Meeting at Infinity (13 page)

I
N
THAT PART
of his mind which had not been too badly battered by the repeated mental hammering of the men from Akkilmar, Shane Malco was tempted to say aloud “I told you so.”

But Lyken’s haggard, pitiable face prevented him. And after all, with the powers these strangers possessed, who could resist? Visions tormented him of worse than puppet armies: of millions “black-boxed” into unquestioning submission.
No one who gave much thought to it could find his own world’s middleman society attractive, with its substructure of dregs and its superstructure of vicious rivalries. But in comparison, it was paradise.

He licked his lips and looked about the operations room. The staff present seemed more like wax dummies than men who breathed—even down to the man from Akkilmar who sat at the side of the room with his black box on his knee, waiting.

There was a risk of more mental punishment if he even spoke, he knew. But there had been silence for perhaps an hour now, and anything was preferable to the isolation of silence.

Licking dry lips, he said, “Ahmed, what do you suppose has happened? Do you suppose the attacks have started?”

Lyken gave a weary shrug, and made no answer.

The silence closed in again like fog. More minutes dragged by. Then one of the room’s doors slid aside, and a man entered with the now familiar expression of one who had been “black-boxed”—bitter, resentful, but hopeless. Malco shifted in his chair to look at him; even Lyken looked up.

The newcomer crossed the floor and stood before the man from Akkilmar. He said in a dull voice, “There has been a message.”

The man from Akkilmar nodded. His face was expectant but not at all eager.

“The wild men and animals have destroyed all the fire posts except three on the southern side,” the messenger said, and a spark of enthusiasm enlivened his dull voice for a moment. “The supplies and reinforcements from Akkilmar have not come. It is believed that Akkilmar has been destroyed.”

The impassivity of the man from Akkilmar vanished in an instant. He got to his feet slowly, his mouth working. After a moment, he spoke hissingly.

“You lie!”

“I can’t lie,” said the messenger, and gave the words a weight of somber satisfaction. “I’ve been treated with one of your black boxes.”

The man from Akkilmar made as though to raise the box he himself carried and smash open the messenger’s skull, savagely. Slowly the meaning of what had been said penetrated Malco’s mind, and also Lyken’s. They exchanged wondering glances, hardly yet daring to hope.

“What else?” said the man from Akkilmar, his teeth together, his hands closing into fists.

“That—” the messenger began, and was interrupted by the shrill clanging of alarms. The technicians around the room, startled into life, began to move, scanning their Tacket detectors. They too had been shocked from their lethargy by the news; now, as they saw what information the detectors had to yield, they dared to smile.

The man from Akkilmar tapped his black box, and one of the technicians gave a sudden groan.

“What happens?” came the barking question. The technician had to put out one hand and find support, but his sweating face revealed the triumph that he felt.

“The attack has finally started,” he said grimly. “There are portals opening all around the base, and it looks as though mass by the thousands of tons is being shifted in.”

Another door opened, and a woman in the costume of Akkilmar came panting in. She rapped out something to her companion in her own language, and he hesitated for a moment. When he answered, although his words were incomprehensible, it was plain that he was spewing angry oaths. He closed both hands on his black box.

A rush of pain like boiling water swamped Malco’s mind, Lyken’s, the minds of the technicians, and hurled them into unconsciousness. The last thought that Malco carried with him was a notion, too sharp to be an illusion, that the man
and the woman from Akkilmar had vanished from where they stood.

“We can’t stop it now,” said Clostrides, and his voice was doom-laden. “Once the other Directors found out that Lanchery had gone into the franchise as planned, and once they knew that we’d put a force through Yorell’s portal near Akkilmar, no amount of arguing or pleading or anything could have held them back. So the men of Akkilmar get their victims anyway.”

From across the room, in the chair to which he had returned, Jockey Hole looked at the high bailiff curiously. He said, “Bailiff, you still got your string knotted?”

Clostrides gave him an uncomprehending glance.

Jockey shrugged. “I read this different,” he said. “Why worry any more? Lanchery got in his attack, the idea being that these numbers couldn’t control animals and anyway they wouldn’t start worrying about them till too late. We got in our attack at Akkilmar, and like I said these numbers wouldn’t have paid any attention to dregs like my boys, gold? I’ll lay on one thing—the way it finally was set up, it’s going to be free falling now all the way.”

“If the attack on Akkilmar served any purpose,” Clostrides said heavily, “and if the defenses were wiped out by Lanchery and his wild beast show …”

Jockey leaned back in his chair, apparently quite relaxed and unworried. He said, “To me, Bailiff, it all smells sweet as roses now.”

The signal for an outside call came from the communicator. Clostrides answered it. A youthful face appeared in the screen, muddy, scratched, but grinning. A hesitant voice said, “Uh—I sort of wanted Jockey Hole.”

Jockey got up and moved into screen range. He said, “Tad, how was it?”

“It was free fall all the way!” said Tad with enthusiasm.
“We got them by surprise. They were moving in all kinds of supplies and a lot of armored people, too. Real army, looked to me. And machinery, weird! So we just naturally burned ’em out. Jockey, that’s to be seen, all gold! We put four million megawatts into that town, Gaffles said afterwards—houses all wood, burned like a bonfire, and these weird gadgets which were maybe weapons just caught one bolt and began to go off like crackers. We rushed ’em after—captured maybe four hundred on the way to frying. Lots of ’em just disappeared into nowhere, so we cracked the others on the head and now we’re pumping stuff into them to make them sleep and good.”

He brought his right hand into screen range and looked at it thoughtfully; it was wrapped in bandages.

“Lose anybody?” said Jockey, nodding towards the screen.

“Not so you’d notice, boss. A few. We did more hurt to ourselves than they managed, though.”

Jockey glanced at Clostrides and lifted an eyebrow questioningly. The high bailiff leaned back, closing his eyes.

He said, “All right. All we can do now is what you said yourself: turn it on and let it run.”

Curdy Wence tried to move. Fiery pain lanced his chest; he desisted. He forced the lids back over his eyes, feeling a vast ache within his head. Someone was bending over him. It was a man in a company uniform he did not recognize, carrying an energy gun on a sling behind him. His expression was one of wonder.

He said, “What hit you? You’re not a Lyken man—you must be one of the poor bastards he kidnapped in.”

The edge of pain in Curdy’s head lifted a little, just enough to allow memories to ooze out. He said. “That’s the way it was. Bastards.”

“What hit you, though?” the man persisted.

Curdy found the right word, and forced himself to utter it. He said very thinly, “A pig.”

“A pig! Curdy, what
has
been going on around here? Already I found a number with a broken leg said he’d been kicked by a horse, and a whole damned fire post caved in with the craziest animal you ever saw lying dead in the middle-thing musta weighed a ton, with horns and a mane all round its shoulders.”

Curdy let slip his hold on consciousness and drifted into the comfort of darkness again.

The hands on the clocks throughout The Market were moving up towards their meeting at noon. Once more an outside call was signaled; buoyed up more by the news of unlooked-for success than by the artificial invigoration of the drugs he had taken to alert his mind, Clostrides answered it.

The face of Dewitt Yorell, with a look like thunder, appeared on the screen. He said in a frosty voice, “Manuel, you have a lot to answer for. I’m calling a meeting of the Directors to investigate the stories you’ve been spinning us. Your double-dealing has failed. You’re through.”

Clostrides said, “Really?” He made the word a self-confident drawling sound.

“You have no call to look smug,” said Yorell, but his assertiveness had already diminished.

“I think so,” murmured Clostrides. “But explain!”

Yorell drew a deep breath. He said, “I don’t know what conspiracy you and Lanchery involved yourselves in, but we’re not standing for it. We held back our attack on the strength of the extraordinary story you fed us—fed all of us but Lanchery! When we finally realized you’d played us for fools, and sent in our forces anyway, we found Lanchery just about in sole possession and no trace of this mysterious superrace from wherever you dreamed up to mislead us!”

“I think that gives me every reason to look smug,” said Clostrides frigidly. “What are you doing now?”

“Making sure your plot with Lanchery falls down!” barked Yorell. “We have Lanchery himself in custody, and we’re clearing out his forces.”

“You are an incompetent blockhead, Dewitt,” said Clostrides. “You’re incapable of seeing anything but your own profit and loss, aren’t you? I think you’d better change your mind very quickly, before the forces of Akkilmar can recover from the damage we inflicted and return to the attack.”

“I’ve had enough of that,” said Yorell shortly. “Stop deluding yourself, Manuel. As I already told you, you’re finished.”

Behind Yorell in the screen, someone moved into view. A woman. She seemed tall and attractive, and she wore a blue cloak with a high collar standing up behind her head. She reached out and tapped Yorell on the shoulder, her face impassive.

Yorell switched around as though he had been stung. He said, “Who are you? Who let you in here?”

The woman shrugged. “I let myself in,” she said. “I can go more or less where I like, you know. My name is Allyn Vage, and I think you’ll understand things more clearly if I explain.”

T
HE
D
IRECTORS
accepted the situation sullenly and with bad grace; they were not used to councils at which outsiders were
present, even when the outsiders—such as one of Earth’s leading doctors, and a man who could summon a private army of two thousand on a hour’s notice, and a woman who appeared to be able to go wherever she liked—were outstanding in their own fields.

But Clostrides, to his own secret surprise, found himself welcoming the situation.

With a worried look on his face, Knard was hesitantly addressing Allyn. He was saying, “At first, of course, Allyn, I was suspicious of your reliability. After all, your venomous hatred of your husband …”

Allyn didn’t look at him. She said composedly, “He did try to kill me, of course, in a very horrible and savage manner. The cause was simple jealousy. Had it not occurred to you that the perceptor might also confirm that for me?”

“We didn’t understand what rho function fields could accomplish,” Knard said self-excusingly. “I still don’t.”

“Luis is dead now, and what happened doesn’t matter.” Allyn waved one hand gracefully, dismissing the past. “Arid as to what the rho function field can do, I can only give you examples. I’m one. It’s essentially a device for enlarging the potential of the mind, guiding and disciplining it. I found out by slow stages. But my hatred—which I no longer feel, but can’t regret—served a useful purpose there, driving me when I might have given up.

“As you already know, the people of Akkilmar wanted perceptors operating here to reflect our reality for them, to allow them to spy on us and manipulate events so that untimately they could use our own rivalries and jealousies to overcome us. I reached a point at which I could impose myself on the reality within the rho function field so well that I could act a part in reality outside it. That was when I began to understand what the people of Akkilmar were doing.

“But I could sense the approaching crisis; I could sense the
urgent need for a way to oppose the enemy which he could not control. And I presented myself to Hal Lanchery. I manipulated him as the people of Akkilmar had manipulated others.”

She glanced at Lanchery, who scowled and crossed his arms as though ashamed of himself.

“I could do that much, When I learned that the people of Akkilmar could come and go between the Tacket worlds without depending on artificial aid, then I knew I would have to find some way of doing the same. I could not risk being incapacitated simply because someone smashed my perceptor. You see, it was by then clear that in the mind itself there must also be analogues of reality as precise as those in the perceptor, or more so.”

Dewitt Yorell cleared his throat noisily, leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

“I had to drive myself to depend on the analogues in my mind, and there was only one way I could do that.”

“To be afraid of death,” said Clostrides softly, as though a great light had come to him.

“That was why I told the policeman to turn off the perceptor and the supply of nutriment that sustained my body in the cocoon.”

“But—” Knard was almost spluttering with excitement. “That means, though, that the power of mind is literally unlimited—that a body can be created by mind!”

Allyn glanced at him. “You have to regard it this way,” she said. “Physical and mental are conjoined and interdependent; you cannot have a mind discarnate, but it has to grow within a growing brain. Contrariwise, it appears to me, physical reality is a kind of sum total or common denominator of that which is perceived by consciousness. It is possible to act mentally on this physical reality so as to change not it itself, but the mode in which it is perceived. Do you follow me?”

“Not yet,” said Knard. “But we will. We will.”

Hal Lanchery said, not looking at anyone, “Isn’t that enough of this metaphysical gabble? What are we going to do about the important problem—these people out in some Tacket world or other where they’ve been doing all these things for ages, who came within inches of exploiting our very minds?”

He shot a hostile glare at Allyn on the last word.

Knard said diffidently, “We’ve been questioning the captives from Akkilmar, you know. We have, of course, to keep them half-dopey to prevent them disappearing from under our noses, but we’ve established a few important facts. Essentially, they do as we have done, but instead of simply trading, they exploit directly. They will occupy a productive Tacket world, establish domination of the inhabitants, and milk it. Contact with us indicated the desirability of having a highly advanced technological civilization to milk, as well as what they have already.”

“And they fell down on their own assumed superiority,” Clostrides said. “Is that right?”

“Not altogether,” Knard corrected. “True, they were in part blinded because they had never encountered serious opposition. Also true, they made no allowance for the difference between their society—an oligarchy ruling a ‘black-boxed’ majority—and ours, so they never reckoned with Mr. Hole’s yonder boys, or with Director Lanchery’s animals and wild men.”

“But—?” prompted Clostrides.

“But there was something still more important,” said Allyn in answer. “Their view of reality was conditioned by their knowledge that they could manipulate it deliberately. Whereas we—” She broke off, and then continued in a changed tone.

“Who here believes in luck?”

For a moment there was silence. Then Jockey Hole gave a self-conscious grin. He said, “Maybe I do.”

“You should. You have it. Only it’s not simple chance. It’s the gift of extracting trends subconsciously from the analogue of reality which exists in all thinking minds. You were able, without knowing what you were doing, to set in motion a train of events leading to your capture of Erlking, then to your linking Erlking with Knard, and through Knard with me, and to the presentation of all the facts at once to the only man in a position to act on them: Clostrides there.”

Jockey said in a serious tone, “I often said I could surprise myself. I guess I know how, now.”

“Luck,” said Lanchery in a sour voice. “What concerns me isn’t luck. It’s how to cope with the enemy!”

Clostrides nodded. He looked at Knard. “You’ve been responsible for interrogating the captives,” he said. “Would you say they will return to the attack?”

“Very possibly,” Knard answered. “The damage to their self-esteem alone suggests that.”

“Then I’ll say one thing that’s got to be done.” Clostrides took a deep breath. “The Market has got to go. The system behind The Market has got to go. By luck we succeeded this time. Next time, our bickering rivalries may really wreck our chances.”

The Directors exchanged glances so obviously appalled it seemed to Clostrides almost funny. Yorell spoke for all of them, saying curtly, “Manuel, that’s nonsense and you know it. For one thing—how do we know there’ll be another time? It was an infinitely small chance that we contacted one another in Lyken’s franchise; it’ll be there, if anywhere, that we’ll meet again. And now that the bastards have done whatever it was that they did to Lyken and his staff—”

Clostrides interrupted without apology. He addressed Knard. “Is there any hope of restoring their minds, do you think?”

“Virtually none,” said Knard shortly. “All Lyken’s key men, and he himself, have practically total amnesia.”

“Thanks to the black boxes?”

“As far as we can tell.”

There was a moment of silence while those present reflected on the power of Akkilmar. Some of them had seen Lyken’s staff while they were occupying his franchise; the sight had not been pleasant.

“One thing puzzles me,” said Jorge Klein, who had sat silent during the previous discussion. “These people have such powers—why did they not simply make an open attack on us?”

Clostrides answered in a sober tone. “There are too few of them.”

“What?”

“Too few,” Clostrides repeated. “Representing, as they do, a thin layer of dominating individuals scattered among who knows how many worlds, all their power does not compensate for their lack of numbers.”

“All the more reason to stop the nonsense about abolishing The Market,” said Yorell gruffly. “If there are so few of them, and the odds are billions to one against their cropping up anywhere except in Lyken’s franchise, all we need to do is police that one franchise. We could hold it co-operatively, perhaps.”

“You don’t sound happy about even that much co-operation,” said Clostrides cuttingly. “Has it not been made clear that these people gained access to our own world, as well as to the one where Lyken had the franchise? Are you going to take the risk that they might come to one or other of the Directors, or to some other concessionary, and offer him secret advantages over the rest?”

“They show up on Tacket detectors, don’t they?”

“You’re prepared to allow your bases to be searched every time the operation of Tacket’s Principle is recorded?” countered Clostrides.

“You’re still talking nonsense,” Yorell retorted. “No one in his right mind—”

“Lyken did. But he wasn’t in his right mind. Not when the people from Akkilmar were through with him.”

“We know about that now. We can guard against it.” A gleam of sweat showed on Yorell’s forehead. “As for intruding into bases, I have a score to settle about the storming of my Southern-K Portal by this gang of wild youths, and I’m not going to forget it!”

“The attack that went through that portal prevented reinforcements from leaving Akkilmar,” said Clostrides glacially. “That’s all I care about. All you care about is that your portal was used. That’s why The Market will have to go, and us with it.”

“Repeating that won’t endow it with sense,” Yorell snapped. Clostrides’s jab had struck home, obviously. “In any case, Allyn Vage has discovered the possibilities of the rho function field—she’s here when she should be dead—that changes the situation completely.”

“Do you
still
not understand?” said Allyn’s voice, wonderingly.

All heads turned towards her. Clostrides said, “What do we not understand?”

“I’ve tried to explain that you don’t alter reality through the rho function field. You only alter the mode in which it’s perceived.” Allyn sounded deliberately patient.

“Yes, but—” Clostrides began, when he caught sight of Knard’s face. It had gone white; his mouth was half-open.

“You—!” said the doctor chokingly.

Allyn Vage nodded. “Of course. I’m dead, don’t you see? How could I possibly be here?”

And she was not.

They stared for a long time at the place where she had seemed to be. In their imaginations was the crashing sound
of worlds collapsing, and around them the fabric of The Market seemed to reel drunkenly.

At last they began to look at one another again, and in their eyes fear of the strange new universe into which they had been precipitated was naked to be seen.