Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

Van Noon scowled. ‘And you have no idea at all what the Dark is made of?’

Courtney spread his hands. ‘God-alone knows what it really is. Even the Pen raises some nice problems in physics which don’t have answers in any of the textbooks.’

‘All right,’ said van Noon. ‘I’d like to take a closer look at it first and come back to you when I’ve some idea of what questions to ask.’

‘Good idea,’ Courtney said. ‘We’ve assembled such a mass of data on the Dark that we don’t know if we’ve lost our way in our own erudition. That’s why we asked for some of you Unorthodox Engineering chaps to come out to Ithica to supply a fresh approach. The answer may be so damned obvious that we can’t see it for the weight of the maths intervening.’

‘And the primary object of the exercise is what?’

Courtney glanced from the window at the monstrous column of darkness which reared its head high over the landscape. ‘I don’t know. Study it, use it, get rid of it—it’s an alien paradox, Fritz, and I don’t think anyone with an ounce of science in his makeup can let it rest there doing nothing but soaking up the sun.’

‘What’s the general topography of the Dark area, Jacko?’

Jacko Hine of the Unorthodox Engineers unrolled his sheaf of maps. ‘This is the position of the Dark, and the area I’ve coloured shows the extent of the Pen. As you can see, the whole is centred on the edge of what used to be the city of Bedlam.’

‘Nice name, the original colonists had a sense of humour! Is it still there?’

‘Its ruins are. The present city of New Bedlam has moved southwards, but in and around the Pen the remains of the old city still exist. Nobody lives there now. If you’d been into the Pen you’d understand why.’

‘You’ve been in, then? What’s it like?’

‘Weird,’ said Jacko. ‘It’s cold and oppressive, but the sensations aren’t the usual ones of coldness and oppression. This is a different feeling entirely. I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something wrong with the physics of the place.’

‘Then I think I’d better start there. Where’s the rest of the UE squad?’

‘Doing some preliminary fact-finding at the edge of the Pen. I suggest we contact them as we go in, and see what they’ve found.’

‘No,’ said van Noon. ‘I’d sooner contact them on the way out. I want my first impressions of the Pen to be a direct personal experience. I need to get the “feel” of the thing—because I have a suspicion that this problem is going to be cracked by intuition rather than by observation. Maxwell Courtney’s no fool, and he and his team have been gathering facts for three years now. There’s no sense in repeating what they’ve already done, so I’m going to play it my way.’

‘I was rather afraid of that,’ said Jacko, following in his wake.

The edgeland was an area dominated by the ruins of the old city. The transport took them to the very perimeter of the Pen, and here they dismounted. van Noon surveyed the phenomenon thoughtfully.

The termination of the Pen was sharp, precise, and unwavering. At one point the bright sunshine of Ithica baked the dust golden and ripened dark berries on the hanks of hackberry-like scrub. A centimetre away the summer changed abruptly to a dark winter, shadowed and uninviting, and such scrub as grew within its bounds was thin and gnarled and bore no fruit at all.

Above them the wall of shade rose vertically until it disappeared into the cloud-ring which clung stubbornly round the sombre column. Looking into the Pen, van Noon gained the impression of gradually increasing coldness and bleakness and gloom until, in the centre, he could just detect the absolute blackness of the great pillar of the Dark. Cautiously he extended a hand into the boundary of the Pen and withdrew it, experiencing the strange chill on his skin.

‘Very curious,’ he said. ‘What strikes you most about this, Jacko?’

‘Lack of interaction between the warmth outside and the cold inside. There shouldn’t be a sharp boundary like this.’

‘Precisely. At a guess there’s a temperature fall of fifteen degrees centigrade over a distance of one centimetre. Now there’s plenty of heat available out here, so why doesn’t the warmth penetrate farther into the Pen?’

‘There’s only one answer. The heat is being removed. Transferred elsewhere?’

‘Hmm, but I don’t see how. Even if you postulate that in the centre of the Pen is an area of absolute zero temperature you would still expect to get a graduated temperature rise at the boundary and not a sharp transition.’

‘So?’ Jacko looked at him expectantly.

‘So I can see how to achieve the inverse of this situation using, for instance, a collimated beam of infrared heat. But a collimated shaft of coldness is something very new indeed. As you remarked, Jacko, there’s something wrong with the physics of this place.’

With swift resolution van Noon stepped through the perimeter and into the Pen. Jacko pulled up his collar and followed him in. The contrast was staggering. Whereas a few seconds previously the warm sunshine had been sufficient to bring them to a gentle sweat, they now stood shivering with the curious chill which inhabited the Pen. Van Noon was looking with amazement at the dreary landscape and sub-climate of the Pen interior.

No sunshine penetrated here. The internal winter continued sheer up to the outer wall, and such light as there was filtered downwards from a dirty, leaden cloudbase trapped within the Pen itself. Even looking sunward, no sign of the Ithican primary could be seen, though it should have been clearly visible, and its apparent loss was not explicable in terms of haze or diffraction.

The sun-toasted ruins which stood outside the Pen continued inside as a depressing waste of rotting bricks and slimed timbers, forming forgotten streets on which even the sparse and miserable vegetation had not much cared to grow. A few furred rodents scattered at their approach, with an attitude of resignation, as if self-preservation here was a matter about which one thought twice.

Van Noon was sampling his surroundings with the detachment of a scientist, yet using his own body in lieu of instrumentation. The process went on for several minutes before he came to a conclusion.

‘What do you feel, Jacko?’

‘Bloody cold.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, almost a sense of depression. I don’t know if it’s physical or psychological, but every action seems to demand too much effort.’

Fritz nodded. ‘I agree. I don’t think it’s psychological. It’s almost as if every form of energy here was negated or opposed.’

He picked up a stone. ‘See the window in the old wall over there? He threw the stone with practised ease, having judged its weight to a nicety. But the stone lost speed rapidly and fell in a limp trajectory to the muddied soil several metres short of its intended target.

‘See what I mean?’ said van Noon. ‘That stone, accelerated to the velocity at which I released it, should at least have hit the wall. But it didn’t. It acted as a lighter body might have done on travelling through these conditions—or as a body of its actual weight might have done had it somehow lost kinetic energy during flight. How do you lose kinetic energy from a body in flight, Jacko?’

‘You can’t lose it,’ said Jacko. ‘You can only react it against something—friction, air-resistance, and so on—in which case the energy leaves the system in some other form, usually heat. The energy itself is never lost, only converted.’

‘Conservation of energy, right. But not here,’ said van Noon. ‘I wasn’t throwing against a headwind, and the air is no more dense than outside after allowing for temperature and humidity differences. So whatever stopped that stone wasn’t a normal reaction to flight. And I can find no evidence of abnormal gravity or coriolis effects. That stone just progressively lost energy. Mass times velocity doesn’t seem to equal momentum in the Pen—and that’s a hell of a smack at the textbooks you and I were raised on.’