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Through the rear viewport, I could see bits of Wanderer, glowing bright as a sun, flaking off and trailing behind us, almost lost in a flare of burning gases—we were making a tunnel of fire through this planet's atmosphere, feeding it with the ship's substance.
Dark, using all his strength, was wrenching and punching the levers and buttons that usually needed only a touch to make Wanderer respond smoothly, whether in deep space, paraspace, or any known or predictable atmosphere. Any atmosphere, that is, which it entered with due respect for the laws of physics. Some obscure malfunction had brought us in at the wrong angle and velocity, and the oxygen-rich stuff outside was eating the ship as we bored through it at meteor speed.
"Controls aren't responding!" Dark bellowed, "Fused—maybe burned off!" Those flaming bits had to be something, why not the external control surfaces and jet orifices? Very likely the hull itself would last long enough for us to impact with the surface and produce a really spectacular conversion of mass—ours and the ship's—to energy. But Dark either had not given up hope or, more probably, was doing his job as long as he could. You don't get to be pilot of an Explorer ship unless you're the kind that sticks to things.
The same is true of Recorders. With probably something under three hundred heartbeats left to me (taking into account an understandably accelerated pulse rate) before our violent encounter with this planet we had meant to investigate and catalogue, I was still observing, just as though I would be making a draft report and then a final version later on. At least I had something to do. Ari was simply sitting, looking peaceful or maybe switched off. Imminent vaporization or roasting is significant to a lot of people, but it provides very little material to interest a Metahistorian.
Valmis, in contrast, was noticeably jumpy, fingering a small black box he was holding on his lap. Now, if ever, would have been the time for him to Integrate with the Infinite, putting himself into a context in which the destruction of Wanderer and its crew was only an insignificant rearrangement of fluxes. Valmis's function in Exploration is to Perceive the whole mental and physical Pattern of a world, on all possible levels, from the particular to the gross structural. I understand that approach in theory, and it has been known to happen that an Integrator's work was the most fruitful result of a particular Exploration, but it is too arcane and tenuous for me to be comfortable with. I imagine my own specialty is too much involved with the finite for me to be much good at the Infinite.
"We're approaching the surface!" Dark called. "Any time now!" He seemed almost cheerful at being able to predict reasonably precisely the instant of our deaths.
Valmis scrabbled the box open and pulled out a peculiar luminous object. It was composed of some very odd shapes—I could make out a helix, but other pieces of it seemed to be all wrong in a way I couldn't quite grasp. Some sort of Integrator's amulet or meditative aid? A bit late for that, surely.
He took a deep breath and jabbed at it with one forefinger. I was curious to see what good it might do him, but just then there was a jolt that shook Wanderer, a kind of twitching that felt as if I had been turned inside out and then back again, and I knew we had impacted.
Then I realized that being able to have that thought meant it wasn't so—Wanderer was still up and moving.
"Controls responding now!" Dark yelled. "We're changing altitude and losing velocity!"
I looked out the viewport again. The glow behind us was dying, and there were no ominous flakes of Wanderer's outside buffeting in our wake. It seemed we were not to blow a hole in the planet's crust—good luck for it, and us.
I checked the lower viewport. We were higher above the surface now, still moving desperately rapidly, but not enough to burn us. I could see nothing but vegetation, apparently large trees, flashing by beneath us.
"Do you plan to try to land here?" I asked Dark. "Looks very inhospitable."
"We land where Wanderer chooses," he said. "I've got some control back, not all—not enough to pick a spot. And no connection to the power plant or the antigravity—might have a last flick or so of thrust, but that's all. We're a ballistic problem now—moving on a trajectory and slowing. We'll hit the surface just about where the trajectory intersects it, with maybe a little adjustment at the last minute."
"How did you get control back at all?"
"No idea—I'd thought all the externals had ablated or fused, but there must have been something left, and maybe a servo cut in again for one last twitch. Anyhow, it's saved us."
I looked at the unending stretch of trees below us.
"Saved us from being vaporized in an instant so that we can experience the full sensation of being crushed inside Wanderer when it hits?"
Dark shrugged. "If the hull hasn't suffered too much, it might stand up to that. But there's water ahead—ocean-sized, that first orbital pass showed us. That's where we'll come down."
I turned back to the others. Ari still looked cool, only mildly interested in what was going on. Valmis, strangely, seemed more agitated than before, twisting his hands in front of him. I could see that the black box was empty, but did not see the strange object he had taken from it. His face looked haunted.
I sat next to him. "Well, it looks as though you may get to do some Integrating on this planet, after all," I said. "I wouldn't have thought it a while ago, but we do seem to have survived."
He looked at me wildly. "Did we? Did we, indeed? Yes and no, Recorder, yes and no. Record that, record that . . ."
"Tighten up, man," I said sharply. "You're saying everything twice."
He smiled in a way I didn't like at all, and said, "I didn't notice. But perhaps I have to."
I thought of asking what he meant, but decided not to. It was clear that he was in no state to make sense. Integrators are expected to be almost preternaturally stable and at the same time ultimately sensitive; they are bound to get off balance once in a while, and just barely avoiding being atomized is as likely as anything to do it.
There was nothing but gray water below us now. I went forward to Dark. "Are we any better off coming down out here than on land? There isn't much point in floating around until we sink."
He shook his head. "There's another land mass at the other side of this—I remember it from the orbital survey. Some evidence of population. I'll save up what power we have left and put us down as soon as we're in sight of it. That way we have some chance of help from the natives or of working out a way to get to shore ourselves."
True—the prospect of being killed by this planet had for the moment made me forget what we had already learned about it: continental distribution, gravity, atmosphere and so on. I had had the information neatly filed in my mind right up to the point when we entered the atmosphere for descent and the deadly buffeting began. Lights on the night side, indications of industry—hydrocarbons in the atmospheric spectra—no sign of atomics or space-flight capability: probably somewhere on what the Explorers call Level Four of cultural development.
The natives ought to be able to handle the problem of getting us safely on land, provided they noticed us. But considering the shape Wanderer was in, it looked as though that was about as much help as we were going to get. A Level Four technology tends to be purely mechanical / chemical, and the ship, after its burning passage through the atmosphere, was certainly going to need some Level Seven refitting—involving advanced metallurgy and electronics, refined fissionables.
I looked again at the ocean slipping by beneath us. It was beginning to seem likely that this planet would be our permanent home, so I might as well start becoming familiar with it. But there is nothing particularly striking about one stretch of water seen from above as against another.
Dark had been thinking along the same l
ines. "From what we saw, I doubt we'll find a shipyard that can handle Wanderer. But they do have industry of a sort, apparently. Just possible that they're far enough on so that we can give them the techniques and in a while they can develop far enough to let us get fixed up and out of here."
I was shaken. First our Integrator seemed to have fallen apart; now the Captain was proposing to violate one of the strictest tenets of the Explorers. "We can't possibly interfere with the planetary culture that much—it's the very first—"
"Not much point in Exploring," Dark said firmly, "if you don't get back to make your report. If we don't succeed in accelerating the locals so we can get away from here, the rules won't matter to us; if we do, we can handle the explanations—or take the penalties, if it comes to that—afterwards."
Valmis roused himself from his glassy-eyed lethargy and joined in. "Don't worry about that," he said bitterly. I waited for him to repeat it, but he seemed to have got past that habit. "We've already interfered with this world—and everything else. What have we done?"
"What's that mean?" Dark asked. "All I've been trying to do is keep this hulk from blowing a hole in the planet—now that would have been interference, if you like."
"Yes," Valmis said. "We were about to impact, weren't we? Just about to—there was no way out of it, right?"
"Well, we didn't." I gestured at the still-watery surface beneath us.
"We did, though," Valmis said.
"Are you maintaining that this is a sort of afterlife?" Dark said scornfully. "Seems pretty real to me."
"Not 'after'—other," Valmis said. We all three looked at him, Ari having evidently decided to switch on now that there was something to be argued about—though what it was I could not make out.
Valmis's explanation didn't help much. First there was something about the nature of Infinity, the idea being that it applies to possibilities as well as actualities—in an infinite universe, everything that can happen will happen. Otherwise it wouldn't be Infinity. But since every time something happens, something else doesn't—or many things don't—happen, Infinity is contradicted. Therefore it is necessary to assume that there are other parallel levels, planes, or what you will, of existence, in which all the things that don't happen in "reality" do take place. Whether these other levels are actual or only potential was still a matter of philosophical debate among Valmis and his fellow Integrators, who seemed to be the only people much occupied with this notion.
In any case, where there is a theory, instrumentation usually follows; and an Integrator with a fair grounding in paraphysics had come up with what he called a Probability Displacer, a device existing partly in "reality" and partly in some variant of paraspace that impinged on one of these alternate levels. Activated at a moment of high probability of an event's occurrence, it would displace the user to an alternate plane in which the highly probable event did not happen—theoretically the same in every respect as "reality" except for that one event.
This was obviously an effective shield against disaster—and Valmis had been intellectually curious enough about the Displacer to sneak it aboard and key it to Wanderer.
"Are you telling me," Dark said, "that it was your gadget that kept us from smashing up back there?" He looked as angry as you might expect a spaceship Captain who believes that his skill and nerve have prevented destruction would be at being told that it was all because of somebody's lucky charm.
"Yes and no," Valmis said, going back to his oracular manner. "It did and it didn't."
I could see that Dark was exasperated—so was I—over this yes-and-no business, but it seemed to interest Ari. "Fascinating," he said. "You mean that in the 'real' universe, Wanderer and we ourselves are now a dispersing cloud of random atoms, and that therefore we are in a different continuum in spite of having, in a sense, been destroyed?"
"Just so," Valmis answered, visibly relieved to have an understanding listener.
"But then," Ari went on, enjoying it, "there must have been a Wanderer, complete with Dark, Valmis, Ari and Raf, already in this continuum. Have we displaced them?"
Valmis tried to work it out that we were "them" as well as the luckless ones on the destroyed Wanderer, and he and Ari went at the logic of the situation in a fairly complex argument.
"It gets them after a while," Dark said quietly to me. "All that universal awareness. Valmis had set himself for being blown up, and finding he hasn't been has loosened his wits. We had some luck with the controls cutting back in, and we'll need some more to get down in one piece, but that's it."
I had to agree. This business of alternate planes was something well outside what a conscientious Recorder could deal with, and I suppose that, like most specialists, I rather tend not to believe in much outside my specialty. Meaningful reality is what I can observe: that's what I'm on an Explorer ship to do. Yet that odd twitch just as Valmis manipulated his gadget—I had observed that, but had put it down to the physical effect of the jolt when the control surfaces started to work again. . . .
"Valmis, where is this Displacer now?" I asked.
He showed me the empty black box beside him. "It vanished when we . . . changed," he said. "It existed in the actual reality and in the potential one at the same time—and when this potential reality became the actual one for us, the Displacer had to cease to exist, because the dynamic tension between the actual and the potential had vanished, so—"
I waved a hand impatiently. Left alone, he could go on forever about it. Just because a man is professionally involved with Infinity doesn't mean that he should talk at infinite length. "Well, it doesn't matter. If, as you say, this universe is like ours in every respect except that we're alive instead of dead, the thing to do is cope, with it, whatever it is."
Valmis looked at me intently. "Raf—you're unmoved by the fact that we have wrenched the fabric of the universe, in a sense created a new one?"
"It was you that did that," Dark said. "If it was done at all," he added in a lower tone.
Ari spoke up. "As Raf said, the thing we have to think about is what we're going to do about being where or what we are."
"What I was saying when we got into all this talk," Dark said, "was that we've got to get the natives here, if we can, smartened up enough to do the repairs Wanderer is going to need. And never mind Rule Whatever-it-is about interfering with alien cultures."
I could understand a Captain having that attitude—his job is to get his ship to where it's going and back, and any rule that interferes with that can expect to be disregarded. But Recorders have the noninterference rule drummed into them from the beginning of their training—besides, if they were constitutional interferers, they wouldn't want to be Recorders in the first place. Integrators, though for different reasons, are just as strong on that rule; and I appealed to Valmis for backing.
He said, "Raf, I have already interfered with this world—with the universe—to an ultimate degree. I hadn't worked it out before; in panic, I used the Displacer, but this plane did not exist before then. I called it into being! So you will see that I am not very much concerned about any further interference with it or any part of it!"
There was no use arguing with Valmis—he was set on his notion that he had done something cosmic with his weird device, and that was it. I turned to Ari, "Surely you can see—"
"I must agree with Valmis and Dark," he said. "Whether or not Valmis's contention is correct, the clear truth is that we are in a position where we must choose between interfering with the natives of an obscure—and perhaps in a sense unreal—planet, on the one hand, and settling among them, on the other—and if I must believe in displaced probabilities and so on in order to be at ease about that interference, then that's what I'll believe."
I knew quite well what, aside from self-preservation, was in his mind. Metahistorians, studying the flow of history on a myriad of planets, with as close an approximation to the scientific method as possible, lack one thing: the experiment. They are good at making what has happened fit
in with Metahistorical theory and at explaining what's going to happen in a way that can always be made to seem accurate later on, but they are barred from saying, "If you wish this effect under these conditions, then that action will produce it," and carrying the idea out. To do such a thing to prove a scientific (or quasi-scientific) point would be appallingly callous and would also, of course, be a direct violation of the Explorers' noninterference rule. But Ari now had a pressing motive to justify what he might do, and Valmis's bizarre talk eased his conscience enough to allow this.
"And I expect you intend to work out the best ways to interfere?" I said.
"I will certainly make available, when I have acquired it, my understanding of the trends and crisis points on this planet," Ari replied suavely. "It should give you some interesting material to Record."
"Trends or not," Dark said, "we'll have to get these fellows turned into competent metallurgists and technicians—and I have some plans for how to do that. Strap in, all of you—there's land ahead! If there's anything left in the control jets, I'll point her down and try to slow her so we'll be able to take the landing."
I could see a shoreline, backed by mountains, catching the light of the planet's sun, which was behind us. As we descended, I could see Wanderer's shadow racing ahead of us—first smooth, then more and more distorted by the waves, now clearly recognizable as we neared the surface. I also got a flash of what appeared to be vessels—far off, but obviously able to see us, if we could see them. Whatever our encounter with them was to be—rescue or attack—it would be happening soon.
Now we were racing in, the shore and vessels lost to sight, only the sky above and the sea, nearly surrounding us. Wanderer shuddered and white foam splashed past the viewports, then clear air again for an instant—we must have hit the crest of a wave—then a slam that flung us against our retaining straps, a rolling motion that left us leaning far to right, then to left, before we settled—if that is the word—into a helical swaying that I found remarkably unnerving.
"We're down," Dark said unnecessarily. "Gather what gear you want to have with you—then there's nothing to do but wait."
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