Paradox Alley

14

"What now, Arthur?" I said wearily.

"I'm supposed to go fetch Sam and the rest of the washouts when Prime gives me thq all clear."

"When will that be?"

"I don't know, dearie. When the current flap has subsided. h won't be safe until then."

"Okay, say you go and get them," I said. "Then what?"

"I take you to the egress portal and show you what cylinders to shoot in order to get back where you belong."

For which there was no need, since I had the Roadmap. I looked around, throwing up my arms. "What do we do till then? Fill out a time card and punch in?"

"Make something," Arthur said, "like Carl did."

"Do you need any ashtrays?"

"How about a hand-tooled leather wallet, monogrammed?"

"You only have one initial," I told him.

"And I don't have any pockets, either. Well, then, I'm stumped."

So was I. But there was nothing to do. We couldn't leave for the master portal, and we couldn't very well drive all the way to the other side of the world, back to Emerald City. We were at Arthur's mercy.

There was sleep to catch up on, though, and thinking to do. Lay yourself open to the dream-teaching, Prime had advised. I wasn't sure I was ready for that yet. I thought about it. I needed answers, but falling into a swoon and getting infused with divine enlightenment wasn't my style. Besides, didn't you have to fast for forty days and nights in the desert first? l had left my hairshirt at the cleaners back in T-Maze.

I was tired of searching for ever-elusive answers. Damn tired of it. As Darla said, we keep getting pushed around by unseen forces. A phrase Prime had used kept echoing: "whatever forces are at work behind you." Indeed, what forces? If neither Prime nor the White Lady were really calling the shots, who was? Were there other aspects of the Culmination? Was it something outside the Culmination entirely? More whispers in the darkness, more missing pieces of a puzzle I had grown weary of fumbling with.

I lay in the bunk, Darla asleep beside me. No dreams for her. It seemed that if you didn't want to hear the propaganda, you simply turned off your receiver.

I listened. The plant was quiet except for a faint background hum. Now and then came a faraway thump or bangmaintenance attendants about their chores, perhaps. Perhaps not. Were we safe here? Of course not. But Arthur had his funnel-ears pricked for any intruders-and whatever other sensors he had were tuned in, too.

I got up and went out to the cab, sat in the driver's seat. Arthur had inflated the spacetime ship to about half its full size, and had gone inside. Said he had things to do.

I regarded Carl's vehicle. Everyone, including Carl, had wondered about its origin. Had Carl created it himself? The answer, in gleaming chrome and whitewall tires, lay out there on the floor of the receiving bay.

The time comes, as the saying goes, when a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Push me, and I push back. Time to take the offensive. From now on it would be Jake McGraw, Master of Space and Time.

I woke Darla up. "Hmph?" she said.

"C'mon. I got an insane idea."

"Hmph."

I went back to the cab while Darla dressed. "Bruce?"

"Yes, Jake?"

"Patch me through to the plant foreman."

A short delay, then: "He's on the line."

"Hello?" I said.

"Greetings!" the foreman beamed.

"Hi. Uh, would it be possible to use the Product Ideation and Design Facility again?"

"Certainly! At this moment?"

"Yes, please."

"Will send transportation immediately."

But could I do it, make that insane idea a reality? Reality seemed a fluid, changing thing here on Microcosmos, a malleable lump of stuff that could be beaten and pummeled into whatever shape was desired. I'd take a whack at it myself.

I told Darla to take a blanket along. I thumbed the intercom button, thought better of it, and punched up the interior trailer monitor. Oops, Carl and Lori were busy back there. I hoped those kids knew at least the rudiments of birth control. I should talk, I thought.

The robocart arrived, and we stepped on.

"It is revolutionary concept," the design chief said. I thought I detected a note of awe in its voice.

"Yeah, it sure is."

I peered into the depths of the drafting board. Since the object I wanted to create was immaterial, there wasn't much to look at except geometry. But it was fascinating. There were all sorts of things: planar sheaves warping and folding back on themselves, torus shapes and saddle shapes distending and contracting, Moebius strips and Klein bottles and things that neither gentleman had dreamed of; a matrix bound up in knottcd tufts of nothing-at-all, forming the very fabric of space itself-and of time, and even of matter; point-masses migrating across limitless dimensions; impossible constructs, singularities, parallel lines meeting at the edge of infinity…

"However," the chief went on, "technique of dimensional impaction is not unknown. Scale here is much larger, but in theory can be done."

"Can be done in practice?" I asked.

"Would be honored to try. May suggest to begin by postulating isotropic homogeneity throughout entire metrical frame?"

"Sure, let's do that thing. What's an isotrope?"

Two hours later, I had a terrific headache, but the design chief seemed confident that the major theoretical obstacles had been overcome. Problems concerning the actual production of an artifact loomed large, though. The production manager was called in for consultation.

"Retooling necessary," the PM stated.

"How extensive?" the chief asked.

"Possibly entire facility."

"Can be done?"

"Affirmative."

Later, my head seemed about to burst. They brought me a bed-it was a big round cushy thing, very comfortable-and I racked out after trying to rouse Darla, who preferred the floor. Her back, she said.

I slept for an hour, got up and went to the board, where I was served a cup of hot beverage and a sweet roll. "Anything?" I asked.

"Design almost complete," the chief told me. "Must tell you that entire plant staff is much enthused and excited by this particular project. Retooling is progressing on schedule."

"Jeez, you guys must make a bundle in overtime."

"Say again, please?"

I took a slurp of ersatz coffee. "Sorry, just thinking aloud."

We went on an inspection tour of the retooling effort, visiting buildings that I didn't think we'd been in before. They were tearing the place apart. What we witnessed surpassed anything we had seen of the plant's "conventional" production operations. We watched an army of robots storm an assembly facility and reduce it to junk, then cart in new material and build a titanic contraption that looked like a particle accelerator married to an exciter cannon. We stood by, spellbound, as whole new wings were added onto existing buildings-slap, dash, bang-to accommodate new oversized equipment. One of the larger facilities now housed a monstrous affair that had been thrown together in under an hour, a towering edifice of black glass tubing, shining metal, copper spheres, and multicolored domes. At its top, dozens of shafts converged, bringing unknown forces together to clash inside a central chamber. They were apparently testing the thing when we drove through. Violet discharges snaked through the dark glass, and the machine screeched like a beast chained in the depths of hell. We got out of there.

When we returned to PL&D., Carl and Lori were there, looking worried.

"What's going on?" Carl asked. "The whole place is going crazy."

"Quotas to meet for the Five Year Plan."

"Huh?"

"I got a little project cooking," I said.

"Jesus, we thought something happened. Little project?"

A big problem came up: a power shortage. The energy requirements for final assembly of the object were beyond the plant's capacity. Calls went out to other automated industrial facilities around the planet, and most replies were favorable. They'd be willing to help. Word had gotten out about the project. We were a sensation.

The retooling went on for another twelve hours before the initial stages of final assembly commenced. It was then that a horrendous explosion rocked the plant. We tried frantically to contact the foreman. Half an hour later, our call was returned.

"Extensive damage sustained in facility housing Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Ring," the foreman reported.

I felt guilty. "Gee, that's terrible. What happened?"

"Failure in primary power tetrode, leading to fracture and subsequent leakage in coupling loop."

"Oh. Anybody hurt? Uh, I mean…"

"Several worker units lost. Have been replaced."

"I see. Maybe we'd better cancel the project before worse mishaps occur." I was thinking more of our own safety.

"Anomalous event, recurrence statistically negligible. We urge that effort be pursued through to completion."

"Well, I don't know."

"Abandoning task at this point would take on tragic aspect."

"It would?" These guys really were gung-ho. "Okay, let's go ahead then."

"Splendid! Your courage is to be commended."

"My courage?"

Repairs were effected, and work was resumed.

Arthur told me he was ready to leave any time. I told him we wanted to go back with him to Emerald City.

"Fine with me," he said, "though you could wait here. I won't be more than an hour."

"I think I have to get out of this place before I go nuts. Can you wait till the project's done?"

"Sure. By the way, what in the world are you people trying to do?"

"Produce your hand-tooled, genuine leather, monogrammed wallet," I said.

"Just what I've always wanted."

The final assembly was almost an anticlimax. Everything went smoothly. We were summoned to the showroom.

I held it in the palm of my hand and stared at it. The robot who had delivered it whooshed away.

It was a very simple object, yet a very strange thing to look at: a small, totally black featureless cube.

"A most sublime artifact," the foreman said with almost religious solemnity.

"The cube!" Darla gasped. "My God, Jake, why?"

"I don't really know why, not intellectually," I told her. "Not yet. But everything seems to revolve around this little object. A whole legend has grown up around it, around us. The legend says that when we go back, we'll arrive before we left, and I will give the cube to Assemblywoman Marcia Miller, who will in turn hand it over to the dissident movement, who will in turn give it to you. And you will give it back to me. Except that the `me' you will give it to is the me of three months ago." I took Darla's hand and placed the cube in her palm. She stared at it in astonishment. "My duty seemed very clear. Since somebody stole the one you gave me, I thought I'd better come up with another one to give back to you. And there it is."

"But…" Darla was baffled.

"According to the legend," I went on, "the cube doesn't have an origin. It just keeps cycling from future to past and back again. Now, here I am at the end of the Skyway. It doesn't look as if I'm ever going to find an object like this. In fact, everyone here seems bent on taking the original one away from me. So, I thought I'd kill two paradoxes with one volitional act-I created the damn thing on my own. Now I have the cube again, and the cube has an origin. Well, these guys did the originating, actually. I just gave them the idea."

"But how, Jake?" Darla asked, shaking her head in wonder. "How did you know what to create? Nobody ever really cracked the cube's mystery. Ragna's people made some good guesses, but how did you know what the cube really was?"

"I didn't, of course. I took Ragna's people's speculations and asked the design chief to come up with a design for an artifact that would more or less answer to the description. He did. And the factory crew made it a reality."

"But what is it, Jake?" Carl asked. "What is the cube? What's it for?"

"Don't know what it's for, yet," I answered. "But what it is, near as I can figure from what the design chief told me, is a continuum in which the normal properties of space and time are nonexistent. Within the confines of these six sides, neither space nor time exist at all. What's inside the cube is literally and absolutely nothing. A nonspace. A singularity. The Ahgirr scientists' speculation about it being a huge space folded up was wrong, but I can see how they arrived at the hypothesis. Nonspace is a slippery concept to grasp. Another thing: space and time are not the only thing that doesn't exist inside. Nothing else in the universe does either. Fundamental things, like the Planck Constant, or G, the gravitational constant, or any of those foundation stones of the physical universe as we know it. Inside the cube, anything goes. You could make a whole new universe in there, using physical laws different from the standard ones."

Darla said, "What about the information, the data coming out of the cube? The Movement people who examined it discovered that."

"The chief told me that stray radiation is generated at the interface of the cube's surface and the outside world. It has something to do with virtual particle creation, which goes on everywhere in the universe all the time. I can't quite grasp the reason, but somehow when these particles pop into existence near the cube, they get real nervous and instead of blinking out of existence like good little virtual particles are supposed to, they stay real and fly out into the world as electronpositron pairs."

"Man, you lost me there," Carl said.

"Forget it," I said. "I don't understand it myself."

"Jake, I have other problems with this," Darla said. "How do you know that this cube and the first one are identical?"

"I don't, now," I said. "But if I do succeed in delivering this one back to T-Maze three months in the past, it will be identical. Because this cube will be the first cube. No?"

Darla sighed in resignation. "I guess." She frowned and shook her head. "But I still don't see how you could have created something when you didn't know exactly what that something was in the first place."

I took the cube back and tossed it into the air, caught it. It was feather light. What I couldn't figure was why it wasn't completely weightless. The design chief had told me it had something to do with "inertial drag" and the fact that the frozen energies holding the cube together possessed "mass equivalence."

"Well, let's put it this way," I said. "I didn't know anything. But I had some speculations about what the cube was. Everybody had them. Prime told us that it was `an experiment in the creation of a universe.' Don't ask me how he knew. I spilled all of this to the design chief, who is a creative mind. He took these ideas and kicked it around his circuits for a while and came up with a few ideas of his own. One of them turned out to be feasible. And the technical guys did it up for us. This is how the cube got created in the first place. This was its origin."

"If you say so," Darla said.

We got on the robocart for the trip back to the receiving bay.

"There's still a paradox," Darla stated as we got moving. "Where did the idea for the cube come from?"

"I told you," I said.

"No, I mean the reason it came to be. Its reason for existing at all. The first cube prompted the speculation, which generated the motivation to create this one. But you're saying that this one is the first one. So… so, you see, it's as if-"

"The cube created itself," I said.

"Yes! That's the only way you can look at it! It's impossible, Jake. Absolutely impossible."

"Have an impossibility," I said, handing it to her.

The plant foreman was sad to see us go. "You will return sometime soon? Our brief association has been most rewarding and gratifying."

"Sure, we'll come back," I told it, not wanting to hurt its feelings.

"When?"

"Uh…" Nothing like being put on the spot.

"Will you consider postponing your departure? All our various subsystems are most distressed over your leaving. Individuals of paramount creative powers, such as yourselves, are very rare. We are very desirous of continuing to work with you on other projects."

"Well, you're very kind, but we really must run along."

There was a sound not unlike a sigh. "Then please take our good wishes with you, and do return at your earliest convenience."

"Thank you. We will."

I wondered when the plant had last entertained visitors. Thousands; millions of years ago? It was cruel, in a way.

After Arthur had inflated the spacetime ship to full size, I shot the rig into the large cargo bay, and Carl tucked his Chevy into one of two smaller ones. We all boarded the craft. The illuminated spires and domes of the plant dwindled behind us as we sped toward the edge of the world, It was night on this face of Microcosmos, which Carl had dubbed "Fiipside." The moon surrogate rode low in the sky, and stars like diamonds on black velvet dotted the dome of night. Below, city complexes lay outlined in dim crosshatches, and a few stray lights glowed feebly in the dark countryside. A still, deserted world, Microcosmos was, eerie even by day, by night a place of silence and shadows and mystery. A chill went through me. Time was a thing of substance on this world, a weight bearing down like the stone mass of an ancient temple. I felt a sudden savage longing to get free of this place, this graveyard of the ages. It was dead here. There was death here. The world-disk flipped over as we swung around the edge, and seeing- Microcosmos in daylight again made me feel a little better. But not for long, because a reception committee was on its way to meet us.

"Oh, shit," Arthur said, frantically swiping at the control box.

Dozens of variously colored fiery motes were streaking up at us. Arthur put the ship into a steep climb, but in no time a swirling orange vortex-phenomenon was hard on our tail. The thing looked very familiar. Arthur began evasive maneuvers.

"Arthur," I said, trying to sound calm, "what do those things do?"

"Oh, they eat things," Arthur said airily. "Like spacetime ships. Ingests them, sort of. An explosive device can't do much damage to us, nor can any kind of beam weapon. But that thing can snare us and slowly disintegrate us. It has enough energy to do that."

I said, "Oh."

Horrified, I looked at Carl, remembering one of his Chevy's fantastic weapons, the enigma Carl called the "Tasmanian Devil." Carl swallowed hard and nodded.

I turned to Arthur. "Are these the things that chase their targets and never give up until they destroy them?"

"Yup. How did you know?"

"Uh… what are you going to do?"

"Well, there's only one thing I can do…" Arthur said. The thing behind us was gaining, matching our every increment of speed, growing until we could see its boiling interior, a fiercely glowing furnace of demonic combustion. There was a suggestion of something else in there, a shape, a mad, implacable figure, a howling psychotic beast bent only on destruction.

"… and I think I better do it now."

Instantaneously, everything around us disappeared-the Tasmanian Devil, the sky, Microcosmos itself. And in their place were endless stars, all around us.

We were in space.

"Dearie me," Arthur wailed, "I've really gone and done it now."

He was silent, slowly moving his thick, stunted fingers over the face of the control box.

"Arthur," I said after a long moment, "what's happened?"

"Oh, nothing. We made a continuum jump, which we shouldn't have done near such a large mass as a planet, especially Microcosmos, since it has very peculiar gravitational properties. We had no choice, but that doesn't help much."

"What's the problem?"

"Well, I have no idea where or when we are. None. It'll take time to get enough readings to make an educated guess. My uneducated guess is that we've jumped over ten billion light-years."

Standing beside me, Darla put both arms around my waist and pressed herself against me. I needed someone to hug, too; I snaked my arm about her shoulders and held her closer.

"Well, this is a bit of luck," Arthur said. "Star very near. Not only did we not wind up in the middle of intergalactic space, we blundered on to a likely planet-bearing star." He snorted. "It probably has a brood of grungy ice balls and gas giants orbiting it. No good to us." He sighed. "Better check it out, anyway."

The stars shifted suddenly. Then again. And again. Each time, a single star up ahead grew brighter, and with a few more jumps it stood out as a tiny disk against the spattering of glowing points around it.

"Looks awfully familiar," Arthur said suspiciously. He shook his head. "Couldn't be. But it's the right spectral type. Let's see if we can resolve a planet or two."

Delicately, Arthur palpated the face of the box, which, I had come to believe, was some sort of direct interface or link between the ship's instrumentation and Arthur's powerful robot brain.

I scanned the star swarm around us. To our rear, the swarm thickened, congealing along a long milky band of luminescence shot through with dark clouds. I searched left and right, trying to pick out constellations.

"You won't believe this," Arthur said. "But guess where we are."

"That's Sol over there," I said. "The sun. Earth's sun."

"You just earned your astronomy merit badge, kid."