Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

“What a contract for the firm that landed the bid!” Deverel put in, smiling. “What do you say we top it? I’ve got an itch to see it firsthand—touch it.”

Colbie nodded, and Deverel braced himself against the wall, forming a cup with his heavily gloved hands. “Up you go! But once you get up,” he warned, “careful you don’t topple. That’d mean trouble in large doses.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Colbie said grimly. “If any one falls, it’s going to be you, not me.”

He put one foot in the outlaw’s hands. Deverel heaved. Colbie shot up and caught both hands around the rim, which sloped inward. That done, he drew himself upward so that he was sitting carefully on the rim, facing Deverel.

With much effort and care, he drew Deverel beside him, and then, as if with mutual consent, they twisted their heads and sent their eyes out over the great mirror.

At once, all sense of perspective and balance left them. Light from all directions smote them, blinded them, sent a haze into their minds. Downward and to all sides and above, there was light. In fact, the light of the stars and the light of the mirror were indistinguishable in the split second when that bewildering sensation of instability struck them. Colbie thought fleetingly and in panic that he was poised upside down on the most insecure foothold in the universe. He could not decide, in that split second, which was the true sky.

So—he clutched at the wrong sky, and toppled over the rim.

Deverel, feeling precisely the same sensations, would have recovered in time had not the rope attaching him to Colbie forcefully jerked at him a second before he had fully decided which way was up. So they both fell down the angle of the mirror, and were, in a second, shooting haphazardly, horridly, through an interminable pressing mist of light and nothing but light.

They were plunging downward so swiftly, and yet so lightly, that they might have been wafted along on an intangible beam of force. For they felt nothing. Not the slightest sensation of sliding— only a sense of acceleration downward.

After that first moment of heart-stopping horror, after the first panic, the first moment of unutterable vertigo had passed, Colbie’s nerves started quivering violently. Deliberately he quieted them by closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Then he opened fists and eyes both, and looked around for Deverel. Deverel was about five feet behind him.

Deverel was looking at him from eyes that were extremely concerned.

“And I said to be careful,” he snapped angrily. Colbie started to open his lips with hot words, but Deverel waved a hand disgustedly. “I know, I know. My fault, too.” He drew a long breath and occupied himself putting his head where his feet were.

Colbie did the same, and then very gingerly tried to stay his fall, by pressing his hands and feet on the surface of the mirror. This had not the slightest effect on his position or his velocity. He found that it was extremely difficult to twist his body except by flinging his arms around, but he accomplished this not by any aid the mirror gave him. His hands in no slightest degree rubbed against the mirror’s surface. In fact, he felt no sensation which told him that his hands might have touched a surface. It was as if he had run a finger over a vat of some viscous slime, as if the slime had imparted no heat, no cold, had not adhered to his finger, had not impeded its motion in any way, had merely guided it along a path determined by its own surface!

He closed his eyes painfully. The trend of his thoughts hinted of insanity. He tried to analyze his sensations. He was falling. Falling straight down, at the acceleration the gravity of this planet gave his body. But he knew he was merely gliding along at a downward angle. He was simply being guided by a substance which in no degree impeded the action of gravity. That must mean-

No friction!

The words exploded in his brain—and exploded crazily from his mouth. “No friction!”

Deverel stared at him, and then frantically made tests. He tried to rub that surface. He felt nothing, nothing that held his hand back—as if it had slid along infinitely smooth ice.

“You’re right,” he said, staring stupidly. “That’s what it must be. Hell —it’s frictionless!” And then he cried, “But that can’t be!” and his lips twitched. “There can’t be anything that’s frictionless. You know that. It can’t be done!”

Colbie shook his head as one speaking to a child. “No, Deverel,” he found himself saying in a kindly voice, an insistent but pitying voice, “it has no rub. You put your hand on it and push. And does it hold your hand back? No.” He shook his head sadly. “They made this stuff frictionless.”

And as they shot downward into the sea of light, they held each other with their dumbfounded eyes.

The outlaw sharply shook his head. “We’re making fools of ourselves. Let’s face it. There isn’t any friction. Now—now we’re up against something.”

“I know it.”

Colbie almost drunkenly squirmed around, and finally maneuvered until he was sitting, his feet crossed under him, his eyes trained hypnotically into the downward distance. Or was there any distance? There was no horizon. The stars, and the conglomerate glow of the mirror that was the absolute reflection of the stars, merged with each other.

‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,” he said stubbornly. “Let’s think this out. We’ve got to get used to it.”

“Right.” And Deverel did the first sensible thing by twisting and looking behind him. They had toppled over the rim of the mirror almost exactly two minutes ago, and though their velocity had steadily been mounting, there was a horizon back there which could be seen. It was mainly indicated by that lofty, slowly rising mountain which loomed up against the rim of the mirror. He felt that it was a good landmark—somehow, that was the place they had to get back to.

“Now look,” he said seriously to Colbie, “let’s talk this over.” His voice was slightly metallic as it came through Colbie’s earphones. “Before I landed on this planet I took some readings on that mirror same as you, and I guess I came to the same conclusions.

“Long ago, maybe a million years, there was a race of men—or beings— who lived on a planet that circled a sun just like ours, perhaps. They had a satellite, this planet we’re on. They were engineers on a monster scale. I have no doubt they could have remade their planet, and even their solar system, exactly to suit themselves—and maybe they did. But they made this satellite over to suit themselves, that’s certain. They gouged out—how I wouldn’t know—a section of this planet that corresponded to the bottom part of a sphere. The radius of that sphere—I figured it—is about 1600 miles out in space. Then, so help me—I wouldn’t know this, either—they coated that gouged-out surface with some substance which, when it hardened, formed an absolutely smooth surface. You came to the same conclusions I did, didn’t you? That it was such a perfect reflector you couldn’t measure the amount it didn’t reflect?”

Colbie, listening with interest, nodded. “And we should have seen that such a good reflector would be frictionless, too. Couldn’t be any other way. And say!” he exclaimed. “This stuff can’t be frictionless. We knew it couldn’t reflect all light. It simply reflects all but a negligible amount of light, and it’s got a negligible amount of friction, too!”

“That’s right!” Deverel was genuinely relieved. “That idea of no friction at all had me going cuckoo. ‘Course not—there can’t be any surface that’s got no friction at all. The molecular state of matter forbids it. No matter how close you crowd the molecules, they still make an infinitesimally bumpy surface.