"Certainly, why not?" smiled Radwick, clomping a design with his
blocks. He made the carbon ring to symbolize life and an energy formula
to symbolize the machine. "It's only in people's minds that there is a
clean break between organic and non-organic. Machines have a youth, old
age and death; so do people. They are really interchangeable...."
"I don't like the idea of traveling in the stomach of some
space-monster," I babbled. "He might get the idea to digest us."
"Stomach-bummick," said Radwick. "This cabin could just as easily be an
ear or the inside of an eye. Only the ship isn't organic in that way.
It's just partly organic and partly not which may be expressed--"
He fell silent, throwing the blocks around. Suddenly I heard a bell. It
consisted of four mellow tones struck at regular intervals.
"What's that?"
"Ideal sound," he said. "You'll have to get used to that too. It's
another concept that we don't have back on earth."
"What's ideal about ringing a dinner bell?"
Radwick shrugged. "It's just a discontinuity to us. The Stardust people
write off our fashions in clothing as a discontinuity in reasoning that
they don't understand. We must write off theirs." He smiled briefly.
"You'll come to write off a great many things, young man."
I didn't tell him I thought the bells were far from ideal. They didn't
have any place to come from, and for the first time I felt a fear of
the unknown. Radwick sat there unperturbed trying to fashion some
concept, probably of the bells, with his blocks. The earthmen finished
servicing and came in to make arrangements for a rendezvous with us
some months from then.
"First time out?" the Captain asked me.
"Yessir," I said, trying to look fearless.
He sighed. "Watch out for the Ideals," he said. "The first time's the
hardest." His crew stood behind him looking at me like they would look
at a condemned man about to take his place in the electric chair.
"Well, all happiness," he said, giving a distasteful glance at the
absorbed Radwick.
"All happiness," I managed and they left us alone in space with ringing
bells and the red space ship that had the disconcerting habit of
sighing once in a while or shifting its wall structure in a stretch
that was so human you felt like apologizing for being inside it.
* * * * *
We were out in four light year space. In the big Empty between our
solar system and the next. We had passed through two magnetic fields,
and already I wasn't the same, but Radwick had laughed.
"Pleasure and pain," he said. "As common as an old shoe on a vacant
lot. Why get corked over a little thing like that?"
It helped. It helped a lot to see him twisting and writhing on his
bunk, the same as I was, only with the big red encyclopedia on his
face as he pretended to read in indifference. We were in the painful
magnetic field for about eight hours and I cried and cursed and prayed
and laughed in horror and sweated a bucket. The reaction was worse. My
frayed nerves temporarily gave out and I tried to walk through the wall
of the space ship into the dining room of the Thousand Lights back in
New York.
Shortly after that we hit the pleasure field. Those precious moments
lasted for the same time as the painful sensations, but after that
earth seemed like a cemetery of the dead. I mewed like a stroked kitten
and Radwick kept putting down his encyclopedia and laughing in goofy
happiness. It was silly; it was wonderful; it made me so glad to have a
human body that I wanted to cry.
These magnetic fields were behind us now and I was staring at the
outside emptiness apprehensively.
"Radwick, look--" I gasped.
I had been watching a point of light in the distance. It broke on us
swiftly with dazzling power. The magnitudes of light were so powerful
that I had to turn the screen down to its darkest level.
Out there was what looked like the true Choir of Heaven. Rank on
rank of singing, human faces, spiraling upward. Tensions of mighty
humanistic fire glowed from the banked, singing faces. The hymn was
obscure but it was faintly religious and very stirring. Now we were
winging down a long corridor in space banked on either side by a myriad
shining, dedicated human faces, pouring out glory with solemn deep-soul
singing. The celestial organ effect made the whole ship vibrate and
made Radwick's blocks jump on the table like animated poker chips.
We were traveling towards a throne of golden light. In the midst of
the throne was a blinding brilliance that was our goal. Now the vision
closed in and the entire power of light and sound blasted into my
deepest marrow. Even when I closed my eyes I could see the faces; my
plugged ears yielded to the lifting sound.
Radwick was holding out a can of pork and beans towards me.
"Yesterday we had chili for supper," he shouted. "How's about beans
tonight--or shall I open a canned steak?"
"Man," I yelled, pointing helplessly to the overpowering vision. "Man--"
I have never been particularly religious because it doesn't help in
space. But for anybody that goes by the Book, this was Paradise in
white and gold technicolor. I was ready to subscribe my salary to the
cause and give up my life of sin in those seconds.
At the moment we came to the celestial throne, Radwick was scrounging
in the kitchen drawer trying to find another can-opener to replace the
one I'd bent.
We shot past the throne and into emptiness again. I mopped my brow and
peered back, exalted by the vision but glad that I was only seeing
things.
Only the Choir was still there and the throne, receding in the
distance. We were on the back side of it now.
"How about that?" I croaked weakly to Radwick. "How about that?"
"Oh, it's real all right," said Radwick evenly. He took a hatchet to
the can of beans and burst it open. "You can join up with the hymnals
if you want. Step right outside the ship and fall into rank. Heaven by
any definition. The company's lost plenty of spacemen there. Chance to
become immortal, you know. I suspect that the Choir's time is infinity
and past; present and future would cease to exist for you. Your body
would wither away and you'd become an essence, still with a vague
sense of your old name and address but totally wrapped up in the glory
hallelujah and the singing. On the whole, not a bad place to spend the
rest of eternity."
"Immortality," I breathed. "But--why--"
"According to the law of discontinuity," said Radwick, "the basic
assumptions which make its existence impossible are wrong. In other
words, we don't believe it could happen because of the known physical
facts of the human body and the known facts of space. But if any step
of reasoning along the way is wrong, then it could exist. So one link
in our reasoning is wrong--and it exists."
I didn't get that and he sat down with his half of the can of beans and
tried to explain it to me with his semantics blocks.
* * * * *
I remember arguing the point of meaning and insanity with Radwick while
we were passing through the layers of time. The ship would give a jerk
each time we cut into a new strip in the piled-up layers. First we
would be in our own time which Radwick called white time. Then we would
bump over into blue time and there was a pervading sense of oddness
while our eyes adjusted to a new system of angles which made everything
look like a parallelogram in shape. In blue time our drinking water was
a rubbery chunk of blue stuff and the solid walls of our ship shimmered
into opaque, running liquid that forever eddied and whirled and yet
never drained away. You could put your hand into it and feel the walls
splash and splatter like water. But our hands, and indeed, our whole
bodies shifted in gaseous uncertainty, both Radwick and I becoming
shapeless things of floating motion in a time where liquids were solid,
solids liquid, and organic matter gaseous. Together we expanded to
fill the cabin and I was fascinated by the shifts in form.
I felt the logical hammer strokes of Radwick's thinking. "You've heard
ideal sound that pleases the auditory nerves. You've experienced the
perfect tyranny of pain and pleasure. You've witnessed the extreme
wonder of spiritual Heaven--now, my friend, feel freedom. A perfect,
ideal freedom of mind and body and being that men who grub after
freedom will never know."
Then we broke back into white time and everything became normal.
"No wonder they go mad out here," I breathed.
"Mad?" said Radwick. "No, not over that. The more alien a sensation,
the less dangerous it is to sanity. With the unknown there is the fear
symptom, perhaps, but there is no identity with the alien. The things
that drive men crazy are the known, normal things which are just one
beat off. Things that ought to be normal but aren't."
"Like the Ideals."