The Rape of The Sun Read online

  “It is your privilege. I will try to avoid bewilderment.”

  “Is it true that you were once a space medic?”

  “For U.K., yes, during 1990 and 91.”

  “And then they—released you?”

  “Only at my urgent request. They had wanted to promote me. But it really wasn’t my sort of haggis.”

  “Are you English?”

  “Good God, no! I am a Scot!”

  “Did you fly any space missions?”

  ‘Two, sir, in 1991.” Collins named the missions and added: “I am interested in the object of this line of questioning.” “Can’t you read it in my mind?”

  “I could, but I don’t. It would be unethical without permission.”

  “And yet apparently you are reading the minds of beings from another galaxy—without their permission.”

  “That is different, because technically they have to be counted as enemies.”

  “All right; my object. Southeastern Power is flying a mission to the sun. Would you—this is not a proposal, but— would you be interested in a place on the crew?”

  “Indeed your question surprises me. I read your excellent Sunday feature about the mission. Yes, I would be very much interested. Are you empowered to offer it to me?”

  “Not yet; but I do need information about you, Mister Collins. You don’t have any doubt that you are capable of doing this?”

  “As medic?”

  “And as backup man for almost anything.”

  “As medic, I am ready. In terms of physical fitness for space, I am basically fit, but I probably need a bit of retraining in centrifuges and such. How much time do we have?” “On the present schedule, nearly three months for part-time refresher work in Houston.”

  “That would work, I am sure. And it would be enough. Indeed, should you advance your schedule, I would go it full time.”

  “How about your qualifications as backup?”

  “None, but I could learn it very quickly on the job if the other crew members would let me tap their minds for that purpose only. Who are the others?”

  “Captain Jensen, Doctor Cavell, Doctor Haley, and myself.”

  “That would be perfectly wonderful. I shall hope to be hired.”

  “One more question. Are you able to control yourself in a ship under freefall conditions?”

  “Absolutely. Here, let me show you.” Rising out of his chair and clear of the floor in a sensational cancellation of

  gravity, Collins did several midair pirouettes, then floated gracefully down into his chair.

  Wel wore an open-mouthed grin. “My God, you’re Ariel himself!”

  “I thank you, Prospero. Again, I shall hope to be hired.”

  'At three o’clock Thursday afternoon, Wel resumed his vigil at the Sheraton, hoping to catch Vandevelt entering; the astronomer would be almost impossible for one reporter to catch emerging from one of the several exits either from the White House or from the Executive Building. But Vandevelt eluded him. Eventually Wel went to Vandevelt’s hotel room and knocked; no answer.

  Friday morning, May 5, Wel made appearance at Mallison’s press conference. Mallison offered no announcement pertinent to Wel's concerns. Having waited through several questions, Wel raised his hand. “Brian, what did you find out for me?”

  “I beg your pardon, Wel?”

  “Wednesday, you said you’d look into the presence in Washington of Doctor Vandevelt, Doctor Haley, and some other astronomers.”

  “Wel, confound it, I’m sorry, I forgot all about that—”

  “I’m wondering if their presence here had anything to do with the increasing brightness of the stars.” Several other reporters straightened.

  “Oh, that,” lofted Mallison. ‘These scientific esoterica do get away from me in the press of public affairs. You know, our President is enormously perceptive, and he had asked these people to consult with him about that very topic. And it seems that the whole thing is atmospheric.”

  “Brian, three prominent meteorologists have assured me that it is not.”

  “Is that so? Wait, let me think. The exact words of Doctor Vandevelt’s formulation were, quote, ‘It is a phenomenon of the Van Allen belts,’ end quote. Aren’t they part of the atmosphere?”

  “They are somewhat higher,” Wel bit; and he departed the meeting, went into evasion tactics to shake three reporters who followed him out, and found an obscure telephone.

  Bill Haley sounded as though this call was all he had ever desired. “Wel! Am I glad you phoned! I was trying to reach you. What came out at the press conference?”

  “Nothing,” said Wel, “until I asked. Mallison first tried to duck the question. Then he said it was atmospheric. When I pushed him on that, he made it the Van Allen belts, and he quoted Vandevelt.”

  Silence. Then Bill, bitterly: “That tears it. Wel, can you meet me for dinner tomorrow evening at the Pipkin? Right, your Pipkin. Good; let’s make it for seven. And, Wel, see if you can also round up Helen and Sven for it. Let’s make it a crew dinner.”

  “Then maybe I should also try to get Collins there?”

  “Not the mystic?”

  “He may be our fifth crew member.”

  “Jesus Christ—no, wait; maybe there are good reasons to have him along. All right, bring him. And, Wel-I’ll be talking for publication.”

  Having nailed me down by visiphone for Saturday dinner, Wel pushed through a connection with Sven in Houston. “Hell, yes, great!” Sven exploded. “And Helen tells me that she has a tape to play for me—”

  “Get to our place early for it,” Wel advised. “What’s on it is pertinent background.”

  “I’ll be there at five tomorrow, prettied-up for dinner—but not black tie.”

  “Better make it five-thirty, Sven. We’re near the Pipkin, and we shouldn’t have more than one drink first, we’ll need all our wits. Hey, there’s another thing: I think I’ve found our fifth crew member.”

  “Who?”

  “Collins.”

  “Not that Collins?”

  “That Collins. Good space-medic experience—and who knows what else he can bring us?”

  Sven was grinning. “At least, it will be entertaining. Sign him on.”

  “He’ll be my next phone call. Anything else, friend?”

  The word friend did something to Sven’s face. Frowning, he mumbled, “Yes, I think there is—” He looked up, troubled: “Wel, do you mind if we turn off the video for this?”

  “Done,” said Wel, vanishing from Sven’s visiplate. A moment later, Sven vanished from Wel's.

  The voice of Sven, most careful: “Hel told me that you know, I won’t say what. Do you?”

  Wel, noncommittal: “If Hel said I know, then I know whatever she said I know. Did she?”

  Sven, after a pause: “How do you feel about that?”

  Wel: “If we’re talking about the same thing, then it’s more important for me to know how you feel.”

  Sven, fervently: “Deep friendship for all concerned. That’s my problem. Do you want me to back out of it?”

  After a moment, Wel: “Clearly we are talking about the same thing. Are you making any plans to move in for permanent exclusive possession?”

  Sven: “Oof.” Then: “Even if I wanted that and got it, which I won’t because she won’t allow it, she and I both know that it would turn out to be a disaster for both of us— for all three of us. I’d assess it as a—mutual flaring of passion in the course of friendship-love. But, Wel-my old friend—it is a good flaring, a good flaring.”

  “In that case,” Wel advised warmly, “by all means, both of you, keep on flaring freely until that phase begins to nidder. Only, Sven, keep the faith: if it should take a turning toward exclusive possession, tell me, tell me, because then I will want with all my heart to compete.”

  12

  Bill had reserved a private dining room and insisted on popping for drinks and dinner. “That is silly,” I declared. “It’s a crew meeting—let
me pick up the tab for Southeastern.” Wel, too, was a bidder: “It is doubly silly, Bill, because you said you were talking for publication; let me pick it up for the Herald-Trib” “Thanks, but no dice,” Bill said unhappily; “I’m doing a thing I maybe shouldn’t do, and I don’t want anybody else in on the money angle.” That crimped our party at the very outset; but a couple of pre-dinner drinks and some good talk eased things off. Collins, no good at small talk, merely listened; but several times he grinned appreciatively.

  We ordered beef dinners, and Wel insisted on sponsoring two bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape. While dinner and wine were en route, Bill burst out over the remnants of his Rebel Yell (which, for you yankees, is a damned fine southern bourbon) : “Wel, we’ve been had, and that’s why I’m blabbing. All of us had a good conference with the President last Wednesday; we laid the whole thing before him and recommended that we get you to make it public. But the President chose instead to confer with Vandevelt on Thursday, and Peter told us what he had agreed to for all of us. There was a lot of anger among us, but Pete, as our chairman, held his ground, although just how he managed to interpret chairmanship as dictatorship escapes me. Anyhow, I waited to make sure about it; and when you told me what Mallison said and did at yesterday’s press conference, it blew my mind and I simply couldn’t go along with it.”

  Dinner and wine interrupted, but after five minutes of work on both, Bill began to talk again—and still he was preapologizing. “I wanted Wel here to give him the story for his newspaper, and I wanted the rest of you here because you are my crew-sibs. Vandevelt should have known that he couldn’t make decisions for all of us; hell, the President should have known that he can’t muzzle scientists who aren’t on his payroll. We scientists are paid by the society and we work for the society, and the society is entitled to know our definitive findings. If our findings are bad news, people need to know that, so they can intelligently plan to meet the problem—”

  Gently queried Wel: “Bill, instead of spilling this to me for a general-public newspaper, why don’t you publish it in a scientific medium?”

  Savagely Bill shoved into his mouth a load of prime roast beef, chewed it once, swallowed it, chased it with wine. “All right; so I submit my scholarly paper, and some periodical editor says it is nuts and sends it back; or else he agrees to publish but gives me a schedule for next Janivember. Right now is when the public needs to know—but it needs to face the facts in perspective. They have their mitigating factors, it is faintly possible that with heavy expenditures we may find a way to reverse them or compensate for them, and meanwhile people need not to panic but to chuckle. And, Wel—you can write it like that.”

  “Maybe,” Wel suggested, “you need to tell me what the facts are”

  “All right,” said Bill, laying down his knife and fork. “You are right, Collins: the sun and its planets are shrinking, and we and our measuring instruments are shrinking along with them. But the other stars are not shrinking.”

  “Thank you,” softly said Collins.

  “Wel, ” Bill continued, “you eliminated the atmospheric hypothesis, and the Van Allen hypothesis is ridiculous—among us it was merely an alternative which we confronted and eliminated before meeting with the President—and you said that your logic could think of only two other alternatives, but you didn’t name them. I will name them. Situation: the stars keep growing brighter and brighter, and it is unaccountable by atmospheric or magnetic explanations. Alternative One: the entire universe, except for ourselves, is expanding. Alternative Two: the rest of the universe is staying the same, but our solar system is shrinking. Occam’s razor says: Alternative Two.

  “The independent work of your Doctor Mullett confirms it In the case of the star Sirius, we have sophisticated measures of its actual mass—which appears to be greater than its normal mass by a factor of nearly two, meaning of course that our own measuring instruments have shrunk. That measurement was made a month ago, and more recent and cruder measures indicate that the shrinkage has progressed.

  “My normal height is two hundred centimeters. My present height is still measurable as two hundred; but if it were now measured by last year’s instruments, it would be about ninety—less than half my normal size.”

  We stared at him. I was hugging my shoulders as though impossibly to measure them.

  Bill thrust aside his food plate and took his wine in both hands. “As I said, Wel, there are some mitigating factors, and you must be sure to make them come clear.

  “One factor is that we will not keep on shrinking into infinitesimals. We have been keeping growth records of apparent star magnitudes, and we have been able to compute and plot reliable growth curves which generalize into a single curve. The growth in star-magnitude has already passed an inflection point and is beginning to level off—which means that our shrinkage is leveling off. We will end up just about one-third of our former sizes: us, all our body components, our measuring instruments, our world, the other worlds of our solar system, our sun.

  “Another mitigating factor—and it may surprise you that I consider it mitigating—is the space monster which Helen and Sven watched being pulled in and subsequently dissected. Until I heard about that, I was totally at a loss to imagine any cause for this shrinkage, and of course I was looking for some cosmic cause. Now we can start hypothesizing that some incredibly able agency is doing this to us, for some reason of its own; and we can start looking for the agent. If the agent can diminish us, perhaps it can be led or forced to re-expand us. On the other hand, I realize that getting an enemy to reverse our shrinkage might be like getting Russia to unscramble the ruins from a nuclear bombing which it had already brought off. Wel, I don’t know whether you will want to publish about the space-manta—but at least, you can correctly say that science has a handle on the causes. It depends upon the President whether you can also say that science is pouring all its resources into the project, but I dare hope that your one or several articles will influence and even put a squeeze on the government. Vandevelt was had, he is politically weak despite his high astronomical prowess, but you, Wel, are strong.

  “The third mitigating factor is, that I don’t know how anybody on Earth can be practically affected by the shrinkage, in and of itself. I have checked with a couple of biophysicists under a pledge of rigid, confidence; they assure me that every meaningful bodily component can accept a two-thirds shrinkage if it is balanced, and continue to function normally in terms of reduced body size.

  “But all the mitigating factors, Wel, are wiped out by a supreme irony. In front of the President, one' of my colleagues rightly called it the Ultimate Catastrophe. Because of the reduced masses of Sun and planets, our fabric of gravity is ruptured. Already we must be imperceptibly receding from our sun, and this recession will accelerate. All the planets will fly away; and soon all the life now on Earth will be permanently frozen dead among the outer stars.

  “Oho, but a rare cosmic joke it is!” Bill finished off his wine and slumped.

  No thoughts at all occurred to Sven, or to Wel, or to me.

  A thought occurred to Collins.

  The seer spoke softly. “My friends—I think I can introduce you to the causes.”

  Apathetically we turned to look at him.

  “If it means anything to you,” Collins explained, “I feel that I am finally ready to show you in a convincing way the nature of my psycho-spying on the remote enemies who are doing this to us.”

  Bill looked around at us. I nodded. Sven nodded. Wel nodded. Bill said, “I respect mysticism when it is well grounded. Go ahead, Mister Collins.”

  “I have asked myself,” said Collins, “how I can best tell you about my findings. I think I have found the way. Among my silly little talents, I have the ability to project my mind-states in a selective way into the minds of others, if the range is close and the others are receptive. The range here is very close; do you all suppose that you could be very receptive?”

  Haley demanded, “How would that
be done?”

  Said Collins with severity: “It would be particularly hard for you, sir. You have to expunge all thoughts from your consciousness and allow the inflow of whatever may flow in—which would be my projection.”

  “Perhaps,” Bill surprisingly rejoined, “you could first hypnotize me. You may not believe it, but I have twice voluntarily gone under that.”

  Collins released a wan smile. “I believe you, Doctor Haley, although with difficulty. But I prefer not to hypnotize when I do this, it puts the recipient too deeply under for the best cognitive results. It might be better to down a stiff drink.”

  “Now that” said Bill with enthusiasm, “makes exquisite sense. How stiff is stiff?”

  “Shall we assume seventy-proof brandy? For me, one ounce; for all others except Doctor Haley, two ounces; for Doctor Haley, four ounces.”

  Bill buzzed for the waiter, issued the order, and added, “Please bring it immediately and quietly, set it before us, and go away, closing the door. Perhaps after that, if you snoop, we will seem for a long while to be sleeping; do not disturb us, and see that we are not disturbed. Our appreciation will be generous.”

  Served, we toasted communication, drank off, and leaned back to mind-listen.

  Into each of us, during nearly an hour, flowed all Collins’s experiences of Dhom. The continuity was in fact mind-accelerated, as with hypnotics, but the timing seemed fully natural, we had no sense of unusual speed. We were there, yet not there, two million light-years away from Earth: invisible spectator-auditors of the unfolding quasi-human epic of inter-galactic conquest.

  As a finale, Collins gave us a bonus—a revealing new experimental series which had come to him only Thursday evening—perhaps under the stimulus of Wel's visit. It began with Captain Dhurk ruminating in his own castle-home on a mountain across the murky abyss from the Horn’s mountain and lower down than the Horn’s home....