Twistor (44 page)

David glanced across at the children. They weren't sleeping. They looked quite wide awake and interested. He, on the other hand, felt bone tired and rather drowsy. He yawned, then continued the story.

'Ton picked up the Urorb and concentrated on the cottage of Zorax. It was empty, as before, but it was now day in the outside world, and he could see well enough inside from the daylight coming in through the greased parchment of the windows. He surveyed the room. Where would the old man have kept the scarf? In the dream, Zorax had been sitting near the fireplace. Ton looked there. The fireplace was constructed of rough stone, and there was a long shelf above the hearth. Several niches were cut at odd places in the broad upper part.

'Ton examined the shelf. There was a clutter of miscellaneous objects there: vials, crystals, a brass coin inscribed with an incredibly ugly face, a dried toad, papers, the paw of an animal – perhaps a fox – an iron rod like a great needle, pointed on one end and with a circular hole at the other, books and papers in an unstable stack, a half-eaten apple, and many other objects that Ton could not readily identify. Then he studied the niches. One held a cracked black sphere; in another there was a human skull.

'On the highest of the niches was a small steel-bound box. Considering Zorax's habits, Ton decided that this might be a likely place to look. He grasped the Pricklance and poked through the Urorb at the box. It fell to the floor and burst open. Inside was a golden-colored strip of cloth. The sash!

'At that moment the door of Zorax's cottage burst open and the magician himself walked inside. Ton considered whether he had time to wind the scarf around the Pricklance and retrieve it. He decided that he did
not
and shifted his point of view to regard the magician. It came as a shock to realize that he was not invisible to the old man, who seemed very much aware of his presence. Zorax strode forward, but did not, to Ton's surprise, reach for the scarf. Instead, he took the pointed iron rod from the fireplace shelf. Ton could see the old man's lips move, and suddenly a tongue of green flame erupted from the tip of the rod and came straight at him. He struggled to shift his viewpoint, but before he could do so the flame came through the Urorb and struck him squarely in the face. He screamed.

'From a corner of his mind, he realized that he was in great pain and that he could not move at all. He was paralyzed and dying. He slowly sagged sideways, and in doing so his hand touched the little book. At the instant of contact his perspective shifted. He was still in pain, still dying, but somehow he was in control of the flame. He pushed it away from him, and it retreated. Its flow reversed, and now it was not attacking him but Zorax. The great pain was diminishing, and he could see the old magician writhe as the green fire ran from the rod up his arm to cover his body. The form of the old man seemed to wither and turn brown like an autumn leaf. His height diminished, and he looked thinner, like a dry branch. Abruptly, the green flame disappeared and the iron rod fell to the floor.

Ton shifted his viewpoint and looked. There on the floor were the clothes that Zorax had been wearing. Nothing else remained. He turned his view to the fireplace. The golden cloth still rested on the floor, glittering in the light from the windows. With the Pricklance he pierced a corner of it, then wound the cloth around the end of the weapon and pulled it back.

'He had the golden scarf!'

David looked again at his audience. They were fast asleep now. He blew out the candle and lay down. It had been a long day.

*   *   *

David, broom in hand, was sweeping away the colored border line. He would clean up the forest floor, erase the boundaries. He worked on with the heavy broom until the line was gone.

A bright green treebird waddled from the forest and crossed the place where the line had been, leaving a new brightly colored line in its wake. Two more treebirds followed it. Then more. Soon the ring beneath the tree was solid green with them.

They flew and squawked and clawed and pecked at each other. This was no confrontation ritual, it was a fight in deadly earnest. The green plumage began to run with bright red blood, and soon the forest floor was littered with green bodies. The few survivors continued their attacks until all was quiet in the forest and red and green death lay everywhere.

David came awake with a start, shaking green wisps of the dream from his consciousness. He pushed the backlight button and read his watch. It was three A.M. An urgent problem had been pressing at the edges of his mind, he realized . . . territory.

Tomorrow, if everything worked out, they would be returning home. He tried to picture what would happen then. He'd be very happy to reunite the children with Paul and Elizabeth, and it would be wonderful being with Vickie again. But the twistor effect was going to be a problem.

The twistor genie was out of the bottle. He'd inadvertently demonstrated to the authorities how the twistor effect could be used as a surveillance tool and a weapon. And they had discovered a whole new planet on which no one – no one but Jeff – had yet made a claim. Many power groups and nations of the old world would compete to stake claims in this new one. The genetic psychoprogramming of most of the human race compelled men, no less than treebirds, to claim
and
hold territory. And that programming was about to be reactivated in the biggest territorial scramble since Columbus. The twistor effect might spark devastating wars of territory, nuclear wars that could bring the end of civilization.

David thought back to his days at Los Alamos: the security checks, the classified documents, and the secret research labs. The government would surely want to classify everything about the twistor effect they could, to seal it in a wall of secrecy. That was almost inevitable.

He was certain it was the wrong thing to do, that in the long run such a policy would lead to disaster. It was like trying to seal a vessel of heating water to keep it from boiling. It worked for a while, and then there was a big explosion. It was far better to dissipate the force of the steam over the largest available volume than to try to keep it pent up. The twistor effect was no secret to Megalith, the people in the physics department and a few others. Word of the secret effect and the access it opened to shadow universes would spread.

Once a thing is known to be possible, its secret will soon be rediscovered. Attempting to monopolize knowledge is a fundamental mistake. When knowledge is shared, its quantity isn't reduced or diminished. On the contrary, when more minds work with the knowledge, it grows and flowers, and everyone gains. New information is misused when it's hoarded and protected. It must be distributed as widely as possible, particularly when it is coupled so directly with the opportunity for new territory.

There had to be a way to defuse this bomb before it exploded, to safely dissipate its energy. But how? He lay for a long time, turning the problem over in his mind.

He twisted on the sleeping pad, realizing that he wasn't very comfortable. A lump under his hip was pushing
against
his side. Reaching down, he found that he was lying on the cut-off cord of the telephone.

An idea exploded into his consciousness, dazzling him with its simplicity. There was a way! For the rest of the night, David dozed fitfully, plans for tomorrow swirling in his head.

24

Thursday, October 28

David looked around the room. They were all set. In the treehouse, four gasoline engines were driving generators, each powering a bank of twistor drive units in the big rack. Sections of plastic garden hose from the generators were joined by a ball of duct tape to the gray spiral tube of dryer ducting, leading the engine exhausts out the tree-hole. David powered up the little control computer. He was pleased to see that it functioned normally on this makeshift power. The familiar icons of the control program filled the screen. Jeff and Melissa sat beside him at the console, watching with fascination.

David moused up the file containing the settings from the transition that had brought them to this universe. He changed the signs of several parameters to reverse the direction of the twistor transition. He moved the mouse to the
control on the computer screen and clicked. The synthesized voice of the control program began the down-count:
'Five!
. . .
Four!
. . . '

'It's talking again!' said Jeff, delighted.

'Yes, it is,' said David. 'Isn't that great?'

'Three!
. . .
Two!
. . .
One!*
said the synthesized voice.

'David, are we really going home?' asked Melissa.

'Activating!'
said the voice.

The Seattle Convention Center was a sprawling free-form building that extended its domain from a fringe of downtown hotels to spread directly over the I-5 freeway
bisecting
downtown Seattle. Inside, Gil Wegmann was covering a medical technology convention for
Newsweek.
He'd just been interviewing a biotech magnate who was pushing a new, FDA-approved, bio-tailored virus. The virus, it was claimed, would on command attack human fat cells and only fat cells. The bio-tekkie expected to be very rich very soon.

Gil's beeper summoned him to the nearest telephone. His boss in New York had received a hot tip that something was up at the University of Washington. He wanted Gil to get over to the UW physics department in a hurry, because something very big was about to break.

Wegmann, who had for the past year been trying to get transferred out of the sinkhole of being a science reporting understudy at
Newsweek
and maneuver his way into the foreign news department, was considerably less than pleased. As far as he was concerned, 'hot physics news' usually meant that someone who was not at all photogenic and who showed serious personality defects had discovered something unpronounceable that couldn't be explained in simple terms and had no discernible practical applications. Gil liked covering medical stories better; at least with medicine you could always imply that it was a possible cancer cure.

Nevertheless, he dutifully flagged down a taxi in front of the convention center, and, after a few mishaps, he and the cab driver had managed to find Physics Hall. In the rear parking lot were several vans painted with logos of the local TV stations. That made it easy. He walked to the back door, followed the extension cords and the small groups of curious students and faculty to the bright lights, and there they were, all crowded into a long room. The university police officer guarding the door admitted Gil after seeing his press card.

The room was unusual for a physics laboratory. It was occupied by a huge dome of polished wood. A planetarium? No, that was astronomy, not physics. He wondered
what
the thing was for and how they'd gotten it through the door. The near half of the room was crowded with cameramen, TV cameras, lights on stands, and numerous people. Gil picked a 'suit,' a distinguished-looking guy standing to one side near the door, identified himself, and asked what was happening here.

The suit turned out to be one Professor Ralph Weinberger, the physics department chairman. He described what had been happening, and mentioned Victoria Gordon's kidnapping. He pointed to a beautiful redhead in a light blue dress who was standing in front of the wooden dome. Gil had assumed she was a TV reporter; she'd been the center of attention for the TV crew since he'd entered the room. Then Gil noticed that a funny light blue catlike animal with too many legs was perched on her shoulder. Well, it matched her dress.

He walked across the room, noticing that the TV news types seemed to have stopped questioning the redhead and were pointing their cameras at various places around the big wooden thing. Good timing, he thought, switching on his portable recorder again and inserting himself into the group.

'Excuse me, miss,' he said, 'you're Victoria Gordon, aren't you? I'm Gil Wegmann from
Newsweek.'
He offered her his business card. 'You were in the newspapers yesterday, the one who'd been kidnapped?' His eyes wandered to the little blue animal on her shoulder. Its big violet eyes seemed to be watching him with great interest.

'Yes, that was me,' she said. A look of discomfort fleetingly crossed her face, to be replaced by calm. She had nice green eyes, he noticed.

'You seem to have bounced back,' he said, looking her up and down.

'I was lucky,' she said. 'They were about to inject me with a terrible drug when I was able to get away. Professor Saxon wasn't so lucky.'

Interesting
sidebar, but surely not the main story, Gil thought. 'Guess I can read all about that in yesterday's papers,' he said. 'I know almost nothing about what's going on here. Maybe you can explain it to me. Why are we here? What's going to happen?'

Miss Gordon paused and seemed to be studying him. The strange little cat did the same. 'In about five minutes the big wooden ball over there will disappear,' she said. She explained to him about David and the children. 'They're coming home,' she said.