Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Other voices answered it; then came a rolling, rumbling avalanche of sound—an explosion!

Naismith gathered himself and shot to the doorway, looked put. A man of the Entertainer caste, armed and helmeted, face intent, went by down the corridor.

“What is happening?” Naismith called after him, but the man was gone.

On the way to the social room, he passed two groups of hurrying automatic guns, their red lenses aglow; the second was accompanied by a robot, which did not respond to his questions. Somewhere, very distant, sounded the rumble of another explosion.

The huge globular hall was filled with motion: People were rushing in all directions, interfering with each other, often colliding. Robots and automatic guns were everywhere. There were a few greenskinned servants, all with the metal collars around their necks, all with wild, stunned expressions. He passed one male greenskin who was arguing or pleading with a stout man in white. The man, who was carrying a viewscreen on which a tiny picture was visible, shifted a few yards away from the servant, not looking at him; the servant followed, still talking, and so they moved jerkily across the hall. Naismith drifted after them and listened.

“… to kill me like this,” the greenskin was saying in a hoarse, indistinct voice. “Tell them not to do it, please tell them—”

“Leave me alone,” muttered the man, gazing into his viewscreen. He moved away again. Again the servant followed.

“Don’t let them kill me, that’s all I ask,” he said thickly. “I’ll do anything, I’ll be good, I’ll never be slow when you call again—just please tell them—”

Without speaking or looking up, the man moved away. The servant fell silent and gazed after him. His heavy face turned blank; then he shuddered, his face darkened, his muddy eyes bulged. With an inarticulate sound, he launched himself through the air, arms outstretched.

He never reached the man in white. In mid-air, his head suddenly dropped, his body went limp. He floated, turning slowly, past the man in white, who did not even glance up.

From the back of the metal collar around the dead greenskin’s neck, a thin trickle of blood crept into sight.

Naismith turned, went on his way. Here and there in the huge space, he saw other drifting, greenskinned bodies. One or two were being towed away by sarcophagus robots; the rest were being ignored.

He noticed, too, that the man in white was not the only one with a viewscreen. Almost every member of the ruling caste had one; and where the people clustered thickly, he discovered, they were watching larger screens that hung in the air.

Naismith moved on. Movement flowed around him, voices called in excitement; once he saw an Entertainer with a bloody face being carried past by a robot. But it was all dreamlike, distant.

What was wrong with him? He felt a tension in himself that was slowly, steadily increasing, and it seemed to him that it had been building continuously all this while, ever since that first day in the multiple classroom in Los Angeles. Every step, from the death of Ramsdell, his imprisonment, then Wells’ murder

… traveling forward with the two aliens, the buried spaceship, all the way to the City… that tension had been remorselessly growing inside him. He felt as if his body were being physically distended by it, till he must burst if he could not find relief. His forehead was sweating; there was a tremor in his arms. Something inside him… that buried mystery, the thing that had taken over in the psychiatrist’s office, and again in Prell’s laboratory… the black secret of his being….

He felt as if the door were about to open, and as if its opening would destroy him.

“Shefth, what’s the matter with you?”

He looked up. It was a fat little man in brown and green stripes, gazing at him with anxious eyes. The shrill voice went on, “Don’t you know the Highborn has been asking for you?

Where have you been? Come along, hurry!”

Naismith followed toward the center of the hall, where the largest cluster was located. As they made their way slowly through the close-packed, moving bodies, the little man panted back at him, “Hurry, hurry—she wants you there before it happens!”

“Before what happens?” Naismith asked dully. The pressure inside him was so great that he could scarcely breathe. His head ached, his hands were cold.

“The Barrier!” the little man shrilled. “They are going to put up the Barrier any minute! Hurry!”

Squeezing his way through the inner ring, Naismith came into view of the fat woman and her entourage, gathered around a row of big circular screens. One showed a view of the time-laboratory workrooms, with a gnome in the foreground—

Pendell, or another just like him. The fat woman was screaming hysterically, “Isn’t it ready yet? How soon, then, how soon?”

“A few minutes, Highborn.”

“Why can’t you be more specific? A few minutes, a few minutes—how many?”

“By my estimate, not more than five,” said the gnome. His face was strained; he was giving part of his attention to the aristarch, part to a control box he held in his hands.

“But I want to know exactly” the fat woman shrilled. Her eyes were mad in her yellow face. “Go forward in time and find out, as I asked you to before!”

The hawk-faced man drifted up and said, “That would pinch out the loop, Highborn. It is contrary to the basic laws of time.”

“Pinch out the loop, pinch out the loop, that’s all I hear!”

the old woman screamed. “I’m tired of it, tired of it! How many minutes now?”

“Perhaps three,” said the gnome, tight-lipped.

“Highborn, the trap worked!” said a grime-streaked Entertainer, darting up, his face jubilant. “The Uglies were destroyed

—we have their time vehicle!”

“Good!” said the fat woman, looking momentarily pleased.

“How many does that leave?”

The men beside her turned toward one of the floating screens, in which nothing showed but a scattering of greenish points of light. As Naismith watched, a few winked out, here and there.

The nearest man touched the edge of the screen, peered at the numbers that appeared at the bottom. “Seven hundred fifty-three, Highborn,” he said.

“Good! And how many Zugs?”

The group’s attention turned to another, similar screen, in which the dots of light glowed sullen red. “The same as before, Highborn,” said a man. “Five hundred eighty-seven.”

The old woman snorted with indignation. “Still so many?”

she said. “Why, I say why?”

“The Barrier will kill them, Highborn,” Hawknose reminded her gently.

“Then how long is it till the Barrier?” she demanded.

“Less than one minute,” said the gnome. Drops of sweat stood on his brow.

In his mounting distress, it seemed to Naismith that the whole great gathering had turned sordid and ugly, the colors dulled; even the air he breathed smelled overperfumed and fetid. This was a sorry climax to the drama of the human race, he thought—this pampered oligarchy of piggish little men and women, selfish, ignorant and stupid—less worthy to survive than the Entertainers who amused them, or even the neuras-thenic technicians who kept their city functioning. And now there would be no threat to their dominion, for ever and ever

… That, somehow, was the most intolerable idea of all.

“Ready!” the gnome snapped. His eyes gleamed with excitement as he glanced around. Behind him in the darkness, Naismith could see the other technicians floating beside their machines, all with faces upturned toward Pendell.

“Now!” said the gnome harshly, and his fingers touched the control box.

Naismith felt an instant’s violent and inexplicable alarm.