The twenty-three psychics had chosen seven of their number at random to be privileged with the experience of primary contact (all having agreed that Krzyszkowiak should be among the “lucky” eight). Eight more were chosen for secondary contact.
These sixteen entered the Groombridge chamber at 14:36 on 27th November 2051.
Within seven minutes, half of them were dead.
( see attached graph1.jpg )
Every person who experienced primary contact was killed by it. None showed any symptoms of distress until the first died, little more than a minute after touching the bridge. All experimenting stopped while the two attending physicians went to his aid. Then the other primaries died, one by one.
Analyzing the tapes of the tragedy, we found a direct relationship between the individual’s psychic ability and the length of time he or she survived after primary contact. The accompanying table and graph illustrate this relationship.
The first person ever to make primary contact was the Tamer Hsi Ch’ing, who survived for three hours and forty minutes. If we assume that his Rhine score was 100 (there are no data), then his death agrees with this exponential curve.
Secondary contact proved to have no ill effects, as was also true in the first set of experiments.
Several theories have been advanced to account for this “reflex killing” on the part of the bridges. In the previous section we described the unfortunate demise of Robert Willard, and the bridge’s attempt on the life of this author when we tried to dissect the creature prior to its “slingshot” transformation. The reflex in this case is understandable in terms of self-preservation. But it is less easy to explain the reflex killing of primaries, and the obvious relationship between time-lag-to-death and Rhine potential.
A theory first advanced by Hugo Van der Walls takes into account the fossil evidence of . . .
31 – Crystal Ball I
No one alive in 2051 will ever understand the Groom-bridge bridge.
The truth was deduced in 2213 by a woman who happened to be the great-great-great-great-grandniece of Jacque Lefavre (no great coincidence: half the planet was at least that closely related to him). Her name is difficult to translate, since her language was partly telepathic, but it was something like “Still Cloud Yet Changing: Anthropologist.”
Still Cloud was investigating some unspectacular ruins left on a planet circling Antares, remnants of an extinct nonhumanoid race that had been studied extensively in the previous generation. These ruins had just been discovered, but Still Cloud studied them for years without any significant findings.
This race worshipped an ugly creature whose name we may translate as God, who supposedly lived inside the planet. An odd feature of their religion was that they believed that every inhabited planet had its own God-yet the race did not have space travel. Nowhere could she find that they had any concrete evidence that life existed on other worlds; it was simply an article of faith.
Eventually Still Cloud uncovered a palace that belonged to the planet’s highest religious leader. Underneath the palace was a labyrinthine system of tunnels, one of which led to a chamber, or apartment, that still gleamed with luxury after a quarter of a million years of abandonment: the place where God lived.
What she and other investigators had taken as myth and metaphor was actual fact: their God was an immortal, omnipotent creature who had descended from heaven to live under the earth and rule their lives and destinies. It was the representative of a race that once ruled this corner of the galaxy with benign, but absolute, authority.
In the apartment was a machine that functioned as a library. It was still in good working order; immortals build things to last. In it there was a reference to the star humans called Groombridge 1618, and to the telepathic creatures that lived there.
This immortal race had constructed the Groom-bridge bridge for its own amusement. It served as a scorekeeper in a decades-long game that involved the precise matching of emotional states. The planet Groombridge had been subjected to a kind of reverse geoformy: its ecology simplified so that none of the indigenous fauna would interfere with the game.
Human scientists were guilty of parochialism in classifying the Groombridge bridge as a physiologically simple creature. It is in fact the most complex organism ever studied-more complex than the scientists who have to dissect it by remote control.