Hank Merry scratched his chin. “I could tell you what it sounds like,” he said. “Ever hear of entropy?”
Robert grimaced. “If I remember right, that’s one of those things that scientists all agree is there but none of them can define.”
“It’s hard to define, all right. And it wouldn’t mean very much to most people even if we could define it. All the same, it’s a concept that we live with all the time. It has to do with the exchange of heat between objects of different temperature until equilibrium is reached. We just accept as fact that something that’s warmer than the air around it tends to cool off while the air around it tends to warm up until the temperatures are equal. Same with things cooler than their surroundings; they tend to grow warmer, while the surroundings get cooler, until the heat content is the same. That’s why you make the tea strong if you want to pour it over ice cubes. Put cold ice cubes and hot tea side by side, and the ice cubes get warmer and melt, the tea gets cooler and weaker, and you end up with an equilibrium where the ice cubes and the tea are essentially the same temperature. And if it’s a very hot day, the whole mess tends to warm up to room temperature.”
Robert nodded. “But the room air doesn’t get any cooler.”
“Yes it does. You just can’t notice it because there’s so little iced tea and so much room.
It’s the tea that registers the measurable change in heat content.”
“Well—okay,” Robert said dubiously. “I still don’t see what all this has to do with Mike Janner.”
Hank shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It was just that his whole story sounded like an entropy system gone all out of whack. Certainly something happened to him. Something bad, from his viewpoint; he didn’t lose seventy pounds in four hours for no reason. And it sounds like it involves heat exchange in some way.”
“Well, if Cygni had suddenly become terribly hot, he’d start warming up too, I suppose,”
Robert said.
“Exactly. Only the planet didn’t look any different than it ever had. A man can take pretty dreadful heat before he starts to dehydrate from it, certainly before it starts pushing his body metabolism up. Mike Janner’s body literally burned off those seventy pounds, but he didn’t see any grass turning brown around him. No parched trees, no streams dry and baked. The breeze felf cool on his cheek.” Hank Merry shook his head. “I don’t think the planet was any hotter than it ever was. But if Janner’s story is true, his body was warmer than the atmosphere when he got there—by Jove!” Hank broke off, picked up the intercom. “Jerry?
What was the temperature in that starjump chamber that brought the man back from 61
Cygni?” He paused and Robert heard gabble from the phone receiver. “I see,” Hank said.
“No possible mistake?”
He hung up. “They’re still chipping the icicles off it,” he said. “It was so cold the door mechanism jammed when it arrived here. And the man inside it was roasting in his own skin.”
“I don’t get it,” Robert said.
“Neither do I,” Hank admitted. “A warm man on a temperate planet getting warmer and warmer, while the cool Threshold chamber that carried him there was getting colder and colder. Robert, it’s all backwards. It should have been the other way around!”
“But it wasn’t,” Robert said.
“I’m sorry, but the laws of Nature say it had to be the other way around. There just isn’t any place in this universe that has negative entropy. Nor in the Threshold universe either, as far as I know.”
“No.” Robert stood up, paced the room, finally turned to Hank. “At least, then, we know that Janner and his friends will recover as soon as their body temperatures stabilize. But other things have been happening other places, too. Jonathan Tarbox’s steel pipe may have carried an overload of contraband, but it went somewhere that reduced it to a heap of molten slag before it got to Mars at all. And those men exploring Saturn—”
“What about them?”
“It’s not very cheering. We’ve had Threshold chambers turn up in awkward places before, on exploratory missions, but we’ve never had one just disappear before. Those men took a chamber with them down to the surface of Saturn, to bring them back to Titan when they were ready. The spot was even triangulated and located on the surface by satellite observers, but the instant that they jumped, they and the receiver both vanished. And they didn’t vanish into the Threshold universe, either. I don’t know where they vanished to, but I think we have to find out. And it’s the same old story again.”
“Communication with the Thresholders,” Hank said glumly.
“Exactly. As far as I can tell, the Thresholders don’t know what’s going wrong either, but we really have to be able to compare notes and work together if we’re going to find out. A vague, fleeting contact won’t do it.” Robert sighed. “I’ve been afraid all along that it wouldn’t, that something was going to make real communication necessary. And I’m not sure it’s possible. I’ve been digging in every direction I could think of, without much change. But there’s one person who might be able to help, if we could find a way to beat out fear.”
“Who’s that?”
“A girl. At the Hoffman Center. I can’t explain, you’ll have to see her. At first I thought she might lead me right to the core of the question, and then all of a sudden she was too frightened to keep working.” Robert stood up and walked to the window, looked out at the red desert beyond the city. “Her name is Sharnan, and she’s quite a girl. I think you should meet her, because I have a hunch that she’s the one hope we have of getting control of something that’s getting farther out of control every minute.”
Something in Robert’s tone made Hank look up at his young friend intently. “You’re worried about this business, aren’t you?”
“I’m worried sick about it. Hank, I’m out of my depth in this thing. I’m so far over my head I’ve forgotten what it feels like to breathe. And I don’t know what to do.” He turned from the window. “Do you remember the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice?”
Hank nodded. “A foolish boy who tried to use his master’s magic spells,” he said.
“That’s right,” Robert said. “He used magic that he didn’t understand to make a broomstick carry water for him. It worked fine at first, the broomstick came to life and started filling the cauldron with water. Too much water—the apprentice found out too late that he didn’t know how to turn the broomstick off again, and it kept right on hauling water until it nearly drowned him.” Robert shrugged. “That’s the way I feeclass="underline" that I’ve started something going that I can’t understand and I can’t control it, and I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do.”
Hank shook his head angrily. “You can’t take all the blame. You were under terrific pressure from McEvoy, from me, from the Thresholders. It wasn’t even your fault you were the goat; your own parents put you on the spot years before, much as they regretted it later.”
“But I’m still on the spot. And the broomstick keeps hauling that water in.”
“The broomstick was controllable, wasn’t it? The apprentice couldn’t stop it, but there was a counter-spell that could.”
“So who knows the counter-spell to this one?” Robert said.
Hank spread his hands. “You’ve got me. I don’t know any magic word.”
“Nor do I,” Robert said forlornly. “About all I can hope right now is that ‘Sharnan’ might be the magic word.”
—8—
To anyone who had never seen it before, the Hoffman Medical Center in Philadelphia District was always something of a shock. If people were looking for a great hospital, they were disappointed. Sprawling hospital facilities were there, but the Hoffman Center was no more just a hospital than it was just a doctors’ clinic, or just a research center. Originating in the early 1980’s as a central clearing house for medical knowledge and research efforts throughout the world, the Hoffman Center had grown beyond any expectation, piling building upon building, wing upon wing, spawning branch centers for specialized research in a hundred different corners of the world, in burgeoning geometric progression. Like the early sprawling Telcom organization, which had come to dominate most of the research in physics, electronics and communications by the turn of the century, the Hoffman Center now dominated all aspects of medical training and investigation. And as the last organic diseases of man began to yield to research—cancer curable, heart disease at last controllable—it was inevitable that more and more attention at the Hoffman Center was focused on the last and deepest medical mystery of alclass="underline" the mystery of the human mind and how it worked.