trick! I think I’d like to go home now.’
‘Opposing steel pipe,’ said van Noon. ‘Lord! I thought it was a joke when Courtney suggested that they stopped a projectile with an anti-projectile. But it appears it wasn’t. They do just that. They tried to stop our pipe with a length of opposing pipe so precisely similar that I’d not have noticed the difference had I not been counting. What type of creatures could do that, Jacko—almost instantaneously?’
I don’t know,’ said Jacko. ‘But I’m afraid of them.’
‘You and me both. To work a trick like that must demand a technology centuries ahead of ours. But even so, I’ve a feeling we’ve got them worried.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because if they were still operating at full efficiency there’s something we’d logically have met in this pipe before now—a anti-radiation monitoring trolley pushed by an anti-Fritz van Noon.’
‘We’re way out of our depth, Fritz,’ said Jacko finally. ‘Are you still going on?’
‘If you’re still following.’
‘I’m still behind you, but I’m damned if I know why. I’ve followed you into some crazy situations before, but this has the lot beaten.’
They moved on, the roar of the trolley echoing and reverberating around them and occasionally stopping as Fritz eased the little wheels over a flange gap.
Just entering pipe nineteen,’ said van Noon finally. ‘If they provided as many as we did then there’s only one to go.’
‘See anything yet?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I was just thinking, Fritz. It’d be a neat trick if they’d connected an infinity of pipes together. We could go on crawling through here till Judgment Day.’
‘Good point, Jacko. We’ll reconsider the position when we get to the end of number twenty.’
Again the trolley jerked and stopped.
‘Just entering pipe twenty,’ said van Noon.
‘Let’s get it over with,’ said Jacko. ‘It can’t get any worse, surely.’
‘Right. This is it!’
The trolley was moving slowly now, with Fritz concentrating on every centimetre of its progress, using the feel of the iron instead of eyes. There was no way to measure distance in the darkness. The only way was to crawl and to hope that one remembered the feeling of crawling a length of pipe. Then a sudden cessation of noise, with the echoes slowly sinking around them.
‘End of pipe,’ said van Noon. ‘But no resistance. The trolley is half way out of the end but I still can’t see a thing. I’m going to let the trolley go and see what happens.’
There was a brief scrape of metal on metal, and the thump of something on the pipe.
‘It fell down,’ said van Noon, ‘but not very far. I can still feel it with my hand. And something else… There’s no anti-momentum out here. I can move quite freely. It isn’t even very cold. It must mean we’re well inside the wall of the Dark. I wonder if the torch will work.’
The torch did work. In the darkness the light touched the interior of the pipe with an intensity that was momentarily dazzling. Projected outwards, the beam was clearly visible but it contacted nothing that reflected except the wet, brown stones of the earth, and the equipment trolley fallen on its side. Ostensibly they were looking into night, bare and empty, but Fritz was not convinced.
‘This isn’t darkness,’ said van Noon. ‘It’s more like veils of darkness… thin layers of negative-light. See how the torch beam falls off in discrete quanta. I’m going out there, Jacko, to see if I can make head or tail of this. You stay by the pipe with a torch ready to guide me back. I’d very much like to find out who or what it was that put ten pipes on the end of ours.’
‘And I’m going to wish you luck,’ Jacko said. ‘But I’m not at all sure I want to know.’
Van Noon dropped to the ground. The soil underfoot was an obvious continuation of the old town terrain. His torch illuminated the stony earth for many metres in front of him, but it was useless when directed horizontally in any direction because of the apparent lack of anything to reflect the light.
But he was right in his observation that the intensity of the light was stepped-down by curtaining veils of something. As he approached a veil he could see a distinct drop in the brightness of the beam as it was intercepted by something dark and nebulous. He reached the veil and touched it, curiously. His fingers encountered nothing, and he walked through it without sensation. Looking back, he was glad still to be able to see the light from Jacko’s torch, but he knew that if he passed through many veils even that would be lost to him.
But the situation changed without warning. The fifth veil was not insubstantial at all. It was a film of something like dark, thin-blown glass, and he shattered it with his torch because he had not known of its solidity. And as it shattered, light from beyond spilled out through the broken edges and he had the briefest glimpse of the scene of gold-hazed wonder… and then the air exploded in his face.
But even the explosion was unreal. The blast caught him not from in front but from behind and above, moving towards the explosion rather than from it. It tumbled him forward and pinned his body to the ground with a great pressure. Desperately he fought to raise his neck and shoulders for a further glimpse of the creatures who lived in their sanctuary deep inside the hollow Dark. He wanted a better look at the godlike machines they controlled, now rising high like gossamer and congregating in the golden light as they swept magnificently upwards almost faster than the eye could follow. But a sheet of flame crackled and tore across the vastness of the area and whipped high in an angry, explosive tide.
A shockfront of pressure tore him from the ground, then dropped him cruelly. Despite the hurt he fought to retain consciousness and turn and watch the exodus of the gods. But the forces acting on him were too great. Instead he was swamped by darkness.
His next impression was that of Courtney’s face and the sense of lapsed hours. He felt bruised and shaken, but not seriously hurt. He was lying in the open, and the Ithican sky above was broadly trailed with the colours of the sunset.
Courtney came up and put a folded coat beneath his head and a blanket over him.
‘Take it easy, Fritz. There’s a doctor on his way.’
Van Noon smiled wanly. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. ‘Is this where the Dark was, or did you get me out.’
Courtney sat down beside him. ‘The Dark’s gone, Fritz. I don’t know what you did, but you certainly made a good job of it. The whole darn thing imploded. It was a fantastic sight. The Dark and the Pen drew up together, then spiralized like a whirlwind. There was a blast which broke every window in New Bedlam… and then the whole complex just disappeared.’
‘I know what did it,’ said van Noon. ‘Our universe reacted with theirs violently. Their laws of physics must have been very different! It was our tunnel that punctured the protective barrier, and I broke the last seal by accident. Once the reaction started, nothing could stop it.’
‘So it
‘I think it was another universe, a parallel dimension. Another membrane interacting with ours. It’s possible it was an antimatter universe, I suppose. I’d give anything to know how they managed to connect the two!’
Courtney whistled. ‘What was that you said about the laws of physics?’
Fritz heaved a sigh. ‘It’s been suggested that other membranes in the multiverse would almost certainly have physics different from ours. Maybe only slightly—but maybe drastically different. Theirs must have been
‘So who were they, and what happened?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe they were scientists, or explorers—they could even have been refugees from God- knows-what. When the two universes came into contact, the bridge between was destroyed.’
‘The doorway slammed shut! Courtney muttered.
‘Yes, quite,’ agreed Fritz. ‘As to what happened to them… who knows. We could have learnt an awful lot from them, if only there had been a means of contact.’
‘Had they been inclined to teach,’ said Courtney, ‘but in two hundred years they never attempted even to make any contact. I think that they were so far ahead of us that we were merely as ants to them.’
