Philip Dick - A Maze of Death

After a pause Ignatz Thugg guffawed.

“What is it, Glen?” Tony Dunkelwelt said.

Belsnor said thickly, “There are only two tape-heads used in transmitters such as are aboard the satellite. An erase head, mounted first on the transport, then a replay-record head. What has happened is that the replay-record head has switched from replay to record. So it is erasing the tape an inch ahead automatically. There’s no way I can switch it off; it’s on record and that’s where it’ll probably stay. Until the whole tape is erased.”

“But if it erases,” Wade Frazer said, “then it’ll be gone forever. No matter what you do.”

“That’s right,” Glen Belsnor said. “It’s erasing and then recording nothing. I can’t get it out of the record mode. Look.” He snapped several switches open and shut. “Nothing. The head is jammed. So much for that.” He slammed a major relay into place, cursed, sat back, removed his glasses and wiped his forehead. “Christ,” he said. “Well, so it goes.”

The speakers twittered briefly with cross talk, then fell silent again. No one in the room spoke. There was nothing to say.

“What we can do,” Glen Belsnor said, “is to transmit to the relay network, transmit so it’ll be carried back to Terra, and inform General Treaton at Interplan West of what’s happened, that our briefing of his instructions has failed to take place. Under the circumstances they’ll undoubtedly be willing—and able—to fire off a communications rocket in our direction. Containing a second tape which we can run through the transport here.” He pointed to the tape deck mounted within the radio gear.

“How long will that take?” Susie Smart asked.

“I haven’t ever tried to raise the relay network from here.” Glen Belsnor said, “I don’t know; we’ll have to see. Maybe we can do it right away. But at the most it shouldn’t take more than two or three days. The only problem would be—” He rubbed his bristly chin. “There may be a security factor. Treaton may not want this request run through the relay network, where anyone with a class one receiver can pick it up. His reaction then would be to ignore our request.”

“If they do that,” Babble spoke up, “we ought to pack up and leave here. Immediately.”

“Leave how?” Ignatz Thugg said, grinning.

Nosers, Seth Morley thought. We have no vehicles here except inert and fuel-zero nosers, and even if we could round up the fuel—say by syphoning from every fuel tank to fill up one—they don’t have tracking gear by which we could pilot a course. They would have to use Delmak-O as one of two coordinates, and Delmak-O is not on Interplan West charts—hence no tracking value. He thought, Is this why they insisted on our coming in nosers?

They’re experimenting with us, he thought wildly. That’s what this is: an experiment. Maybe there never were any instructions on the satellite’s tape. Maybe it all was planned.

“Make a sample try at picking up the relay people,” Tallchief said. “Maybe you can get them right now.”

“Why not?” Belsnor said. He adjusted dials, clamped an earphone to the side of his head, opened circuits, closed others down. In absolute silence the others waited and watched. As if, Morley thought, our lives depend on this. And—perhaps they do.

“Anything?” Betty Jo Berm asked at last.

Belsnor said, “Nothing. I’ll switch it on video.” The small screen jumped into life. Mere lines, visual static. “This is the frequency on which the relay operates. We should pick them up.”

“But we’re not,” Babble said.

“No. We’re not.” Belsnor continued to spin dials. “It’s not like the old days,” he said, “when you could tinker with a variable condenser until you got your signal. This is complex.” All at once he shut off the central power supply; the screen blanked out and, from the speakers, the snatches of static ceased.

“What’s the matter?” Mary Morley asked.

“We’re not on the air,” Belsnor said.

“What?” Startled exclamations from virtually all of them.

“We’re not transmitting. I can’t pull them and if we’re not on the air they sure as hell aren’t going to pull us.” He leaned back, convulsed with disgust. “It’s a plot, a friggin’ plot.”

“You mean that literally?” Wade Frazer demanded. “You mean this is intentional?”

“I didn’t assemble our transmitter,” Glenn Belsnor said. “I didn’t hook up our receiving equipment. For the last month, since I’ve been here, in fact, I’ve been making sample tests; I’ve picked up several transmissions from operators in this star system, and I was able to transmit back. Everything seemed to be working normally. And then this.” He stared down, his face working. “Oh,” he said abruptly. He nodded. “Yes, I understand what happened.”

“Is it bad?” Ben Tallchief asked.

Belsnor said, “When the satellite received my signal to activate the audio tape construct and complying transmitter, the satellite sent a signal back. A signal to this gear.” He indicated the receiver and transmitter rising up before him. “The signal shut down everything. It overrode my instructions. We ain’t receiving and we ain’t transmitting, no matter what I tell this junk to do. It’s off the air, and it’ll probably take another signal from the satellite to get it functioning again.” He shook his head. “What can you do but admire it?” he said. “We transmit our initial instruction to the satellite; in response it sends one back. It’s like chess: move and respond. I started the whole thing going. Like a rat in a cage, trying to find the lever that drops food. Rather than the one that transmits an electric shock.” His voice was bitter, and laden with defeat.

“Dismantle the transmitter and receiver,” Seth Morley said. “Override the override by removing it.”

“It probably—hell, undoubtedly—has a destruct component in it. It’s either already destroyed vital elements or it will when I try to search for it. I have no spare parts; if it’s destroyed a circuit here and there I can’t do anything toward fixing it.”

“The automatic pilot beam,” Morley said. “That I followed to get here. You can send out the message on it.”

“Automatic pilot beams work for the first eighty or ninety thousand miles and then peter out. Isn’t that where you picked up yours?”

“More or less,” he admitted.

“We’re totally isolated,” Beslnor said. “And it was done in a matter of minutes.”

“What we must do,” Maggie Walsh said, “is to prepare a joint prayer. We can probably get through on pineal gland emanation, if we make it short.”

“I can help on preparing it, if that’s the criterion,” Betty Jo Berm said. “Since I’m a trained linguist.”

“As a last resort,” Belsnor said.

“Not as a last resort,” Maggie Walsh said. “As an effective, proven method of getting help. Mr. Tallchief, for example, got here because of a prayer.”

“But it passed along the relay,” Belsnor said. “We have no way to reach the relay.”

“You have no faith in prayer?” Wade Frazer asked, nastily. Belsnor said, “I have no faith in prayer that’s not electronically augmented. Even Specktowsky admitted that; if a prayer is to be effective it must be electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Manifestations are reached.”

“I suggest,” Morley said, “that we transmit our joint prayer as far as we can through the automatic pilot beam. If we can project it eighty or ninety thousand miles out it should be easier for the Deity to pick it up… since gravity works in inverse proportion to the power of the prayer, meaning that if you can get the prayer away from a planetary body—and ninety thousand miles is reasonably away—then there is a good mathematical chance of the various Manifestations receiving it, and Specktowsky mentions this; I forget where. At the end, I think, in one of his addenda.”