“I’m not sure what the rest of you want to do, but as for myself, I say that we should and must continue to our journey’s end. There is more now to spur us onward. The being did not verify or disagree as to our theory. He merely tried to dissuade us. This only proves to me that there is something ahead of us.
“Think of the glory man will achieve if we actually do succeed in our endeavor. Earth’s civilization will rise to galactic heights. With the forces at our disposal tapped from the primal matter of the focal center—we can build a race of supermen. The possibilities are unbounded!”
His eyes aflame with scientific zeal and with the potential aspects of his words, Anthony Cregg’s voice aroused the others from their lethargy. Conversation sprang up, heated and tense. Melton Sarzkoff alone was silent. Anthony Cregg watched him as the others voiced approval of his words. The expedition would go on.
As the scientists once again grew silent Anthony Cregg turned his attention to the visiplate. The mist no longer covered the ship. But it was out there in space—a spherical cloud, far to the left of the ship. And it was keeping constant pace with them. He reached out and switched off the plate. Then he glanced at his chronometer.
“This is hardly a time for rest after what has just occurred, but I believe some sleep would help to straighten us out.
With lingering glances at the now blank visiplate, the men from Earth arose and made their way to their respective quarters. Finally only Cregg and Sarzkoff remained in the control room. Anthony Cregg looked at his scientific rival. Sarzkoff sat immobile in his chair, gazing into nowhere. There was an odd expression on his face. The look of a little boy who has encountered something that he cannot understand.
“Sarzkoff!” Cregg spoke the name loudly. Sarzkoff shook his head and the expression of puzzlement vanished.
“I suggested that we all get some sleep. The others have already left.”
Sarzkoff gazed, long at Anthony Cregg. His eyes held a vacant stare.
“Of course.” he said. “Yes, we must sleep. Our minds must have rest.” The words were toneless. As toneless as was the vacant stare in his eyes. Anthony Cregg frowned as Sarzkoff arose and walked from the control room. For there was something unnatural about Sarzkoff. The way he looked, talked, and walked. Anthony Cregg made a final check on the instruments before he closed the control room door behind him and went to his quarters. But he could not erase that vacant stare from his mind.
TIME, INEXORABLY, crept onward. Seconds ticked into minutes; minutes crept into hours; hours changed to days; days into weeks. And with each passing instant of time the Theorist increased its mad dash through space.
Time passed. The ten scientists watched it pass; felt it grow upon them. There was tension. Because their acceleration was reaching its zenith. Already the revolving chart had neared the point where the speed of the ship would have to be broken. There were prepared for this. The Theorist had been constructed for the express purpose needed. The outer hull of the vessel at a flick of a lever would make a 180-degree turn without moving the inner hull of the ship. It was in fact a gyroscope of space. And the thundering jets of the atomics would instantly be pouring their power in the opposite direction of their acceleration. The ship would gradually lose its momentum.
Out in space the entity followed them. Always beside them. But never did it make its presence known.
Anthony Cregg sat before the controls of the ship. A look of unease was in his eyes. He was thinking of Melton Sarzkoff. For Sarzkoff had been acting strangely ever since that day they had encountered the entity. Seldom did he leave his quarters. And when he did he only glanced intently at the space chart, never speaking. There was that vacant stare in his eyes—and something else. Something that grew as the days slipped by.
Sarzkoff was in the control room when Anthony Cregg snapped the lever that revolved the outer hull of the ship. There was no sensation as the ship to all outward appearances suddenly twisted upon itself and seemed to be heading in reverse. There could be no sensation, for there was nothing to cause one. They would not even have been able to tell that their vessel was beginning its long-drawn-out process of braking had they not known that it was doing so.
Anthony Cregg turned from the studded panel and for the first time noticed Melton Sarzkoff standing inside the threshold. He looked at him. Sarzkoff returned his gaze with that semi-vacant stare.
“You have begun deceleration,” he said tonelessly.
“Yes.” Anthony Cregg replied. He walked toward Sarzkoff. “Is there something bothering you, Sarzkoff? You’ve been acting queer these past few weeks.”
The faintest semblance of a smile crossed Melton Sarzkoff’s face.
“Something wrong with me? No. There is nothing wrong with me. We are slowing down. But we won’t get there. We must not get there.”
He spun on his heel and was gone.
The nine remaining scientists gazed at each other in perplexity. They all knew Sarzkoff had been acting strangely—almost as if he had lost his sanity. But why? And just when the end of their journey was in sight.
THE THEORIST continued its plunge through space. Days passed. Days in which the tension that had been mounting for months was reaching its climax. The time was close at hand when that tension would let go. One way or another. For there could be only success or failure. Success with all the undreamt of power man would control with the primal matter of the Universe’s focal center. Or failure. And the weary months of returning to report it.
Anthony Cregg kept an almost ceaseless vigil at the visiplate. His eyes flicked from the stygian gloom of space ever and again to the revolving chart opposite him. He did not need to calculate himself—although he would have welcomed the task of actually doing something. Delicate electrical wave indicators did the work much better than he could have. Their position was pre-calculated to the nth decimal. So he sat and watched, oblivious of the others grouped about him.
Outside the Theorist there was another watcher. A watcher who needed no space charts or delicate instruments; with something far more accurate and far-seeing than a machine. He had thought. Pure, free, unbounded thought. And this watcher kept pace with the slowing space vessel. There were none to tell what he was thinking. Or if he even were thinking. There was only the visible evidence of the spherical mist. Nothing more.
Anthony Cregg found his gaze shifting to Orkloneh. Why was he accompanying them? Had they, mere mortal beings from Earth, excited interest in this timeless entity? Was he even now pondering over their theory? Could it be that this being who had searched the Universe in quest of knowledge had never found the Center of the Universe? The Earthman felt a surge of pride at the thought.
Slowly the hours slipped by as the horizontal bisector of the chart moved infinitely closer to a point designated by a gold cross. Each scientist sat in his accustomed place now, waiting. Anthony Cregg surveyed them as he felt the tension reach a climax. Their instruments were set and ready for the moment when they would reach that point of the void indicated on the chart. Instruments that would register every force, every variation of a force, every atom, every electron, that we known to the scientific mind. They would know by their instruments whether success or failure was in their grasp.
Nine sets of eyes watched the chart. Nine scientists from Earth. Anthony Cregg glanced at them and the vacant chair of Melton Sarzkoff, who hat! chosen to remain in his quarters.
Slowly, with almost infinite care, the bisector edged toward the gold cross. Anthony Cregg turned to the visiplate. The banging of the control room door arrested his attention.
Melton Sarzkoff stood on the threshold. Or what had once been the famed scientist. His clothes were disheveled, as if he had been tossing about on the floor of the ship; his hair hung down over his forehead; his eyes—his eyes gleamed madness. And his hands—gripped tightly within one of them was a gun, a gun capable of loosing a bolt of force strong enough to reduce them to ashes. He stood there.
“Fools!” his voice was h
arsh. “Did you not take the warning? Would you tamper with things beyond your comprehension? Did you believe you could see into the Creator’s very soul? Well you won’t! None of us will! For unto God alone shall be rendered the things that are His!”
THE SCIENTISTS sat there unmoving, amazement written across their faces. Anthony Cregg alone showed calm thought. For a question he had been pondering had suddenly been answered for him. He now knew why the entity had accompanied them. It was trying to stop them inches short of their goal—through the drugged mind of Sarzkoff!
Anthony Cregg arose slowly from his chair. He began to walk toward Sarzkoff. Slowly, deliberately.
“Stop!” Sarzkoff shouted. “Stand where you are! Or would you die faster?”
“Sarzkoff. You cannot kill us. Think.” Anthony Cregg spoke calmly, forcefully. “Do you remember your Commandments, Sarzkoff? Do you remember the fifth of them? ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Would you disobey your Creator’s will?”
He continued to advance. Confusion played across the face of Sarzkoff at his words. His brain, thinking only in terms of religious law, seized upon this. For an instant there was doubt in his eyes. A wavering. Cregg had been watching for this. He sprang forward.
There was a shout from Sarzkoff. There was the sizzling bolt from the gun he held. Then Cregg hit him. It was a hard blow. Thrown with every ounce of strength in his body. Even as the beam of death grazed past his shoulder, burning the flesh painfully, he struck Sarzkoff. The gun fell from his limp fingers and he sagged forward to the floor. Anthony Cregg stood over his unconscious body and retrieved the gun. Silently he returned to his seat before the control board, oblivious of the agony that tore at his shoulder. Around him the others relaxed gratefully.
There was a sound. A sound that at first was nothing audible. It simply commenced to exist. Then there was another sound. It might have been the chorus of rushing winds; it might have been the symphony of an astral organ; it might have been anything. Then there was the voice.
“Beings of Sol. Look to your instruments.” The voice faded.
Anthony Cregg glanced at the chart. The pain suddenly left him. The bisector was about to connect with the gold cross. Cregg looked into the visiplate. His pulse leapt.
“Look!” he breathed.
Out there in space it was black. There were no stars to be seen. There were no stars near enough to be visible. There was blackness. But there was one point in the inky void that was not black. It was so dense an absence of light that mere blackness was blindingly bright. It was absolute, total, complete darkness. It was the essence of eternal night. Straight for it the Theorist shot.
There was the voice.
“It is too late now, Beings of Sol. You cannot turn back. I tried to stop you, as you, known as Anthony Cregg, now realize through your associate, Sarzkoff. I failed. There is nothing left but to go on.
“I am old. So old I am weary even of myself. I have seen many of the great phenomena of the Universe. I have witnessed the birth and death of stars, races and galaxies. I have solved every mystery of creation and destruction. I have seen everything. I shall now witness the culmination of it all. Perhaps it is as well. For this shall be the greatest scene of them all.”
THE VOICE faded. The Theorist shot into the depths.
There was the sensation of infinite stillness. The complete absence of any moving organism. It was as if the Theorist itself, hurtling at a still tremendous speed, had suddenly become quiescent. It grew upon them that it had. The atomics had ceased their wild expulsion of power.
There was an aura about them. A weight of unnameable nothingness. An absolute, incomprehensible feeling of all of the unguessable depths of infinity compressed into a single gigantic aura.
They could not move. For the first time they felt fear.
There was the voice.
“You have reached your goal, Beings of Sol. You have penetrated the Center of the Universe—that from which all has sprung. Look into your visiplate.”
The voice faded and they looked. Their eyes saw. They gazed upon—
They had the illusion of viewing a mighty spectacle from an invisible source. They had the feeling of being three-dimensional. It was as if they gazed from a window overlooking the vastness of infinity. They saw the Universe.
It was beautiful. Far more beautiful than their meagre senses could appreciate. And it was vast. So vast as to be incomprehensible. But it was perfectly organized. Pebbles; meteors; planetoids; planets; stars; solar systems; galaxies; island universes. They were all there. Moving in perfect order.
Then there was havoc.
It was as if an almighty hand had turned a switch. The awesome beauty, the orderly balance—vanished in an instant. Pebbles crashed into meteors; meteors tore into planetoids; planetoids shattered into planets; planets collided with stars; stars absorbed solar systems; suns exploded against suns; galaxies against galaxies; island universes against each other.
The voice echoed into their consciousness as they watched, terrified.
“Look, Beings of Sol. Look upon the greatest sight ever to exist. And take pride in the fact that you were its author. Could your feeble minds not see what would happen when you invaded the Center of the Universe? You who have spent your lives building machines—could you not imagine the Universe as a machine—a mechanism so finely balanced that the weight of a grain of sand at its focal center would destroy its equilibrium?
“Look at the greatest sight time has spawned. The Universe, all of its splendid glory, crumbling, descending upon itself. Upon you; upon me. The balance is gone. The machine is running wild. It cannot be stopped until it is destroyed. Look!”
They looked. Space was alight with flame. The flame of countless billions of stellar bodies, winging at infinite speed toward the center of their birth. They had come to gain power for their race. For the glory of man. They had found power. But it was beyond their reach. And man whom they had striven to glorify had already ceased to exist.
“You sought a truth, Beings of Sol. You have found it. The ultimate truth. The culmination. In your religious tenets there is, perhaps, a prophecy. ‘And the Heavens Shall Rent Asunder. For there was a Beginning and there shall be an end.’ You have found the beginning, Beings of Sol, you are witnessing the end. Watch, Earthmen, before you die.”
They watched. They saw.
They died.
The Astral Exile
PAUL DUNN’S first sensation on the astral plane was that of floating quietly in silent darkness. He seemed to have just awakened from sleep, yet his impressions were strangely unlike those he usually had upon awakening.
He missed the warm pressure of the bed covers and the shade-softened yet insistent glare of sunlight against his closed eyes. Closed eyes? He knew his were open, but he saw nothing — neither the blaze of the sun nor the radiance of the moon. There was only the darkness, complete and impenetrable.
He tried to move but could not. He felt queerly immobile and helpless. It was as though his body were paralyzed. That would explain the floating sensation, he thought.
A cold weight of panic filled him. Something was wrong—horribly wrong. Why couldn’t he move? Why couldn’t he see? What had happened?
As though produced by the fear pulsing through him, he became aware suddenly of another sensation beside that of floating. It was a strong tugging at the back of his head. From this region something like a huge ripple started and passed through him like a convulsion. His mind was reeling from the shock of it when abruptly he felt himself, fluttering rapidly up and down for all the world as if he were a sheet on a line being whipped straight out by the wind. And as he fluttered the pull at the back of his head became a powerful jerking.
He was struggling to move his limbs, to break free from whatever weird force had him in its grip when a sound broke the tomb-like silence. It was the administration building clock, striking the hour. He listened as it struck three times, a little amazed that he could hear it after the unearthly quiet i
n which his body had performed its fantastic gyrations.
The last echoes of the clock were fading when still another impression registered upon Dunn. He could see—mistily at first, but then with increasing clearness.
Amazement crashed through him. The portion of the room he saw was familiar. He recognized the window with the framed pictures on the wall at one side and the oak bureau standing against the other. He knew where he was now — in his own dormitory room on the Elm Center nuclear laboratory grounds. But his position relative to the window told him that he was — incredibly — floating on his back some distance in the air. Not only floating but at the same time rising steadily toward the ceiling.
Again he struggled to move in the half-conscious fear that his uncanny weightlessness might desert him and let him drop to the floor. But his limbs remained rigidly immobile.
He abandoned his efforts as he discovered that a change in his weird situation was taking place. His body was tilting forward, moving from the horizontal to the vertical. In another moment he found himself standing on the floor of the room.
He was trying to digest what had happened when he felt his paralysis leave him. His sense of sudden freedom was exhilarating. The tugging sensation at the back of his head remained, but he overlooked this in his relief at being able to move his limbs.
He turned toward the bed from which he had so inexplicably floated — and stared in wild disbelief. The bed was not empty. A sleeping figure lay in it — a young man, leanly muscular, with blunt, boyish features and thick, tousled brown hair.
The man was himself! There were two of him.
Stretching from himself to his double in the bed Dunn saw what appeared to be a palely glowing cable. This seemed to issue from the forehead of the sleeping figure and the other end, as far as he could determine, was fastened somehow to the back of his head. The presence of the cable at that spot evidently explained the tugging sensation he had experienced.
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 38