"Kathryn?" She was awake and opened her eyes as he came to sit beside her. "You're looking well."
A banality and a lie-she seemed shrunken and smaller in the face than she had. The result of the wide bed, the recent illness, her own expression which held a haunted introspection.
"Gustav." Her hand closed on his with the old strength. "They've told you?"
"Yes. A chill." He drew in his breath with an audible rasp. "It seems my prayers were answered. Thank God it wasn't-"
"Hnaudifida?" Her smile was reassuring. "What are the reports on that?" The outbreaks were under control, no new cases reported for a day now, and the monks, working like men possessed, had organized isolation sheds and manned them with willing volunteers immunized with vaccines obtained from their blood. Details she heard without expression. "I'm glad," she said when he had finished. "We must do something for them."
"The monks? Of course, when you are on your feet, my dear. Some land might be best, a small farm so as to provide food and sustenance. And a little space in the city for them to erect a larger church. We can talk about it later."
She nodded and one hand traced patterns on the smooth cover of the bed. Looking at it she said, "I've been dreaming, Gustav. I think it was a dream. Of Iduna."
He said nothing, waiting.
"She was so lovely. Do you remember when she was a baby how odd she looked? Everyone said how beautiful she was but they were only trying to be kind. But later, when she filled out and could sit upright, there was no need for them to flatter. The child was lovely. So very lovely. Gustav! Oh, Gustav!"
His arms closed around her as her head came to his shoulder and he could feel beneath his hands the wracking as she yielded to grief. Tears which wet the fabric of his blouse and misery which stung his own eyes as he shared the pain he could not alleviate. So many years now. So many, many years.
And again he saw the small shape lying on the floor of his study and the cursed orb of the Tau glowing to one side.
He should have followed her then but he hadn't known, hadn't guessed what happened. A child who had collapsed- first had to come the medical diagnosis, the tests, the investigations. Then he had yielded to Kathryn's dictates and had let others go where he had not. A coward, he thought bitterly. One who had died many times and still held back from dying once.
Now all he could do was to hold his wife and kiss her and wait for the sobbing to quiet and give her what comfort he could until, finally, she slipped into a doze. Chasing the illusion of a lost daughter, perhaps. He had no way of knowing.
But, perhaps, he could give her news when she next woke.
Tamiras was where he had left him, a small figure in the harsh confines of the chamber, flanked by guards who watched as he studied the Tau. From the bank of instruments standing to one side Marita studied dials and called figures at his command.
"No change." Tamiras sucked in his cheeks. "No discernible lift in emitted radiation. No alteration in temperature. No-a complete stasis, my friend. As I could have told you. As I have told you many times in the past. The Tau is a closed system and so, by definition, cannot be affected in any way. If it could it wouldn't be a closed system." His shrug added a single word.
Elementary.
Gustav said tightly, thinking of Kathryn, "This isn't a lecture hall, Tamiras, and you don't have to be clever. As our foremost electronic expert I'd hoped you could help."
"If I could I would-can you doubt that?" Tamiras met his stare, his own eyes direct. "From the beginning I have worked on the problem but, always, the answer is the same. To began investigating the Tau I must risk destroying it. In fact it is possible that only by destroying it can anything be learned."
"No!"
"You refuse as you have done before and I can understand the reasons for your refusal. Can you understand mine for not wanting to waste time on a problem I have no hope of solving? And you could be wrong. Destruction of the Tau could be the only method of achieving the desired end."
"Can you be positive as to that?"
"No. How could I be? The Tau is a mystery which we, as yet, have only tackled with measurements and the application of logic. The measurements prove, if they prove anything, that we are dealing with a closed system. As yet that is the sum total of our knowledge. The rest is speculation. Is Iduna within the Tau? For want of any better explanation as to what happened to her we must assume that she is. Can others follow her? We have idiots and the dead to prove the inadvisability of trying. Can she be rescued? A question without an answer and one based on the viability of the original speculation. If Iduna did not enter the Tau then she cannot be rescued. If she did we do not know how." He ended bleakly,
"There you have it, my friend. The poor fruit of what you are pleased to term an expert mind."
"Logic," said Gustav impatiently. "Pick your premise and by the use of logic you can prove anything you want to. Forget logic-what we need here is intuition. Logic will tell us a thing is impossible but still that thing can be done. Too often logic is nothing but a wall halting progress."
Gently Tamiras shook his head, "No, Gustav, you are wrong?"
"Wrong? What of your own field-baths? I remember when to mention them was to invite scorn and laughter. How could invisible energies relax and comfort? And rafts? They are heavier than air and so obviously could never fly. It is against all logic-so why bother to look for an answer? The men who found it in use of antigrav units didn't listen to that kind of logic and neither will I. We have facts. Work on them. Iduna is in the Tau. How?"
Old ground and Tamiras sighed as he answered the question. But Gustav was strained, too tense for his own good, and the answer might serve to unwind him a little.
"There is only one way. Physically, of course, she remained here so all that could have been transmitted is the mesh of electromagnetic micro-currents housed by her brain. Not all of them, some residue must have remained to activate the autonomic process and we can speculate that the residue must belong to the sub-frame of human development and is in fact a part of the basic metabolic structure. Elg Barham has done some work on the subject and read a paper at the Arteshion University which I was fortunate enough to hear. He contends that the mind, the intelligence, is a later addition to the actual physical body, and therefore could be divorced from it. If true this would explain certain claims made by those who swear they had left their own bodies either to travel vast distances to observe events or to have actually inhabited others and shared their lives and experiences. There could also be an association with the belief that individual awareness does not become erased at death but moves on in some way as a disembodied intelligence. An intelligence which retains, perhaps, the conviction that physically it is still alive which would account for the phenonema we know as "ghosts." The intelligence, trying to communicate, adopts a familiar form or impresses itself on another's sensory apparatus in a recognizable shape."
"A ghost," said Gustav. "You are saying Iduna is a ghost."
"In a manner of speaking she can be nothing else." Tamiras gestured at the Tau. "A mind trapped in a closed environment. A charge in an accumulator, an intermeshed potential-how can I describe it?"
A drop of water in a soaking wet sponge-Gustav could provide his own analogies but none of them helped.