Mind Webs - The Rules Of The Road

A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs. Each episode is a cerebral journey into the mind’s deepest questions.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Mind Welcome to a half hour of mind Waves short
stories from the world of speculative fiction. All this is

(01:29):
Michael Hanson with a Mindweb story by Norman Spinrad, copyright
by Galaxy Magazine in nineteen sixty four. The story also
appears in Spinrad's book The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde,
published by Avon. The Great Silver Dome sat in the

(01:49):
desert at Yucca Flats. It was featureless, save on an
innocent appearing open entrance way, but there was something about
it that shrieked alien. The silver shimmer was not quite
the shimmer of silver, whether it was more like the
silver of shimmer. The tanks, machine gun emplacements in foxholes
surrounding the dome confirmed the sense of alienness. The dome

(02:13):
was surrounded and cordoned off. Whether it was being guarded
or contained was a moot question. Near the opening of
the dome, a tent had been pitched. The flag of
a three star general flew from a makeshift flag bold
inside the tents, where a half dozen canvas folding chairs
and the elaborate radio set up a large map table

(02:33):
that seemed to serve no useful function. Five assorted colonels
Lieutenant General Richard Brewster, a middle aged man with the
look of an athlete gone to fat, and one lone civilian,
looking plucked and out of place amidst all a khaki plumage.
General Brewster eyed the civilian with cold resignation. I've lost

(02:55):
ten men in there already, he said, in a tone
of voice like a poker player describing a particularly bad
run of cards. Ten men, and we don't know any
more than when we started. Brewster stared out the open
tent flat at the entrance to the dome. There's only
one thing we know. It's from the stars, interesting, said

(03:20):
the civilian flatly. He was a wiry man, not short,
not tall. His face showed even more tension than this
bare body. His mouth seemed frozen in a perpetual sour sneer.
His expression appeared dead and juiceless. Only his large, dark
eyes betrayed him. They shifted purposely from focus to focus, absorbing, categorizing, analyzing, interesting.

(03:44):
Is that all you have to say? One's from interesting?
It's from the stars, manly attracted from beyond the orbit
of Pluto. Don't you understand it's a spaceship from another
solar system. It's the key to the stars. Yeah, that's
what it is to you, but what it is to
whatever you send it? There is another question? Are you

(04:05):
so sure they intend it as a key to the stars?
What about those ten men you sent in general never
came out. Do you think they're so sure it's the
key to the stars? What are you, lady enough to man? Well,
just that you know really nothing about why that thing
came here. Ten men go in, none of them come out.

(04:26):
Maybe it's not here to give us the stars at all.
Maybe it's purposes as alien as its manufacturer, or maybe
maybe it's just a better mus trap. Well will you
or won't you? If you're trying to point out how
dangerous it is and it's time, you're wasting your time.
I've lost ten minutes it is, and I know, damn
well it's dangerous. I've been told that you're not afraid

(04:49):
of danger. I've been told you enjoy it. Well, in
a way, it's not that I enjoy danger general, it's
just that I need it. Is how much do you
think you need me? Or do you lean? I mean
two hundred and fifty thousand tax free dollars So they
mayn't take it or leave it all payable if you

(05:10):
succeed in telling us what's inside the dome? Now what else? Okay,
you're on. Bert Linstrom was aware of his glamour only
when he wanted a woman, and then it proved most useful.
It was a well honed, finally crafted tool. There were
plenty of women who could resist the soldier fortune myth,

(05:32):
to be sure, but there were many more who could not.
The probabilities were all on his side, and odds were
Bert Linstrom's religion. Lindstrom was a calculating man. He would
undertake nothing that did not seem to offer an odds
on chance of success, nothing from seduction to assassination. Yet
he would never fail to accept the challenge when the

(05:53):
odds were in his favor, no matter if he were
risking the dime or his life. For in his system values,
there was no real difference. It was not what it
was being risked. It counted. It was the risk itself.
His life meant little to him when he was not
risking it. Only when he was gambling with his existence

(06:13):
it had come to have meaning. Then it was the stake,
the challenge, the risk. Lindstrom did not seek both. He
risked his life only when he found that the odds
were on his side. He did not seek death, but
he had to be near it. He had to risk it,
or only at the moment of risk could his life

(06:33):
have any meaning. And this was the best risk in
a life of risks, not necessarily because it was the
longest shot of all instrument The professional risk taker's contempt
for soldiers who took risks on orders that ten soldiers
had not come out was a thing of little import
to him. What was interesting was that the dome from

(06:55):
the stars was a total unknown. Even the odds on
coming out were incalculable. They might be in his favor,
they might not. He was betting his instinctive feelings about
himself against a complete unknown. If he had set up
the situation himself in a laboratory, he could not have
contrived a more perfect risk. The hot desert wind blew

(07:22):
at Linstrom's back as he approached the entrance to the dome.
The soldiers who had not come out had been armed
to the teeth. Therefore Lindstrom was not. He carried only
his old forty five, a machete, which was more a
luck charm than anything else. A coil of rope and
all purpose utility knife in the flashlight. The entrance was

(07:42):
little more than the door sized hole in the material
of the dome. Linstrom peered inside. He could see nothing
but blackness. He drew his gun, turned on the flashlight,
and stepped inside. As soon as he crossed the threshold,
there was light. It did not seem to come from anywhere,

(08:04):
just was the pearly luminescence. He could see. He was
standing at the mouth of a tunnel, a smooth, round,
somehow almost colorless tunnel that curved crazily upwards and leftwards
in an arc so steep that it seemed impossible to
hold one's footing. Nevertheless, Lindstrom decided to try to climb it.

(08:24):
Although the material of the tunnel seemed glass smooth, he
did not have a low frictional coefficient. It was more
like walking on concrete than glass. Stranger Still, although his
eyes told him that he was walking up a curve
at an impossible angle his body tilted almost forty degrees
from the vertical, his kinesthetic senses told a different story.

(08:47):
The force of gravity remained perpendicular to the floor of
the tunnel, no matter what angle the tunnel took to
the Earth's surface, so that he was walking upright, as
if the tunnel had a private gravity on its own.
Lindstrom was somewhat and the instinctual fear of the unknown
this he had, of course expected. Fear meant that there
was danger risk, and risk meant that he was living.

(09:12):
The tunnel came to a fork, decision number one. Had
this been the point at which the soldiers had made
the wrong calculation, Blinstrom was sure that surviving in the
dome was a matter of making the proper calculations, the
correct decisions. Either that or there was no way of surviving,
and that was a possibility not worth considering, since if

(09:34):
it were true, the game was already lost. It was
like walking on the ledge over a precipice in the dark.
You knew that there was a safe path, and you
knew that there was a point beyond which death lurked,
but you had no way of knowing how wide the
ledge was, how much margin for error you had. There

(09:55):
was nothing to choose from between the two forks. The
one on the right curved up, the one on the
left down. Otherwise they were identical. A random choice, okay,
thought Lindstrom. He hesitated for only a moment, and then,
for no reason in particular, took the right hand turn.

(10:16):
He'd only gone a few steps. The intersection was just
behind him when he felt a sudden flash of heat
at his back. He whirled in time to see a
solid pillar of fire and gulf the crotch of the intersection,
the spot where he had stood moments ago. Pondering his
choice by some number one, he thought, no hamlet's allowed.
When faced with a decision, make it one way or

(10:38):
the other. Don't temporize or you'll be vaporized. The tunnel
wound down for an indeterminable distance, then it ended, or,
from another point of view, took an abrupt ninety degree
turn and became a bottomless, black circular hole. Lindstrom shined
his light into the hole. The bee petered out in blackness.

(11:02):
The hole seemed made of the same material as the tunnel.
There was nothing to secure the rope too. Now what
Flinstrom thought grimly, and how much time do I have
to remember? The pillar of fire? At the fork, he
felt that weird, timeless, floating exhilaration that he only experienced
at those times when he knew that death was near.

(11:24):
And had the time to contemplate it. The hole was
like the tunnel. He must go forward or not like
the tunnel. It was the tunnel, or at least it
should be. Fatalistically, he dangled his feet into the hole
until his soles intacted its sides, and then he stood up,

(11:46):
or rather stood down. Quite suddenly he was standing up
right in what had been the hole. Now it was
just more of the same tunnel. The thing actually did
have a gravity of its own. Lesson umber two, he thought,
this place has its own rules, learned them and over
athen It was highly probable that none of the soldiers

(12:10):
had gotten this far. This was a place that demanded
a cold, mathematical intimacy with death. It was a place
where the greatest risk of all was not to take risks.
It was no place for a man under orders. Linstrom
felt calmer now he had dared and he had won.
The fear that he had left was not a paralyzer.

(12:31):
It was a tonic, the satisfied fear that a matador
feels when he realizes that he's facing the truly great bull.
He wandered further along the tunnel, and with every passing
minute the calmness he felt he had earned diminished. This
was not ordinary mortal danger. Linstrom had lived on speaking
terms with death too long for mere danger to be extraordinary.

(12:55):
This was something far worse. He was thinking too much
as he walked, and this was a place that was
not to be thought about, because it was a place
without rules, which is one symptom of madness. There might
be no rules, he thought, but there must be a purpose.
Something had brought the dome to earth, something intelligent, and

(13:16):
intelligence implies purpose. But what if it really were just
a giant must trap. But that was ridiculous. If they
had wanted merely to kill him, they could have done
that a long time ago. The dome was not only
their creation, it was a universe in itself. Inside the dome,

(13:37):
they could alter the very rules of existence. No, the
rules were set up so that it was possible to survive.
Fantastically difficult, but possible. That was all he had to
cling to. The odds against survival might be astronomical, but
survival was at least a possibility. I can die, he thought,

(14:01):
I can die. Therefore I can live. In the distance.
Around the bend the tunnel ended, It opened into a
large domed chamber. The chamber was lit with the same
pearly light as the tunnel, and it seemed to be
made of the same substance. It was a smooth, featureless room.

(14:22):
At that end, it was empty. A voice that was
not a voice nibbled at his mind. You have passed
the entrance examination. Are you ready? Ready for what? Ready?
The single word had many nuances. It seemed to Lindstrum

(14:42):
that the voice in his mind was intimate with his
entire being. Ready. Ready was the word that described his
entire life. Ready seemed to imply acceptance and belligerents at
the same time, Ready to accept possible death and ready
to fight to cli life, ready to wait, and ready
to make instant decisions? Yes, yes, why uh? Why all this?

(15:09):
While your general Brewster was right in a way, This
is a spaceship, a starship for your people that can
be the key to the universe. If you are ready,
if you can change, change to to watch, change, not

(15:33):
change to what adapted to that which is constantly changing.
Live on a tight rope strung over nothingness. Your race
is now reaching for the planets of your solar system.
A tiny beginning you have conquered your world by adapting

(15:55):
it to our needs. But the universe will not be apted.
An infinity of death awaits you out there, deaths you
cannot now even conceive of. I have never been afraid
of death. You have always been afraid of death. It

(16:15):
is your very fear which allows you to face it.
But fear is not enough. What else is there? You
will learn? Here? You will learn or you will die.
And why perhaps you are ready to begin to learn? Why?
Behold the road to the stars. He was in the

(16:42):
place that was terror. It was no place at all,
It was every place. He was at the same time
in a lightless blackness and the mad disassociated core of
the sun. It was a space with no dimensions. It
was a space within it infinity of dimensions. He had

(17:02):
no senses. He had sense that could not exist. He
tasted color, He saw time raveled like a vast ball
of twine around him. He heard the creation of the universe,
and he smelt the acrid stench of its eventual death.
Entropy ran forward backward in circles. He was bigger than

(17:25):
the entire universe. It nestled in his navel. He stood
on the non existent surfaces of a trillion electrons. He
was an insect, a star, a void, a galaxy. He
screamed and screamed, and screamed and screamed. He burned and froze,

(17:49):
exploded and imploded. His mind was boiled in alien thoughts,
unspeakably foul. He rolled in beauty so hideous that he
died an infinity of deaths from pleasure. Stop stop, stop,
and his cries echoed from the walls of existence and
rebounded backist things, flesh, like a geometrically breeding nest of

(18:10):
angry hornets. Enough, Van Dunstrom was back in the featureless chamber.
What what? What wasnt That is the real universe or else?
His illusion? A partial truth, a projection in three dimensions
of a reality with an infinity of dimensions. That is

(18:34):
the road to the stars. You mean we have to
learn to navigating that, to remain sane long enough to
find a way. It's impossible. That is the real universe.
It is not enough to learn to travel through it.
You must learn to live in it, in it, in

(18:55):
that madness. It is reality. The universe is not as
tidy as you would like it to be. Time is
not really a straight line, nor space. Three dimension arm.
It is possible to be all places at once. It

(19:18):
is possible to be all times at once. Your racist
view of the universe is pathetically limited, perhaps to preserve
your sanity. Winstrom felt his mind perched on the edge
of a fathomless abyss. He felt the bonds of reality

(19:39):
crumbling about him. What, after all, was reality? Was it
really this unspeakable horror, this mad, murderous confusion. Yes, you
are looking down into an abyss. But you must do

(20:00):
or you must learn to jump willingly into it. In
the real universe, the laws of nature are not constant.
The rules themselves very according to rules for rules, which

(20:21):
in turn very according to still higher orders of rules.
Stop Stop. No one can cope with the thing like that.
I don't wanna know anymore. I like choice is not yours.
No human will be permitted to leave this place unchanged.
And this chamber is a dead end. There is no

(20:45):
other passage out but the way you came, and that
tunnel is sealed to you forever. I mean, you intend
to keep me a prisoner here for there, for the
rest of my life. Or there is no passage out,
but there is a way out. Either you will learn

(21:07):
it or you will die. We begin. Windstrum found himself
in a space with four dimensions. It hurt his mind.
There was a fourth dimension that was somehow at right
angles to all three normal directions, and his body was different.

(21:33):
He wasn't closed in a cubical box of some dull
metal and closed on all six sides. Slowly the walls
of the box began to contract in on him. He
was trapped. He was surrounded on all six sides. But
in this space a cube did not have six sides,

(21:55):
it had thirty six. He did a thing that strained
his mind near breaking. He moved at right angles to
all six faces of the contracting cube simultaneously. He was out,
and he was a point in space with no dimensions.
He was every point in the space since all points coincided.

(22:20):
He was trapped. Trapped in a space with no dimensions,
there could be no motion. But time existed, and in
this place time had three dimensions. A special point that
was Lindstrom wriggled in three temporal dimensions and became a
temporal solid, And thus he was back in normal space

(22:46):
time and was whisked into a star filled blackness. But
the blazing suns were also the nuclear eye of the
atoms of his body, corresponding one for one with each other,
macrocosm and microcosm. He did a thing with his mind
for which there are no words. But he was back

(23:07):
once more in the featureless chamber, and was transported to
even stranger otternesses, an infinity of places, dimensions, and othernesses
for which there are not even the ghosts of concepts.
He felt a strangeness in his mind, a complexity beyond complexity,

(23:30):
a revelation of new and unexpected textures in his psyche.
Time was space was flux eternity was a variable. There
came a time when he stood, naked, alone and homesick
on the surface of some far off kindet, looking up

(23:51):
at a small star in nu assal. He remembered the
spaces he had seen, spaces of no dimensions and infinity
of demas engines, spaces that were not spaces, but times.
There was a way back to Earth. He did something

(24:11):
with his mind, and the surface of the planet vanished
like mist. His body floated in total blackness. He felt
it expand and contract rhythmically, from the size of an
electron to the size of the universe. He caught it
in a phase where each of its atoms corresponded to
a star and the galaxy. Then he let his entire

(24:35):
mass lide down the hill of space time to one
of the sun atoms, the one called Saul, to one
of its electrons called Earth. He was back in the chamber,
and he knew the way out. General Brewster stood outside

(24:55):
his tent, staring at the silver Dome and wondering whether
it was time to try something else. Lundstrom's been in
there two days, he said to a nervous looking colonel,
two days, and I think we can assume that whatever
happened to the others happened to him. What now, sir,
I don't know. I just don't know. I suppose we

(25:17):
could try to blow the thing open. But a man
suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He was standing just outside
the dome. He was a wiry man, not short, not tall. Well,
it's Lindstrom, the being that had been Bert. Linstrom began

(25:39):
to walk slowly toward the tent. It had two arms,
two legs, two eyes, and those about. It was in
fact the perfect image of the man who entered the dome.
But when Lindstrom was close enough for Brewster to see
into his eyes. The General was dreadfully sure that the
creature facing him was something other than human. Ah, you've

(26:33):
heard the Rules of the Road, A story by Norman Spinwet,
copyright by Galaxy Magazine nineteen sixty four, also appears in
the spin Reet collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.
This is Michael Hanson, Technical operation for this broadcast by
Steve Gordon. Mind Webbs is a production of WHA Radio

(26:58):
and Madison Service of the University of Wisconsin Extension