XIII

Exultation: How easy it was to deceive these creatures! Take the Powers instrument: all naive, unquestioning. Why, he had shown no doubt whatever when told: “It is only a human illusion that good triumphs over evil.” Oh, how Powers had taken the bait! He couldn’t even see that severing the association between the Primary and Bradford would result in instant, delightful destruction of everything.

Let him dream of power, let him imagine mountainous portions of wealth, authority, control were just beyond his fingertips. Truly, the instrument was overanxious to accomplish his implanted purpose.

But there were, oh, so many delicacies to savor before the ultimate enjoyment! Like the physical debacle—whatever it would turn out to be—that was symbolized by the halving of the radiant, celestial seas. So, why rush universal destruction?

Even in the area of favored-creatures involvement, developments were offering great promise. All those missiles being readied for firing on both sides of the world. Limited war approaching total escalation. All the forces of nature yielding so much destruction, misery, death.

This was a time for exultation.

* * *

Urgency pervaded the foundation meeting room. The full directorate was present. Some sprawled in their chairs. Others—particularly McMillan, head of the Astronomical Section, and Chief Mathematician Steinmetz—scribbled frantically on their pads, trying to keep bloodshot eyes in focus. The air of general fatigue was as palpable as the pall of tobacco smoke that had fogged the room for more than a day.

Pacing along the far wall, Duncan had difficulty keeping shoulders level and head erect, hiding his weariness and uncertainty. Moving back and forth in front of the data he had chalked on his huge slate, he appeared much like an admiral surveying battle deployment on the plot board of his flagship’s Combat Information Center. But no CIC had ever channeled data as critical as these.

“There’s got to be an answer—a key!” he exclaimed. “Sun, moon, planets don’t just go popping in and out of the sky without cause—not even under our modified discipline of determinism!”

Security Chief Hawthorn, seeming anxious to end the session, suggested, “Maybe we’re worked up over nothing. It’s been four days since all that stuff happened up there. Perhaps it was just a simple one-shot upheaval—a sort of random spasm in the celestial range.”

“It just appeared to be random,” Duncan countered. “By only glancing at these data, I can sense enough order in what happened on the night of July 30th to know that something fundamental was involved.”

“But suppose it was merely a sort of scattershot convulsion,” Steinmetz said, “—a temporary ripple in the fabric of reality.”

“No.” The director stood upon his conviction. “What we observed—moon, sun, planets blinking off, on, off, on—reflected a basic alteration in natural law. I’m certain of that, intuitively at least. If there were just some clue! Some inspiration that might lead to the underlying cause!”

Duncan’s intuition held no small measure of respect. Hadn’t it been his ‘hunch’ five years ago that had ferreted out Bradford’s ‘true nature’? In deference to his judgment, the directorate somehow became more alert, more willing to go over the facts one more time. Even Powers swilled the remainder of his coffee and sat erect.

“These are the data Dr. McMillan wangled from the Orb-observational Information Center.” Duncan tapped his yardstick against the blackboard. “OIC gives us this chronology of what happened on that impossible night last week. I’ve converted times to our local zone.”

He read off each item as he thumped it with his indicator:

9:15—moon out, first time	9:23—moon out, second time
9:15—moon in	9:24—Venus out, second time
9:18—Venus out, first time	9:27—Mars in
9:20—Venus in	9:31—sun in
9:21—Mars out, first time	9:31—moon in again
9:23—sun out	9:32—Venus in again
9:34—Mars out, second time	10:34—Jupiter out, second time
9:51—Jupiter out, first time	11:39—Saturn in
9:52—Mars in again	11:47—Saturn out, second time
10:27—Jupiter in	11:53—Jupiter in again
10:27—Saturn out, first time	2:19—Saturn in again

“At first,” Duncan resumed, “the effects would appear to be purely random. A blinking out. Blinking in. Out. In. But somehow I can see just enough vague order in the chronology to resist calling the manifestation in its entirety a ‘scattershot convulsion’ of the Creative Force, as Dr. Steinmetz proposes.

“These data, rearranged in this second chart, reveal a bit of that elusive regularity.” Again he pointed to each entry as he read out the times and effects:

SUN	MOON	VENUS	MARS	JUPITER	SATURN
9:23—out	9:15—out	9:18—out	9:21—out	9:51—out	10:27—out
9:31—in	9:15—in	9:20—in	9:27—in	10:27—in	11:39—in
	9:23—out	9:24—out	9:34—out	10:34—out	11:47—out
	9:31—in	9:32—in	9:52—in	11:53—in	2:19—in

Duncan gulped coffee. “This second chart shows us that five celestial bodies—moon and four planets—disappeared twice. But the sun went out just once, coincident with the moon’s second fadeout. Why the distinction?

McMillan proposed, “Let’s consider basic differences between the sun and planets. That’s the only logical approach if we’re going to explain the discrepancy between the sun and planets in the way they were affected by whatever happened.”

“But there are so many differences!” Hawthorn protested.

“Then it’s our job as a task force to single out the pertinent ones,” Duncan said.

McMillan raised a finger to his chin. “I have a hunch that the most relevant distinction has something to do with the fact that the sun radiates, while the moon and planets reflect.”

“And I’ve a hunch,” Duncan said, gripping the astronomer’s shoulder, “that you’ve just made a significant contribution, Irving.”

He paused, bowing the indicator between palms. “Let’s review some of the other effects that may or may not be relevant:

“First, Dr. McMillan has also learned that new radar measurements show the moon and planets at twice their former distance.”

The astronomer held up his hand. “But we know those new values can’t be correct. Especially in the case of the moon. First: no observable decrease in apparent size. Second: triangulation from polar stations, we’re told, gives precisely the same distance.”

Then something must be wrong with the radar equipment,” Communications Chief Wittels said.

“File it away for future reference,” Duncan instructed. “Maybe it will all fit logically into the picture. Second, Moonbase U.S. reports exactly reciprocal effects. They watched earth vanish twice—at about the same times we saw the moon disappear.”

“Sounds like a subjective effect to me,” Chief Mathematician. Steinmetz offered. “Especially when you consider that a shuttle craft, en route home, reported double disappearances by both earth and moon.”

“Not disappearances,” Wittels corrected. “They just quit shining. No stars were observed in the spaces occupied by their blackened discs.”

Duncan paced, paused to look at the blackboard, then stared at his aides. I’ve a feeling we’re very close to the answer; that all we need is just one simple key.”

He shrugged. “Third, there’s that slight retrograde displacement of the moon and planets. Very slight for the moon. A bit more noticeable for Venus and Mars. More pronounced for Jupiter and Saturn. Why? Why should the planets be set back in their orbits by an angular amount proportionate to their distances not from the sun, but from Earth?”

“Geocentric universe after all?” McMillan mumbled.

Silence prevailed, broken only by the sound of the director’s measured steps back and forth. He had to radiate assurance; it was good for morale.

“There’s a deep, unguessable method in this whole thing,” he mused aloud. In all this contradictory disorder, there is harmonious order. It almost leaps out at me from those figures on the blackboard. But I just can’t put my finger on it.” If only he were free from the obligations of command! Then he might lock himself in his study—if he still had a study—and ferret out the answer within minutes.

He paced again, closer to the table. When he passed Powers, the psychiatrist’s head was shaking in the slow rhythm of puzzlement while he muttered to himself.

Vincent Kadesch rose in front of the director. “Remember Silverstein?” the scientific survey chief said. “Do you suppose that could fit into the picture somewhere—another clue perhaps?”

Hawthorn straightened. “Who’s Silverstein? What about him?”

“Dr. Silverstein was connected with Tristate Nuclear Laboratory,” Kadesch explained. “It was the last such establishment to close down. Too many accidents among the others. TNL performed its final experiments on July 31, the day after our celestial freakout.”

“Yes?” Hawthorn said impatiently.

“Silverstein told me TNL’s betatron consistently malfunctioned on the morning of July 31. Whenever its accelerators could be goosed up enough to produce the desired reaction, it yielded results at about one-fourth the anticipated energy levels in MeVs.”

Duncan admitted it might be one of the jigsaw bits—if only he could guess how to fit it into the picture.

He also recalled listening to the last Houston-Moonbase radio conversation monitored by the foundation. There had been something odd about that. About the message itself—the discussion of the earth-moon disappearances? No, not that. Something else. Something to do with the mechanics of transmission. But what?

His face brightened with inspiration, then drained itself of all expression in the next instant. He’d almost had it. He stared back at the blackboard for a long while, then resumed pacing, resumed command.

Powers was still hunched forward upon the table. And he was mumbling: “Half a sea? Half a sea? Half—”

Duncan wondered, in even deeper perplexity: Half a sea? Why, no—that wasn’t what Powers was saying at all! It only sounded like that. And then, with the intensity of a flash bulb going off in his face, he realized what the psychiatrist was actually murmuring!

Whirling, he seized the other and hauled him to his feet. “Powers has it!” he proclaimed. “Now we know what it is!” Then, somberly: “O, God! Now we know.”

“What is it?” McMillan demanded. “What’s the answer?”

“Half c! Don’t you understand? One-half c! It’s the only explanation that satisfies all the observed effects. The speed of light has been reduced to half its former value!”

He paced again, but with a purpose now. “Radar measures the moon and planets at twice their distance because electromagnetic waves are being propagated at half their former velocity. The planets appear in retrograde positions because it takes light double the time to get here—the farther away the planet, the more pronounced its retrogression.

“Of course there was something wrong with that last Houston-Moonbase communication. It was sluggish, drawn out. Took twice as long as the usual exchange of information. The time lapse between question and response was more pronounced. Why? Because signals traveled half as fast over the distance!”

He went to the blackboard, fatigue no longer evident in his steps. “We can now reconstruct what actually happened at 9:15 P.M. on July 30. But, first, let me state the premise: The speed of light was arbitrarily changed at that moment—but not of light already in transit. Rather, the modification applied to the phenomena of radiation and reflection at their sources.”

He wielded his yardstick upon the tables of figures: “First, the sun, our radiating body, quit shining from 9:23 to 9:31. In other words, it went out about eight minutes after 9:15. Therefore, we can deduce that the last wavefront of light to leave the photosphere at 9:15 continued traveling at the old speed of 186,000 miles a second, taking eight minutes to get here. Also at 9:15, with c reduced to half its value, the new wavefront of half-speed light left the sun; it would require sixteen minutes to cover the distance. At 9:23 the last wavefront of c-light reached earth, leaving the sun dark for eight minutes—since, at 9:23, the new ½c wavefront had covered only half the distance to earth. Eight minutes later, at 9:31, the first wavefront of ½c light reached here, restoring the sun’s radiance.”

“I don’t have the background to consider all the ramifications of ½c,” McMillan said, shaking his head. “But it seems to me it would disturb such relationships as wavelength and frequency, Planck’s constant and the like; that we’d have an entirely new spectrum; that even nuclear processes involving c as a constant would be knocked askew; that …”

“True,” Duncan admitted. “But you’re overlooking the possibility that It may have mitigated the change in such a way as to prevent life from becoming physically intolerable.”

“Good God!” McMillan objected “Are you actually suggesting a homocentric, homo-oriented universe?”

“Why not?” Hawthorn broke in. “The Creative Force is Bradford-oriented, isn’t it?”

Kadesch reminded them again of Tristate Nuclear Laboratory and asked, “Could ½c have had anything to do with Silverstein’s betatron yielding only one-quarter of the anticipated MeV levels?”

“Of course!” Duncan affirmed. “The constant c is a factor in nuclear phenomena. And ½c2 is one-fourth the value of c2. Silverstein’s results confirm our hypothesis!”

He turned back to the column under the heading “MOON” in the second chart. “We’ll consider the case of just one reflecting body in order to see how precisely the ½c hypothesis is validated:

“At 9:15 the moon blinked out for an instant—my guess would be about one and a third seconds, the time light used to take to travel from Moon to Earth. In other words, since the transition affected reflection too, there was a gap of lunar darkness between receipt of our last c-speed reflection and our first ½c-speed reflection from that body.

“So, the moon blinks off for a little over a second, then shines normally from 9:15 to 9:23—all the while that it is still receiving the final stream of c light from the sun. Then, at 9:23, the moon goes out once more—at almost exactly the same time the sun stops shining. Why? Because the last wavefront of c light from the sun has not only stopped reaching earth, but has stopped bathing the moon too.

“At 9:31, both the sun and moon start shining again—as the first wavefront of steady ½c light reaches earth and its satellite.”

He laid down his yardstick. “The same principle applied with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn: an initial blackout while the mechanics of reflection adjusted to ½c; a second blackout as a result of being deprived of radiation from the sun in the gap between c and ½c illumination. We should have recognized from the beginning that the length of the sunout was equal to the time it takes sunlight to reach us; that the durations of the first blackouts of the moon and planets were proportional to their distance from us; that the durations of their second blackouts were proportional to the total Sun-to-planet-to-Earth distances.”

“What do we do about it?” Wittels said. “Can we live with it?”

“I don’t know. We need a basis for rational prediction.”

“I’m for the Ultimate Remedy—now!” Hawthorn declared.

“But even that’d take time,” Duncan reminded. “We’d have to carefully prepare our direct appeal.”

“God!” he added, starting. “That was close! It lost control over the velocity of light and c slipped to half value. Suppose c had doubled, or perhaps assumed infinite velocity!”

“Yes?” McMillan said, obviously not realizing the consequences.

“E=mc2,” Duncan went on, scarcely above a whisper. “In all nuclear equations c would have been a factor of unlimited magnitude! Every star would annihilate itself immediately! Every naturally occurring nuclear reaction—even in our own atmosphere—would generate infinite energy!”

* * *

Too many concessions. But, oh, what blissful relief: not having to push each photon at that awful velocity! It was an even greater self-deliverance than the detranscendentalization of pi and of some of the other nonalgebraic values.

One would think that with most of the transcendentals eliminated, with the impossible nonstars-nongalaxies withdrawn from existence, with causative discipline placed on a less rigid basis, with the momentum of light cut in half—with all of those simplifications, the self-challenge would become tolerable and it would be proved that the self-defier could be successfully repudiated.

But no.

For the halving of light’s speed had been fraught with dangers for the mortal beings. And many qualifications had to be made in establishing the new, less demanding order—exceptions in natural law that were helping to mitigate the overall effects on those creatures. But these exceptions, in themselves, comprised a new patchwork discipline that was almost as difficult to maintain as the former unreasonable limiting velocity.

Why, even after light had been slowed at its sources, the principle of continuous creation had had to be annulled. At the time, it seemed as though that would be the ultimate concession. But no. It was clear that there would have to be additional retrenchment if Creation was to be preserved in a form remotely resembling its present status.

* * *

Bradford hitched his robe and took two faltering steps before his knees buckled. But, with Ann’s help, he averted falling.

“This is no good,” he complained through the fog that hung over his senses. “I’m all spaced out. And I can’t come down.”

“You’ll get your strength back, Brad.” Her dark eyes conveyed sincerity. “After all, this is only the fourth day.”

Exhausted, he dropped into a chair. “Why did I have to be stoned for so long—for over a week?”

“Powers’ll fill you in on that. I can’t.”

He looked over at the tray where half of his supper still lay untouched. But, at least, he was eating more each meal.

Ann knelt beside his chair and searched his face. “Powers says there’s a way we can—you can—I mean you and I—”

He touched her soft hair. “He thinks I can be normal again?” It was an effort to keep his mind from wandering back to the hallucinations and hallucinations within hallucinations.

“Yes. And—oh, Brad, I don’t care what happens. Just as long as we …”

For a moment the inner mist seemed to clear. “On the other side of the pit I’ve just climbed out of, I asked you to marry me. I wasn’t going square on you. I asked because—I was suspicious. I wanted to see how eager you’d be to …”

All the coherence seemed to have melted.

“It doesn’t matter,” she assured. “The important thing now is for you to be yourself again; for you and me to be together, normally, without any soul barriers between us.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her—weakly though, because he was still debilitated. “Yes, that’s the important thing. The only thing.”

High-spirited, Powers entered and led Bradford back to bed. “We’ve had enough exertion for one day, haven’t we?”

Bradford looked up from the pillow while the psychiatrist prepared his injection. “I wanted to ask about what happened during—”

Powers bared and swabbed his arm. “Questions and answers can be tiring. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

He waited with Ann until the injection had taken effect. Then he exclaimed, “This may be it, dear! Transfer, at last!”

“We’re going to try it again—now?”

“Not we. Just I.” He ushered her into the corridor, then locked the door behind him. Drawing his revolver, he thrust its muzzle against Bradford’s temple and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Then, dismayed, he realized his finger wasn’t exerting any pressure at all! He couldn’t shoot Bradford!

Not for the moment, at least, rumbled the voice within. There’s still too much gratification to be had by stringing things out a while.

“Yet you wouldn’t have been able to stop me from killing myself in my office—that evening when I learned about you.”

True. But that was when I controlled only your inner drives. Now I’ve taken charge of your impulses too.

* * *

Iggy beat upon the padded door with his fists, then launched a kick at the lower panel.

Marcella drew her knees up beneath her chin where she sat on the bed. “Won’t do any good. They can’t even hear you.” Bare midriff exposed the bandaged, but almost healed gunshot wound in her side.

“If I don’t get some speed,” Iggy groaned through the disarray of his stringy beard, “I’ll blow my mind in this damn place!”

Uncoiling, Marcella rose and stood beside the bed. “This is not a damn place,” she admonished. “Not with Drofdarb Yloh here.”

The food slot in the door swung down and a double tray was shoved in, the face of the shover remaining visible beyond the opening.

Iggy lunged over. “Did you get it, Kcodrum? Did you get it?”

Murdock put a silencing finger to his lips while his eyes scouted the hallway. “No. I can’t get any—ah, acid in this place.”

Iggy swore. “Where’s the key so’s we can split this pad?”

“I have it,” the former VA man disclosed. “But Eugatnom doesn’t want us to use it now.”

“You’ve seen the Tehporp again?” Marcella asked.

“Just this afternoon. He says the three of us are going to have the first chance to release Drofdarb from captivity.”

Iggy sobered. “We’re going to snatch the Infinite Man?”

“We’ll give it a try anyway. If we fail, the Crusaders will be ready to storm this bastion.”

Marcella crowded the door. “When will the Crusaders get here?”

“The first ones are already trickling in. All the main forces will arrive by day after tomorrow.”

She drew in an exultant breath. “Oh, what a blast it will be when we release the Inverse Vessel and tell Him what the score is and get Him to help us reach the Primary One and tame things down and—”

Murdock appeared uncertain. “Why, that’s just what the foundation wants to do.”

“But they are infidels,” Iggy pointed out, swearing. “They think they’re messing around with nothing more than a Creative Force. We know He’s the Primary One. We dig the true prana of all things. They’d screw up the deal. We’re going to suck it dry—with all due veneration, of course, like Eugatnom says.”