Barrington Bayley - The Star Virus

“Have you finished the test?” Rodrone asked.

With an affected sigh Redace gestured elegantly, inviting him towards a nearby doorway.

Closing the door on the noise outside, Rodrone soaked up the already familiar scene in the workroom. The lens lay on the floor, surrounded by the equipment Redace had brought with him when his spacer thundered down into the crater. For nearly a month now they had applied every test and experiment they could think of, provided it seemed unlikely to damage the specimen.

Redace was something of an expert in vibratory techniques. Withdrawing behind soundproof baffles, he had bombarded the lens with vibrations of every frequency until the air sang and throbbed and their bodies ached with the dangerous pulsations. Then he had fed the results through a computer.

The computer’s verdict had been interesting. The material of the lens—which they still could not analyze—was doped with atoms in a peculiar state of vibration. They were what gave off the glowing swirl in the center. Just what the atoms were they couldn’t say, except that they were trans-plutonian.

Beyond that, they had discovered nothing concrete and were forced back on speculation. Redace still clung to the theory Rodrone had abandoned, that the lens was a picture device showing fictional playlets.

“But why are the Streall so desperate to have it back?” Rodrone objected.

The other shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their outfit? Maybe it’s some big chief Streall’s kid’s favorite toy, so he’s sent out the army and the navy to find it.”

Rodrone disliked any explanation that smacked of the trivial. He was much too in awe of the lens to accept that. Hour after hour he sat gazing spellbound at the myriad shifting scenes. As he watched, his whole perspective on the universe seemed to change, twist and distort itself, so that several times he had to wing himself back to his normal way of thinking with a snap.

Only rarely did the lens show anything familiar. Most of the scenes were utterly alien. Also rare was any scene taking place in space. Almost invariably the brief dramas enacted themselves on planetary surfaces, under the sea, or sometimes deep underground. Duration varied between a few minutes and a few hours. The one exception to both this and the first rule was the picture that had begun shortly after the lens first came to life. For weeks the brown-garbed monk had sat on his hillock, head on hand, shifting position every now and then. One day he had sprung to his feet and gone walking, on and on. Eventually he met a group of ill-dressed men—thus putting an end to any doubts about his human nature—and harangued them vigorously until they turned to go. At that, the monk took a whip from his belt and lashed out at them, driving them before him like cattle.

The bizarre procession still continued, over arid hills, plains, fording sluggish rivers. Of all the stories to be seen so far in the lens, it was at once the most tedious and the most compelling.

Then, one day, Rodrone himself had jumped up as a new idea occurred to him.

“Got it. It’s a communicator!”

“Hmm? Who’s on the other end?”

“Nobody. And the scenes aren’t fiction. Somehow or other the lens picks up real happenings from all over the galaxy. It’s a sort of universal observer.”

“Not tenable,” Redace said after a moment’s thought. “Some of the pictures clearly are fictional. Their meaning is symbolic.”

Rodrone had to admit that was a flaw in his theory, but he refused to reject it on that account. The symbolic stories, he argued, could be codified versions of situations not readily comprehensible in direct form to the viewer for whom the lens was designed.

His theory suggested two tests. Firstly, there should be selective controls for the lens. Secondly, it seemed reasonable that the central swirl of light should represent the Hub of Thiswhirl, or the Milky Way, to give the galaxy its archaic name.

Even Redace had admitted himself to be knocked over by the suggestion. “Every atom a sun! But that’s incredible.”

But Rodrone urged that the avenue should be explored. The first part of their plan failed miserably. By no means could they influence or alter the kaleidoscope of pictures in the outer parts of the lens. Either its controls were beyond their reach, or it was a law unto itself. The difficulties involved even in contemplating the second part made Redace threaten to go back to his asteroids. Rodrone wanted him to map the doped atoms, not one at a time, which was impossible with their equipment, but by density and agglomeration. The intention was to compare this map with a similar one of suns in the galaxy, or failing that, in the Hub.

This latter scheme was the one that Rodrone hoped had now been completed. As soon as they entered the workroom Redace minced over to his computer-operated collator and turned to give Rodrone a teasing smile.

“Yes, our labor of love is all finished, sweetheart, and though I do say so myself it’s all been a gorgeous waste of time.”

“The maps don’t match?”

“No more than I would with a Vegan duck.”

Rodrone sat down and looked at the monk, still driving his unwilling herd, whipping them now through rain and slush. Lightning flashes crashed down on either side of them, as if daring them to go on. And indeed, one thunderbolt struck a straggler and converted him to a charred mass. Against desperate protests, the monk took no notice and lashed his slaves on.

“Well, perhaps the doped atoms aren’t meant to be a literal representation,” he suggested. “Conceivably they play no part in the working of the thing at all. They could be ornamental, just a symbol of what it’s for.”

“Could be, could be. Excuse me, love, but do you know what I think? Eventually you’ll see a picture you might have seen before. Then another one you know you’ve seen before. The whole sequence will repeat itself. There’s a record of it all in there somewhere, which you have accidentally switched on.”

“If that’s all it is, why do the Streall want it so badly?”

“Do they? You may be overestimating that, you know. Take my tip, Rodrone dear, and relax for a bit. Anyway, who knows? I didn’t say there was only one record. Maybe another one gives all the addresses where some Streall politician gets his kicks. The only copy, and very embarrassing if it falls into the wrong hands.”

The trouble with Redace, Rodrone thought, was his conviction that the sordid explanations were usually the right ones. In exasperation he stood up and gave the lens a kick.

The door opened and he glanced around irritably at the stocky, pale-faced man who entered.

“Something’s happening on the communicator, chief.”

“What do you mean, ‘something’s happening’?” Rodrone almost snarled.

“It’s—the Streall are through to us!”

Rodrone pushed him aside and went charging through the door, Redace following. The news had evidently spread, for there was consternation in the recreation area.

In the communicator room he found Clave and Kulthol. The redhead was scowling and rubbing the stubble on his chin. Clave, for all his death’s grin, looked a little stunned.

The communicator screen was blank, but odd squawks came from the speaker, breaking eventually into intelligible speech. When the Streall spoke to one another it sounded like a cat spitting; when forced to use human speech, they made grotesque gobbling noises in a travesty of the human voice.

“You will please answer.”

Rodrone noticed that the transmit key was still switched off. “Don’t answer,” he said. “Just let the signal fade.”

“It doesn’t show any sign of fading, chief,” Kulthol told him gruffly. “They seem to have an angle that keeps space-tensor contact going for as long as they like.”