The Complete Short Stories Page 27

  His session with Coma had made Powers feel suddenly dissatisfied with the way he was spending his last months. Goodbye, Eniwetok, he had written, but in fact systematically forgetting everything was exactly the same as remembering it, a cataloguing in reverse, sorting out all the books in the mental library and putting them back in their right places upside down.

  Powers climbed one of the camera towers, leaned on the rail and looked out along the aisles towards the sightscreens. Ricocheting shells and rockets had chipped away large pieces of the circular concrete bands that ringed the target bulls, but the outlines of the huge 100-yard-wide discs, alternately painted blue and red, were still visible.

  For half an hour he stared quietly at them, formless ideas shifting through his mind. Then, without thinking, he abruptly left the rail and climbed down the companionway. The storage hangar was fifty yards away. He walked quickly across to it, stepped into the cool shadows and peered around the rusting electric trolleys and empty flare drums. At the far end, behind a pile of lumber and bales of wire, were a stack of unopened cement bags, a mound of dirty sand and an old mixer.

  Half an hour later he had backed the Buick into the hangar and hooked the cement mixer, charged with sand, cement and water scavenged from the drums lying around outside, on to the rear bumper, then loaded a dozen more bags into the car's trunk and rear seat. Finally he selected a few straight lengths of timber, jammed them through the window and set off across the lake towards the central target bull.

  For the next two hours he worked away steadily in the centre of the great blue disc, mixing up the cement by hand, carrying it across to the crude wooden forms he had lashed together from the timber, smoothing it down so that it formed a six-inch high wall around the perimeter of the bull. He worked without pause, stirring the cement with a tyre lever, scooping it out with a hub-cap prised off one of the wheels.

  By the time he finished and drove off, leaving his equipment where it stood, he had completed a thirty-foot-long section of wall.

  Four

  June 7: Conscious, for the first time, of the brevity of each day. As long as I was awake for over twelve hours I still orientated my time around the meridian, morning and afternoon set their old rhythms. Now, with just over eleven hours of consciousness left, they form a continuous interval, like a length of tape-measure. I can see exactly how much is left on the spool and can do - little to affect the rate at which it unwinds. Spend the time slowly packing away the library; the crates are too heavy to move and lie where they are filled.

  Cell count down to 400,000.

  Woke 8-10. To sleep 7-15. (Appear to have lost my watch without realizing it, had to drive into town to buy another.)

  June 14: 9/2 hours. Time races, flashing past like an expressway. However, the last week of a holiday always goes faster than the first. At the present rate there should be about 4-5 weeks left. This morning I tried to visualize what the last week or so - the final, 3, 2, 1, out - would be like, had a sudden chilling attack of pure fear, unlike anything I've ever felt before. Took me half an hour to steady myself for an intravenous.

  Kaldren pursues me like my luminescent shadow, chalked up on the gateway '96,688,365,498,702'. Should confuse the mail man.

  Woke 9-05. To sleep 6-36.

  June 19: 8/4 hours. Anderson rang up this morning. I nearly put the phone down on him, but managed to go through the pretence of making the final arrangements. He congratulated me on my stoicism, even used the word 'heroic'. Don't feel it. Despair erodes everything - courage, hope, self-discipline, all the better qualities. It's so damned difficult to sustain that impersonal attitude of passive acceptance implicit in the scientific tradition. I try to think of Galileo before the Inquisition, Freud surmounting the endless pain of his jaw cancer surgery.

  Met Kaldren down town, had a long discussion about the Mercury Seven. He's convinced that they refused to leave the moon deliberately, after the 'reception party' waiting for them had put them in the cosmic picture. They were told by the mysterious emissaries from Orion that the exploration of deep space was pointless, that they were too late as the life of the universe is now virtually over!!! According to K. there are Air Force generals who take this nonsense seriously, but I suspect it's simply an obscure attempt on K. 's part to console me.

  Must have the phone disconnected. Some contractor keeps calling me up about payment for 50 bags of cement he claims I collected ten days ago. Says he helped me load them on to a truck himself. I did drive Whitby's pick-up into town but only to get some lead screening. What does he think I'd do with all that cement? Just the ort of irritating thing you don't expect to hang over your final exit. (Moral: don't try too hard to forget Eniwetok.)

  Woke 9-40. To sleep 4-15.

  June 25: 7/2 hours. Kaldren was snooping around the lab again today. Phoned me there, when I answered a recorded voice he'd rigged up rambled out a long string of numbers, like an insane super-Tim. These practical jokes of his get rather wearing. Fairly soon I'll have to go over and come to terms with him, much as I hate the prospect. Anyway, Miss Mars is a pleasure to look at.

  One meal is enough now, topped up with a glucose shot. Sleep is still 'black', completely unrefreshing. Last night I took a 16 mm. film of the first three hours, screened it this morning at the lab. The first true horror movie, I looked like a half-animated corpse. Woke 10-25. To sleep 345.

  July 3: 53/4 hours. Little done today. Deepening lethargy, dragged myself over to the lab, nearly left the road twice. Concentrated enough to feed the zoo and get the log up to date. Read through the operating manuals Whitby left for the last time, decided on a delivery rate of 40 rontgens/min., target distance of 350 cm. Everything is ready now.

  Woke 11-05. To sleep 3-15.

  Powers stretched, shifted his head slowly across the pillow, focusing on the shadows cast on to the ceiling by the blind. Then he looked down at his feet, saw Kaldren sitting on the end of the bed, watching him quietly.

  'Hello, doctor,' he said, putting out his cigarette. 'Late night? You look tired.'

  Powers heaved himself on to one elbow, glanced at his watch. It was just after eleven. For a moment his brain blurred, and he swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, massaging some life into his face.

  He noticed that the room was full of smoke. 'What are you doing here?' he asked Kaldren.

  'I came over to invite you to lunch.' He indicated the bedside phone. 'Your line was dead so I drove round. Hope you don't mind me climbing in. Rang the bell for about half an hour. I'm surprised you didn't hear it.'

  Powers nodded, then stood up and tried to smooth the creases out of his cotton slacks. He had gone to sleep without changing for over a week, and they were damp and stale.

  As he started for the bathroom door Kaldren pointed to the camera tripod on the other side of the bed. 'What's this? Going into the blue movie business, doctor?'

  Powers surveyed him dimly for a moment, glanced at the tripod without replying and then noticed his open diary on the bedside table. Wondering whether Kaldren had read the last entries, he went back and picked it up, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

  From the mirror cabinet he took out a syringe and an ampoule, after the shot leaned against the door waiting for the stimulant to pick up.

  Kaldren was in the lounge when he returned to him, reading the labels on the crates lying about in the centre of the floor.

  'Okay, then,' Powers told him, 'I'll join you for lunch.' He examined Kaldren carefully. He looked more subdued than usual, there was an air almost of deference about him.

  'Good,' Kaidren said. 'By the way, are you leaving?'

  'Does it matter?' Powers asked curtly. 'I thought you were in Anderson's care?'

  Kaldren shrugged. 'Please yourself. Come round at about twelve,' he suggested, adding pointedly: 'That'll give you time to clean up and change. What's that all over your shirt? Looks like lime.'

  Powers peered down, brushed at the w
hite streaks. After Kaldren had left he threw the clothes away, took a shower and unpacked a clean suit from one of the trunks.

  Until his liaison with Coma, Kaidren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building, a geometric model of and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents' hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the roof-top, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day's trapping.

  Powers noticed him there when he drove up at noon, poised on a ledge 150 feet above, head raised theatrically to the sky.

  'Kaldren!' he shouted up suddenly into the silent air, half-hoping he might be jolted into losing his footing.

  Kaldren broke out of his reverie and glanced down into the court. Grinning obliquely, he waved his right arm in a slow semi-circle.

  'Come up,' he called, then turned back to the sky.

  Powers leaned against the car. Once, a few months previously, he had accepted the same invitation, stepped through the entrance and within three minutes lost himself helplessly in a second-floor cul-de-sac. Kaldren had taken half an hour to find him.

  Powers waited while Kaldren swung down from his eyrie, vaulting through the wells and stairways, then rode up in the elevator with him to the penthouse suite.

  They carried their cQcktails through into a wide glass-roofed studio, the huge white ribbon of concrete uncoiling around them like toothpaste squeezed from an enormous tube. On the staged levels running parallel and across them rested pieces of grey abstract furniture, giant photographs on angled screens, carefully labelled exhibits laid out on low tables, all dominated by twenty-foot-high black letters on the rear wall which spelt out the single vast word: ******YOU******

  Kaldren pointed to it. 'What you might call the supraliminal approach.' He gestured Powers in conspiratorially, finishing his drink in a gulp. 'This is my laboratory, doctor,' he said with a note of pride. 'Much more significant than yours, believe me.'

  Powers smiled wryly to himself and examined the first exhibit, an old EEG tape traversed by a series of faded inky wriggles. It was labelled: 'Einstein, A.; Alpha Waves, 1922.'

  He followed Kaldren around, sipping slowly at his drink, enjoying the brief feeling of alertness the amphetamine provided. Within two hours it would fade, leave his brain feeling like a block of blotting paper.

  Kaldren chattered away, explaining the significance of the so-called Terminal Documents. 'They're end-prints, Powers, final statements, the products of total fragmentation. When I've got enough together I'll build a new world for myself out of them.' He picked a thick paper-bound volume off one of the tables, riffled through its pages. 'Association tests of the Nuremberg Twelve. I have to include these..

  Powers strolled on absently without listening. Over in the corner were what appeared to be three ticker-tape machines, lengths of tape hanging from their mouths. He wondered whether Kaldren was misguided enough to be playing the stock market, which had been declining slowly for twenty years.

  'Powers,' he heard Kaldren say. 'I was telling you about the Mercury Seven.' He pointed to a collection of typewritten sheets tacked to a screen. 'These are transcripts of their final signals radioed back from the recording monitors.'

  Powers examined the sheets cursorily, read a line at random.

  '... BLUE... PEOPLE... RE-CYCLE... ORION... TELEMETERS...'

  Powers nodded noncommittally. 'Interesting. What are the ticker tapes for over there?'

  Kaldren grinned. 'I've been waiting for months for you to ask me that. Have a look.'

  Powers went over and picked up one of the tapes. The machine was labelled: 'Auriga 225-G. Interval: 69 hours.'

  The tape read:

  96,688,365,498,695,96,688,365,498,694 96,688,365,498,693 96,688,365,498,692 Powers dropped the tape. 'Looks rather familiar. What does the sequence represent?'

  Kaldren shrugged. 'No one knows.'

  'What do you mean? It must replicate something.'

  'Yes, it does. A diminishing mathematical progression. A countdown, if you like.'

  Powers picked up the tape on the right, tabbed: 'Aries 44R95 1. Interval: 49 days.'

  Here the sequence ran: 876,567,988,347,779,877,654,434 876,567,988,347,779,877,654,433 876,567,988,347,779,877,654,432 Powers looked round. 'How long does it take each signal to come through?'

  'Only a few seconds. They're tremendously compressed laterally, of course. A computer at the observatory breaks them down. They were first picked up at Jodrell Bank about twenty years ago. Nobody bothers to listen to them now.'

  Powers turned to the last tape.

  6,554

  6,553 6,552 6,551

  'Nearing the end of its run,' he commented. He glanced at the label on the hood, which read: 'Unidentified radio source, Canes Venatici. Interval: 97 weeks.'

  He showed the tape to Kaldren. 'Soon be over.'

  Kaldren shook his head. He lifted a heavy directory-sized volume off a table, cradled it in his hands. His face had suddenly become sombre and haunted. 'I doubt it,' he said. 'Those are only the last four digits. The whole number contains over 50 million.'

  He handed the volume to Powers, who turned to the title page. 'Master Sequence of Serial Signal received by Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory, University of Manchester, England, 0012-59 hours, 21-5-72. Source: NGC 9743, Canes Venatici.' He thumbed the thick stack of closely printed pages, millions of numerals, as Kaidren had said, running up and down across a thousand consecutive pages.

  Powers shook his head, picked up the tape again and stared at it thoughtfully.

  'The computer only breaks down the last four digits,' Kaldren explained. 'The whole series comes over in each 15second-long package, but it took IBM more than two years to unscramble one of them.'

  'Amazing,' Powers commented. 'But what is it?'

  'A countdown, as you can see. NGC 9743, somewhere in Canes Venatici. The big spirals there are breaking up, and they're saying goodbye. God knows who they think we are but they're letting us know all the same, beaming it out on the hydrogen line for everyone in the universe to hear.' He paused. 'Some people have put other interpretations on them, but there's one piece of evidence that rules out everything else.'

  'Which is?'

  Kaldren pointed to the last tape from Canes Venatici. 'Simply that it's been estimated that by the time this series reaches zero the universe will have just ended.'

  Powers fingered the tape reflectively. 'Thoughtful of them to let us know what the real time is,' he remarked.

  'I agree, it is,' Kaldren said quietly. 'Applying the inverse square law that signal source is broadcasting at a strength of about three million megawatts raised to the hundredth power. About the size of the entire Local Group. Thoughtful is the word.'

  Suddenly he gripped Powers' arm, held it tightly and peered into his eyes closely, his throat working with emotion.

  'You're not alone, Powers, don't think you are. These are the voices of time, and they're all saying goodbye to you. Think of yourself in a wider context. Every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature. As you've just said, you know what the time is now, so what does the rest matter? There's no need to go on looking at the clock.'

  Powers took his hand, squeezed it firmly. 'Thanks, Kaidren. I'm glad you understand.' He walked over to the window, looked down across the white lake. The tension between himself and Kaldren had dissipated, he felt that all his obligations to him had at last been met. Now he wanted to leave as quickly as possible, forget him as he had forgotten the faces of the countless other patients whose
exposed brains had passed between his fingers.

  He went back to the ticker machines, tore the tapes from their slots and stuffed them into his pockets. 'I'll take these along to remind myself. Say goodbye to Coma for me, will you.'

  He moved towards the door, when he reached it looked back to see Kaldren standing in the shadow of the three giant letters on the far wall, his eyes staring listlessly at his feet.

  As Powers drove away he noticed that Kaldren had gone up on to the roof, watched him in the driving mirror waving slowly until the car disappeared around a bend.

  Five

  The outer circle was now almost complete. A narrow segment, an arc about ten feet long, was missing, but otherwise the low perimeter wall ran continuously six inches off the concrete floor around the outer lane of the target bull, enclosing the huge rebus within it. Three concentric circles, the largest a hundred yards in diameter, separated from each other by ten-foot intervals, formed the rim of the device, divided into four segments by the arms of an enormous cross radiating from its centre, where a small round platform had been built a foot above the ground.

  Powers worked swiftly, pouring sand and cement into the mixer, tipping in water until a rough paste formed, then carried it across to the wooden forms and tamped the mixture down into the narrow channel.

  Within ten minutes he had finished, quickly dismantled the forms before the cement had set and slung the timbers into the back seat of the car. Dusting his hands on his trousers, he went over to the mixer and pushed it fifty yards away into the long shadow of the surrounding hills.