‘Not reach through,’ said Dallas. ‘Reach in. As I said, it’s all interior mechanism. There’s nothing on the other side of the door either.’
‘You mean, reach into the door itself?’
‘That’s right, Cav. Inside it’s actually a fairly conventional mechanism. Levers and precision gears. There’s a diagram on your computer. All you’ve got to do is reach inside the door and feel for those gears. Just as if you were a safecracker in an old movie. As a matter of fact, that’s where I got the idea. Only you won’t have to use a stethoscope to help you hear what’s happening inside, or a sheet of sandpaper to make your fingers more sensitive on the combination dial. You’ll be using the most sensitive safecracking tool in the human toolbox: the telekinetic power of your own brain.’
Dallas picked up Cavor’s real arm and helped him to access a diagram of the safe’s interior workings on his life-support computer.
‘Here we are,’ he said, locating the layout. ‘The Ambler Tageslicht SuperVault. A patent class 109 safe. Capable of repelling a missile, but incapable of defeating you, Cav. Those UHT guns wouldn’t make a mark on this. It’s made of heat-dissipating steel. The locking mechanism consists of six massive six-inch-diameter chrome-plated solid steel locking bolts, all individually chambered in titanium steel. The bolts operate independently of one another. Each bolt is electrically controlled by a separate gear that’s about the size of a melon, which, for all its size, is extremely easy to turn inside its own compartment. It has to be, to move bolts of these dimensions. All you have to do is place your hand on each one in turn and then roll them counterclockwise, the way you’d roll a basketball. When those six bolts are withdrawn, there’s still a continuous fixing locking bar that’s six feet long and about an inch and a half in diameter, and which is connected to the electrically operated hinges. As soon as you pull that out of the way, the door will open automatically.’ Dallas waited to see that Cavor had understood and then tapped him on the helmet.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like I ate something.’
‘Forget about it. Mind over matter. The brain generates the experience of the body, remember?’ Dallas steered Cavor toward the vault door and positioned him so that the shoulder bearing his false arm was pressed up against the smooth curving steel.
‘No, wait,’ said Cavor, and moved away again. ‘I thought of something. Something that might help my confidence.’
‘Try anything, if it helps,’ agreed Dallas.
Cavor lowered the prosthetic arm by his side and tried to concentrate his thoughts. Gradually, a conscious perception formed inside his brain, and then became an awareness. It was the feeling he’d experienced before, only stronger this time. It started as a burning sensation in the tips of his fingers, almost as if he had already rubbed them on a piece of sandpaper, as Dallas had described. Was there some kind of suggestive power operating here as well? Cavor wasn’t sure. But as the sensation increased, so did the certainty that it had nothing to do with the prosthetic by his side, which now seemed something quite alien to him. Burning gave way to a cramping sensation — a feeling that made him think the phantom limb was something that needed exercise and movement after long disuse. It was as if he were trying something long neglected. He could see now how the phantom limb needed to be stretched before being used. A shooting pain traveled through his whole arm as he flexed his invisible muscles. The messages from his brain urging his muscles to move the limb were now stronger and more frequent, and the perception of the limb amounted to something more than a mere feeling. If he thought hard enough, surely he would see it.
And so he could. Not just him, but Dallas too.
‘There,’ said Cavor, as if he had done nothing more remarkable than pick something off the ground.
The phantom limb seemed to materialize before their eyes, and to that extent, Dallas thought the phenomenon was well named. It looked like a spirit taking on a ghostly form in order to effect some purpose in the substantial world. Blue, like something cold, it blazed in the air, a fabulous firefly of twisting muscles and stretching fingers. The apparition — Dallas could think of no better way of describing what he could see — was quite naked, and as astonishment gave way to wonder, he realized he would not have been surprised to see the limb accompanied by the spirit of the whole Cavor, in some sort of out-of-body manifestation. Whatever was happening here was scientific only to the extent that the phenomenon could be observed without explanation.
Not that explanation counted for very much anymore. Empirical science was largely ossified. The majority of modern scientific inquiry was postempirical and speculative, in that it was very much concerned with answering riddles. How was the universe created? How did life begin? None of this could transcend the truth that already existed. If anything, science had merely reinforced the mystery of the universe. And this — the phenomenon of Cavor’s phantom limb — looked like another such mystery. Dallas might have discovered a way of unlocking its power, but neither he nor the scientists who had recently described the phantasmagoria had much of an idea how it worked, beyond the rudimentary explanation that had been given in some of the more esoteric science journals Dallas had studied and which he had reported to Cavor. For now, he was content with a partial explanation and his own capacity to be amazed. How little man really knew, he reflected. No matter how far science could go, man’s imagination would always go further.
‘It’s really there, isn’t it?’ he said, smiling as Cavor reached into his helmet and touched the end of Dallas’s nose. Cavor’s finger felt cold, but still recognizably human. ‘How do you decide to touch one thing, and penetrate another?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ admitted Cavor. ‘I’d say I’d need to live with it over a period of time.’
Dallas nodded. ‘Perhaps the structure of our minds constrains the questions we can ask of them and the answers that we can comprehend.’
Cavor removed the finger from Dallas’s helmet. He was quite sure that if he had pushed the finger all the way into the other man’s skull, into his brain, he could have read his mind. He readopted his former position by the vault door, slowly sliding the phantom limb into solid steel, encountering no more resistance than a swimmer’s arm in water. He recalled a time, many years ago, when he and his wife had honeymooned in Rome — the Moon had been too expensive for them — and saw some ancient monument, a head with an open mouth into which he had thrust his hand. The Mouth of Truth, was it? This felt more like the moment of truth.
It was a curious sensation, to move through solid matter and then to be able to grasp ahold of it, as if in real life. The only way he could describe the feeling to himself was to compare it with something as simple as sliding his hand across a flat surface before pressing down on a particular spot. And there was somehow the certainty that part of him had escaped the threedimensional world and was now somewhere four-dimensional. Perhaps it wasn’t just space-time that could be bent under the influence of gravity. Perhaps the very molecules of matter could be bent under the influence of life. He had no reason to think that. It was nothing more than intuition.
Locating the first gear, he found it cold and hard to the touch and oily, too. Dallas said that this was the lubricant that helped the gear turn smoothly, as indeed it did now, with not much more than a finger’s pressure. The withdrawal of the first locking bolt was the work of only a minute or two, and so simply done that Cavor marveled that the vault’s designers had not anticipated such effortless defilement. Indeed, what he was doing seemed so entirely natural that, several times, he had to remind himself he was up to his shoulder in solid metal. The second, third, and fourth bolts moved just as easily, and he grew more confident of the arm that was part of him and yet not part of him at all. In another time and place he thought he might have reached through a solid wall and written a message, in the manner of the hand at Belshazzar’s impious feast. And when all six bolts were finally withdrawn, he told Dallas that all matter was mind and asked him if he thought it was possible that there might exist some halfway state between reality and virtual reality. If so, said Cavor, that’s where his arm appeared and appeared not to be.