Dawsett reported next morning that Smath was not to be found. The indications were that he and two other men, both known to be Sect Dualers, had left Terra in the early evening, Splendiss time. Dawsett noted that would place their departure shortly after Keaflyn had called the city's directory from Felston's clopter.
"That doubtless alerted them that their plan had gone wrong," the Emergencyman said. "Keaflyn was meant to die after regaining consciousness alone in the desert. That would place a second and dissimilar trauma on the one he was already loaded with, one in which they would not appear. Any involvement of them in his disappearance could thus be delayed until well into his next lifetime, and perhaps forever."
"Since they can't be punished, why did they bother to run?" asked Didorik.
"Oh, they would be punished, but not under any law," said Dawsett. "Society does not think highly of known breakers of the ethical code of man. They would be made to feel that disapproval. I presume they will establish themselves under aliases on one of the more distant planets."
"Won't their own feelings of guilt punish them?" asked Felston.
"Not while they feel they were justified," said Tinker. Keaflyn listened with what he hoped wasn't a sickly grin. The hard knot of hysterical merriment was still as solidly planted in the center of his being as it had been the previous day, but there was a difference: last night's physical ache had returned this morning to add to his feeling of disorientation.
He wished he could get rid of the ache, but the idea of seeing a doctor made him twitch inside. That was the last thing he wanted to do. So he said nothing about the ache. And if Tinker's expression showed that she, if none of the others, was aware of his increased distress, she was respectful enough of his privacy to say nothing about it.
"That appears to exhaust this caper's amusing possibilities," he said, "so if you gentlemen have no intention of confining me in the honored backtrack style of Bedlam, I'll take my leave."
Dawsett shrugged. "I have no objection."
"Tinker," Keaflyn said, turning to the little girl, "you know my present-life identity now. Call me if you need me."
She nodded. "Goodbye, Jack."
Felston said, "I'll give you a lift to your ship, pardner."
"Thanks."
The two men climbed out the wallport and into Felston's clopter. "Across town to the spaceport and to Mr. Keaflyn's ship," the cowpoke directed.
"Yes, sir," the machine replied, relinquishing its hold on the apartment building and lifting away.
"It's been great knowing you, Alo," smiled Keaflyn. "I didn't know there were any salt-of-the-earth types like you still around, much less punching cattle. Maybe cowpokes are a kind of stability and I ought to include you in my study of such things."
"I doubt it," said Felston. "Anyway, I'm not enough of a stability, personally, to stick with cowpoking. I got talked out of it after you went to sleep last night."
"Oh? Some scheme of Didorik's?"
"A scheme of Tinker's. She recruited me to work on this research project you suggested. It's a good idea, Mark."
"Great! But isn't it out of your line?"
"Not especially. This feel I have for beaten-down egofields can be augmented by psionics, she tells me. I'm to try to establish enough rapport with the egos of lower bodyforms to check them for ancient pleasure-imprints like yours. Maybe round up a few dozen experimental subjects."
"There used to be Earth animals called laughing hyenas," chuckled Keaflyn. "They may still be around. You might check them out. And I remember numerous dogs who always seemed to be grinning."
"We'll look at a variety of species," Felston assured him seriously. "It might be best if you stuck around, Mark. A guy in your condition oughtn't to be flitting around the galaxy by himself. Besides, we might need you for tests at any moment."
Keaflyn was silent for several seconds before replying, "Don't think my grin and that ball of hysteria inside me has turned off my mind, Alo. I understand my predicament well enough. Above all, I understand that my work with stabilities could be important. It's something I've been preparing for, more or less intuitively, for half a dozen lifetimes.
"I might have only this lifetime in which to carry it out, if I'm destined to join the lower animals in the near future. That gives me a sense of urgency I haven't felt for centuries, since the days when death was considered final.
"Maybe you and Tinker will find a cure for me, and maybe you won't," he finished. "If you don't, I've got a lot of work to do before I add a death trauma to my load. So I can't sit around playing guinea pig."
He glanced at Felston and found the cowpoke regarding him, for the first time, with respect instead of as if he were a sick cow. He laughed softly.
"I'll tell Tinker you said that," Felston told him. "It'll make the little girl feel better about you."
At the spaceport, Keaflyn said goodbye to Felston, boarded his ship Kelkontar, ordered it to lift off and set warp for the Bensor system.
Moments later he noticed the ache was gone from his body.
Morning sickness? he wondered with a giggle. Two days in a row he had awakened in physical pain. Yesterday it had lasted, apparently, until Smath installed the pleasure-impress. Today it had vanished once he was in the long-familiar surroundings of his own spacecraft.
It reminded him of the unpredictable manner in which headaches had come and gone back in the Earthbound days when total health and sanity were mere dreams instead of realities. Back when "the human condition" was equated with "quiet desperation"—or noisy desperation, more often than not.
Now that was his condition once more. Urgency. Haste. Desperation.
So why had he told his ship to warp for Bensor? He had no work to do, at this time, on his current birthworld. It must have been a desire, he guessed, to seek solace from his parents for distress.
"Kelly," he addressed his ship, "break that warp I gave you. Set a new one for Lumon's Star."
"Okay, Mark," the Kelkontar replied. Keaflyn felt the warp break and reset, and the ship reported, "We're now on course for Lumon's Star. Time of run: eighty-six hours, twenty-two minutes."
"Good. Now I'll get to work."
"Your notebooks, Mark?"
"No. Run me off a couple of lists. One on your library entries on Sect Dualers. The other on entries on contralife."
"Very well. Should I respond when you laugh, Mark?"
"No, don't bother. I'll be laughing a lot from now on. Just ignore it."
"Okay. The lists are ready."
Contralife (sometimes also called "Negs"): Hypothetical inhabitants of a universe that is the negative mirrorimage of the real cosmos. The contralife theory is an outgrowth of physiomathematical indications which in late Earthbound times were cited as evidence of the existence of "negative matter"—that is, of mass composed of atoms with negatively-charged nuclei surrounded by positron clouds instead of the normal positively-charged nuclei accompanied by electron clouds. However, while the negative components for such atoms were rather readily detectable, no complete negative atom, much less a mass of such atoms, has yet been observed. Nevertheless, theoretical considerations led to the proposal that an entire universe of contramatter must exist, as a "balance" for our own. Rigorous mathematical proofs, in fact, have shown a necessity for such a universe if the principles of conservation are applicable (as they seem to be) at the most basic levels of existence. These same proofs, rather ironically, rule out the possibility of either of these universes ever being observed in any manner from or by an entity of its counterpart.
Thus, the belief of certain investigators and others (see Sect Dualers) that the contrauniverse has living inhabitants appears eternally beyond proof pro or con. Despite currently accepted theory to the contrary, the Dualist assumption is that contralife not only exists, but has certain capabilities of impinging itself upon our universe.
Such reference summaries as this one told Keaflyn little that he did not already know. As a physicist he had a passing familiarity with the contrauniverse theory, although he had never made a study of the mathematical proofs of it. He considered doing so now but decided he lacked the power of concentration for that kind of work at the moment.
Instead, he viewed a book published by the Sect Dualers themselves, on how they conceived the nature of contralife.
They offered no description of the physical appearance of the Negs. As he read, Keaflyn got the impression of dark, formless entities, existing in equally dark, formless worlds. There was, he soon realized, a problem with visualization that the Sect Dualers, despite the efforts of their book to be convincingly positive, had never been able to solve.
How, in short, does one sum up all possible negative characteristics as they would presumably exist in a negative reality, and then visualize the result?
The substitution of darkness for light was a laughably trivial beginning. And what does one do about motion? The book offered no answer. Would the negative be no motion? Or would it be contramotion, and if so, what the hell was contramotion like?
Perhaps the Dualist thinkers assumed the nature of contramotion could be taken for granted as following logically from their concept of time reversal in the contrauniverse. The pertinent paragraphs on that subject said:
We of the normal cosmos experience time as a sequencing from a partially experienced, known, and recorded Past into a wholly speculative Future (the adjectives being applicable in the Present). This may be diagrammed:
P—F
Certain theorists have suggested the contrauniversal time flow would simply reverse this diagram:
F—P
That is, if we could observe events of the contrauniverse, we would see all cycles in reverse, entities moving from death to birth, actions generally progressing from effect to cause.
Certainly a time-reversal is involved, but if we accept a mere reversal in direction of flow, we accept a theory most mathematicians agree is not necessarily true and, worse, a theory that leads nowhere and explains nothing. Indeed, this theory would all but rule out impingement of Negs on normuniverse affairs: conflicting temporal energies would be too tremendous to permit any crossover. And as other sections of this volume make clear, the evidence for impingement is overwhelming.
Bearing in mind that the Past, P, represents that which entities have partially experienced, known, and recorded, and that the Future, F, represents that which is speculative, the contrauniversal sequencing is best diagrammed as F—P
That is, the time-vector parallels our own, but is nevertheless a flow from F, that which is speculative, toward P, that which is partially experienced, known, and recorded.
The concept of this sequencing is less difficult to visualize than one might immediately expect. One need only imagine himself riding in a groundcar and looking at the landscape ahead while giving scant thought to the scenes passed. Thus, the rider is experiencing, knowing, and recording what is to come as the car continues its forward motion. But his quick recall of scenes that he has passed and that he is making no special effort to remember, might well be uncertain and speculative. In any event, his visual sense presents to him, in the Present, what lies ahead, while there is no such presentation of what lies behind . . .
In other words, Keaflyn summed up for himself with delight, the Negs could foretell the future, since to them the future had the characteristics of our past. He wasn't ready to buy that F—P scheme; it smacked of sophistry to him. But if that was what the Sect Dualers wanted to believe . . .
He scanned the rest of the book, taking note of the "evidence" the Dualists offered for their beliefs. Items ranged from the expansion-contraction cycle of the universe to the point Felston had made about the unexplainable abundance of debased ego-fields in existence.
The Negs, according to the book, being our opposites, had goals the reverse of ours. Whereas we seek continued and augmented existence, they desire nonexistence. We seek to conquer the universe; they seek retreat from theirs into nothingness.
A basic postulate of Dualism was the old one, never substantially proven, that reality is as real as its associated ego-fields make it. Thought is senior to matter and energy and is probably the creator of matter and energy. If this were assumed, it followed that even without any crossovers, the Negs impinged on the normuniverse, and human activities impinged on theirs, because the universes must remain in balance. As intelligent normlife proceeded in its conquest of matter and energy and attainment of augmented existence, increasing the reality of the normuniverse in the process, so the Negs were forced, willy-nilly, away from their goals of retreat into nonbeing. Normlife marched forward and the universes expanded. Contralife gained superiority and the universes contracted.
This was the fundamental conflict of nature—a conflict beside which man's battle to win over the forces of normuniverse nature, as well as man's lengthy backtrack of inhumanity to man, shrank to secondary status.
For the Negs were no mean adversaries. Witness their achievement, never duplicated by normlife, of devising a means of crossing over so as to impinge directly on the ego-field of a key individual in crucial situations.
Is that supposed to be me? Keaflyn asked, making a mock mental curtsy to both universes. The key individual? What a good boy am I! But my Christmas pie is only eleven years old.
Evidently, the book continued, such impingements were made by the Neg ego attaching itself—or perhaps a projection of itself—to the human ego-field. Symptoms of such "possession" by a contrauniverse "demon" varied according to the state of the individual before possession occurred. In earlier times, when all ego-fields were burdened with backtrack traumas, the result was likely to be sudden insanity. But in the 29th Century, thanks to the development of track-scanning techniques that had brought freedom from trauma to man, an impingement was likely to produce nothing more than physical discomfort—the pain and unpleasant emotion that a healthy Neg would find desirable.
"Ha!" Keaflyn barked.
"Yes, Mark?" asked the ship.
"That was just a loud laugh, Kelly. Ignore it."
"Okay."
Maybe all this stuff was pure nonsense, Keaflyn reflected, but if Smath believed it, the explanation for what the doctor had done was clear. He had considered Keaflyn a key figure, singled out as such by the Negs, to be invaded and directed into certain actions by a Neg ego. He had then postulated that if Keaflyn were loaded with a pleasure-impress—which would be intense pain to the invader—the Neg ego would find continued impingement unendurable and would vacate. And not knowing how long Keaflyn would remain a key figure, Smath had made the impress so intense that it could not be lifted, in the present or any future lifetime.
Of course the joke was on Smath, Keaflyn decided. The pleasure-impress, after all, hadn't kept him from feeling sick again this morning. So, whatever his ailment was, it wasn't anything so fanciful as invasion by a Neg ego.
"Time for some lunch, Kelly," he said, turning off the viewer.
After eating he exercised for a while, then returned to the viewer to read with rapidly declining interest about the Sect Dualers. One thing he learned was that no religion was involved in the movement; they had been tagged with the word Sect by the public but referred to themselves simply as Dualists.
Also he learned that their membership was small. He figured it out to be an average of twelve Dualists per inhabited planet. Of course, the number would run higher on well-populated worlds such as Terra and Bensor.
But the Dualists were of little concern to him, he decided. He was not possessed by a Neg and had never been, as the recurrence of his physical discomfort after the pleasure-impressing demonstrated. If the Dualists interfered with him again, all he had to do was tell them so and they would leave him be.
They were, after all, rational people, like everyone else. They merely interpreted reality a bit differently than the majority of humanity.
Finally he told the ship to clear the viewer rack, had some supper, and climbed into his sleeptank.
He was roused some hours later by an alarm buzzer and the Kelkontar's persistent urging, "Wake up, Mark." He sat up. "What is it, Kelly?"
"We've been seized," the ship replied.