Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 12

The computer trunk, featureless as before, floated into the kitchen, seemed to register his presence with some invisible bank of sensors. “You are accompanied by someone else,” it said. “Identify them, please.”

“My wife,” Salsbury said, stretching things a bit.

The computer was silent a moment, adjusting to the information that was certain to require more than a little shifting of data. “You are not permitted…” it began.

“Whatever authority you had over me is gone,” Salsbury told it.

On the surface of the trunk, two squares began to glow yellow. “Place your hands here for your next series of orders,” the computer said.

“I repeat,” Salsbury said, “that whatever authority you had over me is gone.”

“On the glowing plates,” the computer said.

“If you expect to have authority over me, even the littlest bit of authority, you will have to tell me enough about this thing to keep me alive. As it is, I've killed three robot men and one robot dog sent by those lizard-things, though I have no idea what in the hell-”

“Lizard-things? But you must be wrong. The vacii invasion is not to begin for several days yet. Put your hands on the glowing-”

“Go to hell! You can come look at the parts of the robots if you want. You can stay until one-thirty in the morning when the portal opens in the wall and more of them come through. Or maybe the lizards will come themselves this time.”

There was another pause. The plates on the trunk surface ceased to glow. “You are telling the truth,” it said, as if it had lie-detecting devices wired into it.

“Damn straight. And I've just decided that this isn't worth sticking around for. I can't trust you'll tell me everything. I think the wise thing for us to do is get out of here now, fast, move somewhere else where I can paint and-”

“That would be unwise.” The computer's voice was a monotone and had already begun to sound hollow and boring.

“You think? Why?”

“Because,” the 810-40.04 said, “if you don't continue the plan and defeat the vacii, they'll pour into this continuum, overwhelm it and establish one of their cultural experiments. In six months, they'll rule this world.”

“Six months? An alien invasion? That's insanity!”

“You've seen them in the wall,” Lynda reminded him.

He shook his head in agreement. “Let's get this over with, then. Brief me.”

“Put your hands on the glowing-”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “I will not let you delve into my mind and fill me up with orders I don't even know you've given me. Brief me verbally.”

“It would be impossible to control you as before. You have become too human in time since the last stage of the operation. Your psyche has been allowed to recover from its hypno-training.”

“Verbal,” he said.

“You must carry the first briefing,” it said. “My data banks must include the present situation.”

He told it all that had happened since he had left it in the cave to go purchase the Jacobi house. When he was done, he said, “Now maybe you can tell me why you wouldn't respond when I came to you to find out about the lizard-things and the robots.”

“You must realize that an 810-40.04 has a contained power source and that I can only operate in the time allotted by the plan. Otherwise I risk draining my reserves, which could be disastrous. Without computer briefing, you might fail. The plan might fail. We mis-estimated the time of the first vacii attacks. Seriously mis-estimated. Otherwise, you would not have had to face the robots unarmed.”

“Who am I working for?” he asked, not bothering to comment on the first answer, afraid that the well of information would dry up if he didn't fill his buckets quickly.

“The oppressed people of the vacii experimental society of Earth Number 4576.”

Salsbury waited for more. When there wasn't any” more, he said, “What is that supposed to mean? Where are these oppressed people?”

“Two-hundred-and-eighty-five years in the future,” the 810-40.04 said.

They sat still, hardly breathing. Vic cleared his throat. “And what… Is… Well, is that where I came from? From 2255 A.D.?”

“Yes.”

“But why doesn't he remember that future?” Lynda asked, leaning over the table toward the trunk as if it were a person.

“Because he never lived it,” the computer said.

“Wait,” Salsbury interrupted. “I'm not tracking clearly. When did I live, then?”

“Never,” the computer said. “You're an android.”

He looked at Lynda; she at him. She took his hand, which was the sign he needed to maintain his confidence. He spoke to the 810-40.04 again. “I'm not made of wires and tubes. I bleed real blood.”

“Android, not robot,” the computer said. You were a product of the Artificial Wombs, grown from a chemically simulated egg and a chemically simulated sperm, each with carefully engineered genes. From all appearances, you are a natural born man. You think, feel, and react like a man, like Victor Salsbury who was chosen because data about him had survived the centuries; his work gained renown after his death. You have, it is agreed, a soul like any man, for you are in all ways human except for those differences built into you. They are three. One: in a crisis, you react with more speed than a man should, for your mental process are stimulated by danger and you can tap them with the fluency of some wild animals. Two: you have an ability to produce and use an adrenalin-like substance which is secreted by a mechanism buried in your liver. This has the single drawback of making you highly susceptible to alcoholic beverages, but this cannot be helped. Three: you have great recuperative powers far beyond the normal. Otherwise, you are a man.”

“If this cause is so important,” Victor said, “why not send one of those oppressed people back? He would be more fanatical. You would be more certain of his cooperation, though he would not have my recuperative powers or reactions.”

“That is reason enough,” the machine said. “But, also, a man cannot travel so far into the past, unfortunately.”

“Why not?”

“As he travels backwards, a man grows younger. If he begins his journey as a fifty year old, travels twenty years into the past, he is then thirty. No man can, therefore, return further into the past than his birth date. Since, in our future, the average age under the vacii is only eighty-two, we have no chance of finding a real man old enough to come back to this period and still be an adult when he arrives.”

“But why didn't I react like a man?” Vic asked. He suspected why. The suspicion lingered in the back of his mind, frightening yet tantalizing.

The computer continued in a level tone. “The artificial atmosphere of the mechanical wombs can help us achieve many things. The flow of time can be compressed or stretched. In your case, we made the interior of the womb capsule an accelerated time pocket. It took two years to create you, but you were carefully aged 310 years in that time. When you came back into the past in the normal time-flow reversal, you ended up in 1970 as a twenty-five-year-old man.”

Salsbury could think of nothing to say, nothing to ask. He could only look at his body, his hands, and think about how old he was… how really really old.

Lynda thought of something. “If we stop these… these vacii and can live a normal life, will Vic live to be 310?”

The computer seemed to take a moment for reflection. “He will be a fixture of the present, will not wink out of existence. He will live a healthy life, though it is not certain he will grow to be 310. He will not be living a preordained life, but a future of his own choosing. His mortality should be every bit as shaky as anyone's in this era.”

“You've more or less convinced me the vacii must be stopped,” Salsbury said. “But why? What are they… and where are they from?”

“They are an intelligent extra-galactic race. Not only have they conquered faster-than-light travel, but probability travel as well. Or at least one probability line of them has.”

Salsbury looked properly perplexed, and the computer's sensors must have registered the expression.

“Imagine,” the computer said, “that this is not the only Earth that exists. There are thousands, millions, billions, countless Earths with slightly different histories. There are an infinity of probabilities, all existing in the same space and time, but separated by quasi-dimensional spaces. Traveling from one to the other of these probabilities involves finding the weak spots in the quasi-dimensional spaces, the places where the probabilities almost touch. Once these are found, equipment is erected to weaken these places further until, finally, a bubble develops between the two probabilities, a bubble through which you can pass. At first, living tissue cannot move through the bubble and survive, for it is a vacuum filled with randomly bouncing electrons freed when the quasi-dimensional space is broken down to form the bubble. These electrons have a mass all out of proportion to their size. Tremendous density. They're like bullets that are of micro-micro size; they corrode the flesh, though they do not harm the plasti-steel alloy of the robots specially built to transverse the primitive bubble.

“Once on the other side, the robots can bring through equipment to set up a beam generator from this side of the bubble. When the beams from both sides are locked, the bubble becomes a doorway that even flesh can pass through without difficulty. The vacii have sent robots through to destroy you but have not yet opened the bubble to animal transport. They will do that shortly, as soon as they have killed you, or before.

“But to return to the origins of the vacii, the lizard-men. They landed on an Earth of one of the other probability lines and conquered it. From there, they spread out in both directions on the plane of probabilities, defeating one counter-Earth after another. We are the seventy-sixth to fall. We have not essentially been conquered from space, but from our own other probabilities. Here, at Harold Jacobi's house, in the summer of 1970, the vacii took over this probability. They established as experimental station, then proceeded to worlds beyond ours, into other probabilities.

“Unknown to the vacii manning the station, on this world, our world-the future from which you and I have come-man discovered time travel. It was obvious, at once, to those in our future, that a time machine could be used as a weapon against the vacii rulers. If someone could be sent into the past to stop the vacii takeover of our worldline, the future would be entirely different. Man would be free. And, perhaps, the other vacii empires could fall like dominoes, backwards through the other probability lines they conquered; one Earth becoming free after another.”

That was it. But it was too complicated to grasp all its significances in one sitting. Salsbury could only let it settle into his mind where he could later proceed to try to understand it. The lizards in the wall were aliens. But they were coming from a counter-Earth, not directly from the stars. He had been sent from the future of this Earth to stop their invasion before it began

“What do you mean by experimental stations?” Lynda asked. “And what is the future like under the vacii?”

“The vacii,” the 810-40.04 said, “are nearly emotionless creatures. Perhaps they do experience love, pity, and hate among themselves, though to a small degree; but they have no feelings toward men. They look to man as an inferior animal to be experimented with. Where man's personality includes creativity and human interaction, the vacii have only scientific curiosity. They live for their experiments. The purpose of the race is to glean knowledge from the universe, or thus has developed their chief philosophy. Man is not the only race they have brought under their rule. There are other species throughout several galaxies. With each new race it subdues, the vacii begins controlled social experiments. How will men, for instance, react in a world of total anarchy? To find out, the vacii produce a world of anarchy and watch for a few centuries. The experiment never ends really, continuing as long as one human being is left alive in that experimental situation. Or maybe they create a world of pure democracy. Or a world ruled by teen-agers. Or they introduce a certain invention into the established society, perhaps a new weapon, perhaps something making genetic control possible. All sorts of things.”

“And on this probability line, in our own future?” Salsbury asked.

“Fascism,” the computer said. “Man has had his two-hundred-and-eighty-five years of Hitlers. It is not a pleasant place-your future.”

Three-hundred years of fascist rule

“The men who structured this operation were confident of your cooperation up to this point. It was realized that you would begin to grow less like the Puppet and more as a human being, which you are. Whether you would be anxious to help at this point was not known. If you rejected direct briefing through my sensor plates, then a series of senso-tapes was provided to show you the world of your future, show you what it will be like as a vacii experiment.”

A hundred questions had risen now. “Why,” Salsbury asked, “couldn't all this knowledge have been implanted in my mind to start, as well as a complete set of orders?”

“Because, as you grew younger, all the knowledge in your memory cells would fade. You arrived here with a blank brain and would have arrived blank even if you had been briefed in the future.”

“Then how did I know to kill Harold Jacobi?”

“A small chemical tape, impervious to unaging, was built into your brain. It played back your orders on your arrival. While you slept those two weeks in the cave, I filled you in on your background as Victor Salsbury, but there was not time to tell you more, and no room for another chemical tape to have been implanted at the start”

“The senso-tapes,” Lynda said. “What are they?”

“They affect all your senses,” the computer said. If you will each put a hand on one of the glow plates, I will transmit them to you. The nerves in your fingertips are enough to guarantee reception.”

Salsbury grabbed Lynda's hand as she reached out. He spoke to the computer. “This would be a fine moment to indoctrinate both of us, to turn me into a Puppet again.”

“No,” the 810-40.04 said. “It would not work. You are no longer receptive.”

He looked skeptical.

“You are too humanized now,” the computer said. “Surely you can see that.”

He shrugged, reached out as Lynda did, touched the transmission plates on the top of the trunk. They faded into another world.

There were ten scenes in all, propaganda most certainly, but propaganda at once so horrid and believable that there was no denying its persuasive effect, Salsbury had been willing to cooperate, but had he not been, this would have convinced him. Not only because the entire population (save a handful of dictators and their staffs) of the world was suffering, but because he and Lynda would suffer too if the vacii could break through into this probability line and establish another experimental outpost.

When it was over, they settled back from the computer, trembling, white, perspiring. Whatever future man had been building for himself, no matter what degree of stupidity, it could never match the nightmare of that fascist experiment, of that place where alien vacii maintained the psychotics in power. That was a society various nations had accepted before, eventually to reject it. But if Vic didn't continue with the plan, that insanity would be his own future.

“Well?” the 810-40.04 asked.

“Tell me what I have to do,” he said numbly.

After the explanations were given, questioned, and understood, there was a good deal of work to be done. It was not particularly difficult labor, though it was tedious. At the computer's directions, Salsbury brought the two other trunks down from the upstairs bedroom, into the cellar, pressed them down against the floor before the spot in the wall where the vacii had opened their portal. The computer opened the other two trunks with an electric impulse broadcast to their interior locks. The lids popped open, revealing a great many wires and tubes, machine parts. It was Salsbury's job to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, following the 810-40.04's directions. He was assembling, he found, a prober exactly like that of the vacii. When the aliens tuned in tonight, Salsbury would lock their beam with the vacii beam and open the bubble between probabilities to the passage of living tissue. This living tissue would be Victor.

The fact that their would-be mechanical assassins waited on the other side didn't help the slimy rollings of his stomach. If there were fifty robots however, he would be ready for them, for the 810-40.04 was equipping him for almost any eventuality.

But did a hero's knees knock together? Or did his breath come difficult?

No, he wasn't feeling much like a hero. He felt more like a little boy who has been playing a game with older kids and then abruptly discovers they're getting too rough for him and that there is no way he can graciously get out of the game. He was trained to fight. The chemical tape that had played itself the night of Harold Jacobi's murder had crammed thousands of pieces of commando combat techniques into his brain. But all the tricks of karate and judo and savate seemed weak when pitted against gray, scaled, sucker-mouthed things from somewhere a few million light-years and a few probability lines off.

By ten o'clock they finished rigging the probe machine. It was a rather rickety looking bunch of lightweight, sectioned beams supporting panels of intricate mechanisms. There was a chair for the operator. To operate the thing, Salsbury knew, one only needed to sit in that chair, flick a single switch, grip the handles on the sides of what looked like a spotlight, and aim the projector. There were little screws on each handle to work with your thumbs to change (ever so slightly) the flow pattern of the beam so that a good lock could be achieved.

They decided, with the computer's agreement, that things would move more quickly if Lynda were to operate the prober, lock beams, and open the probability doorway. Salsbury, meanwhile, could be standing next to where the portal would solidify, could leap through without having to first climb down from the prober.

At Lynda's suggestion, they left the computer to grab a bite to eat. Salsbury could only choke down half a sandwich and a cup of coffee. At a quarter after eleven, they went back into the cellar to wait. It was a nervous time. Vic paced, and Lynda bit her nails. The 810-40.04 went over and over the instructions until they were all ready to scream. At last, it was one-thirty. Lynda took her place at the chair; he stood alongside the wall, next to where the portal would open.

One-thirty came. And so did the vacii.

The blue spot began to glow on the wall, slowly clearing.

Lynda snapped on their own prober.

The two beams met. The window began to clear.

“Now!” the computer said.

And Salsbury leaped sideways and through into the other probability line, into the room where the vacii operated their own prober.