Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“Hardly a revelation. But go on.”

“All right, in desperation out there we might become able to flash back along ourselves to a point of danger and tip the scales for death. I tell you, I felt it!”

“The pain I grant you, but not the danger. Suppose you had killed yourself, aged ten. Then you couldn’t have made that unauthorized tape-substitution and we wouldn’t be here. But we are here.”

“Someone else would have done it, perhaps you.”

“That’s changing the past,” McPherson said angrily.

“The past would be intact all the way back to Creation, for all you could ever determine,” Gard said. “But I’d be dead.”

“I just can’t think it, Ed.”

“None of us can think it in our bones and muscles, Ike,” Svirsky said, “but we can still talk about it in words. Listen now, not with your muscles. Each of us is a world-line in a four-dimensional continuum that contains a certain irreversibility. To know ourselves, we segregate the irreversibility into one dimension and call it time. Then we experience ourselves as free in the other three dimensions. Suppose now, not with your muscles, that the Proteans handle the irreversibility differently. They have made a cage for us, as we for them, but of their own world-stuff.”

“Show me a crucial test for that hypothesis and I’ll buy it, Joe,” Chalmers said. “But you do give me an idea. We have long known how language both structures and reflects the structure of the microcosm which we project into the world and what a social process it is. We may be able to overcome this disintegrating influence by going out in company and talking constantly.”

“Not all of us,” Gard said sharply. “We might all flash back and get hurt or die and this trip would never have been. I won’t have that.”

“You mean to coerce history by holding back a hostage? I talk in words, I talk in words!”

“Yes. There may also be a least action factor that makes prevention of suicide more probable than bodily replacement.”

“I wish we could cancel this trip!” Minelli burst out. “That guy Onderdonck that broke his back ski-jumping just before we left must’ve known what he was doing. God knows how we’ll end.”

“I see your point, Ed, but I prefer to call it a control. Whom shall we leave?”

“Joe and yourself,” McPherson said. “In time you two will hammer this thing out flat, I feel it. We can’t risk you.”

Chalmers demurred and was shouted down. Gard’s right hand clasped McPherson’s left strongly. Minelli had firm hold of Gard’s left wrist. The three men moved out, talking steadily.

Look, the tree’s blurry. Pete, Pete, pick out the leaves. Keep seeing the leaves, well the branches then don’t let it get solid pull off a twig man feel it bite it bleeding the tree screamed bending at me the earth the grass pull it bleed ingand foldingover God’seyeupthen .. .

“. . . eat mud, Ed Gard. You said it’s no different up here than on the ground.”

“Must be a hundred-foot drop.”

“So the I-beam is still just as wide as the one you walked down below. With your eyes closed, down below. Eat mud, Ed Gard.”

“I’m scared. But I won’t eat mud.”

“Eat mud, Ed Gard.” .

“Here goes, damn you. Just as wide, nothing to it . . .”

. . . armsthrashingco lorsflashing the fear the fear jerking him along past lump trees a man too, and there Svirsky reaching out, the zone, of course, clearing now, all right now.

Mary Gard let go of Vane’s hand and looked ruefully at Chalmers.

“Well, Hank, talking doesn’t help,” she said.

“That’s data too, Mary. What did you experience, Chuck? Time suicide?”

“Hell no,” Vane said. “We talked and things went horrible anyway and then bang, we were still talking, but it was back in my office in Denver. A real memory-dream, like. Mary was just telling me about Ike McPherson being arrested for rape and it was an hour before lift out. She was crying.”

“Can you really cry, Mary?” Chalmers asked.

“Tears of rage, Hank,” Mary said. “I couldn’t bear being thwarted. Even with only Chuck and I knowing the secret, the jinx still worked. Onderdonck broke his back and Minelli got cut up in a tavern brawl and that was all right, we could go short-handed. But we had to have a shipman.”

“She knew I was licensed,” Vane took up the story. “She said it was Earth’s last chance to solve the mystery of Proteus and she wouldn’t let it go, was I a man or a mouse, and me saying I’d be busted out of the Corps and my wife screaming mad and both of us still saying it as she dragged me up the gangplank.”

“That doesn’t support your death-urge hypothesis, Mary,” Chalmers said.

“Mine does again. Maybe it’s just me,” Mary said. “I went back to an experience of my father’s, a bad fall that kept him out of school for a year. It was eerie—death waiting and a kind of voluptuous wanting to fall. I could feel myself taunting myself into it, swinging myself into vertigo, yet it was my father all the time.”

“But your father survived. Even granting that your consciousness can cross a world-line synapse into a parent, you haven’t changed anything. Chuck’s experience was innocuous. Our solid evidence indicates only loss of awareness and coordination in present time.”

“Even so, that’s dangerous,” Vane said. “We couldn’t man the ship in that state. The wolf-things or even the Proteans could eat us alive.”

“Chuck, that’s the how!” Mary cried. “Remember how the Proteans seem to paralyze or uncoordinate the goatthings they sometimes eat? I’ll bet they just run around them. Remember how they walked around us and we felt angry and had headaches and how I conked out and got bitten on my bad arm? They were trying to put us in cages then and we were too strong. So now they’ve done it massively. It’s as if we’d made our cage out of armor plate after the first one failed.”

“That’s part of the what, not the how,” Chalmers objected, “and your argument is from analogy—”

“Which may be perfectly good Protean logic,” Svirsky interrupted. “It’s a Protean cage we’re in. No how will satisfy you until we.reduce it to touch and kinesthesis. But this how is different. Consider, our bodies are not caged but our minds are.”

“How can a mind be caged?" Vane asked.

“When we know, we will escape,” Svirsky said. “We must play a word game now apart from muscle-thinking. We are in a time trap. Here in our cage our entropy increases. I am thirsty. I feel the heat of that sun, but I marked the cage shadow after our first alarm and in all our scramblings since that sun has not moved"

Chalmers paled. “That’s something I can grasp, anyway. It supports Mary’s weird notion about changing the past. That stillness out there. Time stasis. To be conscious is to be conscious of change . . . now I talk in tongues, Mary.”

“It’s only a word game, Hank. Keep talking.”

“All right, changing the past, words only,” Vane said. “Coercing history by leaving someone behind. That dream I had out there, damn it, I wanted to tell Mary to go to hell and I couldn’t. Maybe that was history coercing me. But let’s all go out now, and if I hit that sequence again you can damn well bet I’ll refuse and we’ll be out of this fix. Word game!”