Copyright

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

Copyright © 1966 by John Rankine

A Golden Apple Production 2003

Cover design by John R. Mason

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ISBN: 1-904073-42-5

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Copyright

About

Pattern as Set

Pattern as Set

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

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Pattern as Set

Mark Bowden was spending more and more time simply standing in the short, white corridor which ended in the sealed hatch of the thermal control block. Twelve months’ solitary confinement was coming to an end, and in spite of all the training and the ample provision of every kind of substitute to fill the social vacuum, he was good and ready to hear another human voice coming across live, and see other human flesh in 3D. Particularly that. Particularly so, since his relief was Dena Holland.

There, indeed, was other human flesh with a bonus. Whatever else he turned his mind to, it swung back like a compass needle to the immovable magnetic pole of Dena’s many-sided attraction. Now he was seeing again the leave they had spent between the last training session and the final commissioning of Cyborax. Six days on the island reserved for research personnel with only the most tactful and unobtrusive supervision. If the medical people were doing a calorie count and if the isometric drills were still in the daily programme, it was possible not to notice and to believe that they were normal and alone.

Swimming in the gin-clear water of the harbour. Walking on springy turf across the headland. Sun all the time, burning pictures of Dena into his brain, like the etching fluid on a lithographic plate. Silky, red gold hair, which turned into a dark copper sheath when it was wet, emphasising the modelling of her head with its classically satisfying balance of proportion. Beneath it all, the indefinable feeling that he had known her before, always known her and that their meeting was only recognition.

The overriding, lasting impression was of a smiling face. Smiling in a way which was more than the common social rictus. Even during the recurrent checking sessions she would be smiling, minimising it, taking its sting. At night, ‘en bonne maitresse, grave et serieux’, there would still be an underlying smile.

But he had to close his mind to that. He walked rapidly back into the quiet control centre and did the routine checks on the presentation panel of the computer bank. For such a massive ship as Cyborax, it was not a big room. In the centre, gymbol mounted, a single acceleration couch for the pilot and a concentration of miniature duplicates of the individual consoles. For take-off, one man controlled everything. Three other couches were folded back, ready to take the chief executives of power, navigation and communications during the long distant period of landfall.

In spite of his rapid movements and surface attention to what he was doing, Mark Bowden could not exorcise his pleasant ghost. It was a classic case, he realised, of motivation. He could tell his mind what it ought to be doing and flog it along the path; but what it wanted to do was to be still and consider a picture of Dena which had come up. Sitting up out of his arms, pale brown skin, satin smooth, velvet soft, slightly salt to his lip, moving down from the curve of the shoulder. He forced his mind away and went on.

The sidereal plot showed nothing new. Changes were slow. For a long time it had presented basically the same star clusters. A kind of luminous expectancy on the far northern perimeter, global-wise, showed that something was due to come into vision from that quarter. It would be something big to be heralded that way. Dena would see it. He checked himself. There it was again. Everything related itself to her. It was just as well there was less than twenty-four hours to go.

He went round the individual consoles and confirmed that readings were normal. The enterprise was in good shape. Speed approaching the maximum, course right, data being processed, recorded, digested, fed back into the robot navigators.

The black polished screen above the navigation desk was blank. He threw a key to bring in scanning eyes in the outer sheath, for a picture of the outside of the ship, a diurnal check. Visual inspection for meteoritic damage. There had been none yet; but any second could bring the statistically unlikely accident, which would send him on through the prescribed sequence of repair drills.

Waiting for the screen to fill, he found himself staring fixedly at his own reflection. Long oblong face, high forehead, shaven head. Body hair was a casualty in the cause of clinically sterile surfaces for the long years in thermal control. He had kept it that way because in any case it would have to come off when he went back. Dena would be the same. He had not faced that with any realism.

He concentrated, to see his own face instead of hers in the black mirror. An intelligent face. Calm and controlled. A complete mask for the ceaseless flow of introspection. That presumably was so for everyone. I think, therefore I am. Grey eyes, wide apart. Mouth set now in a thin line. Age, when it was allowed, would make a right rat trap out of that feature.

Then the outlines of the ship began to form and he had something else to do. Cone first, slowly round to the starboard quarter: port to the same point symmetrically; gleaming surfaces unmarked. Two aerial stubs showed up and he activated the gear. Slim antennae extended and retracted in perfect order.

As the range extended, a line of blank ports came into view: the thermal control block. He had already worked it out that Dena must be behind the fourth port in the lower bank. A new thought went ahead to the next changeover.

So far, he had not seen beyond their own meeting; the time now coming up, when the automatic awakening process would start and the refrigerated pack would be delivered to the resurrection bay. Then Dena would come out. Honeycomb foam plastic dropping away as she broke free, rebirth of Venus, new style.

After a day or so she would be fully recovered, then they would have about five days together before he was due to go into cold storage himself. Now he began to think of the remote end of her tour of duty. She would wait for and welcome Stoddard, the number one navigation executive.

That was not good. Not good at all. Stoddard would also have the job of preparing her for refrigeration. He stuck there, considering the angles. Damn Stoddard, he would take every chance he could get. Bowden found himself struggling to suppress a rising anger. This was stupid.

They were professional people; the cream of the cream of the advanced society that had sent them on this mission. Here he was bringing it all down to the absurd level of primitive sex jealousy.

It would not go away. Perhaps he should stay out of the thermal control the whole year with Dena? Then Stoddard could put them both away together. But even whilst his mind toyed with this, he knew perfectly well that it could not be done.

The mission was a finely calculated thing. Food reserves for the one hundred year round trip were reckoned on the assumption that only one crew member would be awake at a time. Altering the scale of consumption could throw out a number of interlocking factors. Progressive weight reduction for one. Oxygen consumption. Water from the fuel cells only accumulated fast enough to supply one person for any length of time. Big reserves would be needed for the middle phase, when all were awake and success or failure might hinge on logistics.

So the pattern as set had to be preserved. Cyborax had left the pad with twenty-four of its twenty-five personnel in deep freeze. Each year, the computer controlled machinery with micro-metric accuracy would deliver one man or woman to the resurrection bay, the incumbent would surrender the keys of the kingdom and take the vacant slot. They had been rehearsed in the drill and during training each had experienced the suspended animation. It worked.

From his point of view, it had seemed like a brief hiatus when Reg Golding had leaned over the box and clapped his ham hands in noisy welcome, helping to scrape off the remnants of foam packaging, saying, “Out of it Mark, boy. Who’ve you got in there, eh?”

In the twenty-four years he had not aged or changed. He had felt unsteady for an hour, as though his balance was impaired; granules frozen solid in the gravy of the semi-circular canals. But then it had worn off and he felt fine.

Golding had been glad to take his place. He had said, “If ever this is done again, Mark, we should insist on joint watch details. Training is no kind of preparation for this. However rigorous the schedules are made, you can’t fool the subconscious; the cunning wee bastard knows that it isn’t for real and that there’s buttered crumpet waiting in the parlour. But this is something else. Here, you dredge right down into the why and wherefore. Keep the tapes going. Don’t be too long silent.”

When he was ready for urn burial, he had some difficulty in swallowing down the heavy, viscous liquid which protected internal tissue and contained a knock-out drop to ease the journey into the ice. When it was done he said thickly, “It reminds me of the old story about the hypochondriac type who sent for the quack because she couldn’t enjoy her food. When he asked what she had eaten for her last meal, she said, ‘I managed to get a little rabbit down.’ And he said,” Reg’s voice was slurring now; but he was grinning like a madman at the denouement, which he was trying to achieve. “He said, ‘Then, madam, you don’t need a doctor. What you need … what you need is a bloody ferret’.”

He finished it in a hoarse whisper and was still grinning when the cold set him that way.

Thinking about Reg had improved his temper; but there was a residue of nagging doubt which would take some moving. Fortunately, thought stopped in the cold store or it would have been unendurable. A quarter of a century immured in a solid block, with impotent jealousy corroding like vitriol from inside! Even laughter would have had its danger. Reg there trying to finish his laugh off would be a raving lunatic when next circulated.

Mark Bowden found he was looking at the screen without seeing it and went back over the last scan. It showed a long oblong. From the periscope housing, with its flared heat shield, to the base of the two starboard thrust tubes. Nothing remarkable, but something had broken his train of thought and re-directed his attention. He looked again. This time he saw what it could have been. An area about the diameter of a tennis ball, a metre in from the tubes. Discolouration? Or something more?

He steadied magnification. When the area was plate size, there was no longer any doubt, a small hole was surrounded by a dark, blue-violet penumbra where the surface had suffered chemical change.

In some ways, he was glad of the action. Getting out the excursion module and making the repair would take several hours. It would pass the time. A filled interval was subjectively shorter than an unfilled one and here, at least, the only clock was subjective.

Below the cone, a section of heat shield retracted to make an exit hatch for the module. Getting into the cramped semi-robot was a lengthy chore in itself. It was also a further diminution of personality, a surrender of another part of the self. The heavy ovoid was powered for extensive reconnaissance on every kind of inhospitable surface. Tethered on an extending cable, it could trundle its way round the superstructure by surface adhesion and use its four flexible grabs to fine limits of workmanship.

Mark Bowden had used it on training sessions, but never before to make a repair. He found that he was now using it without much sympathy and some of his usually meticulous skill with things mechanical had deserted him. On the first run down he overshot the mark. The slope of the rocket tube cowling launched him out and the module went off at a tangent to the full extent of its tether.

Cyborax from outside looked unreal against a deep, violet backdrop. A stationary silver tank, going nowhere. Metaphysical speculation stopped when the slow turn of the hull brought the thermal control block ports into vision. Dena was in there; not long now, before he would see her again. Better get on with this job. It would be too bad if there was no one to welcome her. Could be dangerous too, to waken into a silent world without another human being.

The casual gyration had already wound his chain once round the hull. He did some rapid calculation and fired a tiny rocket to give the ovoid working speed. Then he steered it round the ship, cleared the chain, wound back and started again. That was the first of six attempts before he was finally located over the hole and tackling the repair.

Time meant nothing. Even natural appetite was dulled so that no inner compulsion counted towards a meal time. Indeed, training had already done a good deal to blanket out that kind of personal clock. It was arguable that there was more psychological dislocation in this than the head shrinkers had allowed for. Anyway he had defeated the ploy by having a ticking clock of another kind. The year of vigil had been so many seconds, minutes, hours, days until Dena came out. And the time was almost up.

One patch was lost. It took off with enough acceleration to take it skimming out of sight. The second was a success and he buffed the finished surface until it was lost in uniform tone with the rest. Then he hauled in and sank the module into its niche.

Time was running out. But there was no change in the control centre. It could be a meal time. He decided to wait and began to collect items for a celebratory reunion dinner; rummaging through the manifest to see what recherché dishes were still on the menu. Basic foods were reconstituted from staples and the foundation of all was the quick growing protein grass in the hydroponic tanks; but one or two luxury stores had been taken along. When it was assembled with a tall bottle in the centre it looked quite impressive.

He remembered meals on the terrace of the hotel, built out from the cliff face. Incredible sunsets, with Dena’s hair meeting a rival in the red-gold light. This time, there would only be the clinical, harsh, white light of the wardroom. Perhaps he could dim it down? She would say with Jessica, “What, must I hold a candle to my shames?” She might even feel herself to be grotesque.

A warning ping from the control centre drew him back there to stand in front of the computer bank.

The time had come as it always did in the end. The one certainty in an uncertain universe; the only truly inexorable thing. Whatever you did to mitigate it, or hold back the process it always caught up with you in the end; the slow bleeding away of the self. Only man carried his own bomb.

This time, anyway, had come, and the end of the week would come just as surely and the end of the year that left her with Stoddard. Dials showed the process begun. Thermal activity was being pumped in at the rhythm of a beating heart. Soon now, she would be stirring in the light foam.

Checking a rising excitement, he went round the consoles with particular attention to power. All was well. Dead on course for the immensely distant objective. Whispering mercury ion engines pushing out their tireless thrust which had accelerated them to half the speed of light. Communications, processing, sifting and collating data to feed it in pre-digested titbits to the master mind.

Then he gave up all pretence of being a professional engineer and thankfully allowed his mind, without reservation, to go over to waiting for the girl. He went into the corridor and looked into the reception bay. That was all right. Less than ten minutes to go. Check the table again. Clothing? How stupid, of course she would want the pleasure of wearing something even though there was little necessity temperature wise.

He went to the narrow locker room where each crew member had five cubic feet of storage space. Small dance steps, to a rhythm that was beating in his head, fitted in with his movements and he thumped on each panel as he checked off the names; double taps as he read off the name, DENA HOLLAND: COMMUNICATIONS.

Lightweight robe, pale, translucent blue-green; white sandals. She could get anything else herself. Music. He had a microtape ready and keyed it in. Chocolate box stuff, but right for his mood. Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, a prime statement of nostalgia. The theme of the star-crossed lovers would be just about belting out when she came through the hatch.

Nothing to do but wait like a Turkish bath attendant. Temperature coming up into the eighties. Physiological data should be registering any time now. Each storage box had multiple connections with the control console, with leads going back to the frozen tenant for a blow-by-blow record of the score.

No heart beat yet. A few more degrees. Brain currents, not registering. Temperature pulsed itself over the ninety. Now surely? The presentation panel responded to his query and a new set of dials came in. It had estimated the unusual pattern of the subject’s responses and was introducing emergency measures. A powerful stimulant was prepared for injection. Temperature steadied at ninety-eight. Respiration nil. Heart nil. Brain nil.

He went at a run to the delivery bay. The robot could do no more. It had started the delivery sequence so that its charge could be handled by its peers.

Cor anglais and muted violas were introducing the first of the lyric themes when the white oblong slid out in its cremation in reverse. Momentarily, she was as he had expected she would be. A pale sculptured form lying on a bank of pink tissue. He had cleared the torso to the waist when it began to collapse. It melted away; withered away; shrank as a snow figure would disappear in front of a furnace door, until what was left was horrible, obscene, a twisted, atrocious caricature of a human being.

He had gone ice cold himself. Moving like a zombie, he went back to the control centre and began the emergency drill. God knew what contamination this would release into the ship. He passed the box to a disposal bay, where it was baked biologically clean, its contents incinerated and expelled as a flurry of dust.

The music had come to its heart-stopping halt and now began its sombre epilogue with reminiscence of earlier themes. It had not been a bad choice at that. He snapped it off and tried to think. There was no doubt what he would have to do: override the time selector and dig out Stoddard. A salutary shock for that one. He wouldn’t be expecting … but of course he wouldn’t be expecting anything, except at the last moment when the brain took up where it had left off and recreated the state of mind of twenty-three years back. But with Stoddard you could bet it would be a lecherous state of mind at that.

Using manual gear, which shortened the chain of events, he had the next box set up for delivery in five minutes flat. Then he gave the robot gear its head. It was routine. He went into the corridor and felt the flimsy robe against his ankles. He wouldn’t like Stoddard to make any crack about that; so he quickly took it and the sandals back to her locker.

Once again it was time. Heat at ninety-four and no joy on any dial. Panic seized him and he ran backwards and forwards from the bay to the control panel, hammering with clenched fists on the motionless gauges, shouting, “Move, you stupid bastards, move!”

When the box came out, he knew it would be no good. For the record, he forced himself to look. Then he was back, sending the mess through the decontamination routine.

After that, he worked in a kind of bitter fury. Box after box. A macabre, compulsive ritual. Already he knew how it would be. There was a hold-up at the tenth. Warning came up that a period of rest would be required for the disposal bay to replenish itself. He had worked through a sleep period, but he could not sleep. He took some food and a long drink. Then set to work to see it through to its inescapable end.

As he went through the list and the times of incarceration shortened, he began to hope that there would be one at least to come out alive. Surely, Reg would have made it; but Reg Golding’s contorted grin lasted only five seconds before the flesh fell away.

At first, Mark Bowden only thought of which way out to go. He could take refrigeration himself and leave Cyborax to get on with it. Or he could change course and send his prison into the nearest asteroid. Open the hatches; fire it like a longship on a different ocean. He was not thinking systematically at all. Wandering all over the ship, he stared out of the ports without seeing the little there was, time and again finding himself back at the control centre.

Slowly, he became very angry. Angry at the unchanging scan on the stellar display. Angry at the error, whatever it was, that had moled and sapped their careful enterprise. A quarter century to go, before the planned landfall and a doubtful thing whether one man could carry out the manoeuvres to do it. But twenty-five years was a long time; he could perhaps work something out in that time. Even the take-off was not impossible; but he could not expect to survive the trip back. But he might set Cyborax on its way and leave a robot call going which would alert an Earth-based reception unit.

Why bother? What did it now matter? A tide of impotent fury against the facts of the situation, slow moving, like the circulation of lymph swamped out the question. It mattered because it mattered because it mattered. The indefinable feeling of but. It was up to him to make their deaths meaningful. They had accepted this mission with knowledge of the uncertainty of ever seeing it through. Unless each one was prepared to take it on to the limit of endurance, it diminished the rest, made a nonsense of their lives to this point. Doubt had a recrudescence. Suppose it was, indeed, a nonsense, an illusion, nothing real outside the consciousness of self?

But he knew that was false; because of Dena. They had established the possibility of communication. They had ended that isolation for each other. Not to have the refreshment of renewing that bond would take some endurance through the years. He drowned out the ‘why’ of it which was beating at his brain by shouting it for himself in the echo chamber of the silent ship.

“I believe in mankind; in form; in the possibility of organising the environment in a coherent pattern of beauty. I believe in purpose. I believe in purpose until I am not here to believe in anything. I believe in belief as a fact of life.”

He was hammering it with clenched fists on the blank panel of the thermal control block hatch.

Consciousness of hands holding him came slowly. From a long way off, a voice, concerned, anxious for him, saying, “Steady now, steady Mr. Bowden. Quietly, please Mr. Bowden.” Out of the darkness, a face leaning towards him. A nurse, and behind her the white, clinical setting of the therapy ward into which he had been carried from the huge mock-up version of Cyborax in the psychometric lab.

Immense relief flooded his mind, consciousness of some great danger averted; something hardly to be borne no longer threatening him. He remembered now that he had been isolated in the training ship for his last tests. Beyond that he knew nothing.

Senior Controller Wells tapped the folder, lying in front of him on the oval table. “That ties it up then. Training schedules complete for all personnel. Are you ready to give the all clear on this operation?”

There was silence for a long minute. Breaking it, the speaker weighed his words carefully and seemed hesitant. An elderly man, grey, round shouldered, a veteran of many committees and many chair-borne enterprises. “The details are very satisfactory, Chairman. Your department deserves every congratulation. I believe we could give it clearance. One medical report interested me. An engineer, I think. Bowden. Mark Bowden.”

He leafed through his pile of documents and fished out the one he wanted. “Here it is. I suppose you are satisfied that this man is quite stable? On his final extended flight simulation session, he was under the illusion that the mechanism had failed in some way.”

“That is true, Sir Andrew ; but the psychologists were more than satisfied with his reaction to what he believed had happened. You will see that he faced the crisis and decided to go on alone. He was also concerned about the welfare of the other men and particularly about the man who was to relieve him. On the main count, the object of the exercise, as you might say, he behaved with complete reliability. He operated the exchange mechanism twenty-four times without error and went through the drill of making a repair. Nor did he miss one of the routine inspections. No, we are very pleased with Bowden, he will certainly be one of the crew.”

“How is his will to undertake the mission affected?”

“Not at all. This investigation was at a very deep level. Almost like a samhadic state of trance. He does not remember anything at all about it.”

“How long is the ‘samhadic’ state maintained?”

“Three days; but subjectively this would appear to be a much longer period. Suggestion was constantly fed in. He would react as if a full year had passed. Each man, of course, has gone through this process. Now they are ready to go.”

“How long will that readiness be maintained?”

“Up to six months; but the sooner the better. As you see, I have set a provisional date-line ten days from now. This is what I am asking the committee to approve.”

“I realise that, Chairman. However, I still think we should have included some women in the team. Three at least. There is time, on your own admission, to make that adjustment.”

“But not to train them.” Wells was beginning to feel exasperation building up. This was always the way of it. The only good committee was a committee of two, with one kept away by multiple injuries. He worked hard to keep his feelings out of his voice and asked flatly, “Are you making a formal proposition on those lines?”

Sir Andrew was too old a debater to be brought to an open challenge before he was ready. He said, “Southern Hemisphere Space Corporation had a similar research project which has not been finalised; but a great deal of training has gone on. Some of their personnel might be used. It would only postpone matters for a few weeks at most. The gain might be very great.”

Wells looked round and recognised, wearily, that the man would make his point. Quick agreement now, and some decision taken would save time in the long run. “Very well, Sir Andrew, if that is what the executive wants, it can certainly be done. Will you leave the choice of personnel to me or do you want a further meeting on that?”

“Those details are your province, Chairman. I, for one, will be quite happy to leave it to you.”

In the event, it was eight days only, before the selected additions stepped out of the cooling, inter-continental shuttle. A tender, with one of the project personnel, was waiting to meet them. Tall with a well-shaped, close-cropped head, wide apart grey eyes, which opened with something like puzzled recognition at the first of the newcomers.

She was used to making an impression. Red-gold hair swung elastically as she came forward with hand outstretched. “Holland, Dena Holland. This is a wonderful thing. Our own project was cancelled you know. We are privileged to share this venture with you.”

Mark Bowden relegated his bewilderment to the anterooms of his mind. One thing was for sure, it was like meeting another part of himself. It set a seal of perfection on the mission. Nothing could now keep him out of Cyborax. He said simply, “The privilege is all on our side. You are very welcome.”

When their hands touched, her eyes told him that the same kind of half recognition was present in her mind. They both knew that this would be a numinous thing for them and that the interlude, which was beginning, was in some way a unique dispensation of special time.