Michael Stall
Tests notoriously bring out the best and the worst in people and in priding ourselves on always rising to a challenge we are aping our ancestors. However deplorable or anachronistic such a stance may be, it could come in mighty handy...
* * * *
The First Door
Inspector Norman Williams of the Humberside constabulary rubbed a rather too bristly chin with his uniform black glove as he looked on the long metallic cylinder that had sprouted overnight in John Sternson’s field. It certainly looked solid and substantial enough: it was surely no hoax; but that being so, just what was it ?
‘There’s an opening at the other end,’ Sternson told him and Williams turned to look at the anxious farmer. But it was no use asking him any more questions; he could either wait for the arrival of a superior officer, or he could investigate himself. There was no question in his mind of what he ought to do; the Humberside constabulary was just five years old, as old as the new county, but in that time it had established the usual traditions.
‘Lead the way.’
* * * *
The opening looked dark and forbidding, and it was quite impossible to see any distance into the object. Williams looked back at the road, two hundred yards away, where he had ordered his driver to remain in the car, in touch with local headquarters. Perhaps he ought to tell his driver... But tell him what?
‘Wait here,’ he told Sternson, and started in.
As he entered, he took off a glove and felt the metal; it was cold to the touch, and smooth—very, very smooth. Some alloy or other, he thought, as he went from the dark portal through a dark passageway, to enter a small, brightly lit chamber, with faceted walls that for a moment made him think he was stepping into the interior of a cut diamond. He touched the glistening wall, and this time it felt warm and yielded a fraction to his touch—but no more. And there was a soft, rustling noise behind him.
He turned quickly about to see the chamber wall parting. He moved into a defensive crouch; but nothing more happened, nothing emerged from the new door, and the passage it opened on was as dark as the passage by which he had entered. Instinctively, he turned the way he had come, half-expecting to find that way out no longer available to him. But it was there, just as before.
In a flush of courage, inspired by the barely conscious realisation that only by action would he have an excuse not to think too deeply about the nature of the thing he found himself in, he entered the new passage with a brisk step.
The passage ended in a glittering screen that shone like the diamond walls of the chamber; but as he approached it he could make out a picture, a scene beyond it. Green pasture and trees, and about a hundred yards past the entrance, another cylinder, shining in the sunlight.
He pressed forward through the screen which offered no resistance, as if it were an illusion; and he stood on green grass, beneath a blue sky. But it was an alien sky; the grass wasn’t the right colour of green; it was strangely bifurcated; the trees were such as had never grown on Earth; and the air had a strange, metallic taste to it. And none of it bothered him. There was a bucolic peace to this landscape; there were no signs of handiworks or artifacts; and everything, for all its strangeness, felt right.
He pressed forward to the new cylinder thinking, even as he entered it, that the chamber within, if it resembled the one he had just come through, was too high to be accommodated—as it was—in the cylinder.
Inside it was as before; a new passage opened for him; he entered, and as he approached the screen, he began to make out the view of a different, dark world, all rocks and shadows. He put forth a hand to where the screen seemed, and felt nothing. Then he withdrew it. He had come far enough; he had learnt enough, perhaps more than enough, for the present. It was his duty to return and report in safety... He turned and made his way back under that safe though alien sky, beginning to wonder what it would be like to be famous.
* * * *
The Second Door
As he lumbered over the grass in his radiation suit, Dr. Julian Wechsler found he couldn’t concentrate on the great enterprise he was about to undertake; he just felt ridiculous under the gaze of the red-tabbed generals and senior civil servants dotted about the field. Who was it who’d said he didn’t believe in adventure because even in its midst, one was always onself ? He couldn’t recall; all he could think of was that he felt itchy inside the suit.
He was actually glad to enter the passage and make his way into the chamber, where there were only three tunnel technicians who saluted him wordlessly as he entered the second passage.
It had all been so much easier for poor old Williams. He’d talked to him in hospital before he’d died, and been very struck by the description of the other world, of the walk Williams had had there, of the peace he had felt there. The peace, though he had not realised it, of a dead world. They were only now beginning to know; but it looked very much as if all the sentient life of that world had been destroyed in some atomic war. It would be easier to tell when the new batch of radiation suits were ready. But for the time being, of course, they had to concentrate on the second door.
He stopped at the screen and picked up the radiation counter that lay just before him. He checked it with practised ease and then began the long walk through the lead tunnel that had been mechanically extruded to join the two cylinders so that in future it would be possible to pass between them without all the ridiculous garments that he now wore. That was essential if the apparently airless world the second door led to was to be properly explored.
He watched the needle on the central dial carefully as he walked; if it started to swing the wrong way he would know that the seal wasn’t perfect and get back in double quick time. But it held, and he found himself in another chamber, just like the one he had left.
Strictly against instructions, but just as he had intended, he walked down the new passage, and looked out on an airless world. In the distance he could see another cylinder. But it was someone else’s job to get to that. And a much simpler job than his own, he judged. His team had done a good job. It was time to go back and tell them.
* * * *
The Third Door
Ernest Thorton screamed. No one heard the scream through the thick full-protection suit, but the young doctor just saw the open mouth and guessed the pain. It was not hard to guess when one saw the fungoid growth that had been Thorton’s face. The young doctor took out a syringe, but his older colleague stopped him. The outside of the suit had been sterilised and sprayed with sealer when he had crawled back through the door; now, they could not take the risk of allowing anything to get out, even through the smallest aperture. The young doctor nodded. The patient would be taken back through the airtube on New Moon to the second chamber. There they would decide whether it was safe to take him back to Earth. By then he would almost certainly be dead.
Ernest Thorton was still screaming as they began to move him.
* * * *
Julian Wechsler scratched his chin. It was not one of his usual reactions but the request that had just been made of him in the domed, airtight resthouse on New Moon had nothing of the normal about it.
‘Yes, I suppose the cylinders would stand it. No temperature we’ve been able to create has had any effect on them, but...” He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘It’s the only way,’ Hardy insisted. ‘Napalm has no lasting effect. An A-bomb mightn’t have a very lasting effect either, but it would clear the hundred yards between cylinders just long enough.’
‘Whose decision is it ?’ Wechsler asked him.
The grey haired spore biologist looked back at him hard. ‘You could swing it. I mean, who is in charge of all this? The PM certainly. His nominee—just an elderly civil servant without scientific training. The real directorship of the project is up for offers. Decide on this, and it works—who else but you will be confirmed Scientific Director?’
The argument had a certain logic to it. The device—in both senses of the word—was crude, but it should be effective for all that; and Wechsler, otherwise a section head at a covert AWRE, was ambitious enough. The Scientific Directorship would eventually bring him a knighthood, a real footing in the scientific power politics of his country, of the world ... He nodded.
Hardy smiled. And suddenly Wechsler wondered at his motive. It could be pure scientific curiosity. It could also be that he intended to steal the credit for himself. Well, he’d picked the wrong boy for that. Wechsler knew he was only a middling physicist, but he was a damned good politician; he owed his present position to that. The thing to do, he knew, was to go straight to the nominee director and offer him the credit—he’d be only too willing to reward him with the Scientific Directorship: the inefficient always need good subordinates—his long service as a civil servant had taught him that.
* * * *
The Fourth Door
Korner ran his eyes lazily over the array of instruments by the greenly flickering screen. The dials on the probe and back-up probes were all large and luminous as it was necessary for them to be read at some distance. The casts themselves were about the size of frying pans: if the next environment were radioactive there would be no large metallic objects to obstruct the way to the next cylinder.
No one, after Williams, was likely just to volunteer to step outside in ignorance. It would have been better if the probes which were to be cast by a small spring steel arbalest, could radio back information. But radio didn’t work. Before the screen and beyond were two different worlds.
It was nearly time. It was scheduled to start in ten minutes, and Director Wechsler was to be there to supervise. Korner wasn’t too happy about that; he rather despised Wechsler as a time-server made good, but he had to admit the man had guts, and he certainly didn’t want his job. He tried to lose himself in the mechanics of his own job in the project, but every so often he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the purpose behind the cylinders. With two men already dead, he didn’t view the makers of this puzzle, or whatever it was, as purely beneficent. He even favoured the idea, current in the project, that the investigation be internationalised. But that was a dead horse; only failure would entail that, so he could not wish for it.
‘Ready?’
Korner turned to see Wechsler standing in the passage. He nodded.
‘It looks all right out there. Perhaps this will be a good world.’
Wechsler didn’t speak, but his silence was a reply; it confirmed Korner’s true opinion. Somebody would die out there. Perhaps himself.
‘Let it go,’ Wechsler ordered.
Stooping, Korner released the arbalest.
And it was all right! This was the good one, Korner felt, as he read the instruments, irritated by seemingly imaginary flashes of light at the edge of his vision: he had hardly slept in several days; sleep would put it right.
* * * *
The re-fashioned, armoured, general purpose suit felt even more uncomfortable than the earlier version: Wechsler felt like nothing so much as a hastily fabricated tank, with himself doing duty as commander and powerplant. He would, he decided, memo the design team about the dehydrating unit.
Abruptly, he realised he was thinking about the suit so as not to think about what he had to do. Well, the best way not to think about it was simply to do it. Without another glance at his back-up man he stepped through the screen into the afternoon world.
He immediately felt ridiculous, like a knight in armour at a garden party. This world was different; but it was right. One could live here. This was the big one.
Something caught at his ankle. He shook it off without looking down. The second cylinder with its new door was only seventy yards off. Something was catching at his ankle again. It was like a large grasshopper. But in steel. And with appalling swiftness, the air was full of them, and they began to settle all over him. Not grasshoppers—locusts! He stood immobile, in shock, listening to a new grating noise— the sound of a hundred tiny steel pincer jaws eating away at his armour. Like a fly in molasses, he turned back the way he had come. Behind that door was safety, a back-up team, only thirty yards and how many parsecs away ? A steel locust obscured his vision; all he could see were pincers gouging into armour glass, desirous of doing the same to his eyes. He wanted to scream, he wanted to run, but that would be death. Summoning all the self-possession he had, he began to walk slowly and deliberately back to the door, the grinding as his armour was slowly eaten away sounding like a death rattle in his ears.
He found the passage with his hands, just as the armour on his left gauntlet gave. He felt steel cut into his flesh. He screamed, but kept on. The armour broke in other places; steel teeth began to eat him alive, and still he moved on, until his counted paces told him he was at the door. He had to be there; his strength was at an end. Then he fell through, into the darkness.
* * * *
A lecturer in Heuristics—a philosopher. A sounding board. A way of externalising a dialogue with himself. He had thought that; but it wasn’t turning out that way, Wechsler realised. Gordey was taking over. It was as if the pain had bankrupted his mind. But he could not admit to that. He picked up the now lifeless locust from his bedside table—his hospital room was on New Moon, but from its appearance, it could have been anywhere on Earth. He turned the locust over in his hands.
‘Utterly dead, now,’ he said in a low, tired voice.
Gordey twisted in the visitor’s chair. ‘But how?’
‘You’ve told me already,’ Wechsler said. ‘Either the door cut it off from its power source, whatever that may be, or the force screen that must somehow be incorporated in the door somehow deactivated it.’ He shook his head tiredly. ‘How does that get us any further?’
‘You’re viewing the problem in isolation,’ Gordey said. ‘The doors are a whole, a series of graduated tests. Until now, our technology has been up to it; now it isn’t. So the problem is bringing it up to this new standard.’
Wechsler looked hard at the locust. Perhaps half a dozen new technologies were there, waiting to be taken.
‘The project needs broadening,’ Gordey said. ‘It’s too big for one country; perhaps for the world. We should-’
‘No.’
Gordey nodded his submission to political reality.
* * * *
‘So be it. Then the thing is to decide what stopped the locusts. We can take it for granted they’ve eaten a sentient race out of existence, that they’re programmed for just that. Every world, even this airless one, with its atmosphere blown off into space by God knows what weaponry, once held living intelligence.’ He noticed Wechsler flush. Everyone on the project knew this; they just didn’t like to talk about it—eminent scientists and superb technologists awed by the cylinders like medieval peasants in a great cathedral. But this was no cathedral, and Gordey refused to be awed. The makers were a long way from gods. He knew where he was. He was in Bluebeard’s Castle and the fifth or sixth or seventh door was death for humanity. He was certain that was the intent; and he knew in his bones there was no turning back. The test couldn’t be ignored; it had to be passed, and beaten.
‘We’ll concentrate on the force field aspect,’ he said with as much assurance as he could manage. ‘The doors have to incorporate them, otherwise air would rush out into the vacuum, or spores drift through. And the force shield we’ll assume beat the locusts.’ It was a tall order. But they knew they existed, so they could be understood and duplicated. And then the project would be the paramount power on Earth, for what importance that now had. And suddenly Gordey realised he was making a bid for power. Wechsler, lying half eaten on his bed, realised that too, that much was obvious.
‘Well?’
With equally obvious reluctance, Wechsler slowly nodded his head.
* * * *
Korner enjoyed using the shears. There was an element of danger about it; one had to get fully suited and lug the apparatus out to near the end of the passage, beyond the door; and the shield embodied in the shears was crude compared to the one in the doors: it flashed blue and green and yellow fire like a vastly expensive firework, was energy expensive, and the apparatus was constantly under repair.
But for men in armour it provided a way across to the next cylinder. And back on Earth—a long way back now— the project could use the field to make nuclear weapons obsolete. If the cylinders let men have the time. That particular thought was on everyone’s mind. It was nearly two years now since the forward cylinder had first appeared in a Humber field; and there was a time limit to every test. Korner almost shivered as he thought about it. That was Gordey’s view, and it had diffused downwards.
A pebble tossed through the door tapped against his armour. That was the latest communication system through a thousand kiloparsecs—that was the astronomical section’s conservative estimate—and it meant the Deputy Director was coming through.
He worked the shears in a pyrotechnic display to clear the ground again. It was better not to use the shears with anyone in the way; that tended to build up a static charge on their suits.
As it happened, he didn’t need to use the shears again that day: Gordey crossed uneventfully.
* * * *
The Fifth Door
With Wechsler slowly being put back together again with grafts and cosmetic surgery on New Moon, Deputy Scientific Director Gordey ran the project: the titular head sat in an office in London and signed requisitions, or authorised someone else to authorise someone else to do the same. As he stripped off his suit, he vaguely wondered at the mechanism that kept here—without the intervention of mankind—at a sufficient heat, and with a proper partial pressure of oxygen. They didn’t even know how that was done yet, or where the doors got their power from. He pushed the thought out of his mind and looked about him.
The back-up team on door five was the largest for any of the doors; there was no forward team: for as far as they could tell, this door opened into the interior of a sun.
The door superintendent came over to him. Normanton, Gordey recalled: 47, astrophysicist, married, one daughter, 8, and his wife once held a party card. It was easy to train the memory into becoming a walking card index file. Politicians did it all the time. The one competence of the incompetent, he thought uncharitably: to know whom to tell to do what.
‘Nothing new?’
Normanton nodded. ‘Nothing at all, sir. It seems we’ve reached a dead end.’
Sir—the word echoed in Gordey’s mind: he was always careful for that respect: only the super competent could afford to dispense with it, and a philosopher, even a slightly mathematical one, was a long way from that in as technological an environment as this. Or was he simply an ordinary egoist ? The time was almost come when he could judge for himself.
A dead end, in the centre of a star. The idea made a delayed intrusion on his cheap introspection. There was no sense to it—a graduated test, with no final exam. Having come this far, was it time for the makers of the cylinders to step in ?
But he didn’t believe that: the makers only acted through their agents, the cylinders. It was an intuition without pretence of proof, but he shared it with almost the entire personnel of the project. There had to be a final test. But what? The ability to exist in the centre of a star? With perfect force shields, it was just conceivable; but to what end ? No, it had to be the way he had intuited. But he knew it didn’t have to be that way at all... Now was simply the time he had to take that chance which was the justification for his rank.
He had forgotten Normanton for a moment. He wondered what emotions had played in his eyes, for the superintendent was looking at him oddly.
‘I’ll see it,’ Gordey said, and Normanton superfluously led the way through the last of the identical chambers.
* * * *
The door was simply a solid white, of intense brightness, just viewable. Dramatically, it was a let down. But obviously the force screen was programmed so as not to let enough light out to blind: that was the pattern: on your side of any door, you were safe. But the tests had been quite convincing as to what lay on the other sides of doors; and all the indications were that on the other side of this, there was heat so intense that it could only be the centre of a star.
Now!
‘A dead end,’ Normanton reiterated.
‘I hope not,’ Gordey said, and flung himself through into the whiteness.
* * * *
zoon politikon
Sir Julian Wechsler fumbled with his shorn hands to unfasten his bow tie as he strode into the main room of his small though sufficiently luxurious London flat. He looked content with the world, as a man should who had just dined rather well with both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Technology, and had been offered, and had accepted, the Under Secretaryship of State at MinTech, with especial responsibility for the project. The fact that a life peerage to get him into Parliament went with the job was a pleasant little bonus.
‘Hello, Wechsler.’
In the long silence that followed, Gordey looked Wechsler over. Most traces of the indecisive invalid he had seen in the hospital on New Moon had disappeared; Wechsler had left his chrysalis stage and become fully what he had always been in potential: a politician. But, they had their uses. In fact, they were indispensable.
Oddly, Gordey found himself thinking of those few moments when he had seemed to hang in the flame, wondering whether his gamble that the last door was a test of educated courage had been about to pay off. Wechsler would never have made that jump. But the tests were complex; as well as its technology, they also tested the range of a race.
And the doors had found the Culls wanting.
‘What do you want?’ Wechsler demanded abruptly.
‘There’s been some talk,’ Gordey began elliptically. ‘Talk about not taking a risk with the survival of the human race.’
Wechsler finally managed to divest himself of his bow tie, took a cigar from a box on the table and sat down in the armchair opposite the one Gordey occupied, beside the blazing but simulated fire.
‘Just talk,’ he said, as he lit up.
‘I think not,’ Gordey said, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’
‘I don’t believe the British Government’s involved.’
‘I know that,’ Gordey smiled. ‘That’s what I’m here to complain about.’
‘You mean-’
‘No. I want that kind of talk stopped. By your government. Incidentally, congratulations.’
Wechsler paused on the edge of thanking him. ‘We’re not a superpower, and even if we were, we couldn’t dictate to sovereign states.’
‘Britain had the first fruits of all the project inventions, and has the best force screens in the world, not to mention a fair lead in the New Industrial Revolution. But I won’t argue the point. I never expected the British Government to do my work for me. Just to pass on a message.’ He paused. ‘We finally have matter transmission.’
He watched Wechsler’s face, watched him come to full realisation of what that fact meant. The force screens all the nations had built in the last few months, crude though they were, had made nuclear war virtually impossible. You can’t bomb through a force shield. But you can transmit through it. The project, with its lower case name, its nine thousand men, its several bases and now its vague affiliation to the UN, was the greatest power on Earth while it kept that secret.
‘And we intend to keep our secret,’ Gordey said. ‘The only technical people who could explain it are two doors away, so snooping will do you no good. And we’ve arranged things so that any attempt to take over the project, such as would have been necessary to erase the Culls, will fail. Fail disastrously.’
Wechsler had gone white faced with anger. But that was because he was a politician by instinct, and preferred to gloss over the crude wielding of power, disguising it with proper forms. This raw, it grated on him.
‘I’ll pass the message on,’ he said tightly, obviously aware that the message was actually the first assertion of suzerain power over all the nations of Earth that could be made to stick: the beginnings of world government.
Gordey had realised that was the logical consequence of his actions a long while since. It didn’t trouble him; it was inevitable, one way or another. But he also realised that the pill had to be sweetened.
‘I’m not making a bid for personal power,’ he said. ‘I’ve a story for you as well. One you’ve heard most of, but missed the end. You see, I also know the precise purpose of the cylinders.’
Stepping quite uninjured on the floor of a cylinder beyond the last, Gordey had felt suddenly elated. He was alive: he had been right. He walked the remaining yards into the open air, without fear. There was no other cylinder, just mountains—and in the far distance, an odd looking mountain hut. He turned about—and saw just mountain rock, no cylinder. Fear caught at his vitals, he couldn’t breathe, and then the irregular shadows of the rock sorted themselves out in his mind, and he saw that one of them was really quite regular, the end of the passage. He breathed again, and remembered the hut. This world was still inhabited; it was the end of the line.
But the Culls were not the makers. It had been a long, hard business, discovering the facts’ about them-
‘I know all this,’ Wechsler interrupted him impatiently, ‘I helped choose the team that analysed their radio transmissions. On the face of it, it’s true they don’t look like the makers, but-’
‘You’ve seen their technology!’
‘They’re several generations behind us, and at their rate of progress that could mean a couple of centuries. Their technology would have difficulty duplicating a computer, let alone the cylinders. And there’s no sign they’ve regressed. But-’
‘The same “but”, and it’s a large “but”, isn’t it? After seeing so many dead worlds, we can’t go on appearances; so wipe clean. And after we’ve done it, they have to be the makers, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been an act of justice, just murder. And if the makers are dead, the cylinders can no longer harm us. So we can forget them.
‘But then, in thirty or forty years, the cylinders will establish a new forward cylinder, on a new living world, and if the occupants of that world fail to get to us and wipe us out in their own well justified fear, the cylinders will leave them for later. And sooner or later, someone will get through, and...’
‘How can you be sure?’
Gordey shrugged. ‘I can’t prove anything, but I tell you it’s so, and I was right once before.’
‘You were,’ Wechsler admitted grudgingly.
‘And I’ve already told you what the cylinders are.’
‘A doomsday weapon, cutting a swathe of fear through the galaxy, setting young races at each other’s throats...’
Smiling bitterly, Gordey cut him short. ‘That’s rather too grand.’ He paused, then: ‘In fact, it’s a graded mousetrap.’
* * * *
Wechsler seemed to crumple back into his chair, as if a sorcerer’s needle had been stuck through the heart of his doll.
‘It all fits, even to the fastidious detail of letting the various species of mice do the actual killing.’ Gordey stopped talking. He could see Wechsler was convinced. There was much more to say, how they could contact the Culls, and use the still primitive matter transmitter to make the leap out into space to contact other races ... a federation of mice. The metaphor ought to be ridiculous, but it wasn’t.
Or was it ? Intelligent mice might avoid a trap, but they don’t get down to understanding it, and turning it on its makers.
He wondered briefly about the makers. What kind of race was it that needed so desperately to be alone? Fear of the stranger was a fault; perhaps it could be exploited as such.
Man was a political animal, zoon politikon, and that was his strength, to build upon. A Federation of Not Quite Mice. He almost laughed; he was getting very good at humourless laughing. He would have to remember to play down the mouse metaphor soon: it was strictly shock tactics. Then he remembered he had a question to ask.
‘You’ll pass the message on?’
For a second time in his life, Wechsler nodded in a particular way.