this.’
‘And if we prove it?’
‘Then I think we’ll have a way to drive a tunnel into the Dark and see what’s inside.’
Jacko lost his power of speech as his mind strove to contain the enormity of the project. Fritz shot him an amused glance.
‘There’s a particular reason I want to go in, Jacko. There’s a second principle involved in this detection, analysis, opposing-synthesis set-up which you might not have thought of. Something else is implied… and that is some form of guiding
They had chosen heavy caterpillar crawlers for their transport into the Pen. The choice was determined not only by the fact that a tracked vehicle was an advantage over the broken terrain but also for the reason that the vehicles possessed powerful engines and an ample reserve of power. Three crawlers were obtained for the expedition; one to run well ahead, one to act as reserve, and one to stay well in the rear with sufficient rescue equipment to recover either of the leading crawlers should the deeper Pen effects exceed the capacity of the engines to keep the vehicles in motion.
Clothing for the party had been chosen for a simple property—thermal insulation. Although the actual temperature of the deep Pen probably did not reach freezing point it was essential to insulate the radiant heat of a man’s body against the negative-heat effect which would otherwise have striven to reduce his temperature to the ambient point, with lethal effect. In this way the cold of the Pen differed from normal cold, and the expeditionary figures were clad as though for a journey to the arctic.
Once clear into the outer perimeter of the Pen and out of the strong Ithican sunshine, the expedition began to appreciate the clothing which up to that point had caused them a barely tolerable condition of overheating. Now, as the light faded and the chill of the perpetual winter closed around them, they grew more comfortable. But the underlying seriousness of the venture was pointed-up by a change in the engine note to a more laboured level as both the functioning of the engine and the momentum of the vehicle were affected by the negative elements of the Pen.
The leading crawler carried the bulk of the equipment, especially the precious lasers with which it was hoped to establish the existence of a time-lag in the Dark phenomena. Van Noon was captaining the vehicle. Jacko was driving, and Pederson, an observer sent by Courtney, completed the party. van Noon had intended their route to follow a road indicated on the old maps as running for nearly two kilometres straight in the direction of the axis of the Dark. The intention was abandoned quickly on finding that a building of considerable proportions had collapsed, turning part of the road into an unnavigable pile of masonry. The maps were forgotten and a new route was improvised as the situation demanded, having regard to the abilities of the crawler and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the slow erosion of the Pen environment on the fabric of the old town.
The light from the trapped cloudbase became increasingly leaden and dull until, at about five kilometres in from the perimeter of the Pen, Jacko was forced to switch on the headlamps. Their effect was negligible. Such light as they produced was robbed by some negative effect in the Pen environment and did little to disperse the muddy gloom. Fritz had anticipated this and had a searchlight mounted on the roof of the crawler. The intensity of light from this was sufficient to permit their passage through the damp, dilapidated, ghost-like streets of Bedlam to within two kilometres of the Dark itself. Then that illumination too became inadequate.
‘Better get out, Jacko, and let’s estimate the situation,’ said Fritz.
They descended, conscious of the acute negative-heat coldness which searched at their shrouded faces and probed at their wrists and ankles. They were conscious too, now, of anti-momentum, which gave an entirely false impression of the density of the air, since the effect was remarkably like trying to move under water.
Pederson joined them, and they made a brief survey of the situation. Whereas from a greater distance the column of the Dark had been clearly visible, it was now merged into the claylike blankness of scene which made it scarcely distinguishable as a separate entity. Jacko tried the radio communicator, but the instrument was dead save for some rare static from a distant rogue storm. The magnetic compass also had become nonfunctional much earlier, and though the gyro-compass still worked its readings were questionable in view of the conditions under which it was operating.
The quality of light from the cloudbase was curious and unreal. Effectively the light from above should have given them far greater incident and reflected illumination than they actually experienced. This drastic attenuation of the light should have been explicable in terms of fog or haze, but nothing such existed, and their inexpressibly dreary state of near-night had no explanation save for that of an alien opposition to the fundamental laws of physics.
‘What are we going to do, Fritz?’ Jacko’s own attempt to resolve the situation had reached an impasse.
Van Noon looked back, hoping for an indication as to whether or not the second crawler had been able to follow their tortuous route to the spot. No evidence was forthcoming, so he shrugged his shoulders.
‘You two can vote me down if you want to, but I propose that we choose the most likely direction for the Dark and just drive blind until we hit it or stop.’
‘I’m with you,’ said Jacko. ‘What about you, Pederson?’
Count me in. I’ve no ambition to walk back on my own.’
They re-entered the crawler. Having decided on the most probable direction of the Dark, Jacko orientated the vehicle, locked the tracks on synchronization, and proceeded to drive straight into the unknown.
The journey was a driver’s conception of Hell, a nightmare route across unfamiliar territory, effectively blind, and with no warning of what obstacle might halt or jolt them. Added to this was the rising resistance to movement, both on the part of the vehicle and of its occupants. Inside the driving cab even the instrument lights had become impossible to see, and the penetrating coldness finalized the depression which was settling over the spearhead of the expedition. Once or twice Jacko questioned whether they ought to attempt to turn back. Van Noon chided him gently and looked only ahead to the point where the darkness ought to terminate in a meeting with the absolute of the Dark.
Constantly the vehicle rolled and bucked, and canted at dangerous angles as it encountered broken walls or piles of debris in its path. Sometimes it stopped with a bruising shock against some obstacle beyond its power to move. Jacko was skilful in such emergencies and withdrew the vehicle from each such predicament without stalling the engine, knowing that a stopped engine this far into the Pen would never be restarted. Bruised, and in constant danger of masonry from grazed walls crushing the cab, they endured the journey patiently; although with various deviations from the course which the presence of unsurmountable obstacles forced on Jacko, they had no certain idea if they were still headed towards the Dark at all.
Then came the moment they had been dreading. In pitch darkness now, the crawler came to a sudden halt against something immovable. The tracks churned the soft floor uselessly for a half second, and then the engine stalled before Jacko could throw the vehicle in reverse. He tried the ignition cycle in vain, but the negative effects were too powerful to permit the heavy engine to be restarted. The silence grew absolute save for the tick-tick of metal cooling rapidly and Fritz’s voice cursing in a strangely muted way.
‘End of the line,’ said Jacko finally.
Van Noon opened the door. ‘As we’ve managed to get here we may as well see where we are,’ he said.
They climbed out. Their powerful torches were little use, and permitted an examination of no object more distant than about a quarter of a metre.
Beyond this was darkness in all directions except directly vertical, where a muddied stain across the sky mocked them with its inability to provide any useful illumination on the ground. Fritz searched around him and picked up a short length of rotting timber with which he cast about in the darkness on all sides. Then he called urgently: ‘Jacko, are you near the crawler?’
‘I am,’ said Pederson. Just by the cab door.’ He banged the metal, which returned a dull and unrewarding thud. Like their voices, the sound was strangely attenuated.
‘Good! Now, Jacko, can you place yourself by sound in a line between our two voices?’
Jacko moved somewhere in the darkness. ‘I think I’m there.’
‘Right. Now we’re three in a line, with Pederson on the right, you central, and myself on the left. As far as I can make out, about three paces ahead of us is the Dark. Find something to probe it with, and don’t touch it even with your gloves. Maintain your orientation carefully so that you don’t lose direction and walk into it. It could be very dangerous to touch.’
