A BETTER MANTRAP
Bob Shaw
CONVERSION
When you love a woman you can forgive her for doing almost anything – but there has to be a limit.
And Sharly went way beyond that limit at 3.17 on the afternoon of June 12.
I know the exact moment it happened because the whole thing was recorded, though at a distance, by Arnie Archbold. He was making his scheduled round of Level Eight, pacing himself so as to be near the coffee machine when it came to break time, and was so wrapped up in visions of burying his nose in a hot foaming beaker that at first he wasn’t even aware of Sharly on the gallery above him. His recorder picked her out, though.
All members of Icewell Security, myself included, wear wide-angle buttonhole machines which serve roughly the same purpose as flight recorders on aircraft – if one of us gets himself totalled the investigation team can run a tape through afterwards and settle back in comfort and decide what went wrong. To be fair, the recorders often provide valuable retrospective evidence concerning accidents and equipment failures, and I guess I should have been grateful that there was no doubt, none whatsoever, about what Sharly did. I was off the island on a five-day course at the time it happened, but the tape showed everything…
She came out of the Field Analysis suite on Level Nine and walked slowly in the direction of Structure Telemetry on the south side of the well. Nothing in her gait or manner suggested she was under any kind of stress. That was something to which I could testify because we had been lovers for some months and, although she was wearing a loose-fitting heatsaver, I could visualize the fine lazy action of every muscle in her body. She even, and it hurt me every time I watched it on playback, performed one of her most characteristic tricks with her hair – pushing the curls upwards slightly from the nape of her neck with one hand as though they were little springs upon which she was carrying out a compression test. I had seen Sharly do that a hundred times in reality, always when she was relaxed and pleased with herself and feeling good about life, and that made what came next all the more shocking.
About ten paces from the door to Structure Telemetry she came to an abrupt halt and clapped her hands to her temples. She rocked backwards and forwards for a few seconds, then turned towards the centre of the well. The blow-ups from Archbold’s tape gave us a good look at her face in that crucial moment, and I pray never again to see anything so close to The Scream. Her eyes and mouth were circular black wounds, deep, incurable. She advanced to the gallery’s safety rail, went up the four bars as though they were steps of a ladder, and walked off the top one into space.
Cold, empty, unforgiving, lethal space.
The sudden movement attracted Archbold’s attention and dragged him around, with the result that all who studied his recorder tape got a clear view of Sharly’s body plunging down into the well. There were lights down there, but they only had the effect of deepening the blackness in between, and her writhing figure disappeared into a complicated nether world of pipe runs, valves, ice bulwarks and pools of oil and oil-scummed seawater. She made no sound on the way down and the final impact was lost amid the massive heartbeats of the primary pump.
That’s all there was to it.
Charlotte Railton had been part of the world scene as a warm, intelligent, humorous person for twenty-six years, and suddenly – for no reason that I could fathom – she was gone. They didn’t even manage to find her remains. The investigators who arrived next day by copter concluded that the body had been drawn into one of the main drainage outlets and expelled into the sea. They only stayed a day-and-a-half before heading back to Port Heiden and I received a distinct impression that if Sharly hadn’t been a Grade One Engineer they would have taken off much sooner.
I resented that a lot. In fact, resentment was the driving force that got me through the following weeks. I felt other emotions, of course – grief, despair, anger, self-pity – but I was able to keep them in check by concentrating on my sense of outrage over all that had happened. One playback of Archbold’s tape was enough to satisfy everybody concerned that they were dealing with a straightforward suicide, and from that point on the case was virtually closed. My testimony that Sharly had not been a suicidal type and had, in any case, been in excellent spirits immediately prior to her death was politely noted and dismissed as not being relevant. The evidence of the tape was all that mattered, and even I had to acknowledge it.
That was what helped crystallize my resentment against Sharly herself. Widows and widowers often feel anger – even though it is rarely expressed – towards their departed spouses for having spoiled everything by dying, and I came to know exactly what goes on in their minds. At times I actually hated Sharly for the pain she had caused me, then a reaction would set in and guilt would be added to all my other emotional burdens, and to help me squeeze out from under I would get out of bed, put on my uniform, sling the carbine on my shoulder and go patrolling the chill dark reaches of Icewell 37. I don’t know what I was hoping to find. I wanted to blame something for Sharly’s death, but the rational part of my mind told me there was no chance of encountering a convenient and suitable external agent. There was no malign ghost of Level Nine, and even had there been it was unlikely that it could have been exorcized by a spray of high-velocity bullets.
The well is a creepy and fear-making place, though, especially at night. It is an artificial island constructed from ice, and it’s hard for a non-scientist like me to accept that the localized coldness which makes it possible is imported from interstellar space.
Sharly knew as much about the telecongruency warp as anybody and she used to waste hours trying to make me understand how the focal point of the warp generator actually existed in two places at once – one of them here in the middle of the Bering Sea, and the other at some unknown location between the stars where the temperature was close to absolute zero. The position of the alpha-locus, the Earth-based focal point, could be accurately controlled and it was automatically drifted all over the island to keep the ice structure hard and strong, but nobody had any idea of the spatial location of the zeta-locus. Apparently it could have been just about anywhere in the universe. I never really got used to the idea of dangling a kind of cosmic fishing line in a distant part of space, but the notion held no fears for Sharly. It buoyed her up.
“This is only the beginning,” she had assured me once. “The telecongruency warp is a powerful tool, but right now we’re only debasing it. Using it as a heat sink to create ice castles in the ocean is easily the cheapest and best way yet of building deep-sea oil wells, but that’s only playing with the concept. What we have to do is gain control. We ought to be able to reverse the potentials, make it a two-way thing. We should be able to pinpoint the zeta-locus anywhere we want it – and when that happens we’ll be able to grow food or gather diamonds or pick flowers on any planet in the galaxy.”
When she talked that way I used to get jealous because the disks of misty white light appearing in her eyes were exactly the same as when we were making love and it was going well, but I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut about how I felt. Most people were surprised over a woman of her background taking up with a sergeant in Icewell Security, and as I couldn’t quite believe it myself sometimes I knew not to strain my luck. And in the end it was Sharly’s luck that ran out, not mine. She would never have the chance to pick those alien blossoms and I desperately wanted to know why.
I even, and this shows how obsessive my thinking became, considered murder. Post-hypnotic suggestion was one method I dreamed up – it seemed to me that somebody could have implanted a command for Sharly to walk off that gallery railing. Then there were exotic drugs which could suddenly trigger a self-destructive urge, and sonic beams which might scramble the brain and produce instant madness. Far-out ideas like those clamoured through my mind for hours on end, accompanied by equally bizarre notions about possible motives, so I was in a pretty abnormal psychological state during those nights when I was up there prowling on the high levels with the carbine nudging me in the back like a secretive accomplice. And I guess that’s why I sensed there was something badly wrong as soon as Lieutenant Oliver came through on my personal radio.