Alternating Currents (12 page)

Perhaps more, even, than he had bargained for.

~ * ~

The trouble with
Terra II
was that she was playing a cosmic game of blind-man’s-buff. Jumping into hyperspace was like leaping through a shadow, blindfolded; there was no way of knowing in advance what lay on the other side.

The first hyperspace rocket had taught a few lessons, expensively learned. On its first jump into hyperspace,
Terra I
had been ‘out’ for just under one second - just enough, that is, for the jump generators to swing the ship into and out of the Riemannian n-dimensional composite that they called hyperspace for lack of a better term.

And it had taken
Terra I
nearly a year to limp back home, in normal space all the way, its generators a smouldering ruin. Back still again to the drawing boards!

But it was no one’s fault. Who could have foreseen that any electric current, however faint, would so warp the field as to blow up the generators ? The lesson was plain:

No electrical equipment in use during a jump.

So
Terra I,
rebuilt, re-equipped and with a new crew, tried again. And this time there were no power failures. The only failure, this time, was the human element.

Because in hyperspace, the Universe was a crazy-quilt of screaming patterns and shimmering lights, no more like the ordered normal-space pattern of stars than the view through a kaleidoscope is like the coloured shreds of paper at its focus.

So the Celestial Atlas was added to the complement of a hyperspace rocket’s crew. And
Terra I
was rebuilt, and
Terra II
and
Terra III
and
Terra IV
came off the ways. And Earth cast its bait into the turgid depths of hyperspace again and again ....

The crews of the charting service were all volunteers, all rigidly screened. The ten officers who made up the wardroom of
Terra II
were as brilliant and able a group as ever assembled, but the emergency officers’ meeting was a failure, all the same.

There just wasn’t any way back.

‘We’re the trail-blazers,’ rumbled the captain. ‘If we had a duplicate Celestial Atlas - but we don’t. Well, that’s something for the next ship to bear in mind, if we ever get back to tell them about it.’

Ensign Lorch said tentatively, ‘Sir,
don’t
we have one ?’

The captain rasped, ‘Of course not, man! I just finished saying we didn’t. You should know that.’

‘Yes, sir. But that’s not exactly what I meant. We have a Library and, as I understand it, the Library is basically the same as the Atlas - a trained total-recall observer. Doesn’t any of the information in the Library duplicate the Atlas ?’

‘Now that,’ said the captain after a pause, ‘is worth thinking about. What about it, Hal ?’

The Exec said, ‘Worth a try, captain.’

‘Right. Yoel, get her up here.’ Lieutenant Yoel saluted and spoke into the communications tube. The captain went on reflectively. ‘Probably won’t work, of course, but we’ll try anything. Anybody else got a suggestion ?’

‘Dead reckoning, sir?’ Yoel suggested. ‘I know we’ve got the record of our fixes so far; can we try just backtracking ?’

‘Won’t work,’ the captain said positively. ‘If we could be absolutely exact, maybe. But without an Atlas we can’t be. And a centimetres’ divergence at the beginning of a run might put us a thousand kilometres off at the end. A thousand kilometres in hyperspace - heaven knows what that might come to in normal space. Anything from a million light-years down.

‘I couldn’t do it, Yoel. Even Groden couldn’t do it
with
his eyes, and he’s the best shiphandler on board. And I don’t think he’s going to have his eyes, anyway, at least not for a long time. Maybe for ever, if we don’t get back to the eye banks on Earth: Without the Atlas, we’re as blind as Groden.’

The speaking tube interrupted and rescued Yoel. It whistled thinly: ‘Recorder Mate Eklund reporting to the wardroom.’

‘Send her in,’ said the Exec, and the Library, Nancy Eklund, RM2c, marched smartly into the meeting.

~ * ~

It wasn’t going to work; the captain knew it in the first few words. They spent an hour sweating the Library of all of her relevant data, but it was wasted effort.

The captain thought wistfully of Recorder Mate Spohn, the lost Celestial Atlas. With him on the bridge, hyperspace navigation had been - well, not easy, but
possible.
For Spohn was trained in the techniques of total recall. The shifting, multicoloured values of Riemannian space formed totals in his mind, so that he could actually navigate by means of a process of mental analysis and synthesis so rapid and complex that it became a sort of
gestalt.

Of course, a twelve-stage electronic computer could have done the same thing, just as quickly. But
Terra II
had its limitations, and one of the limitations was that no electronic equipment could be operated in a jump - just when the computer would most be needed. So the designers came up with what was, after all, a fairly well tested method of filing information - the human brain. By the techniques of hypnotic conditioning
all
of the brain opened up to subconscious storing.

Recorder Mate Spohn, trance-like on the bridge, had no conscious knowledge of what was going on as, machine-like, he scanned the Riemannian configurations and rapped out courses and speeds; but his subconscious never erred. With its countless cells and infinite linkages, the brain was a tank that all the world’s knowledge could hardly fill - just about big enough, in fact, to cope with the task of recognizing the meaning of hyperspace configurations.

And the process worked so well that the delighted designers added another recorder mate to the personnel tables - the Library - which enabled them to dispense with the dead weight of books as well.

The entire wardroom, in order of rank, shot questions at their Library, and her disciplined mind dutifully plucked out answers.

But most of them she never knew. For
Terra II
was a charting ship, and though the Atlas had, as a matter of routine, transcribed his calibrations into the ship’s log - and thence into the Library - all that Nancy Eklund knew was how
Terra II
had reached its checkpoints in space. Hyperspace was a tricky business; backtracking was dangerous.

When
Terra II
got back -
if Terra II
got back - those who came after them would have complete calibrations for a round trip. But they did not. Their task was as difficult and dangerous, in its way, as Columbus’s caravels. Except that Columbus had only one great fear; falling off the edge of the Earth.

Lucky Columbus. The technology that had produced
Terra II
had brought plenty of new fears.

~ * ~

Three shells ‘up’ - towards the ship’s centre - a surgeon’s mate named Conboy was pulling the fourth needle out of the arm of Lieutenant Groden. The big navigator should have been out cold, but he was tossing and mumbling, his head thrashing from side to side in its thick wrappings of bandage.

Tough guy, thought Conboy critically, counting up the ampoules of opiate the blinded officer had taken. They were all tough guys, anyway, from the skipper on down. But the little pipettes brought them down to size and Conboy, though only an inch over five feet tall and the frailest on board, was the man who drove in the pipettes.

‘He’s under, Mr Broderick,’ he reported to the ship’s surgeon, who nodded.

‘Keep it so,’ the officer ordered. ‘If anything comes up, I’ll be in the wardroom.’ The captain would be wanting to hear about Groden’s condition, and Broderick wanted very much to hear what the emergency meeting had to say about the condition of
Terra II
in general.

This was fine with Conboy, who had a similar concern of his own. As soon as Commander Broderick was out of sight, Conboy took a last look at Groden and, reassured that the navigator would be out of trouble for at least half an hour, hurried to the next cabin to pry what information he could out of the chart-room.

A spaceman-first named Coriell was methodically taking optical measurement on all the stars of second magnitude or brighter. Conboy looked uncomprehendingly at the entries on the charts. ‘Got anything ?’ he asked.

Coriell spat disgustedly. ‘Got trouble. See that little fellow down there, between the two real bright ones ? That
might
be Canopus. The rough lines check; Mr Ciccarelli’s going to have to run a spectrum on it, when he gets through with the meeting.’

Conboy looked sourly at the indicated star. It was brighter than the average, but far less bright than the two that flanked it. ‘Canopus, huh ?’ he repeated. ‘Suppose it is, Coriell. How far from Earth does that put us ?’

Coriell shrugged. ‘What am I, a navigator? How’s Groden, by the way ?’

‘He’ll live. Suppose it is, Coriell?’

‘Well-’ Coriell thought for a moment. ‘Depends. If we’re on the same side of it as Earth, might not be far at all. If we’re on the other side - well, Canopus is six hundred and fifty-light years from Sol.’

Conboy looked again, longingly. ‘Well, thanks,’ he said, and went back to his patient.

That was the trouble with hyperspace travel, he thought. You go in at one point, you rocket around until you think it’s time to come out, and there you are. Where is ‘there’? Why, that’s the surprise that’s in store for you, because you never know until you get there.

And sometimes not even then.

~ * ~

On the bridge, everything was Condition Able. Ensign Lorch, booted early out of the meeting because he was due to relieve as Junior O.O.D., signed in and made his tour of the ship. The damage-control parties below decks were all through with the necessary repairs, and keeping themselves busy with such cosmetic tasks as fairing down the beads left by the first emergency welds. It was hot down there.

Lorch conscientiously whistled up the bridge on the speaking tube and ordered them to start the fans and valve enough gas into the expansion locks to make up for the heat rise. The crew quarters were shipshape, even the women’s section; the jet chambers were at stand-by, with the jet-room hands busy at their usual stand-by task of thumping the tubes for possible hidden cracks. The working parties were finishing up the job of restowing the cargo that had to be shifted when the meteorite hit.

Lorch signed in the log, and paused thoughtfully over the spaces for entries of course and position. The helmsman was smartly at attention at the main board, though there was nothing for him to do since all jets were capped. Lorch glanced at him reprovingly, but the helmsman was conspicuously correct in his behaviour.

It made a problem; Lorch detested the thought of writing in ‘unknown’, but it certainly would be exceeding his authority to call the chart-room without permission of Lieutenant Yoel, his shift commander. Not, thought Lorch a trifle rebelliously, that Yoel was likely to object very strongly.

Yoel was a drafted mathematician, not a ship-handler. He knew very nearly all there was to know about geodesic theory and the complex equations that lay behind the ‘jump’ generators and their odd nucleophoretic drive. But he was far from a model officer, so little conscious of the fundamental law of R.H.I.P. that he was capable of presuming to advise the captain on ship-handling - the scene in the wardroom had proved that.

~ * ~

Lorch had just about decided to call down to the chart-room when Yoel appeared, signalling that the meeting was over, and Lorch deftly dropped the problem in his superior’s lap.’ Ship on Condition Able,’ he reported briskly. ‘No manoeuvring during watch; no change in operating status during watch. I have made no entry for course and position, sir. Though you might like to.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Yoel said sourly. ‘Put down “unknown”. Write it in big letters.’

‘As bad as that, sir?’

‘As bad as that.’ Yoel turned his back on his junior and methodically scanned the segment of sky outside the port. It was in constant spinning motion, flashing past the field of vision as
Terra II
whirled on its axis to give the crew something approaching gravity.

Lorch cleared his throat. ‘You got nothing out of Eklund, sir?’

‘Oh, sure. We got the absolute magnitudes and stellar distances of half the stars in the Galaxy.’ Yoel turned from the port and shook his head. ’We got a short course in Riemannian geometry and an outline of the geodesies of n-dimensional space. But we didn’t get a road map.’ He glanced at the thermometer on the wall and said vaguely, ‘I thought I heard -’

He stood up straight.
‘Mister
Lorch!’ he exploded.’ I wasn’t hearing things! You were bleeding air into the expansion locks!’

‘Why, yes, sir. To cool the ship,’ Lorch explained. ‘The welding torches were -’

‘Blast the welding torches, mister! Did it ever occur to you we’re a long way from home?’

‘Yes, sir, but -’

‘But you’re an idiot! But! You valve off air as though we had a whole world of it. Did it ever occur to you that we might be in space a long time ? Did you stop to think that we might run out of air ?’

Lorch stared at him wordless. For a frozen moment he thought his superior had gone mad. Spaceships? Spaceships ran from point to point in n-dimensional hyperspace, no point was far from any other - an hour’s travel, perhaps a day’s.
Terra II
was crammed to the gunwales with air, by the standards of the service. Run out of
air?