“There’s some sausage,” the Negro said. “And some bread that’s still fairly fresh, and some red wine.”
From his loose-fitting trousers he produced a huge pocket knife and set about carving up the bread and sausage. Then he uncorked the bottle of wine and offered it to Antonella. Corson watched him with fascination.
“Never seen anything like it, hm?” Touray said, noticing his amazement. “I bet in your time you lived off pills and chemicals! But this isn’t too bad, you know. When at war you make the best of what you’ve got.”
The wine, Corson found, was warming and comforting. He bit into a chunk of bread and decided that it was time to ask a few questions. After all, here was a man who had had far more experience of this weird world.
“What surprises me,” he said cautiously, “is that the sky is practically empty. You’d expect aerial warfare to spread all over the place.”
“There are regulations,” Touray said. “At least, I assume there are. In this sector of Aergistal there are no planes, no rockets and no copters. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t dogfights going on somewhere else. In fact I’d be rather surprised if there weren’t.”
“Regulations,” Corson repeated thoughtfully.
“You must have noticed something right away,” Touray went on. “Nobody around here is using nuclear bombs, right? I imagine that puzzles you. But on the other side of those mountains atom bombs do go off now and then. Big ones at that!”
Corson recalled the pillars of fire and mushrooms of smoke which they had seen beyond the mountains. He nodded.
“And who makes sure the rules are obeyed?”
“If only I knew, I’d file a polite request for him to get me out of here! Oh, probably a god—or a devil!”
“Do you really think we might be in hell?”
Corson used the word readily enough, but it had little personal meaning for him. By his time, in an age dominated by cold and calculating pragmatism, its only referent was half-forgotten mythologies. And the nearest term available to match it in the galactic tongue meant no more than somewhere especially unpleasant.
Still, Touray took his point. “I’ve been wondering a lot about that,” he admitted. “But this strikes me as a pretty material kind of hell, if it is one. I managed to make some sightings on the sky as I went up and down with this balloon, and I’m convinced the ceiling is only about ten or twelve kilometers above us. Of course, even if it is made of ordinary matter, this place doesn’t look much like a natural planet. No horizon, an absolutely level surface… Or if the planet were big enough to give this impression, we ought to have been squashed flat by the gravity in the first minute.”
Corson agreed, surprised that this man from a period so long before his own should know so much.
“I don’t think we’re in normal space at all,” Antonella said. “I can’t cog anything—not a thing. At first I wasn’t worried because our foresight does fade away now and then. But never so completely. Here it’s as though I were… well, as though I were blind.”
Corson stared at her. “When does your talent let you down?”
She flushed. “For a few days every month, that’s one thing. But that’s not what’s happening at the moment. And during a space flight, but I haven’t flown space very often. And when I’ve just made a jump across time, but that never lasts for long. And lastly when the probabilities in favor of several different outcomes are almost exactly balanced. But I always retain at least the ghost of the power. Here, there’s nothing at all.”
“What power is she talking about?” Touray demanded.
“Antonella’s people have a certain ability to see into the future. They call it ‘cogging’, from precognition. They can foretell events before they happen, usually a couple of minutes ahead.”
“I see. It must be like having a periscope capable of breaking through the surface of the present. But it sounds like a pretty shortsighted kind of periscope. Two minutes—that isn’t very long.”
Corson sought to organize what Antonella had told him into a pattern that would make sense. He knew that if prescience were possible—and it was—it must be dependent in some way on Mach’s cosmogonic principle, the uniqueness of each point in the universe in relation to the whole. Would a total breakdown of the power imply that they were no longer in the universe to which Antonella’s nervous system was attuned? Were they in fact dead, without remembering that they had been killed?
“You know, it’s very funny,” Touray said. “In Africa, long before I was born, there were witch doctors who claimed they could foresee the future. Nobody believed that any longer, in my day. Yet that wasn’t in the past; it was in the future they claimed they could look into!”
“What about this bread?” Corson asked, brandishing the remains of his sandwich. “Where does it come from?”
“Oh, from whoever runs this place. Now you mention it, I must say I haven’t seen plowed land anywhere, let alone factories or bakeries. But it’s always like that in wartime, isn’t it? Guns, uniforms, medicines, rations, all come from far, far away, in what might as well be a mythical country. If the war lasts long enough, you just stop wondering about that sort of thing. The only fields you see are the ones you bum over because they’re in enemy hands.”
“Where are the high command? Why do they carry on with these crazy battles?”
“Oh, they’re a long way up the ladder from you. A long, long way. In the normal course of events you’ll never see them.”
“But what if they get killed?”
“They’re replaced,” Touray said. “By those who come next in line. You see, in a really all-out war you go on fighting because for one thing there’s the enemy and for another you don’t have any alternative. Maybe the brass hats have reasons of their own, but those must be—well, brass-type.”
Corson drew a deep breath.
“But where the hell are we?” he shouted.
Touray gave him a steady stare. “I could say we’re in a balloon above a calm ocean. But that might be a delusion. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I can only offer three possible explanations. See which you prefer, or come up with another.”
“What are they?”
“First off, then: we’re good and dead and we’ve arrived in some kind of hell or purgatory, and we’re stuck here for goodness knows how long, maybe for all eternity, with no hope of escape even by getting killed. The Breathers take care of that.”
“The Breathers?”
“You haven’t been through one of those yet? No, of course you haven’t—you only just got here. I’ll tell you about those later, then. My second theory is that we don’t actually exist. We just have the illusion of existence. We may be nothing more than data, tape perforations or punched cards or electrons whizzing around in some gigantic machine, and someone’s playing a war game with us, or a Kriegsspiel, or whatever they call it where you come from, trying to find out what went on in such-and-such a battle. Or maybe what would happen if all the wars in the universe took place at once. In that case we’d simply be tin soldiers, if you get me.”
“I get you,” Corson said from a dry mouth.
“A variant of that notion would be that we do exist, but not in this world. Maybe we’re all stacked up in a vault somewhere, wired into a machine, and just imagine that we’re alive here. It could be a sort of therapy, to make us sick of the very idea of war, or it could be a show put on for somebody, or it could be an experiment.”
“How about your third theory?”
“That this universe is in fact real. Weird, by our standards, but genuine enough. And built by someone, possibly by humans—though I doubt it—to serve some purpose I daren’t even guess at. That’s the theory I prefer. Because if it’s correct, there might be a way of escaping and still being yourself.”