The Paradox Men Page 11

Alar had been wandering through the streets about an hour when he saw Keiris.

  She was standing alone on the steps of the Geographical Museum, regarding him gravely. A light cape was thrown about her shoulders and she appeared to hold it together with the fingers of her right hand, or possibly a barely visible metal clasp.

  The lamps on the museum porticoes threw an unearthly blue light over her bloodless face. Her translucent cheeks were drawn and lined, and her body seemed very thin. There was now a streak of white in her hair, which was knotted unobtrusively at the side of her neck.

  To Alar she was completely lovely. For a long time he could only stare, drinking in the moody, ethereal beauty of the composition of light and blue shadow. His torturing frustration was forgotten.

  “Keiris!” he whispered. “Keiris!”

  He walked quickly across the street and she descended the steps stiffly to meet him.

  But when he held out both hands to her, she merely lowered her head and seemed to swirl her cape closer. Somehow, he had not expected so cool a reception. They walked silently up the street.

  After a moment he asked, “Did Haze-Gaunt give you any trouble?”

  “A little. They asked some questions. I told them nothing.” Her voice was strangely husky.

  “Your hair—have you been ill?”

  “I have been in a hospital for the past six weeks,” she replied evasively.

  “I’m sorry.” After a moment he asked, “Why are you here?”

  “A friend of yours brought me. A Dr. Haven. He’s waiting in your study, now.”

  Alar’s heart leapt. “Has the Society reinstated me?” he asked quickly.

  “Not that I know of.”

  He sighed. “Very well, then. But how did you meet John?”

  Keiris studied the dim-lit flaggings of the street. “He bought me in the slave market,” she said quietly.

  Alar sensed the outline of something ominous. What could have angered Haze-Gaunt to the point of selling her? And why had the Society bought her? He couldn’t talk to her about it. Perhaps Haven would know.

  “There’s really nothing mysterious about it,” she continued. “Haze-Gaunt gave me to Shey. When Shey thought I was dead he had me sold to what he thought was a charnel-house buyer, only it turned out to be a surgeon sent by the Thieves. They kept me in their secret hospital for six weeks and as you can see I didn’t die. And when Dr. Haven came I told him where you were. We slipped through the blockade last night.”

  “Blockade?”

  “Haze-Gaunt grounded every planetary and spacejet immediately after you left. The Imperials are still combing the hemisphere for you.”

  He stole a cautious look behind them. “But how could a Thief ship enter Lunar Station? The place is swarming with I.P.’s. You’ve been spotted, surely. It was insane of Haven to come. The only reason both of you weren’t arrested when you landed was that the I.P.’s hoped you’d lead them to me. Well, we’re being tailed right now.”

  “I know but it doesn’t matter.” Her voice was quiet, with a soft huskiness. “The Mind told me to come to you. As for Dr. Haven, I question none of his acts. As for you, you’ll be safe for several hours.

  “Suppose the guards at the landing locker did identify Dr. Haven and me, and suppose that I have called their attention to you and suppose we are being followed. If we don’t try to leave Selena they won’t do anything, at least not until Thurmond arrives and perhaps Shey. Why should they? They think you can’t escape.”

  He started to make a sarcastic retort, then changed his mind. “Does Haven really think he can get me off the moon?” he queried.

  “A high government official, a secret Thief, will plant his bribed guard at the exit port at a certain hour and all of us can escape then.” She compressed her lips, gave him a strange side look, and then said without expression: “You won’t die on the moon.”

  “Another prediction of the Meganet Mind, eh? Incidentally, Keiris, who is the Mind? Why do you think you have to do everything he says?”

  “I don’t know who he is. It’s said he was once a common circus performer who could answer any question if the answer had ever appeared in print. Then about ten years ago he was in a fire that left his face and hands disfigured.

  “After that he couldn’t make any more public appearances, and became a clerk in the data banks of the Imperial Science Library. That’s where he learned to absorb a two thousand page book in less than a minute and that’s where Shey discovered him.”

  “Go on.” He felt a twinge of guilt at pressing her for details about a life she must long to forget. But he had to know.

  “About that time Kim disappeared and Haze-Gaunt—took me. I got a note in Kim’s handwriting asking me to do whatever the Mind requested. So—”

  “Kim?” Something sagged within the Thief.

  The woman said quietly: “Kennicot Muir was my husband. You didn’t know?”

  A great deal was suddenly incisively, painfully clear.

  “Keiris Muir,” he muttered. “Of course! The wife of the most fabulous, most elusive man in the system. In ten years he hasn’t appeared in person to the Society he founded or to the woman he married.” He said abruptly, “What makes you think he’s alive?”

  “Sometimes I wonder myself,” she admitted slowly. “It’s just that on that night, when he left me to go to his fatal interview with Haze-Gaunt, he told me he’d get through and come back for me. A week later, when Haze-Gaunt had installed me in his personal quarters, I received a note in Kim’s handwriting asking me not to commit suicide. So I didn’t.

  “The next month I got another note telling me about the Meganet Mind. About once a year since then there have been other notes in what looks like his handwriting, telling me that he looks forward to the day we can be together again.”

  “Have you considered that they might be forgeries?”

  “Yes, they might be. He may be dead. Perhaps I am naïve for thinking him alive.”

  “Is that the only evidence you have?—those notes in his handwriting?”

  “That’s all.” Keiris nodded solemnly. “And yet, I think it’s significant that none of the wolf pack thinks he’s dead, either.”

  “That includes Haze-Gaunt?”

  “Oh yes, Haze-Gaunt is almost certain Kim is in hiding, perhaps overseas.”

  To Alar that was the strongest possible indication that Muir was indeed alive. The hard, practical chancellor would be certain to hide his secret fears if he thought them baseless.

  “But,” Alar said, “what about the Mind? What is his connection with the Society?”

  “A secret agent, I suppose. His access to the Imperial Science Library is probably of considerable value to the Society.”

  Alar smiled humorlessly. Keiris’s intimacy with greatness had apparently blinded her to the probability that the Society was a mere catspaw of the Mind. You, I, all of us, he thought, caught in the omnivorous meshes of that mysterious net. Ah, Mind with the Meganet, you are well named!

  And the comparison led to a startling possibility.

  “You say,” he began slowly, studying her closely, “that Kennicot Muir disappeared about the same time that the Mind put in his appearance. Does that seem significant to you?”

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Have you considered,” he persisted, “that the Meganet Mind might be your husband?”

  She was silent for a moment before she replied.

  “Yes, I’ve considered it.” Her dark eyes searched his face eagerly. “Have you learned something?”

  “Nothing specific.” He saw the sudden disappointment reflected in her eyes. “But there seems to be an inordinate number of coincidences connected with the two men.”

  “The only resemblance between them is in their over-all size. Otherwise they’re utterly different.”

  “The Mind is disfigured, so that would be a perfect disguise. More important is the rise to prominence of the Mind after your husband�
�s disappearance. Note his influence with the Society.” Alar watched her carefully. “And he treats you like a special ward.”

  “They can’t be the same man,” she said without conviction. There was doubt, now, in her eyes.

  “What proof do you have that they aren’t?” Alar said gently.

  “Proof?” She obviously had no answer to his question.

  “You said,” he continued, pursuing the point which formed the basis for her doubt, “that you’ve weighed the possibility. What made you discard it?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, beginning to be upset as she felt her confidence fading away. “I just did.” She shook her head almost desperately. “I have no proof, if that’s what you mean.”

  He was being cruel, he knew, with his questioning. She wanted to be objective, to face the situation, but the pain within could not be controlled. He hunted frantically through his brain for a final question to settle the doubts in both their minds.

  Suddenly he had it. “Has Haze-Gaunt also considered the possibility?”

  “Why, yes! Yes, he has!” Her eyes were very wide now.

  “To what effect?”

  “He rejected the idea completely! I know he did!”

  “So!” Alar said and sighed. That was importantly significant—that was negative proof as good as one might expect to find. The interrogation was over. He looked abruptly at the luminous dial on his wrist radio.

  “It’s four now. If Thurmond left immediately—and we must assume he did—he’ll be here with troops by midnight. We have eight hours to complete the solution to the star plate and to blast off. Our first step is the Galactarium, then back to my study and John Haven.”

  12

  Search for Identity

  THE WIZENED CURATOR unlocked the door, and Alar led the woman into the great dark chamber of the Galactarium. The door closed quietly behind them, and their eyes strained forward in the cold gloom, sensing rather than seeing the vastness of the place.

  “A gallery circles the interior,” whispered Alar. “We’ll take a moving platform to the necessary point.”

  He led her down the ramp and they were soon speeding around the dark periphery of the great room.

  Within a few seconds the platform slowed to a stop in front of a vaguely lit control-board. Keiris smothered a gasp as Alar’s hand flew to his saber pommel.

  A tall somber figure stood by the panel station. “Good evening, Mrs. Muir, Alar!”

  The Thief felt his stomach turn over slowly.

  The tall man’s laughter welled in ghastly echoes out into the blackness, circling and sodden. His face was that of Gaines, Undersecretary of Spaceways. The voice was that of the Thief judge who had condemned him to death.

  Alar was silent, wary, speculative.

  The man seemed to read his thoughts. “Paradoxically, Alar, your escape from us was the only thing that could have reinstated you in the Society. It confirmed your ultrahumanity as no number of words could have done. As for me, if you’re wondering, I arrived on the sun-bound Phobos last night, and I am here now to provide for your safe passage home and to ask if you have discovered the secret of the star plate. Our time is growing very short.”

  “Why do you want to know?” queried Alar.

  “I don’t, particularly. The important thing is that you know.”

  “That’s easily answered, then. I don’t know—or at least I don’t know the whole story.” Alar had a stubborn impulse to maintain a strict silence until he learned more about his role in this fantastic drama. Still, for ill-defined reasons, he trusted this man who had once wanted his life. “Look out there,” he said simply, pointing into the man-made space before them.

  The three of them stared into the silent vastness while Alar flicked a switch on the panel. Even Gaines seemed subdued.

  Sol with his ten planets sprang into glowing three-dimensional view before them. Cerberus, the newly discovered trans-Plutonian planet, was nearly a mile away, barely visible. Expertly the Thief manipulated the dials and the system began rapidly to shrink. The three picked up opera glasses from the panel pockets and watched. Finally, Alar spoke.

  “Our sun is now about the size of a very small speck of luminous dust, and even with our magnifiers we can’t see Jupiter.” He quickly began to activate more switches. “That’s Alpha Centauri, a visual binary, over two hundred yards away from the sun on the present scale. The bright one on the other side is Sirius. And there’s Procyon. They’re accompanied by dwarfs too faint to see.

  “Within this mile-diameter Galactarium there are now about eighty of the stars nearest the sun. On this scale the galaxy would fit in a space about as big as the moon. So we’ll have to shrink the projections still more to see any substantial part of the galaxy.”

  He turned more dials and a great glowing wheel with spiraling spokes began to form before them. “The galaxy—our local universe,” he said softly. “Or at least ninety-five percent of it, scaled down to a mile across and one-tenth of a mile thick. It’s just a haze of light now—the Milky Way.

  “The main identifying features are the two Magellanic Clouds. For more accurate identification we can refer to the positions of the spiral arms, the hundred globular clusters and the configuration of the star cloud in the center of the galaxy. Now watch.”

  The wheel and its Magellanic satellites shrank quickly. “The Galactarium is now on a diametric scale of five million light years. Far off to the right, about seven hundred and fifty thousand scale light years away, is our sister galaxy, M thirty-one in Andromeda, with her own satellite clusters M thirty-two and NGC two hundred and five. Below are two smaller galaxies, IC one thousand six hundred and thirteen and M thirty-three. On the other side is NGC six thousand eight hundred and twenty-two. The universe-fragment you now see,” he concluded simply, “is exactly what I found on the star plate.”

  “But this is old stuff,” protested Gaines in heavy disappointment.

  “No,” interjected Keiris. “Alar means that he has seen our own galaxy from outside.”

  “That’s right,” said the Thief. “For two centuries astronomic theory has predicted that our own galaxy would be visible as soon as a telescope were constructed capable of penetrating the thirty-six-billion-light-year diameter of the universe.”

  “So!” Gaines said. “From the outside!” He beat a faint tattoo with his opera glasses against the panel pocket. “Then we’re peering clear across the universe!” He seemed immensely impressed.

  “Well,” Alar said, giving a fleeting wry smile, “that’s not very much to my credit. When the Lunar Observatory was finished it was just a question of time before my discovery was made. So my contribution in that direction is largely routine.”

  Keiris glanced sharply at him.

  “Have you discovered something else, then?” she asked.

  “Yes. In the first place, light from the Milky Way, passing in a closed circuit across the universe, should return only after thirty-six billion years, so that what we now see on the plate should be our galaxy as of thirty-six billion years ago, on the very eve of its formation from cosmic dust. Instead, the plate shows the Milky Way as of now—today—just as you see it out there.”

  “But that’s impossible!” exclaimed Gaines. “There ought to be a thirty-six-billion-year lag!”

  Smiling, the Thief said, “It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But the positions of the galactic spiral arms, the peripheral velocity of the nebula as a whole, the positions of the globular clusters, the spectral age of our own sun, even the positions of the planets, including Terra, prove otherwise.”

  “Then how do you explain it?” asked Keiris.

  “Here is my hypothesis: According to Einstein, time multiplied by the square root of minus one is equated to Euclidean space. That is, a light year of distance equals a year of time multiplied by the square root of minus one. So if space is finite, so must time be. And like space, time curves and bends back on itself, so that there is no beginning and no en
d.

  “Our galaxy moves simultaneously along time and space coördinates like this.” He held up two pencils crossed at right angles. “Let the x-axis be time, the y-axis space, our galaxy located at the intersection. Now I move the y-pencil to the right, and simultaneously push it up. Anything at the intersection will be moving in both coördinates.”

  He offered the two pencils to Keiris, but with a toss of her head she deferred the honor to Gaines. The Undersecretary took the two slim implements and, holding them together at right angles, moved them back and forth and up and down. His lips were pursed and his eyes were intent. Keiris was concentrating on the demonstration, too.

  Alar watched the two of them adjusting themselves to the concept. He leaned towards them and touched the pencils.

  “Now,” he said, “suppose you substitute two hoops for the pencils, so that the hoop frames intersect each other at right angles like the frame of a toy gyroscope. Let one hoop be equivalent to thirty-six billion light years of space and the other equivalent to thirty-six billion years of time, with our galaxy always at their intersection.

  “I’ll assume further that for any given time-space intersection there can be but one distribution of matter, with the corollary that, when the same intersection recurs, the same matter will be there. So, after the hoops have made one-half revolution, the intersection does recur, and it follows that our galaxy is in two places at once, or to be more precise, in the same space at the same time.

  “But space and time have vanished and rematerialized across the poles of the universe and, when they did, our galaxy materialized with them. The joker in my illustration is that we are tempted to view the rotation of the hoops in Euclidean space, while they’re really associated only through the square root of minus one via the fourth dimension. Only their intersections—just two geometric points— have mutual Euclidean values.”

  He took back the two pencils Gaines was offering.

  “And, since the two intersections are diametrically opposite in the space-time cycle, one should always be thirty-six billion years ahead of the other, so that when light starts from the ‘future’ intersection and travels across the poles of time and space to the lagging intersection, it arrives at the other thirty-six billion years later, to be received by the same space-time-matter continuum from which it originated. That’s why the ‘mirror’ galaxy was the same age as ours now is, when its light began that long journey.”