by Bob Shaw
"Listen, doctor. I'm way out on a limb here in the tail and I can feel -- "
He broke off as the aircraft suddenly lurched sideways, shuddered, righted itself and became ominously quiet as all four engines cut out at the same time. Soderman, who had been lifted out of his seat and smashed against his instrument arrays, struggled to his feet and ran forward past Dr. Cosgrove. There was a noticeable slope in the gangway, showing that the aircraft was now flying in a pronounced nose-down attitude. A gray-faced second officer collided with him in the doorway to the flight deck.
"Get up to the tail and get your backs against the lavatory bulkhead! We're going down!" The officer made no attempt to keep the panic out of his voice.
"Going down?" Soderman shouted. "Going down where? There isn't a field within three hundred miles."
"Are you telling me there's no field?"
Even in a crisis the airman was jealous of his superiority over ordinary mortals, resentful at having to discuss the affairs of his aerial domain with an outsider.
"We're doing everything we can to restart the engines, but Captain Isaacs isn't optimistic. It looks as though he'll have to try setting us down on the snow. Now will you go aft?"
"But it's dark out there! Nobody could put a ship down -- "
"That's our problem, mister." The officer pushed Soderman up the swaying gangway and turned back to the flight deck. Soderman's mouth was dry as he moved aft, following the stumbling figure of Dr. Cosgrove.
They reached the conical tail-section and sat on the floor, backs braced against the cool metal of a major bulkhead. This far from the center of gravity each control movement made by the pilot was felt as a great, wild swing which gave Soderman the conviction the final catastrophe had arrived. With no sound from the engines to mask it, the passage of the fuselage through the air was loud, variable, menacing -- the gleeful voice of a sky which could feel an enemy's strength bleeding away.
Soderman tried to reconcile himself to the thought of dying within a matter of minutes, knowing that no combination of luck, pilot's skill and structural integrity could enable the aircraft to survive contact with the earth. In daylight, or even in moonlight, it might have worked, but in pitch blackness there could be only one outcome to this rushing descent.
He clenched his teeth and vowed to go out with at least as much dignity as Dr. Cosgrove seemed to have mustered -- but, when the impact came, he screamed. His voice was lost in a prolonged metallic thunderclap, then the plane was airborne again in a crazy, slewing leap, culminating in another incredible blast of sound which was compounded by the clattering of moveable objects bounding the length of the fuselage. The nightmare seemed to last for an eternity, during which all the interior lights were extinguished, but it ended abruptly, and Soderman discovered he was still breathing -- miraculously, impossibly alive.
A few minutes later he was standing at an emergency door peering into the night sky at the glowing face of his savior.
Striated curtains of red and green light shimmered and danced from horizon to horizon, illuminating the snowscape below with an eerie, theatrical brilliance. It was an auroral display of supernatural intensity.
"This illustrates what I was saying about the Van Allen belt being overloaded," Dr. Cosgrove commented emotionlessly behind Soderman. "The solar corpuscular stream is washing the upper atmosphere with charged particles which are draining into the magnetic poles. Their display, to which it seems we owe our lives, is only one facet of . . ."
But Soderman had stopped listening -- he was too busy with the pleasurable business of simply being alive.
Dr. Fergus B. Raphael sat quietly at the wheel of his car, staring across the oil-dappled concrete of the university parking lot.
He was seriously contemplating driving away towards the ocean and never being heard of in academic circles again. There had been a time when he had tackled his work with supreme enthusiasm, undeterred by the realization that -- in the very nature of things -- he would never achieve the rewards which were possible for workers in other fields. But the years had taken their toll, the years of living on the wrong side of the scientific tracks, and now he was tired.
He put aside the daily pretense that he was free to drive away from his obsession, and got out of the car. The sky was overcast and chestnut leaves were scuttling noisily before a cold, searching wind. Raphael turned up his coat collar and walked towards the unremarkable architecture of the university. It looked like being yet another very ordinary day.
Half an hour later he had set up the first experiment of the morning. The volunteer was Joe Washburn, a young Negro student who had shown flashes of promise in a previous series of tests.
Raphael raised a microphone to his lips. "All set, Joe?"
Washburn nodded and waved to Raphael through the window of his soundproof booth. Raphael moved a switch and checked with his assistant, Jean Ard, who was sitting in a similar booth at the opposite side of the laboratory. She gave him an exaggeratedly cheerful wave, which Raphael took as an indication that she too was feeling depressed. He started the recording machine, then leaned back in his chair, unwrapping a cigar, and watched the visual monitors with dutiful eyes.
Not for the first time, he thought: How long does this farce have to go on? How much proof do I need that mind-to-mind communication is impossible?
Jean Ard keyed in her first symbol and a triangle appeared on her monitor. Her face was impassive behind the thick glass of the booth and Raphael wondered if she always tried to concentrate and project, or if she ever just sat there, pushed buttons and thought about her evening date. A few minutes later Washburn's monitor lit up -- a triangle. Raphael ignited his cigar and waited, wondering how soon be could break off and go for coffee. A square appeared on Jean's monitor, followed by a square on Washburn's. She tried a triangle again, and Washburn matched ber. Then a circle and a star, and Washburn registered a circle and a star. In spite of himself, Raphael's pulse began to quicken and he felt a recurrence of the old nervous fever which might have made him a chronic gambler had be not found a way to sublimate it in research. He watched closely as Jean continued keying in at random the five abstract symbols they used in the telepathy experiments. Eight minutes later she had gone through a complete test sample of fifty projections.
And Joe Washburn's score was exactly fifty.
Raphael stubbed out his cigar with a shaking hand. He felt deathly cold as he raised the microphone, but he kept his voice as flat as possible to avoid injecting even the minutest disturbance into the experiment.
"That was all right for a warm-up, Jean and Joe. Let's run through another set." They both nodded. He moved a switch and spoke to Jean only. "I'd like you to use both the abstract and the related symbols this time."
He hunched over the console and watched the monitors with the eyes of a man playing Russian roulette. The addition of the five meaningful symbols -- tree, automobile, dog, chair, man -- brought the range up to ten, and made a freak run of success that much more difficult.
Washburn made one mistake in the next series of fifty, and no errors at all in the following three sets. Raphael decided to introduce the demons of emotion and self-consciousness.
"Listen, you two," he said thickly. "I don't know how you're doing it, but you've been scoring virtually one hundred percent since this experiment started, and I don't have to tell you what that means. Now let's keep blasting away at this thing till we see how far it's going to go."
Washburn made four mistakes in the next set, two in the following set, and none in the five further tests which Raphael put him through before switching off the recording equipment. Both Jean and Washburn had to examine the print-out for themselves before they accepted that the whole affair had not been a trick devised by Raphael to introduce a new experimental factor. When the truth had sunk in they stared at each other with cautious, wondering eyes.
"I think it'd be a good idea if we had some coffee now, Jean," Raphael said. "This needs some thinking about."
"A long-distance call for you, Dr. Raphael," the university operator said. "It's Professor Morrison calling from Cleveland."
"Thank you," Raphael said dully, shocked at the coincidence. He had been going to call Morrison, who was his closest friend among the handful of men still working in the unfashionable field of extrasensory perception. Somehow, he had a prescient awareness of why Morrison was calling, and the feeling was confirmed when he heard the other man's excited tones.
"Hello, Fergus? Thank God I got hold of you -- I had to get this off my chest to somebody before I exploded. You'll never guess what's been happening here."
"I will," Raphael said.
"Try it then."
"You've begun getting hundred percent successes in telepathy experiments."
Morrison's gasp of surprise was clearly audible. "That's right. How did you know?"
"Perhaps," Raphael said somberly, "I'm telepathic too."
VIII
A full day had passed before Jack Breton's consternation over the fragment of poetry began to abate.
He had questioned Kate about it as closely as he dared and, when he learned how it had been written, pretended a sympathetic interest in automatic writing. Kate had seemed pleased and flattered at his support, and had explained in detail everything she knew about Miriam Pa]frey's powers.
Becoming more and more uneasy, Breton had examined hundreds of samples of the automatic writing and learned that the piece of verse was the only thing of its kind Miriam had ever produced. Furthermore, she had done it within hours of his arrival in the Time B world -- which would hardly be a coincidence. The only answer his mind could produce, no matter how he juggled the facts, was telepathy -- and the last thing he wanted was somebody reading his mind.
On the following morning his guess, wild as it had seemed, was confirmed in an unexpected manner. The apparent breakdown in John Breton's relationship with Kate had accelerated visibly since Jack's arrival. He had become more withdrawn, more caustic when he did speak of her, obviously in the throes of assessing his whole life. And, as if to assert his claim to an independent existence in his own universe, he constantly patrolled the house with a radio tucked in the crook of his arm, turning it to full volume at every news broadcast.
The newscasts he overheard told one part of Jack Breton's mind that some very unusual events were taking place, but he was too deeply involved in working out his own personal destiny to pay much attention to stories of scientific curiosities. Had he not been weighing up his plans in the light of the fact that Miriam Palfrey appeared to have snatched something right out of his mind, he would not have absorbed the news that telepathy experiments in several universities had suddenly begun to yield dramatic results. The information served to demote Miriam from the status of an inexplicable menace to that of the other background phenomena.
Strangely, Jack Breton found no deterioration in his relationship with his other self. The big house was filled with almost-tangible currents of emotion as John and Kate maneuvered endlessly, each waiting for the other to break the stasis which had descended on them. But at odd moments Jack discovered himself in a calm backwater in which he and John could talk like twin brothers who had not met in a long time. He also discovered, and was mildly surprised, that John's memory of their common boyhood was much more detailed and complete than his own. Several times he argued with John about the authenticity of some detail until the relevant compartment of his mind seemed to open suddenly, admitting the varicolored stains of memory, and he realized John had been right.
A tentative explanation reached by Jack was that memories were reinforced by repetition of the act of recall -- and, at some time during the past nine years, John Breton had begun to live in the past. Some dissatisfaction with the shape of his life in the Time B world had led him to draw on the stored comforts of a bygone era.
Even in the short time he had been in the house Jack had noticed John's obsessive interest in old movies, the way in which he invariably compared people to the old-time actors and actresses. Photographs of Thirties-style cars with their tiny vertical windshields were hung around the basement workshop. ("I'd love to drive one of those myopic old things," John had said. "Can't you smell the dust in those big cloth-covered seats?") And when he had lifted himself clear of the past, he avoided the human realities of the present, sinking his mind into the engineering and commercial disciplines of running the Breton Consultancy.
Jack Breton received the up-to-date details of the business gratefully -- he was going to need all available information when the time came for him to take over. It also gave him the opportunity to establish one fact which was vital to his plan. . . .
"Gravimetric surveying has become impossible, of course," John was saying after lunch. "The Bureau of Standards came right out and said it this morning -- the force of gravity is decreasing. It always did fluctuate, and I'm willing to bet we're simply on the downward slope of a more massive variation than usual, but all the same, it's funny the news broadcasts don't make more of it. I mean, there's nothing more basic than gravity. Perhaps there's been a clamp-down of some kind."
"I doubt it," Jack said absently, thinking of Kate upstairs in the same house, perhaps in the bedroom adjusting her plumage.
"At least my gravimeters are all right. Carl and I were worried. Did you have him in your setup? Carl Tougher?"
"Yes. Hetty and he took over the business." Kate might be moving naked through the guilty afternoon twilight of closed blinds.
"It wouldn't have mattered too much about the gravimeters, luckily. There was a time when a gravimeter, a theodolite and a couple of ex-Army Dumpy levels were just about all the capital equipment I had. That was before I started accepting bore-hole contracts and some large-bore work."
Jack's interest was suddenly aroused. "How about these new non-physical drills? The matter disrupter gadgets? Do you use those?"
"Got three of them," John replied warmly. "We use them for all the large-bore drilling. Carl doesn't like them because they don't have a coring facility, but they're fast and clean. You can sink a two-foot hole through any kind of strata, and it all comes up as micro-dust."
"I've never seen one in action," Jack said with deliberate wistfulness. "Are there any sites close to town?"
"The nearest is about twenty miles north of here on the main route to Silverstream." John sounded doubtful. "I don't see how you could get out there, though. People are going to start wondering if they see two of us walking around."
"But that situation's going to be corrected soon."
"Is it?" John Breton was instantly suspicious, and Jack wondered if he had any inkling of the fate planned for him.
"Of course," he said quickly. "You and Kate are bound to reach a decision any time now. In fact, I don't see what's taking you so long. Why don't you admit that you're sick to death of each other, and get it over with?"
"Has Kate said anything to you?"
"No," Jack replied cautiously, not wanting to precipitate a crisis before he was completely ready to handle it.
"Well -- anytime she works up the nerve to say what she's thinking, I'll be ready to hear her out." A look of schoolboyish truculence passed over John's square face, and Jack realized his own instincts had been right all along. No man would ever willingly give up a prize like Kate. The only solution to the triangle problem lay in two pieces of machinery -- the pistol hidden upstairs in his room, and the matter disrupter drill along the Silverstream highway.
"Is it important for you to get Kate to make the first move?"
"If you don't analyze me, I won't analyze you," John said significantly.
Jack smiled at him, calmly.
The reference to analysis made him think of John's body converted to micro-dust, completely anonymous, defying any kind of investigation.
When John had returned to the office, Jack waited hungrily for Kate to come downstairs to him, but she appeared dressed in a tweed suit with tied belt and a high fur collar.
"Going out?" He tried to mask his disappointment.
"Shopping," she said in a businesslike voice which hurt him in some obscure fashion.
"Don't go.
"But we still have to eat." Her voice carried what he recognized as a trace of antagonism, and he suddenly realized she had been virtually avoiding him since their single physical encounter. The idea that she might be feeling guilt -- and associating him with it -- filled Breton with an unreasoning panic.
"John's talking about pulling out." He was unable to prevent himself blurting the lie like a love-sick adolescent, in spite of his awareness of the need to prepare her mind for John's disappearance more carefully than he had ever done anything in his entire life. Kate hesitated between him and the door. The down on her cheekbones caught the light like frost, and he seemed to see the mortuary drawer supporting her on its efficient cantilever. He became afraid.