Star Bridge Part 8

This could be death. Horn considered the possibility calmly. He tossed it away. It was an unprofitable a.s.sumption. If true, his condition was unchangeable; if not, his acceptance of it might make it actual.

He was in the Tube. These sensations-or these lacks of sensation-were a result of that; probably they were the effect of it.

He had been in a Tube twice before: going from Quarnon Four to Eron and from Eron to Callisto. Both times he had been unconscious. Gas, he had thought the first time. The second time he had held his breath, lying strapped in the guard-quarters bunk, but it hadn't delayed the blackness. They could have other means.

He had suspected then that it was a precaution against revealing a clue to the nature of the Tube. Now he was not so sure. It was obviously-if not entirely-a precaution against insanity. He knew himself to be tough-minded, and he had come dangerously close to irreversible madness.

He returned to the problem. He was in the Tube, falling from Earth to Eron. The effects were these: no light, no sound.... Better: no movement. Still better: no energy. Or the effect was this: no sensation.

Was there a way to tell which was the actual state of affairs? The effect on his consciousness would be identical, whether there was no stimulus or no reaction. Or, perhaps, if there is no reaction, the stimulus does not exist. Is there a sound where there are no ears to hear it?

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to a.s.sume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.

There should be tests to determine which of the alternatives was true. But how can a mind test anything? The mind has three functions: memory, a.n.a.lysis, and synthesis. Memory....

A man, dressed in a gray uniform, looking at his watch: "I thought these trips took three hours; not even a minute has pa.s.sed."

a.n.a.lysis....

1) Eron lied; the trip is instantaneous.

2) The man was mistaken; his watch had stopped.

Synthesis....

If 1) is true, then these thoughts I am thinking are instantaneous. Can this trip which seems infinitely long be infinitely short? Time is man's invention, true, and it may not exist in a way we can understand it inside the Tube, but I am conscious of duration, however long. Moreover, instantaneous transmission implies the existence of a thing in two places at the same time. Judgment: implausible.

If 2) is true, then motion ceases inside the Tube. This would include: light, sound, all manifestations of energy, breathing, heartbeats, all internal activity including neural.... Then how do I think? Is intelligence incorporeal? Judgment: more likely.

The hypothesis was self-consistent and fitted the observable phenomena. If it were correct, then both alternatives could be true: there was no stimulus and the senses could not receive impressions and transmit them to the brain. If he could test it- Horn recognized the familiar wall. At least he had a hypothesis, and that was better than nothing.

The walls-he remembered them suddenly, and he remembered that they were dangerous. He must not touch them. That was the function of the gold bands around the s.h.i.+ps, to keep them from touching the walls. But he had no gold bands, and he had no way of keeping away from the walls and no way of knowing when he was close to them. Even now he might be edging close, imperceptibly- He caught himself and drew back from the edge of panic. It was pointless to worry about the walls. If he touched them, it was all over, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He remembered how the Tube had seemed to taper. He had seen a sketch of a Tube once. He tried to visualize it. It had tapered. Like a tube of gla.s.s heated in the middle and pulled at both ends, the Tube had been drawn out to a slender filament. Was it wide enough to let him through?

The s.h.i.+ps were much bigger. They got through. But the gold bands could be responsible for that. When he got to the narrowed section- It was necessary to do something. Fatalism and inactivity might be natural under the circ.u.mstances, but they could be disastrous psychologically.

He decided to concentrate on just one sense. He tried to see. And failed, after an eternity of mind-wracking effort. He was troubled, however, by a vague feeling of something impenetrable equidistant on all sides of him. Could that be the Tube? If the mind were something distinct from the brain, could it sense directly, especially in circ.u.mstances like these? He accepted the possibility, and saw no way to prove it or put it to use.

The endlessness of the trip oppressed him. Time might be man's invention and his tool, but it could also be an enemy to destroy him. With nothing to measure its pa.s.sing, he could grow senile waiting for an instant to elapse. The objective duration of the trip might be three hours; subjectively it was eternity multiplied.

He had escaped one trapdoor to madness only to find himself standing on another. He must keep his mind busy; he must fill eternity with thoughts.

He planned what he would do when he reached Eron. The Tube would take him to one of the Terminal caps at the poles, a cap bristling with Tubes. The caps didn't rotate with Eron. If they did, the Tubes would soon be twisted together like spaghetti. The broad, spiked caps floated in a shallow pool of mercury. They turned in the opposite direction of Eron's rotation, or, rather, motors kept them motionless while Eron turned underneath.

The s.h.i.+ps pushed through airlocks into the s.p.a.ce around Eron. They located their a.s.signed elevator. The ma.s.sive elevator lowered each s.h.i.+p past level after level until it reached the appropriate one. The freighters went deep, close to the ancient, sterile rock of Eron itself. The fighting s.h.i.+ps stopped at the barracks-level. The liners, reserved almost exclusively for the Golden Folk, dropped only a little.

But s.h.i.+ps were useless to him. Even if he could steal one and get it into s.p.a.ce, he would have no place to go. Not into Eron. The elevators were operated from inside the skin of the world. The nearest planet was years away by conventional drive; he would be recaptured quickly.

There had to be some way to get from the caps to Eron itself, other than by s.h.i.+p. Could he walk out on the surface in his s.p.a.cesuit and find a way in? No, that wasn't the way. Even if he could jump from the stationary cap to the spinning world without disaster, he would be dangerously exposed while he was searching for an entrance, if any.

There should be a direct connection. Not at the perimeter, although the relative motion would not be so great after all. If the caps were fifty kilometers in diameter and Eron rotated as rapidly as Earth, the relative motion would be less than seven kilometers an hour. But it would be awkward, waiting for doorways to align themselves; Eron would never plan it like that.

The nearer a man approached the pole, on the other hand, the less the linear velocity would be until it dropped away to zero directly over the pole. There, if anywhere, should be an entrance to Eron. Horn planned, in as much detail as his knowledge of Eron permitted, how he would get to Eron from the cap and what he would do when he got there.

But he could never quite forget the mouse of insanity nibbling at the edges of his mind. How swift is thought? How slow is time? How long is three hours?

The insensate mind that called itself Horn floated blind and helpless within a formless area, carried along by an unfelt force toward a shrinking goal. Only faith could sustain it, and the only faith it had was in itself.

It was irony, Horn thought, that when he was most alone, most independent of outside influences, he was unable to react with his environment; a completely isolated individual, he could not move a muscle, he could not alter his circ.u.mstances in any way. Perhaps there is a lesson in that, he thought.

Maybe it would have been better to have believed in something, he reflected, even though belief is a form of surrender to the universe. It might have sustained him now, if he could believe, as the Entropy Cult preached, that there was a great, beneficent force behind the apparent aimlessness of the wheel of creation.

He did believe in something: he believed in Eron, in its skill and its power. When Eron built something, it worked; the Tube worked, and it would take him to Eron. But believing in Eron was only a form of believing in himself; it was believing in his senses, his judgment, the validity of the external environment.

How swift is thought? How long to Eron?

It was not such a bad thing to believe in: himself. Would he have got so far if he hadn't, if he had believed in something else instead? He knew that he would not. It had saved him from self-pity, from easy satisfaction, and from soft acceptance, this belief that a man's fate is in his own two hands. Few things are impossible; fewer are inevitable.

It had taken him to wealth three times; twice he had tossed it away riotously. The third time he had wasted it fighting a futile war with Eron. It had taken him into countless adventures on a dozen worlds in the Cl.u.s.ter, found profit in them, and brought him out again. It had taken him three hundred light years across the Empire to Earth and a rendezvous with a.s.sa.s.sination.

The only way to get to Earth had been through Eron. Horn had taken advantage of the general amnesty to enlist in the Guard. After brief training on Quarnon Four and a taste of the fierce discipline enforced by barbarian mercenaries, Horn had been s.h.i.+pped to Eron. There he was handed over to the molding hands of Eron's drillmasters.

None of the recruits died; the officers called them the lucky regiment. But Horn couldn't count on the lightning stroke that a.s.signment to a s.h.i.+p with orders to Earth would be. He got himself attached to the headquarters staff; when the duplicated stacks of orders arrived, he leafed through them, found one for Earth, forged with practiced skill the name of his own company, and less than a day later was on Callisto, satellite of a giant world in the solar system that included Earth.

The trip to Earth was far slower. Once there, he spent days searching for a way to escape from the s.h.i.+p. One night he was stationed as a guard at Port Three, whose ma.s.sive rifle had been dismounted for rewinding. He had gone through it as soon as his fellow guard was stunned and tied.

It had taken him a week to avoid recapture and reach the tall, electrified N-iron fence that separated the food-plantations from the great American desert. It was patrolled, and the fence went too deep to dig under in the time available. Eventually, he had to fight his way through a gate, leaving two out of the four dead because one man was too alert.

Through the desert, believing in himself, taking what he needed. The nomad's pony, the stick man's life. The pony had been forfeit, like the nomad's life, when he had crept up on his camp, on foot; if Horn could catch him, he would never have escaped the swarming hunters. The stick man had been dead anyway; why should two men die when one is sufficient?

Horn remembered the terrified Chinese, the incredibly ancient Wu, teetering on the twisting girder above the black abyss, gasping with fear, toppling, screaming.... Horn supposed he hadn't meant to twist the girder, but without the threat of it he would never have learned the truth about Wu and Lil. As it turned out, it hadn't mattered, but he couldn't know that.

Horn wondered if death had caught up with them at last. That or imprisonment and, of the two, death was more likely.

With a twinge of shame, Horn remembered the screaming panic of his flight after Kohlnar's death. He remembered the valley and the chessboard desert and the man who moved only on the black squares, the despair, the return to the valley, and the rabbit. The strength of that had brought him here, up through the dark tunnel for a third time to this darker tunnel.

He remembered holding Wendre Kohlnar in his arms, and it was a good memory because there was no feeling left in his body. He remembered the slim firmness of her body struggling against his arm and her breath hot against his hand. It could almost make his heart beat again, thinking of her beauty and her courage and the way she had talked....

How swift is thought? How far to Eron?

It was folly, thinking of Wendre, heir to the Empire, but it was better than madness. It was better than the eternal death that madness would be, because he had a hunch that he would need a mind that worked before he was out of the Tube.

Death. The bullet had whistled through the spot where Wendre had been. It had been meant for her; Horn knew that now. Who had wanted to kill her?

Who had hired him to kill Kohlnar?

That was behind him. Ahead was Eron. Surely he would be there soon!

He tried, once more, to see. Again he had a vague impression of impenetrability equidistant from him. Except in one direction. His mind strained. Was it light? Was it imagination? Was it delusion?

Distantly, an impression shaped itself inside the insensate mind. Brightness, coin-sized, growing. Along, barrel-shape beyond. Getting nearer, clearer. The image of the main lock grew more vivid in Horn's mind. Was this some kind of extrasensory perception, or was it illusion, the first step toward madness? There was no way to be certain, no tests to make. The brightness appeared to grow closer. Think!

If he were sensing this directly with his mind, why should there be a limit on it? Why couldn't he have seen this long ago? Answers: maybe he could, maybe there is a natural limit, maybe.... Too many answers, too many questions.

The brightness was growing larger more slowly. Too slowly. If he were seeing it, he would estimate the distance as twenty meters. Fifteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.

Too fast. Too fast!

Was it possible that he wasn't going to reach the lock? Was this real, what he was sensing, and was he going to fall short for some reason? Because he didn't enter the Tube with any velocity of his own, perhaps? Would he fall short by ten meters?

Ten. Ten. Ten. Eleven.

He had to act as if this were real, not a projection upon a hysterical mind of its own fears. But he couldn't act. There was nothing he could do-do- He couldn't move....

Twelve. Thirteen.

Think! What are the chances, say of something falling thirty light years through a straight tube and never touching a wall? No chance. Meaningless. No-no! Something must have kept him equidistant, if this is real. The mind? Some force it exerts in this strange universe? Try it! What can you lose?

Only your sanity.

Horn pushed. There was no other word for it. Gravity caught him, yanked him cras.h.i.+ng to the lock floor. Light blinded him, sensory impressions of every kind overwhelmed his mind.

Horn let out a gasping breath that started as a sigh and ended sounding much like a sob.

He had made it. He had reached Eron, and it seemed like an old friend.

But that was only a mask. It was suicide to think otherwise.

THE HISTORY.

Dreamer, builder....

Like the ant, man builds cities. Unlike the ant, he builds them consciously. Because they are convenient and economical, not because he needs the city life or likes it. He hates it. Always. And yet the city-building was something which, once started, could not be stopped.

All things tend toward ultimates, but it is the nature of ultimates that they can never be achieved. If Eron, then, was not an ultimate, it is because of the definition. Eron was the dream of Man, the City-Builder.

Trace the steps, the dreams. Ancient Paris and London; old New York and Denver; mighty Sunport. But they were rubble before Eron began.

Eron the City. A world encased in a metal skin, gleaming coldly in the light of its distant sun. One world, one city. As Eron grew powerful through the Tube, the Golden Folk built up and dug down: s.p.a.ce, more s.p.a.ce, still more. Warehouses and trading centers, schools and barracks, tenements and residences and palaces, amus.e.m.e.nt centers and factories, restaurants and communal kitchens, control rooms and power rooms....

Eron was the center of a star-flung empire: politically, economically, socially. Every extraplanetary s.h.i.+pment, every message, and most of the Empire's power went through Eron. Eron grew, automatically. As long as the golden Tubes led only to Eron, that growth would never stop.

Eron. Megalopolis....

9.

SPIDERWEB.

Horn pulled himself together. It was an effort, as if part of himself were still on Earth and he had to wind it in through all the weary distance, the danger, the darkness, and the fear.

If that's independence, he thought wryly, I've had enough to last me for quite a while.

His senses had eased their angry battering at his mind, and his mind started working again in its usual way, collecting information, weighing it, acting on it. He pushed himself to his feet. The giant doors were closed behind him, sealing the mouth of the Tube. Horn looked at the red emergency disk and turned away, shuddering. He walked quickly down the long, gleaming barrel.

The door to the personnel lock was in the same position. It swung open readily, closed behind Horn, and in a moment the door opposite opened. The walls of the small room were lined with s.p.a.cesuits, supported at the armpit by pegs. They were all identical, these Terminals, constructed to rigid specifications. This one was exactly like the one he had left on Earth. He had no way of knowing, really, that he hadn't returned there.

Faith sustained him. Faith in Eron and faith in the Tubes that were Eron's greatness. Eron built well, and the things that Eron built worked.

Still, Horn thought, it would be ironic if he had returned to Earth. He should have made some mark- He had. He had taken away a suit. There was no vacant s.p.a.ce now. He must be on Eron.

He pushed one of the suits to the floor and stood in its place. Before he removed anything, he stopped and thoughtfully brushed the breastplate with his gauntleted hand. The gauges sprang to life against the helmet face. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two....

No change. He had used no air while in the Tube which seemed like proof that the bodily activities were suspended. Now, though, it would be a good idea to eat and drink. He might not have another chance for some time.

He worked the tube into his mouth and drew in half a liter of tepid water. He let the tube go and clamped his teeth on the food ejector. A pellet dropped into his mouth. He let it dissolve slowly, savoring the meaty flavor. When it was gone, he finished the water. He began stripping off the suit- The room trembled.

Horn paused, half out of the suit, and listened to the reverberations. They could only be one thing: a s.h.i.+p entering the main lock a few meters away. A s.h.i.+p from Earth close upon his heels could only be pursuit.

He stepped free and made himself hesitate, studying the long line of suits against the wall like decapitated monsters, all gray, ungainly, limp. He stuck his hand inside the neck of one and squeezed the ejector. A pellet squirted into his hand. When he reached the door, he had five of them. He dropped them into a tunic pocket.

Horn opened the door and stepped onto the railed steps slanting down. They shook as he ran down them, hundreds of meters from the pavement. He grabbed the rail and looked back. A s.h.i.+p was coming out of the lock into the cradle, stern first. it was a small s.h.i.+p, a scout.

Horn raced to the joint, where the ladder began. The whole mounting shuddered as the cradle swung down toward the pavement below. When it stopped, Horn started down the ladder, swinging down swiftly, scarcely touching the rungs with his feet. A glance at the s.h.i.+p told him that he couldn't beat it down. The shaped dolly had reached up to receive the s.h.i.+p and was lowering it to a horizontal position. A faint s.h.i.+mmering revealed the tiny power loss of a unitronic field.

Horn swung his body around the ladder quickly. A body of guards had marched into the room from the side doorway. Now the mounting was between him and them. There were a dozen of them, dressed in gray uniforms like the one he wore. They didn't look up. They headed purposefully across the floor toward the s.h.i.+p.

Horn moved down cautiously, silently. A dark opening grew oval and round in the scout's hull, became bright, and flickered as gold-uniformed guards emerged and came down the dolly's built-in steps to the pavement. There were six of them. They glanced at the waiting gray guards, shrugged, and looked back up the steps toward the s.h.i.+p. They waited. The gray guards waited. Horn, who had dropped within meters of the floor, waited.

Wendre Kohlnar came through the port and ran down the steps. As she reached the pavement, the gray guards, with perfect timing, clubbed down Wendre's guards. While they were still falling, two more sprang at Wendre. She struggled in their arms, indignant, confused.

The noise covered Horn's final descent. Sheltered behind one of the giant beams, he stared speculatively at the scuffle. He fingered the b.u.t.t of his pistol indecisively, fighting an unreasonable urge to help the girl.

He had no idea what was going on, what sides were represented here. There were too many of the gray guards. This wasn't his battle. Why should he trouble himself over a woman who would only turn him over to Eron justice? Let them fight their fights. His business was survival.

They had vanished into the s.h.i.+p again, taking Wendre with them, leaving the guards like molten gold on the pavement. The port closed.

Horn walked briskly across the broad floor toward the door in the side wall. He breathed deeply trying to shake a dark mood of depression and worthlessness. The h.e.l.l with them. The h.e.l.l with all of them! It didn't help much.

"Get her?"

Horn looked up quickly. A technician was standing in his way. His golden features were almost pure. "Who?"