Mercer entered and took the proffered chair. Surreptitiously he made a study of the captain’s heavy-boned, sturdy face while the officer spent some moments placing some papers in a drawer.
Brode looked up. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr Stone?”
“I would have thought that was obvious, Captain. I want to know why my friend died.”
“He died because he broke ship’s regulations,” Brode answered heavily.
“I know that,” Mercer said shortly, though the strain of the interview was already beginning to grow in him. “In the circumstances, I hardly care about that.”
“Yes, of course.” Brode placed his hands on his desk and dropped his gaze. Mercer saw that he was genuinely sympathetic.
Brode said: “You have had a very lucky escape.”
Mercer turned several degrees paler than he already was.
“Escape—from what?”
Brode debated within himself, uncertain and disturbed. Was he going to have to tell Stone what he himself had learned only after fifteen years of special education under constant surveillance? He felt that the fellow had some right to it, and he had already checked his Citizen Dependency Rating. And yet….
He rose.
“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked, trying to drive the question home.
“No,” said Mercer after a moment. “I feel torn. But after that….” He tailed off.
“If you insist, I will admit you into the secret, since you already know part of it.”
Mercer nodded.
Captain Brode turned and took a heavy, black leather-bound volume from a shelf: The Table of Physical Constants. Letting Mercer see the gold-lettered title, he placed it on the desk.
Understanding, Mercer placed his hand upon it.
“Do you swear by All that exists to communicate to no person what you are about to learn?” the captain intoned.
“I so swear.”
The captain replaced the book on its shelf. He turned to face Stone again, feeling slightly embarrassed about what he had to say.
“The simple fact is,” he began, “that any man who looks into space immediately dies.”
Since the hideous event at the aperture, Mercer had been feeling his mental world begin to revolve upside-down. Now he felt a premonition of something that was the complete inversion of the world-picture he had always carried with him. He tried to look straight into the captain’s steady, comforting face.
“But how?”
“That is the part we do not know. In fact, it only is known partly. We think it is because he sees the universe too nakedly, too incomprehensibly vast. He loses himself in it, and his consciousness is whisked away into space like a fly would be if we opened the main port.
“As for the technicality of it, we’re not sure Probably he loses his point of reference.”
“No one ever came to harm in interplanetary flights,” Mercer pointed out.
Brode nodded. “For some reason it doesn’t happen inside a solar system. Something to do with the sun: it provides a mental anchor. That’s what I meant by a point of reference. Once you get out there—make no mistake, there’s nothing to hang on to. You’re lost. Nowhere to go, and if there were anywhere, nowhere to start from.”
There went the second half of Brian’s theory, Mercer thought. The ruling was not a jealous monopoly on the part of the Scientocrats. It was a sacred trust. “It frightens me,” he muttered.
Captain Brode looked hard at the pale, worried face of Mercer Stone. “Space does it,” he said. “There’s too much of it out there. It would swallow us all, swallow any number, without making any difference. It’s the worst possible way to die.”
He turned away. His voice dropped. “But you know, I don’t think it’s worth dying any other way.”
Life Trap
Although we of the Temple of Mysteries have devoted our energies to the pursuit of life’s secrets, it has never been guaranteed that what we may learn will be in any way pleasant, or conducive to our peace of mind. What becomes known cannot be made unknown, until death intervenes, and all seekers after hidden knowledge run the risk of finding that ignorance was after all the happier state.
The experiment was conducted at midnight, this being the hour when the subject, by his own account, customarily knows greatest clarity of mind. This subject was in fact my good friend Marcus, Aspirant of the Third Grade of the Arcanum—the highest rank our hierarchy affords, entitling him, when the occasion arises, to wear the mantle of High Priest. The mixture had been prepared earlier in the day, and was a combination of ether, poppy, a certain mushroom, and other consciousness-altering drugs, all substances which, when taken singly or in various simpler compounds, produced effects already well known to us from our years of investigative labour. Never before, however, had we designed a concoction for so ambitious or so hazardous a purpose: to take the mind, while still fully conscious, beyond the point of death, and after an interval to return it to the living world.
Vainly I had begged Marcus to be less precipitous; to test the compound beforehand, possibly using partial samples on a candidate acolyte. But Marcus, adamant that nothing less than the full dose would be effective, consented only to test it on a dog belonging to our drug expert, Lucius the apothecary. When forced to inhale the fumes the animal became rigid and appeared to be dead for the space of about an hour. After this it quickly recovered, but for a further hour it showed some nervousness, barking and cringing when anyone came near. Eventually this, too, wore off, and Marcus announced that the symptoms were as would be expected.
On the appointed night Marcus and I were alone in the Temple, the others having left at Marcus’s own request. In the changing room I helped him into a robe of crisp clean linen on which the emblem of the Temple was sewn. Then, for a period, we sat together, while the water-clock dripped away the moments. We said little, for all aspects of the enterprise had already been thoroughly discussed.
The pan of the clock began to tremble. “Soon we may know the truth,” Marcus said with a smile.
“Or I shall lose a friend,” I replied.
Just then the balance tipped and the water-clock chimed the hour of midnight. We both rose.
I accompanied Marcus to the inner sanctum. As we went down the short corridor, flanked by two pillars, which leads to the door of the adytum, the possibility that I might be seeing him alive for the last time suddenly weighed heavily on me, but I tried to show no emotion. I opened the heavy oak door, whose edges are trimmed with lambswool so as to shut out extraneous noises, and we entered.
I looked around to ensure that everything was in place and the surroundings harmonious. For us, the inner sanctum serves the same function in our activities as the preliminary ritual of donning ceremonial garb: to help calm the mind and divert it from trivial thought. Hence everything is arranged to invoke the feeling of departure from the mundane. The room is oval in shape and painted in restful hues. On the walls are mandalas and one or two specially selected paintings. Earlier I had placed a vase of peonies on the small table of polished walnut.
The nostrum had already been left in a crucible over the brazier. While Marcus reclined himself on the couch I moved the brazier closer, so he would gain the direct benefit of the vapours, and lit the oil-soaked charcoal with a taper. Quickly the brazier began to blaze and the nostrum to bubble.
With no further glance at Marcus, I left.
The Temple of Mysteries subscribes to none of the traditional doctrines, since all of these are in varying degrees erroneous or at best blur the distinction between what is truly known and what is merely deduced or speculated upon. Our approach, once we have formulated an area of ignorance, is to try to gain the truth first-hand.