Chapter Four - Secret Destination
'Hell,' said Graeme Dezlin, 'is an appropriate name.'
He sat, slamming down the tray laden with the evening's first round. Four hands eagerly reached out.
'It's a chaotic tract of space the size of a decent solar system that breaks most of the laws of the universe.'
'You can't break a scientific law,' scoffed an incredulous Mark Fenton.
'Of course you can.' Graeme paused, relishing his shock. 'Laws are artificial, they're just theories we've created.'
'A theory isn't artificial,' Phil Wyler broke in aggressively, 'it's deduced from hard evidence. That makes it real.'
Graeme grinned, a grin Fenton had seen before, usually seconds ahead of the moment he annihilated his opponent. Fenton had lost count of the number of times he'd been on the receiving end of it in these first five weeks at Gadder. He glanced across the table. Alizen Retta smiled back in sympathy. They both knew Phil didn't stand a chance. But he'd guessed it from experience. She probably already knew where Graeme was heading. She was frighteningly clever.
'No,' continued Graeme, 'the evidence is real, but the theory isn't because we're making assumptions about the relationship between cause and effect that might not exist.' He held up his hand to stop the anticipated interruption. It worked. Phil's expression was clear though, he was giving Graeme seconds to prove his case. Graeme rose to the challenge.
'For example: centuries ago, before our ancestors worked out how to launch a ship off Homeworld, they used to believe their sun orbited their planet.'
Fenton shook his head. He was continually astounded by the obscure facts Graeme had at his command.
'Yes, I know it sounds stupid now, but it made perfect sense to them. It explained the facts. They saw the sun rise on the horizon each morning, they watched it meander across the sky during the day then they saw it sink out of sight in the evening. They saw it move. They thought their planet was standing still and why shouldn't they? They couldn't see or feel it move. Those were the facts they observed. The only thing that explained them was the sun was going round them. That was their theory. It was real to them because it made sense of observed phenomena, but it wasn't real in the sense you mean,' he waved at Phil, 'that it was eternally valid. It wasn't. It was wrong. They couldn't know that though until they found some new data that contradicted their theory. Then they had to come up with a new explanation, a new theory, to explain away the discrepancies.'
He paused. Phil was silent, beaten.
'It's important to remember that about every theory. Just because it works now it doesn't mean it always will. And that applies to so-called common sense too. It's not a big problem though if a theory fails. It just means the pattern we tried to impose on reality was too rough and needs further refinement.'
Graeme smiled smugly and raised his glass. Fenton lifted his. He was glad it was only his first. It was difficult enough to follow Graeme at the best of times, let alone after a couple of drinks and there would be a few tonight after another hard week of lectures. The bar was rapidly filling. They'd been lucky to get this table. The insistent buzz of chatter was building. By the end of the night they'd have to shout to make themselves heard, assuming they had anything coherent to say by then. He yawned, running his free hand back through his close-cropped hair. It was only half way through the first term and he was already shattered.
'Hell's not showing up on this search,' said Alizen, brandishing her tablet with a flourish.
Graeme laughed loudly. They were meant to be planning an itinerary for their tour next summer, but none of them were taking it very seriously. Graeme's suggestion they should visit Hell was the latest in a long line of outlandish destinations. But she wasn't just running with the joke. There was an edge to her voice, a challenge. Graeme and Alizen were inveterate leg-pullers, always trying to catch each other out. She was accusing him of not playing fair, of making up destinations. She'd had no problem with that stuff about theory, that was old news to her, but she was unconvinced about Hell itself.
'Well, it's not really a tourist trap,' Graeme responded with mock exasperation.
'I'm amazed,' she retorted, 'with a name like that I'd have thought they'd be flocking there.' Fenton smiled. He liked them both. She was clever and self-assured but wonderfully down to earth and vivacious. She had a mischievous sense of humour but there was no malice to her; she was the warmest person he had ever met. And Graeme? He could be irritating but he got away with it. He was eminently plausible and his conversation was fascinating. It was hard to believe they'd only known each other five weeks. He was surprised at how quickly they'd all bonded, surprised but pleased. It was unusual for him. He'd been a serious, lonely child, an awkward, intense adolescent. He'd never really mixed. Phil had been his only real friend and that had developed tentatively over years at school. Now for the first time in his life he felt accepted. He was part of a gang.
'Hell. It's a wind-up. It doesn't exist!' declared Phil triumphantly, not realising he was one step behind.
'It does exist,' Graeme savagely snapped.
'So how come I've never heard of it?' Phil was defensive, surprised by his fury.
Graeme suddenly hesitated. He looked uncomfortable, as if he'd been caught out. For a moment Fenton thought they'd got him: he was lost for words, about to come clean. But then he recovered.
'Well, it's a long way out, beyond The System's rim and the administration haven't gone out of their way to publicise it so not many people have,' he said patiently.
'Why's Central so keen to cover it up?' Fenton asked keenly.
'Oh, they're not covering it up; they're just not advertising it. You have to ask. You have to have access to the right data cells at Central. They're not restricted, just rather esoteric, and the subscription's expensive.'
'Eso-what?' asked Phil.
'Known and understandable only to a select few. You're the literature student; I thought you'd know that.'
Graeme could be infuriating. If he hadn't known he had a glittering career ahead of him in scientific research Fenton would have pigeonholed him as a potential politician.
'How can anyone ask about it if nobody's told them it exists?' Fenton demanded. 'That's typical Central tactics. They keep everyone in the dark but still claim they've got an open government policy. ''You only had to ask,'' they'd say.'
'Graeme, why doesn't Central want to tell anyone about Hell?' Alizen's interjection was unusual. Normally she stayed coolly aloof from the boys' squabbling, waiting for the dust to settle, patient, enigmatic, beautiful. But now there was curiosity glittering in those sparkling eyes. She'd been seduced. She'd accepted Hell was for real and was intrigued. Graeme smiled, pleased by her interest.
'The administration is in a tizz about it because it's giving us data we can't explain. It's contradicting our theories, blowing them apart. Now, that wouldn't be an issue if we could use that data to make a bigger, more meaningful model of the universe but no one's smart enough to do it. Hell's wrecking our theories but we're getting nothing better in return. And those theories have served us a very long time. They've allowed us to infest the universe. It would be frightening and downright embarrassing to have to admit we might have been going in the wrong direction for the last few millennia. It's a political problem more than a scientific or philosophical one. Just think what the outsiders and the other retrogrades would say, it'd be the perfect ammunition for them: ''You don't know what you're doing. You never did. You've just been lucky.'' They'd be right too in some respects. It could cause widespread doubt about our technology and as The System is reliant on technology public knowledge could be dangerous. Remember the Great Collapse? It might have been twelve centuries ago but it still worries people.' He glanced conspiratorially at Fenton. They'd been talking about it last night.
'Now, the administration maintains something like that could never happen again, there are too many safeguards in place for central planning and communications to fail com
pletely. But everyone knows if they did there'd be no recovery this time, the infrastructure is much more complex now than it was then. There'd never be another System, there'd just be millions of deaths and a new dark age of barbarism. That frightens people. So, if Central was seen to be fallible there's the potential for a crisis of confidence. That could lead to panic. Panic leads to anarchy, anarchy leads to chaos. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Chaos spreads through the universe, civilisation breaks down and we've got our second collapse. So, until we've got a better idea about what's going on there the official policy is to keep quiet about it.'
'But..' Fenton was about to launch into a diatribe against Central's usual, paternalistic we know best approach but Alizen had already begun to speak.
'So, what's the problem there? What don't they want people to know about?'
'Well, there're the gravitational fields for starters. They're a complete nightmare and don't make any sense. There're gravitational whirlpools in there that overlap and interfere.' He put down his glass, waved his hands round, clapped then waved them round again. 'They're constantly shifting and we can't plot or explain them. Anything that gets caught between them is ripped apart by the opposing pulls or crushed like an eggshell. That's what's happened to the probes we've sent in. Nothing's gone into Hell and come out again. Now there's been the odd occasion when we've fired in a satellite that hasn't been instantly destroyed. They must have been lucky and hit a safe path. But then we've lost their signals. They've probably been slung into a black hole. There're a few of them in there. Without more information it's impossible to tell how many. And any stuff we do get back from the probes before we lose them is garbled because there's so much radiation in there.'
Graeme stopped. He had the absolute attention of everyone around the table and he knew it. He took another sip of his drink.
'But, it gets more confusing. There're a couple of suns in there, both of them white dwarfs, and ten planets with moons. Now, with those gravitational fields we shouldn't expect to find planets in there. They should have been thrown out or smashed into each other long ago. But they haven't. They just keep going round and round in erratic orbits we can't work out. We've been observing Hell as best we can from the outside for seventy years and we haven't seen any kind of consistency. It's mad. Total chaos but some kind of underlying structure we can't fathom. And we can't go in there to find out more.' He drank again. The silence around the table was absolute. He paused, judging their reactions, waiting for the precise moment to continue.
'And,' his timing was perfect, 'even if you could navigate it you'd need impressive shields to withstand the radiation.'
'How bad is it?' asked Phil.
Graeme drained his glass before answering.
'In a heavily armoured spacesuit you'd have a safe time of about thirty minutes, but you'd be chancing it even then. But you wouldn't go out there in just a suit unless you wanted to know how a pinball feels.'
He stopped again, purely for effect.
'It's infernal.'
A couple of hours later the table was littered with used glasses and discarded snack wrappers. A casual glance would never have revealed the order implicit in that chaos. It was a model of Hell. The packs had been torn up and scrunched into ragged balls. They had been probes and spacecraft but now they lay shredded and mangled at the bottom of the empty glasses. The glasses were the black holes. Fenton shook his head. He was so tired. He'd had too much to drink. The bar seemed different to how he'd remembered it at the start of the evening. He was half-aware it had become very noisy but the sound seemed far away. They had to huddle together to hear each other speak but he was sure Alizen didn't need to be that close to Graeme. Phil was long gone.
'My theory,' said Graeme, very slowly and deliberately.
'Theory's worthless,' declared Fenton, provocatively.
'No, it's not,' replied Graeme, turning away from Alizen for a moment, wagging his finger at him. 'Mine's not, anyway,' he added, 'my theory is there's nothing contradictory going on in there.' He waved his hand over the table. Alizen was gazing at him. He grabbed her hand. There was no adverse reaction, she just smiled. Graeme paused for a second, gratified, then carried on. 'There's something in there causing it. Something we don't understand. Not yet.' He stopped, staring straight at her. Fenton suddenly realised Graeme was only talking to her. He was superfluous, a distraction. Was that why Phil had disappeared? He thought he'd been insistent for him to go too. Oops. Perhaps it was time to make himself scarce? No, he was too tired to move. He was too interested to move. Alizen had the most ridiculously enchanting expression on her face. He could really get to like her.
'It could be natural,' Graeme continued, 'but I think, I hope, it's something more.' He was quoting Rodrik Breen! Graeme could be pretentious as well as irritating. 'I think it's an alien artefact and I'm going to find it.' Fenton started to giggle. Graeme ignored him. He leaned in closer to her. Their noses were virtually touching. He was deadly serious. 'I'm going to solve the mystery of Hell and when I do, together, we're going to ride the wind.'
They kissed.
'Fenton!'
His eyes snapped open. Brozmam's pistol and Javer's Thoron blaster were both trained on him. That was what the gun was called! Pandemonium hung above them. They were in Hell. He must have passed out. It could only have been for seconds but the memory had been so vivid. Graeme and Alizen. Bastard! Ride the wind. It was pathetic. But he'd kept his promise. He'd solved the mystery. At just twenty-four, still at Gadder, Graeme Dezlin had calculated how to navigate through Hell. The station on the monitor was the proof, the station where Graeme had gone to work, the station Graeme had designed. How did he do it all?
He was right; there was something in Hell warping space. He'd found a pattern in the chaos, he'd traced the disturbances to their source, a mystery object. He didn't know what it was but he understood what it did, how it affected the matter surrounding it. The administration had been so impressed they'd given him the money to find out more. They'd built Pandemonium from his specifications so he could ride the winds of Hell. But he hadn't ridden them with Alizen. Did she still love him?
'Fenton!'
He tried to speak but his jaw wouldn't move. His mind felt like it was wrapped in polythene. There was something terribly wrong, something worse than Alizen and Graeme and him, something to do with Graeme and Pandemonium.
He remembered.
Pandemonium was their destination. People had died there. Graeme was there.
'G-rrr-aa-e-mmmmm-e!' he stammered, the drugs affecting his vocal chords.
'What?' Brozmam leaned forward, the servos of his suit spluttering as they articulated the joints.
'Grraaemmme Dezzzzlinnn.'
'What about Dr Dezlin?' barked Brozmam, towering above him, a titan in the massive suit, piercing blue eyes gleaming, nostrils looming, the gun a prompting finger.
'Is he alright?' A sudden rush of adrenaline released his voice. He still felt exhausted though. The dull ache in his mind and body hadn't gone.
With a screaming cacophony of hydraulics Javer leaned forward.
'Why shouldn't he be alright, Mr Fenton?'
Damn! He wasn't supposed to know what had happened on Pandemonium. He cursed himself for his stupidity.
'Well, he's there isn't he?' he asked, desperately hoping his voice, thick with sleep, sounded convincing. 'He's still on Pandemonium? Why else would you bring me here if it's not to do with him?'
'What do you know about Pandemonium? What do you know about Dr Dezlin?' He reeled under Brozmam's staccato questions, his defensive answer tumbling from his mouth.
'I was at Gadder with him. He left in the third year to work there. I haven't seen him since.' He was furious at Brozmam for his badgering but he mustn't let it get to him. He couldn't let them know what he knew. He'd lose his only advantage and implicate himself in whatever this was about. They'd never believe he'd spied on them, they'd just assume he'd known all along. They'd want to know more
. They'd try to beat it out of him.
'How do you know about Dr Dezlin's work? How do you know about Pandemonium?' demanded Javer.
He had no choice.
'He told me.'
Graeme Dezlin tossed him an intricate football-sized model.
'Don't drop it. It's survived intense radiation and unbelievable gravitational forces. I'm not having a buffoon like you break it!'
He turned it over. About half of it was plated with mirrored solar panels but the other side was open, revealing its internal structure. It was a hollow sphere, a complex framework of girders. It looked fragile but felt reassuringly sturdy. Instruments and equipment seemed to be slotted in at random. There were tiny propulsion jets and what looked like accommodation units and research labs clustered together like bacterial colonies on a petri dish.
'Why are you showing me this?' he asked coldly.
'I thought you'd be interested. It won't be on the news bulletins. You may hear about it if you listen carefully enough in the right places but you won't find any pictures of it and they won't tell you that's where I'm going or that I designed it.'
'Is it classified?' He'd meant to be angry and aloof but his voice revealed his interest.
'Almost,' smiled Graeme.
It was a typical, infuriating Dezlin comment.
'And you trust me not to tell anyone, with the people I associate with?'
'Oh, the Earthpeople are a harmless bunch. For all their subversive rantings they'll turn out to be administrators or financiers when they graduate. You will.' He grinned at Fenton's furious expression but then the smile vanished to be replaced by a look Fenton hadn't seen very often on Dezlin's face, his serious, sincere one.
'I have to tell someone where I'm going, and you wouldn't tell anyone would you? You wouldn't break a confidence. I trust you, Mark.'
He'd told them. He'd betrayed Graeme. But there'd never been any real reasons to keep his promise, just misguided loyalty to a former friend and a sense of his own integrity. He'd had to tell them, he'd had no choice. Besides, he'd already broken his word, he'd told Alizen. He'd never been able to keep secrets from her. Then with a profound sense of sorrow he realised it was irrelevant anyway. Graeme was probably dead.
'What do you know about Hell and Pandemonium? What did he tell you?' demanded Brozmam.
'Nothing much. Just that he'd worked out how to navigate through it and they were going to build that,' he nodded at the screen, 'so he could investigate the source of the gravitational anomalies and the radiation. He showed me a model of it before he left.'
'So, you don't know about recent developments?' said Javer.
'What developments?'
There was a dangerous pause.
'Do you know?' insisted Brozmam.
'No. I haven't heard from him since he went there, four years ago and we weren't on good terms then. And if he had told me I wouldn't understand. I'm not a scientist. What are these developments?'
No answer came. There were no further questions. Brozmam's head turned to face Javer's. The vast helmet swivelled round accompanied by the now familiar hum. It came to rest in profile, the side-mounted equipment blocking any glimpse of his face. Fenton turned his head to Javer to see an identical sight. They were both silent, communicating by lip-reading.
Why were they in spacesuits?
They must be going outside.
They were planning to spacewalk, spacewalk through Hell.
Fear seized him. They had to be heading for Pandemonium, there was nothing else out there. They were going to leave him here, helpless and alone. What if they never came back? But why risk walking, couldn't they just dock? He glanced up at the monitor, to Pandemonium, straining his eyes to make out the details. It was hard to see. Angry white light rippled across its surface casting jagged shadows but the station was dark, no lights gleamed from its windows.
Power loss.
The implications were terrifying. If there was no power for the shields Pandemonium would be at the mercy of Hell's radiation. Nobody could survive that for long.
If there was no power for the propulsion units the station wouldn't be able to execute the constant adjustments needed to keep it on Graeme's safe pathway. But then if there was no power Pandemonium's main computer would be off, it wouldn't be able to calculate the corrections let alone implement them. Pandemonium would slip off the pathway and be torn apart. It could happen at any moment.
Without Pandemonium and its instruments there could be no data transmitted to their ship. It would be impossible for them to navigate without it. They'd lose the path and be obliterated.
And if there was power there was still the communication's interference. So, even if the information was available it would never reach them. Or, if it did, it would be so garbled it would be useless.
He stared at Pandemonium in numbed horror. They had to get out of Hell now. Every second's delay increased the chance they'd be destroyed.
'Mr Fenton.'
His head jerked back. Brozmam and Javer were looking at him, their faces emotionless and unreadable. Then Brozmam smiled his humourless, thin-lipped smile. His voice, as always, was precise and measured.
'We're all going for a short walk.'