Уильям Макгиверн - Collected Fiction - 1940-1963

“Do you want me to follow them down?” Ramar Chind asked.

Garr Symm envied the policeman. Naturally, Ramar Chind did not share his terror. You didn’t know the terror until you learned about proto-man; then the response seemed to be triggered in your brain, as if it had been passed to you through the genes of your ancestors, waiting a million years for release...

Fear, a guardian.

Of what? Garr Symm asked himself. Think of that, fool. Think of what it guards.

Power—

Teleportation or its equivalent.

Gone the subjective passage of hours in hyper-space.

Earned — if you were strong enough or brave enough to earn it — the ability to travel instantly from one humanoid world to another. Instantly. Perhaps from any one point on any humanoid world to any one point, precise, specific, exact, on another world.

To plunder.

Or assassinate.

Or control the lives of men, everywhere.

Sans ship.

Sans fear.

Sans the possibility of being caught or stopped.

Sweating, Garr Symm said: “Bring the Dog Star down after them, Ramar Chind.”

Ramsey smiled without humor. “What now, little lady?” he said mockingly.

“Shut up. Oh, shut up!”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I told you to shut up. I have to think.”

“I didn’t know a gorgeous tri-di actress ever had to think.”

“Let me see those figures again,” Margot said.

Ramsey handed her the tapes from the Enterprise’s environment-checker.

Temperature: minus two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.

Atmosphere: none.

Gravity: eight-tenths Earth-norm.

“And we don’t have a spacesuit aboard,” Ramsey said.

“But it can’t be. It can’t. This is the home of proto-man. I know it is. But if I went out there I’d perish from cold in seconds and lack of air in minutes.”

“That’s right,” Ramsey said almost cheerfully. “So do I take the ship back up?”

“I hate you, Jason Ramsey. Oh, I hate you!” Margot cried. Then suddenly: “Wait! Wait a minute! What was that you were thinking? Tell me! You must tell me—”

Ramsey shook his head and tried to force the thoughts from his mind with doggerel. Ben Adam, he thought. Abou Ben Adam, Humpty Dumpty, hurry, hurry, hurry, the only two headed get yours here the sum of the square of the sides is equal to the square of the hyper-space, no, mustn’t think that mimsy were the borogroves and the momraths now what the heck did the momraths do anyhow absolute zero is the temperature at which all molecular activity...

“What were you thinking, Ramsey?”

His mind was a labyrinth. There were thousands of discrete thoughts, of course. Millions of them, collected over a lifetime. But all at once he did not know his way through that labyrinth and his thoughts kept whirling back to the one Margot Dennison wanted as if, somehow, she could pluck it from his mind.

She stood before him, her brow furrowed, sweat beading her pretty face.

And she was winning, forcing the thought to take shape in Ramsey’s mind—

But if I went out there I’d perish from cold in seconds and lack of air in minutes.

Cold , came the known and unbidden thoughts to Ramsey’s struggling mind. And lack of air. Attributes of extension, of space , but measured by duration, by time. And since time does not exist in hyper-space, the vacuum out there and the terrible, killing cold, could have no effect on you. You could go out there perfectly protected from the lethal environment by the absence of the time dimension.

Margot smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Ramsey.”

He was about to speak, but she added: “And don’t give me that stuff about a power we shouldn’t tamper with. I’m going out there. Now.”

Ramsey nodded slowly. “I won’t stop you.”

“But just so you don’t get any ideas of stranding me here — Vardin. Vardin’s going with me.”

The Vegan girl looked at Ramsey mutely.

Ramsey said: “What makes you think I’ll let you take her?”

Margot smiled again. “The m.g. gun makes me think so.”

“The heck of it is, you’re not really bad, Margot. This thing’s got you, is all. You’re not essentially evil.”

“Thank you for the thrilling compliment. I’m delighted,” Margot said sarcastically.

“Vardin stays with me.”

Margot reminded him of the lethal m.g. gun by showing it to him, muzzle-first.

He laughed in her face. “Go ahead and shoot.”

She stared at him.

“There isn’t a lethal weapon’d do you any good here in a timeless continuum. Take an m.g. gun. It induces an artificial breakdown of radioactive fuel in its chamber, firing an instantly lethal dose of radiation. But in order for radioactive breakdown to occur, time must pass. Even if it’s only milliseconds, as in the case of an m.g. gun. There aren’t any milliseconds on this world, Margot. There isn’t any time. So go ahead and pull the trigger.”

Margot frowned and pointed the gun to one side and fired.

Nothing happened. Margot almost looked as if her hard shell had been sundered by the impotence of the m.g. gun. She pouted. Her eyes gleamed moistly.

Then Ramsey said: “O.K. Let’s go.”

“What — what do you mean?”

“Out there. All of us.”

“But I thought you said—”

“Sure, I’m scared stiff. A normal man would be. It’s in our genes, according to your father. But I’m also a man. What the devil d’you think it was first got man out of his cave and started along the road to civilization and the stars? It was curiosity. Fear restraining him, and curiosity egging him on. Which do you think won in the end?”

“Oh, Ramsey, I could kiss you!”

“Go right ahead,” Ramsey said, and she did.

They opened the airlock. They went outside smiling.

But Vardin, who went with them, wasn’t smiling. There was sadness instead.

In cumbersome spacesuits, the five Irwadians made their way from the Dog Star to the Enterprise . Ramar Chind and his three policemen carried m.g. guns; Garr Symm was unarmed. Chind used a whorl-neutralizer to force the pattern of the lock on the outer door of the Enterprise’s airlock. Then the five of them plunged inside the ship.

The inner door was not closed.

The Enterprise was empty.

Garr Symm looked doubtfully at the gray murkiness behind them. Although the Dog Star stood out there less than a quarter of a mile away, they couldn’t see it through the murk.

“Where did they go?” Ramar Chind asked.

Symm waved vaguely behind them.

Chind and his men turned around.

Gritting his teeth against the fear which welled up like nausea from the pit of his stomach, Garr Symm went with them.

At that moment they all heard the music.

“You hear it?” Ramsey asked softly. His voice did not carry on the airless world, of course. But he spoke, and the words were understood, not merely by Margot, who could read his mind, but by Vardin as well.

“Music,” said Margot. “Isn’t it — beautiful?”

Ramsey nodded slowly. He could barely see Margot, although he held her hand. He could barely see Vardin although they stood hand in hand too. The music was un-Earthly, incapable of repetition, indescribably the loveliest sound he had ever heard. He wanted to sink down into the obscuring gray murk and weep and listen to the haunting, sad, lovely strains of sound forever.

“What can it possibly be?” Margot asked.

Surprisingly, it was Vardin who answered. “Music of the Spheres,” she said. “It’s a legend on Vega III, my world.”

“And on Earth,” Ramsey said.