“He and I and Svartalf are as good a squad as you’ find. If anybody has a hope of pulling the stunt off, we do. The rest of you can help with preparations a with recovering us. If we don’t make it back, you’ll have the repositories of what has already been learned. Because this is a public matter. It goes far beyond our girl . . . agreed. That’s your main reason for assisiting us. To try and make sure your children and grandchildren will inherit a world worth having;”
She reached in her purse. “Damn,” she said, “I’m out of cigarets.”
She clung a lot of offers, but accepted mine. Our hands clung for a second. Ashman sat staring at his intertwined fingers. Abruptly he straightened and said, with a kind of smile:
“All right, I apologize. You must admit my reaction was natural. But you’re an able group. If you think you’ve found a way to enter hell and return unharmed, you could be right and you have my support. May I ask what your scheme is?”
Barney relaxed a trifle. “You may,” he said. “Especially since we’ve got to explain it to some of the others.”
He stubbed out his cigar and began on a fresh one. “Let me put the proposition in nickel words first,” he said, “then the experts can correct and amplify according to their specialties. Our universe has a straightforward space-time geometry, except in odd places like the cores of white dwarf stars. Demons can move around in it without trouble—in fact, they can play tricks with distance and chronology that gave them the reputation of being supernatural in olden days—because their home universe is wildly complicated and variable. Modern researchers have discovered how to get there, but not how to travel around or remain whole of body and mind.
“Well, Steve’s information that we could reach any point in hell time, if we knew the method opened a door or broke a logjam or something. Suddenly there was a definite basic fact to go on, a relationship between the Low Continuum and ours that could be mathematically described. Dr. Falkenberg set up the equations and started solving them for different conditions. Dr. Griswold helped by suggesting ways in which the results would affect the laws of physics; Bill Hardy did likewise for chemistry and atomistics; et cetera. Oh, they’ve barely begun, and their conclusions haven’t been subjected to experimental test. But at least they’ve enabled Dr. Nobu, as a metaphysicist, and me, as a practical engineer, to design some spells. We completed them this morning. They should protect the expedition, give it some guardianship when it arrives, and haul it back fast. That’s more than anybody previous had going for them.”
“Insufficient.” Charles was the new objector. “You can’t have a full description of the hell universe—why we don’t have that even for this cosmos—and you absolutely can’t predict what crazy ways the metric there varies from point to point.”
“True,” Barney said.
“So protection which is adequate at one place will be useless elsewhere.”
“Not if the space-time configuration can be described mathematically as one travels. Then the spells can be adjusted accordingly.”
“What? But that’s an impossible job. No mortal man—”
“Right,” Ginny said.
We gaped at her.
“A passing thing Steve heard, down in the crypts, was the clue,” Ginny said. “Same as your remark, actually, Admiral. No mortal man could do it. But the greatest geometers are dead.”
A gasp went around the table.
XXIX
With appropriate seemings laid on, and Svartalf indignantly back in the sample case, our community left the plant on a company carpet. It was now close to four. If my FBI shadow didn’t see me start home around five or six o’clock, he’d get suspicious. But there wasn’t a lot I could do about that.
We landed first at St. Olaf’s while Pastor Karlslund went in to fetch some articles. Janice Wenzel, seated behind us, leaned forward and murmured: “I guess I’m ignorant, but isn’t this appealing to the saints a Catholic rather than a Lutheran thing?”
The question hadn’t been raised at the conference. Karlslund was satisfied with making clear the distinction between a prayer—a petition to the Highest, with any spells we cast intended merely to ease a way for whoever might freely respond—and necromancy, an attempt to force our will on departed spirits. (While the latter is illegal, that’s mainly a concession to public taste. There’s no reliable record of its ever having succeeded; it’s just another superstition.)
“I doubt if the sect makes any odds,” Ginny said. “What is the soul? Nobody knows. The observations that prove it exists are valid, but scattered and not repeatable under controlled conditions. As tends to be the case for many paranatural phenomena.”
“Which, however,” Dr. Nobu put in, “is the reason in turn why practical progress in goetics is so rapid :5 once a correct insight is available. Unlike the force-fields of physics—gravitation, electromagnetism, and , so on—the force-fields of paraphysics—such as similarity and ergody—are not limited by the speed of light. Hence they can, in principle, shift energy from any part of the plenum to any other. That is why a vanishingly small input can give an indefinitely large output. Because of this, qualitative understanding is more important to control than quantitative. And so, a mere three days after learning about the time variability of hell, we feel some confidence that our new spells will work . . . But as for the soul, I incline towards the belief that its character is supernatural rather than paranatural.”
“Not me,” Ginny said. “I’d call it an energy structure within those parafields. It’s formed by the body but outlives that matrix. Once free, it can easily move between universes. If it hangs around here for some reason, disembodied, isn’t that a ghost? If it enters a newly fertilized ovum, isn’t that reincarnation? If the Highest allows it to come nearer His presence, isn’t that salvation? If the Lowest has more attraction for it, isn’t that damnation?”
“Dear me,” Janice said. Ginny uttered a brittle laugh.
Barney turned around in the pilot’s seat. “About your question that started this seminar, Janice,” he said, “it’s true we Lutherans don’t make a habit o€ calling on the saints. But neither do we deny they sometimes intervene. Maybe a Catholic priest or a Neo-Chassidic rabbi would know better how to pray for help. But I couldn’t get any on short notice that I dared co-opt, while I’ve known Jim Karlslund for years . . . Speak of the, er, pastor—” Everybody chuckled in a strained way as our man boarded with an armful of ecclesiastical gear.
We took off again and proceeded to Trismegistus University. Sunlight slanted gold across remembered lawns, groves, buildings. Few persons were about in this pause between spring and summer sessions; a hush lay over the campus, distantly backgrounded by the city’s whirr. It seemed epochs ago that Ginny and I had been students here, a different cycle of creation. I glanced at her, but her countenance was unreadable.
Wings rustled near, a raven that paced us. An omen? Of what? It banked as we landed and flapped out of sight.
We entered the Physical Sciences building. Corridors and stairwells reached gloomy, full of echoes. Desertion was one reason we’d chosen it, another being Griswold’s keys to each lab and stockroom. Karlslund would have preferred the chapel, but we were too likely to be noticed there. Besides, Ginny and Barney had decided in their plan-laying that the religious part of our undertaking was secondary.
We needed someone whose appeal would be unselfish and devout, or no saint was apt to respond. However, they seldom do anyway, compared to the number of prayers that must arise daily. The Highest expects us to solve our own problems. What we relied on-,what gave us a degree of confidence we would get some kind of reaction-vas the progress we’d made, the direct access we believed we had to the Adversary’s realm and our stiff resolve to use it. The implications were too enormous for Heaven to ignore . . . we hoped.