The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 11

  “They just stood there…” the kid is muttering over and over again. “They just stood there…”

  I put my arm around the kid’s shoulder. The kid had done all right. “Yeah, kid,” I say quietly. “They always just stand there. That’s why we keep it a secret from the civvies. They would never understand, without coming up a hill against all the hell the Empies dish out, and even then…”

  I look down at the dead Funny Bunnies. I know I can’t kill them any more, but man oh man, how 1 hate them. “Know what M.P. stands for, kid?” I say.

  “What, Sarge?” he mutters, not realizing that he is about to learn the secret.

  “Militant Pacifists,” I tell him. “They crossed space and conquered half the world before we found out the secret. They’re ruthless fanatics, who’ll do anything to win, even make men kill themselves. But the Funny Bunnies just can’t make themselves do one thing that we do real well, kid. They can’t kill. They just never learned how.”

  The Rules of the Road

  The great silver dome sat in the desert at Yucca Flats. It was featureless, save for an innocent-appearing open entranceway, but there was something about it that shrieked: alien. The silver shimmer was not quite the shimmer of silver. Rather it was more like the silver of shimmer.

  The tanks, machine-gun emplacements and foxholes surrounding the dome confirmed the sense of alienness. The dome was surrounded and cordoned off. Whether it was being guarded or contained was a moot question.

  Near the opening in the dome a tent had been pitched. The flag of a three-star general flew from a makeshift flagpole. Inside the tent were a half-dozen canvas folding chairs, an elaborate radio setup, a large map table that seemed to serve no useful function, five assorted colonels, Lieutenant General Richard Brewster—a middle-aged man with the look of an athlete gone to fat—and one lone civilian, looking plucked and out of place amidst all that khaki plumage.

  General Brewster eyed the civilian with cold resignation.

  “I’ve lost ten men in there already,” he said, in a tone of voice like a poker player describing a particularly bad run of cards.

  “Ten men, and we don’t know any more than when we started.” Brewster stared out the open tent flap at the entrance to the dome. “Only one thing we know,” he said. “It’s from the stars.”

  “Interesting,” said the civilian flatly. He was a wiry man, not short, not tall. His face showed even more tension than his spare body. His mouth seemed frozen in a perpetual sour sneer, his expression appeared dead and juiceless. Only his large dark eyes betrayed him. They shifted purposefully from focus to focus, absorbing, categorizing, analyzing.

  “Interesting? Is that all you have to say, Lindstrom? Interesting? It’s from the stars, man. We tracked it from beyond the orbit of Pluto. Don’t you understand? It’s a spaceship from another solar system. It’s the key to the stars.”

  “That’s what it is to you,” said Lindstrom. “But what is it to whatever sent it here? Are you so sure they intend it as a key to the stars? What about those ten men you sent in who never came out? Do you think they’re so sure it’s the key to the stars?”

  “What are you leading up to, man?” spat Brewster, with unconcealed distaste.

  “Just that you know nothing about why that thing came here. Ten men go in, and none of them come out. Maybe it’s not here to give us the stars at all. Maybe its purpose is as alien as its manufacture. Or maybe—” Lindstrom paused and allowed himself a grin.

  “Maybe it’s just a better mousetrap,” he said.

  “Well,” said Brewster, “will you or won’t you? If you’re trying to point out how dangerous it is, you’re wasting your time. I’ve lost ten men as it is. I know damn well it’s dangerous. I’ve been told you’re not afraid of danger. I’ve been told you enjoy it.”

  Lindstrom laughed brittlely. “In a way,” he said. “It’s not that I enjoy danger, General. It’s just that I need it. The question is, how much do you think you need me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean two hundred and fifty thousand tax-free dollars. Take it or leave it.”

  “Payable if you succeed in telling us what’s inside the dome?”

  “What else?”

  Brewster nodded. “Okay, you’re on.”

  Bert Lindstrom was aware of his glamor only when he wanted a woman. Then it proved most useful; it was a well-honed, finely-crafted tool. There were plenty of women who could resist the soldier of fortune myth, to be sure, but there were many more who could not. The probabilities were all on his side.

  And odds were Bert Lindstrom’s religion.

  Lindstrom was a calculating man. He would undertake nothing that did not seem to offer an odds on chance of success. Nothing, from seduction to assassination.

  Yet he would never fail to accept a challenge when the odds were in his favor—no matter if he were risking a dime or his life.

  For in his system of values, there was no real difference. It was not what was being risked that counted, it was the risk itself. His life meant little to him when he was not risking it. Only when he was gambling with his existence did it come to have meaning-then it was the stake, the challenge, the risk.

  Lindstrom did not seek death. He risked his life only when he felt that the odds were on his side. He did not seek death, but he had to be near it, he had to risk it, for only at the moment of risk could his life have any meaning.

  And this was the best risk in a life of risks. Not necessarily because it was the longest shot of all. Lindstrom had the professional risk-taker’s contempt for soldiers who took risks on orders.

  That ten soldiers had not come out was a thing of little import.

  What was interesting was that the dome from the stars was a total unknown. Even the odds on coming out were incalculable. They might be in his favor, they might not. He was betting his instinctive feelings about himself against a complete unknown.

  If he had set up the situation himself in a laboratory he could not have contrived a more perfect risk.

  The hot desert wind blew at Lindstrom’s back as he approached the entrance to the dome.

  The soldiers who had not come out had been armed to the teeth. Therefore Lindstrom was not.

  He carried only his old .45, a machete which was more a luck-charm than anything else, a coil of rope, an all-purpose utility knife and a flashlight.

  The entrance was little more than a door-sized hole in the material of the dome. Lindstrom peered inside. He could see nothing but blackness. He drew his gun, turned on the flashlight and stepped inside.

  As soon as he crossed the threshold, there was light. It did not seem to come from anywhere, it just was.

  In the pearly luminescence, he could see he was standing at the mouth of a tunnel, a smooth, round, somehow almost colorless tunnel, that curved crazily upwards and leftwards in an arc so steep that it seemed impossible to hold one’s footing.

  Nevertheless, Lindstrom decided to try to climb it. Although the material of the tunnel seemed glass-smooth, it did not have a low frictional coefficient. It was more like walking on concrete than glass.

  Stranger still, although his eyes told him that he was walking up a curve at an impossible angle, his body tilted almost forty degrees from the vertical, his kinesthetic senses told a different story. The force of gravity remained perpendicular to the floor of the tunnel, no matter what angle the tunnel took to the Earth’s surface, so that he was walking upright, as if the tunnel had a private gravity all its own.

  Lindstrom was somewhat frightened: the instinctual fear of the unknown. This he had, of course, expected. Fear meant that there was danger, risk. And risk meant that he was living.

  The tunnel came to a fork. Decision number one. Had this been the point at which the soldiers had made the wrong calculation? Lindstrom was sure that surviving in the dome was a matter of making the proper calculations, the correct decisions. Either that, or there was no way of surviving. And that was a possibility not w
orth considering—since if it were true, the game was already lost.

  It was like walking on a ledge over a precipice in the dark. You knew that there was a safe path and you knew that there was a point beyond which death lurked. But you had no way of knowing how wide the ledge was, how much margin for error you had.

  There was nothing to choose from between the two forks. The one on the right curved up, the one on the left down. Otherwise they were identical. A random choice.

  Okay, thought Lindstrom. He hesitated for only a moment, and then, for no reason in particular, took the right-hand turn.

  He had only gone a few steps, the intersection was just behind him, when he felt a sudden flash of heat at his back.

  He whirled in time to see a solid pillar of fire engulf the crotch of the intersection, the spot where he had stood moments ago pondering his choice.

  Lesson number one, he thought. No Hamlets allowed. When faced with a decision, make it, one way or the other. Don’t temporize, or you’ll be vaporized.

  The tunnel wound on for an indeterminable distance. Then it ended. Or, from another point of view, took an abrupt ninety-degree turn and became a bottomless, black, circular hole.

  Lindstrom shined his light into the hole. The beam petered out in the blackness. The hole seemed made of the same material as the tunnel. There was nothing to secure the rope to.

  Now what? thought Lindstrom grimly. And how much time do I have? He remembered the pillar of fire at the fork.

  He felt that weird, timeless, floating exhilaration that he only experienced at those times when he knew that death was near, and had the time to comtemplate it.

  The hole was like the tunnel. He must go forward, or…

  Not like the tunnel. It was the tunnel. Or at least it should be.

  Fatalistically he dangled his feet into the hole, until his soles contacted its sides. Then he “stood up”—or rather stood down.

  Quite suddenly, he was standing upright in what had been the hole. Now it was just more of the same tunnel. The thing actually did have a gravity of its own.

  Lesson number two, he thought. This place has its own rules. Learn them and obey them.

  It was highly probable that none of the soldiers had gotten this far. This was a place that demanded a cold mathematical intimacy with death. It was a place where the greatest risk of all was not to take risks.

  It was no place for a man under orders.

  Lindstrom felt calmer now; he had dared and he had won. The fear that he had left was not a paralyzer, it was a tonic, the satisfied fear that a matador feels when he realizes that he is facing a truly great bull.

  He wandered further along the tunnel, and with every passing minute, the calmness he felt he had earned diminished.

  This was not ordinary mortal danger—Lindstrom had lived on speaking terms with death too long for mere danger to be extraordinary. It was something far worse. He was thinking too much as he walked, and this was a place that was not to be thought about, because it was a place without rules… which is one symptom of madness…

  There might be no rules, he thought, but there must be a purpose. Something had brought the dome to Earth, something intelligent, and intelligence implies purpose.

  But what if it really were just a giant mousetrap?

  But that was ridiculous. If they had wanted merely to kill him, they could have done it long ago. The dome was not only their creation, it was a universe in itself. Inside the dome, they could alter the very rules of existence. No, the rules were set up so that it was possible to survive. Fantastically difficult, but possible.

  That was all he had to cling to. The odds against survival might be astronomical, but survival was at least a possibility.

  I can die, he thought. Therefore I can live.

  In the distance, around a bend, the tunnel ended. It opened into a large domed chamber. The chamber was lit with the same pearly light as the tunnel, and it seemed to be made of the same substance.

  It was a smooth, featureless room. A dead end. It was empty.

  A voice that was not a voice nibbled at his mind.

  “You have passed the entrance examination,” it “said.” “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Ready.”

  The single word had many nuances. It seemed to Lindstrom that the voice in his mind was intimate with his entire being. Ready… Ready was the word that described his entire life. Ready seemed to imply acceptance and belligerence at the same time. Ready to accept possible death, and ready to fight to cling to life. Ready to wait, and ready to make instant decisions.

  “Yes,” said the voice, “yes.”

  “Why?” asked Lindstrom. “Why all this? Why…”

  “Your General Brewster was right,” said the voice. “In a way, this is a spaceship. A starship. For your people, it can be the key to the universe. If you are ready. If you can change.”

  “Change to what?” said Lindstrom.

  “Change,” said the voice. “Not change to what. Adapt to that which is constantly changing. Live on a tightrope strung over nothingness. Your race is now reaching for the planets of your solar system. A tiny beginning. You have conquered your world by adapting it to your needs. But the universe will not be adapted. An infinity of deaths awaits you out there. Deaths you cannot now even conceive of.”

  “I’ve never been afraid of death,” snapped Lindstrom.

  “You have always been afraid of death,” said the voice. “It is your very fear which allows you to face it. But fear is not enough.”

  “What else is there?”

  “You will learn. Here you will learn, or you will die.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Perhaps you are ready to begin to learn why,” said the voice. “Behold the road to the stars.”

  He was in a place that was terror. It was no place at all. It was everyplace. He was at the same time in a lightless blackness, and the mad dissociated core of a sun. It was a space with no dimensions. It was a space with an infinity of dimensions.

  He had no senses. He had senses that could not exist. He tasted color. He saw time raveled like a vast ball of twine about him. He heard the creation of the universe, and he smelt the acrid stench of its eventual death.

  Entropy ran forward, backward, in circles. He was bigger than the entire universe; it nestled in his navel. He stood on the nonexistent surfaces of a trillion electrons.

  He was an insect, a star, a void, a galaxy.

  He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed…

  He burned and froze, exploded and imploded, his mind was boiled in alien thoughts unspeakably foul. He rolled in beauty so hideous that he died an infinity of deaths from pleasure…

  “Stop. Stop. Stop!” His cries echoed from the walls of existence and rebounded back to sting his flesh like a geometrically breeding nest of angry hornets…

  “Enough,” said the voice.

  He was back in the featureless chamber.

  “W-what… what was it?”

  “That,” said the voice, “is the real universe. All else is illusion, a partial truth, the projection in three dimensions of a reality with an infinity of dimensions. That is the road to the stars.”

  “You mean we have to learn to navigate in that? To remain sane long enough to find our way? It’s impossible!”

  “No,” said the voice. “That is the real universe. It is not enough to learn to travel through it. You must learn to live in it.”

  “In it?” exclaimed Lindstrom. “In that madness?”

  “It is reality,” said the voice. “The universe is not as tidy as you would like it to be. Time is not really a straight line, nor space three-dimensional. It is possible to be all places at once. It is possible to be all times at once. Your race’s view of the universe is pathetically limited. Limited, perhaps, to preserve your sanity.”

  Lindstrom felt his mind perched on the edge of a fathomless abyss. He felt the bonds of reality crumbling about him. Wh
at, after all, was reality? Was it really this unspeakable horror, this mad, murderous confusion…?

  “Yes,” said the voice, “you are looking down into an abyss. But you must do more, you must learn to jump willingly into it. In the real universe, laws of nature are not constant. The rules themselves vary, according to rules for rules, which in turn vary according to still higher orders or rules…”

  “Stop. Stop. No one can cope with a thing like that. I don’t want to know any more. I—”

  “The choice is not yours,” said the voice. “No human will be permitted to leave this place unchanged. This chamber is a dead end. There is no other passage out but the way you came, and that tunnel is sealed to you forever.”

  “You mean you intend to keep me a prisoner here for the rest of my life?”

  “No,” said the voice. “There is no passage out, but there is a way out. Either you will learn it, or you will die. We begin.”

  He was in a space with four dimensions. It hurt his mind. There was a fourth dimension that was somehow at right angles to all three normal directions…

  His body was… different. He was enclosed in a cubical box of some dull metal. Enclosed on all six sides. Slowly the walls of the box began to contract in on him…

  He was trapped. He was surrounded on all six sides.

  But in this space, a cube did not have six sides, it had thirty-six.

  He did a thing that strained his mind near breaking. He moved at right angles to all six faces of the contracting cube, simultaneously.

  He was out.

  And he was a point in a space with no dimensions. He was every point in the space, since all points coincided.

  He was trapped. In a space with no dimensions, there could be no motion…

  But time existed, and in this place time had three dimensions.

  The special point that was Lindstrom wriggled in three temporal dimensions, and became a temporal solid, and thus…

  He was back in “normal” space-time.

  And was whisked into a star-filled blackness… But the blazing suns were also the nuclei of the atoms of his body, corresponding, one for one, with each other, macrocosm and microcosm.