Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

He was approaching the core. He focused his attention on the two instruments directly in front of him. He could feel the deceleration of the boat as the toruses, top and bottom, became more nearly balanced. The temperature inside the cabin was one hundred and forty-six degrees Fahrenheit, but Wilburn was not uncomfortable. He had the feeling that everything was going very well, and he wished he could tell Harriet. The deceleration continued; several of the gauges on the periphery of his vision went off scale. He was very close to the core. Conditions seemed to be as predicted.

He continued to watch, and a chime softly began a beat that slowly increased in tempo. He did not know it, because there was no instrument to record it, but the temperature outside approached the one billion mark. He watched the neutrino flux direction indicator, knowing that the great quantity of water aboard was no longer in the form of a liquid, vapor or solid, and it crossed his mind to wander how that could be. And when the neutrino flux direction indicator wavered, and changed direction to show he had just passed through the very center of the core, he placed his finger on the black button. The last thing he remembered were the words, still clear in his ears, “don’t mean a thing without one human finger.” Then the walls of the boat collapsed and released the water. And the electron-positron pairs appeared instead of the neutrino-antineutrino pairs. On the neutrino detector in the orbiting ship, Eden saw the tiny, hot core fade and disappear. The technician made an adjustment to bring in the neutrinos with slightly greater interaction, and the normal core showed up again, with its normal neutrino flux. But Eden, though he stared at the screen with eyes wide open, could see nothing but a blur.

The room was white. Its walls were like unmarked fields of snow, gleaming in the light of four fluorescent strips set in the ceiling. In the center of the room stood the Box, a huge cube of stainless steel ten feet on a side. It resembled some exquisite, ultimately formal piece of modern sculpture, although Carpenter, whose last visit to an art gallery had been as a freshman many years ago, preferred to think of it as a shiny, oversized sugar lump.

The surfaces of the Box were, with one exception, featureless, and this exception showed the outline of a flush-fitting door. In place of a latch there was a metal plate possibly five inches square and secured with four crosscut, countersunk bolts. Elleston, who relieved Carpenter at the end of his afternoon watch, had told him that the plate concealed something called a time lock.

Carpenter sat on a chair with his back to one of the room’s white walls and facing the Box’s door. He was a large man and the chair was rather too small to be comfortable. He’d asked Horden, the man who’d hired him, for a new chair. Carpenter thought that Horden, who was a sedentary, oversized, florid man himself, would be sympathetic to his request, but three weeks had passed so far and the chair had not been replaced.

For four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon Carpenter was supposed to watch the Box. There was a red disk inset on the wall beside him and he was supposed to press this if anything untoward occurred. Untoward was Horden’s word. Supposedly the red disk was some kind of alarm.

Anne had picked him up in her Volkswagen after his first day at Chemitect.

She was glad he had got the job. He was really very lucky. Had he seen the unemployment count, going up and up? This was really a job he should try to hold onto. How had it gone?

The Volkswagen purred into life. Carpenter was happy to let Anne drive. He didn’t like the Volkswagen—its seats were too small for one thing—but it was cheap and it was economical to run and it was all they really needed.

He told her about the job, about how all it was just sitting there, you see, and watching this ... Well, he didn’t know what it was. It was big and square and shiny. Like a big, square shiny box. Yes, he meant he just sat there, he really did. On a chair. Well, wasn’t sitting in a clean room better than grease-monkeying? Yes, that was it, only this big square, shiny box, nothing else. What was in the box? Well, he didn’t know. It had a door so ... so he forgot about the door, just a door, nothing else. Well, it had a door, so he supposed there was something inside. Sure he’d asked. He’d asked Elleston...Who Elleston? He didn’t know who Elleston. Elleston relieved him at the end of his afternoon watch, Cochran stood in for him for two hours at lunchtime and Levinson—yes he thought he was Jewish—was the one he relieved in the morning. Yes, he’d asked all three, but none of them knew. None of them knew what—if anything—was in the box.

And there was the alarm of course....

Anne turned her head sharply. Blond, slightly greasy hair spun and whipped at him.

For Christ’s sake watch the road! What are you doing...

Anne turned into a side-street and pulled up.

Well, he was coming to the alarm wasn’t he? Jesus, just a red button. Yes, red. Look, you can’t stop here. He pushed the button if anything untoward happened. What untoward? He meant unusual. OK, he meant if anything went wrong. He didn’t know what was likely to go wrong. Nothing. Nothing would go wrong. They wouldn’t make him sit there if it was dangerous would they? He meant it wasn’t likely to explode was it? He meant that if it exploded, then they wouldn’t need an alarm, would they? Everybody would know about it, you bet. Yes, he realized it wasn’t funny.

Anne said she didn’t like it. Not at all. But she started up the car. Looking out of the window as the city swallowed the Volkswagen, Carpenter smiled so that she wouldn’t see. She was pretty when she worried and wasn’t it nice to have somebody worry about you? He’d marry her when things were better. This job was only the beginning. Hadn’t he thought that about all the others? Sure but the gas station, the drugstore, all the no-hope jobs that anybody could get, that had a high turnover rate unemployment or no unemployment...losing those jobs had at least taught him the importance of keeping this one. Wait until they had enough money put by to go east. Everybody knew the best jobs were in the east. He’d marry her then, in the east.

Later that evening at his apartment she made him promise.

If you don’t promise you don’t get your reward. You know what I mean. Promise you’ll find out what’s in that box. Promise you’ll find out if it’s dangerous. I don’t want you involved in anything dangerous. Please. You know I get worried about you.

She smiled and looked pretty.

He promised.

The cell was white, or had been once.

Its walls were blank, or had been once.

The prisoner slept on a discolored pallet that stank of decaying weeks and months. He wore a coarse shut and trousers that itched upon his skin and caused rashes. Apart from the prisoner and the pallet, and the pail into which he urinated and defecated, there was nothing.

The light, which came from a small barred slit high on one wall of the cell, was dim and constant during the day, nonexistent during the night, which, like the dawn, always came on abruptly. If he jumped he could just reach the window slit with his fingers and, hanging there, could usually just manage to draw himself abreast of it for a few seconds. The slit was only a few inches high and possibly a foot deep in the wall. Through it he could see only blue sky. He never saw a trace of cloud, nor any birds.

The temperature was constant too. Constantly warm. At the window slit he never saw either rain or snow, or any manifestation of the seasons, although he assumed, as with the absence of clouds and birds, that this was merely bad luck. He seldom had the strength to hoist himself to the slit more than twice a day, usually after the meager warmth and sustenance of a meal.