Mindbridge (6 page)

 
“-guess it won’t
             
“-works

 
work three, you
              
again now.

 
hear me Jacque you
           
You hear me

 
hear me Carol? yes
           
Carol? Yes.”

I Yes.”

Tania and Vivian splashed ashore some twenty meters downstream. “What are you three babbling about?” Tania said.

They explained rapidly and then demonstrated the creature’s powers, first to Tania and then to Vivian.

“Wait,” Vivian said. “You say you can talk to each other with this thing?”

“That’s right,” Ch’ing said. “Complete sentences,” Jacque added.

“I don’t get anything like that. Ch’ing, you think of something, try it on me and then on Jacque.” Ch’ing did.

“All I get,” Vivian said, “is ‘mountain’ and ‘rose’... and a feeling of sadness, nostalgia.”

“Let me try it again,” Jacque said. “It’s two lines from a poem: ‘I haven’t seen the Eastern Hill for a long time/How many times has the rose flowered?”

“That seems to be accurate,” Ch’ing said. “It is a poem, a well-known poem by Li Po:

Pu chien Tung S/ian chiu

Ch’iang-wei chi tu hua.

The first two lines of the poem, that is.”

“You thought it in Chinese?” Jacque said. “Yes,” Ch’ing said.

The five of them stood on the river bank for most of an hour, experimenting. They rejected the first notion, Jacque’s, that the creature simply worked better with men than with women. Trying to communicate “hard” data such as Social Security numbers and birth dates, they soon deduced the simple truth: sensitivity of telepathic reception decreased according to how many people had touched the creature before you.

Thus Ch’ing was most sensitive, followed by Jacque, then Carol, Tania, and Vivian, in that order. Ch’ing could read any of them like a book (though actual words came to him in Chinese unless there were no precise equivalent to the English); Vivian received only vague impressions and occasional words. She could get about half the digits in a Social Security number.

“Obviously,” Tania said, “it’s worth departing from our schedule for a day or two to look for more of these creatures.” She suggested they form a line out from the bank, facing the current underwater, with their lights on. They would be able to see the creatures swimming by if they passed within a meter or two.

Ch’ing stayed out of the water to guard “his” creature, while the other four splashed in to find their own.

They talked excitedly for a while, then settled into staring at the bright ochre blankness. Time passed very slowly. It was an event of great interest when a bubble or fragment of twig drifted within Jacque’s field of view. He was content, though; there were a lot of things to sort out. He tried to recall each separate link he had made during the course of the past hour’s experimentation.

A soft chime told him it was time to eat. He wasn’t especially hungry, but was glad to have something to do. The food tube snaked up in front of him and he sucked on it: texture and flavor of mashed potatoes and gravy, but too bland. Then something like an inoffensive mixture of carrots and peas. He wished for a saltshaker. At least the fluids tube gave him a measured amount of red wine.

Now if there were only some way to smuggle in an after-dinner cigar.

Jacque overheard Carol ask Ch’ing whether he would like to try, in the interests of science, an experiment in intimate biological communication, once they got back to Earth with the creature (that being yet another thing you couldn’t do inside a GPEM suit). He said he would be delighted and honored.

Jacque did recognize that the wave of jealousy he felt was both unfair and irrational.

After two hours of immersion, which seemed much longer, Tania said they might as well give it up; continue with the survey. Perhaps their presence had frightened the creatures away or, as Vivian suggested, the one that Ch’ing caught had sent out a telepathic warning to the others.

They asked Ch’ing his opinion and got no answer.

While they were scrambling out of the water, Tania called for a readout from Ch’ing’s biometrics system. Everything seemed normal except for brain waves: a slight wiggle in theta; no activity at any other level.

Before they reached him, an alarm went off and the following information was projected on her viewplate:

EMERGENCY

ALL VITAL FUNCTIONS HAVE CEASED IN

GPEM 2 EMERGENCY MEASURES IN EFFECT

UNDIAGNOSED GPEM MALFUNCTION

NO RESPONSE 21:33:00

NO RESPONSE 21:33:05

NO RESPONSE 21:33:10

NO RESPONSE 21:33:15

NO RESPONSE 21:33:20

NO RESPONSE 21:33:25

NO RESPONSE 21:33:30

DEATH DUE TO CARDIAC ARREST

DEATH PRECEDED BY ABRUPT CESSATION OF MENTAL ACTIVITY

DEATH DUE TO UNDIAGNOSED GPEM MALFUNCTION

(From Salesman’s Quick Reference to Occupations, Hartford Insurance Company, Inc., Hartford, CT, 2060:)

Occupation: Tamer

Recommendations:

No new policies to be issued. Outstanding policies, contracted for previous to current employment, not to be extended.

Spouse of Tamer also poor risk due to extreme nervous tension. Death to be investigated carefully for possibility of suicide.

(Actual mortality rates for Tamers are classified information. Informal studies indicate that fewer than 50% survive a tour of duty.)

Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Jaime Barnett, Research Director, Agency for Extraterrestrial Development, Colorado Springs, at the dedication of the new 120-cm. LMT crystal, 28 October 2044.)

NBC: -now this is something I’ve never understood. They all come back at the same instant, with no expenditure of power...

JB: (laughs) Welcome to the club. Nobody understands it. It’s obvious that what’s at work here is some kind of a, what scientists call, a conservation law-

NBC: I understand.

JB: -but it’s not clear exactly what is being conserved. Matter and energy and space-time are all involved.... Let me stress this. We can describe the Levant-Meyer Translation, we can describe it mathematically to ten significant figures. But it’s all empirical; we can’t pretend to understand why it works.

The Slingshot Effect is itself a good illustration of this. When a group of people is translated to another planet, one of them carries a homing device-what we call their “black box.” When their time is up on the planet, everything sufficiently close to the black box will automatically return to Earth.

NBC: How close is “sufficiently close”?

JB: It duplicates exactly the configuration of the original LMT field. In the case of our new crystal here, that will be a cylinder 120 centimeters in diameter by some five meters high.

At any rate, there isn’t any theoretical reason for the wiring in this black box to work. Scientists cobbled it together by trial and error, starting from the wiring that was present in the electron microscope that was involved in Levant’s original, uh, accidental experiment.

NBC: But only one person can carry this black box.

JB: Of course. The Los Alamos disaster proved that.

NBC: And they can bring back anything they want from the planet, so long as it fits inside the cylindrical field.

JB: That’s right, uh, Fred. But as you know, the samples they bring back only stay on earth for as long as the people were on the other planet. Then they disappear.

NBC: They also slingshot back? To their home planet?

JB: That would seem logical. Symmetrical. But we don’t know; we’ve never traced a sample.

NBC: And what happens to a person, on the other planet, if he’s caught outside the cylindrical field when time runs out?

JB: That’s happened twice. We sent rescue missions both times, but no one was there.

NBC: They just disappeared? It couldn’t-

JB: That’s right.

NBC: You have no idea what happened to them?

JB: None whatsoever.

They left Ch’ing’s body by the riverside and continued to survey the planet.

Without the floater, it was a difficult task. Most of their time was taken up in traveling-literally running from their high-latitude position up to the pole, down to the equator, and back. With their suits’ amplification they could cover a thousand kilometers or more per day.

The planet was less than promising:

There was a sea, covering a fourth of its surface, that had such a high concentration of salt that nothing could live in it, except for certain hardy microorganisms that stayed close to the mouths of rivers.

The polar cap was a frozen wasteland, arid and lifeless, where fossil snow rolled rattling, hard tiny granules pushed by a never-ceasing gale; where the wind carved ice mountains into fantastic shapes, great curving sweeps that met in razor edges to sing one long note in the wind.

A chain of dead volcanoes, their tops dusted with a golden snow of monoclinic sulphur.

An ancient weathered meteor crater, larger than Texas, perfectly round, with the vestige of a central peak-filled with sweet water and a bewildering variety of marine life. None of the creatures had telepathic properties.

Working down from the pole, the frozen sterile ground thawed into a bog, with more and more plant life as they moved toward the equator; then less life as the ground dried out and the temperature rose. The last several hundred kilometers before the equator was all parched desolation, bare gray rock and sand in monotonously regular dunes.

On their last day they hurried back to the river, so they could slingshot Ch’ing’s corpse and suit back for the scientists at Colorado Springs.

DEATH DUE TO UNDIAGNOSED GPEM MALFUNCTION had haunted all of them for seven days.

They had been pushing their suits to the limit all week.

Ch’ing had been killed by his just standing, doing nothing.

But there hadn’t been any problems. These things happen, Tania said; freak accidents. The GPEM’s are checked, double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked. But it’s as complex a mechanism as anyone has ever trusted with his life. The doctors and engineers will find out what happened to Ch’ing and make sure it never happens again. Tania said.

The river had risen and Ch’ing was standing upright in knee-deep water. They got there with more than two hours to spare, before the Slingshot Effect took hold.

They moved him out of the water and sat, waiting. Jacque took the creature out of the compartment in Ch’ing’s suit, where they had stored it (in an environment that simulated the river).

They passed the animal around and its powers seemed undiminished.

“I have a theory,” Jacque said.

“On what?” Carol said.

“Why there aren’t any land animals.” Except for the creature Ch’ing found, they’d found no animal that could survive out of the water. “When that meteor hit, you know, the big crater? It must have caused a worldwide catastrophe. Earthquakes, fires, tidal waves-“

“Fill the atmosphere with superheated steam, if it landed in water,” Carol said.

“Radioactive steam,” Tania added. “That kind of impact-“

“That’s what I mean,” Jacque said. “Nothing on land survived. Only plants and animals that were protected by a buffer of water.”

“Could be, could well be,” Tania said. “If that happened, the geologists ought to be able to reconstruct it.”

“From the samples,” Carol said.

They were quiet for some time. The only one standing was Ch’ing.

“How much longer?” Vivian asked.

“About twenty minutes,” Tania said. “Twenty-two.” Another long silence. “Well, we might as well get into position,” Tania said. “Jacque, you’ll be on top again, otherwise the heights won’t match up. I’ll be on the bottom with Ch’ing . . . Ch’ing’s suit.”

They shuffled and climbed into place, after Tania scratched a 120-centimeter circle to guide their arms and legs. “Four minutes.”

Like the first time, the transition was abrupt. One instant, they were looking out over the dirty-milk river; the next instant they were falling from a meter or so above the floor of the Colorado Springs LMT chamber.

“We have life,” Vivian said, before Jacque had even hit the ground. “Need a chamber at twenty-eight degrees, pressure point eight nine four. The following mix: nitrogen, point three five seven; argon, point two nine seven . . .” This would be the preliminary environment for the creature; they would be able to match the ambience of Groombridge exactly after analyzing the samples the Tamers brought back. “. . . and a source of circulating water, a tub. The creature is semi-aquatic.”