He had no trouble getting back
into the building. None of the staff, who were scattered about the entrance
hall with its many alcoves, seemed even to notice his return, any more than
they had noticed his departure.
Definitely, luck was with him,
but he could not expect it to last forever – he must get some answers ready. Questions
might be fired at him any second. And for a start he must face the issue
himself. Why had he absconded?
He no longer knew – the impulse
was gone. Though it had seized him less than two hours ago, the episode was
burnt out, finished. Thus the reason for it had slipped from his mental grasp. If
he wished to bring that reason back to mind, he must take a risk – he must
re-evoke the impulse…
Like one who knocks insincerely
on a door, hoping that no one will answer, he decided to run that creepy risk. Here
goes, he thought – and tried to recover that frame of mind he’d been in, when
he had rushed from the lecture room.
And nothing came of it. What a
relief. He could only recall the effect of the sudden panicky oppression
that had driven him out of the Institute – not its cause; not a whiff remained
of the actual phenomenon which had capsized his purpose so abruptly.
He had a good hope now, that he
was done with such aberration. Henceforth he would remain steadily locked onto
his chosen destiny.
That had better be true,
considering his reception among the Splashers. Yes, the old life, as far as he
was concerned, was dead. No option remained other than to commit himself to the
new.
He made his way to his room and
lay down on his bed, hands behind his head, closed his eyes and concentrated,
for he still had to use logic (since memory wouldn’t help him) to work out the
mechanism of the trigger which had caused him to rush out of that session in
Room L44.
For it wasn’t enough simply to
vow that it must not happen again. He must understand himself, understand what
might make him do such things.
Suddenly he was wise to it. Perfection
is the enemy.
That was it; you could almost
graph the pressure – the steepening towards disaster –
It happens
thus: things go well – expectations soar – with them zoom demands – demands on
himself, on his life and world – upping the price of failure (even the
slightest failure) to infinity. Catastrophe awaits the slightest slip.
Consequently the actual trigger
did not matter much in itself. If it had not been one thing it would soon have
been another. His exalted state had had no safety-net between it and the abyss
of exaggerated disillusion.
The only defence against plunging
is not to soar in the first place.
Could he control his
expectations? Could he stop his blood from rioting in his veins?
An encouraging whisper of memory:
the girl lolling on the windscreen of the barge.
Think about that girl…
On reflection, he recognized the
type – ah yes, that weirdly convincing type. Broadcasting her own
infinite worth. What kind of worth? Never any answer to that. Just ‘Plop!’ and
the notion lodged in his head for free. But this time it had not happened
that way.
This time, he had been able to
overcome the power of illusion.
He had not been wrenched – this
time – into worship of her. No, this time, flick! he’d switched off the
nonsense. Evidently he was becoming less impressionable. A cheering
thought; a vital thought, strategically essential now.
He opened his eyes and looked at
the clock in his room.
No use now trying to rejoin the
class in L44; no use joining the other trainees in their break, either – since
that interval, too, was past. He must join the next session.
Ah yes:
the session in the Light-Tank Chamber. That was his next appointed goal.
Glancing
at his printed plan of the building, he hurried through empty corridors amid a
wash of rising and falling sounds that seeped variously through the walls, the
sounds suggesting that he was being excluded from some great, urgent
enterprise; but whereas a few hours ago he would have fallen prey to a fear of "missing out", now he had recovered his confidence, and was able to reject the smog of
anxieties which might otherwise have obscured his determination. After all, at the end of the day, never in his
life had he succumbed to conclusions he did not like – a robust attitude which
stood him in good stead when his swift stride brought him face to face with the
Light-Tank Chamber entrance.
The
grinding roar from within told him that the session had already begun. He must
push his way into the Chamber as a latecomer. Very well: let the rest of his
life begin with this.... He pushed the door and found himself staring into a
pool of white fire.
The
black silhouettes of his fellow-trainees wavered in front of the heaving
brilliance. Some figures stood uncertainly, some were darting to right or left
to snatch a look through tubes that were attached all along the railing that
surrounded the lake, or pool, or tank of seething whiteness – which actually
was not fire; he likened it, as he advanced, to a pit of trapped, incandescent
worms, or to squirming lightning-bolts, slowed to
speeds of only a few yards per second – speeds which the eye could follow – and
emitting a sawtoothed grinding din, clash upon clash, from staccato to
continuous roar and back.
No use
complaining that he did not know what all this was about. It was his own fault
that he had missed most of the background lesson which ought to have prepared
him. He must now rely upon sheer aplomb (or blind arrogance) to see him
through.
He
reached the railing. Glancing to left and right, he saw trainees scribbling
their notes with fervour. He smiled ruefully at that. I,
Midax Rale, will not pretend to scribble. He just stood, receptive,
while the writhing tangle of rays in the tank, in their zigging and zagging,
blasted the chamber with wave after wave of drenching brilliance – which,
however, he could look at without hurting his eyes, thanks no doubt to
anti-actinic invisible shielding in the material of which the tank must be
composed.
Areas
of regularity sometimes appeared within the lunging tangle; pockets of law in
the midst of chaos. Whenever these coalesced, whenever the wild rays were
somehow combed into an orderly pattern, they immediately attracted the aim of
scores of telescope tubes, swung round by students avid to get a bearing on the
new patch.
Regularity
bred regularity. Law and order – whenever a patch of it appeared – seemed to
foster some clingy complexity which resisted the return of chaos for a while. Realizing
that this must be what the students were competing to study, Midax likewise
sought to use one of the little ’scopes.
He began, unawares, to draw ahead of the others, the moment he
conceived the idea of trying to sight along
rather than at
the fat-light rays. He soon scored a “hit”,
meaning that he sighted exactly along one of the rays. The immediate result of
this was that the ray itself disappeared from his field of view; for now that
he was no longer looking at it but by means of it, he was able to use it as one uses a torch, illuminating whatever
lies at the end of the line of light.
Triumph
thrilled his every nerve as the eyepiece now showed him the scene at the bottom
of the tank, hidden before this moment by the morass of white-light bolts. The
moment was strangely prolonged, as if the ray, while being looked along, wished
to remain frozen with the observer, enabling the airlift of a supply of
stability into a beleaguered patch of order. Midax was able to hold his aim for
about two minutes, during which he was able to study the scene revealed.
It was
a cruder equivalent of the kind of intensely varied landscape he’d seen from
the top of the Surveillance Tower when gazing onto the floor of the gigantic Luminarium.
Here,
in the far smaller Tank, not much trouble had been taken to perfect the details.
Houses, trees and vehicles were but little models, and there was no life or
motion in them, but Midax felt an excited suspicion as if he expected it all to
awaken by magic.
Then a
thing happened to Midax’s target ray: it corrugated. It
went from straight to zig-zag in an instant as if its joints had suddenly
buckled from pressure. Yet it reached the same distance as before. And if the corrugated version stretched as far as the straight - this implied
a huge and abrupt increase in the line’s actual length.
Midax this was true with his “free” eye, while with the other – the eye at the lens,
looking along the expanded ray – he experienced a terrific leap
forward in range of view.
Something happened, brief and extraordinary. Then
the line went straight again and the event was over. Midax had already jerked back from the
eyepiece, his head aching from a momentary greatness of vision.
Thoughtfully
he searched for words to describe how those little model ships and houses and
trees and trains, and all the land-types they rested on, had suddenly swum into
a mightier, boundless configuration....
He
tried it again. All the rays were corrugated in such a way as to allow him
(when he looked along them) to expand his vision into a world; all of them,
that is, except those that bounced uninterrupted between the tank’s two ends –
those rays stayed straight and instantaneous; the others, the intermediate
ones, zigged and zagged.
While
he reflected on this, one of the supervisors stepped quietly near.
Her sharp voice caused him to blink back out of realms of philosophic
wonder. “Well,
Midax, so you’re back with us but not yet working?”
She
was the lantern-jawed woman named Jaekel. Her eyes blazed with an intelligence
that warned Midax not to try any unsuccessful tricks.
“I
haven’t been writing notes, if that’s what you mean,” he shouted back over the
din.
“Why
not?” hissed Jaekel, her voice drowned out but her lips readable.
Midax,
amid all the grinding roar and the flashes in the Chamber, paused to take stock
of his impertinence. He judged it
viable. “Because,” he replied, “I don’t think you care what we write. We’re not
here to discover things. Rather the reverse.”
“Go
on.” Jaekel was looking him full in the face, with an intensity of expression that
would have been terrifying to any dithering student, and Midax was grateful for
the boon of insight.
“We
are being assessed, and sensitized,” he declared, “to that process which we
shall meet when we cross through the Portal in eight days’ time. The right
reflexes are being built into us.”
Jaekel
drew closer with a measured smile. “It seems unnecessary, then, to force you to
finish this exercise. But it could have been useful to have your
verbal description of what you saw.”
Ah, yes. Find the right words –
or invent the right word. Match the syllables to the idea, and, zing, a new vocable sees the light of
day… Midax pushed his luck. Holding back his punchline in Splasher
style, he mused aloud: “I was just getting round to it, using our word-forming rules, to invent
a term for a thing I seemed to see when looking down that ray, and I find the
word is – ‘horizon’.”
Jaekel froze agape, as if she were staring with her teeth. Then she muttered: “For you,
eight days will be none too soon.”
Midax, sensing that he had gone far enough, held his tongue.
Jaekel continued, “We shall put
you through your paces nevertheless. Starting tomorrow we shall send you out on
patrol.” A pause. “Out on patrol,” she repeated. “Eh?”
She wanted him to react, so he queried: “Out?”
“Into town!” grinned Jaekel, and peered at him closely. “I detect consternation!”
He mumbled his reply:
“It so happens, I’ve just
revisited my old haunts.... somewhat unsuccessfully.”
“And so you thought you were
finished with town!” Jaekel laughed.
>>>next chapter>>>