Ratner's Star (26 page)

Thorkild opened the bathroom door and appeared in the entranceway, dressed in that hit-and-run outfit he'd seen hanging on the towel rack. When he looked back to the grating, Harry Braniff's head and hand were gone but the sound of his voice, barely audible, drifted up from the darkness below.

“Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.”

News of the conference spread rapidly, causing rumor to flourish, much of it humorous in nature, centering on the notion that ninety percent of the universe is missing. It was the second formal conference in the brief history of Field Experiment Number One. (The first, predating Billy's arrival, had been presided over by Endor and concerned the transmission from the area of Ratner's star.) It even had a name. Conference on Invisible Mass. As the hours passed, there was less jocularity in evidence and a greater degree of uneasiness, particularly among those who'd heard the latest rumor.

He walked into the conference room.

The latest rumor concerned the people who'd been selected to attend the conference. All (with one exception) were experts in alternate physics. Why did this cause uneasiness and tense speculation? Because many scientists questioned the utility and general merit of alternate physics, dealing as it did with the effects of suppositional laws on hypothetical environments.

Since he'd been invited merely to “sit in” on the meeting, Billy took a chair in the corner and tried to look like someone “sitting in.” Three men and a woman sat at a large octagonal table. There were no pencils, note pads or glasses of water. He took this to mean that extremely serious matters were about to be discussed. No time for customs, rules, formalities or informalities. The woman's name was Masha Simjian. The men were Maidengut, Lepro and Bhang Pao.

“Who's chairing?” Simjian said.

She looked from face to face, sucking on hard candy all the while, cheeks indented and thin lips thrust sourly outward.

“Let's all chair,” Maidengut said. “Except whoever's sitting in.”

“All right then, who's participating and who's sitting in? Show of hands please.”

“I'm sitting in,” Billy said.

“Show of hands.”

He raised his hand.

“It's my understanding,” she said, “that persons invited to sit in on a formal conference aren't permitted to speak unless directly addressed.”

“Why or because,” Lepro said.

“What do you mean?”

Maidengut, a blocklike man, spoke out on Lepro's behalf.

“He has trouble distinguishing between ‘why' and ‘because.' In his language the same word is used for both. So in order to save time and avoid confusion he uses ‘why' as well as ‘because' and leaves it to the listener to match the right word to the context. In other words he says ‘why or because' instead of ‘why' individually or ‘because' individually.”

“Time to begin,” Simjian said. “Who wants to get things moving?”

Bhang Pao shifted in his chair, drawing everyone's attention. He wore a dark suit and tie. His face was round and pleasant, shady manila in color, and on his head was a bowl-shaped toupee, incongruous not
only because it suggested an unprofessional haircut but also in view of its glossy look and poor fit, these factors combining to engulf any trace of authenticity.

“We've long known about invisible mass,” Bhang Pao said. “Galaxies are no longer flying apart at previous rates of speed. We must presume they are being held together by gravity. However, the mass needed to generate this much gravity is not present in or between the galaxies themselves. There is unexplained mass. A great deal of unexplained mass. Really a whole lot. What is it? Where does it come from? Why can't we find it?”

“Succinctly put,” Simjian said.

“Don't interrupt my train.”

“Please go on.”

“Visible matter cannot account for the failure of the galaxies to disperse at prior speeds. Therefore we frame a hypothesis based on missing matter and we estimate that this matter is many times greater than the sum of all detected matter in the universe. Of course not everyone accepts this model. Some years ago it was determined that interstellar deuterium abundance relative to hydrogen is lower than was thought. This means less density than suspected, which in turn means not as much invisible mass as previously conjectured. However, I regard these findings as tentative in the extreme.”

“Bravo.”

“Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock,” Bhang Pao said. “Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind. All we can do as scientists is try to determine the nature of the invisible mass, assuming there is such mass and that it's invisible. Some say the laws of physics are different in remote parts of the universe. Others argue that hydrogen clouds invisible to our most sensitive devices account for the missing mass. But now a new theory has been put forth, one of vast implications.”

“Do we ask questions as he goes along,” Maidengut said, “or do we hold them in abeyance?”

“Let's let him finish, but when he does I've got some extremely incisive queries to make,” Simjian said.

“But now a new theory has been put forth.”

The telephone buzzed once.

“Vast implications.”

Masha Simjian got up and answered the phone, which was part of a mounted array of devices set into the wall. She listened for a moment and then turned toward Billy.

“Contingency personnel,” she said. “There's a loud party going on in your canister.”

“Who, mine?”

“A very wild party, contingency says. He hasn't made a security check yet. Wanted to contact you first. I'm repeating what he says semi-verbatim. It sounds excessive. Drinking, shouting, raucous laughter. Someone singing in a very loud voice. Obviously intoxicated, he says. Your canister. A wild, wild party. I'm paraphrasing.”

“That's not a wild party,” he said. “That's just the tape of a wild party. I was listening to it when they told me to come up here and sit in. There's no wild party. Tell contingency it's just a recording.”

“This is a one-way priority phone. I can't tell him anything. You'd better go down there and straighten it out. Unfortunately we can't delay Bhang's clarification of invisible mass. But that doesn't mean you don't have to come back. You have to come back immediately. Melcher-Speidell wants to see you.”

“Who's that?” he said.

“Be serious.”

“I never heard the name in my life.”

“Security man's waiting,” she said.

He took the elevator to his sector. Since he hadn't heard the entire tape, he intended to run it over from the beginning. The tape had surprised him to the degree that he now tended to believe what Harry Braniff had crudely implied after making the delivery, that the woman with the eyepatch had absolutely no part in this. First, there was no sign of her voice on that portion of the tape he'd already played. Second, no one on the tape had referred to her in any way—not in dialogue, moan, bellow or song. It was a party tape, all right, and a wild party at that. The focus of the recording was Cyril Kyriakos, the one-armed transitional logician and somewhat cynical father-to-be who had talked a while with Billy and others on the day of the shadow-flow.

On the tape, scattered among shouts, odd remarks, volleys of laughter, sounds of stunning insults and objects flung at walls, weaved freely into all this scat and roar, was an extended song delivered by Cyril in a dissonant tenor voice, altering the metrical flow as he went, talking the lines, then chanting ecclesiastically, sometimes wailing at the high-pitched edge of panic. Billy saw the contingency man waiting in the corridor. He stood there flexing his knees and slowly swinging his arms in front of him, right fist popping into the palm of his left hand, this contact made in synchronization with the bending knees—a characteristic stance of security personnel everywhere. The corridor was quiet, however. No hint of a party or the tape of a party.

“I'm contingency for this sector,” the man said. “Kyzyl by name.”

“There's no party in there. That's just a tape recording.”

“I wondered why it stopped so suddenly.”

“Tape.”

“I wondered what kind of party would stop so suddenly,” Kyzyl said. “Orgy parties sometimes do that out of sheer exhaustion.”

“I'll put the volume way down this time.”

“While I was here a personage came by and said he wants to receive you in his apartments at the top of the armillary sphere.”

“Apartments plural?”

“This is acoustically what I heard.”

“It must be Melcher-Speidell.”

“He gave no name but said I should be sure to escort you to his quarters.”

“Why do I need an escort all of a sudden?”

“An aborigine was seen in the building early this morning.”

“What was he seen doing?”

“Lurking,” Kyzyl said.