In Deep (14 page)

He examined the cylinder with sensitive instruments that had previously measured its dimensions, its weight and structure. The cylinder was unchanged, undistorted.

Krisch grinned at the Pattern. There was danger in that enigmatic structure of forces, he knew; but he had escaped it by a strategy that was perfect because it was so simple. There were a million questions he had wanted to ask the Pattern; they tingled within him like an internal itch; but he had not asked one. He had asked only for the technical information he needed to build the transport device—he had not even followed up any of the curious mathematical and philosophical implications of some of the steps involved.

And he knew that his certainty of safety was not self-delusion: he had checked himself daily with the hypnotically given psych tests. He was sane. His self-confidence was up a few points; that was natural. His empathy rating was down about the same amount; that had never been high—if it had, he would never have been assigned to head the Project. Those were the only changes. His orientation was perfect. There were no signs of any incipient neuroses or psychoses, including the one he had most feared: a guilt complex centered around his destruction of the cadets.

He was able to think about that without remorse, now as ever. They had only been half alive. They were better off in oblivion.

He looked at the finished device once more. It was a hollow framework of curious, out-of-plumb angles. Over it and around it crawled a metal vine bearing odd fruits: metal roses, each petal mathematically aligned; lozenges of transparent metal, each with a tiny, glowing heart. It looked like nothing so much as some alien being’s notion of a work of art; but Krisch looked at it with awe and respect, remembering the labor each tiny part had cost him.

Inside, in the field created by those metal blossoms, matter gained a new dimension—permanently. It was not like the half-efficient overdrive used in spaceships—that was an artificial condition, that collapsed when the power was withdrawn. Krisch had made a visual analogy to help himself understand the difference. He imagined normal spacetime as a sphere of viscous fluid. A ship going into overdrive extended itself half out of that sphere, and tilted its molecules so that the rest offered less resistance to the liquid. But the Pattern’s device extended the matter it affected like an accordion—open, half out of the stream; closed, all the way out. The matter so treated was not an uneasy visitor on the threshold of that abnormal space; it was at home there. And, once treated, it could be made to move from one space to the other at will.

It was, Krisch thought, the difference between a flying fish and an amphibian.

The test cylinder, though it now partook of the properties of both spaces, was useless for transport because it lacked control. It was set to home on the target plate where it now was. If you tried to move it away, the instant you succeeded by so much as the width of a molecule, the cylinder would return through hyperspace to its former position. The result, in gross terms, was that you simply could not budge it. It was an amusing toy, Krisch thought, and some use might later be found for it. Target plates planted in enemy cities, for example, and radiating missiles.

But the principle military use of the device was going to involve human control. The human passenger was the control. You snapped into hyperspace, you selected your target in normal space, snapped through again, and you were there. In hyperspace there was a perceptible interval, long enough to choose; in normal space there was none.

Krisch checked his equipment once more. He had a semi-portable field generator which projected a spherical force around him, and a reaction motor which could be used for short-range travel. The assembly was much too bulky and awkward to be of any use in military operations, but it was a necessary safeguard. If anything went wrong Krisch did not propose to die for want of air in interplanetary space. Also, he meant to appear somewhat dramatically in the all but impregnable fortress that housed GHQ on Cynara. A startled staff officer might conceivably turn a weapon on him before he had a chance to explain.

He considered setting a charge to destroy the Pattern’s device after he had used it, and regretfully abandoned the idea. It would be good insurance against any reluctance to meet his terms, but the model itself was the only thing he had to sell. He had not drawn any plans as he worked; the plans were now the Pattern’s memory, and he had saved time by working directly from the vivid images the Pattern gave him.

Krisch turned off the power, stepped into the middle of the framework and stood with his hand on the control. There was nothing more to be done. He looked at the Pattern and ought, “Will you be here when I return?”

“Yes.”

Good enough. The thing was not alive, not intelligent, and as therefore, obviously, incapable of boredom. Its drives took it restlessly from one questioning mind to another—when there were minds available. When there were none, it would wait. It had been built on this planet; evidently no provision had ever been made for it to leave.

It knew too much, and was intrinsically too dangerous, ever be allowed to contact another mind. Krisch could not destroy it, but it would be here when he returned; and he could make sure that no one else would ever come to this world.

Krisch thought to himself, “Cynara. The spaceport outside Fortress One.” He visualised it, held the thought firmly in his mind. He turned on the power.

Stunned, Krisch tried to orient himself, to figure out what was the matter. He lay weightless in a gray space, somehow above and somehow surrounded by a frightening, tangled infinity of gray spheres and white, crisscrossing lines. Everything he saw was at the same time immensely distant and so close that he could almost touch it. The array changed and, shifted bewilderingly, and he tried helplessly to follow it, read some sense into its motion, until he remembered: “Cynara. The spaceport outside Fortress One.”

There it was, below him, like some incredible four-dimensioned map, at his fingertips. He saw it clearly. He willed himself toward it, into it. But nothing happened.

Time passed, without measure. The tiny gray figures of man and machine did not move; time was suspended, for them, at the instant Krisch had entered the field. Krisch realised suddenly that he was hungry. Terrified, he looked at the dial of the airmaker at his waist. It was hard to read; the new dimension made vision queer and uncertain; but he made out at last that he had used more than three hours’ supply. Time had not stopped for him.

He thought desperately, “The Project planet. The cavern.”

Instantly, there was the cavern; the framework standing in the middle of the shop floor, and, nearby, the Pattern. An instant later the Pattern vanished.

A voice said in his mind, “Ask me anything.”

Krisch stared at it. Was there a mocking tone in that unaccented, polite, mental voice? He said hoarsely, aloud, “What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong.”

Krisch mastered himself sufficiently to say evenly, “I was not able to enter normal space at my destination. Why not?”

“You did not wait long enough. There is a great disparity between the time rates of this plenum and the normal one; that is why travel can be achieved at a rate which cannot be distinguished from simultaneity by your methods. In subjective terms, the trip to Cynara will take you a long time.”

“How long?” Krisch demanded. He felt helpless, fixed like a pinned specimen in the midst of this gray infinity.

“Approximately one thousand of your years.”

Krisch felt his face writhe and distort into the silent shape of a scream. Blood pounded at his temples; his eyes filmed. He said, “How long—back to the cavern?”

“Only one year, if you were to start immediately to concentrate on the objective. If you allow yourself to drift, as you are doing now, the distance will widen rapidly.”

“But I’ve only got enough air for twenty hours!” Krisch shouted. “I’ll die!”

There was no response.

Krisch pulled himself back from the borderline of hysteria. He suppressed his rage and fear and uncertainty. At least—whatever the reason—the Pattern was here to answer questions. He said, “What was your motive in lying to me?”

“I did not lie to you.”

“You told me,” Krisch said furiously, “that there was a ” negligible time interval between departure and arrival. Why?”

“To me it is negligible.”

Krisch saw that it was true: it was his own fault for having “phrased the question inadequately, for having refused to follow up all the implications of the science the Pattern had taught him. The Pattern, he remembered, was not alive, not intelligent—not capable of boredom. ”

He remembered another line of questioning that he had not followed up, and thought he saw the vague shape of a terrifying possibility.

He said, “When you first came to me—you described yourself as a device to amuse and entertain. Was that the whole truth?”

“No.”

“What is the whole truth?”

The Pattern immediately began to recite the history of the that had made it. Krisch realised petulantly that he had asked too sweeping a question, and was about to rephrase it; but the significance of what the Pattern was saying stopped him.

They had been entirely alien, those people; their psychology was incomprehensible to men. They did not fight; they did not explore; they did not rule or exploit; they had nothing that could be identified with human curiosity—that apelike trait that had made humanity what it was. Yet they had a great science. They had acquired it for some motive that Krisch could never grasp. They had, really, only two characteristics that would be recognisable to men: they loved each other, their homes, their world; and they had a deep, joyful, ironic sense of humor.

“Men came,” said the Pattern, “eleven million of your years ago. They wanted my makers’ world and therefore they killed my makers. My makers knew anguish of flesh and spirit, but they could not fight. Aggressiveness, conflict, were inconceivable to them. But remember that they understood irony. Before the last of them died they made us as a gift to their destroyers. We were a good gift. We contain all that they knew. We were truthful. We are immortal. We are made to serve.

“It is not our makers’ fault,” said the Pattern, “if men use the knowledge we give them to destroy themselves.”

There was only a thin shred left of Krisch’s hold on his sanity. He said very carefully, “Did your makers foresee this—the situation I am in?”

“Yes.”

“
Is there any way for me to escape from it?
”

The Pattern said, “Yes. It is the final jest of my makers. To travel in hyperspace, you must become what I am—only a pattern of forces and memory, not alive, not intelligent, not capable of boredom. I can make this alteration, if you request it. It is simple: like the growth of one crystal from another, or like the transfer of pattern in living cells.”

Krisch choked. He said, “Will I—remember?”

“Yes. You will have your own memories in addition to those I give you. But you will not retain your human character: you will not be aggressive, or cruel, or egotistic; or curious. You will be a device for answering questions.”

Krisch’s mind revolted against the thought. But he looked at the dial of his airmaker and knew what his answer would be. And in a flash of prophetic insight, he knew what would happen thereafter. He would finish his journey to Cynara. He would tell the truth, and the truth would corrupt.

Wherever there were men, throughout the universe and to the end of time, his influence would follow them. In time there would be other unwary seekers of knowledge who would take the path he had taken. By choosing this way out he would become mankind’s executioner.

But when had men hesitated to risk the survival of the race for their own advantage?

The pattern, Krisch thought, was clear.

The attendant at the car lot was daydreaming when I pulled up—a big, lazy-looking man in black satin chequered down the front. I was wearing scarlet, myself; it suited my mood. I got out, almost on his toes.

“Park or storage?” he asked automatically, turning around. Then he realised who I was, and ducked his head away.

“Neither,” I told him.

There was a hand torch on a shelf in the repair shed right behind him. I got it and came back. I knelt down to where I could reach behind the front wheel, and ignited the torch. I turned it on the axle and suspension. They glowed cherry red, then white, and fused together. Then I got up and turned the flame on both tires until the rubberoid stank and sizzled and melted down to the pavement. The attendant didn’t say anything.

I left him there, looking at the mess on his nice clean concrete.

It had been a nice car, too; but I could get another any time. And I felt like walking. I went down the winding road, sleepy in the afternoon sunlight, dappled with shade and smelling of cool leaves. You couldn’t see the houses; they were all sunken or hidden by shrubbery, or a little of both. That was the fad I’d heard about; it was what I’d come here to see. Not that anything the dulls did would be worth looking at.

I turned off at random and crossed a rolling lawn, went through a second hedge of hawthorn in blossom, and came out next to a big sunken games court.

The tennis net was up, and two couples were going at it, just working up a little sweat—young, about half my age, all four of them. Three dark-haired, one blonde. They were evenly matched, and both couples played well together; they were enjoying themselves.

I watched for a minute. But by then the nearest two were beginning to sense I was there, anyhow. I walked down onto the court, just as the blonde was about to serve. She looked at me frozen across the net, poised on tiptoe. The others stood.

“Off,” I told them. “Game’s over.”

I watched the blonde. She was not especially pretty, as they go, but compactly and gracefully put together. She came down slowly,flat-footed without awkwardness, and tucked the racket under her arm; then the surprise was over and she was trotting off the court after the other three.

I followed their voices around the curve of the path, between towering masses of lilacs, inhaling the sweetness, until I came to what looked like a little sunning spot. There was a sundial, and a birdbath, and towels lying around on the grass.

One couple, the dark-haired pair, was still in sight farther down the path, heads bobbing along. The other couple had disappeared.

I found the handle in the grass without any trouble. The mechanism responded, and an oblong section of turf rose up. It was the stair I had, not the elevator, but that was all right. I ran down the steps and into the first door I saw, and was in the top-floor lounge, an oval room lit with diffused simulated sunlight from above. The furniture was all comfortably bloated, sprawling and ugly; the carpet was deep, and there was a fresh flower scent in the air.

The blonde was over at the near end with her back to me, studying the autochef keyboard. She was half out of her playsuit. She pushed it the rest of the way down and stepped out of it, then turned and saw me.

She was surprised again; she hadn’t thought I might follow her down.

I got up close before it occurred to her to move; then it was too late: She knew she couldn’t get away from me; she closed her eyes and leaned back against the paneling, turning a little pale. Her lips and her golden brows went up in the middle.

I looked her over and told her a few uncomplimentary things about herself. She trembled, but didn’t answer. On an impulse, I leaned over and dialed the autochef to hot cheese sauce. I cut the safety out of circuit and put the quantity dial all the way up. I dialed
soup tureen
and then
punch bowl
.

The stuff began to come out in about a minute, steaming hot. I took the tureens and splashed them up and down the wall on either side of her. Then when the first punch bowl came out I used the empty bowls as scoops. I clotted the carpet with the stuff; I made streamers of it all along the walls, and dumped puddles into what furniture I could reach. Where it cooled it would harden, and where it hardened it would cling.

I wanted to splash it across her body, but it would’ve hurt, and we couldn’t have that. The punch bowls of hot sauce were still coming out of the autochef, crowding each other around the vent. I punched
cancel
, and then
sauterne
(
swt
.,
Calif
.).

It came out well chilled in open bottles. I took the first one and had my arm back just about to throw a nice line of the stuff right across her midriff, when a voice said behind me:

“Watch out for cold wine.”

My arm twitched and a little stream of the wine splashed across her thighs. She was ready for it; her eyes had opened at the voice, and she barely jumped.

I whirled around, fighting mad. The man was standing there where he had come out of the stair well. He was thinner in the face than most, bronzed, wide-chested, with alert blue eyes. If it hadn’t been for him, I knew it would have worked—the blonde would have mistaken the chill splash for a scalding one.

I could hear the scream in my mind, and I wanted it.

I took a step toward him, and my foot slipped. I went down clumsily, wrenching one knee. I got up shaking and tight all over. I wasn’t in control of myself. I screamed, “You—you—” I turned and got one of the punch bowls and lifted it in both hands, heedless of how the hot sauce was slopping over onto my wrists, and I had it almost in the air toward him when the sickness took me—that damned buzzing in my head, louder, louder, drowning everything out.

When I came to, they were both gone. I got up off the floor, weak as death, and staggered over to the nearest chair. My clothes were slimed and sticky. I wanted to die. I wanted to drop into that dark furry hole that was yawning for me and never come up; but I made myself stay awake and get out of the chair.

Going down in the elevator, I almost blacked out again. The blonde and the thin man weren’t in any of the second-floor bedrooms. I made sure of that, and then I emptied the closets and bureau drawers onto the floor, dragged the whole mess into one of the bathrooms and stuffed the tub with it, then turned on the water.

I tried the third floor: maintenance and storage. It was empty. I turned the furnace on and set the thermostat up as high as it would go. I disconnected all the safety circuits and alarms. I opened the freezer doors and dialed them to defrost. I popped the stair well door open and went back up in the elevator.

On the second floor I stopped long enough to open the stairway door there—the water was halfway toward it, creep across the floor—and then searched the top floor. No one there. I opened book reels and threw them unwinding across the room; I would have done more, but I could hardly stand. I got up to the surface and collapsed on the lawn: that furry pit swallowed me up, dead and drowned.

While I slept, water poured down the open stair well and the third level. Thawing food packages floated out into rooms. Water seeped into wall panels and machine housings; circuits and fuses blew. The air conditioning stopped, but the pile kept heating. The water rose.

Spoiled food, floating supplies, grimy water surged up the well. The second and first levels were bigger and would longer to fill, but they’d fill. Rugs, furnishings, clothing, the things in the house would be waterlogged and ruined. Probably the weight of so much water would shift the house, rupture the water pipes and other fluid intakes. It would take a repair crew more than a day just to clean up the mess. The house itself was done for, not repairable. The blonde and the man would never live in it again.

Serve them right.

The dulls could build another house; they built like beavers. There was only one of me in the world.

The earliest memory I have is of some woman, probably the cresh-mother, staring at me with an expression of shock and horror. Just that. I’ve tried to remember what happened directly before or after, but I can’t. Before, there’s nothing but the dark formless shaft of no-memory that runs back to birth. Afterward, the big calm.

From my fifth year, it must have been, to my fifteenth, everything I can remember floats in a pleasant dim sea. Nothing was terribly important. I was languid and soft; I drifted. Waking merged into sleep.

In my fifteenth year it was the fashion in love-play for the young people to pair off for months or longer. “Loving steady,” we called it. I remember how the older people protested that it was unhealthy; but we were all normal juniors, and nearly as free as adults under the law.

All but me.

The first steady girl I had was named Elen. She had blonde hair, almost white, worn long; her lashes were dark and her eyes pale green. Startling eyes: they didn’t look as if they were looking at you. They looked blind.

Several times she gave me strange startled glances, something between fright and anger. Once it was because I held her too tightly, and hurt her; other times, it seemed to be for nothing at all.

In our group, a pairing that broke up sooner than four weeks was a little suspect—there must be something wrong with one partner or both, or the pairing would have lasted longer.

Four weeks and a day after Elen and I made our pairing, she told me she was breaking it.

I’d thought I was ready. But I felt the room spin half around me till the wall came against my palm and stopped.

The room had been in use as a hobby chamber; there was a rack of plasticraft knives under my hand. I took one without thinking, and when I saw it I thought,
I’ll frighten her
.

And I saw the startled, half-angry look in her pale eyes as I went toward her; but this was curious: she wasn’t looking at the knife. She was looking at my face.

The elders found me later with the blood on me, and put me into a locked room. Then it was my turn to be frightened, because I realised for the first time that it was possible for a human being to do what I had done.

And if I could do it to Elen, I thought, surely they could do it to me.

But they couldn’t. They set me free: they had to.

And it was then I understood that I was the king of the world…

The sky was turning clear violet when I woke up, and shadow was spilling out from the hedges. I went down the hill until I saw the ghostly blue of photon tubes glowing in a big oblong, just outside the commerce area. I went that way, by habit.

Other people were lining up at the entrance to show their books and be admitted. I brushed by them, seeing the shocked faces and feeling their bodies flinch away, and went on into the robing chamber.

Straps, aqualungs, masks and flippers were all for the taking. I stripped, dropping the clothes where I stood, and put the underwater equipment on. I strode out to the poolside, monstrous, like a being from another world. I adjusted the lung and the flippers, and slipped into the water.

Underneath, it was all crystal blue, with the forms of swimmers sliding through it like pale angels. Schools of small fish scattered as I went down. My heart was beating with a painful joy.

Down, far down, I saw a girl slowly undulating through the motion of a sinuous underwater dance, writhing around and around a ribbed column of imitation coral. She had a suction-tipped fish lance in her hand, but she was not using it; she was only dancing, all by herself, down at the bottom of the water.

I swam after her. She was young and delicately made, and when she saw the. deliberately clumsy motions I made in imitation of hers, her eyes glinted with amusement behind her mask. She bowed to me in mockery, and slowly glided off with simple, exaggerated movements, like a child’s ballet.

I followed. Around her and around I swam, stiff-legged, first more child-like and awkward than, she, then subtly parodying her motions; then improving on them until I was dancing an intricate, mocking dance around her.

I saw her eyes widen. She matched her rhythm to mine, then, and together, apart, together again we coiled the wake of our dancing. At last, exhausted, we clung together where a bridge of plastic coral arched over us. Her cool body was in the bend of my arm; behind two thicknesses of vitrin—a world away!—her eyes were friendly and kind.

There was a moment when, two strangers yet one flesh, we felt our souls speak to one another across that abyss of matter. It was a truncated embrace—we could not kiss, we could not speak—but her hands lay confidingly on my shoulders, and her eyes looked into mine.

That moment had to end. She gestured toward the surface and left me. I followed her up. I was feeling drowsy and almost at peace, after my sickness. I thought… I don’t know what I thought.

We rose together at the side of the pool. She turned to me, removing her mask: and her smile stopped, and melted away. She stared at me with a horrified disgust, wrinkling her/Dose.

“
Pyah!
” she said, and turned, awkward in her flippers.

Watching her, I saw her fall into the arms of a white haired man, and heard her hysterical voice tumbling over itself.

“But don’t you remember?” the man’s voice rumbled. “You should know it by heart.” He turned. “Hal, is there a copy of it in the clubhouse?”

A murmur answered him, and in a few moments a young man came out holding a slender brown pamphlet.

I knew that pamphlet. I could even have told you what page the white-haired man opened it to; what sentences the girl was reading as I watched.

I waited. I don’t know why.

I heard her voice rising: “To think that I let him
touch
me!” And the white-haired man reassured her, the words rumbling, too low to hear. I saw her back straighten. She looked across at me only a few yards in the scented, blue-lit air; a world away… and folded up the pamphlet into a hard wad, threw it, and turned on her heel.

The pamphlet landed almost at my feet. I touched it with my toe, and it opened to the page I had been thinking of:

… sedation until his 15th year, when for sexual reasons it became no longer practical. While the advisors and medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by violence.