‘But this means hypo-sub!’ called out Eck.
‘Exact! hypo-subquark transoscillation necessary basis ... No harm start these lines now, sharpen our tools against Parameter-Assessment verdict day.’
Two years later the PA boys came up with the answer: all the known physical world was subject to the same pitch or ‘gradient’, the natural rate of time. Its connexion with entropy was complex, but the basic rate was fixed.
It took eleven more years, years in which Naverson lived, slept, and ate helix-gradientry, before his hypo-subdep found their answer: infra-hypo-subquark shunts were the only hope, for the fundamental structure of time lay in the i-h-s-q domain. Some amazing things came to light as a result of their researches. Mank Showk (Domenico Zhukov) was chatting to Naverson one day.
‘Sole reason we cannot see/hear Past is, recession-velocity c, therefore its signals undergo transfinite redshift, arrive with zero energy.’
‘What about Future?’
‘Not in being. Continuous creation of Time, expansion from zero-volume Present. Or conversely, Present advances into Future with velocity c.’
‘Explain: whither?’
‘Fourth space dimension. A moment eight and a half minutes ago is one astro-unit away along fourth dimension. A moment one year ago is one light year away along it.’
‘Then we shall never explore Future or Past?’
‘Not on supra-i-h-s-q levels. Not on any practical level probably, and not at all without fifty years’ grind.’
‘And no professional motive or money in present world conditions.’
In fourteen further years, with Naverson now in greying middle age, the solution was found, after a fashion: the experimental rats, surrounded by the palladium coils, were pushed into a 0.01 per cent natter gradient, as assessed by computer ... They simply vanished; they ceased to intersect with the rest of the known universe except instantaneously, and therefore imperceptibly ...
‘Flatch!’ called the Director on the visiphone to his opposite number in Population. ‘Our AC sports have hit a Wunkun for you.’ A Wunkun was the current term for a rewarding disaster, an ill wind that blew somebody good, an ugly duckling that was somebody’s golden-egg-laying swan. The name derived from the name of the head of the century-old expedition round Venus that had shattered half the planet’s surface, destroying itself in the process, and in so doing had made the planet landable-on and ultimately habitable.
‘Out with; I’m suicidal now: Earth’s only three generations from standing room. Riots, virus-epidemics increasing monthly. Like the 21st-century crash, but no solution this time.’
‘Visit, please: security.’
‘Right; in fifteen minutes till forty-five minutes convenient?’
‘Make twenty till sixty.’
‘Non-poss. Twenty till fifty?’
‘Right.’
When Flatch Bemp (i.e. Flotsham Bassompied) landed from Sahara, the DPC Director, Kulf (pronounced Kulluf) Gren (i.e. Kinloch Grattan) had a shot of lysergibenzedrine ready for him. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘I call Nevzen Bewce, dedicated man — he explains quick.’
Naverson Builth appeared in the secure internal visiphone screen.
‘Nev, this Flatch Bemp, Director Population.’
Naverson nodded, a subservient greeting in those days. Flatch twitched his left eyebrow.
‘Population may have use, your gimmick. Explain it.’
Naverson explained that, depending on the degree of shunt, any gradient desired could be given to the organism.
‘Steeper, too?’ asked Flatch.
‘Steeper too — ages quicker, flatter slower.’
‘How many gradients total?’
‘Infinite. Only limitations precision of infra-hypo-subquark gadgetry operation.’
‘In practice?’
‘Say 105 flatterwise, 108 steeperwise. Technically possible also produce zero gradient or negative gradient, respectively eternal life and regression to infancy (backward time), humanly pointless. 105 flatter but positive.’
Flatch spread his hands outwards, an outrageously extravagant gesture in that crammed and pressed world, but warranted by the moment and encouraged by his boost from the 1-b shot.
‘Eureka! How apply shunt?’
‘Chamber of coils. Any age.’
‘Size limit? Get in several together?’
‘Say 70 metres cube; 34 times 104 cubic metres.’
‘Get crowd in then?’
‘Possibly. Tell you in year perhaps.’
‘Eurekest! Select families from volunteers, promise lebensraum, shunt off; divide world population by 105 at least! Extend top privileges to all here, heaven on earth!’
A vast grin spread round his face ...
‘Understand, moment security, silence, death penalty.’
‘Rest of team?’
‘Temporary silence to lower echelons. Eh, Kulf?’
‘Right. You are Project X now. To remain here, Flatch?’
‘Exact, best remain here, channel to me via you, Kulf.’
‘Right.’
~ * ~
It took two years to establish the intra-coil limits. They worked on elephants and on sequoias (complete with roots), also on families of zoo bears, and goats (most land animals were in zoos or labs, except farm animals too precious to waste). The practical limit proved to be a 97-metre-diameter sphere. The gradient-density limit worked out at 105 x 2 channels for the flatter gradients, and over 107 for the steeper ones. Flatch Bemp found ethical objections to sending people into a gradient with a shorter life-span, and again to extending the life-span beyond 300 years (besides, how many would ever volunteer for outside these limits?). So he was obliged to be content with the least flat of the flatter gradients, which meant under 104 channels. Still, to propose to divide the world’s present population by nearly ten thousand was to give it a glimpse of hope.
‘If we can take them at that rate!’ murmured Naverson.
‘Does Flatch know what we’ll send into?’ twanged Mank.
‘Fowp’s best theoretician. He and Eck say each gradient manifestation same multigrade reality, gross physical world same in each. Just ensure good population density shot in, enough specialists, hydroponic equipment, soil bacteria cultures, ultrasonic crumblers, algae, fish-spawn — build up civilization in three generations.’
‘Fully voluntary basis, Kulf,’ said Flatch two rooms away; ‘we’ll appeal world-wide time-gradient emigration. Plenty volunteers, tough pioneers, independents, claustrophobes, crowd-haters. Ask full details. Computers assess potentialities, eliminate misfits, compose suitable shunt-manifolds, balanced gradient-populations. Details to include preferred life-span — of juveniles: parents to fit in or stay behind. Can’t give a tenner, a twentier and a fiftier same gradient and expect all three live same length!’ He chuckled fatuously.
Linked batteries of computer complexes worked out time-logistics and densities so as to give the minimum of hardship. Meantime Naverson’s boys (he was now in charge of the whole subdep X) had built a series of Shunters, one for each desired gradient. Human bulk transport was easy and they preferred not to disperse the project at this stage; besides, the emergent migrants were best concentrated in one spot whence they could fan outward and where they could hold pioneer councils.
The emigrants were duly selected and shot off into the unknown. A rate of 10,000 a day was achieved, which exceeded Flatch’s own logistics researchers’ forecast by a factor of ten, but was still an insignificant offset to the birthrate. Four years later, years of intense negotiation and effort, one thousand batteries of Shunters were up and the rate (improved for each) now totalled thirty world-million a day. Eventually Naverson, a prematurely elderly man at seventy, had 7,000 million leave each day through 30,000 batteries, dispersed over the margins of the habitable globe, a rate which might be expected to drain off nearly the current birthrate-excess. It was a real achievement to have reached this plateau
, thought Naverson.
The Shunter complexes were nearly all sited on poorly populated highlands away from the warren-edges, where vast reception camps could be set up and where the migrants, when they passed through, would be able to survey the lowlands as they held their first councils. The scenes in the gigantic Reception Areas — as each accepted family with its minimal goods was admitted, documented, inoculated, made up on basic rations, weapons, tools, camped on its bench for two days, was re-checked for infection, was herded on, passed through, was corralled in the polygonal eight-storey intra-coil chamber, and, with some 20,000 other individuals, a herd of goats, and a lot of equipment, shot off into the unknown — would have electrified an Eichmann, at such an Endlösung to end all Endlösungen. But it was a Dies Irae minus the wrath. The countless hosts arrived, if not actually singing, at any rate chattering, to stream through their gates, not of pearl, but of palladium; and if they held hands as they saw the last of this continuum, that was only to be expected.
Naverson, on whom the strain of the great operation was telling, had a curious dream about this time. He was talking to Flatch (who was already dead in fact) and saying, ‘We are attenuating local world-line reality, riddling it, fractionating it. Previously 104 gradients dense, so to speak. Now only one. Emigrant populations burrowing structure. Won’t survive 1/ 10,000 rarefaction much longer.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Flatch and at that moment the whole inhabited surface-region of Terra comploded, like a termite-infested building. Naverson woke up with pounding heart, sweating, dry-tongued, to hear the visiphone alarm calling. It was ‘morning’, but he had slept in.
‘Nev!’ said the figure of Misk Howla (Hatch’s successor; today he would have been Methexis Ulvelaej). ‘Nev! Something up. Unexplained population figures, not down enough. A lot of illegal squatting empty marginal dwelling spaces. Have they all come back?’
‘Impossible,’ said Naverson, then he paused. ‘Check births, origins, genes if necessary, computerwise.’
‘Why?’
‘Check first.’
Ten days later the computer complexes gave up their answer: up to 15 per cent of the world population (concentrated near the new dwelling spaces on the warren margins) were unexplained, with no known origin. Their gene-type percentages gave a picture which was partly identical with that of the local population, but partly composed of puzzling variants which, or in proportions which, the computers were quite unable to match.
‘Know why, Misk?’ whispered old Naverson to the young Population Director in the dazzling privacy of the Directorial office, lit by real sunlight through real glass on the edge of a warren by the Ahaggar Mountains. ‘Know why? The other gradients aren’t void or uninhabited; they are full! Just like us, more or less, probably. Our time-universe is only one among millions, perhaps infinite number. They’ve hit on our method approximately same time-point.’
Misk, an impulsive man, jumped through the window, 278 storeys up.
Naverson, who knew Misk’s staff well now, took over Population’s end of the problem and in another week had further details: the immigrant-sending gradients were all steeper; there were several thousands of them known to be sending at the moment, though rates and numbers were likely to increase. The sending chambers were not identical with his own, or in the same places, but created new populations in similar marginal areas. The immigrants had found themselves in a populous world where they had been expecting an empty one; however, they had made the best of a bad job and, being enterprising, broke up their chamber-storeys, scattered, infiltrated the mass, occupied vacant cells in the warren-margins, and had evaded detection for some years.
Three months later a series of strange short-lived virus epidemics, beginning near the Alpine and Rocky Mountains margins, seized 60 per cent of the American and European population, and killed 25 per cent of those they struck. In spite of the television propaganda, the survivors blamed the ‘invaders’, and any unvouched newcomers to a warren district were butchered from then on, including the children. Later, actual Shuntee batches were found by out-labour gangs, sometimes still in their multi-storey capsules, and a fight to the death would ensue with such weapons as came to hand. Naverson pictured the same fate fallen and befalling, and to befall, his own shuntees ... At seventy-five, he had reached retiring age. Worn out, he died, a disappointed man, in the grey winter of 2395 a few months later, leaving the Worlds to struggle with their monstrous burden.
In February ad 2021 in the same continuum, just before the Second World Famine, the newscasts were full of the death of Naverson Builth, the brilliant young researcher struck down by a once-famous accident at the great accelerator, who had lived on in a permanent coma for forty-nine years, kept alive by modern medical science ... It was his reality which had been fractionated by infra-hypo-subquark shunt.
<
~ * ~
Psychosmosis
‘One has succumbed in the house by Thorn Thicket, Little Ness,’ said Tan, rapidly and shamefacedly, meeting the chunky fellow on the edge of the swamp where Ness had been trapping for some days.
‘One of their old ones?’
‘No, no, it is the one who was the wife of Kemm; she had a sudden illness.’
‘Ah,’ breathed Ness, ‘then we shall have two new namings — or are the wife of Nant and the second daughter of Big Ness already named again?’
‘No — it happened an hour ago. You are in time to hear.’
‘This was a troublesome death, then — but we shall have fun at the naming-feasts.’
Little Ness found that he was breathing rather quickly. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask Tan casually ‘And how is —?’, for he was interested in Big Ness’s nubile younger daughter. A narrow escape.
The house of Kemm and his parents and old aunts was carefully bypassed by everyone. It had a black cloth stuck on two stakes across its entrance. Nant and Big Ness had seen the way things were going for a day or two and held secret councils in their houses, so they were ready when the black cloth appeared. Since Nant’s wife and Big Ness’s second daughter had the same name as Kemm’s second wife, they must be renamed at once. As a precaution, Nant had taken to addressing his wife as ‘wife’ at first. She had settled finally for Mara, which faintly recalled her old name, and Big Ness had persuaded his daughter that Nura (which was even closer) would do for her; though he shunned saying or even daring to think so, it recalled his dead wife’s name too, which had the same u-vowel as well as all the other sounds. A quarter of an hour after Little Ness had heard the news from Tan, Nant and his wife paraded round the settlements banging an old dish and calling out ‘Nant’s wife is Mara. Come to the feast tonight!’ Everyone began to mutter ‘Mara, Mara, Mara’ to themselves to memorize the name. Ten minutes behind them Big Ness and his family came hitting two spoons together and shouting ‘Big Ness’s second daughter is Nura — come and see us tonight.’ The hearers muttered ‘Nu-ura, Nu-ura.’ and debated which house to visit first. They thought there would be more amusement to be had at Nant’s house later, on the whole.
Little Ness, however, decided to call first on Nant, so as to have the rest of the evening with the girl whom he must now, with some distaste, think of as Nura. What a name! There he found Nura herself paying a token visit and sliding down her first drink of the evening. They greeted each other selfconsciously and remained rather ill at ease. Little Ness did not like to criticize the name directly, but Nura knew instinctively what was wrong. Kemm, walking like a man in a dream, came in on the arm of the doctor, hoarsely greeted Mara by name and touched the proffered (and nearly empty) cup with his lips. Then he and the doctor walked off to Big Ness’s, and the company breathed more freely. Presently the doctor, Sull, came in again alone. Everyone knew he had taken Kemm back home. (Parents and aunts were bedridden.) Sull downed several drinks quickly and began to tell one bawdy story after another. Mara and Nura nodded at one another and, escorted by Little Ness (who would now rather hav
e heard the stories) made their way in the bat-haunted dusk to Big Ness’s house. As they entered, the dark beauty, Forna, arm entwined with that of Heft (her husband Freth was safely off at Nant’s house) was saying loudly ‘Don’t know how we managed in the dull old days.’ After a drink, Mara went back on the arm of Big Ness, while Tark, his eldest son, played host for the time being.
Little Ness, in whom the drinks were beginning to work, would have liked to get Nura on her own, but it was impossible tonight. He stayed to the end, to keep an eye on her, and somewhere in the early morning bade her an amorous farewell outside and lurched homeward. His father was snoring, having got away before midnight from the party.
The doctor, Sull, woken an hour or two later by the owls and a rumbling stomach, squinted at the moon, mixed himself a strong tonic, and crept out without waking Skenna. He made his way in the moonlight with a second draught to Kemm’s house, stole in without disturbing the old folk, shook Kemm by the shoulder but found him rigidly awake, made him drink the draught, and with him laid the body on the cart at the back. In two hours, during which neither spoke, they reached the lip of the volcano. The grey dawn was touching the summit as they tipped up the cart and shot the body down the hot cindery slope. Sull, after returning the cart, brought Kemm on to his own house, where Skenna gave both men breakfast in silence. Then, as Sull had his rounds to make, she started to take Kemm home. They had not gone far before a confused outcry broke out. Presently a youth came running up. ‘Mara’s husband is gone!’ he shouted and sped on.
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