The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  He stretched himself; his injuries were tightening as they healed, causing discomfort. "Well, that was why they picked me—that, and the fact that I was much smaller than the other candidates, so they could loft a bit of extra reaction mass for free-fall maneuvering. Do you understand how my craft works, or rather, was supposed to work?"

  "I think so. The gas-globes were to carry it above most of the atmosphere, and then the drivers were to blast you into orbit, and then you'd fire them again to—"

  "Not quite. Out in space I was to use regular musculator pumps to expel a heavy inert liquid that we've developed. The fuel used for the drivers becomes unstable under free-space radiation. We lost two or three of our early cylinders that way, before we figured out what the problem was. Or rather, I should say 'they,' not 'we,' because that happened long before I joined the team."

  Karg heaved a deep sigh. "I was looking forward to it, I really was! And now I've lost my chance forever."

  "Surely not! After your pad has grown back"—Albumarak could still not mention that promise without a hint of awe in her voice, for it bespoke medical techniques far surpassing those boasted of at Fregwil— "they won't want to waste someone with your special talents and training."

  "Oh, I gather Yull impressed everybody mightily with her reference to regrowth, but the process is actually still in the experimental stage, and in any case you don't get the feeling back. And every square clawide of my body was pressed into service to control the hauq, and the purifiers, and the maneuvering pumps, and the farspeakers and the rest. No, I had my chance, and a meteorite stole it once for all."

  "So what will you do now—go back to underwater work?"

  "I could, I suppose; it isn't so demanding ... But I'd rather not. I think I'll stay on at the space-site. I gather Yull told you that we're going to have to abandon our existing plans and try another course."

  "Yes, but..." Albumarak clacked her mandibles dolefully. "You said your regrowth techniques are still at the experimental stage. The same is true of our loss-free circuits. They still take ages to grow—we'd been working on the one which we demonstrated at the Sparkshow ever since the last Festival of Science—and they haven't yet been proved under field conditions. For all we can tell, they may be vulnerable to disease, funqi, wild beasts, parasitic plants..."

  "Yes, it seems more than a padlong from demonstration of a pilot version to what Yull is talking about. Even so, a fresh eye cast on the principle ... What is it?"

  "The principle? Well ... Well, how much do you know about sparkforce?"

  Karg shrugged; she felt the branches stir. "Take it for granted that I know a little about a lot of things."

  "Yes, you'd have to, wouldn't you?" Embarrassed again, Albumarak went on hastily. "What she seems to have in mind isn't even at the experimental level yet. It's a mere oddment, a curiosity. It depends on using sparkforce charges to repel each other."

  "I thought that must be it, but if you did put such a huge charge on one of our cylinders, then ... Hmm! Wait a moment; I think I see how it might be done. If there were some way to alternate the kinds of repulsion—Ach! I'm taking an infusion to control my pain, and my mind is still too foggy for constructive reasoning. But I'll remember to mention my idea to Yull in the morning."

  He shifted in the crotch, turning his eye on her. "Did you get enough to eat this sundown?"

  "As much as I wanted."

  "If you didn't eat properly, you may find your mind is as sluggish as mine when you arrive in Slah. It can take quite a long time to adjust to local dark and bright after traveling to a different continent at today's speeds—Oh, hark at me! I hadn't set pad on a foreign continent myself before my crash. I'm not the person to lecture you. But I thought it was worth mentioning."

  "How would you have coped in space, then? There isn't a dark-bright cycle up there!"

  "In the orbit I was supposed to follow, there would have been, but six or seven times as fast as a regular day. I didn't expect any trouble, though. Deep underwater you have no dark-bright cycle at all, and I lived through that."

  "What exactly were you to do out there?"

  Karg stretched again, and a hint of agony discolored his pheromones, but it lasted only a moment.

  "Bring together two of our automatic orbital cylinders and connect their ecosystems, then work inside them for a while, making sure everything was going as well as the farspeakers indicate. We do seem to have beaten one major problem: we've developed plants that purge themselves of deleterious mutations due to radiation. Some of them have been through four or five score generations without losing their identity, and should still be fit to eat. But of course there may be changes too tiny for our monitors to locate and report on. How I wish we could get to the moon and back! We need samples of the vegetation up there in the worst way!"

  Listening to him in the gloom of the ill-tended bower, Albumarak found herself wondering what Presthin had been like when she was younger and less cynical; much like Karg, she suspected ... She decided once for all that she had been right to throw in her lot with these people. If they succeeded with their plan to survive in space, they would not be driven mad by the fate of their fellow creatures, any more than Karg by Quelf's mistreatment. But they were no less civilized for that. Yull's contempt for the folk of Prutaj was justified. Worse than primitive, they were insane ... if sanity consisted in doing the most the universe allowed, and she knew no better definition.

  In a tremulous tone she said, "I admire you very much, Karg. I'd invite you to pair with me, but I shouldn't be in bud during my first few moonlongs at Slah, should I?"

  "Quite right," was the answer. "And in any case I'm still too weak, though I look forward to the time when it will be possible. And—ah— you say you admire me. But all my life I've been trained under the finest tutors to do unusual and extraordinary work. You've had a truly awful teacher, and yet for me at least you've performed not just one miracle, but two. Thank you again."

  And he swarmed away, leaving her delighted with the world.

  VIII

  For the first few days, what fascinated Albumarak about her new home was less its modern aspect—its space-site, its laboratories which in many ways were more impressive than those at Fregwil, perhaps because the staff were under less pressure to be forever producing novelties—than its sheer antiquity. She had been vaguely aware that Slah enshrined the last remaining traces of the only ocean-going city to have outlasted the heyday of the People of the Sea, but it was very different to hold in her own claws the mandible of a long-extinct fish, found among the roots of its most ancient trees, or nibble a fragment of funqus and know the species had last been modified by Gveest in person.

  As she had expected, the pace of life here was calmer, yet she detected few signs of discontent or boredom. More people were occupied with old-fashioned tasks—such as disposing of dead luminants—which at Fregwil were deputed to creatures programmed for them, but there was a greater sense of being in touch with the natural world, which Albumarak found refreshing, and the citizens, most of whom had naturally heard about her, seemed never to lack time to offer advice or assistance.

  By stages she began to grasp the full sweep of the plan these people had conceived for the salvation of their afterbuds, and its grandeur overawed her. They referred casually to the astronomers' estimate that it might take ten thousand years for the sun to orbit through the Major Cluster, they accepted without question that its dense gas—from which stars could be observed condensing—would raise the solar temperature to the point where the planet became uninhabitable; they were resigned to the high probability that there would be a stellar collision, and if that did not eventuate, then so much random matter was bound to fall from the sky that it would come to the same thing in the end; and all this was equally well known at Fregwil.

  But instead of closing their minds to the catastrophe, these people were prepared to plan against it. They spoke confidently of vehicles carrying scores-of-scores of folk, along with ev
erything needed to support them, which could be moved away from the sun as it heated up, maneuvering as necessary to remain within its biosphere, while adapted plants freed raw materials from the outer planets and their moons. Then, later, they envisaged breaking up the smaller orbs and converting them into cylinders which could be spun on their long axis to provide a substitute for gravity. These, they predicted, would permit at least some isolated units of the folk to navigate between the nascent stars, using reaction mass or the pressure of light itself.

  All this, of course, was still theoretical. But Albumarak was astonished to learn in what detail the history of the future had been worked out here. She wondered whether she was worthy to contribute to it.

  Inevitably, the bright arrived when she was summoned to the neurophysical laboratory attached to the space-site, well beyond the city limits. Omber appeared to guide her. There she was welcomed by a tubby, somewhat irascible personage called Scholar Theng, who lost no time in getting down to business.

  "Well, young'un," she boomed, "it seems we have to reconsider our ideas. Yull tells me loss-free circuits are the answer. She brought me a sample—Don't look so surprised! Turned out a good many of your citizens didn't care for what Quelf did to Karg, and gifted her with a piece of one, enough to culture a few cells from."

  "You didn't tell me!" Albumarak cried. "I'd have been here long ago if I'd realized you weren't going to have to start from scratch! I've wasted time trying to reconstruct from memory everything I know about designing the things!"

  "So that's what you've been doing, is it?" Theng growled. "I had the impression you were just sight-seeing ... Well, come and look at what we've got so far."

  If it was true that she had started with "a few cells" she had made remarkable progress. Already a web of thin brownish tendrils stretched back and forth over a patch of heavily fertilized ground under a transparent membrane that gathered winter sunwarmth and protected them from storms.

  "But this is wonderful!" Albumarak declared.

  "Oh, we can grow them all right, and they seem to perform as advertised. Question is, can we make them do what Yull wants? You're an expert on sparkforce, they tell me. What do you think?"

  The likelihood of putting Yull's proposal into effect seemed suddenly much greater. Albumarak filled her mantle.

  "Omber, it is the case, isn't it, that one would still have to loft drivers and their fuel, even if one did build a—a launcher capable of replacing gas-globes?"

  They had occasionally discussed the matter; she knew the answer would be yes before it came. And went on, "So the next step must be to grow a miniature test version of your cylinders and see whether"—thank you, Karg!—"we can put sufficient charge on it."

  "We can't," Theng retorted briskly. "We already went over that with our chief chemist Ewblet. It would destabilize the fuel. Want to see the simulation records?"

  Albumarak was minded to clack her mandibles in dismay, but controlled herself and, so far as she could, her exudations. She said in a tone as sharp as Theng's, "Then let Ewblet find a way of preventing it! My business is loss-free sparkforce circuitry, and I'd like to get on with it!"

  Theng looked at her for a long moment. At last she said, "Well spoken. What do you expect to need?"

  It was like being on a different planet. Colleagues much older than herself consulted her without being patronizing; others of her own age reported to her the problems they had encountered, described their proposed solutions, and asked for her opinion; in turn, when she swam into a snag they were prompt to offer information and advice. She had already grasped the overall pattern of what the folk here were committed to, but now she was given insight into its minutiae ... and the multiplicity of details was frightening. So too, in a sense, was the dedication she discovered. She almost came to believe that there was no one in the whole of Slah, bar a clawful of budlings, who lacked a part to play in converting their vision into reality.

  Space-launches using gas-globes were continuing despite the winter storms, along with work on every other aspect of the scheme. The orbits of some of the space-cylinders were decaying; it was essential to send up more reaction mass, using automatic control systems, so they could be forced further out. Everybody, not just Karg, wanted to learn what was happening to the vegetation on the moon; one of the younger scientists proposed crashing a cylinder there which would survive sufficiently intact to gather samples and then emit two or three others much smaller than itself, propelled by a simple explosion on to a course that would bring them to rendezvous with a collector in local orbit, and then recovering the collector in the way designed for Karg. Simulations showed it might well succeed, and the job was promptly put in claw.

  Eventually Albumarak said despairingly to her new friends, "I don't know how you stand the pressure!"

  But they answered confidently, "We enjoy it! After all, is there a better cause we could be working for?"

  And then, to their amazement, they realized she had never learned the means to make the most of dark-time, devised long before the Greatest Meteorite, which depended on freeing consciousness from attending to the process of digestion. With only the mildest of reproaches concerning Fregwil's standards of education, they instructed her in the technique, and after that she no longer wondered how they crammed so much into a single day.

  As Karg had predicted, casting a fresh eye on the loss-free circuits led to rapid improvement. Whiter was milder here than at Fregwil, but that alone did not account for the speed with which the tendrils grew, nor for the flawless way each and every one checked out. Quelf's team had been resigned to losing two or three in every score; here, when one slacked in its growth, the cause was sought and found and in a few days' time it was back to schedule.

  Albumarak detected something of the same phenomenon in herself.

  She was eating an unfamiliar diet, but her mind had never been so active. She mentioned as much to Theng once, when the latter was in a particularly good mood, and was told: "A few generations ago, the air at Slah was always filthy thanks to the metal-working sites nearby. That was at the time of Aglabec and his disciples—heard of them? I thought you would have! Rival cities like Hulgrapuk and Fregwil made the most of it, to disparage us! But we retained our wits well enough to realize it was no use sending crazy people into space, so we put that right, and now there's not a city on the planet where you breathe purer air or drink cleaner water or eat a more nourishing diet. We're allegedly possessed of intelligence; we judged it right to apply our conclusions to ourselves as well as our environment. And it's paid off, hasn't it?" Indeed it had...

  At one stage Albumarak came near despair, when a simulation proved that nothing like enough sparkforce could be generated to drive even the smallest of the Slah cylinders to the heights achieved by gas-globes. There were no pullstones worth mentioning on this continent; the world's only large deposit was on Prutaj. Suddenly someone she had never heard of reported that by adding this and this to the diet of a flashplant, and modifying it in such a way, its output could be multiplied until it matched the best pullstone generator. Someone else suggested means of deriving current from the wind; another, from compression using the beating of ocean waves; another, from conversion of sunshine...

  Yull was in the habit of visiting the laboratory now and then, sometimes with Karg or Omber, more often alone. One day in spring she arrived with a grave expression, and asked Theng, in Albumarak's hearing, what progress had been made.

  "Good!" Theng declared gruffly. "Ewblet has stabilized the fuel at last, we have enough sparkforce and nearly enough loss-free circuitry to loft a driver to where it can be fired into orbit, and the eastern side of Spikemount slopes at pretty well an ideal angle to build the launcher. We expect to be at status go by fall."

  "You're going to have to do better than that," Yull told her soberly.

  Sensing disaster, Albumarak drew close.

  "Take a look at these," Yull invited, proffering a pack of images. They were regular astronomical pi
ctures of the kind produced at any major observatory, and they showed a patch of night sky in the vicinity of the Major Cluster. Theng glanced at them and passed them to Albumarak.

  "You'll have to explain what's so special about them!"

  "This is!" Yull tapped one tiny dot with a delicate claw. "Look again. They were taken on successive nights."

  "It's not on this one," Albumarak muttered. "But it's on this one, only fainter, and—no, not on this one, but on this one as well, and brighter if anything ... Oh, no!"

  "I think," Yull murmured, "you've caught on. For nearly a moonlong past, something has been appearing and vanishing in that area of the sky. We have here a score of images that show it and a quarter-score that don't. What is it?"

  Albumarak's mind raced. "Something spinning! It's rough on one side and smooth on the other, so it only catches the sun at certain angles!"

  "Exactly what our most eminent astronomers suspect," Yull said, reclaiming the pictures. "In addition, though, they can show that it's very far out, beyond Sluggard."

  "Then it must be huge!"

  "Yes. As big as the moon. And what little of its orbit has been analyzed suggests it may be going to intersect with ours in at most a score of years. Even if it misses us, it will certainly crash into the sun."

  IX

  Albumarak felt unbelievably old as she strove to judge the relative merits of a score of rival projects competing for time on the world's only full-scale sparkforce launcher.

  Yull's inspiration had been justified over and over. Cylinders had been flung skyward first to where half the mass of the air was below, then four-fifths, then nine-tenths, the magic altitude from which the drivers could reach escape velocity. Now it glowed vivid blue ten tunes every moon-long, summer and winter alike, and the air for padlonglaqs reeked of sparkforce stink, and the night sky was crowded with artificial stars, one of which loomed brighter than the moon at full: an orbital colony-to-be.