The Unorthodox Engineers Read online

  ‘So that’s it!’ said Lieutenant Fritz van Noon.

  Dr Maxwell Courtney nodded. ‘That’s it. That’s what we call the Dark. What you see now is the mushroom dome. It’s all of twenty-five kilometres across, and as near indestructible as anything we’ve ever encountered. We’ve tried everything short of nukes and nothing happened at all.’

  Van Noon raised an eyebrow. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘The Dark absorbs every erg of energy released. It swallows the whole damn lot without as much as a flicker.’

  ‘And you say that aliens put it there?’

  ‘So the records read. About two hundred Terra-years ago—long before we re-established contact with Ithica. It would seem some sort of alien vessel orbited the planet, stayed just over a day and then vanished as abruptly as it had come. It wasn’t tracked in or out. Just appeared and disappeared.

  ‘But it left behind this pillar of darkness, and nobody has ever found out what it’s for—or what it’s supposed to do. There’s a great many theories about it, but none which completely explains the facts. Some think that it soaks up energy and transmits it elsewhere. Some think it’s antimatter. It’s even suggested that an alien colony lives inside it.’

  It can’t be antimatter,’ Fritz pointed out. ‘It’s in contact with the ground, not to mention air molecules, dust etc.’ He looked across and grinned. ‘There would have been a hell of a bang!’

  Courtney nodded acknowledgment. Fritz asked: ‘And what’s your own opinion?’

  Courtney shrugged. ‘After three years of scientific examination I still don’t know what to think. At some time or another I’ve held most of the current physical theories only to discard them for another.’

  ‘Is it uniform right the way down?’

  ‘It’s really shaped something like a bolt,’ said Courtney. ‘The shaft proper is about seven kilometres in diameter and about thirty kilometres high. It’s capped by the mushroom head here which extends out to about twenty-five kilometres in diameter and apparently defines the region of the Pen.’

  ‘The Pen?’ van Noon looked up from his notes. ‘What’s that?’

  Courtney smiled fleetingly. ‘Sorry! That’s local terminology. I mean the apparent penumbral shadow of reduced effects which surrounds the pillar of Dark. It’s a twilight region about nine kilometres average depth, the outer reaches of which are easily penetrable, and the inner regions connect with the Dark. It has an interesting sub-climate too—but you’ll see that for yourself later.’

  Van Noon scowled. ‘And you have no idea at all what the Dark is made of?’

  Courtney spread his hands. ‘God-alone knows what it really is. Even the Pen raises some nice problems in physics which don’t have answers in any of the textbooks.’

  ‘All right,’ said van Noon. ‘I’d like to take a closer look at it first and come back to you when I’ve some idea of what questions to ask.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Courtney said. ‘We’ve assembled such a mass of data on the Dark that we don’t know if we’ve lost our way in our own erudition. That’s why we asked for some of you Unorthodox Engineering chaps to come out to Ithica to supply a fresh approach. The answer may be so damned obvious that we can’t see it for the weight of the maths intervening.’

  ‘And the primary object of the exercise is what?’

  Courtney glanced from the window at the monstrous column of darkness which reared its head high over the landscape. ‘I don’t know. Study it, use it, get rid of it—it’s an alien paradox, Fritz, and I don’t think anyone with an ounce of science in his makeup can let it rest there doing nothing but soaking up the sun.’

  ‘What’s the general topography of the Dark area, Jacko?’

  Jacko Hine of the Unorthodox Engineers unrolled his sheaf of maps. ‘This is the position of the Dark, and the area I’ve coloured shows the extent of the Pen. As you can see, the whole is centred on the edge of what used to be the city of Bedlam.’

  ‘Nice name, the original colonists had a sense of humour! Is it still there?’

  ‘Its ruins are. The present city of New Bedlam has moved southwards, but in and around the Pen the remains of the old city still exist. Nobody lives there now. If you’d been into the Pen you’d understand why.’

  ‘You’ve been in, then? What’s it like?’

  ‘Weird,’ said Jacko. ‘It’s cold and oppressive, but the sensations aren’t the usual ones of coldness and oppression. This is a different feeling entirely. I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something wrong with the physics of the place.’

  ‘Then I think I’d better start there. Where’s the rest of the UE squad?’

  ‘Doing some preliminary fact-finding at the edge of the Pen. I suggest we contact them as we go in, and see what they’ve found.’

  ‘No,’ said van Noon. ‘I’d sooner contact them on the way out. I want my first impressions of the Pen to be a direct personal experience. I need to get the “feel” of the thing—because I have a suspicion that this problem is going to be cracked by intuition rather than by observation. Maxwell Courtney’s no fool, and he and his team have been gathering facts for three years now. There’s no sense in repeating what they’ve already done, so I’m going to play it my way.’

  ‘I was rather afraid of that,’ said Jacko, following in his wake.

  The edgeland was an area dominated by the ruins of the old city. The transport took them to the very perimeter of the Pen, and here they dismounted. van Noon surveyed the phenomenon thoughtfully.

  The termination of the Pen was sharp, precise, and unwavering. At one point the bright sunshine of Ithica baked the dust golden and ripened dark berries on the hanks of hackberry-like scrub. A centimetre away the summer changed abruptly to a dark winter, shadowed and uninviting, and such scrub as grew within its bounds was thin and gnarled and bore no fruit at all.

  Above them the wall of shade rose vertically until it disappeared into the cloud-ring which clung stubbornly round the sombre column. Looking into the Pen, van Noon gained the impression of gradually increasing coldness and bleakness and gloom until, in the centre, he could just detect the absolute blackness of the great pillar of the Dark. Cautiously he extended a hand into the boundary of the Pen and withdrew it, experiencing the strange chill on his skin.

  ‘Very curious,’ he said. ‘What strikes you most about this, Jacko?’

  ‘Lack of interaction between the warmth outside and the cold inside. There shouldn’t be a sharp boundary like this.’

  ‘Precisely. At a guess there’s a temperature fall of fifteen degrees centigrade over a distance of one centimetre. Now there’s plenty of heat available out here, so why doesn’t the warmth penetrate farther into the Pen?’

  ‘There’s only one answer. The heat is being removed. Transferred elsewhere?’

  ‘Hmm, but I don’t see how. Even if you postulate that in the centre of the Pen is an area of absolute zero temperature you would still expect to get a graduated temperature rise at the boundary and not a sharp transition.’

  ‘So?’ Jacko looked at him expectantly.

  ‘So I can see how to achieve the inverse of this situation using, for instance, a collimated beam of infrared heat. But a collimated shaft of coldness is something very new indeed. As you remarked, Jacko, there’s something wrong with the physics of this place.’

  With swift resolution van Noon stepped through the perimeter and into the Pen. Jacko pulled up his collar and followed him in. The contrast was staggering. Whereas a few seconds previously the warm sunshine had been sufficient to bring them to a gentle sweat, they now stood shivering with the curious chill which inhabited the Pen. Van Noon was looking with amazement at the dreary landscape and sub-climate of the Pen interior.

  No sunshine penetrated here. The internal winter continued sheer up to the outer wall, and such light as there was filtered downwards from a dirty, leaden cloudbase trapped within the Pen itself. Even looking sunward, no sign of the Ithican primary could be seen, though it should have been c
learly visible, and its apparent loss was not explicable in terms of haze or diffraction.

  The sun-toasted ruins which stood outside the Pen continued inside as a depressing waste of rotting bricks and slimed timbers, forming forgotten streets on which even the sparse and miserable vegetation had not much cared to grow. A few furred rodents scattered at their approach, with an attitude of resignation, as if self-preservation here was a matter about which one thought twice.

  Van Noon was sampling his surroundings with the detachment of a scientist, yet using his own body in lieu of instrumentation. The process went on for several minutes before he came to a conclusion.

  ‘What do you feel, Jacko?’

  ‘Bloody cold.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, almost a sense of depression. I don’t know if it’s physical or psychological, but every action seems to demand too much effort.’

  Fritz nodded. ‘I agree. I don’t think it’s psychological. It’s almost as if every form of energy here was negated or opposed.’

  He picked up a stone. ‘See the window in the old wall over there? He threw the stone with practised ease, having judged its weight to a nicety. But the stone lost speed rapidly and fell in a limp trajectory to the muddied soil several metres short of its intended target.

  ‘See what I mean?’ said van Noon. ‘That stone, accelerated to the velocity at which I released it, should at least have hit the wall. But it didn’t. It acted as a lighter body might have done on travelling through these conditions—or as a body of its actual weight might have done had it somehow lost kinetic energy during flight. How do you lose kinetic energy from a body in flight, Jacko?’

  ‘You can’t lose it,’ said Jacko. ‘You can only react it against something—friction, air-resistance, and so on—in which case the energy leaves the system in some other form, usually heat. The energy itself is never lost, only converted.’

  ‘Conservation of energy, right. But not here,’ said van Noon. ‘I wasn’t throwing against a headwind, and the air is no more dense than outside after allowing for temperature and humidity differences. So whatever stopped that stone wasn’t a normal reaction to flight. And I can find no evidence of abnormal gravity or coriolis effects. That stone just progressively lost energy. Mass times velocity doesn’t seem to equal momentum in the Pen—and that’s a hell of a smack at the textbooks you and I were raised on.’

  ‘Working outside the textbooks never worried you before,’ said Jacko. ‘Let’s get out of this place, Fritz. Its giving me the creeps.’

  ‘In a minute, Jacko. I’d like to explore a bit farther in first.’

  They walked together down the remains of a long-forgotten road, treading wearily on the slimed cobbles of the surface. The environment was desolate and forlorn, with an air of perpetual dampness and slow rot and reluctant fungus. As they penetrated to greater depths the gloom grew perceptibly greater, and the cold chill reached a degree where it would have been unwise to remain too long without the protection of additional clothing. Vegetable and animal life were here almost completely absent, and the slime and fungus showed plainly that even the lower life-forms were maintaining their hold only with the greatest difficulty. Even organic decay had not progressed far after two centuries of perpetual winter.

  ‘What are we looking for, Fritz?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the feel of this cold that has me puzzled. I don’t feel I’m cold just because the environment is cold. I feel I’m cold because my body is radiating more heat than it should at these temperatures. To judge from the feel of my skin it’s about five degrees below freezing point here.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Jacko.

  ‘Then just an observation,’ said van Noon. ‘Why aren’t the puddles of water frozen? It’s my guess that a thermometer wouldn’t give much below ten centigrade. It’s the same effect that we encountered at the perimeter of the Pen—radiant heat being opposed by something only explicable as radiant cold.’

  ‘I don’t understand that, Fritz. After all, cold is only the absence of heat.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said van Noon, ‘if that isn’t a limitation to thinking which we’ve imposed upon ourselves.

  What happens if we postulate a phenomenon called negative-heat, which we treat as the conventional electromagnetic heat radiation but with the signs reversed?’

  ‘There can’t be any such animal,’ objected Jacko.

  ‘No? Fetch some equipment in here and compare the radiant heat loss against temperature and I think you’ll find there is. There has to be. There’s nothing else you could set up in an equation which would go half way to meeting all the facts.’

  Something crackled and spat unexpectedly behind them with a sound like a multiple pistol shot. They whirled round and stopped in their tracks. Between them and their path out of the Pen was quite the smallest and darkest and lowest thundercloud they had ever seen. The bottom of the cloud hung probably not more than thirty metres above the ground, and its inky-black consistency made it all the more threatening, though this was probably a trick of light and circumstance.

  But it was the lightning which gave them pause to think: vicious arcs between ground and cloud which started to stab with all the anticipated brilliance and fire but which were curiously extinguished by some constrictive phenomenon which pinched the plasma and quenched the arc. The result was a staccato ‘pop’ instead of a thunderclap, and a rate of lightning repetition which occasionally generated a continuous tearing noise rather than the usual sounds of storm. But there was no doubting the destructive potential of the lightning bolts.

  Moved by unfelt winds, the thundercloud was drawing rapidly nearer, and van Noon was more than a little apprehensive. ‘Better find some shelter, Jacko. This could be dangerous.’

  They looked about them. The ruins of a hovel, partly roofed with sloped and perilous slates, provided the nearest offer of sanctuary. They squatted within the miserable, damp, boxlike walls while the cloud moved overhead. Lightning stabbed at the path outside with a viciousness which seemed to contain some element of personal malice, but finally it passed. The cloud went spitting and snarling on towards the pillar of the Dark, and van Noon and Jacko emerged to watch its progress.

  ‘I’ll teach Maxwell Courtney to speak of “interesting sub-climate,”’ said van Noon ominously. ‘Let’s get out of here, Jacko.’

  ‘That was what the locals call a rogue storm,’ said Courtney. ‘In the Pen you meet them quite a lot. They seem to form and disperse almost spontaneously, but while they last they can be very dangerous. They always travel fast, and always in straight lines. If caught in the open we avoid them by simply moving sideways out of the way.’

  They were seated in Courtney’s office in New Bedlam, and the broad windows of the room opened to a distant view of the Pen and its core of Dark. Courtney’s desk faced the window as if to give him a constant reminder of the broad enigma to which his life was currently dedicated. The attitude of his visitors’ chairs showed that they were no less aware of the dominating influence of the looming column of shadow.

  ‘Well,’ said van Noon. ‘We’ve gathered a little data of our own on a preliminary survey, and I’m told you have acquired data by the ton. That puts you in a good position for answering questions, and me for asking them.’

  ‘Ask away,’ said Courtney. ‘I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I can do you a nice line in inexplicable facts.’

  ‘What can you tell me about anti-energy or negative-energy effects?’

  Courtney whistled softly. ‘That’s a piece of fast thinking, Fritz. It took us nearly a year before we could bring ourselves to consider the hypothesis seriously. But I know what you’re thinking. Most of the physical effects observed in the Pen can be satisfactorily explained only by thinking in terms of polar opposition— negation by precisely defined effects of exactly opposite character. The fact that these opposite effects are completely unknown to nature outside the Pen doesn’t necessarily invalidate the case for their
existence inside the Pen. The very nature of the Pen and the Dark is obviously extra-physical, or we’d not have a problem in the first place.’

  ‘Precisely!’ said van Noon. ‘But you do agree the possibility of negative-energy?’

  Courtney spread his hands. ‘I admit it as a possibility. It’s certainly a basic premise which fits all the observed facts in the Pen. But it’s only one premise among many, and it doesn’t have much to commend it when you consider it a little deeper.’

  ‘Go on,’ said van Noon.

  ‘Let’s take an extreme case,’ said Courtney. ‘You can prove it for yourself if necessary, that the difference between the Pen and the Dark is purely one of degree. Whereas energy negation in the Pen is only partial, that of the Dark is absolute.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. I’d guessed it anyway.’

  ‘Good. Now consider this: no matter what intensity, character, or type of energy we have applied to the Dark, we have had no discernible effect upon it, nor have we been able to pass any energy through even a thin sector of it. We have encountered absolute negation, Fritz, of any energy applied in any way. If you stick to your negative-energy theory the implications are too complex to be true, and rather frightening.’

  ‘I think I understand you,’ said van Noon, ‘but I’d rather hear it your way.’

  ‘I’ll put it as simply as I can. If we fire a projectile at it, according to your theory that projectile needs to be met precisely at the perimeter of the Dark by what is effectively a counter projectile of identical mass travelling at an identical velocity to a precisely identical point. That makes too many coincidences for my orthodox-type stomach. And again, suppose we use X-ray bombardment or any other form of radiation. For precise negation this would need to be met at the identical point by anti-radiation of the same intensity, wavelength, and phase as that which we apply. Either the Dark is an extremely broadband transmitter capable of producing any type of force, energy, intensity, and phase of radiation at any point on its perimeter at any instant without prior notice —accurately and instantaneously—or else the Dark is full of little green men with an uncanny knack of anticipating our test programme and arranging their opposing facilities to suit.’