Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

‘What are we going to do, Fritz?’ Jacko’s own attempt to resolve the situation had reached an impasse.

Van Noon looked back, hoping for an indication as to whether or not the second crawler had been able to follow their tortuous route to the spot. No evidence was forthcoming, so he shrugged his shoulders.

‘You two can vote me down if you want to, but I propose that we choose the most likely direction for the Dark and just drive blind until we hit it or stop.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Jacko. ‘What about you, Pederson?’

Count me in. I’ve no ambition to walk back on my own.’

They re-entered the crawler. Having decided on the most probable direction of the Dark, Jacko orientated the vehicle, locked the tracks on synchronization, and proceeded to drive straight into the unknown.

The journey was a driver’s conception of Hell, a nightmare route across unfamiliar territory, effectively blind, and with no warning of what obstacle might halt or jolt them. Added to this was the rising resistance to movement, both on the part of the vehicle and of its occupants. Inside the driving cab even the instrument lights had become impossible to see, and the penetrating coldness finalized the depression which was settling over the spearhead of the expedition. Once or twice Jacko questioned whether they ought to attempt to turn back. Van Noon chided him gently and looked only ahead to the point where the darkness ought to terminate in a meeting with the absolute of the Dark.

Constantly the vehicle rolled and bucked, and canted at dangerous angles as it encountered broken walls or piles of debris in its path. Sometimes it stopped with a bruising shock against some obstacle beyond its power to move. Jacko was skilful in such emergencies and withdrew the vehicle from each such predicament without stalling the engine, knowing that a stopped engine this far into the Pen would never be restarted. Bruised, and in constant danger of masonry from grazed walls crushing the cab, they endured the journey patiently; although with various deviations from the course which the presence of unsurmountable obstacles forced on Jacko, they had no certain idea if they were still headed towards the Dark at all.

Then came the moment they had been dreading. In pitch darkness now, the crawler came to a sudden halt against something immovable. The tracks churned the soft floor uselessly for a half second, and then the engine stalled before Jacko could throw the vehicle in reverse. He tried the ignition cycle in vain, but the negative effects were too powerful to permit the heavy engine to be restarted. The silence grew absolute save for the tick-tick of metal cooling rapidly and Fritz’s voice cursing in a strangely muted way.

‘End of the line,’ said Jacko finally.

Van Noon opened the door. ‘As we’ve managed to get here we may as well see where we are,’ he said.

They climbed out. Their powerful torches were little use, and permitted an examination of no object more distant than about a quarter of a metre.

Beyond this was darkness in all directions except directly vertical, where a muddied stain across the sky mocked them with its inability to provide any useful illumination on the ground. Fritz searched around him and picked up a short length of rotting timber with which he cast about in the darkness on all sides. Then he called urgently: ‘Jacko, are you near the crawler?’

‘I am,’ said Pederson. Just by the cab door.’ He banged the metal, which returned a dull and unrewarding thud. Like their voices, the sound was strangely attenuated.

‘Good! Now, Jacko, can you place yourself by sound in a line between our two voices?’

Jacko moved somewhere in the darkness. ‘I think I’m there.’

‘Right. Now we’re three in a line, with Pederson on the right, you central, and myself on the left. As far as I can make out, about three paces ahead of us is the Dark. Find something to probe it with, and don’t touch it even with your gloves. Maintain your orientation carefully so that you don’t lose direction and walk into it. It could be very dangerous to touch.’

They advanced slowly, Pederson tapping the side of the crawler for identification, and Fritz and Jacko talking so that the sound of voices gave their relative positions. Even so, Jacko got there first. His probe was a shard of splintered ceramic with which he was striking before him as though at some anticipated enemy. Anti-momentum made this a difficult movement to achieve, and the darkness added to the soup-like resistance to movement, giving the whole situation a dream-like character without the visual qualities of the conventional nightmare.

Then Jacko hit the Dark. It was detectable by its complete negation of the force with which he struck it. And it returned no sound, and in this way was distinguishable from any ordinary obstacle struck with force.

‘Got it,’ said Jacko. ‘But that knocking sound you hear is my knees. I admit I’m frightened of this thing, Fritz.’

‘I’m not exactly keen on it, either,’ said van Noon. ‘But this is what we came to see. It’s a pity we can’t see it now we’ve got here. Have you any suggestions, Pederson?’

‘I’ve just discovered the Dark is what we ran the crawler into. No wonder it didn’t move.’

An ominous and familiar staccato rattle made them turn. A rogue storm, travelling towards them and parallel to the wall of the Dark, was making its passage known by its peculiarly pinched lightning. Because of attenuation, the lightning and thunder had been undetectable even from a short distance, and the storm was almost upon them before they were aware it existed. There was no time to seek shelter. They flung themselves down on the damp earth at the foot of the Dark and waited for it to pass. It sprayed the area with quenched fire as it went, doing no damage to them, but the intensity of the arcs was such that momentarily they had a clear picture of their situation.

The Dark was just in front of them, a sheer wall of unblemished black-velvet nothingness, impossibly perfect. The crawler had nosed head-on up to the black wall, and its tracks were pressed hard against the exterior. On all other sides of them lay the ghost-suburb of desolate ruins, the reflecting white teeth of broken masonry contrasting with the wet, black soil of the earth.

As soon as the worst of the storm was over, they climbed back to their feet.

‘What are you going to do, Fritz? Try the lasers?’

‘I don’t know.’ Fritz had moved back to the crawler and was examining the tracks in contact with the Dark by the spasmodic light of the rapidly waning storm. ‘I don’t think we need to. I think I’ve got my answer.

You see, it did take time for the Dark to analyse and apply a counterforce to stop the crawler. But that fraction of a second was sufficient for something significant to happen. The crawler tracks have penetrated very slightly into the Dark.’

It was impossible for the others to verify van Noon’s statement since the light from the storm had rapidly become eclipsed by the strength of the negative effects. The combined output of searchlight and torches failed to re-establish the point, and the lasers refused to function from the crawler’s emergency power supply. But van Noon was sufficiently convinced of what he had seen to regard the expedition as a success.

‘All we have to do now is to get back to tell the tale,’ said Jacko, unhappily.

They started back by the only means available—they walked. For the first half kilometre they stumbled blindly through the darkness and the nightmare of anti-momentum. The coldness, too, was becoming serious now that they were exposed for a long period without the protection of the crawler cab. But gradually their eyes, accustomed to complete darkness began to discern light like the first touch of dawn, and with the returning ability to see, they no longer blundered into blind paths in the ruins from which they had to retreat by sense of touch alone. And the negative effects grew slightly less, so that their pace progressively improved as they made their way out of the deep Pen regions.