Halfway House

by Robert Silverberg

Afterward, Alfieri realized that you must give a life to gain a life. Now, he was too interested simply in staying alive to think much about profundities.

He was l’uomo dal fuoco in bocca, the man with fire in his mouth. Cancer clawed at his throat. The vocoder gave him speech; but the raging fire soon would burn through to the core of him, and there would be no more Franco Alfieri. That was hard to accept. So he came to the Fold for aid.

He had the money. That was what it took, in part, to enter that gateway of worlds: money, plenty of it. Those who ran the Fold did not do it for sweet charity’s sake. The power drain alone was three million kilowatts every time the Fold was opened. You could power a good-sized city on a load like that. But Alfieri was willing to pay what it cost. The money would shortly be of no use to him whatever, unless the beings on the far side of the Fold gave his life back to him.

“You stand on that bedplate,” a technician told him. “Put your feet along the red triangular areas. Grasp the rail—so. Then wait.”

Alfieri obeyed. He was no longer in the habit of taking such brusque orders, but he forgave the man for his rudeness. To the technician, Alfieri was so much wealthy meat, already going maggotty. Alfieri positioned his feet and looked down at the mirror-bright polish of his pointed black shoes. He grasped the furry yellow skin of the rail. He waited for the power surge.

He knew what would happen. Alfieri had been an engineer in Milan, twenty years back, when the European power grid was just coming in. He understood the workings of the Fold as well as—well, as well as anyone else who was not a mathematician. Alfieri had left engineering to found an industrial empire that sprawled from the Alps to the blue Mediterranean, but he had kept up with technology. He was proud of that. He could walk into any factory, go straight to a workbench, display a rare knowledge of any man’s labor. Unlike most top executives, his knowledge was deep as well as broad.

Alfieri knew, then, that when the power surge came, it would momentarily create a condition they called a singularity, found in the natural universe only in the immediate vicinity of stars that were in their last moments of life. A collapsing star, a spent supernova, generates about itself a warp in the universe, a funnel to nowhere, the singularity. As the star shrinks, it approaches its Schwarzchild radius, the critical point when the singularity will devour it. Time runs more slowly for the dying star, as it nears the radius; its faint light shifts conspicuously toward the red; time rushes to infinity as the star is caught and swallowed by the singularity. And a man who happens to be present? He passes into the singularity also. Tidal gravitational forces of infinite strength seize him; he is stretched to the limit and simultaneously compressed, attaining zero volume and infinite density, and he is hurled—somewhere.

They had no dying stars in this laboratory. But for a price they could simulate one. For Alfieri’s bundle of lire they would strain the universe and create a tiny opening and hurl him through the Fold, to a place where pleated universes met, to a place where incurable diseases were not necessarily incurable.

Alfieri waited, a trim, dapper man of fifty, with thinning sandy hair slicked crosswise over the tanned dome of his skull. He wore the tweed suit he had bought in London in ‘95, and a matching gray-green tie and his small sapphire ring. He gripped the railing. He was not aware of it when the surge came, and the universe was broken open, and Franco Alfieri was catapulted through a yawning vortex into a place never dreamed of in Newton’s philosophy.

The being called Vuor said, “This is Halfway House.”

Alfieri looked about him. Superficially, his surroundings had not changed at all. He still stood on a glossy copper bedplate, still grasped a furry rail. The quartz walls of the chamber looked the same. But an alien being now peered in, and Alfieri knew he had been translated through the Fold.

The alien’s face was virtually a blank: a slit of a mouth below, slits of eyes above, no visible nostrils, a flat greenish facade, altogether, sitting on a squat neck, a triangular shoulderless trunk, ropy limbs. Alfieri had become accustomed to aliens in his dealings, and the sight of Vuor did not disturb him, though he had never seen one of this sort before.

Alfieri felt sweat churning through his pores. Tongues of flame licked at his throat. He had refused full sedation, for unless Alfieri’s mind could work properly he would not be Alfieri. But the pain was terrible.

He said, “How soon can I get help?”

“`What is the trouble?”

“Cancer of the throat. You hear my voice? Artificial. The larynx is gone already. There’s a malignant beast eating me. Cut it out of me.”

The eyeslits closed momentarily. Tentacles twined themselves together in a gesture that might have been sympathy, contempt, or refusal. Vuor’s reedy, rasping voice said in passable Italian, “We do not help you here, you understand. This is merely Halfway House, the screening point. We distribute you onward.”

“I know. I know. Well, send me to a world where they can cure cancer. I don’t have much time left. I’m suffering, and I’m not ready to go. There’s still work for me to do on Earth. Capisce?”

“What do you do, Franco Alfieri?”

“Didn’t my dossier arrive?”

“It did. Tell me about yourself.”

Alfieri shrugged. His palms were growing clammy, and he let go of the rail, wishing the alien would let him sit down. “I run an engineering company,” he said. “Actually a holding company. Alfieri S.A. We do everything: power distribution, pollution control, robotics. We’re getting into planetary transformation. Our operating divisions employ hundreds of thousands of men. We’re more than just a money-making concern, though. We’re shapers of a better world. We—” He hesitated, realizing that he sounded now like one of his own public relations flunkies and realizing also that he was begging for his own life. “It’s a big, important, useful company. I founded it. I run it.”

“And you are very rich. For this you wish us to prolong your life? You know that we all live under a sentence of death. For some sooner, others later. The surgeons beyond the Fold cannot save everyone. The number of sufferers who cry out is infinite, Alfieri. Tell me why you should be saved.”

Wrath flamed in Alfieri. He suppressed it.

He said, “I’m a human being with a wife and children. Not good enough reason, eh? I’m wealthy enough to pay any price to be healed. Good? No? Of course not. All right, try this: I’m a genius. Like Leonardo, like Michelangelo, like—like Einstein. You know those names? Good. I have a big genius, too. I don’t paint, I don’t compose music. I plan. I organize. I built the biggest corporation in Europe. I took companies and put them together to do things they could never have done alone.”

He glowered at the alien green mask beyond the quartz wall. “The technology that led Earth to open the Fold in the first place—my company. The power source—mine. I built it. I don’t boast, I speak the truth.”

“You are saying that you have made a lot of money.”

“Damn you, no! I’m saying that I’ve created something that didn’t exist before, something useful, something important, not only to Earth but to all the other worlds that meet here. And I’m not through creating. I’ve got bigger ideas. I need ten more years, and I don’t have ten months. Can you take the responsibility of shutting me off? Can you afford to throw away all that’s still in me? Can you?”

His unreal voice, which never grew hoarse even when he raised it to a shout, died away. Alfieri leaned on the railing again. The small golden eyes in the narrow slits regarded him impassively.

After a long silence Vuor said, “We will give you our decision shortly.”

The walls of the chamber went opaque. Alfieri paced the little room wearily. The taste of defeat was sour in his mouth, and somehow it did not anger him to know that he had failed. He was past caring. They would let him die, of course. They would tell him that he had done his work, that he had built his company, that it saddened them but they had to consider the needs of younger men whose lifedreams still were unrealized. Then, too, they were likely to think that merely because he was rich he was not deserving of rescue. Easier was it for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to attain new life on the surgeons’ tables of a world beyond the Fold. Yet he couldn’t give up now.

As he awaited his death sentence, Alfieri planned how he would spend his remaining months of life. Working to the end, of course. The heatsink project at Spitzbergen—yes, that first, and then—

The walls were clear again. Vuor had returned.

“Alfieri, we have made an appointment for you on Hinnerang, where your cancer will be remitted and your tissues restored. But there is a price.”

“Anything. A trillion lire!”

“Not money,” Vuor said. “Service. Put your genius to work in our aid.”

“Tell me how!”

“Halfway House, you know, is cooperatively staffed by representatives of many worlds whose continua meet at the Fold. There is not currently an administrator from Earth on our staff. A vacancy is soon to develop. You fill it. Lend us your gift for organizing, for administration. Take a five-year term among us. Then you may return home.”

Alfieri pondered. He had no particular wish to give up five years to this place. Too much beckoned to him on Earth, and if he were away five years, who would take the reins of his companies? He might return and find himself hopelessly out of touch.

Then he realized the absurdity of the thought. Vuor was offering him twenty, thirty, fifty more years of life. Standing at the edge of the grave as he was, Alfieri had no right to begrudge five of those years if his benefactors demanded them. He had made his unique administrative abilities his claim for renewed life; was it any surprise that they now wanted those same abilities as quid pro quo?

“Agreed,” Alfieri said.

“There will, in addition, be a monetary payment,” said Vuor, but Alfieri hardly cared about that.

An infinity of universes met at the Fold, as they did at every other point in space-time. Only at the Fold, though, was it possible now to cross from one continuum to another, thanks to the equipment installed there. A webwork of singularities poked holes in the fabric of universal structures. Halfway House was the shuttle point for this loom of worlds; those who could convince the administrators that they had the right to occupy a valuable place on the transfer channels were shunted to the worlds of their need.

An infinity is an infinity, and the channels filled all needs. There was access, for those who wanted it, to a matter-free universe and to a universe filled with one all-encompassing atom and to a universe containing, a world where living beings grew steadily younger and not the reverse.

There were worlds unknown to the sons of Adam, with tribes whose heads grow beneath their shoulders and their mouths in their breasts; worlds of monoculi, who run swiftly though they have a single leg and a single eye; worlds of folk whose mouths are so small they take nourishment only through a straw; worlds of amoebic intelligences; worlds where bodily reincarnation is an established fact; worlds where dreams become realities at the snap of a finger. An infinity is an infinity. But for practical purposes, only some two dozen of these worlds mattered, for they were the ones linked by common purposes and common orientation.

On one of those worlds, skilled surgeons might repair a cancer-ravaged throat. In time that skill would be imparted to Earth in return for some Earthly good, but Alfieri could not wait for the exchange to be consummated. He paid his fee, and the administrators of Halfway House sent him to Hinnerang.

Alfieri was unaware, once again, as he squeezed through the Schwarzchild singularity. He had always loved tasting unfamiliar sensations, and it seemed unfair to him that a man should be compressed to zero volume and infinite density without some tactile knowledge of the fact. But so it happened. A dying supernova was simulated for him, and he was whisked through the singularity to emerge in one more identical chamber on Hinnerang.

Here, at least, things looked properly alien. There was a reddish tinge to the warm, golden sunlight, and at night four moons danced in the sky. The gravity was half that of Earth’s; and as he stood under that quartet of shimmering orbs, Alfieri felt a strange giddiness and an inner access of ecstatic strength. It seemed to him that he could leap at a bound and snatch one of those jewels from the sky.

The Hinnerangi were small, angular beings with auburn skins, high-vaulted skullcaps, and fibrous fingers that divided and divided again until they formed writhing networks of filament at the tips. They spoke in sinister whispers, and their language struck Alfieri as more barbarous than Basque and as consonant-heavy as Polish; but the usual small devices turned their words to the tongue of Dante when they needed to communicate with him, a miracle that struck Alfieri as more awesome than the whole mechanism of the Fold, which at least he could pretend he understood.

“We will first negate your pain,” his surgeon told him.

“By knocking out my pain sensors?” Alfieri asked. “Cutting nerve lines?”

The surgeon regarded him with what seemed like grave amusement. “There are no pain sensors as such in the human nervous system. There are merely functional bodies that perceive and respond by classifying the many patterns of nerve impulses arriving from the skin, selecting and abstracting the necessary modalities. “Pain” is simply a label for a class of experiences, not always unpleasant. We will adjust the control center, the gate of responses, so that your scanning of input impulses will be orientated differently. There will be no loss of sensory information; but what you feel will no longer be classified as pain.”

At another time, Alfieri might have been happy to discuss the refined semantics of pain theory. Now, he was satisfied to nod solemnly and permit them to put out the fire that raged in his throat.

It was done, delicately and simply. He lay in a cradle of some gummy foam while the surgeon planned the next move: a major resection of tissue; replacement of lost cell matter; regeneration of organs. To Alfieri, wireless transmission of power was an everyday matter, but these things were the stuff of dreams. He submitted. They cut away so much of him that it seemed another slice of the surgical beam would sever his head altogether. Then they rebuilt him. When they were finished, he would speak with his own voice again, not with an implanted mechanism. But would it really be his own, if they had built it for him? No matter. It was flesh. Alfieri’s heart pumped Alfieri’s blood through the new tissue.

And the cancer? Was it gone?

The Hinnerangi were thorough. They hunted the berserk cells through the corridors of his body. Alfieri saw colonies of cancer establishing themselves in his lungs, his kidneys, his intestines. He visualized marauding creatures stabbing good cells with mortal wounds, thrusting their own vile fluid into unwanted places, replicating a legion of goose-stepping carcinomas cell by cell by cell. But the Hinnerangi were thorough. They purged Alfieri of corruption. They took out his appendix, in the bargain, and comforted his liver against a lifetime of white Milanese wine. Then they sent him off to recuperate.

He breathed alien air and watched moons leaping like gazelles in a sky of strange constellations. He put his hand to his throat a thousand times a day, to feel the newness there, the warmth of fresh tissue. He ate the meat of unknown beasts. He gained strength from hour to hour.

At last they put him in a singularity chamber and rammed him through the complexities of the Fold, and he returned to Halfway House.

Vuor said, “You will begin your work at once. This will be your office.”

It was an oval room, walled with a living plastic that made it seem as warm and pink and soft as the walls of a womb. Beyond one wall was the quartz-bounded chamber used by those who traveled the Fold. Vuor showed him how to operate the switch that permitted viewing access to the chamber in either direction.`

“What will my duties be?” Alfieri asked.

“Come and tour Halfway House first,” said Vuor.

Alfieri followed. It was hard to grasp the nature of the place: Alfieri pictured it as something like a space station, an orbiting wheel of finite size divided into many chambers. But since there were no windows, he could not confirm that belief. The place seemed fairly small, no bigger than a good-sized office building. Much of it was given over to a power plant. Alfieri wished to stay and examine the generators, but Vuor hurried him on to a cafeteria, to a small room that would be his dwelling place, to some sort of chapel, to executive offices.

The alien seemed impatient. Silent figures drifted through the halls of Halfway House, beings of fifty sorts. Nearly all were oxygen breathers who could handle the all-purpose atmosphere of the place, but some were masked and mysterious. They nodded at Vuor, stared at Alfieri. Civil servants, Alfieri thought. Doing their routine work. And now I am one of them, a petty bureaucrat. But I am alive, and I will wade through a sea of bureaucratic forms to show my gratitude.

They returned to the oval office with the soft, moist pink walls.

“What will my duties be?” Alfieri asked again.

“To interview those who come to Halfway House seeking to travel beyond the Fold.”

“But that’s your job!”

“No longer,” said Vuor. “My term is up. Mine is the now-vacant position you have been recruited to fill. When you begin, I can leave.”

“You said I’d get an administrative post. To organize, to plan—”

“This is administrative work. You must judge the niceties of each applicant’s situation. You must be aware of the capacity of the facilities beyond this point. You must maintain an overview of your task: whom to send forward, whom to reject.”

Alfieri’s hands trembled. “I’m the one who’ll decide? I say, go back and rot, and you come forward? I choose life for some and death for others? No. I don’t want it. I’m not God!”

“Neither am I,” said the alien blandly. “Do you think I like this job? But now I can shrug it off. I am finished here. I have been God for five years, Alfieri. It’s your turn now.”

“Give me some other work. There must be other jobs suited for me!”

“Perhaps there are. But you are best suited for this one. You are a gifted decider. And another thing to consider, Alfieri. You are my replacement. If you do not take the job, I must remain until someone else capable of handling it is found. I have been God long enough, Alfieri.”

Alfieri was silent. He stared into the golden eyeslits, and for the first time he thought he could interpret an expression he found there. Pain. The pain of an Atlas, carrying worlds on his shoulders. Vuor was suffering. And he, Franco Alfieri, could alleviate that pain by taking the burden on himself.

Vuor said, “When your application was approved, there was an understanding that you would render service to us. The scope of your duties has been outlined to you. There is an obligation, Alfieri.”

Nodding, Alfieri saw the truth of that. If he refused to take the post, what would they do? Give him his cancer back? No. They would find another use for him. And Vuor would continue to hold this job. Alfieri owed his life to the suffering alien. If he extended Vuor’s duties by one additional hour, it would be unforgivable.

“I accept the obligation,” Alfieri said.

The look in the alien’s eyeslits could have been nothing but joy.

There were certain things Alfieri had to learn about his job, and then he was on his own. He learned them. He took up his new existence as a bureaucrat with good grace. One room to live in, instead of a cycle of mansions; food prepared by computers, not by master chefs; a long day of work, and little recreation. But he was alive. He could look to a time beyond the five years.

He sent word to Earth that he would be detained and that he would eventually return in good health to resume his position in the corporation. He authorized the commencement of Plan A for running the company in his prolonged absence. Alfieri had planned everything. Men he trusted would be stewards for him until he returned. It was made quite clear to him at Halfway House that he could not attempt to run the firm by remote control, and so he activated his plan and left the company to its new administrators. He was busy enough.

Applicants came to him.

Not all of them wished medical aid, but all had some good and compelling reason for journeying to some world beyond the Fold. Alfieri judged their cases. He had no quota; if he cared to, he could send all his applicants through to their destinations or turn them all away. But the one would be irresponsible, the other inhumane. Alfieri judged. He weighed in the balance, and some he found wanting, and others he passed on. There were only so many channels, a finite number of routes to the infinity of worlds. Alfieri thought of himself sometimes as a traffic policeman, sometimes as Maxwell’s Demon, sometimes as Rhadamanthys in Hades. Mostly he thought of the day when he could go home again.

The refusals were painful. Some of the applicants bellowed their rage at him and made threats. Some of them shrank into sobbing stupors. Some quietly warned of the grave injustice he was doing. Alfieri had made hard decisions all his life, but his soul was not yet calloused from them, and he regretted the things the applicants said to him. The job, though, had to be done, and he could not deny he had a gift for it.

He was not the only such judge at Halfway House, naturally. Streams of applicants were constantly processed through many offices. But Alfieri was, in addition to a judge, the final court of appeals for his colleagues. He maintained the overview. He controlled the general flow. It was his talent to administer things.

A day came when an auburn-skinned being with swarming subdivided tendrils stood before him, a man of Hinnerang. For a terrible moment Alfieri thought it was the surgeon who had repaired his throat. But the resemblance was only superficial. This man was no surgeon.

Alfieri said, “This is Halfway House.”

“I need help. I am Tomrik Horiman. You have my dossier?”

“I do,” Alfieri said. “You know that we give no help here, Tomrik Horiman. We simply forward you to the place where help may be obtained. Tell me about yourself.”

The tendrils writhed in anguish. “I am a grower of houses. My capital is overextended. My entire establishment is threatened. If I could go to a world where my houses would win favor, my firm would be saved. I have a plan for growing houses on Melknor. Our calculations show that there would be a demand for our product there.”

“Melknor has no shortage of houses,” Alfieri remarked.

“But they love novelty there. They’d rush to buy. An entire family is faced with ruin, kind sir! Root and branch we will be wiped out. The penalty for bankruptcy is extreme. With my honor lost, I would have to destroy myself. I have children.”

Alfieri knew that. He also knew that the Hinnerangi spoke the truth; unless he were allowed to pass through to Melknor to save his business, he would be obliged to take his own life. As much as Alfieri himself, this being had come before the tribunal of Halfway House under a death sentence.

But Alfieri had gifts. What did this man offer? He wished to sell houses on a planet that had no real need for them. He was one of many such house-growers, anyway, and a poor businessman to boot. He brought his troubles upon himself; unlike Alfieri, who had not asked for his cancer. Nor would Tomrik Horiman’s passing be any great loss except to his immediate family. It was a great pity; but the application would have to be refused.

“We will give you our decision shortly,” said Alfieri. He opaqued the walls and briefly reported to his colleagues. They did not question the wisdom of his decision. Clearing the walls, he stared through the blocks of quartz at the man from Hinnerang and said, “I greatly regret that your application must be rejected.”

Alfieri waited for the reaction. Anger? Hysterical denunciation? Despair? Cold fury? A paroxysm of frustration?

No, none of those. The merchant of vegetary houses looked back at Alfieri, who had spent enough time among the Hinnerangi to interpret their unvoiced emotions. And Alfieri felt the flood of sorrow coming at him like a stream of acid. Tomrik Horiman pitied him.

“I am very sorry,” the Hinnerangi said. “You bear such a great burden.”

Alfieri shook with the pain of the words. The man was sorry—not for himself, but for him! Morbidly, he almost wished for his cancer back. Tomrik Horiman’s pity was more than he could bear at that moment.

Tomrik Horiman gripped the rail and stood poised for his return to his own world. For an instant his eyes met the shadowed ones of the Earthman.

“Tell me,” Tomrik Horiman said. “This job you have, deciding who goes forward, who goes back. Such a terrible burden! How did this job come to you?”

“I was condemned to it,” said Franco Alfieri in all the anguish of his Godhead. “The price for my life was my life. I never knew such suffering when I was only a dying man.”

He scowled. And then he threw the switch that sent Tomrik Horiman away.

Content

Halfway House
by Robert Silverberg