Special Deliverance

19

Late in the afternoon of the second day, Mary and Lansing made the discovery.

Between two buildings, at the end of a narrow alley, they saw the gaping hole. Lansing turned the beam of his flashlight into the darkness. The beam revealed a narrow flight of stairs, a more substantial flight than might have been expected leading from an alley.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll go down and look. It’ll probably turn out nothing.”

“No,” she said, “I’m going with you. I don’t want to be left alone.”

Carefully he lowered himself into the opening and gingerly descended the steep flight. Behind him clicks and scuffings told him that Mary was very close behind. There was more than one flight of stairs. He came to a landing and a quarter of the way around it another flight plunged down. It was not until he had taken the first few steps down the second flight that he heard the muttering. When he stopped dead in his tracks to listen, Mary bumped into him.

The muttering was soft. Nor was it quite a mutter, which was what he first had thought it was. Rather a throaty singing, as if someone were singing softly to himself. Masculine, not feminine, singing.

“Someone’s singing,” Mary whispered.

“We’ll have to go and see,” he said. He didn’t want to go on. If he had done what he wanted, he would have turned about and fled. For while the singing (if it was singing) sounded human, there still was about the whole experience an eerie alienness that set his teeth on edge.

The second flight ended on yet another landing and as he went down the third flight, the singing gained some strength, while downward and ahead of him he saw softly glowing lights — cat eyes staring at him out of darkness. Reaching the foot of the stairs, he moved out a few steps on a metal walkway and Mary came to stand beside him.

“Machinery,” she said. “Or a machine.”

“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “An installation of some sort.”

“And operating,” she said. “Do you realize this is the first live thing we’ve found.”

The machinery, Lansing saw, was not massive. Not overpowering. The many glowing eyes scattered all through it furnished enough light so that the machinery could be seen — guessed rather than seen, he told himself, for the light from the eyes was faint. The whole assembly was a spindly, spidery mass. It seemed to have no moving parts. And it was singing to itself.

When he trained his light ahead, he saw that the metal walkway on which they stood ran straight ahead, forming a narrow path between two conglomerations of machinery. The path ran a long way, well beyond the strength of the flashlight’s beam, and as far as he could see, the spindly forms flanked it on either side.

Walking slowly and carefully, he started down the walkway, with Mary close beside him. When they reached the beginning of the machinery they halted and he trained the light on the nearest segments of the installation.

The machines were not only spindly; they were delicate. The polished metal, if it was metal, gleamed brightly; there was no dust or grease upon it. It didn’t, in fact, look like any machinery he had ever seen. It looked like a piece of metal sculpture that a slap-happy artist had assembled with a pair of pliers, chortling all the while. But, despite the lack of moving parts, despite any indication of actual operation, it seemed to be brimming with a sense of life and purpose. And all the time it sang, crooning to itself.

“It’s strange,” said Mary. “As an engineer, I should have some inkling as to what this could be. But there’s not a single component that I recognize.”

“No notion what it’s doing?”

“None at all,” she said.

“We’ve been calling it machinery.”

“For lack of a better term,” she said.

Lansing found his body unconsciously responding to the rhythm of the song the machines were singing, as if his body, all of his body, was responding to its beat. It seeped into him, formed a background for his life.

It’s taking over, he thought, but the thought came from very far away and did not seem to be a part of him, as if another person might be thinking it. He recognized the danger of being taken over and tried to call out a warning to Mary, but the warning took some little time and before he could cry out, he was another kind of life.

He was light-years tall and each step he took spanned many trillion miles. He loomed in the universe, his body wispy and tenuous, a body that flashed like spangles in the glare of flaring suns that swirled and spun about him. Planets were no more than grating gravel underneath his feet. When a black hole blocked his way, he kicked it to one side. He put out his hand to pluck half a dozen quasars and strung them on a strand of starlight to hang about his neck.

He climbed a hill made of piled-up stars. The hill was high and steep and required a lot of scrabbling to get up it; in the process of climbing he dislodged a number of the stars that made up the hill and, once dislodged, they went clattering down, rolling and bouncing to the bottom of the hill, except that it had no bottom.

He reached the summit and stood upon it, straddle-legged to hold himself secure, and all the universe lay spread out before him, to its farthest edge. He raised a fist and shook it, bellowing out a challenge to eternity, and the echoes of his shouting came back to him from infinity’s farthest curve.

From where he stood he saw the end of time and space and remembered how once he had wondered what lay beyond the end of time and space. Now he saw and recoiled upon himself. He lost his footing and went tumbling down the hill, and when he reached the bottom (but not the bottom, for there was no bottom), he lay spread-eagled in a drift of interstellar dust and gas that surged all about him and tossed him mercilessly, as if he were in the clutches of an angry sea.

Remembering what he had seen beyond the end of time and space, he groaned. And groaning, he came back to where he was, standing on a metal walkway, flanked by spidery machines that were crooning to themselves.

Mary had him by the arm and was tugging to get him turned around. Stupidly, not too sure as yet of where he was, he went along with the tugging and got turned around. The lighted torch, he saw, was lying on the floor and he stooped to pick it up. He did pick it up, but in doing so almost fell upon his face. Mary tugged at him again. “We can stop now. How are you?”

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I seem to be confused. I saw the universe—”

“So that is what you saw.”

“You mean that you saw something, too.”

“When I came back,” she said, “you were standing frozen. At first I was afraid to touch you. I thought that you might break into a million pieces.”

“Let’s sit down,” said Lansing. “For a minute, let’s sit down.”

“There’s no place for us to sit.”

“On the floor,” he said. “We can sit on the floor.”

They sat upon the hard surface of the walkway, facing one another.

“So now we know,” she said.

“Know what?” He shook his head as if to clear his mind. The haze was clearing slightly, but he was still muddled.

“Know what the machines are supposed to do. Edward, we can’t tell the Brigadier about this place. He’d go hog-wild.”

“We’ve got to tell him,” Lansing said. “We made a deal with him. We must be fair with him.”

“Once again,” she said, “something we don’t know how to handle. Like the doors.”

He looked back over his shoulder at the spidery machines. He could see them more clearly now. The fuzziness was going.

“You said you saw the universe. What do you mean by that?”

“Mary, Mary, Mary! Will you, please, wait a minute.”

“It hit you hard,” she said.

“I think perhaps it did.”

“I came out of it easy.”

“That’s your strong sense of self-perception.”

“Don’t joke,” she said. “Don’t try to make a joke of it. This is serious.”

“I know that. I’m sorry. You want to know. I’ll try to tell you. I visited the universe. I was tall and big. I had a body of shining starlight, maybe a puff of comet tail. It was like a dream, but not really like a dream. I was there. It was all ridiculous, but I was there. I climbed a hill made up of shoveled-together stars and, standing on top of it, I saw the universe, all of the universe, out to the end of time and space, where time and space pinched out. I saw what lay beyond time/space, and I don’t now remember exactly what I saw. Chaos. Maybe that’s the name for it. A churning nothingness, a raging, angry nothingness. I’d never thought of nothing as a raging anger. That’s what shook me. When I say raging I don’t mean hot. It was cold. Not just cold by temperature, for there was no way to know the temperature. Cold in a deadly, venomous way. Uncaring. Worse than uncaring. Angry against everything that exists or ever existed. Raging to get at anything that is not nothingness and put an end to it.”

She made a sympathetic motion with her hands. “I shouldn’t have asked you. I shouldn’t have insisted. I’m sorry I forced you into telling me. It wasn’t easy for you.”

“I wanted to tell you. I would have told you, but maybe not right yet. But now it’s over with and I feel easier about it. Telling you, I gave some of it away. What they did to me — to us. You said you saw it, too.”

“Not what you saw. Not as devastating. I’m sure the machine did it to us. It takes your mind, your ego, the life force, the personality, and rips it out of you and sends it somewhere else. You said it was like a dream and still it was not a dream. I think it’s actuality, not a dream. A machine would not have a dream concept. If it were possible for someone to go where you went, in all actuality, of course, they’d see what you saw. There were absurdities, of course…”

“I kicked a black hole out of the path. I climbed a starry mountain. Planets crunched like gravel when I stepped on them.”

“Those are the absurdities, Edward. The reaction, rebellion of your mind. A defense mechanism meant to keep you sane. The laughter element. The big guffaw to show you didn’t mind.”

“You mean you think I was really there? That my mind was really there?”

“Look,” she said, “we have to face it. The people who lived in this city were sophisticated scientists, uncanny technicians. They had to be to produce this apparatus and the doors and the Brigadier’s graphics tank. Their minds, their aims, canted in a different direction than yours or mine. They performed chores, sought out answers we’d never think about. Absurd as they may be, the doors are understandable. But what we have here is not understandable. In certain ways, it may be scientific heresy.”

“If you talk that way long enough, you’ll talk me into it.”

“We have to face facts. We’re dealing with a kind of world we do not understand. We’re dealing with what is left of it. God knows what you would have found here at the height of their culture. These may be human concepts. I think they are. They are the kind of heady projects the human race might do. But because of the very fact that they are so far-out human, they may seem more alien to us than something put together by a race on some distant solar system.”

“But their culture failed. Despite all they did or could do, it all came down to nothing. They’re gone and their city’s dead.”

“They might have gone elsewhere. To a world they found.”

“Or they may have overreached themselves. Have you thought of that? They lost their souls — is that what the Parson said?”

“It sounds like him,” said Mary.

“And now yourself. Where did they send you?”

“I caught just a glimpse of it. You must have stayed longer than I did. Just a glimpse was all. Another culture, I think. I really saw no one. I talked with no one. I was like a ghost that no one saw. A shadow that walked in and then went out again. But I sensed the people, the sort of lives they lived, the thoughts they thought. It was beautiful.

“They were godlike. Truly godlike. There is no doubt of that. Stay there long enough, sensing them, seeing how far they stood above you and you would have been reduced to a crawling worm. Gentle gods, I think. Although they were sophisticated. Civilized. Entirely civilized. They have no government. There is no need of one. And no economic sense, no need of economics. It would take a true civilization, the highest concept of civilization, to need no government and no economic system. No money, no buying or selling, no borrowing or loaning, therefore no interest rates, no grubby bankers, no attorneys. There may even have been no such a thing as law.” “How do you know all that?”

“It soaked into me. All of it was there for one to know. Not to see, of course. To know.”

“Instead of telescopes,” said Lansing. “Telescopes?”

“I was just thinking aloud. Back in my world, and I suppose in yours as well, men use telescopes in an attempt to ferret out the secrets of space. But these people — they had no use of telescopes. Instead of looking out, they went out. They could go out there themselves. I suppose wherever they might wish. Having built the sort of installation that is here, they certainly would have known how to use it and control it, so they could go to specific targets. But now the machines — what else can I call them?” “Machines is good enough.” “Now they are running wild. They sent us out at random.”

“Somewhere in this city,” she said, “there must be a control room from which this installation can be handled. Maybe booths in which people who are to be subjected to its operation can be placed — although I guess I’d doubt that. The system would be something far more subtle than that.”

“Even if we found such a place,” he said, “it might take years before we could learn to operate it.”

“Could be, but we could have a shot at it.”

“Maybe this is what happened to the people here. Maybe they found another world, a better world, and sent all their people there.”

“In body as well as in mind?” she asked. “That would take some doing.”

“That’s right. I didn’t think of that. Even if they could that wouldn’t explain everything else being gone. Unless they sent along all their possessions as well.”

“I would doubt that,” Mary said. “Unless they used this apparatus to find another place and they could build another door to it. The two could be related, these machines and the doors, although I’d be more inclined to view the installation here as a research tool to be used to learn from alien worlds. Imagine what could be done with it. You could get all kinds of data that could be adapted to your culture. You could revise political and economic systems, steal technological procedures previously unknown to you, overhaul sociological structures, perhaps even learn of new scientific approaches, even entirely unknown scientific disciplines. For any civilized race, it would be a cultural shot in the arm.”

“You touched on it exactly,” he told her. “An intelligent race, you said. Was the race that lived here intelligent enough? Would your culture or mine be intelligent enough to use what we could find by the proper use of this installation? Or would we simply hunker down, clinging to our old ways, the life we were accustomed to, and misuse or abuse what we found on other worlds — perhaps misuse it disastrously?”

“That’s not up to you or me,” she said. “Not at the moment, it’s not. I think we should go out and see if we can locate that hypothetical control room.”

He rose and reached down a hand to help her to her feet. Once up, she still held to his hand.

“Edward,” she said, “the two of us have been through an awful lot together. Even in so short a time…”

“It’s not seemed short to me,” he told her. “I can’t seem to remember a time without you.”

He bent to kiss her and she held him briefly, then stepped away.

They climbed the stairs back to the alley and began their search. They stayed at it until darkness began to fall. They found no control room.

Back at the building where they were camped, they found Sandra and Jurgens busy preparing the evening meal. The Brigadier was not around.

“He went off by himself,” Sandra explained. “We haven’t seen him since.”

“We found nothing,” Jurgens said. “How about you?”

“No business talk, please, until after supper,” Mary pleaded. “By that time the Brigadier should be back.”

He arrived half an hour later and sat down heavily on his rolled-up sleeping bag. “I don’t mind telling you I’m bushed,” he said. “I covered a good part of the northeast section. For some silly idea I had the hunch that if we were to find anything, we would find it there. I found not a thing.”

Sandra dished up a plate of food and handed it to him. “Let’s eat,” she said.

The Brigadier took the plate and began eating, without waiting for the rest of them, shoveling the food into his mouth. He looked tired, Lansing thought. Tired and old. For the first time, the Brigadier showed a touch of age.

When they had finished eating, the Brigadier dug a bottle out of his pack and passed it around the circle. When it came back to him, he took a long pull at it, recapped it and sat cuddling it in his lap.

“This is two days,” he said. “That is what you promised me. I am a man of my word. I will not try to hold you further. Mary, I know you and Lansing will be moving on. How about you other two?”

“I think we’ll go with Mary and Lansing,” Sandra said. “I know I will. The city frightens me.”

“How do you feel?” the Brigadier asked Jurgens.

“With all due respect,” the robot told him, “there seems no point in staying.”

“As for myself,” said the Brigadier, “I’ll stay on for a while. Later I may catch up with you. I’m sure there is something to be found here.”

“Brigadier,” said Lansing, “we found it this afternoon. But I must warn you that—”

The Brigadier leaped to his feet and the bottle went flying from his lap. It hit the floor but did not break. It went rolling across the floor, and Lansing caught it.

“You found it!” yelled the Brigadier. “What is it? Tell me what you found.”

“Brigadier, sit down,” said Lansing, speaking sharply, as one might address a naughty child.

Apparently astonished at the tone of Lansing’s voice, the Brigadier sat down meekly. Lansing leaned forward and handed him the bottle. He took it and placed it back in his lap.

“Now let’s talk about this quietly,” Mary said. “Let us consider it. Let’s not go charging off. I suggested to Edward that we should say nothing of our discovery, but he said we had made a bargain—”

“But why?” shouted the Brigadier. “Why say nothing?”

“Because what we found is beyond our understanding. We know at least one thing that it can do, but there is no way to control it. It’s dangerous. It’s nothing to fool around with. We told ourselves that somewhere there must be a control room, but we couldn’t find it.”

“You’re an engineer,” said Jurgens. “You, of all of us, should know the most about it. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you found.”

“Perhaps you, Edward,” Mary said.

Lansing said, “No, it’s yours to tell.”

She told them and they listened intently. There were a few questioning interruptions, but not many.

After she had finished, a long silence ensued. Finally Jurgens turned to Mary. “What you are saying is that the people here had a thrust toward other worlds. Alien worlds, most likely, rather than alternate Earths.”

“They may not have been aware of the alternate Earths,” said Lansing.

“They wanted to get away from here,” said Jurgens. “The installation that you found and the doors are tied together, part of the same research effort.”

“It seems likely,” Mary told him.

The Brigadier said, quietly, quite unlike his earlier shouting, “You two are the only ones who have seen it. The rest of us, all five of us, should have a look at it.”

“I’m not saying we should not investigate,” said Mary. “What I do say is that we should be careful what we do. Both Edward and I were taken over, but only for a moment. That may be no more than a sample of what it can do.”

“You have searched for a control room?”

“We searched till dark,” said Lansing.

“It would seem the control should be housed with the apparatus,” said the Brigadier.

“We thought of that, of course. But there is no room. All the space is taken up by the installation. Then we figured that in a building close by…”

“That would not necessarily be the case,” said Mary. “I know that now. The control room could be anywhere in the city. Anyplace at all.”

“You say the mechanism is unrecognizable? That you have no idea what it is?”

“There is not a single piece of it,” said Mary, “that I recognized as anything that would correspond to any kind of mechanism familiar to my world. Of course a closer look, a closer examination might make for a marginal understanding. The point is that I wouldn’t want to get that close, get that involved with it. That would be sticking your neck out. Edward and I did not experience the full effect, I’m sure. Get more involved, closer to it, I can’t imagine what might happen.”

“The feature of this city that worries me the most,” said Sandra, “is the flatness of it. Not of the city itself, but the culture that it represents. It exhibits a cultural poverty that is simply impossible. There are no churches, no recognizable places of worship, nothing that ever seems to have been a library or an art gallery or a music hall. It seems impossible to me that any people could have been so destitute of sensitivity, could have been satisfied to live out such flat lives.”

“They may have been a one-idea people,” said Lansing.

“Absorbed, the entire body of them, in one area of research and endeavor. This, of course, is hard to understand, but we cannot know their motives. It would be possible, I suppose, to have so strong a motive…”

“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” growled the Brigadier. “We’ll have a look in the morning. Or at least I will have a look. The others of you will be taking off.”

“We’ll stay with you,” said Lansing, “long enough to have that look.”

“But, for God’s sake,” said Mary, “everyone be careful.”