“I’m on my way. Listen at this end, but don’t do anything unless I tell you to. However, if I stop talking, or seem unable to move—”
“I will use the cable to pull you out.” E.C. Tally was superior to most humans in at least one respect. He lacked sulking algorithms. He had accepted that he was not going into Paradox, and now he was thinking ahead.
Hans Rebka headed straight for the wall of shifting colors. He felt no resistance as he entered, only the faint tug of the cable unreeling steadily behind him. “Ten meters, and all is well. Twenty meters and all is well. Thirty meters…” He was going to become very bored unless he found something better to say. There were twenty-five hundred ten-meter intervals between the outer surface and the center of Paradox. “The colors are disappearing now. Eighty meters. I can see ahead, all the way to the center.”
He was not the first human to enter Paradox and see clearly to its heart. He would, however, be the first person to return with the knowledge of what he had seen. And Paradox from the inside was different. At least, it was different from data in the old files, gleaned from radiation emanating from the interior.
“There’s a small flat torus in there at the middle. Looks like a fat donut almost side-on to me. I’ve never heard of that in the descriptions of Paradox. My guess is that it must be a few hundred meters across. I think I see dark spots along the outer perimeter — they may be openings. I’ll give more information when I get closer to the center. I don’t see any other interior structures, though there should be lots of them. I also don’t see evidence of color fringes, or space distortion. I must be through the boundary layer.”
Rebka felt a tug at his back, halting his inward progress.
“Wait there for a little while, if you please.” E.C.’s message came clearly through the fiber-optic connection.
“Problems?”
“An insignificant one. There is a snag on the reel that is winding out the cable, and for convenience I wish to free it. Do not move.”
Rebka hovered in space. Twenty-three kilometers to the center. He had said that he had no intention of going that far, but now, with the exploration proceeding so smoothly, who could bear to stop?
His heart was beating faster. It was not fear, but anticipation. Hans Rebka had never thought of himself as a hero, and he would have denied any such suggestion. Some jobs carried danger with them, some did not. He just happened to be a man with a dangerous job. But it was one with its own rewards — like seeing what no human or alien had ever seen before.
“I almost have the tangle loosened.” Outside Paradox, Tally sounded calm and confident. “However, it would make my task rather easier if you were to back up this way a few meters.”
“Very good. Backing up.”
Rebka used his suit controls to reverse the direction of his movement. He turned his head, to judge by the slackness of the cable when he had moved far enough. The fiber was still taut, a clear straight line running back to the shimmering colors of the Paradox wall.
“Are you reeling in the line back there?”
“Not yet. I am waiting for you to back up a little. Please do so.”
“Wait a moment.” Rebka used the suit thrusters again. The line behind him remained taut as ever. He had apparently not moved backward even a millimeter. “Is any line reeling in at your end?”
“No. Why are you not moving toward me?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I can’t move that way at all. Try something for me. Move everything, reel and all, a couple of meters this way, closer to the surface of Paradox.”
“That is about all I can move it, without encountering the surface. I am doing it now.”
The line slackened.
“Good. Now don’t move.” Hans Rebka eased forward, very carefully and slowly, until the line at his back was once more taut. He watched it closely, then operated his suit thrustors to reverse the direction of his motion. The line remained bow-string taut and straight.
Rebka hung motionless, thinking. No one before, in the recorded history of Paradox, had ever had the slightest trouble in leaving the artifact. On the other hand, no one had ever before penetrated the interior and not been affected by the Lotus field.
“E.C., I think we may have a little problem. I can move forward fine, toward the center. But I don’t seem able to back up toward you.”
“You have a problem with your reverse thrustors?”
“I think not. Here’s what I want you to do. Wait a couple of seconds, then pull on the cable — not too hard, but hard enough for me to feel it.”
Rebka turned to grip the cable close to where it met the tether ring on his suit. By taking it between gloved thumb and forefinger he could tell how much tension was in the line. It was increasing. Tally was tugging at the other end. Rebka should now be pulled toward the surface of the Paradox like a hooked fish. He was not moving.
“It’s no good, E.C. I don’t think I can travel outward at all. Listen to me carefully before you do anything.”
“I am listening,”
“We have to face the possibility that I may be stuck inside permanently. I’m going to try something else, but if you lose contact with me, I want you to make sure that a full report on everything that has happened here goes to the Artifact Institute. Address the message to both Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. Is that clear?”
“Completely.”
“All right. Now I want you to try more force on the cable. At the same time I’m going to use my suit’s thrustors, just as hard as they will push. Wait until I give the word.”
“I am waiting.”
Outside Paradox, E.C. Tally crouched over the reel.
“Now!”
Tally moved the whole reel backward to increase the tension in the line, tentatively at first, then with steadily greater force. “Are you moving?”
“Not a micron. Pull harder, Tally. We have nothing to lose. Pull harder. Harder! Hard—”
E.C. Tally and the reel went shooting backward, turning end over end in space. Tally twisted to keep the line in sight. It was clearly free to move, whipping rapidly out of Paradox, meter after meter of it. It was also clear from its movement that there could be nothing substantial on the other end of it.
Hans Rebka was deep inside Paradox, as planned. Not as planned, he seemed to be stuck there.
The designers of E.C. Tally had done one other thing that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It stemmed from their own conviction that an embodied computer could think better than a human.
It stood to reason. E.C. Tally had attosecond circuits, capable of a billion billion calculations a second. He could absorb information a billion times as fast as a human. He forgot nothing, once it was learned. His thinking was logical, unclouded by emotion or prejudice.
The designers had incorporated all that information into E.C.’s memory bank. It provided him with overwhelming confidence. He knew, with a certainty that no human could ever approach, that he was smarter than any organic mind.
And Hans Rebka had an organic brain.
Therefore…
The whole thought process within E.C. Tally occupied less than a microsecond. It took another microsecond for him to construct a message describing the entire sequence of events since their approach to Paradox. He went back to the ship, transferred the message at once to the main communications unit, and selected the Sentinel Gate coordinates for transmission through the Bose Network. He checked the node delays as the message went out. The signal would reach Sentinel Gate in four to five days. Darya Lang or Quintus Bloom, even if they received the message at once and set out immediately for Paradox, could not possibly arrive in fewer than ten days.
Ten days. Enough time for Hans Rebka to run low on air in his suit, but not really a lot of thinking time for a human’s slow brain.