The Two Worlds (80 page)

Hunt turned back to Murray as Lebansky moved to position himself outside, closing the door behind him. "You were holding something back the last time I was here," he said. "You know more about Baumer than you let on. I didn't make a big thing about it then because I wanted to let you think it over. But things have changed. I need to know who he's mixed up with, what he gets up to, and where he goes."

Murray licked his lips dryly. His eyes darted from Cullen to Koberg, who was standing with his arms folded and his back to the door, and then back to Hunt. "What makes you think I know any more than I already said?" he demanded.

"Come on, stop fooling around," Hunt said. "He's mixed up with the local Mafia equivalent, right? That's who you're covering for."

"Have you been seeing Nixie? Did she tell you this?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Where has she been going?"

Hunt could see no point in compounding the situation with further deviousness. "Right now, she's back at PAC, working with some Ganymean scientists," he said.

"Scientists? Nixie?"

"Believe me, Murray, there's a lot more to this than you ever imagined. It involves the whole Earth-Jevlen-Thurien political situation. Somebody's gone missing, and Baumer set it up. We want the people who are running him. I know they're the kind who can get nasty, but that's just something you'll have to live with." He waited. Murray shifted uncomfortably on his chair and wrestled internally. Hunt waved toward Koberg. "We're not playing games, Murray. If you don't give, we'll hustle you back to PAC right now, and
they'll
get it out of you."

"Who are you kidding? The Ganymeans would never go with anything like that," Murray said. But his eyes were nervous, and the attempt didn't quite come off.

"We might forget to ask them," Hunt said.

Cullen stared at Murray for a moment longer, then snorted impatiently. "Get him out of here," he said, motioning at Koberg. Then he called toward the door, "Lebansky, call the wagon. We're not gonna—"

Murray raised both hands protectively. "Okay, okay . . . they're called the
Ichena
—"

"We know about them," Cullen murmured to Hunt. "Protection rake-offs, intimidation and persuasion, a lot of black-market operations with the situation we've got right now." Hunt nodded.

Murray went on. "They've got a racket going for the headworld freaks. Ever since the Gs pulled the plug on jevex, the price has been going outta sight." He showed a palm briefly. "There are still places you can go if you know the right people and you've got the bread."

"How come, if jevex is shut down?" Hunt asked, more to see how much Murray knew and if he was straight.

"Hell, how do I know? I'm not a tech. It's not completely shut down—I don't know why. There are people around who can get a hookup into it, or who look the other way if the price is right. Get the idea?"

"How does this tie in with Baumer?" Cullen asked.

"He's a headworlder. He got hooked soon after he got here. There's this club, kind of exclusive, known as the Gondola. It's got booths out back that you only get to know about if you've got the connections. That's where he goes all the time."

"Where is this place?" Cullen asked.

"Not too far. Five or six blocks."

"Can you get us in? Nobody's going to bust the place. We just want to see if Baumer's there."

Murray shook his head. "Hell, what do you think I am? I'm just a guy who hitched a ride to this planet."

"But you've got contacts," Hunt said. "Do you know someone who can? It's urgent, Murray."

"Maybe . . . I'd have to make a few calls."

"Then start making them."

"What am I supposed to tell them? Why should they be interested in helping you?"

"If they don't, it could be the end of their operation."

"Give me a few minutes." Murray went over to the companel and sat down.

Hunt looked at Cullen curiously. "So how did Baumer come to get the connections so quickly?" he mused. "From what Murray says, he'd only just arrived."

"They gave him a freebie as a hook," Cullen said. "Got themselves a tame Terran inside PAC."

Hunt nodded slowly. It was all beginning to make sense. Baumer had been identified early on as a likely potential addict.
That
was how they had controlled him. So at least that answered one of the sets of questions on Hunt's list. He looked across anxiously at Murray, who was tapping a code into the touchpad. Baumer's motivation wasn't an aspect of it all that Hunt was particularly concerned about just at that moment.

At PAC, Danchekker and Shilohin were putting further questions to Nixie, who was coupled into visar. Nixie was allowing visar to monitor her thought processes and recollections as she described them.

"You're saying that in this world that you claim to be from, there weren't any gadgets at all as we know them, beyond simple implements?" Shilohin said. "No machines, even rudimentary ones?"

"It wasn't possible to put pieces together that could work the way they can here," Nixie answered. She made a helpless gesture. "How do I explain this?" She leveled a forearm to point at Shilohin. "If a thing is that long, maybe this way, then it is different when it goes that way." She rotated her arm horizontally through a right angle. "And all through the day everything changes, too, even without moving. But in this world nothing makes any difference. Everything's always the same. Everywhere there's this magical lawfulness, and impossible things become possible." She looked questioningly from one to the other.

"The images are consistent with a physics in which the relative dimensions of an object, and hence its shape, are not invariant with its state of motion," visar interpreted, analyzing the pictures in Nixie's mind. "So it was not possible to construct mechanisms whose parts would move freely under all conditions. The changes with directional orientation and the regular, superposed daily cycle can be understood as secondary effects due to planetary rotation."

"We are on a planet, then," Shilohin concluded.

"So it would appear," visar agreed.

Danchekker sat forward and rubbed his brow. "Perhaps I'm getting confused. How is the planet rotating? I thought we established earlier that rotation was unknown for some reason. Wasn't the notion of spinning objects considered to be something mystical—conceivable as an ideal, but unattainable in practice?"

"Not quite," visar replied. "
Unconstrained
rotation was common enough. Matter elongated in the direction of motion. Thus a stick thrown into the air, for example, turning about its center, would transform into two wedges connected at their vertices. Moving things changed their dimensions. So there was no effective way of fitting fixed and moving parts together in the kinds of way necessary to build machines. They couldn't even get axles and bearings to work."

Danchekker sat back on his chair again, baffled. "The extraordinary thing is that she doesn't seem capable of inventing it," he mused. "Her grasp of even the elementary principles of mechanics is virtually nonexistent."

Nixie shrugged without taking any offense.

"It is indeed as if her fundamental concepts had been formed in another world," Danchekker went on.

"Which seems to exist in space as we know it, but with different laws of physics," Shilohin said. She looked back at Nixie. "You say that solid objects could interpenetrate?"

"Yes," Nixie assured her.

"Under the right conditions," visar qualified.

"And solid matter didn't always exhibit permanency? Things could just appear out of nowhere?"

"Not often, but apparently so," visar confirmed.

"Or on other occasions might vanish?"

"In her childhood she remembers an entire landscape changing overnight."

"And supernatural powers worked. With training and discipline, people could learn to produce such effects at will, by mind power alone? Some acquired the ability to see visions in these mysterious `currents' that we've heard about, which pervaded everything." Shilohin looked at Danchekker and tossed up a hand briefly. "And even more amazing, these visions were of
this
world—our everyday one. Such people could attach themselves physically to these currents that flowed to the sky, and rise up—and that's how Nixie came here."

visar projected an image onto one of the laboratory's wallscreens, created from information encoded in Nixie's memory patterns. It showed armored warriors with spears and shields falling back in panic as a glowing figure that was floating in the sky directed streaks of exploding lightning down among them. Another image showed a man in robes and a high headdress slowly passing a shining rod through a slab of solid rock, without a mark or opening upon it. There were strange creatures, one with legs that looked like snakes, another that divided into two living halves.

The scenes were the nearest that visar could construct to representations that would be meaningful to human nervous systems, conditioned by familiar imagery; the literal data would have been incomprehensible. The humanlike figures on the screen, for instance, were artifacts of the conversion performed by visar, not forms that Nixie had actually seen as depicted.

"How?" Shilohin asked, mystified. "How could such things be possible?"

"Ah, well . . . that's another question," visar said.

"Could it be some aberration in the Jevlenese communications system, do you think?" Shilohin asked. "Could an h-space link have somehow made a connection to a distant part of the universe that we never knew existed?"

"I can't say it's impossible," visar answered.

Danchekker sat contemplating the screens for some time. Shilohin waited, while Nixie watched with interest. She liked being the center of attention and was happy to cooperate.

Finally, Danchekker shook his head. "No," he pronounced. "Even if such a realm were to exist, how could an individual be transported from that world to this?" He looked to Shilohin in appeal. "The explanation must be purely psychological. The obvious answer as to how an unconventional but consistent system of dynamics comes to be embodied in the constructs of somebody with no intuitive knowledge of physical principles is, quite simply, that jevex put it there."

"You're saying it's all in my head?" Nixie asked matter-of-factly. The skepticism of the two scientists didn't seem to trouble her. It was almost as if she had expected it.

"Hallucinatory disturbances induced by maladjustment of the neural coupling circuits, possibly?" Shilohin offered, looking at Danchekker.

"Now you see.why people like me don't usually talk to anyone about all this," Nixie said. "Most people tend to think we're mad. The ayatollahs try to describe what they've seen, but they don't have the words, or the help of scientists and screens like this. So they try to tell it in symbols. But people don't even begin to understand."

Danchekker smiled benignly. "It's nothing to worry about," he told her. "I'm sure that to you, it all seems quite real." He half turned to take in Shilohin, as well, as he spoke. "It was only when I talked at length to Sandy and Gina that I became aware myself of the extraordinary ability of these Thurien systems to create totally compelling illusions inside the mind. Ganymean psychology is such that they don't get carried away by it, but with humans, apparently, it can all too easily become a craved-for reality substitute. And that, my dear, I have no hesitation in saying, would appear to be the answer."

Nixie smiled back at him in an easygoing way that said she could afford to wait until he changed his mind.

Danchekker turned back to Shilohin and waved a hand carelessly. "In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I think we have the answer to Garuth's whole problem. With jevex switched off, the solution is what I've maintained all along: time and patience. Let us forget any fantasies about unknown realms in other parts of the universe, and concentrate on the real fantasies—if you'll pardon the contradiction. That is all we need concern ourselves with now."

The accused were brought into a plain but imposing courtroom of tiered seats facing the bench where the Supreme Judge sat, flanked by lesser judges, scholars, and advisers. On one side of the space before the bench, Hans Baumer watched from a chair at the table reserved for the prosecution's counsel.

The first of the prisoners was an industrialist—or, at least, Baumer's mildly whimsical, unconscious idealization of one. He was wearing a dark, pinstripe suit with a glittering tie clip, and had a million-dollar tan, silvering hair, and a white mustache. With him were an engineer, a scientist, and a liberal/existentialist philosopher.

The Public Accuser rose and looked first at the industrialist. "Your crimes are greed and the theft of human life. For you not only subordinated all other considerations to increasing your own wealth, but in addition encouraged, if not, indeed, compelled, others to the pursuit of mere sensual and material gratifications in order to command their desires and exploit their labor. By enlisting the lives of others to serve your own misguided ends, you denied them the opportunity for betterment of self that was their true reason for existing."

"You may speak before the hearings commence," the Judge directed.

The industrialist cast an unperturbed eye over the assembly. "Nonsense. I gave them what they wanted. It wasn't my place to judge their tastes. If those tastes didn't reflect the ideal that you consider it your business to approve, it wasn't the fault of the mirror that I provided. And if I grew wealthy in the process, what of it? I took nothing from anyone. What I received, I created. Their lives had been squalid and wretched for thousands of years before I existed."

The Accuser replied, "The greedy, too, had existed for thousands of years. But the means of mass exploitation had not been available"—he addressed the engineer—"until
you
supplied it. You served as his henchman, building the factories and engines that would enslave millions."

"Enslave them? I gave them life," the engineer replied. "Before I came, three-quarters of their children died. Yes, in the early industrial years, life was sometimes hard. We couldn't raise everyone to affluence in a day or a year. But they
survived.
That sounds like a pretty important first step toward any kind of `self-betterment' to me."