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Read Ebook: Ein Mann Des Seefahrers und aufrechten Bürgers Joachim Nettelbeck wundersame Lebensgeschichte von ihm selbst erzählt by Nettelbeck Joachim
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Ebook has 1109 lines and 145742 words, and 23 pages
The Ultimate World
After attaining all conceivable goals, then what? The City was perfection, an ultimate city that left nothing to be desired and sought after. But the City was dying--for it had no purpose.
Low tinkling music awakened Amco. He stirred up out of semi-consciousness as the three-dim screen glowed purple. Lethargic nerves sharpened with intuitive sense of foreboding as the noble figure of the City's Coordinator appeared in the three-dim radius.
The perfect, if characterless, features of the Coordinator were taut with strain.
"We're confronted by a serious crisis, Amco," his voice said, and waited.
Amco frowned. A crisis? How could perfection be confronted by crisis? The City was an ultimate City, colossal, tiers on tiers of intricacy that left nothing desired nor sought after. But--
The last episode that could be termed crisis had been six centuries ago in 9400 when an armada of heavily armed ships from an alien cosmos tried an invasion of Dhoma and were annihilated. Could they be facing another such attack? If so, it was a form of offensive unpredictable by the most advanced Dhomastrial minds. He examined the Coordinator's waiting face.
"I see that the word 'crisis' is perplexing you, Amco."
"Yes. I fail to evolve such a possibility."
"Our city is dying," said the Coordinator.
"How?" Amco asked. "How can perfection die?"
"That is the crisis," said the Coordinator. "We have forgotten how to think. The City has reached a theoretical saturation point. The apparently insoluble problem of--no problems. Utter intellectual and neural satiation. We're no longer motivated to exist. After attaining all conceivable goals, then what?"
A little flutter of interest stirred in Amco's bored mind. "We must think again," he said. "Constructively."
"Then why don't you think?" said the Coordinator softly.
Amco paused blankly. Then: "Wha--what about?"
"That," said the Coordinator, "is our problem. Think of something to think about."
Amco felt the atavistic fluttering again. "We've achieved all possible physical attainments. Perhaps the answer is in the psychoneurel. The imagination."
"Possibly, Amco. Any practical ideas to follow up with?"
"I--I--No," said Amco in almost a whisper. "But it would be sad to see the City die."
The Coordinator trembled with the extreme atavism that differentiated him so starkly from the norm. He raised a clenched fist in a gesture symbolic of a time so long buried that it stirred fear in Amco.
"It mustn't die!" he hissed. "It mustn't die!"
"But you said--" began Amco. The Coordinator interrupted:
"Yes. Rotting with inactivity and futility, the logical next step is death. If we are unable to discover any purpose in living further--end it. But I can't admit such a possibility. The plenum of all evolution mustn't end in oblivion. The greatness of organic matter must be evolving toward some future other than nothingness. Flux must mean something besides an inevitable return to vacuum!"
"At least we have a problem," said Amco.
"And the greatest problem of all," said the Coordinator. "Because if we can find the true answer now, I shall dictate whether or not life as far as Dhoma is concerned should continue."
Amco found himself tensing forward. "You mean if we could definitely determine that Dhomastrial life isn't justified because it has no ultimate goal--you would destroy it?"
"Yes," said the Coordinator hoarsely. "And why not?"
Amco finally managed to say, "No reason, logically. Why go on living without an ultimate goal?" His voice bore a note of resignation, but his eyes hinted at the anxiety he felt.
"That, then, is our problem," enthused the Coordinator. "Is a worthy cause for continued Dhomastrial life determinable? If not, I'll envelop Dhoma in the vibratory blasts that destroyed the invaders of 9400." He paused, then added, thoughtfully, "Perhaps that will be the logical end of it."
Amco revealed what had occurred to him when the Coordinator first mentioned the crisis. He said: "The space-time converter. That is an answer. We could go into the plegarthic time flow called the future and find out."
Amco nodded, too. "It is that. Perhaps it's been wise, restricting the converter. But I see no other way."
"You agree then to make the attempt, Amco? You are the only one I could trust. I know of no one else who still retains adequate sense of responsibility."
"Of course," Amco was saying, his heart pounding abnormally, and his face flushed.
"Thank you, Amco. I put the future of Dhoma in your hands then. Any questions?"
"One," said Amco. "What if my findings are negative? You are definitely determined to destroy all Dhomastrial life?"
"Yes, Amco."
Amco shrugged. He watched the three-dim screen fade.
Amco stood beside the space-time converter on the periphery of a dead sea. A slight cold wind blew from it, whispering of a worldly loneliness. Away from the sea stretched an undulating plane of naked clay, unblemished, glossy, cruel. An anemic pale red sun shown fitfully through a slight dust-mist on the dead sea's horizon.
Realizing that outside his plastic suit, the air was crackling cold, Amco shivered.
He had plunged two million years into the plegarthic flow.
Amco turned away from the barren area that had been a teeming sea. He faced the City. Yes. It still stood as he had left it. It seemed incredible that it was still intact. And yet, if it was perfect, how could it have been touched even by time?
But it appeared quite dead like the rest of Dhoma. He began walking toward it.
Fear crawled like a live parasite into his heart, as he approached the City. Fear coupled with its antecedents, anxiety and uncertainty.
But he could see no life. Nothing moved. Not the faintest aura suggestive of life. A coldness permeated the thin air, radiating from the gleaming plastoid of the City's towering structures, gelid as from a corpse interned in eternal ice.
He found himself walking stiffly and fearfully through its familiar intricacies. He climbed other almost forgotten shafts and hurtled through the tubeways to remote sectors of the City. He stood, a pigmy among gigantic towers he had helped create two million years before, and felt crushed by grandeur, and vague terror.
He had found the answer for the Coordinator. It was simple enough in its futile horror. The City had died. There was not a trace of its inhabitants. There was no clue as to their fate. The City might have been abandoned yesterday, or two million years ago. It didn't matter. There was no life in it. There weren't even ghosts of things or of memories. Only grey, thick, crushing silence.
He looked over collonades toward the red, ugly nakedness of the plane, toward the space-time converter. It was a minute silver blob waiting beside the barren sea. This was the answer he had been sent across the millennia to find. Somehow, it seemed unjust, irrational.
He would return and tell the Coordinator. The only cycle, the story of the plenum is merely an eruption that falls back as dust which some galactic wind would swirl away. A vacuum would efface the bloated plenum. And out of the vacuum would appear the dust again; and out of it would crawl colloidal mucous that would only return inexplicably to the dust again. And the galactic wind would again--
Amco shivered. But in spite of the growing terror, he was grateful that he had found out the truth. Now the Coordinator could frustrate, defeat completely the aimless, ridiculous evolving that led to--emptiness. Then for no cause repeated itself. He was grateful that he could be a factor in blotting out the whole illogical process. He started back out of the City toward the space-time converter.
Then he heard, or rather sensed the radiations. A vague, almost imperceptible tickling of hidden mental potentials flooded his heart with hope.
He plummeted down into the City's heart. Somehow, he knew there was still a form of life in the City.
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