The Imagination Trap Part 4

"Porter told me the stars had all gone out. This suggests there has been a time shift from real to a.n.a.logue time. Our time scale is now so vast that normal light frequencies just don't register with us. It's too much of a coincidence that the stars disappeared just after the receivers were turned off. I surmise that if we can get one dimension back into congruity, the others will follow. After all, they're all now tied to the same controlling constant. Alter one dimension and the others must modify themselves to balance the equation."

Driscoll pulled his lip. "The whole theory's based on far too many a.s.sumptions."

"We don't have time to re-examine the data. Unless you've anything better to offer I suggest we go back in there and try it."

"You're right, of course. At this stage even a bad theory is better than none. And if we're going to die anyway, I know where I'd prefer to be."

Driscoll opened the door and walked towards the blister. Brevis followed, hiding his face in the shadow of Driscoll's fading silhouette-a shadow made surrealistic by the polychromaticfuzz which made nonsense of the outline. The crackling lure of the bright imagery seized his mind and drained his volition. He followed like an automaton, with his eyes fixed on a narrowing area of darkness which was the small of Driscoll's back. And in his mind there nestled an even smaller and more rapidly reducing area of objectivity.

Driscoll was in the blister now. Forcing his hands to find and operate familiar instruments now entirely invisible because of the strength of the hallucination.

"Lamp on," Driscoll said. "It'll take a few minutes to warm. I'm sitting right in front of it.

Make it easy on yourself. Go outside and wait."

"I'm staying," Brevis said. Unable to orientate himself with respect to the now unseeable blister layout, he sat down on the floor. At rest, the impressions overwhelmed him. The Tau images, suffering no attenuation through the limiting filters of the body, a.s.sumed an exquisite fidelity and "edge" which he found both intolerable and irresistible at the same instant.

There was no way now to shut out the startling excitations, nor any way to keep his personality contained. The Tau-psychic interaction continued through to fusion point, and its effect was one of mental dispersion, as though his consciousness was being distributed h.o.m.ogeneously into the surrounding phenomena. His mind and the Tau-s.p.a.ce imagery momentarily seemed fused into one.

It was later that something left of himself tired of being alone and infinite, and tripped his attention to Driscoll's disembodied voice rambling in the midst of chaos. Only one phrase was sufficiently articulate to be understood-but that was sufficient to shock his mind back into narrower awareness.

"Brevis . . . stop fighting me. Is that what you want . . . infinity?"

In that instant of revelation Brevis forced his mind to withdraw from the fantastic rapport, and forced his muscles to carry him to his knees. As he did so a new form of image forced itself into his head-great sliding bands of alternate light and darkness, slipping, twisting, moving always downwards. Then he knew that his eyes had come within the range of the krypton lamp. This was the moire fringe effect, though what was visual and what was hallucinatory he was unable to decide.

But he was conscious that Driscoll was somehow forcing the bands downwards across the field of view, seeking a smaller pattern, a smaller differential between their time and the real time of the universe. The flickering bands cascaded to a blur of grey, then slowed as Driscoll paused for a closer examination of phase, angle and magnitude.

Brevis relaxed, and in doing so he lost the image of the moire fringe. The turbulent Tau image crowded over him again, slipping away on all sides in a torrential series of changing modes and characters breathlessly unlike anything he had previously experienced in Tau.

Unable to regain his vision of the fringe, he attempted to remain a pa.s.sive observer as the drunken kaleidoscope of subjective impression veered down an ever-narrowing funnel of restricted effect.

The thought formed hazily in his head at first, and then with a clear and rising panic, that Driscoll had lost control. The descent seemed too far and too fast, and they were gaining an impetus which it appeared impossible to halt. From the infinitely large, Driscoll's own introspection was threatening to drive them into the infinitely small, and they stood the risk of becoming voyagers in some untenable sub-nuclear domain.

Brevis attempted to extend his mind into correlation with the now fleeting image. But the relative velocity between the phenomenon and the speed of his own thought processes defied the contact and threw him back with a headful of sparks. And his panic grew to a certainty as the velocity of the descent increased still further as judged by the transience of the parade of imagery.

Once again he attempted to enter the battle, and this time his mind caught and held, but with a mental wrench that almost stripped him of consciousness. Then he was back again,fighting to re-form the patterns of Tau image with which he had become acquainted through exposure to more normal states of Tau.

Then suddenly stasis, quietude, rest; a synchronous locking. He caught at the image and held it, and the whole scene stabilized in the rose-pink panorama of the Tau Gamma mode illusion. It seemed they had arrived.

It took him many minutes to collect his senses and to take stock of the situation. The intensity of the Gamma image was low, and the krypton lamp, now itself visible, provided sufficient illumination to draw out other real details against the pink hallucination. Stumbling to his feet Brevis located the switch for the blister's internal lighting. Immediately the normal details of the room became apparent and the pinkness shrank back to a mere ghost of an illusion.

Driscoll had slipped from the chair in front of the lamp and was now prostrate on the floor. Relying now on his eyes, Brevis sought a path through the disordered screens and dragged Driscoll out to the corridor. A swift examination suggested he was not dead but merely in a state of shock. Despite the urgency which the treatment of Driscoll seemed to merit, Brevis felt impelled to visit both Porter and Grus on his way to collect his emergency case. Both were still sleeping, but stirring and shortly due to wake.

It was only when he reached his cabin that his experience in the blister caught up with him. As he opened the door a brief confrontation of his own face in the mirror filled him with confused amazement. In attempting to correlate the death-white idiotic features which he saw with those of his normal image, the wonder and the horror caught up with him. He had a vague impression of falling as delayed shock drove the resistance from his body and tipped him into a pit of unconsciousness.

When he finally awoke, Porter was standing at his side.

"How do you feel now, Eric?"

"Weak," said Brevis.

Porter nodded. "It certainly took it out of you. But you'll be pleased to know that whatever you did was successful."

"You mean we've made it?" Brevis sat up. "We got back into congruence?"

"As near as we can tell. When Sigmund and I came round we found we were in a simple Gamma mode. We took the chance and dropped the ship out of Tau into real s.p.a.ce. There we found everything according to the catalogue. We've been taking spectroscope and radio-telescope fixes on the identifiable primaries and radio-sources, and we've even managed to establish our position."

"How did Pat make out?"

"Fine. He recovered a lot quicker than you. He's back in the blister right now doing triangulation fixes for Sigmund, and feeling rather chipper about the whole thing. He estimates we can make the return trip without losing congruence as long as we don't tie our time constant to a fixed point of reference."

"With that I agree," said Brevis. "Our dimensional dilemma was a simple example of Tau-psychic interaction. The radio-pulses controlled our instruments and our clocks. From these we took our consciousness of time. It wasn't a condition of time appropriate to the separate universe we had become at that velocity, but we fondly imagined that time, at least, was real.

"It was our acceptance of that measured time which fixed it as a time constant as far as Tau-s.p.a.ce was concerned. All the other physical dimensions then had to adapt in order to maintain the right ma.s.s-time relationship. I think for that we can steal Diepenstrom's term of an imagination trap-because that's precisely what it was. Next trip just let the time constant, and thus our time consciousness, drift with the ship. By the way, how far did we travel?"

"When you feel up to it, Eric, come down to Control and see the scanners. It's rather animpressive sight. The Milky Way, seen from completely beyond its boundaries, is a rather frightening and a rather nostalgic thing to see."