“It’s like being, then?” Suzy suggested.
“No. In being there is bliss, if the concept of bliss has anything to do with the chaos theory. I know it’s far fetched, but I have my suspicions that there is also an infinite potential in this state, which is the driving force of our evolution. Perhaps it is the awareness of this potential that results in bliss. Anyway, in stasis, there is nothing. No awareness of self. It is a condition of absolute absence.”
“We have that sort of thing in absolute zero,” Des offered. “At the theoretical point of minus 273.180 Centigrade, there is no molecular motion. A form of stasis.”
“That would make hell the coldest place in the universe,” Alicia mused, fascinated at the prospect against her will. “I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like it at all,” she affirmed with a shudder.
“So the religious concept of hell, fire and all that, does have its echo in science?” John asked.
“I don’t know enough about the old or new metaphysical trends to argue,” Alec admitted. “But to me, stasis is not defined so much as an expression of something negative, as in Desmond’s absolute zero, but rather by the absence of everything, positive or negative. It is a state of, well… of indifference. Like the ultimate state of the universe proposed by some static universe theorists. What do you think, Des?”
“First, I don’t think that absolute zero is mine,” he wagged his finger at Alec, “But I understand your point.” Then the Professor turned to face John, as if Suzy’s father had earned an explanation. “What Alec is referring to is entropy. It is a thermodynamic measure of the amount of energy unavailable in a system undergoing change. With no thermodynamic differential no change is possible.”
“I don’t quite follow...” haltingly Joan joined John. Her eyes registered an equal lack of understanding.
“Imagine a universe,” Alec tried his luck, “wherein all the suns, over billions upon billions of years, gradually died. They’d all burned out their hydrogen, their fuel, and they’d become white dwarfs. All their thermal energy had radiated outwards, and eventually became equally distributed throughout space. The temperature everywhere would now be a fraction above absolute zero, but there would be no differential temperature that could stimulate any motion. You might call it a thermodynamic indifference. The whole universe would be suspended in total inertia. In stasis.”
“Still sounds like hell,” Alicia put in. She didn’t like such extremes. They interfered with her cultivated sense of wellbeing.
“My point precisely,” Alec agreed.
Joan threw up her arms in despair. “How on earth did we get on such a dismal, depressing subject?”
“Because...” the Professor said pontifically, rising to his feet, “because the ignorant have been mouthing off on TV again.”
“What Desmond means is,” Alec stepped in, again, “that when that oaf said we should kill people who detract from the public good he meant that, until there is absolute uniformity in all things throughout society, there will be no peace among the masses.”
“Like stasis...?” Joan finally got the message.
“Like stasis. Only in the social, economical and every other non-thermal sense, I presume,” John put in. Then, after scratching his head he added. “Wouldn’t work, would it?”
“Not even if it were possible, which I sure hope isn’t!” Alec agreed.
The Professor, who’d remained standing since his last pronouncement, looked down at them from his advantageous altitude.
“Y’rre looking like a bunch of lazy bones. Now who’ll get up and join me on a constitutional along this prrristine beach?”
“I presume you want to go for a walk?” Alicia looked up. She liked looking up at Desmond. When they both stood, they were exactly the same height.
“Isn’t this precisely what I just said, lassie?” Desmond confirmed.
“I’m game,” Alicia rose to her feet.
“If only…” The Professor muttered under his breath.
John and Joan preferred a walk to the local store. They had some essentials to buy and they’d hardly seen the ‘other side’ of the house. This suited Desmond just fine as he’d been trying to get Alicia alone since they’d arrived. Although Sasha hardly needed constant supervision, Alec and Suzy remained with their firstborn. By some quirk of fate, Matt was nowhere to be seen. He was always there when needed, but not otherwise. The man must have been a mind-reader.
Soon Suzy and Alec were alone.
Having the terrace all to themselves was just fine by them. For a while they sat in silence, enhanced by the gentle hum of the ocean and a whisper of the breeze, playing hide and seek among the roof rafters. Suzy had a little sleep to catch up on, and this was an ideal opportunity. Alec was, as so often of late, lost in thoughts. The distant horizon was once more getting hazy, gradually merging with the sky above. Finally the ocean and the sky joined into a single, continuous canvas on which an occasional erne drew a fragmentary line. Then, the line dissolved also.
Alec awoke in the body of a man about twenty years his senior. The man’s head was supported on a short and stumpy frame, wrapped in a toga-like garment, flowing from his disproportionately broad shoulders and exposing his equally short and stumpy legs. Rather hairy, he thought.
What a funny dream, he mused. And what’s more, I know that I’m dreaming. Only why am I so short and hairy?
He searched his memory. Maybe I’m a Roman. They were quite short, and being Italian, so to speak, they could have been quite hairy, couldn’t they?
This realization relaxed him a bit. The next moment he, or the body he occupied, got up from the sofa. He was only vaguely aware of propelling it himself. Actually the sofa looked more like a chaise longue that could also have been of Roman origin. Even if vicariously, Alec experienced the familiar movement of legs. He held his emotive breath. ‘I’m walking,’ he thought. ‘My, God! I’m walking...”
His host body approached a large opening in the outside wall. Wherever Alec dreamt he was, it was a beautiful place. The Home Planet? No. On the Home Planet he was always himself. Younger or older, but himself. And here...? For a moment he mused if this was one of the bodies he’d occupied in his previous lives; then he dismissed the idea of reincarnation as non sequitur. It’s neither here nor there… he mused.
He looked out through the... window? A glassless opening.
Pity, he thought. The reflection might have shown me what the rest of me looks like.
As far as Alec could see, the rolling landscape was peppered with villas peeking from behind abundant Cypress trees. From a distance the villas seemed large—luxurious was a better word—with pools of water reflecting the bluest sky he’d ever seen. The grounds separating the villas were also richly landscaped. It all looked about halfway between what he remembered of the Home Planet and what he imagined ancient Rome might have been like. Or...
Suddenly it came to him: I died and gone to heaven. Not a bad place heaven… I could be quite happy here.
Only something was wrong.
If this is heaven, then why am I so hairy...?
Next he wondered if the owner of the body could detect his presence, or his thoughts. He tried to still his mind.
An airplane without wings, appeared out of nowhere and the next instant come to a very rapid stop. Anyone subjected to such deceleration would have been smashed against the wall of the... of whatever it was. A rocket? If the dream were to make any sense, the rocket itself would have fallen apart. But it hadn’t. Even at a considerable distance, Alec could see people getting out of the airship and walking towards the villas. They seemed in perfectly good shape.
They’d overcome inertia! Alec smiled in delight. What a place... what a dream!
Even as he continued to look out at the serene landscape, another cigar shaped object rose from the ground, rose slowly upwards to about two or three hundred feet, then… virtually disappeared. This time, though, it left a slight trail of vapour in the direction it went. Flew
. The direction it shot. And the direction was straight up. As though going into orbit. Or...
Or higher?
For a moment Alec completely forgot that he was dreaming. He even forgot that he was in a strange body. The problem of overcoming inertia commanded all his attention. Inertia was the tendency of any mass to remain at rest, or to keep moving in the same direction unless affected by another force. Theoretically, once an object left the gravitational attraction of the Earth, and then overcame the pull of the sun, it would fly forever, barring being trapped in the gravitational field of another planet, sun or galaxy. But there was an awful lot of space between galaxies. About ninety nine percent of space was, for the purposes of inertia, void. You could go virtually anywhere in the universe, if you avoided the gravitational fields.
If these people have overcome inertia, their interplanetary travel would be child’s play. They would need hardly any energy to pop up to the moon, or Mars, or anywhere. Just for fun. For an after-dinner spin...
These people...?
This is a dream, he reminded himself. Slowly, with disbelief in his eyes, he looked at his short, hairy legs. A funny sort of dream, he mused, shaking his head. And then he gazed at his stumpy legs, again. My God, he thought. I am moving them. I am moving my legs. His legs?
I am walking!
He moved away from the window. Strange how walking comes naturally to me... It took me months to lose the ability, and just seconds to recover... He was already treating the host body as his own.
On the wall opposite the window there was a large map. The island it portrayed, though seemingly large, was quite unknown to him. He looked closer. In the right bottom corner of the wall—a map, really, that covered the whole wall—there was some sort of scale. At least it looked like a scale. It referred to units that were meaningless to him. They could have been miles or kilometers in another language, but he had no idea.
Nest to it, he found a series of buttons. He pressed one at random. The wall shimmered and then solidified into a dark background with little bright balls suspended here and there. He took a step back. Then he froze. The coloured points of light, little round spheres, were moving. They were following a regular trajectory...
“I’m looking at the solar system!” he said half aloud. “Only...” he stopped. He heard himself speaking with a very strange accent. He kept his eyes on the map.
At first he couldn’t figure it out. It was almost like the solar system but it wasn’t. The third planet from the sun was recognizably the Earth—bluish, with off-white patches.
I am back on Earth, he corrected himself. But something didn’t add up.
Then he had it. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter the asteroids were missing. There was no Ceres, no hundreds of even smaller planetoids to be seen. Instead there was a single sphere, in graphic terms, about the size of Mars. And talking of Mars, our neighbour wasn’t red, but bluish-green, with puffy, yellowish clouds, reminiscent to Earth.
It’s amazing what one can see in a dream...
He reached over to press another button. He thought he would have to switch the present one off first, and in the process he turned it a little to the right. As he did, the map got brighter, and hundreds, many hundreds, of little dots began drifting through the space between the planets.
My God! He caught his breath. These must be spaceships!
They were all moving. Scooting through space as though it were the most natural thing in the world. There were literally thousands of them. They moved in a jerky motion. Very fast, then slowly, then fast again.
Inertia means nothing to them, he nodded, confirming his previous suspicions.
And then he stepped back, again.
“Who are these people?” he spoke aloud.
He chewed on the question for a moment or two. “If I am dreaming, and I must be, then what am I dreaming about?” Again he was taken aback by his own accent. It was completely strange to him—as if spoken by someone else.
He blinked, repeatedly, wondering if he might wake up. It didn’t help. The living map was still there.
This was Earth, but not the Earth he knew. There were some different scientific laws, or rules, here. The problem of inertia had not been solved in Alec’s time. There had been some experiments, but his colleagues were a long way from applying them to anything outside lab conditions. No. This was certainly not the Earth he knew. But it was Earth.
I must be stealing a glance at a very, very distant future... he mused, now less concerned with the nature of the dream, as with the things he’d witnessed.
And then he froze for the second time.
If I am looking at the future, then what on earth is the extra planet doing between Mars and Jupiter? And whatever happened to the hundreds of asteroids? Have they glued themselves together?
But even as he speculated on the dream’s facility to glue together large chunks of terrain into a single continent, he knew that he was sailing on a completely wrong tack. He was looking into a distant past. He was looking at the Earth before the planet between Mars and Jupiter came to an untimely end.
Back to the original map.
Alec had to find the scale of the thing. The map was beautifully moulded, the contours rising and falling as if he was looking at this great island from far above. He turned the knob on the right. The map shrunk, the oceans surrounding it retreated till the whole Earth seemed to have formed a sphere, with just one large island remaining at the very center. It was like looking at the Earth through the wrong end of the telescope. Only it was a peculiar Earth. Not resembling the continents at all. It was a sister planet, beautiful, mysterious, where the laws of inertia had already been overcome; a planet for a physicist to study and admire.
Now, why did I think that? Half spoken thoughts seemed generated by someone who had access to his mind.
He turned the dial the other way.
The island grew, swelled before his disbelieving eyes, until it filled the whole wall. He continued turning the dial. The map kept growing until the oceans disappeared and land began sliding off the edges of the wall. Next, a pinpoint light began blinking at the geometric center of the screen. The map grew in direct proportion to his turning the knob. Quite suddenly, a city appeared.
Not exactly a city, but an undulating terrain with villas attached to the slopes of rolling hills. They all seemed to be located as though to optimize the view from each building.
What marvelous people...
In each direction there were long vistas, some with intermittent lakes as serene as Alec had once seen in the far North of Canada. Only this was a balmy climate, neither hot nor cold A gentle breeze was wafting through the large wall openings. Yes. By some freak of nature, he actually felt the breeze on his face. Or perhaps, all things were possible in a dream.
“Maybe this is the Garden of Eden...” he muttered. “Or maybe I’m a transcendental comedian?”
And then he turned the knob all the way. In the same instant he jumped back as though bitten by a deadly snake. He stood facing a short, stumpy man, who was looking at him, his mouth open, the mop of hair on the man’s head reminding him of someone. In spite of the gaping mouth, the man Alec faced exhibited bright, intelligent eyes, and a powerful physique. What made Alec jump was not just the presence of a living being before him. It was the suddenness with which the other man appeared; that, and a deep conviction that the man he was staring at was... himself.
Himself—in his borrowed body.
The man wore an identical tunic, his eyes were at precisely the level of his own and, most of all, the man jumped back when ‘he’ saw Alec. A Doppelganger.
“I must wake up!” Alec whispered through his teeth. “I must wake up, now.” And as he reached for the knob to turn off the unnerving image, his hand trembled. Shall I still walk when I’m awake?
But he didn’t wake up. Not yet.
Closing his eyes he took two steps towards the offending dial and turned it to the left. Then, mustering all his co
urage, he looked again at the map. The man, his spitting image, was gone. He breathed easier.
There were three more knobs on the wall. By now, Alec was a little nervous. Actually, he was more nervous than when he’d first arrived there. The shock of seeing ‘himself’ was more than he cared to admit to himself.
What if Suzy jumps at me in some other body? What if she’s hairy all over?
Dream or not, the thoughts were disconcerting. He returned to the chaise longue, leaned back and tried to work out what was happening. As this is a dream, he reasoned, none of this has to make sense. Not really. On the other hand, many great scientific discoveries had come about because of dreams. If dreams were a source of inspiration, then this one was loaded. And then another strange idea came to him, perfectly consistent with the dream concept. In a way, whatever he imagined happened. He’d always been fascinated by inertia. Here, he saw inertia resolved. He wanted to find out where he was, he needed maps––they appeared. He didn’t exactly locate his whereabouts, but he knew that he was on a continent surrounded by water, with a balmy climate and a very advanced civilization. Very advanced.
Then he wanted to locate himself in time. A map of the solar system appeared out of a wall. He saw the planet between Mars and Jupiter still in orbit.
Why did I say still?
Next, he wanted to find out what he looked like. He got that, too. A living mirror. Scary as it might have been, a nightmare rather than a dream, but it was an experience that he hoped he’d remember when he woke up.
One way or another, whatever he needed, or wanted, or desired, even at a very subliminal level, came to him. There were different laws here.
Alec remembered the many Sci-Fi writers who warned that one should never change anything in the past, as it could affect the future. They warned about the dire consequences of breaking this particular law. Alec didn’t think it applied to dreams, but there were dreams and there were dreams, and this dream was a lot more real than any dream he’d ever had.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 17