“I don’t get it. Somehow you’re still alive. But somehow—well, you—”
“Aged? Gotten old? Don’t be afraid to say it. The vibrokey did most of it. Residuary effect. It has potentialities that I’m sure even father never dreamed of.”
“Vibrokey? I don’t—”
“Think back. Remember how I located the entrance to the machine planet, how I opened it? How I told you that father had said that it could shake whole buildings down? How I explained that it experiments with all possible combinations and magnitudes of vibration speeds and patterns until any assigned pattern is matched—”
Cragin scowled a little. Something stirred stealthily in his memory, and then the whole thing crept slowly back, piece by piece.
“You mean you slammed your way out with that gadget?”
“In a way. The one my father made was of course taken from me and destroyed. But I had helped him build it; I knew I could build another. But I had to steal what bits and pieces of materials I needed whenever it was possible. Sometimes I waited months for an opportunity, only to lose it at the last moment. Yet the waiting helped in its own way. Even as I slaved for them, Cragin, I thought. I figured, refigured. And when, after seven years, I had accumulated the few simple parts I needed, I knew I could build a better instrument than Fowler Griffin himself had.”
“And you built it—”
“While the others slept and the guards ate. That took almost two years.”
“Then?”
“I vibrated a guard into senility. He died of old age within seconds. In what simple uniform he wore and with his weapon, I bluffed my way aboard this ship in which we stand now. I had to kill a pilot and three crewmen before I was successful in tuning the key to a dimension existing in a completely different pattern of atomic vibrations. The transferal itself was instantaneous. Then on critical speeds I found my way back.”
Cragin took a deep breath. “And you once told me I was impossible. But just the same I don’t want to be kidded, even if you have got more circuits upstairs than I can ever be wired for. Remember I didn’t pick you up going toward home. The nose of this barrel was about to do a little Barrier-busting.”
The faded smile returned to Lin Griffin’s age-contorted face. She had not been completely immune to the device of her own making; even her brilliance had been unable to devise a vibration scheme which would resolve to zero the reaction effects of dimension transferal through alteration of atomic vibration patterns.
“I wanted to see Earth again, Cragin. I don’t know if you understand that or not. Love is a common word, but few understand it.
“Our people, advanced in scientific knowledge and wisdom as they are, had long since forgotten it when we first met. It was seldom in their past that their faith was placed wholeheartedly in it. But they’re my people just as they’re yours, Cragin, and I love them because they are. And that’s why I’m on my way to take over the machine-planet; to destroy it. To destroy it so that it can never be replaced.”
“You aren’t making sense, gal.”
“I am, Cragin. Because Owners or no Owners, the Earth—the entire system and the universe in which it lives—have true physical and chemical values of their own—values determined in the very beginning by an entity far higher than they!”
“You mean you actually believe—”
“I do and I’m proud of it!”
Cragin felt his face grow warm, knew he reddened, was not sure why. He felt a strange compulsion to turn his eyes from hers. Mad? Easily said, of course, but—No.
No. Not mad at all.
“I may understand more than you think, Lin Griffin. I am human.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then, as though she had not heard him, she spoke rapidly.
“Once returned to the X Ecliptic, Cragin, I shall set the vibrokey adrift within its circumference, to set up a vibration field which will negate any form of other energy, including counter-vibrations, and which will mean complete destruction to any form of matter. I intend to activate the key from the machine-planet itself with nothing more complex than a simple radar beam, after I have restored the solar system to its original values.”
“That’ll mean everything within the Ecliptic will be destroyed; the machine-planet; you too. You’re telling me you don’t mean to come back. I can’t let—”
It was as though she was totally deaf to each word he said.
“I don’t believe in the Owners as masters of all, Patrolman, despite their extreme advances in the realm of both pure and applied science. You do. You do, because they symbolize the scientific ultimate. . . . But science was only ever meant to be a useful tool for men. Not their God.”
Cragin felt funny inside.
“You’ll die,” he said like a child.
“But you shall not. You shall live. Such a thing,” she said, “has been done before for the peoples of Earth.
“Now go, Cragin.”
There was nothing else to do.
He paused. His wide shoulders sagged a little; he was not given to long talk, and he had discerned the signs of restlessness among a few of the impassive assemblage. Others were more kind. Little else, perhaps, could have been expected.
“As I confessed when I began,” his quiet voice resumed, “I do not have many of the scientific answers you want. Hints that Lin Griffin gave me before her last trip beyond the Barrier—they are all I have to explain why the solar system is as you see it now; altered, changed, alive.
“Unless, gentlemen, you would accept a better answer; one that Lin Griffin herself might have given you. She would tell you that there is more to the Universe—the macrocosmo and the microcosmo as well—than Man has yet measured. To speak of Universe means, gentlemen, to speak not only of its known contents, but of its unknown as well, for it is eternally the container of both.
“Logically, I should have met death in my attempt at escape. Logically, no human woman could have endured what Lin Griffin endured, nor conceived the strategy with which the machine planet was erased from existence. According to the logic of the last five centuries of human culture, what Lin Griffin did, how she thought, were both impossibilities.
“Yet Earth is green again.
“So when next you seek, to plumb the Universe, gentlemen, and to equate yet one more of its myriad unknown quantities, think again of the half-gods, such as the Owners—such as we ourselves strove so mightily to be—who would equate them all. For it is always inevitable, gentlemen that soon or late, though the Universe remains, the half-gods go.
“There are some, I believe, who would seek too high an office. You—you may thank God, gentlemen, for the few who will not let them.”
Then Cragin’s voice at last fell silent, and silently, he stepped from the podium.
The time was five o’clock, Sunday, June 9, 3024, and from somewhere far off there was the gentle sound of a tolling bell.
The Time Armada
Politics and science don't mix—except that Congressman Blair had once been a physicist. This was The Beginning—but The End was worlds away . . .
5:20 P.M., April 17, 1958
CONGRESSMAN Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was good of Grayson to pick him up.
The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed his hat back with the half-formed thought that it might ease the dull pressure behind his eyes.
“Rough going today, eh, Congressman?”
Grayson twisted the blue sedan into outbound Washington traffic, turned the windshield wipers to a faster pace. Click-click, click-click, and Blair wished someone would invent windshield wipers for the brain, to be worn like a radio head-set, maybe with a hole in the top of the head.
“Hey, buddy
! Republicans got your tongue?”
“No, sorry, Carl. Just tired. It’s that damned McKenny bill.”
“Off the record?”
“I’m afraid so for now, Carl. He can get the thing through—he’s so damn. clever he should’ve been a woman. Got the steel men eating out of his hand. Made no bones about telling the rest of us today that what the hell, the people never had anything to say about it, anyway. The work of government is up to the professionals. The sooner the people get their nose out of it, the better off they’ll be. He said that, Carl, right in front of everybody. And nobody so much as blinked.”
The drizzle started to develop into a dark blue rain as they headed toward the suburbs.
“What’s going to happen, Carl?” Blair said after awhile.
“If I knew, believe me, I wouldn’t be sitting here! I don’t know, Doug. We’ll all cook in Hell together I guess. Here, have a cigarette.”
“Thanks. No, dammit. That’s just it—if they’d take this going to Hell business and forget about it—sink it, scuttle it. Nobody goes to Hell, he makes his own if that’s the way he lives, or he makes his own personal Heaven or Paradise or whatever you call it if that’s the way he lives. Most of us are in between someplace, a little scared, mostly indifferent, and too mixed up to see the simple fact that the way of living we’ve got in this country isn’t so bad but what just plain honesty and a little intelligence couldn’t run it right side up.”
“Sure, sure, I know and you’re right, Doug. But take it easy . . . Things aren’t always as bad as they look.”
BLAIR inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better. Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl. Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam.
“You know what, chum?” They were running smoothly along the highway now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan warm and relaxing.
The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the work of the day, tenuous, without substance.
“What, Carl?”
“You should’ve stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your brain you’d’ve made that try for the Moon a success last month instead of another near miss.”
“Maybe you’re right. Those boys know what they’re doing though. I’ll stick to puttering.”
“Puttering the man calls it. ‘He hath a lean and hungry look—such men are dangerous . . .’ Myself, I think that gadget you ‘putter’ with in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead without being told!”
“With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That’s the trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas—slide-rules don’t think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set.”
“You wouldn’t kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away the other night said that it was an experiment with something called tired light.”
“Exactly. Television.”
“Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said—or the martini said anyway—that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it’d be able to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You’re guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking.”
“Off the record—”
“I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch’s chair.”
“Well—the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea’s there I guess. Anyway, it isn’t everybody who has a space-warp for a household pet.”
“Or Einstein for a hobby.”
“Blah, this is strictly Blair. That’s why it won’t work, and I’d be only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a jolt that way.”
“Yuk, yuk.”
THAT was why it was good to have Carl for a friend. No matter how sorry you got to feeling for yourself, he could usually snap you out of it one way or another. Right now, Doug thought, Carl was diligently at work with that peculiar brand of psychology that all newspapermen strive ceaselessly to acquire that makes people blab when they ought to keep quiet. But why not—Carl wouldn’t know what the hell it was all about and he wouldn’t care, if he thought it would take some of the pressure off.
“Well, listen then. Ever look through an observatory telescope and have somebody tell you you were focused on some star or other a couple of thousand light years away? Maybe it was in the process of blowing up and becoming a nova or something like that. Anyhow, it would be explained to you that you were seeing that star as it was two thousand years ago. You were seeing, for instance, an explosion that happened twenty centuries in the past. Reason, of course, is that it took the light that long to get from the star to you. More simply, the light that strikes your back porch in the morning left the sun about nine minutes before.”
“Very clear. Only how come, if the universe is a closed form of infinity like it says in all the new books, this light never doubles back on itself—gives you two or even a million images of the same star?”
“That’s where the tired light comes in. After a certain length of time—unthinkable aeons of it—it, like all other forms of energy, peters out. Runs down. Quits. Kaput. They call it entropy. It constitutes, actually, a gradual running down, growing old of the universe. As far as anyone knows, this happens before it ‘doubles back’ on itself, as you put it. You can’t catch it coming around the second time to see what you looked like umpteenillion ages ago. So, if you want a second look at yourself, you’ve got to go out and catch the light which you reflected in the past—”
“Oh brother. You mean anybody on a planet, say, forty light years from Earth with a supertelescope looking at us would be watching the battle of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood! A hundred and eighty light years away he’d see us slugging it out against King George III at Saratoga and Valley Forge!”
“You’ve got it. In other words, the light reflected from Earth then is somewhere deep in Space now. If you could haul it in on some kind of a receiver, you could see everything all over again—you could watch the land masses of Earth as they shifted to form the continents as we know them today.”
“You’d need something faster than light to trap the light itself—and I thought that was against Fitzgerald or somebody.”
“If you followed the same space warps the light did, it would be. But if it were possible to operate your receiver through the fabric of space-time, instead of along it—a kind of short-cut—you might turn up with what you’re after.”
“I am sorry I got into this.” Blair smiled tiredly. “Me too. Hell, I’m fooling around with things I don’t pretend to know anything about. Just enough to putter. Just enough to keep my mind off all-day-long. God knows what I’ll get when I turn the damn thing on. Probably not even snow so I’m not worried. Turn left at the next stop-light—they’ve got that new cut-off finished.” He started buttoning his coat. Grayson turned left as ordered.
“But suppose it works?”
“Wow. Then the steam-fitters would envy me.”
“Well it sure oughtta do something. You’ve been tinkering with it for—how long? Couple years?”
“About four I guess, off and on. Sometimes I get to wondering what it’ll do if it does do anything.”
“Show us Lillian Russell, maybe, or Little Egypt!”
“There’s a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl. I guess that’s what fascinates me. A little learning is a dangerous thing, they say. Dot’s afraid I’ll blow us up.”
“Well—she could have something there!”
“The thing probably won’t even toast a piece of bread. But I’d rather fool with it than collect buttons or play bridge or some other dam fool thing, so . . .” The blue sedan sloshed up the puddled. drive-way to the new nine-room bungalow and at the porch Doug Blair got out. A wind had sprung up and the dampness suddenly grasped his body, clung, as though he were naked.
“Time for a drink, supper?”
“No, thanks, Doug—gotta see a man. Now take it easy—let the state of the nation go bury its head for tonight and you have some fun blowing fuses!”
“Yeah, yeah! O.K. and thanks.” The blue sedan sloshed its way back to the highway, and Doug went into the house.
DOUGLAS Blair kissed his wife and, as he did every time he kissed her, wondered how he’d been so lucky. He preferred to think as seldom as memory would permit of how close he’d come on a couple of occasions to marrying a country club, a bridge deck, a women’s society, an Emily Post book. And when Dot had given him Terry and Mike, she’d topped off the miracle of herself with the added one of two healthy young minds that had already learned to say “prove it!” Some of the tiredness left him, a lot of the aching discouragement was brushed away.
“Tired, Doug?”
“I was.”
There was a sudden thundering which grew quickly into the crashing noises often made by wild elephants getting exercise in a native village.
“The patter of little feet,” Dorothy said.
“Oh. For a minute I thought it was termites. Hi, fellas! What kind of trouble did we almost keep out of today?”
“Hi, dad! Hey, Mike says you aren’t ever going to try it out. You are, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t say not ever. I said maybe not ever. Things like the Contraption take years to develop, don’t they, dad?”
“Well,” Doug said, doing what he could to stem the onslaught and still stay on his feet, “what’s the source of all this wisdom, Mr. Scientist?”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 19