Read Ebook: The Barrier by Walton Bryce Raymond Ramon Illustrator

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Ebook has 84 lines and 6547 words, and 2 pages

The Barrier

If Stevens could cross the high velocity barrier at the edge of space he would receive a pardon on Earth. But would he live to claim it?

There were maybe ten or fifteen people to see him off. They weren't cheering. They stood in the gray curtain of rain, hunched over with their hands in their storm-coat pockets. Behind them was the vague bulk of the Experimental Station. And beyond that, invisible in the night, were the mountains he would never see again.

"O.K., Stevens. This is it."

So what? Stevens clanked as he turned toward the "Coffin." He was encased in a bulging metal pressure suit and his head was a big alloy bubble. No one smiled. No one raised a hand to say goodbye.

Doris would, of course, say goodbye, if she were here. She wasn't here. She didn't even know about his volunteering.

Major Kanin nodded stiffly. His gray eyes wrinkled. "Good luck, Stevens," he said dutifully. It was meaningless. Kanin had sent too many poor guys out on a one-way trip. He knew Stevens wouldn't come down. Not in any recognizable form.

A couple of gray-suited mechanics moved around behind Stevens. Stevens leaned over and thrust his head into the tubular opening of the torpedo-like plane. The two mechanics lifted his legs, shoved him in headfirst like he was ammunition being crammed into an ancient cannon. The metal hatch slid down past his feet. He was bound tightly by the cockpit which was only an air-conditioned tube but slightly larger than his body. When the canopy over his head closed, he had only two inches between the plate in his helmet and the control and instrument panel.

For one agonizing moment, long and terrifying, Stevens felt an awful compressing suffocation and entrapment. The claustrophobia went away, in part, and left the plexglas plate in his helmet dewed with his sweat.

He tried to relax. He stared at the controls. He twisted his head carefully then so as not to bump his helmet against the side--the noise was numbing inside when he did bump anything--and looked through the tiny peep-hole in the tubular wall which would soon close too, leaving him completely sealed. He looked out and waited for the signal. Major Kanin had turned his back and was discussing something with a Doctor and a Lieutenant. The mechanics were around preparing the kick-off rockets.

The "Coffin" was light, and it was new. A slight improvement over the last one. But the so-called improvement was a farce, Stevens knew, because no one had any idea why none of the others had ever come back. None of them expected him to come back either, and they showed it plainly. Also, none of them cared particularly, from any human point of view. The Military cared of course, from another view-point.

This was another velocity test run. Once around the Earth to this take-off spot on the desert. The Military wanted to get to the Moon if they had to walk there over a suspension bridge of human dead. The first Sovereign State to get a military base on the Moon would, in theory, be the all-time victor in what certain kinds of humorists called the "game" of war. So far, no one had been able to stand the velocity.

Stevens felt his skin stretch in a dry, tight grin. He carefully and slowly moistened his lips and watched the light that would blink yellow. A minute after that the job would kick-off before rockets delivering a 3000-pound thrust for twelve seconds.

Stevens guessed that the brain-boys up in some hidden bureau had an idea that sooner or later they would find somebody who could stand it, then they could make tests, find out why. Stevens had no idea how many had already been sacrificed. The boys upstairs knew but they weren't giving out statistics these days. Stevens would increase the unknown number by one more.

So it meant nothing, he thought. He wasn't one of the superboys, the jet-jyrenes, the hero lads who never came back and had statues and plaques stuck all over the place for being permanently en absentia. Not anymore, he wasn't.

He was one of the new volunteers from the West Coast branch of the Military Prison. Big-hearted Kanin had even promised him a pardon if he brought the ship back. It was a new high in irony, but that was about all.

He wouldn't come back, and he knew it. But he would be free, and Doris would be free to live her own life. He had been stupid, hot-headed, once--and this was a preferable way, he had decided, to pay up the debt.

Doris had resigned herself to waiting for him. It was a manslaughter charge, and he would have gotten out maybe in fifteen years. They didn't parole anybody from a Military Prison, at least not on anything as heavy as manslaughter. It wasn't fair to Doris, nor to himself.

It was up there where the Earth lost its face behind thick vapor veils and began to look like a fancy balloon, that was where you found out the location of nowhere. Inside a beautifully stream-lined "Coffin" you found out--hurtling way beyond the speed of sound, shattering the supersonic barriers, and faster and faster still....

What happened to them? Nobody had figured it out. All the best brains in the world working on it might figure it out. But the brains were split up, divided into little camps here and there, getting a lot of atomic spitballs ready to throw at one another, when teacher's back was turned.

So it wasn't figured out, what happened to them. They had come a long way since they first broke the barrier. Faster and faster and faster--but they'd hit a limit somewhere up there. And until they wiped out that limitation, the Moon was as far away as it had ever been back when man thought the canoe was a great discovery.

They just went faster and faster and faster--and then they disappeared. A curtain parted. A curtain closed. And wherever man wanted to get to so fast--he got there.

The yellow light blinked at Stevens like a jaundiced eye. Stevens winked back with a mock gesture that was hardly genuine. The world rocked, and his head seemed to drain suddenly as though by a suction pump.

His task was simple enough. The controls were automatic until the signal came for bringing the ship in, and then manual controls would be used. Until then, he served as only a slightly necessary human element. A voice. There was the radio, and his voice. He was to keep them informed down there. Keep talking right up to the point when whatever happened--happened.

Stevens talked. He reported the altitude, the velocity, the temperature. He kept reporting as the three of them increased. His eyes watched the light that might blink red. The "panic-light." When that blinked, it meant curtains. It meant fire in the "Coffin." It meant that if you were in a position to do it, you could use the automatic pilot ejector and get hurled into the screaming currents by a 37 mm cartridge that shot the pilot and cockpit straight up at 60 ft. per second.

At this altitude and this velocity, the ejector was useless.

He whispered, "Velocity--five thousand--" He spoke again. "Velocity--fifteen thousand--"

It was frightening. He flicked on the observation screen. It was a blur. He couldn't feel anything. He couldn't hear anything. If he could only lift his legs, bend his knees. If he could only turn over on his side--

He opened his mouth to scream, and somehow prevented the burst that frothed to soundless bubbles on his lips. His body seemed to swell, seeking to burst the Coffin's walls like a swelling mummy. The terror remained in him, icy and deep.

He watched the gauges creeping up and up. He was speaking. He knew he was reporting but he couldn't hear himself saying anything. He watched the "panic-light" that would glow red and that would be curtain time. There was no sound. No sound at all. There was no vision. No awareness of motion. At this incredible height, at this frightening velocity, there was no awareness of anything at all.

He was in a Coffin all right, and he was buried--as certainly as though he were six feet under and as stationary as only the dead can be when they are buried and forgotten down under the clean Earth where they belong when they're tired.

They didn't belong up here, not this way.

"The cooling system's clogging," he heard himself whisper. "Crystals of ice ... cockpit's like a miniature snow storm...."

He heard the unemotional voice come clearly to him. "The emergency trigger--"

He used it. He felt a freezing grin rip across his face as he reached out and used it. The icy spray died away and he heard himself saying something else.

"It's the velocity. I don't have any reason for saying it--I just feel it--you could feel it up here too--I can't explain it, but it's the velocity. I know it. Maybe they crashed on the Earth somewhere. There's lots of places on Earth a ship could crash and no one would know it, especially when it would be taken for a meteor. But this feels like it's the velocity that does it up here. Listen, what about this? Anyone thought of this--what if the velocity breaks a man through into another dimension?"

No one commented on that. It happened to him right then, and he felt it coming. Reflexes tried to move his body, and his head and feet drummed on the restricting tubular walls. There was a wrenching blur and a slipping spinning vertigo.

... there was darkness and he floated in it, but he was conscious. It wasn't any familiar kind of consciousness. Lights began glimmering here and there like fireflies. But it was no dream, he knew that. He didn't know what it was. The music that was something far and incomprehensively beyond music sounded, and he seemed to float on a broad tape of sound to float on a road, a path, a curvature that broadened into unlimited vistas.

It was brief. It was like peeking through a tiny hole and seeing something beautiful, unworldly, very nearly incomprehensible, drift by. He heard a voice that had no body, but he knew it was real, very real. More real than anything he had called real before.

"Another is coming through. Check the matrix."

He tried to understand. Vaporous curtains seemed to draw back one by one and a kind of clarity flowed over his mind like cool ocean up a white beach. A first faint tingling thrill moved in his blood, and became pleasure that mounted through ecstasy and then became something else for which he had no name.

He thought desperately. "Where is this? What has happened?"

"This is Death," the voice that had no face or form answered. "That is what you term it, in the lower stage reality from which you have come. There are other ways of going through the barrier, but death is the sure and the ordinary one. Many come through, in many ways--"

Stevens tried to understand, and he knew that he could not. He tried to see his present form, his present meaning. There was nothing tangible. He drifted. He was light and sound perhaps, movement perhaps. He was part of something greater and far more complex than his undeveloped powers of perception could absorb.

Stevens thought. "You mean--I'm--Dead. I mean--that I'm not living now?"

The thought answered him. It wasn't a sequence of words, phrases, forming meaning. The entire answer was a part of him, immediately. "You call it death. Actually you are more alive, you have come through the barrier into what you call the fourth dimension. It is really but a broader awareness of a higher reality--"

It didn't mean much to Stevens. The unknown, the intangible--it sent a chill through his consciousness. Pain hit him. He winced. Light roiled, irritation eddied like muddy streaks in a clear stream. A bluish haze spread like staining ink through the clouds of brilliance. Dark cracks spread like lines through colored glass.

Stevens felt an icy wind. He seemed to swirl inchoate through a forest of wildly irritated leaves and branches.

The thought came to him, weakly, through distance that was more than mere distance, through barriers of space and realms of time. It came to him weakly, and it began to fade.

"Everything that was, that is, or will be, we are conscious of here in this higher stage of reality. All must come through, and there is never again contact with the lower stage, the third dimension of perception. The matrix is universal, eternal, and it is set and unchanging."

Stevens' mind screamed. "But I'm returning--help me, I don't want to go back. I want to stay, to stay--"

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