Robert Silverberg: Halfway House

Afterward, Alfieri realized that you must give a life to gain a life. Now, he was too interested simply in staying alive to think much about profundities.

He was l’uomo dal fuoco in bocca, the man with fire in his mouth. Cancer clawed at his throat. The vocoder gave him speech; but the raging fire soon would burn through to the core of him, and there would be no more Franco Alfieri. That was hard to accept. So he came to the Fold for aid.

He had the money. That was what it took, in part, to enter that gateway of worlds: money, plenty of it. Those who ran the Fold did not do it for sweet charity’s sake. The power drain alone was three million kilowatts every time the Fold was opened. You could power a good-sized city on a load like that. But Alfieri was willing to pay what it cost. The money would shortly be of no use to him whatever, unless the beings on the far side of the Fold gave his life back to him.

“You stand on that bedplate,” a technician told him. “Put your feet along the red triangular areas. Grasp the rail— so. Then wait.”

Alfieri obeyed. He was no longer in the habit of taking such brusque orders, but he forgave the man for his rudeness. To the technician, Alfieri was so much wealthy meat, already going maggotty. Alfieri positioned his feet and looked down at the mirror-bright polish of his pointed black shoes. He grasped the furry yellow skin of the rail. He waited for the power surge.

He knew what would happen. Alfieri had been an engineer in Milan, twenty years back, when the European power grid was just coming in. He understood the workings of the Fold as well as—well, as well as anyone else who was not a mathematician. Alfieri had left engineering to found an industrial empire that sprawled from the Alps to the blue Mediterranean, but he had kept up with technology. He was proud of that. He could walk into any factory, go straight to a workbench, display a rare knowledge of any man’s labor. Unlike most top executives, his knowledge was deep as well as broad.

Alfieri knew, then, that when the power surge came, it would momentarily create a condition they called a singularity, found in the natural universe only in the immediate vicinity of stars that were in their last moments of life. A collapsing star, a spent supernova, generates about itself a warp in the universe, a funnel to nowhere, the singularity. As the star shrinks, it approaches its Schwarzchild radius, the critical point when the singularity will devour it. Time runs more slowly for the dying star, as it nears the radius; its faint light shifts conspicuously toward the red; time rushes to infinity as the star is caught and swallowed by the singularity. And a man who happens to be present? He passes into the singularity also. Tidal gravitational forces of infinite strength seize him; he is stretched to the limit and simultaneously compressed, attaining zero volume and infinite density, and he is hurled—somewhere.

They had no dying stars in this laboratory. But for a price they could simulate one. For Alfieri’s bundle of lire they would strain the universe and create a tiny opening and hurl him through the Fold, to a place where pleated universes met, to a place where incurable diseases were not necessarily incurable.

Alfieri waited, a trim, dapper man of fifty, with thinning sandy hair slicked crosswise over the tanned dome of his skull. He wore the tweed suit he had bought in London in ‘95, and a matching gray-green tie and his small sapphire ring. He gripped the railing. He was not aware of it when the surge came, and the universe was broken open, and Franco Alfieri was catapulted through a yawning vortex into a place never dreamed of in Newton’s philosophy.

The being called Vuor said, “This is Halfway House.”

Alfieri looked about him. Superficially, his surroundings had not changed at all. He still stood on a glossy copper bedplate, still grasped a furry rail. The quartz walls of the chamber looked the same. But an alien being now peered in, and Alfieri knew he had been translated through the Fold.

The alien’s face was virtually a blank: a slit of a mouth below, slits of eyes above, no visible nostrils, a flat greenish facade, altogether, sitting on a squat neck, a triangular shoulderless trunk, ropy limbs. Alfieri had become accustomed to aliens in his dealings, and the sight of Vuor did not disturb him, though he had never seen one of this sort before.

Alfieri felt sweat churning through his pores. Tongues of flame licked at his throat. He had refused full sedation, for unless Alfieri’s mind could work properly he would not be Alfieri. But the pain was terrible.

He said, “How soon can I get help?”

“`What is the trouble?”

“Cancer of the throat. You hear my voice? Artificial. The larynx is gone already. There’s a malignant beast eating me. Cut it out of me.”

The eyeslits closed momentarily. Tentacles twined themselves together in a gesture that might have been sympathy, contempt, or refusal. Vuor’s reedy, rasping voice said in passable Italian, “We do not help you here, you understand. This is merely Halfway House, the screening point. We distribute you onward.”

“I know. I know. Well, send me to a world where they can cure cancer. I don’t have much time left. I’m suffering, and I’m not ready to go. There’s still work for me to do on Earth. Capisce?”

“What do you do, Franco Alfieri?”

“Didn’t my dossier arrive?”

“It did. Tell me about yourself.”

Alfieri shrugged. His palms were growing clammy, and he let go of the rail, wishing the alien would let him sit down. “I run an engineering company,” he said. “Actually a holding company. Alfieri S.A. We do everything: power distribution, pollution control, robotics. We’re getting into planetary transformation. Our operating divisions employ hundreds of thousands of men. We’re more than just a money-making concern, though. We’re shapers of a better world. We—” He hesitated, realizing that he sounded now like one of his own public relations flunkies and realizing also that he was begging for his own life. “It’s a big, important, useful company. I founded it. I run it.”

“And you are very rich. For this you wish us to prolong your life? You know that we all live under a sentence of death. For some sooner, others later. The surgeons beyond the Fold cannot save everyone. The number of sufferers who cry out is infinite, Alfieri. Tell me why you should be saved.”

Wrath flamed in Alfieri. He suppressed it.

He said, “I’m a human being with a wife and children. Not good enough reason, eh? I’m wealthy enough to pay any price to be healed. Good? No? Of course not. All right, try this: I’m a genius. Like Leonardo, like Michelangelo, like—like Einstein. You know those names? Good. I have a big genius, too. I don’t paint, I don’t compose music. I plan. I organize. I built the biggest corporation in Europe. I took companies and put them together to do things they could never have done alone.”

He glowered at the alien green mask beyond the quartz wall. “The technology that led Earth to open the Fold in the first place—my company. The power source—mine. I built it. I don’t boast, I speak the truth.”

“You are saying that you have made a lot of money.”

“Damn you, no! I’m saying that I’ve created something that didn’t exist before, something useful, something important, not only to Earth but to all the other worlds that meet here. And I’m not through creating. I’ve got bigger ideas. I need ten more years, and I don’t have ten months. Can you take the responsibility of shutting me off? Can you afford to throw away all that’s still in me? Can you?”