Against Infinity (20 page)

Electromagnetic fists seized them and flung them on with an impatient
snick-snick-snick,
between twin walls of impervious slumbering emptiness. Ice began to creep from the corners of the big windows. Manuel thumbed on the embedded web of heaters and the scum cleared. He watched the silent unfolding land, his eyes automatically surveying for darting movement, for some sign of recent passage of something huge and land-gouging, doing this while his mind was blank and preparing him for the days ahead. Slowly a pressure, unnoticed until now, began to ease in him.

A quiet voice asked, “You know this area?”

He looked at the Earther who had spoken. “Some.”

“I am Piet Arnold. I gather you are from Sidon?”

“Was.”

“I am of Earth.”

“I know.”

“It is that obvious?”

“Your clothes.”

“I purchased them, thinking… Ah, they are too opulent, is that it?”

“Could be. What is that stuff, the pants?”

“Corduroy.”

“Never saw it before.”

“I am sorry. My friends”—he swept a hand to include thirteen of them, all identically dressed, seated down one side of the car, their eyes on Manuel—“are here under my guidance. I judged badly in selecting, I see that. We do not mean to place ourselves apart from you who live here. It would have been kinder to requisition clothing at Hiruko and discard our—”

“No, look, I don’t care.”

“We are hoping for full-hearted cooperation from the people of Sidon.”

“You’ll get it.”

“We are here to study the artifact.”

Manuel kept his face blank. “Uh-huh.”

“The Aleph. Do you know much of it?”

“You’ll be out at the site, right, not at Sidon?”

“Yes. The preliminary survey is done. We have studied carefully the borings and unfoldings of the structure.”

“Unfoldings?”

“Yes. You do not follow the reports? There have been many.” Piet spoke with a mild, reassuring cadence. He studied Manuel, undistracted by movement in the car or by the passing land outside.

“I don’t get much time.”

“You should take the trouble. The artifact that once moved is perhaps the most important discovery of our time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We must know more of it.”

“How much do you need to know?”

“One cannot know too much.”

Manuel fidgeted. He reached for something to lighten this conversation. “Like sex, huh?”

Piet’s face went blank. “What do you mean?”

“Like a friend of mine says, only too much is enough.”

“Oh. I see.” A thin, joyless smile crossed Piet’s still-solemn face and, once the gesture had been made, vanished suddenly, like something collapsing.

Manuel saw he had offended the man. “So you’re here to study,” he said lamely.

“Yes. Study without harming. We mounted this expedition at great cost. We on Earth can ill afford many such explorations, I assure you.”

“I guess it’s not like the glory days.”

“Glory?”

“When Earth had lots to spend. You know—the Americans and Russians and Chinese and all. Spreading out here, measuring everything. Pretty rich times for you.”

“Ah.” Piet’s face became stony. “The high-bourgeois culture.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“An unhappy time. Rootless, with the false consciousness of late capitalism—”

“I thought it was pretty good for you. The movies—”

“I assure you, we do not regret the loss of those times. Just as no one now envies the self-indulgences of the courts of monarchical Europe, or the Saturnalia of Rome.”

Manuel didn’t know enough Earth history to tell what the man was talking about. He frowned. “Uh-huh. You, ah, going to be here long?”

Manuel looked around the car, but there were no empty seats. He didn’t remember Piet’s being across from him when he sat down, but maybe the man had moved while he was looking out the window.

“Perhaps for the rest of our lives.”

“What? How come?”

“The return is expensive. We can transmit our findings. Samples, once we dare to take some, can be shipped. There is no need to return us bodily to Earth. We can remain here, to undertake the long-term investigations.”

“Never go
home
again?”

Piet smiled wanly. “It is the price a scientist must pay.”

“Uh-huh.” Manuel had no idea what to say next. It was the worst damn luck in the world to run into this. If he had to spend the hours of the trip talking—

An expression crossed Piet’s face. The man smiled again and said softly, “You must excuse me. We are still not adjusted to your time schedule here. I am tired, and need to rest a moment.”

Manuel nodded. Piet folded his hands, closed his eyes, and was at once deeply relaxed, the lines of his face disappearing. The other Earthers also leaned back in their seats, faces going slack, and in a moment their silence isolated Manuel in an island of calm. He decided they had some kind of implanted command that Piet had activated. He had heard of such things: economical ways to stretch out food resources in times of famine—a common Earthside need.

He was relieved to be freed from conversation. It did not occur to him that perhaps Piet had seen this, and had withdrawn. The on-marching land beyond held his attention as the pulsors thumped regularly, keeping up their speed. He let himself think about what lay ahead for him. His thoughts were as directionless as the unplumbed wastes outside, unwilling to focus themselves, and that is why he did not notice the first sideways lurch of the car. The next one came suddenly, wrenching the couplings so they screeched and people stirred, exclaiming. Manuel felt it solidly shove him against the arm of the seat. His head jerked up, searching for a cause, and his eyes met the blue, still eyes of Piet Arnold for an instant. Then the big one hit.

The crash came through his boots first and then threw him across the aisle, against a row of seats. He felt the car tilt far over. The air was filled with flying stuff and a huge, rolling noise like grinding.

He held onto the seat back near him. Somebody slammed into him and fell away. Shouts, cries. A high-pitched, piping alarm signal rose and abruptly shut off. The car shook, turned on its axis, rattled—and screeched to a dead stop.

Manuel got to his feet. He found he was standing on one of the Earthers. He stepped away, finding a place among the jumble of people crying out and struggling to get up, clothes and luggage strewn all among them. He ignored the noise and listened. No high hiss of escaping air, no pressure drop. Another trembling came, making some people fall again. A woman screamed. Manuel held on to a seat and waited. Another, just barely noticeable. Then nothing.

“Hey! Quiet!” he shouted. He did it again and the ones in the back shut up. “Somebody back there, pick up the comm phone!”

White faces turned but nobody did anything. “You!” He pointed to a tall man at the other end of the car. “Pick it up.”

The tall man did. He looked at Manuel. “Is it live?” Manuel asked. The man nodded. “Wait for the lead car to come on. They’ll tell us the situation. The rest of you, shut up.”

It took a long time to find out. The Earthers helped put a woman’s broken arm in a sling and they all waited tensely. The lights stayed on, but no air came through the vents. When they got word, it was as Manuel had suspected: the ground shocks had thrown two freight cars clean off the tracks. Nobody was badly hurt in the two passenger cars. To get the train moving again they would have to pull the freight cars off the tracks.

Something was blocking the air feed. The heaters also were running at low power. Until they got the passenger cars back in alignment on the tracks, it would be hard to tell if the trouble was serious.

There was never any talk about waiting for help. It would take hours to get crawlers out from Hiruko. If there was damage to the life-support systems, it was better to be moving, even at reduced speed, toward Sidon.

Nor was there any question about who would do the work. The train captain walked through both passenger cars, picking people at random. One of the women chosen was married, and her husband jumped up, angry, protesting. So the captain let the husband stand in for her. Otherwise, there was no trouble. It would take most of the passengers to do the job, and everyone knew time might be important.

Manuel had trouble finding an emergency suit that fit him. He was late getting out the lock. He stumbled down a gravel grade, moving clumsily with the suit’s unfamiliar power amplifiers. Five cars ahead, the grade had shifted and slumped. Manuel studied it, trying to see what had happened. He gazed down the valley that the magnetorail line ran through. Raw dirt and ice had spilled down into the plain. Slopes were cut and cracked by dislocations.

“What caused all this? Is it typical?”

Manuel turned to find Piet Arnold standing nearby, looking uncertain.

“I don’t know. But you shouldn’t be out here. You don’t know how to work in this gravity.”

“We do our part,” Piet said simply.

Manuel saw six more of the Earthers moving awkwardly among the work gang. “Damn stupid,” he said gruffly, but with some grudging respect.

The two freight cars were a hundred meters ahead. The grade had slumped under them. The sag wasn’t bad enough to permanently disrupt the superconducting fields; Manuel could see the magnetic aura running firm and true. The ramrod-straight, reddish halo held the freight cars in midair over the slumped gray grade.

“Fields musta rippled when that shake came through,” a voice said over comm. “Let go the cars for a second, then grabbed ’em again.”

The freight cars looked strange, hovering, caught in the act of tumbling out of the magnetic depression that cradled the train. They hung over the slope at seemingly impossible angles, frozen above the heads of the laboring men and women. In the pale light the work gang shoveled gravel and fashioned supports for the superconducting web that lay along the magnetorail bed.

“How shall we free them?” Piet asked.

“Have to pulse the fields again,” Manuel said, taking a shovel from the pile. “Weaken them so’s they drop the cars.”

“Why dig?”

“Got to realign the bed some. When the fields collapse at one spot, that sets up a strain all along the line. We’ll have to support this part of the train mechanically for two, three seconds.”

Piet nodded and went to explain to his men and women. The captain was giving orders, telling people where to dig and how to wedge the steel bars into place on the slippery, unstable slope. Manuel began digging, glad of something to do, feeling the muscles in his back pull and ache. Working in the petrofac had softened him some. He started sweating heavily. He worked with concentration, forgetting everything, slinging the stones into piles with a steady, swinging rhythm. His breath echoed and roared in the narrow helmet. Around him the braces and wedged rock foundations took form. Engineers worked to make sure the stresses would be right, that angles and vectors were aligned. He preferred to leave the planning to them, to simply dig where he was told and think about nothing other than keeping his footing on the loose slope. Some of the Earthers worked alongside him, but he paid them no mind, did not even speak except to answer orders.

An hour passed. Then another. The maintenance crew could not get the air system back to normal. Carbon dioxide buildup in the passenger bubble could be controlled, but only by venting. That put a deadline on everything. Hiruko had dispatched three crawlers, but nobody on board wanted to go back to Hiruko and wait until the line was repaired. That would take a while, anyway—the seismic shocks had done damage everywhere, and all available labor was going to be scarce.

At last the frame was ready. A crude cage of rods, stripped from the freight cars themselves, held the superconducting web from below. They uncoupled the freight cars. The local current monitors were downtrack, and the captain unlocked them. He gingerly inspected the panel and then waved the work gang away. The party clustered on the other side of the grade, away from the teetering cars.

Manuel was tired and uncomfortable in the ill-fitting power suit. He sat down on a boulder that had tumbled from the hills beyond the rail grade. The slippage here was worse than any he had ever seen. He wondered vaguely where the epicenter had been. He said nothing when Piet sat nearby. Together they watched the last preparations.

“You think it will work?”

“Should. Always trouble to fool with big magnetic fields like this, though.”

“On Earth, we would wait for help.”

“Might die, waiting.”

“I suppose so.” Piet looked doubtful.

The captain checked with Hiruko and called a warning over comm. Figures backed further away from the grade. From where he sat, Manuel could barely see the two cars poised in midair, slanted toward the other side of the slope. A dozen meters away five Earthers clumped together, as if for security.

“Ready! Flux change of five kiloGauss, duration of ten seconds. One, two, three
—
on!”

The pulse came rippling down from both directions. Manuel could see it rock the cars, sweeping by them, leaving the big, sleek compartments bobbing like boats under a gentle swell. The two waves met exactly at the center of the jury-rigged frame—

And the freight cars spun apart. One tumbled down the far slope and was gone in an instant. Through some reaction, its mate tilted backward. The silvery car rebounded off some unseen fluctuation. It spun lazily in the fields, end over end, then faster—

Manuel jumped to his feet. The car shot out of the magnetic trap like a richochet. It plunged down the gravel slope toward the work gang. The field lost it then and it fell heavily, cracking open. It spilled crates, skidding across the ice.

To Manuel it happened with a liquid slowness. The sleek skin of the car wrinkled and split and the crates crashed out and the thing came toward them, skating on the ice, and he gathered his feet under him, arms out for balance, waiting for the right instant—

The car smacked into a boulder, split in half; burst open, slinging crates; but kept on coming, now a mass of flying bits, a wall like a breaking wave—