The Crack In Space (15 page)

‘Tired?’ Howard asked him.

‘Dam right.’ Stanley felt irritable. ‘I ought to be home in bed.’ We all should be, he said to himself. I’ll be glad when they’ve run the final tests on this and it’s ready to go back into operation.

A senior engineer hopped into the tube of the ‘scuttler and disappeared from sight. Stanley dropped his cigarette to the lab floor and savagely ground it out. Now we learn the truth, he realized. We get the poop, whether we’ve failed or been successful.

Minutes passed.

Reappearing, the engineer called to him. ‘Mr Stanley, would you come here, please?’

Stanley, on rubber legs, made his way to the tube. ‘How is it inside there?’

‘The rent’s big, now. Three and a half, maybe four times greater.’

Feeling limp as tension throughout his body lessened, Stanley said, ‘Fine. Now we can go home where we belong.’

‘I want you to look through the rent,’ the engineer said.

‘Why?’ He did not see the point.

The engineer said, ‘Just look, okay? For chrissake, will you please look, Mr Stanley?’

He looked.

Through the rent in the tube wall he saw, not a grassy meadow and ultramarine sky, no white flowers with buzzing, lazy bees tackling them. And he saw no sign of people. None of the tons of equipment which had been passed through the rent. No tents. No temporary septic tanks. No improvised food kitchens or overhead lighting. Instead he saw—and could not at first accept that he saw—a marsh like expanse, gray with mist and the hollow croakings of some distant birds. He saw reeds poking through the gummy, yellow water which lay in pools. A snake moved suddenly, twisting its path through the stagnant debris. And over to the right, some small living creature with a naked tail dropped to safety in the dense shadows beneath a cracked, hairy mass of roots.

The air smelled of decay and silent, utter death.

Pulling back into the ‘scuttler tube, Stanley said hoarsely, ‘It’s not the same place.’

His chief engineer nodded mutely.

‘It’s a swamp,’ Stanley said. ‘My god, what kind of catastrophe is this? Can you make any sense out of it? We better get the original power supply right back on; you evidently can’t increase the load and get the same results only more so, instead you get this, whatever it is.’ He took one more look. All his determination was required merely to see it, let alone venture through the rent and actually into it. ‘I think I understand,’ he said, muttering to himself. ‘There’s not just one alter-Earth, parallel universe or whatever you call it; there’s several, and why we didn’t deal that factor into our planning I’ll never know. We’ll never make that mistake again.’

‘I agree,’ his engineer said, beside him, also looking.

‘You think we can restore the original power supply and make contact again with where we dumped those people?’

‘We can try.’

‘We’ve got to,’ Stanley said. ‘You know who’ll get the rap; it’ll be us. Start work immediately; we’ll work the rest of the night.’ God, he thought. What’ll I tell old man Turpin? Nothing. If we can get this patched up again we’ll see it’s forgotten forever. Like it never happened.

‘I’m not thinking about us getting the blame,’ the senior engineer said to him. ‘I’m thinking about those people, especially those women, stranded there.’

‘They’ll be okay! They’ve got supplies; they went there to colonize, so let them colonize. It was their idea to go across, they knew they were taking a risk. It was their responsibility. So tough tubes.’ He drew himself back into the ‘scuttler, shaking. ‘Wow, what a hell of a sight. I can’t see colonizing there. You think you’d like to live there, Hal?’

‘No, Mr Stanley,’ the engineer said. He rose to his feet stiffly, waved to the team standing before the entrance hoop. ‘Shut it off!’

The power died. Stanley walked back out of the tube and over to Howard. ‘Now we have to take apart the whole damn thing again and fix it back up the way it was,’ he said bitterly. ‘What lousy luck. And it’s going to take twenty years to get those millions of bibs through; President Schwarz’ll never buy that. That’s the end of that contract. That voids it automatically.’ And to think we worked six and a half hours for this, he said to himself.

Something appeared at the mouth of the tube.

Stanley saw it, but, even as he saw it, the shadow-like substance vanished.

‘Who has a laser pistol?’ he said.

‘Get a laser pistol,’ Howard said. Evidently he had seen it, too. ‘It must have followed you. Come over from the other side. Before the power was turned off.’

‘It’s just an insect,’ Stanley said. ‘Some miserable thing that flew up out of that swamp.’ I know that’s all it is, he said to himself. It’s got to be. ‘For chrissakes, somebody kill it!’ he said, looking around. Where had it gone? Not back into the tube, but out into the room.

From within the tube, the senior engineer said loudly, ‘Mr Stanley, the rent never shut down.’

‘That’s absolutely impossible,’ Stanley said. ‘The power’s off.’ He ran back into the tube, found the engineer crouched down by the rent. Once more Stanley saw across, into the world of the swamp, the decaying landscape of doomed, collapsing ruin. His senior engineer was right; it was still there.

‘I can think of only one explanation,’ the engineer said to Stanley. ‘It must be that it’s maintained by a power source on the other side, because you know no power’s coming to it from here; that’s for sure.’

Stanley said, ‘Did you see something that slipped through just now? Something alive?’

‘Only for a second. But I thought it went back.’

‘It didn’t go back,’ Stanley said. ‘It’s out somewhere in the lab, in the TD building, on our side, and now more are going to come across because we can’t shut down this damn rent. Maybe we can block it somehow. Can you put a barrier right up? I don’t care what it’s made out of, just as long as it’s good and solid.’

‘We’ll get on it right away,’ the engineer said and scrambled to his feet.

What kind of power source could exist there on the other side? Stanley asked himself. There in that brackish, desolate swamp  . . . it’s as if it were waiting. But how could it know we’d show up? How could it possibly have been expecting us?’

When he made his way out of the tube once more, Howard said to him, ‘It’s still somewhere in the room. I can feel it, but I’ll be darned if I can see it. It’s like it just merged with everything on this side, just sort of—you know. whatever it saw here.’

Don Stanley tried to remember when he had felt such fear. Not for a long time. Had he ever reacted this way to anything in his life before?

Once, he recalled. Years ago. He had felt the same fright when as he had felt now, seeing this dark, pervasive substance scuttle into his world from the other side. I was eighteen, he said to himself. Just a kid. It was my first visit to the Golden Door satellite.

It had been when he had first seen George Walt.

Since it was impossible to close the rent, Don Stanley decided, they were going to have to make the attempt to subject the dimly-lit swamp world to some kind of ordered scrutiny. Taking full responsiblity, he ordered a QB observation satellite brought to the lab with launching equipment. Before the barrier had been erected by TD’s engineers he had sent the satellite across and had watched as it shot up into the murky, ominous sky.

Reports from the orbiting satellite began to arrive almost at once, and he seated himself with Howard and started methodically to go over them. The time was five-thirty a.m. Much too early to awaken Leon Turpin, he realized. We’ll just have to go on as we are, for at least another two hours.

The planet—and he felt no surprise in learning this—was Earth. But the stellar chart which the satellite recorded on the dark side contained data which was totally unexpected. For a long time he and Howard sat together conferring, to be certain there had been no error. There had not. By six-thirty in the morning, Stanley was sure of the situation, sure enough to have Leon Turpin woken up at his home on Long Island.

The QB satellite, this time, was orbiting an Earth in what was, for their world, a century in the future.

‘You realize what this implies, don’t you?’ he said to Howard.

‘This could still be the same alter-Earth. The one we sent our colonists onto. Only we’re seeing it a hundred years later.’ Abruptly Howard shivered. ‘Then what became of their colonizing efforts? No trace at all? After all, the satellite is picking up lights on the dark side in exactly the same locations as before.’

‘I’ll be glad when Turpin gets here,’ Stanley said. The responsibility had become too much for him; he wanted out. Obviously, the colonization attempt had failed. But he simply refused to face it. It can’t be the same Earth, he repeated again and again to himself. It’s just got to be a totally different one.

Something terrible must have taken place between our colonists and the Pekes.

At seven fifteen a.m., Leon Turpin arrived, perfectly shaved, washed, dressed, and in absolute control of himself.

‘Have you sent dredging equipment across?’ he asked Stanley as the two of them stood by the partly-completed concrete barrier, looking out across the swamp.

‘What for?’ Stanely said.

Turpin’s face twitched. ‘To look for remains of our campsite. This is the same spot, isn’t it? There’s been no movement in space; this is where our colonists set up their base a century ago. There ought to be all kinds of junk, if we dig down far enough, down to the hundred-year level. Tell them to get started right away.’

It took only two hours for the dredges to locate and bring up an aluminum canteen and then a rusted, corroded, slime-drenched U.S. Army laser rifle. And, after that  . . .

Skeletons. First one which they identified as a human male and then a smaller one, possibly that of a female.

Turpin signalled for the dredging to cease.

‘Beyond any reasonable doubt, this was our campsite,’ Turpin said, presently. ‘We’ve proved that, to my satisfaction at least.’ The others nodded; no one spoke, however, and they did not look directly at one another. ‘Perhaps it’s possible to view this as a tremendous break,’ Turpin said. ‘We know now not to send any more colonists across; we know what’s going to happen to them. They’re going to perish right here at the campsite without having even . . .’

‘They were slaughtered,’ Stanley interrupted, ‘because we didn’t send any more across. The first group wasn’t large enough to hold off the Pekes; it’s obvious that the Pekes are responsible for this massacre. What else could have happened to them?’

‘Disease,’ Howard said, after a pause. ‘We never took time to make thorough studies of viruses and protozoa over there, as we should have. We were in such a goddam hurry to rush them across.’

‘If we had kept sending them across,’ Stanley persisted, ‘in a steady flow, the Pekes wouldn’t have been able to mow them down. My god, those colonists suddenly found themselves cut off from us, stranded there with no way to get back, abandoned by us  . . .’ He broke off. ‘We never should have tinkered with the power supply. That’s where we made our mistake.’

Howard said, ‘I wonder what we’ll find when we get the original power supply hooked back up.’ He jerked his head toward the group of TD engineers laboring to disconnect the larger source. ‘In a few more hours they’ll have it back the way it was. Presumably we’ll find ourselves facing the original rent, the original conditions; we’ll be back in contact with our campsite, then, and if necessary we can march them all back here to this side again. Every last one of them.’

‘But,’ Stanley said almost inaudibly, ‘you’re leaving a factor out. The nexus to this swamp world hasn’t gone away; it’s either self-maintaining or some force on the other side is underwriting it  . . . in any case it seems to be there for good. Things are never going to be as they were; we can’t reestablish the original situation. We’ll never see those colonists again. And we might as well get used to that idea. I say, go ahead and hook up the first, smaller power source again, but don’t expect anything.’ To Leon Turpin, he said, ‘I’ve been here all night. Can I go home and go to bed for a few hours? I can’t keep my eyes open.’

Turpin said raspingly, ‘Don’t you want to be here when  . . .’

‘You’re just not facing it,’ Stanley said. ‘When I wake up, six or ten or fifteen hours from now, the situation’s going to be exactly as it is right now. We’ll be looking across at that swamp world, and it’ll be staring right back at us. I’ll tell you what we’ve got to do. Somebody—and I don’t mean just another atavistic, simple-minded robot-type dredge—some brilliant human individual has got to go across there into that swamp world and locate the power source that’s keeping this nexus alive. And then he’s got to blow it to bits or, at the very least, dismantle it.’ Stanley added, ‘And then—and this may be almost impossible—someone’s got to find out who established that power source in the first place. And how they knew we were coming.’

After a pause Leon Turpin said, ‘Howard tells me that in the first few moments of operation with the augmented power source, something came through, some living creature. Is that true?’

Don Stanley sighed wearily. ‘I thought so at the time. Now I think I was out of my mind; I was simply just too scared by what I saw. I must have realized right away that we had lost those colonists forever.’ He walked unsteadily toward the exit door of the lab. ‘I’ll see you a few hours from now. After I’ve had some sleep.’

‘But I saw it, too,’ Howard was saying, as Stanley shut the lab door after him.

I don’t care what came through, Stanley said to himself. I don’t care what you saw. I’ve done all I can. I haven’t got anything left to give to this situation.

But you better have, Turpin, he realized. Because it’s going to take a lot. What I’ve done disconnecting the augmented power source, getting the barrier erected, sending over the QB satellite, starting up the robot dredge—all that’s nothing. Just a way of finding out what confronts us.

He thought, I wish I could sleep forever. Never wake up again and have to face this.

But he knew he had to.

And he was not the only one. They would all have to wake up, one by one, to face this, President Schwarz involved in his deft political maneuverings to outrun Jim Briskin, hitting him with his own idea  . . . Briskin, too, because no matter what Schwarz had done, no matter how hurriedly and recklessly he had acted, the idea behind the colonization had been Briskin’s. The responsibility remained essentially his, and Schwarz, now, would be quick to hand it back to him.