Party Line Read online

  Party Line

  Clifford D. Simak

  Volunteers risk their sanity by sending their minds into the void to query alien intelligences.

  Clifford D. Simak

  Party Line

  I

  Einstein did not come in. That was unusual. Very seldom was Einstein late or absent. Usually he was waiting, ready to take up again the patient teaching that had been going on for months. Jay Martin tried again.

  — Einstein. Einstein. Are you there? Einstein was not there.

  The console in front of Martin hummed and the sensor lights were flickering. The cubicle was quiet, an engineered quietness, insulated against all distraction. Martin reached up and adjusted the helmet more firmly on his head.

  — Einstein. Einstein. Where are you?

  A faint sense of beginning panic flicked across Martin's mind. Had Einstein finally given it all up as a bad job? Had he (or she, or it, or them?) simply slipped away, dropping him, finally despairing of making so ignorant a student understand what he had to say?

  Something out there stirred, a thin whistle of distant emptiness. Strange, thought Martin, how it always came that way — the haunting sense of distant emptiness. When there was, in fact, no distance nor no emptiness involved. The carrier waves were immune to any of the limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instantaneous, no lag, as if distance, matter, time did not exist.

  — Einstein? he asked, convinced that it wasn't Einstein. It didn't feel like Einstein, although he would have been hard pressed if he had been called upon to tell how Einstein felt.

  The thin whistle came again.

  — Yes, said Martin, I'm here. Who are you?

  And the voice (the thought? the pulse? the intelligence?) spoke.

  — The turning point, it said.

  — Unclear, said Martin. What turning point?

  — The universe. The universe has reached its turning point. Universal death has started. The universe has reached its farthest point. It now is running down. Entropy has been accomplished.

  — That, said Martin, is a strange way to say it.

  — The universe always strove toward entropy.

  — Not here, said Martin. No entropy here. The stars still burn.

  — At the edge. The outer fringe. The universe at the edge has reached the point of entropy. Heat death. No more energy. And now is falling back. It is retreating.

  The distance whistled. The emptiness keened.

  — You are at the edge?

  — Near the rim. That is how we know. Our measurement…

  The distance howled, drowning out the words.

  — How long? asked Martin. How long till the end?

  — Equal to the time since the beginning. Our calculations -

  — Fifteen billion years, said Martin.

  — We do not grasp your measurement.

  — Never mind, said Martin. It makes no difference. I should not have said it.

  — The pity of it! The irony!

  — What pity? What irony?

  — We have tried so long. Everyone has tried so long. To understand the universe and now we have no time.

  — We have lots of time. Another fifteen billion years.

  — You may have. We haven't. We're too close to the rim. We are in the dying zone.

  A cry for help, thought Martin. The moaning of self pity. And was shaken. For there'd never been a cry for help before.

  The other caught his thought.

  — No cry for help, it said. There is no help. This is warning only.

  The pulse, the thought cut off. Distance and emptiness whistled for a moment and then it, too, cut off.

  Martin sat huddled in his cubicle, the weight of all that distance, all that emptiness crashing down upon him.

  II

  The day began badly for Paul Thomas.

  The desk communicator chirped at him.

  'Yes,' he said.

  His secretary's voice said, 'Mr. Russell is here to see you.'

  Thomas grimaced. 'Show him in,' he said.

  Russell was prissy and precise. He came into the office and sat down in a chair across the desk from Thomas.

  'What can I do for R&D this morning?' Thomas asked, ignoring all conversational preliminaries. Russell was a man who was impatient with social amenities.

  'A lot more than you're doing,' Russell said. 'Goddammit, Paul, I know that you are hip-deep in data. It's piling up on you. We haven't had a thing from you in the last six months. I know the rules, of course, but aren't you giving them too strict an interpretation?'

  'What are you interested in?'

  'The faster-than-light business for one thing. I happen to know that Martin…'

  'Martin still is working on it.'

  'He must have something. Besides being a good telepath, he also happens to be a top-notch astrophysicist.'

  'That's true,' said Thomas. 'We don't often get a man like him. Mostly, it's a raw farm boy or some girl who is clerking in the five-and-dime. We're running recruiting programs all the time, but…'

  'You're trying to throw me off the track, Paul. I've got men aching to get started on this FTL thing. We know you're getting something.'

  The funny thing about it is that we aren't.'

  'Martin's been on it for months.'

  'Yeah, for months. And not understanding anything he's getting. Both he and I are beginning to believe we may have the wrong man on it.'

  'The wrong man on it? An astrophysicist?'

  'Ben, it may not be physics at all.'

  'But he has equations.'

  'Equations, yes. But they make no sense. Equations aren't the magic thing all by themselves that people think they are. They have to make some sense and these make no sense. Jay is beginning to think they're something entirely outside the field of physics.'

  'Outside the field of physics? What else could they be?'

  'That's the question, Ben. You and I have been over this, again and again. You don't seem to understand. Or refuse to understand. Or are too pig-headed to allow yourself to understand. We aren't dealing with humans out there. I understand that and my people understand it. But you refuse to accept it. You think of those other people out there among the stars as simply funny-looking humans. I don't know, no one knows, what they really are. But we know they aren't humans, not even funny-looking humans. We wear ourselves out at times trying to work out what they are. Not because of any great curiosity on our part, but because we could work with them better if we knew. And we have no idea. You hear me? No idea whatsoever. Hal Rawlins is talking to someone he is convinced is a robot — a funny-looking robot, of course — but he can't even be sure of that. No one can be sure of anything at all. The point is that we don't really have to be. They accept us, we accept them. They are patient with us and we with them. They may be more patient than we are, for they know we are newcomers, new subscribers on this party line we share. None of them think like us, none of us think like them. We try to adapt ourselves to their way of thinking, they try to adapt themselves to our way of thinking. All we know for sure is that they are intelligences, all they know is that we are some outrageous kind of intelligent life form. We are, all of us, a brotherhood of intelligences, getting along the best we can, talking, gossiping, teaching, learning, trading information, laying out ideas.'

  This is the kind of crap you're always talking,' said Russell, wrathfully. 'I don't give a damn about all your philosophizing. What I want is something to work on. The deal is that when you have something that is promising, you pass it on to us.'

  'But the judgment is mine,' said Thomas, 'and rightly so. In some of the stuff we get here, there could be certain implications…'

  'Implications, hell!'

  'What are you doing with wha
t we have given you? We gave you the data on artificial molecules. What have you done on that?'

  'We're working on it.'

  'Work harder, then. Quit your bellyaching and show some results on that one. You and I both know what it would mean. With it, we could built to order any material, put together any kind of structure we might wish. Could build the kind of world we want, to order. The materials we want to our own specifications — food, metal, fabrics, you name it.'

  'Development,' Russell said, defensively, 'takes time. Keep your shirt on.'

  'We gave you the data on cell replacement. That would defeat disease and old age. Carried to its ultimate degree, an immortal world — if we wanted an immortal world, and could control it and afford it. What are you doing with that?'

  'We're working on that one, too. All these things take time.'

  'Mary Kay thinks she has found what may be an ideal religion. She thinks that she may even have found God. At times, she says, she feels she's face to face with God. How about that one? We'll hand it over to you anytime you say.'

  'You keep that one. What we want is FTL.'

  'You can't have FTL. Not until we know more. As you say, we have mountains of data on it…'

  'Give me that data. Let my boys get to work on it.'

  'Not yet. Not until we have a better feel of it. To tell you the truth, Ben, there's something scary about it.'

  'What do you mean, scary?'

  'Something wrong. Something not quite right. You have to trust our judgment.'

  'Look, Paul, we've gone out to Centauri. Crawled out there. Took years to get there, years to get back. And nothing there. Not a goddamn thing. Just those three suns. We might just as well not have gone. That killed star travel. The public wouldn't stand still for another one like that. We have to have FTL, or we'll never go to the stars. Now we know it can be done. You guys have it at your fingertips and you won't let us in on it.'

  'As soon as we have something even remotely possible, we'll hand it over to you.'

  'Couldn't we just have a look at it? If it's as bad, as screwed up as you say it is, we'll hand it back.' Thomas shook his head. 'Not a chance,' he said.

  III

  There were no words, although there was the sense of unspoken words. No music, but the sense of music. No landscape,butafeeloftallslendertrees, graceful in the wind; of park-like lawns surrounding stately houses; of a running brook glistening in an unseen sun, babbling over stones; of a lake with whitecaps racing in to shore. No actuality, but a compounded belief that a shattering actuality lurked just around the corner, waiting to burst out.

  Mary Kay sank into it and let all of it enfold her. This time, she had thought, this time, please God, there will be something that I can understand. But once she had sunk into it, she no longer prayed there would be something to take back. This, in itself, was quite enough. This was all that anyone might want, or need. What was here filled the soul and wiped out the mind.

  A stray, human thought intruded, but only momentarily:

  Some day I'll have it; some day there will be data. Some day there'll be an inkling.

  And then the thought snapped off. For there was no need to know. Being here was all.

  She was no longer human. She was not anything at all. She simply existed. She was stripped of everything but the inner core of consciousness. She had no body and no mind. The intellectuality took in only the wonder and the breath-catching happiness, the innocent sensuality, the mindless well-being and the Tightness of it all — the Tightness of being here. Wherever here might be. She did not even wonder at the here. She simply did not care.

  Duty and purpose struggled feebly with the carelessness.

  — But? she cried, why show me only? Why not tell me, too? I'm an intelligence. I want to know. I have the right to know.

  — Sh-h-h-h-h

  A shushing, a lullaby. A compassion. A tenderness.

  Then the holiness.

  She surrendered herself wholly to the holiness.

  IV

  They looked to him, thought Thomas. That was the hell of it; they all looked to him for guidance, direction and comfort and he had none of these to give. They were out there on the firing line and he was sitting safely back and it would seem there should be something he could offer. But try as he might, he knew that he had nothing. Each of them a sensitive, for if they were not sensitives, they'd not be telepaths.

  It took raw courage, he thought, a special kind of courage, to reach out into the cosmos, out into that place where time and space pressed close even if time and space were cancelled out. Even knowing this, knowing that space-time had been brushed aside, the consciousness of it must be always there, the fear of it always there, the fear of being snared and left and lost within the deepest gulf of it. A special courage to face up to another mind that might be only a few light-years distant or millions of light-years distant, and the alienness that the light-years conjured up and magnified. And, worst of all, the never-forgotten realization that one was a newcomer in this community of intelligence, a novice, a hick, the bottom of the totem pole. A tendency to be retiring and apologetic, even when there was no reason to be apologetic. A kindergartener in a school where high school seniors and college students reared to godlike heights.

  Thomas rose from his desk and walked across the room to stand before a window. The desert lay outside, aloof and noncaring, a humped plain of sand and rock, sterile and hostile. Better judgment would have been to place this installation, he thought, in a kinder land where there would be friendly trees and purling streams and forest paths to walk in. But the desert, in the administrative mind, served a better purpose. Its long distances, its discomforts and its loneliness discouraged the curious who otherwise might come flocking in to stare. No secret project, in the usual sense, but one about which not too much was said, about which as little as possible was said in the unspoken but devout hope that in time it might disappear from the public mind.

  A spooky thing — too spooky to be thrown open. A shuddery business, this reaching out to other minds across the universe. Not something which the public comfortably could sleep with. And what was the matter with the public? Thomas asked himself. Did they not realize that the project was mankind's greatest hope? For thousands of years, mankind had staggered along on its own, coddling its prejudices, making its mistakes, then multiplying rather than correcting them, slipping into a too-human groove that had brought, in its turn, untold misery and injustice. New blood was needed, a new mentality, and the one place to get it was from those cultures far among the stars. A cross-pollination process that could improve the texture and might revise the purpose of mankind's stumbling destiny.

  The box on his desk chirped at him. He strode from the window and snapped down the toggle.

  'What is it, Evelyn?'

  'Senator Brown is on the phone.'

  'Thank you,' said Thomas.

  There was no one he wanted to talk with less than the senator.

  He leaned back in his chair and pressed the button to activate the visor. The visor lighted to reveal the hatchet-face of the senator — ascetic, thin, wrinkled, but with a tightness to the wrinkles.

  'Senator,' he said, 'how kind of you to call.'

  'I thought to pass the time of day,' said the senator. 'It has been a long time since we have had a chat.'

  'Yes, it has.'

  'As you may know,' said the senator, 'the budget for your project is coming up before committee in the next few weeks. I can get nothing out of these jackasses who are your superiors in Washington. They talk about knowledge being the most precious commodity. They say no market value can be placed upon it. I wonder if you would concur.'

  'I think I would,' said Thomas, 'although, if that is all they say, it's a fairly general statement. There is so much spinoff. I suppose they told you that.'

  They did,' said the senator. 'They dwelt most lovingly upon it.'

  'Then what is it you want of me?'

  'Realism. Some old-fashi
oned realism. A hard-headed assessment.'

  'I'm fairly close to the operation. It's hard for me to step back those few necessary paces to take a good objective look at it.'

  'Well, do the best you can. This is off-the-record. Just between the two of us. If necessary, we'll have you in to testify. To start with, maybe, how good are the chances for FTL?'

  'We are working on it, senator. I have a feeling we still have a long way to go. We're beginning to have a feeling that it may not be a simple matter of physical laws.'

  'What could it be, then?'

  'Emphasizing the fact that we do not really know, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that it might be something we have never heard of. A procedure, or a technique, maybe even a state of mind, that is outside all human experience.'

  'Now you're going mystic on me. I don't like this mystic stuff.'

  'In no way mystic, senator. Just a willingness to admit mankind's limitations. It stands to reason that one race on one planet is not going to come up with everything there is.'

  'Have you anything to back that up?'

  'Senator, I think I have. For the last several months, one of our operators has been trying to explain to his opposite number some of the fundamentals of our economic system. It has been and still is a trying task. Even the simplest fundamentals — things like buying and selling, supply and demand — have been hard to put across. Those folks out there, whoever they are, have never even thought of our brand of economics, if, in fact, any kind of economics. What makes it even harder is that they appear to stand in absolute horror of some of the things we tell them. As if the very ideas were obscene.'

  'Why bother with them, then?'

  'Because they still maintain an interest. Perhaps the ideas are so horrible that they have a morbid fascination for them. As long as they maintain that interest, we'll keep on working with them.'

  'Our idea in starting this project was to help ourselves, not a lot of other folks.'