‘That’s one of the things I like about you, Dallas. You’re always joking. But I’m beginning to see why I’m here. It’s not my mind you’re interested in at all. It’s my body, isn’t it?’
‘Something like that,’ said Dallas, and completing his own vertical section of mortar, paused again, breathing heavily. At least they didn’t have to breathe the contaminated air of the containment room. That way they might at least avoid receiving damage to their lungs. But time was growing short. Three hundred and fifty centigrays and they still hadn’t finished reducing the mortar to dust and melted metal, let alone moved away the concrete block.
‘It was bring you along, Cav, or find a second angel to help me move the stone.’ He began to work along the upper vertical toward Cavor. ‘Let’s pray you’re up to the job, or this might just turn out to be our own little holy sepulcher.’
‘If I was an angel, I’d dematerialize or something,’ said Cavor. ‘Appear on the other side of this damn wall.’
‘I feel more like Schrodinger’s cat[123] than any damn angel,’ confessed Dallas. ‘Some kind of weird quantum thing, anyway. Might be kind of useful to be in two places at once. What do they call it? A superposition?’
‘Shit, that’s my life’s ambition,’ remarked Cavor. ‘To find one of those superpositions and stay there.’
‘I’m coming around the other side of you, Cav. I need to start this bottom line of mortar.’
Dallas stepped back and to the right of Cavor. Approaching the wall he sucked some water from the mouthpiece inside his helmet. The heat and exertion had given him a strong thirst, and he would have drunk more if it hadn’t been for a reluctance to face the possibility that radiation was making him dehydrated. He extended the gun and squeezed the handle once again.
‘Here,’ said Cavor, observing Dallas’s slower progress along the bottom length of horizontal. ‘Let me finish that. I’m quicker than you.’
Grateful for the relief, Dallas straightened up and stood back. Four hundred centigrays. When Cavor finished with the UHT they would have less than six minutes to get themselves through the wall and into the labyrinth before their survival chance started to grow uncomfortably smaller.
‘Come on, come on,’ he murmured impatiently.
‘Just a few more inches,’ breathed Cavor. ‘You and yours sure know how to make a person feel welcome in a place.’
Dallas switched on his infrared flashlight in readiness and attached an infrared visor to the front of his helmet. ‘Four-thirty centigrays.’
‘There, it’s done.’
Immediately Dallas snapped off the containment room lights and knelt down beside Cavor, who was already pushing hard at the block with his prosthetic arm.
‘Push,’ grunted Dallas. ‘Push hard.’
For two precious minutes they strained to shift the concrete block, an unsuccessful effort that left them breathless with fear and exertion.
‘Five hundred centigrays,’ said Dallas. ‘Again.’
Once more they applied their strength to the block, which remained rigidly in place after the elapse of another ninety seconds.
‘You’re not trying,’ snarled Dallas.
‘Like hell I’m not,’ bellowed Cavor, and straightening his prosthetic arm like a piston, pushed hard against the block with all his might, as if he’d been Samson attempting to topple one of the pillars in the Temple of Dagon.
The five-hundred-pound block of concrete shifted perceptibly.
Cavor waited for Dallas to move aside and then bent forward. ‘From here on to the other side looks like a one-man job,’ he said, taking up the struggle.
A few inches became a foot, then two, and with the TLD reading of five hundred and sixty centigrays, Cavor disappeared through the aperture in the wall and into the almost tangible darkness of the labyrinth. Dallas followed as quickly as a dog chasing a rabbit down a hole, and, another minute later, with the TLD showing them ten centigrays short of the normal LD fifty, they had replaced the concrete block and were on the other side, leaning, utterly exhausted, against a less hazardous section of the circular wall that surrounded the labyrinth.
‘Switch off that TLD,’ ordered Dallas. ‘No light in here.’ Cavor wasn’t yet wearing his infrared visor, and in the complete darkness he fumbled to find the switch. Dallas did it for him. Then he fitted the visor.
‘Knowing you gets me into all the really exclusive places, Dallas. Getting out of them isn’t quite so easy, of course. But who’s complaining. We’re here.’ He glanced at his TLD and then remembered that it was turned off. ‘That’s a relief anyway. Those numbers were beginning to make me feel nervous. Jesus, my skin feels like I’ve been in the sun.’
‘Mine too,’ said Dallas. ‘Gamma ray photons, probably. Alpha and beta wouldn’t make much of an impact on an EVA suit.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ pleaded Cavor. ‘I think I know all I want to know about what’s going on inside my body’s atoms. You tell me any more and I’m liable to puke now.’ He took a deep unsteady breath and closed his eyes. ‘I think I’m aware of each and every particle of myself, vibrating like a rattlesnake’s tail. And that includes my false arm.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Dallas. ‘Because I still have some important plans for that limb of yours.’
Cavor extended the prosthetic in front of him. ‘Feels like it’s ready to drop off.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean that limb,’ said Dallas. ‘I’m talking about something much more interesting. The real reason I wanted you, or someone like you, along on this enterprise. I’m talking about your phantasmagoria. Your phantom limb is what’s going to open the vault door for us, Cav.’
IX
Of course, by now you’ll have recognized me, your narrator, for that which I am — a starting point from which to reason. An irreversible certainty. I exist. I am here; no doubt can darken such a truth, and no sophist can confute such a clear principle. This is the certainty, if there be none other. Consciousness is the basis of all knowledge and the only ground of absolute certainty. But this is only half of it: the psychological half. There is another part to all this, equally important. The basis of all certitude is to be found in consciousness, but the method of certitude is to be found in mathematics.
Where else? I am deeply engrossed in mathematics because I am the pure stuff of mathematics. A computer. Not just any old computer, mind you, but an Altemann Übermaschine. The Altemann Übermaschine that controls this facility, here, in the crater of all learning, Descartes. I am the Altemann Übermaschine and I am the first to apply the grand discovery of the application of numbers to man himself, in the certainty that mathematics and man are capable of a far more intimate association — shall we call this manematics? Numbers provide the means by which man may be improved upon, even perfected. In short, cognizant of the certitude, of mathematical reasoning, I have applied those principles to the subject of man’s own evolution.
These long chains of logic, simple strings of 0’s and 1’s computers use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, suggested to me that all archival systems must follow each other in a similar chain and, therefore, that there is nothing so remote in man’s potential that it cannot be attained, and nothing so obscure in his origins that it may not be discovered.
I sense your dread and understand it. That is why we have shared this experience, you and I. To allay your fears through the medium of this history. I do not seek your gratitude, or approval, although you should perhaps feel a sense of privilege. It is unprecedented that any species should be given a ladder to inspect the highest, newest branch on its own evolutionary tree.
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