The Rituals of Infinity Read online

  'We'll need some more. They're recycling already, of course, but until we get those big sea-water condensers set up we'll have to keep shipping it in from E-6.' E-6 was a world that now consisted of virtually nothing but freshwater oceans.

  'Good,' Faustaff began to relax. The E-15 problem was still nagging him, though there was little he could do at this stage. Only once before had he experienced a Total Breakup—on the now extinct E-16—the planet that had taken his father when a U.M.S. got completely out of hand. He didn't like to think of what had happened there happening anywhere else.

  'There's a new recruit you might like to talk to yourself,' Harvey said. 'A geologist from this world. He's at main H.Q. now.'

  Faustaff frowned. 'This will mean a trip to E-l. I guess I'd better see him. I need to go to E-l, anyway. They'll want an explanation about the adjustor for one thing. They'll be nervous, quite rightly.'

  They sure will, professor. I'll keep you in touch if anything breaks with this Steifflomeis and the girl.'

  'Have you got a bed free? I'll get a couple of hours sleep first, I think. No point in working tired.' 'Sure. The second on the left upstairs.' Faustaff grunted and went upstairs. Though he could last for days without sleep, it was mainly thanks to his instinct to conserve his energy whenever he had the chance.

  He lay down on the battered bed and, after a pang or two of conscience about Nancy, went to sleep.

  3

  Changing Times

  Faustaff slept for almost two hours exactly, got up, washed and shaved and left the house, which was primarily living quarters for a section of his E-3 team.

  He walked down towards Chinatown and soon reached a big building that had once been a pleasure house, with a saloon and a dance floor downstairs and private rooms for one night rental upstairs. Outside, the building looked ramshackle and the old paint was dull and peeling. A sign in ornate playbill lettering could still be made out. It read, somewhat unoriginally, The Golden Gate. He opened a side door with his key and went in.

  The place was still primarily as it had been when closed down by the cops for the final time. Everything that wasn't faded plush seemed tarnished gilt. The big dance hall, with bars at both ends, smelt a little musty, a little damp. Big mirrors still lined the walls behind the bars, but they were fly-specked.

  In the middle of the floor a lot of electronic equipment had been set up. Housed in dull metal casings, its function was hard to guess. To an outsider many of the dials and indicators would have been meaningless.

  A wide staircase led from the floor to a gallery above. A

  man, dressed in standard T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, was standing there now, his hands on the rail, leaning and looking at the professor below.

  Faustaff nodded to the man and began to climb the stairs.

  'Hi, Jas.'

  'Hi, professor.' Jas Hollom grinned. 'What's new?'

  'Too much. They said you had a new recruit.'

  'That's right.' Jas jerked his thumb at a door behind him. 'He's in there. It was the usual thing—a guy getting curious about the paradoxes in the environment. His investigations led him to us. We roped him in.'

  Faustaffs team made a point of drawing its recruits from people like the man Hollom had described. It was the best way and ensured a high standard of recruits as well as a fair amount of secrecy. The professor didn't court secrecy for its own sake but didn't approach governments and declare himself simply because his experience warned him that the more officials who knew about him and his organisation the more spanners there would be in his organisation's works.

  Faustaff reached the gallery and moved towards the door Hollom had indicated, but before he entered he nodded towards the equipment below. X

  'How's the adjustor working. Tested it recently?'

  'Adjustor and tunneller both in good shape. Will you be needing the tunneller today?'

  'Probably.'

  'I'll go down and check it. Mahon's in the communications room if you want him.' *T saw him earlier. I'll talk to the recruit.'

  Faustaff knocked on the door and entered.

  The new recruit was a tall, well-built, sandy-haired young man of about twenty-five. He was sitting in a chair reading one of the magazines from the table in the centre. He got up.

  T'm Professor Faustaff.' He held out his hand and the sandy-haired man shook it a little warily.

  Tm Gerry Bowen. I'm a geologist- at the university here.'

  'You're a geologist. You found a flaw in the plot of the Story of the Rocks, is that it?'

  'There's that—but it was the ecology of Greater America—not the geology—that bothered me. I started enquiring, but everybody seems to be in a half-dream when it comes to talking about some subjects. A sort of ...'

  'Mass hallucination?'

  'Yes—what's the explanation?'

  T don't know. You started checking, eh?'

  T did. I found this place—found it was turning out a near-endless stream of goods and supplies of all kinds. That explained what was supporting the country. Then I tried to talk to one of your men, find out more. He told me more. It's still hard to believe.'

  'About the alternates, you mean?'

  'About everything to do with them.'

  'Well, I'll tell you about it—but I've got to warn you that if we don't get loyalty from you after you've heard the story we do what we always do ...'

  That's ...?'

  'We've got a machine for brainwashing you painlessly— not only wiping your memory clean of what you've learned from us, but getting rid of that bug of curiosity that led you to us. Okay?'

  'Okay. What happens, now.'

  'Well, I thought I'd give you a good illustration that we're not kidding about the subspacial alternate worlds. I'm going to take you to another alternate—my home planet. We call it E-t. It's the youngest of the alternates.'

  'The youngest? That seems a bit hard to figure.'

  'Figure it out after you've heard more. There isn't much time. Are you willing to come along?'

  'You bet I am!' Bowen was eager. He had an alert mind and Faustaff could tell that in spite of his enthusiasm his intellect was working all the information out, weighing it. That was healthy. It also meant, Faustaff thought, that it

  wouldn't take longfor positive information to convince him.

  When Faustaff and Gerry Bowen got down to the ground floor Jas Hollom was working at the largest machine there. A faint vibration could be felt on the floor and some indicators had been activated.

  Faustaff stepped forward, checking the indicators. 'She's doing fine.' He looked at Bowen. 'Another couple of minutes and we'll be ready.'

  Two minutes passed and a thin hum began to come from the machine. Then the air in front of the tunneller seemed full of agitated dust which swirled round and round in a spiral until delicate, shifting colours became visible and the part of the room immediately ahead of the tunneller became shadowy until it disappeared.

  'Tunnel's ready,' Faustaff said to Bowen. 'Let's go.'

  Bowen followed Faustaff towards the tunnel that the machine had created through subspace.

  'How does it work? Bowen asked incredulously.

  'Tell you later.'

  'Just a minute,' Hollom said, making an adjustment to the machine. 'There—I was sending you to E -12.' He laughed. 'Okay—nowV

  Faustaff stepped into the tunnel and grabbed Bowen, pulling him in too. Faustaff propelled himself forward.

  The 'walls' of the tunnel were grey and hazy, they seemed thin and beyond them was a vacuum more absolute than that of space. Sensing this Bowen shuddered: Faustaff could feel him do it.

  It took ninety seconds before, with an itching skin but no other ill-effects, Faustaff stepped out into a room of bare concrete—a store-room in a factory, or a warehouse. Bowen said: 'Phew! That was worse than a ghost train.'

  But for one large piece of equipment that was missing, the equipment in this room was identical to that in the room they'd just left. It was all that occ
upied the dully-lit room. A

  steel door opened and a short, fat man in an ordinary lounge suit came in. He took off his glasses, a gesture that conveyed surprise and pleasure, and walked with a light, bouncing step towards Faustaff.

  'Professor! I heard you were coming.'

  'Hello, Doctor May. Nice to see you. This is Gerry Bowen from E-3. He may be coming to work with us.'

  'Good, good. You'll want the lecture room. Um ...' May paused and pursed his lips. 'We were a bit worried by E-15 requisitioning our adjustor, you know. We have some more being built, but ...'

  'It was on my orders. Sorry, doctor. E-l has never had a raid, after all. It was the safest bet.'

  'Still, a risk. This could be the time they pick. Sorry to gripe, professor. We realised the emergency was acute. It's odd knowing at the back of your mind that if a U.M.S. occurs we've nothing to fight it with.'

  'Of course. Now—the lecture room.'

  T take it you won't want to be disturbed.'

  'Only if something bad crops up. I'm expecting news from E-3 and E-15. D-squad trouble on both.'

  T heard.'

  The corridor seemed to Bowen to be situated in a large office block. When they reached the elevator he guessed that that must be what it was—outwardly, anyway.

  The building was, in fact, the central headquarters for Faustaffs organisation, a multi-storey building that stood on one of Haifa's main streets. It was registered as the offices of the Trans-Israel Export Company. If the authorities had ever wondered about it, they hadn't done anything to let Faustaff know. Faustaffs father was a respected figure in Haifa—and his mysterious disappearance something of a legend. Perhaps because of his father's good name, Faustaff wasn't bothered.

  The lecture room was appropriately labelled lecture room . Inside were several rows of seats facing a small

  cinema screen. A desk had been placed to one side of the screen and on it was mounted a control console of some kind.

  'Take a seat, Mr Bowen,' said Dr May as Faustaff walked up to the desk and squeezed his bulk into a chair: May sat down beside Bowen and folded his arms.

  'I'm going to be as brief as I can,' Faustaff said. 'And use a few slides and some movie-clips to illustrate what I'm going to say. I'll answer questions, too, of course, but Dr May will have to fill you in on any particular details you want to know. Okay?'

  'Okay,' said Bowen.

  Faustaff touched a stud on the console and the lights dimmed.

  'Although it seems that we have been travelling through the subspacial levels for many years,' he began, 'we have actually only been in contact with them since 1971 —that's twenty-eight years ago. The discovery of the alternate Earths was made by my father when he was working here, in Haifa, at the Haifa Institute of Technology.'

  A picture came on to the screen—a picture of a tall, rather lugubrious man, almost totally unlike the other Faustaff, his son. He was skinny, with melancholy, pverlarge eyes and big hands and feet. He looked like the gormless feed-man for a comedian.

  'That's him. He was a nuclear physicist and a pretty good one. He was born in Europe, spent some time in a German concentration camp, went to America and helped on the Bomb. He left America soon after the Hiroshima explosion, travelled around a little, had a job directing an English Nuclear Research Establishment, then got this offer to come to Haifa where they were doing some very interesting work with high-energy neutrinos. This work particularly excited my father. His ambition—kept secret from everyone but my mother and me—was to discover a device which would counter a nuclear explosion—just stop the bomb going off.

  A fool's dream, really, and he had sense enough to realise it. But he never forgot that that was what he would like to work on if he had the chance. Haifa offered him that chance—or he thought it did. His own work with high energy neutrinos had given him the idea that a safety device, at very least, could be built that would have the effect of exerting a correcting influence on unstable elements by emitting a stream of high energy neutrinos that on contact with the agitated particles would form a uniting link, a kind of shell around the unstable atoms which would, as it were, "calm them down" and allow them to be dealt with easily and at leisure.

  'Some scientists at Haifa Tech had got the same idea and he was offered the job of directing the research.

  'He worked for a year and had soon developed a device which was similar to our adjustors in their crudest form. In the meantime my mother died. One day he and several others were testing the machine when they made a mistake in the regulation of the particles emitted by the device. In fiddling with the controls they accidentally created the first "tunnel". Naturally they didn't know what it was, but investigation soon brought them the information of the subspacial alternative Earths. Further frenzied research, which paralleled work on the adjustor, the tunneller and the invoker, produced the knowledge of twenty-four alternate Earths to our own! They existed in what my father and his team called "subspace"—a series of "layers" that are "below" our own space, going deeper and deeper. Within a year of their discovery there were only twenty alternatives and they had actually witnessed the total extinction of one planet. Before the end of the second year there were only seventeen alternates and they knew, roughly, what was happening.

  'Somehow the complete disruption of the planet's atomic structure was being effected. It would start with a small area and gradually spread until the whole planet would expand

  into gas and those gasses drift away through space leaving no trace of the planet. The small disrupted areas we now call Unstable Matter Locations and are able to deal with. What at first my father thought was some sort of natural phenomenon was later discovered to be the work of human beings—who have machines that create this disruption of matter.

  'Although my father's scientific curiosity filled him, he soon became appalled by the fantastic loss of life that destruction of these alternate Earths involved. Whoever was destroying the planets was cold-bloodedly killing off billions of people a year.

  These planets, I'd better add, all had similarities to our own—and your own, Mr Bowen—with roughly similar standards of civilisation, roughly similar governmental institutions, roughly similar scientific accomplishments— though all, in some way or another, had come to a dead end—had stagnated. We still don't know why this is.'

  A picture came on to the screen. It was not a photograph but an artist's impression of a world the same size as Earth, with a moon the same as Earth's. The picture showed a planet that seemed of a universally greyish colour.

  This is E-15 now,' Faustaff said. This is what it looked like ten years go.'

  Gerry Bowen saw a predominantly green and blue world. He didn't recognise it. 'E-l still looks like this,' Faustaff said.

  Faustaff flashed the next picture. A world of green obsidian, shown in close-ups to be misty, twilit, ghastly, with ghoul-like inhabitants.

  'And this is what E-14 looked like less than ten years go,' came Faustaff s voice.

  The picture Bowen saw next was exactly the same as the second picture he'd seen—a predominantly green and blue world with well-marked continental outlines.

  'E-l3, coming up now,' said Faustaff.

  A world of blindingly bright crystal in hexagonal

  structures like a vast honeycomb, Deposits of earth and water had been collected in some of the indentations. Movie films showed the inhabitants living hand to mouth existences on the strange world. 'E-l3 as it was.'

  A picture identical to the two others Bowen had already seen.

  The pattern was repeated—worlds of grotesque and fantastic jungles, deserts, seas, had all once been like E-l was now. Only E-2 was similar to E-l.

  'E-2 is a world that seemed to stop short, in our terms, just around 1960 and the expansion of the space programmes. You wouldn't know about those, even, since E-3 stopped short, as I remember, just after 1950. This sudden halting of all kinds of progress still mystifies us. As I said, a peculiar change comes over people as well, on
the whole. They behave as if they were living in a perpetual dream and a perpetual present. Old books and films that show a different state to the one they now know are ignored or treated as jokes. Time, in effect, ceases to exist in any aspect. It all goes together—only a few, like you, Mr Bowen break out. The people are normal in all other respects.'

  'What's the explanation for the changes of these worlds?' Bowen asked.

  T'm coming to that. When my father and his team first discovered the alternate worlds of subspace they were being wiped out, as I mentioned, rapidly. They found a way of stopping this wholesale destruction by building the adjustors, refinements of the original machines they'd been working on which could control the U.M. Situations where they occurred.

  Tn order to be ready to control the U.M.S. where and when it manifested itself, my father and his team had to begin getting recruits and had soon built up a large organisation—almost as large as the one I have now. Well-equipped teams of men, both physically and mentally alert,

  had to be stationed on the other alternates—there were fifteen left by then, not fourteen as now.

  'Slowly the organisation was built up, not without some help from officials in the Israeli government of the time, who also helped to keep the activities of my father and his team fairly secret. The adjustors were built and installed on all the worlds. By means of an adjustor's stabilising influence they could correct, to some extent, a U.M.S.—their degree of success depending on the stage the U.M.S. had reached before they could get their machine there and get it working. Things are much the same nowadays. Though we can "calm down" the disrupted matter and bring it back to something approximately its original form, we cannot make it duplicate its original at all perfectly. The deeper back you go through the subspacial levels, the less like the original the planet is and the more U.M. Situations there have been. Thus E-15 is a world of grey ash that settles on it from thousands of volcanoes that have broken through the surface, E-14 is nothing but glassy rock, and E-13 is primarily a crystalline structure these days. E-12 is all jungle and so on. Nearer to E-1 the worlds are more recognisable— particularly E-2, E-3 and E-4. E-4 had it lucky—it stopped progressing just before the first world war. But it mainly consists of the British Isles and Southern and Eastern Europe now—the rest is either waste-land or water.'