up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…'
Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. 'Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone,'
'I'm so sorry.' Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. 'Carry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?'
'I don't mind,' He said, setting his glass down.
'Through here.' Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumb printing the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster of delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.
'Impressive,' Dallen said. 'I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed.'
'My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment,' Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. 'The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and micro controls even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces.'
'What's the point of it?'
Silvia's face was solemn. 'It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal.'
'I see.' Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. 'Proof of life after death.'
'Proof that what we call death is merely a transition.'
Dallen realised that he had to be honest. 'Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?'
'They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved.'
'No, but… I never heard of mindons before tonight, but 1 gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a… discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?' Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.
'Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons.'
'But we don't even know that gravitons exist.'
'But, but, but!' Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. 'Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?'
'I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it,' Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.
She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles — a neutrino having just one — which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples — one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth — who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous' I'm sorry,' he said. 'It's too much for me. I can't believe it.'
'Belief isn't necessary at this stage — all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics.' Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. 'A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop.'
'My brain is getting a bit overheated,' Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.
'All right — here endeth the first lesson — but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back.' Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. 'If you come back,'
'I don't scare easily.' You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated 'business' phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.
'Don't kiss me. Carry,' she said. 'I couldn't handle it.'
'Does that mean it's too soon?'
She eyed him soberly. 'I think that's what it means.'
'In that case,' he said, deciding that a change of mood would be good strategy, 'shall we repair to wherever people repair at a time like this?'
Silvia nodded, looking grateful, and they walked back through the studio to the main part of the house, where she parted from him to attend other guests. Dallen's feeling of elation lasted perhaps five seconds after she was lost to view, and then — as he had known it would — there came a reaction. The predominant emotion was guilt, his constant companion in recent weeks, but now a caustic new element had been added, one he had trouble identifying. Was it in the acknowledgement of what Silvia London could do to him, his belated discovery of the difference between affection, which he had always assumed to be love, and another kind of emotion altogether — wayward and unsettling — which might really be love?'
I ought to get out of here, he thought. I ought to get out of here right now and never come back. He turned to walk to the door and almost collided with Peter Ezzati and his wife.
'You've been getting your indoctrination,' Ezzati said gleefully. 'I can tell by your face.'
'Peter!' Libby was overtly tactful. 'Carry doesn't want intrusions.'
Dallen looked down at her, recalled his earlier lack of manners and forced a smile. 'I'm afraid I get a bit irritable when it's past my bedtime — I must need a cocoa infusion or something.'
'I'll get you a proper drink,' Ezzati said, moving away. 'Scotch and water, wasn't it?'
Dallen considered calling him back and refusing the drink and leaving immediately, then came the realisation that it was still only around ten in the evening and his chances of sleeping if he went back to his empty house were zero. It could be a good idea to spend some time with neutral and undemanding people, to wind down a little and prove to himself that he was a balanced and mature person with complete control over his emotions.
'I was reading a bit about probability math the other day,' he said, seeking total irrelevancy. 'It said that if two people lose each other in a big department store there's no guarantee they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still.'
An expression of polite bafflement appeared on Libby's round face. 'How interesting.'
'Yes, but if you think about it that has to be one of the most useless pieces of information ever. I mean…'
'I've never been to a big department store,' Libby said. 'It must have been wonderful to visit somewhere like Macy's before they let New York go down. Something else that's been lost…'
Dallen was unable to produce an original comment. 'You win some, you lose some.'
'If that were the case things might be reasonable, but the fact is that we lose, lose, lose. Optima Thule has taken everything and given nothing back.'
In spite of his emotional disquiet, Dallen was able to interest himself in the point of view. 'Aren't we taking from Optima Thule? Isn't it doing all the giving?'
'I'm not talking about patches of grass. What has the human race done in the last two centuries? Nothing! There has been practically no progress in any of the arts. Science is static. Technology is actually slipping back a notch or two every year. Orbitsville is a swamp.
