were itching to get their greasy paws on it, into it. Grimes and I told them that it was too potentially valuable to us to risk its being rendered inoperative by clueless tampering. If they wanted to do something useful, I said, they could make a sort of harness to fit around its fuselage, the straps of which must not make even the slightest contact with any of the vanes.

  I put the model, the simulator, through its paces in front of an admiring (possibly) and envious (definitely) audience. I had really gotten the feel of it during our inarch back from the city. I wished that I had a real ship to play with this way. In such a vessel pilotage would be unalloyed pleasure . . .

  Inevitably the thing acquired a name—two names, in fact. It was Bindle who referred to it as a winged wurst. It had never occurred to me until then that the hull was sausage shaped. And Betty Boops called it “the captain’s doggy”. It wasn’t long before some genius came up with a new verse to the Dog Star Line’s anthem which everybody had to sing, with the usual arf, arf! accompaniment.

  How much is that doggy in the window?

  It looks like a sort of a wurst;

  You can’t have that doggy in the window,

  Because the Old Man saw it first!

  Very funny, I thought. Very funny. But they were jealous, that was all.

  We had our evening meal and then I put my doggy through more trials in the darkness. It functioned as well as it had done in broad daylight. Either it had very efficient storage batteries or there was enough radiation, even from the night sky of the Rim, to keep it going. The two engineers watched wistfully. I decided that, to be on the safe side, I would take my pet to bed with me.

  The next morning we set out early. The party was as before but we had an easier time of it; the harness that the engineers had devised from wires and webbing allowed us to hang most of our equipment from the little ship.

  It looked absurd—imagine a balloon with a basket far larger than the gasbag—but it worked. And we knew, having made the experiment, that the machine could lift two people together with their equipment. One of those persons would have to be me—the captain’s doggy was a one-man dog—and the other was to be Sara. It was possible that some fast and accurate shooting might be necessary.

  We hacked our way through that blasted jungle again. Sonya remarked that it was a pity that I had not found a robot bulldozer. We came at last to the city. We ignored the ruined towers, went straight to the temple. I brought my doggy to ground level and we unloaded the equipment. Then I arranged the dangling slings to form a sort of seat and went for my first flight. It was very little different from the other flights that I had handled from ground level. I just . . . thought myself into the air, just thought myself to the roof of the temple. It was very little different, after all, from handling a big ship, except that I wasn’t having to use my hands to actuate the controls on a panel. I didn’t bother to land on the rooftop, just hovered over it. The smooth surface was unmarked. There was no sign of the other sounding machine. But it didn’t matter. We now had something far better than those primitive winches.

  I returned to the ground, extricated myself from the harness.

  We walked into the temple. I brought my doggy in after us. We looked at the altar. Grimes asked, “Are you sure that you don’t mind risking it, George?”

  I didn’t feel especially heroic, but somebody (I supposed) had to go down to where Mayhew and Clarisse had gone. Somebody had to try to find out what made this planet tick. The only reason why it had to be me was that I was the only one with control over a means of transportation.

  Sara and I assembled the pieces of equipment that we should need. A sound-powered telephone, with a sufficiency of wire. Two powerful torches. A laser pistol each. A projectile pistol for myself, a submachine gun for Sara. Ammunition. A camera. Food pellets. (I hated the things, but they were easily portable nourishment should it be required.) Water flasks.

  Hung around with gear like Christmas trees we strapped ourselves into the harness. I must confess that I rather enjoyed this forced close bodily contact with Sara. She seemed to read my thoughts, murmured, “George . . . At last!”

  I said, “Secure all for lift-off.”

  She replied, “All secure, captain.”

  Grimes said, “No heroics, George. If you’re at all in doubt, get the hell out.”

  “He’s a poet and doesn’t know it,” quipped Sonya.

  Then, obedient to my unspoken command, the little ship lifted, raising us from the floor. I looked up, was relieved to see that there was still ample clearance between it and the roof of the temple. I applied lateral thrust and we drifted slowly over the altar, then hovered. I looked down. If I hadn’t been an experienced spaceman I’d have changed my mind about making the descent. It was like—much too like—space as seen from the viewports of a ship running under Mannschenn Drive. There was the slowly shifting . . . formlessness, the darkness that was deeper than darkness should ever be, the ultimate night.

  “Ready?” I asked Sara.

  “Ready,” she whispered.

  We dropped slowly. Grimes and Sonya, Mayhew and Bill and Susan, stood there, watching us go. They looked like reflections of themselves in the distorting mirrors of a fun fair, but not at all funny. Their greatly elongated bodies wavered like candle flames in a draught, shimmered and faded. Grimes raised his hand and his arm seemed to stretch to an impossible length. Sonya said something and her voice was no more than a faraway sighing, long drawn out, like wind soughing drearily over a field of rocks and snow.

  Then they were gone. They were gone, whirled away into the far distance, fading, diminishing, tumbling down and through the dark dimensions. They were gone—but we, ourselves, did not seem to be moving. Around us was nothingness, but I sensed the fast approach of solidity from below. I realized that the model was equipped with the same sensory devices—radar?—as a full-sized ship, and that those sensors were . . . mine.

  I slowed our rate of descent so that we were falling gently as a feather. My boot soles made gentle contact with a hard surface. I said, “We’re here.”

  Sara complained, “You may be, but I’m not. Even when I stretch my toes are only just touching.”

  I brought the doggy down a few more centimetres.

  Mayhew had told us of a vast chamber with shifting, pulsing lights. And that is where we were. Stalactites and stalagmites of iridescence were its pillars and its roof was one enormous rainbow, the colours of which swept in steady procession up from the far distance to one side of us, setting in the far distance to the other. You know those coin-in-the-slot synthesizers that provide music in some taverns? That was the general effect. Mayhew and Clarisse, being in direct telepathic contact with the godlike planetary intelligence, had been awed. Sara and I, nontelepaths, were awed too—but mingled with our awe was a touch of contempt for the gaudiness, the . . . kitsch of it all.

  “Not very neat,” she whispered, “but definitely gaudy.”

  We looked around us. There, and there, and there were the desic
cated bodies of the explorers who had perished here from time to time in the Past, a Past so remote that it was unimaginable. There were the centauroid beings. There were other things that were more or less human. There was the arthropod, like a huge crab, like the creatures which had been immortalized in enduring metal in that group of statuary. Attached to it was a bright, tangled filament, piano wire, the sounding machine line by which we had tried to drag it to the surface.

  A voice sounded in the single receiver of my headset. “George! Are you all right? Report, please.”

  “We’re all right, Commodore,” I replied. “We’re in the cave described by Ken. There are the lights, and the bodies. How much wire have you for the telephone? We shall want to move around.”

  He said, “We can splice on at least another kilometre if we have to. Keep on reporting, will you?”

  “Wilco,” I said.

  I thought of unbuckling Sara and myself from the harness so that we could continue our exploration on foot, then decided against it. We would be able to cover a far greater distance in far less time using my doggy. Obedient to my unspoken command it lifted us clear of the floor of the cave, flew towards a pillar of pulsing light that seemed, somehow, to be an important part of the . . . machinery? I don’t know why I thought that it was important, it was just a hunch. But when you’ve been using machines of various kinds all your life you develop a feel for them, even when you’re not an engineer. And the first saboteurs must have known, instinctively, just where in the works to throw their wooden shoes to cause the maximum disruption.

  Grimes spoke to me again. “Be careful,” he said. “Ken tells me that It knows that you’re down there. It’s puzzled. It can’t read your mind the same way that it read Ken’s.”

  I said, “My nose fair bleeds for It.”

  We drifted slowly over the long-dead bodies. I paused above two of the humanoids. Before they dried out they must have been very like ourselves, I thought. Their faces were upturned; their expressions seemed to change, their limbs to stir under the continually shifting lights. Humanoid? Human, rather. A man and a woman, who must have been handsome before the skin was stretched so tightly over their bones. How long ago had they died? How had they died?

  Reluctantly I came in to a landing. Sara and I unbuckled ourselves from the harness. The doggy hung there, humming faintly, like a faithful hound awaiting orders. We walked slowly towards the bodies. I knelt beside that of the man, pulled what was a weapon of some kind from the holster at his wide belt of metal mesh. It was a pistol, although not a projectile weapon. I found the firing stud and, foolishly, pressed it. Nothing happened, of course. Its power cell was very dead.

  Sara removed a bracelet from the woman’s wrist. She said, “This is like grave-robbing, but . . .” Then, “This must be a watch . . . There’s a dial, but blank. And a stud that you press . . . And nothing happens.”

  “Batteries have a limited life span,” I said. “Even when they’re not being used, there’s leakage. H’m. These people had a level of technology not dissimilar to our own. Their clothing could be plastic . . .” Both man and woman were wearing kilt and shirt, dull green in colour, heavy sandals. I lifted the hem of the man’s kilt, rubbed it between my fingers. The material crumbled to a fine powder.

  “Not dissimilar,” agreed Sara, “and certainly not superior. I, for one, wouldn’t like to walk around not knowing when I was going to do an involuntary strip act.”

  “This stuff is old,” I told her.

  “So’s Doggy old, but she’s functioning well enough.”

  “She’s metal,” I said.

  “Metal, shmetal,” she sneered.

  “What are you arguing about?” demanded Grimes. He could hear my voice, of course, through the throat microphone but was getting only one side of the conversation.

  I made a brief report.

  “Get photographs,” he ordered. “Clothed, then unclothed.”

  “You want us to strip the corpses?” I asked, shocked.

  “They won’t mind,” he said callously.

  “I’m not some sort of ghoul, or necrophiliac, Commodore,” I protested.

  “This is a scientific expedition,” he said.

  “I’m not a scientist,” I told him.

  “You’re under charter to a scientific expedition, Captain Rule. And the terms of the charter party, which you signed, require that you render every assistance to the scientists.”

  He was right, of course. I told Sara what he wanted and we got the first of the photographs. Then we set about the distasteful task that I couldn’t help thinking of as desecration, Sara removing the woman’s clothing, myself the man’s. Fortunately, there was very little handling involved; the plastic material disintegrated at a touch, leaving only the metallic belts, sandal buckles and the like. The male, allowing for desiccation over the aeons, looked normal enough. So did the female, apart from a pair of secondary nipples under her breasts. There was no body hair on either of them—but many human peoples practice depilation and, come to that, extra pairs of breasts aren’t all that uncommon.

  We put the metal articles into the specimen bag and then got back into the harness. Obedient as ever, Doggy lifted and headed towards our original objective. There were no more corpses between us and that pillar of multicoloured light. There was no reason for us to stop, to delay the . . . the confrontation?

  Mayhew’s voice came through the earpiece. “George It’s aware of you. Be careful.”

  Now he tells me, I thought.

  “George I think you’d better turn back!”

  Then Grimes, “Captain Rule, return to the surface. That’s an order.”

  I said to Sara, “They’re scared of something. They want us to return.”

  She replied, “Then we return.” I heard the sharp click as she cocked her submachine gun. “I’ve a feeling myself that we’ve outstayed our welcome.”

  Doggy came round in a wide arc. We should have no trouble finding our way to the . . . the exit; all that I had to do was follow the cable of the sound-powered telephone. Doggy came round in a wide arc—and kept on coming, steadying up, once again, on the pillar of light.

  “Come round, you little bitch,” I muttered. “Come ’round, damn you.” It was happening the way it sometimes happens with big ships, no matter what you do, no matter what you try they seem to exhibit a will of their own. And was Doggy exhibiting a will of her own? I did not think so. She was mine, or had been mine, but now some other intelligence was taking over from me in that miniaturized control room.

  I . . . concentrated. I couldn’t turn her again, but I could—but for how much longer?—check her progress towards the column of luminescence. She wanted to obey me—I felt—but a stronger will than mine was taking her over. It was she and me against . . . It. Two against one. A human mind and a low-grade robot intelligence against a near-deity. But it wasn’t a real god, I told myself. It was only a robot with all a robot’s limitations. (And so was Doggy, come to that, a very minor robot, and I was only a human.)

  She was faithful to me. I was the prince who had awakened her from her aeons’-long slumber. She was imprinted on me. She was trying to obey my orders. But something had hold of her leash and was . . . pulling. She had all four paws dug in yet was slowly being dragged forward.

  “Bail out,” I ordered Sara.

  She unsnapped her buckles, dropped to the ground. I followed her. We stood there helplessly watching Doggy’s struggles. She would jerk back half a metre and then, slowly, slowly, would lose all that she had gained, more. And I identified with her, as any shipmaster always identifies with his vessel. Oh, she was only a model, and she hadn’t been made by beings even remotely humanoid but, from the start, there had been symbiosis.

  “If we lose her,” whispered Sara, “we’ve had it . . .”

  Oddly enough that aspect of it all hadn’t occurred to me until Sara put it into words. And then I felt fear, fear such as I had never known before in my entire career—and I admit
that I’ve been scared stiff more than once.

  Sara opened fire on the pillar of flame. It may have done some good—or harm, according to the viewpoint—but there were no visual indications that anything was being accomplished. The stream of tracer just lost itself in the greater luminosity of the column of light. I pulled my own pistol from its holster. I realized, after I had it out, that it was the laser and not the projectile weapon. And what could it do that the heavy slugs could not?

  But . . .

  Hastily I set the weapon to wide beam. I took aim, pressed the firing stud. I aimed not at the flaming pillar but at Doggy. The dazzling light fell full on the vanes projecting from her sleek body. Radiation was what she fed on, what gave her strength. Perhaps . . .

  “Turn,” I whispered, vocalizing my thoughts. “Turn . . . Turn . . .”

  She turned, not slowly, spinning on her short axis.

  “Steady, now, steady as you go . . . Accelerate!” And, “Run!” I shouted to Sara. “Run! Follow the telephone line!”

  We ran. Luckily the cavern floor was smooth, as most of my attention was devoted to Doggy. I had to stop her at the point where the telephone wire curved up from the horizontal to the vertical. The headset itself I tore off, dropped. There was too much risk of my becoming entangled in the wire.

  Ahead of us, Doggy hesitated, started to swing back towards us. I could see that as yet she was nowhere near the opening of the shaft to the upper world. I gave her another burst from my laser pistol—and, her cells recharged, she came once again under my control.

  We ran past the bodies of the two humans. Briefly I wondered if we should join them. We dashed through a curtain of cold, blue fire that suddenly rose from the cavern floor. Doggy, I saw, had reached the vertical telephone wire. She was waiting for us. Had I ordered her to do so? I could not remember.

  Another curtain of fire, and another . . . A weapon, possibly, a weapon evolved for use against some life form other than ourselves. So it wasn’t so bloody omniscient, omnipotent after all. These pyrotechnics, frightening as they were, weren’t hurting us.