Alternating Currents (16 page)

Consider the Galaxy, he was thinking to himself; a hundred thousand light-years broad, perhaps forty thousand through its axis. Call it a lens-shaped figure with a volume of three hundred trillion light-years. Say that their cruising radius, in normal space, was within a volume of one light-year; that meant that the chances of their coming out, by accident, within cruising distance of Earth was - not one in a million, or one in a hundred million, or one in a billion. . . .

It was one chance in three hundred trillion.

The captain juggled the numbers comfortably enough in his mind. They were absolutely meaningless, far too big to be comprehended or feared.

~ * ~

There it was, the beautiful Master Pattern.

Groden lay tense and fearful, seeing it. It had been a long time since the last needle; by the only clock he owned, his heartbeat, it had been more than two hours since he discovered that he could move his lips and his fingers again. He had feverishly wondered why; and had not dared speak or move after the first trials for fear of bringing the needle again. But now he knew.

There was the Master Pattern. He scanned it slowly in every part. There was the giant star-cluster of Hercules; and there the bridge of
Terra II;
there was the fat red disc of Betelgeuse; and there the shower-room of the enlisted women’s quarters. He took in the ordered ranks of the constellations as easily as he noted that Broderick was gone from the sick-bay, and in his place the young ensign, Lorch, was clinging with harried expression to a stanchion. They were in hyperspace. Broderick was on the bridge. Lorch had been left in charge, and it had not occurred to him, since his patient had been so carefully quiet, to administer another needle.

Groden carefully moved his hands, and found that they would do what he wanted. He was getting the hang of - well, it was not seeing, exactly, he confessed to himself. It was like being alone on a starless night, in the middle of a dark wood. It took time to get used to the darkness, but by and by shapes would begin to make themselves known.

It was not the same thing; this was no mere matter of the expanding pupil of the eye; but the effect was something the same. But explain it or not, he was being able to use it; each time the beautiful vision was more complete, and therefore more beautiful.

He found the straps that bound him, and unbuckled them.

On the bridge, he ‘saw’, the jump at random was nearing its end. It would be only a matter of minutes before they were back in normal space, and he was blind again.

In the outer room of the sick-bay, Ensign Lorch was staring dismally at the hallucinations of hyperspace. It was almost certain, thought Groden to himself, that if Lorch was so fortunate as to see him at all, he would pass off the sight as another of the lies light told. The important thing was sound; he must not make a noise.

He crept through the door, carefully holding to the guide rails. Broderick had been right about one thing, though, he admitted - the pain. The wreck of his eyes no longer seemed as important, with the wonderful things hyperspace’s cloudless perception brought to him, but the shattered bone and tissue and nerve ends
hurt.

Algol’s dark primary occluded the radiant star for a second and confused him; they were moving faster than he had thought. He hastily scanned the Master Plan again, fearful for a second. But there was Sol and its family of planets, and there was Earth.
Terra II
might be lost, but Lieutenant Groden was not, and if only he could get to the bridge . . .

He scanned the bridge. It was later than he thought. He felt the vibrations in the floor as he realized that the jump was at an end. Panicked, he hesitated.

Blackness again, and no more stars.

He stood there, incredibly desolate, and the pain was suddenly more than he could bear.

And from behind him he heard a startled yell, Lorch’s voice: ‘Hey, Groden! Come back here! What the devil are you doing out in the passage ?’

It was the last straw. Groden had no tear ducts left with which to weep, but he did the best he could.

~ * ~

Broderick worked over the girl, Eklund, for a moment, and brought her to. She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, but she was all right. As all right, he thought, as anyone on
Terra II
had any chance to be.

‘Plain heat prostration,’ he reported to the captain. ‘It’s been a pretty rough job for her, trying to keep on top of all this.’

The captain nodded unemotionally. ‘Well, Ciccarelli?’ he demanded.

The navigator ran his hands through his hair. ‘No position, sir,’ he said despondently. ‘Maybe if I ran down the third and fourth magnitude stars -’

‘Don’t bother,’ the captain said. ‘If we aren’t within a light-year of Sol, we’re too far to do us any good. At your convenience, gentlemen, we’ll take another jump.’

The Executive nodded wearily and opened his mouth to give the order, but Broderick protested, ‘Sir, we’ll all be falling over if we don’t take a break. The temperature’s past forty-five now. The only way to handle it is frequent rests and plenty of liquids.’

‘Ten minutes be enough?’

The surgeon hesitated. Then he shrugged. ‘Why not? No sense worrying about long-term effects just now, is there ?’

‘There is not,’ said the captain. ‘Make it so,’ he ordered the Exec.

The captain half-closed his eyes, fanning himself mechanically. When the runner from the wardroom brought him his plastic globe of fruit juices he accepted it and began to sip, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. He had the figures on the tip of his tongue: the first blind jump in Project Desperation had cost them sixteen minutes of rocket time. He could be a little more conservative with the next one - maybe use only ten minutes. That way he could squeeze out at least one more full-length, or nearly full-length, jump; and then one last truly desperate try, not more than a minute or two. And if that didn’t work, they were cooked.

Literally, he told himself wryly.

In fact, he continued, counting up the entries in red ink on their ledger, they were just about out of luck now. For even if their next jump took them within cruising distance of Earth, there was still the time factor to be considered. They had left only twenty-four minutes of jet-time before
Terra II’s
hull temperature passed the critical sixty-degree mark.

True, he had maintained some slight reserve in that not
all
their expansible gas had been used. There remained a certain amount in the compressed tanks. And even beyond that, it would be possible to valve off some of the ship’s ambient air itself, dropping the pressure to, say ten pounds to the square inch or even less.

That
might
give them manoeuvring time in normal space -provided they were God-blessed enough to come out of one of the three remaining jumps within range of Earth, provided all the angels of heaven were helping them. . . .

Which, it was clear, he told himself, they weren’t.

‘Sir,’ said Commander Broderick’s voice, ‘I think you can proceed now.’

The captain opened his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said gravely and nodded to the Exec. It was a quick job by now. The kerosene lamps were already lit, the main electric circuits already cut; it was only a matter of double-checking and of getting the nucleophoretic generators up to speed.

The captain observed the routine attentively. It did not matter that the fitness reports for which he was taking mental notes might never be written. It was a captain’s job to make his evaluations all the same.

‘Stand by to jump!’ called the Exec, and the talker repeated it into the tubes. Down in the generator-room, the jumpmen listened for the command. It came; they heaved on the enormous manual clutches.

And
Terra II
slipped into Riemannian space once more.

~ * ~

The stars whirled before the captain’s eyes and became geometrical figures in prismatic colours. The slight, worn figure of the Library, the girl named Eklund, ballooned and wavered and seemed to float around the bridge. The captain looked on with composure; he was used to the illusions of hyperspace. Even - almost - he understood them. From the girl’s vast stored knowledge, he had learned of the connexion between electric potential and the three-dimensional matrix.

Light and electrons: in hyperspace, they lied.

Matter was still matter, he thought; the strange lights beyond the viewing pane were stars. And the subtler flow within his body was dependable enough, for he could hear as reliably as ever and if he touched something hot, the nerve ends would scream
Burn!
to his brain. But the messenger between the stars and the brain - the photons and electrons that conveyed the image - were aberrants; they followed curious Riemannian courses, and no brain bound by the strictures of three dimensions could sort them out.

Just as now, thought the captain with detached amusement, I seem to be seeing old Groden here on the bridge. Ridiculous, but as plain as life. If I didn’t know he was asleep in the sickbay, I’d swear it was he.

‘Captain! Captain!’ Ensign Lorch’s voice penetrated over the metronome-cadenced commands of the Exec and the bustling noises of the bridge.

The captain stared wonderingly at the phantasms of light. ‘Ensign Lorch?’ he demanded. ‘But -’

‘Yes, sir! I’m really here and so is Groden.’ Lorch’s voice went on as the captain peered into the chaos of shifting images. Lorch himself wasn’t visible - unless that sea-green inverted monstrosity with a head of fire was Lorch. But the voice was Lorch’s voice, and the figure of Groden, complete with the white wrappings over the eyes, was shadowy but real. And the voices were saying - astonishing things.

‘You mean,’ said the captain at last, ‘that
Groden
can pilot us home ?’

‘That,’ said Groden, in the first confident voice he had been able to use in days, ‘is just what he means.’

~ * ~

Blind man’s bluff. And what better player can there be than a blind man ?

Lieutenant Groden, eyeless and far-seeing, stood by the Exec’s left hand and clipped out courses and directions. The Exec marvelled, and stared unbelievingly at the fantastic patterns outside the bridge, and followed orders.

And presently Groden gave the order to stop all jets and drop back into normal space. In a moment, he was blind again - and the rest of the bridge complement found themselves staring at a reddish sun with a family of five planets, two of them Earthlike and green.

‘That’s not Sol!’ barked the captain.

‘No,’ said Groden wearily, ‘but it’s a place to land and cool the ship and replenish our air. You ran us close to the danger line, Captain.’

Terra II
came whistling down on to a broad, sandy plain, and lay quiet, its jet tubes smoking, while the Planetology section put out its feelers and reported:

‘Temperature, pressure, atmospheric analysis and radiation spectrum - all Earth normal. No poisons or biotic agents apparent on gross examination.’

‘There won’t be any on closer examination either,’ said Groden. ‘This planet’s clean, captain.’ He stood hanging on to a stanchion, pressed down by the gravity of the world he had found for them.

The captain looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but there were more important things to attend to.

‘Bleed in two pounds,’ ordered the captain and the Duty Officer saluted and issued orders into the speaking tube.

They had run close to the danger line, indeed; the ambient pressure inside
Terra II’s
hull had been bled down to a scant ten pounds, in order to use as much cooling effect from releasing gas as possible. Whether it was clean or not, no man could step out on to the surface of the new planet until the pressures had been brought back to normal.

They stood at the view panel looking out on the world. They were near its equator, but the temperature was cool by Earth standards. Before them was a broad, gentle sea; behind them, a rim of green-clad hills.

The captain made ready to send his first landing party on to a new and liveable planet.

~ * ~

The scouting parties were back and the captain, for once, was smiling. ‘Wonderful!’ he exulted. ‘A perfect planet for colonization - and we owe it all to you, Groden.’

‘That’s right,’ said Groden. He was lying down on a wardroom bench - Broderick’s orders. Broderick had wanted to put him under sedation again, in fact, but that had brought Groden too close to mutiny.

The captain glanced at his navigator. The swathed bandages hid Groden’s expression, and after a moment the captain decided to overlook the remark.

He went on, ‘It’s a medal for you. You deserve it, Groden.’

‘He’ll need it, sir,’ said Commander Broderick. ‘There won’t be any new eyes for Lieutenant Groden.’ He looked old and sicked defeated. ‘The optic nerves are too far gone. New eyes wouldn’t help now; there’s nothing that would help. He’ll never have eyes again.’

‘Sure,’ said Groden casually. ’I knew it before I brought you here, captain.’

The captain frowned uncomprehendingly, but Broderick caught the meaning in an instant. ‘You mean you could have brought us back to Earth ?’ he demanded.

‘In two jumps,’ Groden told him easily.

‘Then why didn’t you?’ snapped the captain. ‘I have a responsibility to my crew - I can’t let a man go blind because of phony heroics!’