Ride the Star Winds (103 page)

“Cheer up, George,” Sonya admonished me. “The first time here is the worst.”

“Not for me it wasn’t,” grunted the commodore. “Although every time was bad.”

“My first time was bad,” stated Sonya.

We were over the outskirts of the city now, following a broad street through the cracked surface of which trees and bushes had thrust. On either side of us were the buildings, creeper-covered houses with empty windows peering like dead eyes through the tangled greenery. I found myself thinking of ancient graveyards—cemeteries in which the victims of massacre had been buried and commemorated, and then, after many years, forgotten. Something, disturbed by our noisy flight, scuttled below and ahead of us, finally diving into a doorway.

“Hold your fire, Sara,” said Sonya sharply. “It’s only a hen.”

“Nothing wrong with roast chicken,” I said. “The fowl in the tissue culture vats has long since lost whatever flavor it had . . .”

“There wouldn’t have been much left for roasting if I’d let fly with the MG,” Sara told me.

It was a feeble enough joke, but we all laughed nervously.

We came to a sort of square or plaza. There was a group of statuary—once a fountain?—in the middle of it, but so overgrown that it was impossible to see if the figures had been men or monsters. They looked like monsters now. Around the plaza were ruined towers, their outlines blurred by what looked like—was, in fact—Terran ivy. Those colonists had brought a fair selection of Earth flora and fauna with them, some of which had survived and flourished.

Grimes set the pinnace down carefully, very carefully, selecting an area that did not have any sturdy bushes and saplings thrusting up through the paving. We landed with hardly a jar. Reluctantly, it seemed, he turned off the drive. We could hear ourselves think again. This was not the relief that it should have been. The silence, after the arhythmic snarl and thump of the motor, seemed about to be broken by . . . something. By what?

“Well,” said the commodore unnecessarily, “we’re here.”

“You know the city,” said Thorne. “Wasn’t there—isn’t there—some sort of temple . . .”

“I don’t want to go
there
again,” said Sonya determinedly.

Grimes shrugged. “It’s as good a place to start our . . . investigations as any. After all, we
are
here to investigate . . .” he remarked. He turned to Mayhew. “You’re the psionicist, Ken. What do you think?”

The telepath seemed to jerk out of some private dream, and not a pleasant one. “The temple . . .” he murmured vaguely. “Yes . . . I remember. You told me about it . . .”

“Where is this temple?” asked Thorne.

“We shall have to walk,” Grimes told him. “It’s not on the plaza. It’s in a little alley . . . I’m not sure that I’ll be able to find it again . . .”

“I can lead you there,” said Mayhew.

“You
would!
” muttered Sonya. So the telepath was picking something up, I thought. He would home on it, as a navigator homes on a radio beacon. I was beginning to feel as the commodore’s wife was obviously feeling about it. Deciding to throw in my two bits’ worth I asked, “Shall we leave somebody to guard the pinnace?” Sara scowled at me. She was the obvious choice. She would be no more keen on going outside than any of us, but she most certainly did not want to be left alone.

“It will not be necessary, George,” said Grimes. “We will, of course, notify the ship of our intentions. And Ken will maintain his telepathic hook-up with Clarisse. And, before leaving, each of us will leave his hand impression so that the outer airlock door can be locked after us . . .”

This we did. The door would now open if any of us placed either hand—or only fingertips—on the plate set in the hull beside the entrance. One by one we jumped down to the mossy paving stones. There was an unpleasant dankness in the air in spite of the sunlight, a penetrating chill. Yet, according to the thermometer that Mrs. Thorne produced from her capacious shoulder bag, it was mild enough, a fraction over twenty six degrees, too warm for the heavy, long-sleeved shirts, long trousers and stout boots that we were wearing.

Mayhew took the lead, with Grimes, projectile pistol in hand, walking beside him. Sonya and I, immediately behind, followed his example, although she favored a laser hand gun. The Thornes followed us. Sara, carrying a submachine gun, brought up the rear. The telepath led us over the broken pavement, deviating from his course as required to avoid clumps of bushes and the occasional tree, but heading all the time to where a wide street opened off the plaza. It looked more like some fantastically fertile canyon than a manmade thoroughfare. The leaves of the omnipresent ivy glistened in the sunlight, glossy greens and a particularly poisonous looking yellow. There were other creepers too, native perhaps, or importations from other worlds than Earth, but they were fighting a losing battle against the hardy, destructive vine.

We walked slowly and cautiously into the wide street. It must have been an imposing avenue before the abandonment of the city, before burgeoning weeds blurred its perspective and obscured the clean lines of the buildings on either side of it. I tried to visualise it as it had been in its heyday—and succeeded all too well. Everything . . . flickered, flickered then shone with an unnatural clarity. I cried out in alarm as I stared at the onrushing stream of traffic into which we were so carelessly walking. A gaudy chrome and scarlet ground car was almost upon on us, the fat woman driving it making no move either to swerve or to brake her vehicle. I grabbed Sonya’s arm to drag her to one side, to safety. She cried out—and her sharp voice shattered the spell. Again there was the brief flickering and when normal vision returned I could see that nothing was moving in the street save ourselves. There was no traffic, no homicidal ground car. But there was a low mound ahead of us looking like a crouching, green furred beast. Freakishly, the lenses of its headlights had not been grown over and were regarding us like a pair of baleful eyes. And had I seen the ghost of the machine, I wondered, or of its driver?

Sonya was rubbing her arm and glaring at me. The others had stopped and were staring at me curiously.

“Did you
see
something, George?” asked Thorne.

I said slowly, “I saw this street as it must once have been, at its busiest. We were right in the middle of the traffic, about to be run down.” I pointed at the derelict, almost unrecognisable car. “We were almost run down by . . . that. Or its ghost.”

“The ghost of a
machine?
” demanded Thorne incredulously.

His wife, looking at an instrument she had taken from her bag, said, “The graph shows a sudden dip in temperature . . .”

“But a
machine?
” repeated the scientist.

“Why not?” countered Grimes. “Life force rubs off human beings on to the machinery with which they’re in the most intimate contact. Ships, especially . . . And a car is, in some ways, almost a miniature ship . . .” He turned to Mayhew. “Ken?”

The telepath replied, in a distant voice, “I . . . I feel . . . resentment . . . In its dim, mechanical way that thing loved its mistress. It was abandoned, left here to rot . . .”

“Did
you
see anything?” persisted Thorne.

“I saw the same as George did,” admitted Mayhew. “But I knew it wasn’t . . . real.”

We resumed our trudge along the overgrown street. Everybody, I noticed with a certain wry satisfaction, gave the abandoned car a wide berth. We walked on, and on, trying to ignore the brambly growths that clutched at our trouser legs as though with malign intent.

“Here,” announced Mayhew.

We could just make out the entrance to a side alley, completely blocked with a tall, bamboolike growth with tangled strands of ivy filling the narrow spaces between the upright stems.

“Shall I?” asked Sonya.

“Yes,” said Grimes, after a second’s thought.

While Sara watched enviously the commodore’s wife used her laser pistol like a machete, slashing with the almost invisible beam. There were crackling flames and billows of dense white smoke. Coughing and spluttering, with eyes watering, we backed away. I couldn’t help thinking that a fire extinguisher would have been more useful than most of the other equipment we had brought along.

But only the bamboo burned; the surrounding ivy was too green to catch fire once the laser was no longer in use. At last the smoke cleared to a barely tolerable level and we were able to make our way forward. The embers were hot underfoot, nonetheless, but our boots were stout and the fabric of our trousers fireproof.

We found the church.

It was only a small building, standing apart from its taller neighbours. It was a featureless cube. Well,
almost
a cube. I got the impression that the angles were subtly, very subtly, wrong. Unlike the buildings to either side of it it was not overgrown. Its dull gray walls seemed to be of some synthetic stone. The plain rectangular door was also gray, possibly of uncorroded metal. There were no windows. Over the entrance, in black lettering, were the words, TEMPLE OF THE PRINCIPLE.

Grimes stared at the squat, ugly building. I could see from his face that he was far from happy. He muttered, “This is where we came in.”

“This,” Sonya corrected him, “is where we nearly went out . . .”

They had told me the story during the outward passage. I knew how they had investigated this odd temple, and found themselves thrown into an alternate existence, another plane of being on which their lives had taken altogether different courses. It had not been a dream, they insisted. They had actually lived those lives.

“Something . . .” Mayhew was muttering.
“Something
. . . But what?
But what?
”

“And what was the principle that they . . . er . . . worshipped?” asked Thorne, matter-of-factly.

“The Uncertainty Principle . . .” said Grimes, but dubiously. “You know, the funny part is that in none of the records of the abandoned colony is there any mention of this temple, or of the religion with which it was associated.”

“The worshippers must have . . . left,” Sonya said, “before the other colonists were evacuated.”

“But where did they go?” asked Thorne.

“Or
when
,” said Mayhew. “
To
when, I mean.”

Grimes filled and lit his pipe, then almost immediately knocked it out again, put it back in his pocket. He pushed the door. I was expecting it to resist his applied pressure but it opened easily, far too easily. He led the way inside the temple. The others followed. I was last, as I waited until I had raised Bindle on my personal transceiver to tell him where we were and what we doing. He—always the humorist—said, “Drop something in the plate for me, Captain!”

I was expecting darkness in the huge, windowless room, but there was light—of a sort. The gray, subtly shifting twilight was worse than blackness would have been. It accentuated the . . . the
wrongness
of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. I was reminded of that eerie sensation one feels in the interstellar drive room of a ship when the Mannschenn Drive is running, the dim perception of planes at right angles to all the planes of the normal Space-Time continuum. Faintly self-luminous, not quite in the middle of that uncannily lopsided hall, was what had to be the altar, a sort of ominous coffin shape. But as I stared at it its planes and angles shifted. It was, I decided, more of a cube. Or
more
than a cube . . . A tesseract?

Rose Thorne was pulling instruments out of her capacious bag. She set one of them up on spidery, telescopic legs. She peered at the dial on top of it. “Fluctuations,” she murmured, “slight, but definite . . .” She said in a louder voice, “There’s something
odd
about the gravitational field of this place . . .”

“Gravity waves?” asked her husband.

She laughed briefly. “Ripples rather than waves. Undetectable by any normal gravitometer.”

Thorne turned to Grimes. “Did you notice any phenomena like this when you were here before, John?”

“We didn’t have any instruments with us,” the commodore told him shortly.

“And what do
you
feel Ken?” the scientist asked Mayhew.

But the telepath did not reply.

Looking at him, the way that he was standing there, his gaze somehow turned inward, I was reminded of the uneasy sensation you get when a dog sees something—or seems to see something—that is invisible to you. “Old . . .” he whispered. “Old . . . From the time before this, and from the time before that, and the time before and the time before . . . The planet alive, alive and aware, a sentient world . . . Surviving every death and rebirth of the universe . . . Surviving beyond the continuum . . .”

It didn’t make sense, I thought. It didn’t make sense.

Or did it?

His lips moved again, but his voice was barely audible. “Communion . . . Yes. Communion . . .” He took a step, and then another, and another, like a sleepwalker. He paced slowly and deliberately up to—into—the dimly glowing tesseract. He seemed to flicker. The outline of his body wavered, wavered and faded. Then, quite suddenly, he was gone.

The metallic click as Sara cocked her submachine gun was startlingly loud. I still don’t know what she thought that she was going to shoot at. I did know that in this situation all our weapons were utterly useless.

“We have to get Clarisse here,” said Grimes at last. “She’s the only one of us who’ll be able to do anything.” He added, in a whisper, “If anything can be done, that is . . .”

We had to go outside the temple before we could use our personal transceivers. Clarisse was already calling; she
knew
, of course. She was already in
Basset
’s second boat, which was being piloted by young Taylor. Grimes told him to try to land in the street just by the mouth of the alley. There were more obstructions there than where we had set down, in the square, but speed was the prime consideration. I walked, accompanied by Sara, to the proposed landing site, my transceiver set for continuous beacon-transmission so that Taylor could home on it.

We heard the boat—the inertial drive is not famous for quiet running—before we saw it. Taylor came in low over the rooftops, wasting no time. He slammed the lifecraft down to the road surface, crushing a couple of well-developed bushes and knocking a stout sapling sideways. I shuddered. I didn’t like to see ship’s equipment—especially
my
ship’s equipment—handled that way. The door midway along the torpedo-shaped hull snapped open. Clarisse jumped out.