Hidden Variables (33 page)

After an hour of these cheerful thoughts, a new factor entered. My tooth erupted again. It had been sitting back, quietly throbbing, ever since we reached the asteroid. Now it woke up with a vengeance and began to poke red-hot needles down through the top of my head. I couldn't get a finger in my mouth because it was in the suit, but I ran my tongue over the left side of my inner gum and was rewarded with a bolt of lightning through my left temple. The gum felt squishy and I had a peculiar taste in my mouth. The pain grew steadily worse.

There seems little point in a detailed recapitulation of the next three days, If—as seems unlikely—you've been through a similar experience, you know what it was like. If not, no words describe it. Fortunately or unfortunately, the infection from my tooth distorted my time sense. I ran a high fever and was delirious for at least part of the time. Teeth were much on my mind. I remember saying, out loud, "the tooth, and nothing but the tooth," and "uneasy lies the tooth that wears the crown."

One thing is clear. Somehow, the combination of solitude, fear, pain and fever worked a strange synthesis. Just after I had said, "But why put the warp controls on the
outside,
not the inside?" I understood, from nowhere, the purpose, logic and practice of the Kaneelian space warp. I knew why we couldn't see a pattern in the points of exit, and why we hadn't been able to send living things through it.

The knowledge did me no good. My misery went on. Then, long after I had died, gone to Hell, and been sent on from there to a worse place, the gray ambience suddenly vanished and I popped out into the black, dazzling vacuum of normal space. My suit emergency signal switched itself on and four hours later a USF transfer vessel picked me up. I had been warped almost two million miles away from the asteroid. The ship's robodoc clucked over me and pumped me full of antibiotics, tranquilizers and happy pills. By the time we reached Tycho Base I was stoned out of my mind and feeling pretty good.

The trip took twenty hours. When we finally got there, I saw from my watch that my mushroom-deal deadline was a thing of the past. Goodbye million credits, I thought cheerfully. Hello Imre Munsen.

He had arrived at Tycho shortly before I had. Would you believe it, he wanted to pump me for information before we'd exchanged two words? He was in a fine state of excitement.

"Henry, you did it! We knew you would. What was the trick to it? How did you know what to do?"

I had a clear choice. I could tell the truth, and probably be shot for sabotaging priceless equipment. Or I could explain that I had intentionally disabled the space-warp selection mechanism to make it accept living things—and I had, of course, bravely put myself through it as a test.

No prizes for guessing what I told Munsen and his cohorts.

Naturally, I was the hero of the hour. USF dignitaries kept coming to see me, more and more important ones, finally capped by a visit from the eminent President Dinsdale himself.

After two days of steady adulation, I'd had more than enough and wanted to go and attend to my long-neglected tooth. I had guarded my secret of the space warp closely, after I heard what had happened when I had left the asteroid. Munsen had tried to send himself through and the machine wouldn't do it. Maybe my transmission had been its last dying gasp, or perhaps it was self-repairing and had restored itself to its original selective condition.

I left Tycho Base with their praises ringing in my ears and went back to the City. I hated it. God knows what they'd put into my computer file about this one. I didn't want to be dragged out again next time they needed a hero.

Back in my apartment came the unkindest cut of all. I'd been answering questions and shaking hands for two full days at Tycho Base, in no real hurry because my mushroom monopoly deal was dead. But when I arrived back home and switched on the holovision, the date was three days earlier than my watch showed. The warp
was
instantaneous, but only to the outside observer. No wonder my delirious moans had been completely ignored when I was picked up—no one understood that I'd spent three subjective days in that suit.

If I'd known the real date, I'd have had time left to sew up my stock deal and get my commissions after we got back to Tycho. Instead, I'd sat about for days as a USF showpiece for their VIPs. Most annoying of all, I might have guessed that the warp might not be instantaneous for the transferred object—because I knew what the warp had been used for.

The Kaneelians had come to the Solar System for a while, then packed up their furniture and moved on. They were ten meters tall, but like humans in one respect—who bothers to take the empty trash cans with them when they move house? Who cares whether their garbage-disposal unit sends the trash a million miles or a billion miles, or how long the garbage believes it is in transit? The scanner made good sense too. The Kaneelians were like humans in some other ways—household appliances had to be safe and child-proof.

Imre Munsen had declared, in one of his more inflated introductions, that I had a sure place in history. I could imagine it, ringing down the ages. Henry Carver, the only man since time began to be accepted by, and transferred through, an alien garbage-disposal unit.

I sat in front of my holovision, thinking of my lost commissions and wondering how long it would be before anyone else came to the same conclusion about the function of the Kaneelian space warp. At last I reached for the videophone and made a dental appointment.

AFTERWORD: A CERTAIN PLACE IN HISTORY.

The science fiction literature has many heroes and villains but far too few anti-heroes. The anti-hero (male or female) can never become either hero or villain except by sheer accident. He lacks the dedication to pursue great good, great evil, or great anything-at-all. He is pretty much a total loss if you are looking for a doer of great deeds.

In spite of this, stories with anti-heroes as central characters remain very popular. There are good examples for readers of any age—Mr. Toad, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Flashman, The Ginger Man, Yossarian, Major Bloodnok, Falstaff and Uncle Silas. There are still too few of them, and fewest of all in science fiction, where sense of wonder and sense of humor seem to pull in opposite directions.

Ideally, I should have made Henry Carver a woman, because while there are few male anti-heroes there are even fewer female ones. We need Henrietta Carver—cowardly, a little larcenous, slothful, and lecherous when it implies no danger or real commitment.

I'm enough of an anti-hero myself to be afraid to write about Henrietta. She deserves to exist, but I'm sure some readers would infer sexism when all I intended was entertainment. It would need a woman writer to get away with it. When are we going to achieve sexual equality for writers?

ALL THE COLORS OF THE VACUUM

As soon as the ship got back from the midyear run to Titan, I went down to Earth and asked Woolford for a leave of absence. I had been working hard enough for six people, and he knew it. He nodded agreeably as soon as I made the formal request.

"I think you've earned it, Captain Roker, no doubt about that. But don't you have quite a bit of leave time saved up? Wouldn't that be enough?" He stopped staring out of the window at the orange-brown sky and called my records onto the screen in front of him.

"That won't do it," I said, while he was still looking.

Woolford frowned and became less formal. "It won't? Well, according to this, Jeanie, you've got at least . . ." He looked up. "Just how long do you want to take off?"

"I'm not exactly sure. Somewhere between nine and sixteen years, I think."

I would have liked to break the news more gently, but maybe there was no graceful way.

* * *

It had taken McAndrew a while to deliver on his promise. The design of the more advanced ship contained no new theory, but this time he intended that the initial tests would be conducted more systematically. I kept pushing him along, while he tried to wriggle out of the commitment. He had been full of drugs and painkillers at the time, he said—surely I didn't consider it fair, to hold him to what he'd been silly enough to promise then?

Fair or not, I wouldn't listen. I had called him as soon as we were on the final leg of the Titan run.

"Yes, she's ready enough to go." He had a strange expression on his face, somewhere between excitement and perplexity. "You've still got your mind set on going, then, Jeanie?"

I didn't dignify that question with a reply. Instead I said, "How soon can I come out to the Institute?"

He cleared his throat, making that odd sound that spoke to me of his Scots ancestry. "Och, if you're set on it, come as soon as you please. I'll have things to tell you when you get here, but that can wait."

That was when I went down and made my request to Woolford for a long leave of absence. McAndrew had been strangely reluctant to discuss our destination, but I couldn't imagine that we'd be going out past Sirius. Alpha Centauri was my guess, and that would mean we would only be away about nine Earth years. Shipboard time would be three months, allowing a few days at the other end for exploration. If I knew McAndrew, he would have beaten the hundred gee acceleration that he projected for the interstellar prototype. He was never a man to talk big about what he was going to do.

The Penrose Institute had been moved out to Mars orbit since the last time I was there, so it took me a couple of weeks of impatient ship-hopping to get to it. When we finally closed to visible range I could see the old test ships,
Merganser
and
Dotterel
, floating a few kilometers from the main body of the Institute. They were easy to recognize from the flat mass disc with its protruding central spike. And floating near them, quite a bit bigger, was a new ship of gleaming silver. That had to be the
Hoatzin
, McAndrew's newest plaything. The disc was twice the size, and the spike three times as long, but
Hoatzin
was clearly
Merganser
's big brother.

It was Professor Limperis, the head of the Institute, who greeted me when I entered. He had put on weight since I last saw him, but that pudgy black face still hid a razor-sharp mind and a bottomless memory.

"Good to see you again, Captain Roker. I haven't told McAndrew this, but I'm very glad you'll be going along to keep an eye on him." He gave what he once described as his "hand-clapping minstrel-show laugh"—a sure sign he was nervous about something.

"Well, I don't know that I'll be much use. I'm expecting to be just a sort of passenger. Don't worry. If my instincts are anything to go by there won't be much danger in a simple stellar rendezvous and return."

"Er, yes." He wouldn't meet my eye. "That was my own reaction. I gather that Professor McAndrew has not mentioned to you his change of target?"

"Change of target? He didn't mention any target at all." Now my own worry bead was beginning to throb. "Are you suggesting that the trip will
not
be to a stellar rendezvous?"

He shrugged and waved his hands, pointing along the corridor. "Not if McAndrew gets his way. Come along, he's inside at the computer. I think it's best if he is present when we talk about this further."

Pure evasion. Whatever the bad news was, Limperis wanted me to hear it from McAndrew himself.

We found him staring vacantly at a completely blank display screen. Normally I would never interrupt him when he looks as imbecilic as that—it means that he is thinking with a breadth and depth that I'll never comprehend. I often wonder what it would be like to have a mind like that. Humans, with rare exceptions, must seem like trained apes, with muddied thoughts and no ability for abstract analysis.

Tough luck. It was time one of the trained apes had some of her worries put to rest. I walked up behind McAndrew and put my hands on his shoulders.

"Here I am. I'm ready to go—if you'll tell me where we're going."

He turned in his chair. After a moment his slack jaw firmed up and the eyes brought me into focus.

"Hello, Jeanie." No doubt about it, as soon as he recognized me he had that same shifty look I had noticed in Limperis. "I didn't expect you here so soon. We're still making up a flight profile."

"That's all right. I'll help you." I sat down opposite him, studying his face closely. As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses work harder than anyone else, not less hard. His face was thinner, and he had lost a little more hair from that sandy, receding mop. My argument with him over that was long in the past.

"Why don't you grow it back?" I'd said. "It's such a minor job, a couple of hours with the machines every few months and you'd have a full head of hair again."

He had sniffed. "Why don't you try and get me to grow a tail, or hair all over my body? Or maybe make my arms a bit longer, so they'll let me run along with them touching the ground. Jeanie, I'll not abuse a bio-feedback machine to run evolution in the wrong direction. We're getting less hairy all the time. I know your fondness for monkeys"—a nasty crack about an engineering friend of mine on Ceres, who was a bit hairy for even my accommodating tastes—"but I'll be just as happy when I have no hair at all. It gets in the way, it grows all the time, and it serves no purpose whatsoever."

McAndrew resented the time it took him to clip his fingernails, and I'm sure that he regarded his fondness for food as a shameful weakness. Meanwhile, I wondered who in the Penrose Institute cut his hair. Maybe they had a staff assistant, whose job it was to shear the absent-minded once a month.

"What destination are you planning for the first trip out?" If he was thinking of chasing a comet, I wanted that out in the open.

McAndrew looked at Limperis. Limperis looked at McAndrew, handing it back to him. Mac cleared his throat.

"We've discussed it here and we're all agreed. The first trip of the
Hoatzin
won't be to a star system." He cleared his throat again. "It will be to pursue and rendezvous with the Ark of Massingham. It's a shorter trip than any of the star systems," he added hopefully. He could read my expression. "They are less than two light-years out. With the
Hoatzin
we can be there and docked with the Ark in less than thirty-five ship days."