Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

‘I get the point,’ said Fritz. ‘How do you arrange to fire a projectile to meet an unexpected projectile head-on with precisely matched mass and velocity and to an impact position pre-determined to an accuracy of plus or minus a few microns? It can’t be done. You’ve shaken some of my confidence, but you still haven’t encompassed the impossible.’

‘No? Then I’ll do so right away. For your negative-energy theory to be true, the Dark would need to be a dynamic entity. It must necessarily give out exactly as much energy as it receives, for the negation to be complete. It’s been here for two hundred years, Fritz. Now calculate two hundred years of radiant energy from the sun alone and then add what we’ve flung at it in the last three years of experiment. You’ll see that it would need the energy resources of a small star in order to have the reserves to meet any demand.’’

‘I don’t know,’ said van Noon, ‘but we can’t yet claim to know the ultimate in power sources. But very soon I intend to find a way into the Dark, and then perhaps we’ll find out.’

‘You can’t do it, Fritz. There isn’t a ghost of a chance of penetrating into the Dark.’

‘I think there is. And I think I know the very way in which it might be done.’

‘Whatever made you say that?’ asked Jacko anxiously, as they left the room.

‘It’s a feeling I have,’ said van Noon. ‘I said I was going to play this by intuition, and right now my intuition tells me that the Pen and the Dark are negative-energy effects.’

‘In spite of what Courtney said?’

‘Certainly. I must admit he had a nice point about the projectile needing to be met effectively by a antiprojectile if the negative-energy theory was to be maintained. It wouldn’t actually need to be met by a antiprojectile as such, but merely by an opposing force of the right sort applied in the right place at the right time. I don’t doubt that Courtney’s correct that such a negation is necessary to substantiate the negative-energy theory. But I do suspect that his data on absolute negation is not quite as complete as he imagines.’

‘In what way, Fritz?’

‘Well, I can’t conceive of a continuous pattern of negative energy which could deal with any sort of force or radiation applied at any point at any time. I can, however, conceive of a pattern of negative radiation or effect which is selectively produced in response to a particular stimulus at a particular point. But you see what this involves?’

‘No,’ said Jacko.

‘It involves detection, analysis, and synthesis of the opposing effect. Three steps—which must necessitate some sort of time-lag. Courtney has established that any applied energy is negated—but I doubt if it can be cancelled instantaneously. The three steps may be completed in nano-seconds, but I’m quite sure that a time-lag must exist. Now I want to go into the Pen, right up to the Dark perimeter, and see if we can prove or disprove this.’

‘And if we prove it?’

‘Then I think we’ll have a way to drive a tunnel into the Dark and see what’s inside.’

Jacko lost his power of speech as his mind strove to contain the enormity of the project. Fritz shot him an amused glance.

‘There’s a particular reason I want to go in, Jacko. There’s a second principle involved in this detection, analysis, opposing-synthesis set-up which you might not have thought of. Something else is implied… and that is some form of guiding intelligence .’

They had chosen heavy caterpillar crawlers for their transport into the Pen. The choice was determined not only by the fact that a tracked vehicle was an advantage over the broken terrain but also for the reason that the vehicles possessed powerful engines and an ample reserve of power. Three crawlers were obtained for the expedition; one to run well ahead, one to act as reserve, and one to stay well in the rear with sufficient rescue equipment to recover either of the leading crawlers should the deeper Pen effects exceed the capacity of the engines to keep the vehicles in motion.

Clothing for the party had been chosen for a simple property—thermal insulation. Although the actual temperature of the deep Pen probably did not reach freezing point it was essential to insulate the radiant heat of a man’s body against the negative-heat effect which would otherwise have striven to reduce his temperature to the ambient point, with lethal effect. In this way the cold of the Pen differed from normal cold, and the expeditionary figures were clad as though for a journey to the arctic.

Once clear into the outer perimeter of the Pen and out of the strong Ithican sunshine, the expedition began to appreciate the clothing which up to that point had caused them a barely tolerable condition of overheating. Now, as the light faded and the chill of the perpetual winter closed around them, they grew more comfortable. But the underlying seriousness of the venture was pointed-up by a change in the engine note to a more laboured level as both the functioning of the engine and the momentum of the vehicle were affected by the negative elements of the Pen.

The leading crawler carried the bulk of the equipment, especially the precious lasers with which it was hoped to establish the existence of a time-lag in the Dark phenomena. Van Noon was captaining the vehicle. Jacko was driving, and Pederson, an observer sent by Courtney, completed the party. van Noon had intended their route to follow a road indicated on the old maps as running for nearly two kilometres straight in the direction of the axis of the Dark. The intention was abandoned quickly on finding that a building of considerable proportions had collapsed, turning part of the road into an unnavigable pile of masonry. The maps were forgotten and a new route was improvised as the situation demanded, having regard to the abilities of the crawler and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the slow erosion of the Pen environment on the fabric of the old town.

The light from the trapped cloudbase became increasingly leaden and dull until, at about five kilometres in from the perimeter of the Pen, Jacko was forced to switch on the headlamps. Their effect was negligible. Such light as they produced was robbed by some negative effect in the Pen environment and did little to disperse the muddy gloom. Fritz had anticipated this and had a searchlight mounted on the roof of the crawler. The intensity of light from this was sufficient to permit their passage through the damp, dilapidated, ghost-like streets of Bedlam to within two kilometres of the Dark itself. Then that illumination too became inadequate.

‘Better get out, Jacko, and let’s estimate the situation,’ said Fritz.

They descended, conscious of the acute negative-heat coldness which searched at their shrouded faces and probed at their wrists and ankles. They were conscious too, now, of anti-momentum, which gave an entirely false impression of the density of the air, since the effect was remarkably like trying to move under water.

Pederson joined them, and they made a brief survey of the situation. Whereas from a greater distance the column of the Dark had been clearly visible, it was now merged into the claylike blankness of scene which made it scarcely distinguishable as a separate entity. Jacko tried the radio communicator, but the instrument was dead save for some rare static from a distant rogue storm. The magnetic compass also had become nonfunctional much earlier, and though the gyro-compass still worked its readings were questionable in view of the conditions under which it was operating.

The quality of light from the cloudbase was curious and unreal. Effectively the light from above should have given them far greater incident and reflected illumination than they actually experienced. This drastic attenuation of the light should have been explicable in terms of fog or haze, but nothing such existed, and their inexpressibly dreary state of near-night had no explanation save for that of an alien opposition to the fundamental laws of physics.