His story struck as improbable, or at least incomplete, but this was no time to dispute it.
“For heaven’s sake, man!” I cried out. “And get killed ourselves?”
Marchenko bared a gold incisor. “That is the problem, yes? You are scientists. Solve it.”
This insouciance for a moment infuriated us, but solve it we did. An hour or two later, after the truck had returned from the camp with the simple equipment we’d demanded, Lysenko and I were standing in the pit a couple of metres from the black aperture. Behind us the truck chugged, its engine powering a searchlight aimed at the dark triangle. Trofim guided a long pole, on the end of which one of the truck’s wing mirrors was lashed. I stood in front of him, the pole resting on my shoulder, and peered at the mirror with a pair of binoculars requisitioned from (no doubt) a camp guard. Nothing happened as our crude apparatus inched above the dark threshold. We moved about, Trofim turning the mirror this way and that. The magnified mirror image filled a large part of the close-focus view.
“What do you see?” Lysenko asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Well, the joins of the edges. They go as far as I can see. Below it there’s just darkness. It’s very deep.”
We backed out and scrambled up.
“How big is this thing?” I asked Marchenko.
He shifted and looked sideways, then jabbed a finger downward.
“A similar apex,” he said, “pokes down into the gallery beneath us.”
“How far beneath us?”
His tongue flicked between his lips for a moment. “About a hundred metres.”
“If this is a cube,” I said, “four hundred feet diagonally—my God!”
“We have reason to think it is a cube,” said Marchenko.
“Take us to the lower apex,” said Lysenko.
“Do you agree?” Marchenko asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
A sign arched over the camp entrance read: “Work in the USSR is a matter of honour and glory.” For all that we could see as the truck drove in, nobody in the camp sought honour and glory that day. Guards stood outside every barracks door. Three scrawny men were summoned to work the hoist. Marchenko’s squad took up positions around the mine-head. Lysenko, Marchenko, and I—with one of Marchenko’s sergeants carrying the pole and mirror—descended the shaft in a lift cage to the gallery. Pitchblende glittered in the beams from our helmet lamps. We walked forward for what seemed like many hours, but according to my watch was only fifty-five minutes. The cave-in had been cleared. Down like the point of a dagger came the lower apex of the cube, its tip a few inches above the floor. Its open face was not black but bright. It cast a blue light along the cavern.
“Well,” said Lysenko, with a forced laugh, “this looks more promising.”
This time it was I who advanced with the pole and angled the mirror in; Lysenko who looked through the Zeiss. I saw a reflected flash, as though something had moved inside the object. Blue light, strangely delimited, strangely slow, like some luminous fluid, licked along the wooden pole. With a half-second’s warning, I could have dropped it. But as that gelid lightning flowed over my hands, my fingers clamped to the wood. I felt a forward tug. I could not let go. My whole body spasmed as if in electric shock, and just as painfully. My feet rose off the ground, and my legs kicked out behind me. At the same moment I found myself flying forward like a witch clinging to a wayward broom. With a sudden flexure that almost cracked my spine, I was jerked through the inverted triangular aperture and upward into the blue-lit space above. That space was not empty. Great blocks of blue, distinct but curiously insubstantial, floated about me. I was borne upwards, then brought to a halt. I could see, far above, a small triangle of daylight, in equally vivid contrast to the darkness immediately beneath it and the unnatural light around me. Apart from my hands, still clutched around the pole, my muscles returned to voluntary control. I hung there, staring, mouth open, writhing like a fish on a hook. My throat felt raw, my gasps sounded ragged. I realised that I had been screaming. The echoes of my screams rang for a second or two in the vast cubical space.
Before my eyes, some of the blocky shapes took on a new arrangement: a cubist caricature of a human face, in every detail down to the teeth. Eyes like cogwheels, ears like coffins. From somewhere came an impression, nay, a conviction, that this representation was meant to be
What happened next is as difficult to describe as a half-remembered dream: a sound of pictures, a taste of words. I had a vision of freezing space, of burning suns, of infinite blackness shot through with stars that were not eternal: stars that I might outlive. I heard the clash of an enormous conflict, remote in origin, endless in prospect, and pointless in issue. It was not a war of ideals, but an ideal war: what Plato might have called the Form of War. Our wars of interests and ideologies can give only the faintest foretaste of it. But a foretaste they are. I was given to understand—how, I do not know—that joining in such a war is what the future holds for our descendants, and for all intelligent species. It is conducted by machines that carry in themselves the memories, and are themselves the only monuments, of the races that built them and that they have subsumed. This is a war with infinite casualties, infinite woundings, and no death that is not followed—after no matter what lapse of time—by a resurrection and a further plunge into that unending welter. No death save that of the universe itself can release the combatants, and only at that terminus will it have meaning, and then only for a moment, the infinitesimal moment of contemplating a victory that is final because it precedes, by that infinitesimal moment, the end of all things: victory pure and undefiled, victory for its own sake, the victory of the last mind left.
This hellish vision was held out to me as an inducement! Yes, Cameron—I was being offered the rare and unthinkable privilege of joining the ranks of warriors in this conflict that even now shakes the universe; of joining it centuries or millennia before the human race rises to that challenge itself. I would join it as a mind: my brain patterns copied and transmitted across space to some fearsome new embodiment, my present body discarded as a husk. And if I refused, I would be cast aside with contempt. The picture that came before me—whether from my own mind, or from that of the bizarre visage before me—was of the scattered bodies in the pit.
With every fibre of my being, and regardless of consequence, I screamed my refusal. Death itself was infinitely preferable to that infinite conflict.
I was pulled upward so violently that my arms almost dislocated. The blue light faded, blackness enveloped me, and then the bright triangle loomed. I hurtled through it and fell with great force, face down in the mud. The wind was knocked out of me. I gasped, choked, and lifted my head painfully up, to find myself staring into the sightless eyes of one of the recent dead, the camp labourers. I screamed again, scrambled to my feet, and clawed my way up the crumbling side of the pit. For a minute I stood quite alone.
Then another body hurtled from the aperture, and behaved exactly as I had done, including the scream. But Lysenko had my outstretched hand to grasp his wrist as he struggled up.
“Were you pulled in after me?” I asked.
Lysenko shook his head. “I rushed to try to pull you back.”
“You’re a brave man,” I said.
He shrugged. “Not brave enough for what I found in there.”
“You saw it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. He shuddered. “Before that Valhalla, I would choose the hell of the priests.”
“What we saw,” I said, “is entirely compatible with materialism. That’s what’s so terrifying.”
Lysenko clutched at my lapels. “No, not materialism! Mechanism! Man must fight that!”
“Fight it… endlessly?”
His lips narrowed. He turned away.
“Marchenko lied to us,” he said.
“What?”
Lysenko nodded downward at the nearest bodies. “That tale of his—these men were not sent into this pit here, and killed by something lashing out from the… device. These men are
“So why are they dead, and we’re alive?” As soon as I asked the question, I knew the answer. Only their bodies were dead. Their minds were on their way to becoming alive somewhere else.
“You remember the choice you were given,” said Lysenko. “They chose differently.”
“They chose
“Yes,” said Lysenko. “A different hell.”
