The Unorthodox Engineers Read online

  ‘I get the point,’ said Fritz. ‘How do you arrange to fire a projectile to meet an unexpected projectile head-on with precisely matched mass and velocity and to an impact position pre-determined to an accuracy of plus or minus a few microns? It can’t be done. You’ve shaken some of my confidence, but you still haven’t encompassed the impossible.’

  ‘No? Then I’ll do so right away. For your negative-energy theory to be true, the Dark would need to be a dynamic entity. It must necessarily give out exactly as much energy as it receives, for the negation to be complete. It’s been here for two hundred years, Fritz. Now calculate two hundred years of radiant energy from the sun alone and then add what we’ve flung at it in the last three years of experiment. You’ll see that it would need the energy resources of a small star in order to have the reserves to meet any demand.’’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said van Noon, ‘but we can’t yet claim to know the ultimate in power sources. But very soon I intend to find a way into the Dark, and then perhaps we’ll find out.’

  ‘You can’t do it, Fritz. There isn’t a ghost of a chance of penetrating into the Dark.’

  ‘I think there is. And I think I know the very way in which it might be done.’

  ‘Whatever made you say that?’ asked Jacko anxiously, as they left the room.

  ‘It’s a feeling I have,’ said van Noon. ‘I said I was going to play this by intuition, and right now my intuition tells me that the Pen and the Dark are negative-energy effects.’

  ‘In spite of what Courtney said?’

  ‘Certainly. I must admit he had a nice point about the projectile needing to be met effectively by a antiprojectile if the negative-energy theory was to be maintained. It wouldn’t actually need to be met by a antiprojectile as such, but merely by an opposing force of the right sort applied in the right place at the right time. I don’t doubt that Courtney’s correct that such a negation is necessary to substantiate the negative-energy theory. But I do suspect that his data on absolute negation is not quite as complete as he imagines.’

  ‘In what way, Fritz?’

  ‘Well, I can’t conceive of a continuous pattern of negative energy which could deal with any sort of force or radiation applied at any point at any time. I can, however, conceive of a pattern of negative radiation or effect which is selectively produced in response to a particular stimulus at a particular point. But you see what this involves?’

  ‘No,’ said Jacko.

  ‘It involves detection, analysis, and synthesis of the opposing effect. Three steps—which must necessitate some sort of time-lag. Courtney has established that any applied energy is negated—but I doubt if it can be cancelled instantaneously. The three steps may be completed in nano-seconds, but I’m quite sure that a time-lag must exist. Now I want to go into the Pen, right up to the Dark perimeter, and see if we can prove or disprove this.’

  ‘And if we prove it?’

  ‘Then I think we’ll have a way to drive a tunnel into the Dark and see what’s inside.’

  Jacko lost his power of speech as his mind strove to contain the enormity of the project. Fritz shot him an amused glance.

  ‘There’s a particular reason I want to go in, Jacko. There’s a second principle involved in this detection, analysis, opposing-synthesis set-up which you might not have thought of. Something else is implied… and that is some form of guiding intelligence.’

  They had chosen heavy caterpillar crawlers for their transport into the Pen. The choice was determined not only by the fact that a tracked vehicle was an advantage over the broken terrain but also for the reason that the vehicles possessed powerful engines and an ample reserve of power. Three crawlers were obtained for the expedition; one to run well ahead, one to act as reserve, and one to stay well in the rear with sufficient rescue equipment to recover either of the leading crawlers should the deeper Pen effects exceed the capacity of the engines to keep the vehicles in motion.

  Clothing for the party had been chosen for a simple property—thermal insulation. Although the actual temperature of the deep Pen probably did not reach freezing point it was essential to insulate the radiant heat of a man’s body against the negative-heat effect which would otherwise have striven to reduce his temperature to the ambient point, with lethal effect. In this way the cold of the Pen differed from normal cold, and the expeditionary figures were clad as though for a journey to the arctic.

  Once clear into the outer perimeter of the Pen and out of the strong Ithican sunshine, the expedition began to appreciate the clothing which up to that point had caused them a barely tolerable condition of overheating. Now, as the light faded and the chill of the perpetual winter closed around them, they grew more comfortable. But the underlying seriousness of the venture was pointed-up by a change in the engine note to a more laboured level as both the functioning of the engine and the momentum of the vehicle were affected by the negative elements of the Pen.

  The leading crawler carried the bulk of the equipment, especially the precious lasers with which it was hoped to establish the existence of a time-lag in the Dark phenomena. Van Noon was captaining the vehicle. Jacko was driving, and Pederson, an observer sent by Courtney, completed the party. van Noon had intended their route to follow a road indicated on the old maps as running for nearly two kilometres straight in the direction of the axis of the Dark. The intention was abandoned quickly on finding that a building of considerable proportions had collapsed, turning part of the road into an unnavigable pile of masonry. The maps were forgotten and a new route was improvised as the situation demanded, having regard to the abilities of the crawler and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the slow erosion of the Pen environment on the fabric of the old town.

  The light from the trapped cloudbase became increasingly leaden and dull until, at about five kilometres in from the perimeter of the Pen, Jacko was forced to switch on the headlamps. Their effect was negligible. Such light as they produced was robbed by some negative effect in the Pen environment and did little to disperse the muddy gloom. Fritz had anticipated this and had a searchlight mounted on the roof of the crawler. The intensity of light from this was sufficient to permit their passage through the damp, dilapidated, ghost-like streets of Bedlam to within two kilometres of the Dark itself. Then that illumination too became inadequate.

  ‘Better get out, Jacko, and let’s estimate the situation,’ said Fritz.

  They descended, conscious of the acute negative-heat coldness which searched at their shrouded faces and probed at their wrists and ankles. They were conscious too, now, of anti-momentum, which gave an entirely false impression of the density of the air, since the effect was remarkably like trying to move under water.

  Pederson joined them, and they made a brief survey of the situation. Whereas from a greater distance the column of the Dark had been clearly visible, it was now merged into the claylike blankness of scene which made it scarcely distinguishable as a separate entity. Jacko tried the radio communicator, but the instrument was dead save for some rare static from a distant rogue storm. The magnetic compass also had become nonfunctional much earlier, and though the gyro-compass still worked its readings were questionable in view of the conditions under which it was operating.

  The quality of light from the cloudbase was curious and unreal. Effectively the light from above should have given them far greater incident and reflected illumination than they actually experienced. This drastic attenuation of the light should have been explicable in terms of fog or haze, but nothing such existed, and their inexpressibly dreary state of near-night had no explanation save for that of an alien opposition to the fundamental laws of physics.

  ‘What are we going to do, Fritz?’ Jacko’s own attempt to resolve the situation had reached an impasse.

  Van Noon looked back, hoping for an indication as to whether or not the second crawler had been able to follow their tortuous route to the spot. No evidence was forthcoming, so he shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Yo
u two can vote me down if you want to, but I propose that we choose the most likely direction for the Dark and just drive blind until we hit it or stop.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ said Jacko. ‘What about you, Pederson?’

  Count me in. I’ve no ambition to walk back on my own.’

  They re-entered the crawler. Having decided on the most probable direction of the Dark, Jacko orientated the vehicle, locked the tracks on synchronization, and proceeded to drive straight into the unknown.

  The journey was a driver’s conception of Hell, a nightmare route across unfamiliar territory, effectively blind, and with no warning of what obstacle might halt or jolt them. Added to this was the rising resistance to movement, both on the part of the vehicle and of its occupants. Inside the driving cab even the instrument lights had become impossible to see, and the penetrating coldness finalized the depression which was settling over the spearhead of the expedition. Once or twice Jacko questioned whether they ought to attempt to turn back. Van Noon chided him gently and looked only ahead to the point where the darkness ought to terminate in a meeting with the absolute of the Dark.

  Constantly the vehicle rolled and bucked, and canted at dangerous angles as it encountered broken walls or piles of debris in its path. Sometimes it stopped with a bruising shock against some obstacle beyond its power to move. Jacko was skilful in such emergencies and withdrew the vehicle from each such predicament without stalling the engine, knowing that a stopped engine this far into the Pen would never be restarted. Bruised, and in constant danger of masonry from grazed walls crushing the cab, they endured the journey patiently; although with various deviations from the course which the presence of unsurmountable obstacles forced on Jacko, they had no certain idea if they were still headed towards the Dark at all.

  Then came the moment they had been dreading. In pitch darkness now, the crawler came to a sudden halt against something immovable. The tracks churned the soft floor uselessly for a half second, and then the engine stalled before Jacko could throw the vehicle in reverse. He tried the ignition cycle in vain, but the negative effects were too powerful to permit the heavy engine to be restarted. The silence grew absolute save for the tick-tick of metal cooling rapidly and Fritz’s voice cursing in a strangely muted way.

  ‘End of the line,’ said Jacko finally.

  Van Noon opened the door. ‘As we’ve managed to get here we may as well see where we are,’ he said.

  They climbed out. Their powerful torches were little use, and permitted an examination of no object more distant than about a quarter of a metre.

  Beyond this was darkness in all directions except directly vertical, where a muddied stain across the sky mocked them with its inability to provide any useful illumination on the ground. Fritz searched around him and picked up a short length of rotting timber with which he cast about in the darkness on all sides. Then he called urgently: ‘Jacko, are you near the crawler?’

  ‘I am,’ said Pederson. Just by the cab door.’ He banged the metal, which returned a dull and unrewarding thud. Like their voices, the sound was strangely attenuated.

  ‘Good! Now, Jacko, can you place yourself by sound in a line between our two voices?’

  Jacko moved somewhere in the darkness. ‘I think I’m there.’

  ‘Right. Now we’re three in a line, with Pederson on the right, you central, and myself on the left. As far as I can make out, about three paces ahead of us is the Dark. Find something to probe it with, and don’t touch it even with your gloves. Maintain your orientation carefully so that you don’t lose direction and walk into it. It could be very dangerous to touch.’

  They advanced slowly, Pederson tapping the side of the crawler for identification, and Fritz and Jacko talking so that the sound of voices gave their relative positions. Even so, Jacko got there first. His probe was a shard of splintered ceramic with which he was striking before him as though at some anticipated enemy. Anti-momentum made this a difficult movement to achieve, and the darkness added to the soup-like resistance to movement, giving the whole situation a dream-like character without the visual qualities of the conventional nightmare.

  Then Jacko hit the Dark. It was detectable by its complete negation of the force with which he struck it. And it returned no sound, and in this way was distinguishable from any ordinary obstacle struck with force.

  ‘Got it,’ said Jacko. ‘But that knocking sound you hear is my knees. I admit I’m frightened of this thing, Fritz.’

  ‘I’m not exactly keen on it, either,’ said van Noon. ‘But this is what we came to see. It’s a pity we can’t see it now we’ve got here. Have you any suggestions, Pederson?’

  ‘I’ve just discovered the Dark is what we ran the crawler into. No wonder it didn’t move.’

  An ominous and familiar staccato rattle made them turn. A rogue storm, travelling towards them and parallel to the wall of the Dark, was making its passage known by its peculiarly pinched lightning. Because of attenuation, the lightning and thunder had been undetectable even from a short distance, and the storm was almost upon them before they were aware it existed. There was no time to seek shelter. They flung themselves down on the damp earth at the foot of the Dark and waited for it to pass. It sprayed the area with quenched fire as it went, doing no damage to them, but the intensity of the arcs was such that momentarily they had a clear picture of their situation.

  The Dark was just in front of them, a sheer wall of unblemished black-velvet nothingness, impossibly perfect. The crawler had nosed head-on up to the black wall, and its tracks were pressed hard against the exterior. On all other sides of them lay the ghost-suburb of desolate ruins, the reflecting white teeth of broken masonry contrasting with the wet, black soil of the earth.

  As soon as the worst of the storm was over, they climbed back to their feet.

  ‘What are you going to do, Fritz? Try the lasers?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Fritz had moved back to the crawler and was examining the tracks in contact with the Dark by the spasmodic light of the rapidly waning storm. ‘I don’t think we need to. I think I’ve got my answer.

  You see, it did take time for the Dark to analyse and apply a counterforce to stop the crawler. But that fraction of a second was sufficient for something significant to happen. The crawler tracks have penetrated very slightly into the Dark.’

  It was impossible for the others to verify van Noon’s statement since the light from the storm had rapidly become eclipsed by the strength of the negative effects. The combined output of searchlight and torches failed to re-establish the point, and the lasers refused to function from the crawler’s emergency power supply. But van Noon was sufficiently convinced of what he had seen to regard the expedition as a success.

  ‘All we have to do now is to get back to tell the tale,’ said Jacko, unhappily.

  They started back by the only means available—they walked. For the first half kilometre they stumbled blindly through the darkness and the nightmare of anti-momentum. The coldness, too, was becoming serious now that they were exposed for a long period without the protection of the crawler cab. But gradually their eyes, accustomed to complete darkness began to discern light like the first touch of dawn, and with the returning ability to see, they no longer blundered into blind paths in the ruins from which they had to retreat by sense of touch alone. And the negative effects grew slightly less, so that their pace progressively improved as they made their way out of the deep Pen regions.

  Two kilometres away from the Dark they came across the crushed path that their own crawler had made on its way in, and this they followed gratefully. Shortly they found the second crawler, abandoned, and with its engine stalled and cold. The third crawler was patrolling a broad front along a road about three kilometres radius from the Dark perimeter. They were hailed and taken aboard for the last part of the journey through the growing light and finally out into the unbearably bright gold sunset of an Ithican evening.

  Courtney was there to greet them. His team had spe
nt the day re-running exploratory tests, but this time with particular reference to the onset-time of negation. His results amply confirmed van Noon’s experience. There was a time-lag on the introduction of any energy phenomenon to the Dark or the Pen before negative effects set in. The exact period of the lag varied with the type of phenomenon, but was greatest for applied physical force.

  The party rode with raised spirits back to New Bedlam where work on the next phase of Fritz’s plans against the Dark were just about to begin.

  ‘A tunnel?’ said Jacko.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ said van Noon, ‘I had in mind something more in the nature of a horizontal well, but I think a tunnel is a fair description.’

  ‘And just how do you propose to sink a horizontal well into the Dark?’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t see much difficulty. We take an ordinary iron pipe of sufficient dimension to permit the passage of a man—and just knock it in.’

  ‘Crazy like a fox!’ said Jacko. ‘We’re talking about the Dark—the great energy negator. In the name of Moses, how do you just knock a pipe into that?’

  ‘I thought I’d already demonstrated that,’ said Fritz. ‘There’s a time-lag before the onset of negation.

  Apply a pile driver or something to your pipe and hit it once and it will penetrate the Dark just a little before the detection, analysis, and opposite synthesis has a chance to stop it. Then the negation will be applied and stop the tube going in any farther, and the system will reach stasis. The anti-force obviously cannot continue to be applied after the original force has ceased to operate, so the force anti-force balance will then relax.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So then you hit your pipe again and drive it in a little more. And so on. And providing you work on a completely random and non-predictable basis there’s no chance of the anti-force being applied in anticipation. I suspect that only if we set up a standard repetition rate will we meet with complete and instantaneous negation of the force that we apply.’