by Brian N Ball
“Suppose he’s right,” she found herself saying to the two Enforcement Service crewmen.
“Maran right?” Rosario asked.
“Yes!”
“How, Miss Deffant? How right?” Tup wanted to know.
She could hardly put it into words, but she knew what she wanted to convey. Maran had pointed out that, despite all the attempts to communicate with supposed alien intelligences in other island universes, there had been no answers. Vast scanners ranged the depths of the Universe. They had sensed no coherent emissions. Despite the huge beamers which tried to tell far galaxies of the existence of the human race there had been no response. Couldn’t it be, Liz asked herself, that man was entirely alone in the Universe? Maran said so.
She collected her thoughts.
“I meant, what if he’s right about our being the only advanced life-form?” Before they could answer, she went on: “Oh, I know there have been theories about intelligent minerals operating on a time-scale too slow for us to understand—I even went for the notion of intelligent stars when they found that crazy double-star, but not now— you see, I’ve been around! I’ve been to all kinds of planets
—I’ve seen insect-eating lichens, walking plants, fossils that wake up once every millennium and then go back to sleep—but I’ve never come across anything that I can talk to! Nothing! And neither has anyone else!”
Tup was startled by the flow of words, but Rosario was not. New Settlements people had this enthusiasm. It came from their planetfalls on strange worlds which might soon echo to the building of towns. They had to be dreamers.
Liz realized that Rosario was waiting for her to go on. She saw his strong square face and looked at him for the first time as she would look at any handsome man. A stray recollection came back. Buchanan. Al Buchanan. He had looked so helpless the first time she had seen him. Not weak, but hurt. Not at all determined, like Rosario. But Al and Rosario were of a type. There was strength in the Enforcement Service commander’s steady gaze: he would make up his mind and act. Perhaps not as obsessively as Al. Other memories clamored for attention as she tried to marshal her inchoate arguments. Liz recalled small, intense private pleasures from the first days with Buchanan. A tiny victory when he said he would not run the recordings of the Court of Inquiry anymore. The feeling of dried leaves kicked up by their feet as they plowed through an autumn wood. The day they decided to freelance. There had been so many good days.
“Maran, Miss Deffant?” prompted Tup, who had not developed Rosario’s patience. She realized that they were politely waiting for her to make up her mind. The decision, and the answer, came:
“I’ll see him. Not because I want to tell anyone I’ve seen him. It’s just that I wonder about the man who thinks—believes—we’re unique.”
“Take Miss Deffant,” said Rosario. He smiled at Liz. “I think Maran could be right too.”
“Jack?” said Tup, in surprise. “You think he’s right?”
“Yes. Right about the uniqueness of the human mind. Maybe we are the only advanced form of life in the whole of the Universe. Maybe we should find out what caused this thing we call intellect or intelligence or soul.”
Liz hesitated. “You think Maran was right to try to solve the mystery—of how we started?”
“He was in too much of a hurry. If he’s right, if there is some way of understanding the processes of human thought and building on them, then we needn’t hurry. We’ve been around a long time. There’s no need to force the pace.”
“This way, Miss Deffant,” Tup said. He could not help adding: “This way to the Chamber of Horrors!” There was the usual grav-chute. At the bottom, Tup announced their arrival to an unseen robot servitor.
“I’m bringing a female visitor with full Security clearance,” he told it. To Liz he added: “Regulations. We have to comply.”
A shield slid away and Liz saw the cell-deck. A Security guard came across, to be introduced as Pete. Liz waved to him, but she barely noticed his polite smile, nor his brief welcoming words. She was spellbound, rooted to the spot, dazed by the sight of the unconscious expellees in the eerie green subdued lights of the enormous hold.
It was so much bigger than she expected. And nothing had prepared Liz for the shock of seeing rows of tanks, each with its gently swaying body cushioned by a grayish ooze. Tup had spoken of a Chamber of Horrors. It was. The unconscious figures were subtly sinister, like so many effigies of once-fearsome men and women. Liz tried to control her shaking hands. She felt fear, sensed it deep within her body.
“They don’t feel a thing!” declared Tup. Wrapped up in her own reaction as she was, Liz could recognize a change in the young man’s tone. He, too, sensed the chilled malice that emanated from the scores of tanks.
A green iridescence picked out the features of the expellees. Young, old, some women but mostly men. Near-naked bodies bobbed in a pulsating ooze. All the minds blotted out, monitored by machines below the tanks. There was no rational cause for fear, thought Liz. But she felt fear. It was not the corpselike appearance of the expellees, nor the eerie glow of the subdued lighting, nor yet the soft squelching of the ooze as bodies slipped and slid about the tanks; none of these things mattered, for she knew that they were held in a state of unconsciousness deep below the normal level of sleep. The cause of her fear was other than these.
Tup laughed. It was a young man’s reaction, thoughtless and without malice. “There’s nothing to worry about!” he added at once. “They can’t harm you!”
She knew it. Yet there was a sense of ragged, contained violence in the cell-deck. She shuddered, conscious of the empty stares of the unconscious expellees. “It’s their eyes,” said Liz. Pete nodded. “It’s something you have to get used to.”
All three looked into the nearest coma-cell where a large and powerfully-built yet flabby man lay. His eyes seemed to transfix them with a straining, questioning intensity.
Liz shuddered again. Empty eyes, glaring into the emptiness of empty dreams.
“Is that him?” She knew she spoke as if the man in the tank could hear. There was a hostile quality in Tup’s voice when he replied: “That’s Maran.”
CHAPTER 5
The Singularity was near.
Already the vague emanations from its strange depths were impinging upon the sensitive scanners of the station. On the operations screen, which occupied almost the whole of one side of the bridge, an image of the coordinates of the Singularity was forming. Pulsing with a vicious energy, the bizarre space-time event announced its presence. Trails of discontinuous energy fields scored the region inhabited by the Singularity. It was a leprous patch on the screen, a corroding and waiting beast poised, grim, blind. Buchanan knew the configuration of the Singularity. Its unquestioned dangers he admitted; but they held no terrors for him. Soon, the robots would loose the tug and when it fell away he would point the station directly into the maw of the Singularity. But now he had other considerations. Kochan had spoken in terms that had urged new fears into his mind. The passengers and crew of the Altair Star were lost—dead, irretrievably gone, lost. Buchanan’s self-appointed task was to find why the robots had given up so easily; why they had announced that no action on their part—or on the part of any human, by implication, since they regarded themselves as far superior to humans— could possibly do anything to save the huge liner. And that task had seemed enough. To find the reason for the loss of his ship. But now there was more. Kochan had loosed fresh devils to haunt him.
Was it possible that, within the vast, rotating phenomenon, the victims of the tragedy were held in a fantastic chronoclasm?
Buchanan fed instructions to the sensor-pads in his palms. The screen cleared, pulsed with dim light, and then projected a fresh image. Buchanan stared for minutes, watching the ship’s progress. The ship—the station—coasted easily along the inner arm of a spiraling vortex that helped flip it, like some cosmic slingshot, toward the dark regions: always with economy and efficiency toward the Singulari
ty. The ship was being handled superbly. He admitted it. He had hours now, hours in which to think over Kochan’s new and frightening ideas.
He approached the robotic controller and spoke to the cone-shaped pedestal: “The Singularity,” he said.
“Sir?” grated a metallic voice.
“Mr. Kochan left information. Give it. Begin.”
“Yes, sir.”
Buchanan watched. With growing dismay, he saw graphs, readings, projections: the foundation of Kochan’s fears. It was possible.
“That’s Maran,” agreed the guard.
The three of them looked at the lax body. A slow surge within the tank brought the bulk of the chest and belly higher. It was like the surfacing of some great creature from the lower depths. But for the eyes, it might have been a comic sight.
Liz shivered. Here was the source of the unease in the cell-deck.
“Miss, why don’t you go and look at the rest of the ship?”
The Security guard indicated a wide grav-chute at the far end of the cavernous hold. At the same time a slight shake of his head alerted Tup to Liz’s state of shock. Tup was perceptive.
“Not more like this!” Liz shuddered.
“No!” Tup said at once. “Come on, Miss Deffant—you have to see the survival-pods. What’s in them, how they’re launched. You’ll be interested—you’ve done some pioneering.” He took her arm, for once unembarrassed. “It wasn’t such a good idea bringing you down here. We’ll go down to the deck below.”
Liz allowed herself to be led past the rows of green-glowing tanks. She tried to avoid the empty stares of the expellees, but it was difficult. If she had been properly in control of herself and able to state her inclination, she would have asked to be returned to her cabin. But the slightly dazed and considerably fearful state of mind that troubled her made her suggestible. She followed Tup to a grav-chute at the far end of the cell-deck and again found herself floating downward to the further recesses of the great infragalactic vessel.
Tup rattled on cheerfully about the method of propelling the prisoners once they reached the far star at the Rim. Small, individual craft took the awakening expellees to their new lives.
“Here they are!” Tup announced. She was in a huge cargo hold. But this deck was bright and cheerful. No lines of tanks, no eerie half-lights, nothing one could easily associate with the Enforcement Service. The hold was full, however.
Liz saw scores of tall white cylinders, each one about twice the height of a man. Their purpose was obvious.
“The survival pods,” said Tup. He pointed to a small lock. “That’s where we launch them—all automatically. The expellees are shunted down here by the robot servitors, then they’re taken through a fairly slow revivifying process. When they wake up, they’re in a glide path.” Liz inspected one of the cylinders. She made out the small propulsion unit.
“We carried individual life rafts something like them, but not so small as these.”
“They’re not designed for deep-space use—though they would last for about six hours. We launch the expellees at predetermined coordinates that give them a flight of only a few minutes. Want to see inside one?”
Liz shook her head. She was still shivering, though the temperature in the hold was tolerable, comfortable even. Tup was disappointed. “Doubt if you’ll get the chance again,” he offered. “It’s bending regulations to open them, but you’d be interested.” He grinned, shy once more as he realized they were alone. “I had Pete program you on the console as a crew-member. Coming?”
“All right,” said Liz. She examined the gleaming canister without seeing it properly. There were instructions. The words did not reach her mind. There was something troubling her, but she could not quite say what. And if she had been able to identify it, she knew she would not want to speak of it. Something about the eyes …
“Look—everything they need for survival!” announced Tup as he opened one of the pods. “We launch them just outside the gaseous envelope—they glide down in a preset path. By the time he lands, the expellee is fully awakened. Ready to start again.”
Liz shook her head and concentrated dutifully; she studied the contents of the capsule with a professional eye. Tup was right. It was a neatly-designed survival pack. The expellees would not starve. The doubts and fears she had felt were pushed to the back of her mind. She checked the contents.
“Water purification plant, seasonal calculator, tools, medical outfit.”
“Simple expansion-principle weapon in unassembled form,” supplemented Tup. “Where they’re going they could run across carnivores.”
Liz glanced at the package. She was uninterested in weaponry, however primitive or quaint.
“Location of chief mineral deposits; water cycle. It’s a full ecological rundown,” Liz said. “It’s comprehensive. They’ll not starve.”
“I’ve thought of trying one of the pods out,” agreed Tup. “You know—take a vacation and live the simple life.”
“They’ll certainly be doing that,” Liz said.
“After what they’ve done, they can’t complain.”
Liz heard the edge of iron in Tup’s tone. He too was more than he seemed. A shy youth, there was resolution and authority beneath the bashful exterior.
“Well,” said Liz, with an attempt at lightness, “with that kind of rudimentary equipment they won’t be coming back.”
Tup was not smiling when he replied. “That’s the idea.”
At the entrance to the shaft that would take them up to the deck above and its grim lines of half-lit tanks, Liz hesitated. On impulse she said:
“Would you think it foolish if I said something about the cell-deck?”
“No.”
“It was the prisoner, Maran.”
“Jano Maran,” said Tup, not at all boyishly. “He worried you?”
“It was something I thought I saw.”
“Saw? Maran?”
“It was the eyes!”
Tup nodded, “It’s hard to think that they’re in a deep hypno-sleep.” Liz hesitated, feeling foolish now. But she went on with a rush: “He was watching! I’m sure he was!” Tup smiled. “Their central nervous systems are keyed into the comps. Breathing—food intake—waste products —every metabolic system is monitored. They’re held in a complex state deep below normal sleep. Getting them out of it is a long and tricky process. Each expellee has his own program for a return to consciousness. They just can’t do it on their own. Any premature awakening could be dangerous, possibly fatal They’ll be kept under until some hours before they reach the planet we’ve taken over from your Bureau. Out at the Rim. Miss Deffant, Maran wasn’t watching you. It really is impossible. Believe me?”
“Thanks,” said Liz Deffant.
They passed the rows of bobbing figures, Liz staying close to the slight figure of the young man. He was enjoying her dependence on him.
“We have complete automatic control of the expellees,” he went on, keeping to a neutral tone to show that he had no need especially to reassure her. “They feel nothing. It’s hardly necessary to monitor them, but the machines do so. We’re superfluous, really.”
“I suppose so,” said Liz Deffant. She was feeling better. The sense of oppression began to lift as they neared the next grav-chute. It would not be long before she transferred to the Messier 16 shuttle. She would not go to the cell-deck again, Liz decided.
“Ask Pete—Pete!”
The figure of the Security guard was in almost complete darkness, shadowed as he was by a bank of sensors. Tup went across, grinning.
“Aren’t we just spare parts?” he was saying, but Liz did not hear. Impelled by a compulsive curiosity, she had stopped at the tank containing the figure of the expellee Maran. It was morbid, she knew, but she wanted to make sure that she was wrong about the eyes. Those terrible eyes!
Liz looked down.
The eerie half-light played on a mottled face, a mouth wide-open, with the tongue thrusting out blackly . .
. and the eyes. Wide-open in mute appeal, but dead. Blank and dead—not unseeing, dead. And not Maran’s eyes.
Liz screamed. She knew who lay in the tank. It was the Security guard Tup had called to. She looked away, stepping backward in acute mind-reeling terror. Tup’s contorted features glared back at her. She saw big hands at his neck, holding him in a frightful clasp. Tup clawed once at the hands, and then something cracked with an abrupt, sickening finality. The hands relaxed. Tup slid toward Liz.
She knew who had killed him. The impossible had happened. It was the man from the tank: Jano Maran.
CHAPTER 6
Buchanan was oppressed by his solitude. He had not yet grown accustomed once more to his burden of guilt: a residual remnant of Liz Deffant’s gentle, persistent, affectionate presence still lingered. Forget her, he told himself. Finished. Over.
He studied the information left by Kochan. That was his life now, all of it. There was no room for tenderness. He had to be as unfeeling as the automatons. Cold. Logical. Inhuman.
“I’ll check the main features and you agree if I’ve got them right,” he told the robot controller.
“Yes, Commander.”
“First, the central core of the Singularity could be a superdense form of neutron star or star formation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If that’s so, it contains an area where the gravitational pull is a hundred billion times what would be normal on an Earth-type planet.” It was inconceivable, so much pressure.
“About that, sir.”
“The core is ultradense and stable, the crust brittle and fragile. When the crust breaks under gravitational strain the result is starquake.”
“Yes, sir.”
A tiny superdense core ground in on itself by those fantastic pressures. And then, cracking— starquake!
“And associated distortion of temporal field,” Buchanan said slowly. “Chronoclasm. The disruption of time.”
“It’s only a theory, sir. The rest is reasonably well substantiated by automatic readings over fifty years. All recorded data associates the cracking of the crust with starquake. But discontinuous temporal alignments haven’t been recorded.”