John Thomas Riley usually liked his job: Director of Personnel and Operations Chief for AED, Colorado Springs. Sometimes it was not so pleasant.
He went into the briefing room and the talking stopped abruptly. He sat down at the end of the seminar table and began without preamble.
“I know there’s been talk.” The ten Tamers stared at him. He wished he’d brought some papers to fiddle with. “People have called this a suicide mission. But it definitely is not.”
Three of them nodded, good. “It’s pretty well established that the Groombridge bridge killed two people, and almost a third, by telepathic control of their bodies. And we’re asking you to go collect as many of the creatures as you can find.
“But this bridge was handled by a total of 38 people, and did no harm to 35 of them. We know that in two out of three cases the creature killed in self-defense. Or attempted to kill. And we aren’t asking you to harm them. Lefavre?”
Jacque put down his hand. “That’s the main thing that’s bothering us. Ch’ing wouldn’t have harmed the bridge. Not intentionally, anyhow.”
“Maybe there was some kind of accident,” Carol said. “He squeezed it too hard, or something.”
“We’ll never know, of course,” Riley said. “But we have to go on the assumption that they can somehow sense when an organism is threatening them, and take action.
“How they could do this is a mystery. Physiologically, they seem barely more sophisticated than a sponge. But there is other compelling evidence that they can do this, besides the violence done to the men who attempted dissecting it. Jeeves, you’re preparing a report . .
“That’s right,” Tania said. “I’ve talked to my team about this, but not Manuel’s.
“One clue is in the geophysical analysis. We picked up several fossils that appear to be remnants of large carnivores, aquatic ones. The bridges would be obvious sources of food for these creatures.
“But the only place we found any other form of animal life was in the Crater Sea. Completely isolated from the rest of the ecosystem.
“It could be that the bridges came along after some natural disaster that killed off the planet’s animal life. Or the bridges themselves might be that natural disaster: once they evolved their telepathic facility, they proceeded to kill off all of their rivals. They wouldn’t have to kill every single individual; just reduce the population density to where there weren’t enough mating opportunities for each species to survive. This happened to some species of whales, on Earth in the last century.
“We’ll have a clearer picture after this trip, of course.”
“It still doesn’t explain Ch’ing,” Jacque said. “Maybe the creature makes mistakes, kills when it’s not really threatened. Maybe it kills at random, to keep in practice.”
Carol nodded. “We can theorize forever, but we really don’t know anything about it.”
“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”
Riley shrugged elaborately. “Would either or both of you like to be taken off the mission?” Which would mean a review board and probably dismissal-then a lifetime of debt, reimbursing the AED for your expensive training.
They shook their heads no.
“Would anybody else? It’s just a matter of filling out a couple of forms.”
No response.
“Good.
“At any rate, you’re not likely to come in contact, in bridge rapport, with any of the bridges you catch. The main thrust of this mission is to bring untouched bridges back to Earth, so that they can be studied under controlled conditions.
“Jameson suggests that we screen the world’s population for people with phenomenally high Rhine potential; let them make first contact with the bridges. Sounds like a good idea.
“So we don’t want you to touch them, not if you can help it. . . . You know that the Groombridge Effect is blocked by certain dielectrics-ceramic quasi-metals, for instance. We’ve built extensions, waldos, for your suits, made entirely of these ceramics. Hopefully, this is what you’ll be using to pick up the bridges.”
“Nobody told us about that,” Jeeves said.
“We weren’t sure we’d have them made in time. Krupp’s been working night and day. We do have them now, though; that’s why I called this meeting. You and your team are going to go train with them today.
“Team B, Ubico, you’re free to go, unless there are questions.” There were none. “Team A, questions?” None. He stood up. “Well, then. Go on down to the ready room and get suited up. There’s a floater on pad C that’ll take you out to a place on the Colorado River; it has the extension waldos and the nets you’ll be using. Do it right and you’re free until the eleventh.”
The apparatus worked well. The two nets were semi-rigid, articulated so as to conform precisely to the river bottom. It took two people to operate a net, one on each bank. The nets would block off a section of river several kilometers long, and then slowly be brought together. They would trap any floating or swimming object more than a centimeter wide.
In the Colorado they wound up with a swarm of thousands of confused fish. They tested their retrieval waldos by picking a few of the best trout. It took a half hour to get three fish, but trout are faster and slipperier than the Groombridge bridge. Then they rolled up the nets and had a picnic.
GROOMBRIDGE 1618 MISSION,
11 OCTOBER 2051
A TEAM
PERSONNEL:
1. TAMER 5 TANIA JEEVES. FEMALE, 31. 9TH MISSION. SUPERVISOR.
2. TAMER 3 GUSTAV HASENFEL. MALE, 26. 6TH MISSION.
3. TAMER 2 (PROB) JACQUE LEFAVRE. MALE, 26. 3RD MISSION.
4. TAMER 1 VIVIAN HERRICK. FEMALE, 24. 2ND MISSION.
5. TAMER 1 CAROL WACHAL. FEMALE, 24. 2ND MISSION.
EQUIPMENT:
5 GPEM MODULES W/GROOMBRIDGE 1618 MOD
1 PERSONNEL RECORDER
1 HOMING FLOATER W/GROOMBRIDGE 1618 MOD (SECOND SHOT)
2 SERVO NETS (THIRD SHOT)
1 MASS SPECTROGRAPH, WESTINGHOUSE MOD 17 (FOURTH SHOT)
1 COLLECTING TANK (FOURTH SHOT)
POWER REQUIREMENT:
3 SHOTS 17.89688370924 SU, TUNING
@ LOCAL TIME
10:24:38.37677BDK399057
10:32:29.66498BDK399059
10:36:46.00983BDK399060
1 SHOT 17.89688370930 SU, TUNING
@ LOCAL TIME
10:42:05.83997BDK399062
MISSION PRIORITY 1.
FUNDING #733092 PSYCH 40%
#483776 EXOB 20
#000101 PR 20
#000100 GENEX 20
They came out of the LMT near Groombridge’s southern pole. The floater that followed eight minutes later had been modified to approach and then hover nearby, awaiting Tania’s command (to prevent the kind of accident that had left them grounded on the first mission).
They got aboard the floater and homed in on the two nets. That, and taking the nets to the river where they’d found the first bridge, totaled over three hours’ flying time. They unloaded and Tania asked for a volunteer.
“The collecting tank and the MS are a couple of hundred kilometers away. Who wants to go get them?” Silence. “Less than a two-hour job.”
“We should have arranged for B Team to pick them up,” Gus said. “It’s really their job.”
“Too late to change things now,” Jacque said. “Let’s draw straws.”
Tania had everyone pick a number between one and a hundred. Carol lost.
The other four immediately set up the nets, isolating a kilometer-long stretch of the river. The intent was to surprise a number of the creatures, not allowing one to warn the others away.
Of course, there was always the chance that there had been only one bridge on the planet, and it had sought them out. If so, they would spend forty-seven days in fruitless wading.
Jacque thought they would probably catch dozens, maybe hundreds, on each sweep. Spend most of the seven weeks playing with the mass spectrometer.
The actual results fell somewhere in between. When Carol came back with the floater, they were just about through with the first sweep. It was quite a contrast to their practice session: no activity, just a coalescing mat of floating weed. The nets joined at the bottom and they hauled them in.
After an hour of picking through the mess, they found one bridge.
They hurried downstream fifty kilometers and repeated the process. Nothing. They did it again: nothing again.
On the fourth try they came up with another bridge. B Team showed up, homed in on the MS, and started mining the mud.
That first day was the only day Tania’s team caught two bridges. At the end of the seven weeks they had a total of eight bridges. B Team fared better. They had built a small town of airtight, interconnected A-frame huts: rigid silvery tents of aluminum-silicon alloy. They were in high spirits.
Tania’s team was bored and frustrated. Jacque had exploded several times and even snapped at Carol. When they huddled together for the translation back to Earth, it was with desperate relief.
Arnold Bates spends half his life sleeping or taking drugs. Most of the drugs are to help him get to sleep. He is a millionaire several times over, but spends little: rent and food and drugs. He has no hobbies.
When he is awake he is more awake than most people. He must be; he is Senior Controller of the LMT chamber at Colorado Springs. Its 120-centimeter crystal is the largest that AED has, and the busiest.
Bates is a short, wiry man with a shock of white hair framing Amerind features. His skin is pale for an Amerind. He looks fifty but is thirty-two years old. He has been a Controller for ten years, twice the time it normally takes to wear a person down. He has the kind of nerveless self-control that would make an ideal Tamer, but he carries too many bad genes for the job.
His stomach is made of plastic and his liver is a machine. He has an IQ of 189 and gunslinger reflexes.
His main job is to prevent another Los Alamos disaster. Two human bodies trying to occupy the same place at the same time turned a mountain into a deep valley and spread heavy fallout from Albuquerque to Mexico City.
He is looking at the first page of his schedule for today, 27 November 2051:
Jumps Returns Slack Mission Comments
06:09:14 12:38 Tau Ceti Breeding(3)
17:20
06:26:34 61 Cyg B Samples for Agr Grp
09:40
06:36:14 Procyon A Tamers (5)
06:31
06:42:45 Procyon A Floater
22:14
07:04:59 70 Ophiuchi A Tamers (6)
07:34
07:12:33 70 Ophiuchi A Floater
05:11
07:17:44 Tau Ceti Food (hurry crew)
17:43
07:35:27 Groombridge 1618 Tamers (5)
07:51
07:43:18 Groombridge 1618 Floater
04:18
07:47: 37 Groombridge 1618 Misc equipment
05:19
07:52:56 Groombridge 1618 Samples for Bio Grp,
Psy Grp (both on standby)
11:05
08:04:01 E Indi Tamers(5)
16:38 Training
He will be on today from six to ten AM and from two to six PM. The clock in the controller lounge says 05:58.
The door to the control room opens and a young man steps out. Bates has seen him off and on for almost a year, but doesn’t know his name.
“Bates,” he nods; Arnold nods back. “It’s clear now; you’ve got better’n ten minutes’ slack.” Arnold knows this, of course: ten minutes and forty-some seconds. When he opens his eyes in the morning he knows what time it is, to the minute.
The young man is pale, mopping his forehead.
“Trouble?”
“Yeah, bad one last hour. Geoformy team with three injuries, one deader. Slingshot deader.”
“Tamers,” Arnold says. “Can’t learn to keep their arms in.”
“Yeah.” He shuffles out the door and Arnold goes into the control room. His partner is Mavis Eisenstein, overlapping him on the four-to-eight shift. He’s known her for four years.
“Morning, Mavis.” She nods and sighs, gets up from the prime chair and moves over to the other one, the backup.
Arnold sits down and opens a fresh pack of cigarettes. He puts that and his old pack on the table in front of him, lights up.
“Wish you were here at five,” Mavis says. “Instead of me.”
“That’s what he said. Real mess?”
She nods, keeps nodding. “One on the bottom cut right down the middle. Even got blood on the glass. Everybody else fell all over. Coordinator and two others were unconscious anyhow. Still don’t know what happened.”
“Geoformy team?”
“E Eridani. 05:27:14. Their fucking MS coming in right on top of them, 03:29 slack. Had to steam and bake.”
“That’s only a two-twenty cycle.”
“Don’t I know?” Her voice is thin, strained. “Fucking autopsy made me hold. Wanted the cadaver. Almost didn’t make it, steamed one of the loading crew, pretty bad I think. Cycled out with nine seconds slack at that.”
“Too close. Better file a report.”
“Bet your cock I’ll file a report. Six,” she says, automatically, as double chimes announce the hour. “Fucking autopsy acts like they run the place.”
“Want a pill?”
“Took one six minutes ago. I’ll be all right.”
He checks down through the eleven missions they’ll be doing together. “Anybody standing by for the Ag Group samples?”
“No. They called last night, we’re supposed to store. Runner coming at nine.”
“Tell the loading crew about the squeeze on this food shipment?”
“Oh, yeah. Better call again. I prepared them at four but they maybe brought in some new people after the five-twenty-seven. One for sure.”
Arnold places the call. “Whole new crew, as a matter of fact.”
“What about the one I steamed?”
“He’s alive,” Arnold lies instantly. She can find out later. “Fair condition.”
“Hated to do that.”
“They get paid for it.” He points through the window. “There’s our breeders.”
“Thirty seconds early.”
“Twenty-five,” he corrects.
The loading crew has already brought out the floater, now standing upright, centered over the LMT crystal. The three Tamers approach it.
Arnold switches his throat mike to broadcast inside the chamber. “Hey, you guys.” They wave.
“Don’t climb up there yet. Just have to hang on for seven minutes. I’ll drop the cylinder in five; that’ll give you two minutes fourteen seconds slack. Plenty of exercise.”
“Wish they’d do a double shot on these,” Mavis says. Not much volume tolerance.”
“Can’t do it for Tau Ceti,” Arnold says.
“That’s right, I forgot. Too much water, big fish.”
They wait in silence for a few minutes. Then Arnold tells the breeders to climb aboard and he swings the control keyboard over onto his knees. He rests his fingers lightly on the eight emergency keys: SPILL, FILL, HALF SPILL, HALF FILL, BAKE, STEAM, MEDICAL, KILL MISSION.
There are twenty-four secondary buttons on the three rows underneath. His right forefinger automatically touches the one that used to say DROP CYL. The letters have been worn off the button. The only other secondary whose letters have been worn off is AUTOPSY.
“Why do they have both of us on?” Arnold says. The usual combination is an experienced controller in prime, with a new one in backup.
“The Groombridge thing.”
“Ah.” The breeders in place, Arnold drops the cylinder. His finger rests lightly on the KILL MISSION button. He doesn’t launch the LMT, of course-that requires timing to within a hundred-thousandth of a second-but he can kill the jump if he gets a distress signal from inside the cylinder.
The cylinder rises automatically. “Gone.” He swings the keyboard away and looks at her. “What Groom-bridge thing?”
“Don’t you even read the papers?”
“No.”
“They found these creatures that let people read minds. Little squirmy-“
“Oh, yeah. I saw on the cube, that doctor. Claimed one of them made him cut his throat.”
“That’s it. And killed another doctor. They don’t understand quite what happened.”
Arnold shakes his head. “As if the world wasn’t a dangerous enough place already. If they want to play with those things, they ought to go to Groombridge and do it.”
“Yeah,” Mavis says. “Scientists.”
(From Mlndbridge: A Preliminary Evaluation, Jameson et al, AED TFX, Colorado Springs, 2052:)
The first experiments with the Groombridge bridge ended in tragedy; the second series began without tragedy.
The second Groombridge expedition brought back eight untouched bridges. We had assembled twenty-three people who were among the most gifted psychics in the world: their control scores on the standard Rhine tests averaged from 413.7 to 499.9.
This last score belonged to the amazing Jerzy Krzyszkowiak, the only person in history who could reliably perform feats of telekinesis. In our laboratory he was able to exert several grams’ pressure on the pan of an evacuated analytical balance, for hours at a time, the balance being out of his sight in an adjacent room.
The twenty-three psychics had chosen seven of their number at random to be privileged with the experience of primary contact (all having agreed that Krzyszkowiak should be among the “lucky” eight). Eight more were chosen for secondary contact.
These sixteen entered the Groombridge chamber at 14:36 on 27th November 2051.
Within seven minutes, half of them were dead.
( see attached graph1.jpg )
Every person who experienced primary contact was killed by it. None showed any symptoms of distress until the first died, little more than a minute after touching the bridge. All experimenting stopped while the two attending physicians went to his aid. Then the other primaries died, one by one.
Analyzing the tapes of the tragedy, we found a direct relationship between the individual’s psychic ability and the length of time he or she survived after primary contact. The accompanying table and graph illustrate this relationship.
The first person ever to make primary contact was the Tamer Hsi Ch’ing, who survived for three hours and forty minutes. If we assume that his Rhine score was 100 (there are no data), then his death agrees with this exponential curve.
Secondary contact proved to have no ill effects, as was also true in the first set of experiments.
Several theories have been advanced to account for this “reflex killing” on the part of the bridges. In the previous section we described the unfortunate demise of Robert Willard, and the bridge’s attempt on the life of this author when we tried to dissect the creature prior to its “slingshot” transformation. The reflex in this case is understandable in terms of self-preservation. But it is less easy to explain the reflex killing of primaries, and the obvious relationship between time-lag-to-death and Rhine potential.
A theory first advanced by Hugo Van der Walls takes into account the fossil evidence of . . .
No one alive in 2051 will ever understand the Groom-bridge bridge.
The truth was deduced in 2213 by a woman who happened to be the great-great-great-great-grandniece of Jacque Lefavre (no great coincidence: half the planet was at least that closely related to him). Her name is difficult to translate, since her language was partly telepathic, but it was something like “Still Cloud Yet Changing: Anthropologist.”
Still Cloud was investigating some unspectacular ruins left on a planet circling Antares, remnants of an extinct nonhumanoid race that had been studied extensively in the previous generation. These ruins had just been discovered, but Still Cloud studied them for years without any significant findings.
This race worshipped an ugly creature whose name we may translate as God, who supposedly lived inside the planet. An odd feature of their religion was that they believed that every inhabited planet had its own God-yet the race did not have space travel. Nowhere could she find that they had any concrete evidence that life existed on other worlds; it was simply an article of faith.
Eventually Still Cloud uncovered a palace that belonged to the planet’s highest religious leader. Underneath the palace was a labyrinthine system of tunnels, one of which led to a chamber, or apartment, that still gleamed with luxury after a quarter of a million years of abandonment: the place where God lived.
What she and other investigators had taken as myth and metaphor was actual fact: their God was an immortal, omnipotent creature who had descended from heaven to live under the earth and rule their lives and destinies. It was the representative of a race that once ruled this corner of the galaxy with benign, but absolute, authority.
In the apartment was a machine that functioned as a library. It was still in good working order; immortals build things to last. In it there was a reference to the star humans called Groombridge 1618, and to the telepathic creatures that lived there.
This immortal race had constructed the Groom-bridge bridge for its own amusement. It served as a scorekeeper in a decades-long game that involved the precise matching of emotional states. The planet Groombridge had been subjected to a kind of reverse geoformy: its ecology simplified so that none of the indigenous fauna would interfere with the game.
Human scientists were guilty of parochialism in classifying the Groombridge bridge as a physiologically simple creature. It is in fact the most complex organism ever studied-more complex than the scientists who have to dissect it by remote control.
Its true form will never be directly perceived by humans, human senses being limited to three spatial dimensions and the one-way arrow of time. The wiggly nudibranchiform creature that taught humans how to read minds is pure illusion-the simplified projection of a four-dimensional object onto three dimensions. In the same way, the projection of an unabridged dictionary onto two dimensions-its shadow-is identical to the gray rectangle projected by a blank piece of paper, and gives no clue as to the object’s complexity.
When this race of Gods decided to destroy itself, it saw no reason to tidy up beforehand. So the Groombridge gameboard remained for future, simpler, races to puzzle over.
The planet that Still Cloud studied had been dead and cold for two hundred millennia when the Gods went home to die. Home was a couple of thousand light years away, which distance they traveled instantaneously, by an application of will.
In Jacque Lefavre’s time, all that was left of the home of the Gods was a rapidly expanding nonthermal radio source called the Cygnus loop.
The light of Their passing had enabled Neanderthal men to hunt at night for several months.
An advertisement appearing in every major newspaper in Nevada the week of March 4-11, 2052:
DIE
FOR
MONEY
WANTED: LEGAL SUICIDES
IF you have a legal suicide permit, and can supply proof of good health and mental stability, we offer you the chance to make a unique contribution to science while leaving a sizable sum to your heirs.
PROJECT THANOS will pay up to $10,000 for qualified subjects. Amount paid will depend on the subject’s score on a battery of psychological tests. Minimum pay will be $2,500.
If interested, please write or call:
PROJECT THANOS
Box 7777
Colorado Springs
Colorado 7019464
3037-544-2063, Extension 777