Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

Colbie said it was all right with him. After all, the whole thing was up to Deverel from now on. No number of solutions would help if Deverel didn’t give in.

They discussed the color of the strange substance. Did it have one? No, certainly not; it absorbed no light, hence was the color of any light it reflected. Could they, as a single system of two bodies, change their direction of motion? No. They were a closed system, and as such had a single center of gravity which would continue on its present course forever, unless some outside force intervened. They could jerk, they could squirm, but for every action in one direction, there would be equal reaction in the other. Was this substance either hot or cold as determined by human senses? No. For it could absorb no heat, nor could it, therefore, transmit heat. The first would convey the impression of coldness, the second that of warmth-

It was an amusing subject, and exhaustless. But Deverel plucked no fruit from its many branches. They were still hopelessly marooned within the bowl of the incredible mirror.

They hit the apex of the third swing across the great mirror—and fell downward again. They bounced back up from the bottom, zoomed upward through the sea of luminescence, fell downward again the fifth time.

And Deverel said, “It’s coming. It’s here. The first Crucial Moment. But we have to pass it up.”

The sixth apex dwindled away, found Deverel looking longingly at the sharply rising mountain which he had placed in his head as a landmark, “the place they had to get back to.”

“I know when we have to get out,” he told Colbie anxiously, “but the how of it knocks me! Every trip across we take, we fall nearer the bottom by ten feet. Right now we’re about sixty feet below the plane of the rim of the mirror. How are we going to rise that sixty feet?”

“You have me there,” said Colbie nonchalantly.

Deverel regarded him seriously. Colbie was an uncaring idiot—didn’t seem to give a damn whether they got out or not. But Deverel was beginning to feel whole new quantities of respect for the IP man. There was certainly more to him than he had hitherto suspected. He smiled. “Still holding out?”

Colbie said he was.

“Well, you know I won’t give in.” Deverel said harshly, “I’m supposed to be damned fool enough to think my way back to Earth with you, back to jail. I’ve outbluffed better men than you, Colbie, and I’ll stick this one out, too. Are we going to be damned fools? You know, if this was off my mind, I could devote myself a lot better to the one problem that fuddles me up.”

But Colbie said that he was sorry he couldn’t help the outlaw get the suspense off his mind. And Deverel’s teeth closed with a snap. Colbie, looking at the hard sardonic features, wondered vaguely, perhaps with a slight inward shudder, what would be the outcome of it all.

Then ensued utter weariness. For interminable minute after interminable minute, they swept dizzyingly down and up through the pressing, aching mist of light. Their eyes became tortured, their brains became inflamed, their muscles stiffened, their nerves jangled. They became irritable and touchy. The monotony was man-killing, especially in view of the fact that the manner of their salvation was yet a thing of the future—or perhaps a thing of no solution.

Deverel was up against a blank wall, and his every word had a snarl in it. “There’s some way it can be done,” he insisted, as they were dropping down after the tenth plunge across the great mirror. “And I have to find it soon. We’re a hundred feet below the rim now. You could help me, Colbie —you’ve the brains for it, I know you have. But you’re lazy, damn it. You insist on sitting back there and letting me do all the thinking. Suggest something, won’t you?”

Colbie answered seriously, “Deverel, I have been thinking. But it’s no good. What is it you know? What strange characteristics has the mirror got that both you and I don’t already know?” He paused, shaking his head. “I can’t see the trees for the forest—I’ll admit it.” He was genuinely sorry he couldn’t help, and was more than a little touched by the outlaw’s desperate search for the final link in the chain he had evidently fabricated. “Why not tell me what it’s all about?” he suggested. “Maybe I can go on from what you’ve found out.”

“No sale!” Deverel snorted angrily. “What I know is my trump card— you’d know as much as I do. Wouldn’t do me any good.”

“Won’t do you any good, anyway—unless you give in.” Colbie grinned easily.

“And you can bet everything you’ve got I won’t!” Deverel snapped. And then looked queerly at Colbie. “You really have made up your mind, haven’t you?” he demanded. He shrugged his shoulders sulkily. “But maybe you’ll change it. That’s what I’m banking on, anyway. You’re not the type that can hold out forever.”

Colbie shrugged his own shoulders in indifference, and then crossed his legs a different way. Thinking better of it, he lay flat on his back, and by virtue of swinging his arms one way and his legs the other, started to whirl about. Elsewhere, the action might have seemed childish, but here it was one of a strictly limited number of amusements.

While this aimless gyration, which, once started, continued unabated, may have amused Colbie at first, it very soon had a much different effect. Abruptly he sat up—still spinning lazily—and stared at Deverel. A slow grin appeared on his lips, went into temporary eclipse as he turned around, and appeared again as the rope holding them together wound up about him. “Your difficulty,” he asked judiciously, “lies in being unable to make up for that hundred feet or so we’ve lost to friction, I take it?”

Deverel looked at him keenly and nodded.

Colbie’s face split in a slow, broad grin. “I haven’t got it all figured out. I said I’d let you do that. But I know how to make up for that difference. It takes cooperation, and maybe if you know how to do it, you’ll give me the rest of that information sooner. Because I won’t cooperate till you do. You think what I was doing, and you’ll get it.”

Deverel looked at him blankly. Then—”I’ve got it!” he gurgled. “I knew it could be done—and it’s easy!”

He was talking rapidly, excitedly. “I’ve got the whole thing worked out, now. Everything I need! It’s only a question of waiting. Two or three more times across the mirror— Now listen,” he went on rapidly. “You have to tell me it’s all right. This’ll get us out, both of us. You will, won’t you?” he demanded anxiously.

Then he saw Colbie’s mask of a face and shouted furiously, “Don’t be a damned fool, Colbie! You don’t want to die, do you? You know you won’t be able to stand death from lack of water and food—you know it! Now’s the time to make up your mind.” He was feverish.

“I made up my mind quite a while ago,” Colbie pointed out. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have contributed your clinching link just now.”

Deverel laughed harshly. “You’re going to stick with it,” he jeered. “You’re going to let a principle kill you! Well, I’m going to let it kill me, too—and I’m not as scared of death as you are. In fact, it’d be better if I did die; I’ve got too much hell in store for me, one way and another. So I don’t really care. How do you like that?” he ripped out savagely.

“It’s all right with me—I always knew you didn’t give much of a damn about anything, Deverel.” He smiled disarmingly.

Deverel regarded him in blank amazement, an amazement that swiftly turned into sheer, obvious admiration. Until that moment, Deverel had doubted that Colbie was sure of his intentions; now he knew it, and the knowledge gave him a new picture of Colbie.