News From Elsewhere (3 page)

“Why the devil,” said Captain Mauris to himself, “do they use a lot of big words to tell me that I’m merely acting wet nurse for a bunch of S.F.P.’s?
If the Master should satisfy himself and the authorized scientists concerned
. .
. 
Very funny! The whole idea is not less than one hundred per cent suicidal, and then they talk about a sufficient danger factor!”

There was a knock at die door.

“Come in,” called Mauris.

It was Kobler, chief of the S.F.P. team. He was a thin, pasty-faced man of perhaps forty. His mouth looked as if it would split if he tried to smile.

Mauris motioned him into a chair and reached for two glasses and the decanter. As he poured the drinks, Kobler glanced at the ship’s articles lying on the desk.

“I see you have been studying the scriptures,” said the physicist.

“I was merely trying to find out,” explained Captain Mauris equably, “what authority, if any, I possess—in case of an emergency.”

“And have you found out?” enquired Kobler, sipping his whisky.

“Yes.”

“Are you satisfied?”

“No. From the point of view of getting a clear-cut definition, it’s as woolly as hell.”

“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said Kobler pleasantly. “If anything goes wrong, you’ll probably have a megasecond in which to think a last beautiful thought.”

“That,” retorted Mauris thinly, “is why I would have liked sufficient power to overrule you people—just in case I happened to anticipate the hypothetically fatal megasecond.”

“Sorry,” said Kobler, “but I’m the boss-man. That’s the way it has to be for this sort of thing. You’d better resign yourself to praying for my spiritual guidance.”

“I don’t know why you people need a space captain,” said Mauris testily. “You could have programmed the 
Santa Maria
to take you to dissolution point under her own steam.”

Kobler smiled, and his face didn’t crack. “You may not believe it,” he said ironically, “but we space-frame gentry have nice orderly minds. We’re very conventional really. Besides, even a space captain has his uses. . . . How did you enjoy the hop round Beta Centauri?”

“So that was why they wanted me to go,” said Mauris. “I wondered about it.”

“You were lucky,” said Kobler. “They wouldn’t let me go because some idiot mathematician suggested that the ship might surface too near a sun, or something damn silly like that. ... It seems that my brain was considered too valuable to be fried.”

“Mine evidently wasn’t,” observed the Captain.

“You, my friend, are unique,” said Kobler dryly. “You are a veteran of the stellar drive and the galactic jump. We regard you as a curio, a kind of talisman.”

“I am flattered,” said Captain Mauris. “And now, I think, we had better discuss ways and means.”

“You know the destination?” asked Kobler.

The Captain inclined his head toward the papers on the desk. “According to the Field Testing Executive,” he said calmly, “it is Messier 81.”

“What do you think of it?” asked Kobler smugly.

“I think it might be—interesting,” said Captain Mauris with sarcasm. “I don’t think I’ve ever visited a spiral nebula before.”

Kobler grinned. “One million six hundred thousand light-years,” he said. “Quite a little hop when you come to think of it.”

“How long do you think it will take.”

The physicist’s grin broadened. “I don’t know,” he said happily. “Probably just that hypothetically fatal meta-second.”

Mauris restrained himself with an effort. “I’d appreciate a brief exposition of the theory,” he said. “It might be useful.”

Kobler helped himself to more whiskey, leaned back in his chair, and regarded the ceiling. “Essentially,” he began, “it involves my private theory of matter, which also involves the stress characteristic of space and the so-called temporal regression.”

“Proceed,” said Mauris. “For a moment I thought you were going to get complicated.”

Kobler ignored him. “You understand, of course,” he continued, “that matter is a form of locked-up energy?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I now have news for you. Energy is simply a form of locked-up space. There is, from the physicist’s point of view, quite a reasonable amount of energy in the cosmos: there is also a devil of a lot of space. Now there is, as well, the curious phenomenon of the expansion and unwrinkling of space alongside the actual diminution of energy.”

“You wouldn’t be throwing overboard the first and second laws of thermodynamics, would you?” interrupted the Captain mildly.

Kobler admired his own fingernails complacently.

“Child’s play,” he said. “Entropy and the first and second laws are all washed up. Funny thing, when I was a student I instinctively knew there was something wrong.

. . . But back to the point. I have established a definite coefficient—the practical application of which means, my friend, that we too can adopt the charming habit of energy. We can
submerge
in space. Just as energy, when it thinks nobody is looking, opens a little door into the fifth dimension and smartly sidesteps all detection by
becoming
space, so we can play the same trick. . . . Only we can go one better: we can become energy again. Which, in effect, means that we can knock the mainspring out of time. . . . Because, Captain Mauris, by becoming virtually nonexistent, we escape the temporal regression. That, in a simpler fashion, is why you were able to hop round Beta Centauri and swallow seven hundred light-years. And of the three hours twenty-seven minutes it took, you spent most of the time surfacing so that Egon could panic over his star maps.”

“That is true,” said Mauris. “But—if you will forgive a simple space captain for pointing out the obvious—we were functioning in a known energy system. ... By making the new target M 81, you are postulating a jump clean out of the local energy pattern.”

“Not
out
of, but
through 
corrected the physicist. “On the Beta Centauri trip you were still slightly limited by a temporal regression. This time the deceleration will be so sharp as to make a total breakthrough. We shall make a neat hole in our own space frame and enter sub-space. We shall become a pattern of space on the frame of sub-space. Then we shall localize our return breakthrough when a pretty little instrument that I have programmed for M 81 recognizes the surface energy pattern.”

“Suppose the programming fails.”

Kobler laughed. “As it is the first true cosmometer, there is the possibility. But you can take it from me that it is theoretically perfect.”

Captain Mauris thought nostalgically of the Amazonian hinterland. After nearly a minute’s silence, he said, “It’s nice to feel that somebody’s confident, anyway.”

“Space has a very definite direction,” pursued Kobler. “Its vortices are the galactic leaks. In some respects, we can regard the sub-echoes of nebulae as stepping-stones. In the extragaiactic jump, it’s chiefly a question of defining the direction/deceleration crisis—or in plain language, of making the right hole at the right time.”

“I expect you’ll want to clear the System before the—er—experiment begins,” ventured Mauris.

“Naturally,” said Kobler. “By the way, would you like me to tell the crew what it’s all about?”

“I was going to suggest a brief lecture,” replied Mauris. “But since you have explained the background to me so lucidly, I think I might save you that little job. I’ll tell them we’re going to make a nice little hole in the balloon of space and pop up again sixteen hundred thousand light-years away. That should make for some interesting discussion.”

“You think they’ll panic?”

The Captain shook his head. “They’ll just laugh politely and think I’m getting too old for the job.”

“So far as I can see,” said Kobler, downing the remainder of his whiskey, “everything is predictable—except the human reaction.”

“It makes for a nice philosophical problem,” observed Mauris.

“What does?”

“Whether or not we can be conscious of our own nonexistence.”

Kobler gave him a look of respect. “That’s the crux of the matter,” he admitted. “You see, the
Santa Maria
and all aboard will cease to be a system of molecular organizations.”

“Conversely,” said the Captain in a matter-of-fact voice, “it will become the abstract memory of an energy pattern which will be resynthesized out of space—when and if your infallible cosmometer correlates the pattern of M 81 with that of its own environment.”

Kobler sat up. “I didn’t know you were a physicist.”

“I’m not,” retorted Mauris dryly. “But I’ll tell you something else, too. It’s going to be damn cold!”

Pluto’s orbit was a hundred million miles astern, and the
Santa Maria
had achieved a satisfactory clearance of the System. For the last ten hours she had voyaged under her stellar drive. Through the dark plastiglass portholes, men occasionally stared at the long star-torn silence of total night.

The navigation deck was a scene of activity and tension, for deceleration point was rapidly approaching. A fat copper cylinder had been battened to the deck in front of the main control panel, and the second bank of switches, with their mysterious calibrations, had now been unsealed. Kobler had lovingly supervised the installation of his cosmometer and was now displaying sufficient humanity to fuss about it much as an anxious father nursing his firstborn. Phylo, the first officer, was surreptitiously biting his nails. He was definitely unhappy. His appreciation of the science of physics being rather more limited than usual for one in his position, he had come to believe simply that the approaching - experiment was merely the most elaborate method yet invented of committing suicide.

Of all the personnel of the
Santa Maria,
Captain Maims was the most calm. He was very busy breaking several regulations. He lay on his master’s contour berth and watched all the extra berths that were needed by the physicists being bolted down. Kobler had decided, after much consultation, that the entire S.F.P. team should foregather on the navigation deck for the experiment. Half a dozen extra baths had then been hastily erected, giving the impression of a surrealist hospital.

Normally Captain Mauris would have regarded the invasion with frigid resentment. But now he watched the proceedings with a benevolent air.

It was his duty as Master of the ship to present at all times an aspect of confidence. With the aid of a bottle of Scotch and a somewhat prehistoric corncob pipe, he was fulfilling this obligation admirably. He was also sweating, for he had discarded his uniform jacket in favor of two old polo-necked jerseys. . . . Doubtless the Field Testing Executive would strongly disapprove of his unconventional approach, but then the F.T.E. were millions of miles away.

Having taken what he considered to be a sufficiency of spirit, the Captain was now engaged in chewing glucose tablets. Phylo watched him with silent awe.

Eventually Kobler looked up from his cosmometer. “Nine minutes to go, Captain,” he said formally.

Mauris glanced at the bulkhead electxochron and nodded. “Five hundred seconds,” he said pleasantly. “And then sixteen hundred thousand light-years. . . . Science is quite wonderful.”

Kobler was nettled. “What are you eating—nerve pills?”

“Glucose,” said Mauris affably. “I’ve been dieting on whiskey and glucose.”

“Why?”

“Because,” explained Mauris, “I intend to keep both warm and energetic.”

“There should not be any drop in temperature,” said Kobler. “In any case, the thermostat will fix it.”

“The nonexistent thermostat,” corrected Mauris gently. “But I was not thinking of coldness that can be measured in degrees centigrade.”

“There is no other,” said Kobler authoritatively. “Neither is there any need to keep your strength up. There will be no fatigue.”

“Nor was I thinking of physical fatigue.”

Kobler shrugged. “Every man to his own superstitions,” he said.

Captain Mauris smiled. “Would it be indiscreet to suggest that yours are non-Euclidean?”

Kobler turned away in disgust and spoke to one of his aides. “Get everyone in their contour berths and switch the auto-announcer on. We might as well let the brain take over.”

Captain Mauris made a last attempt to be helpful.

“It is well known,” he said placidly, “that smooth motion never made anybody tired. But I am not so sure about smooth stillness. It may be very fatiguing. , . . Perhaps it may even be possible for a nonexistent man to be too tired 
to
maintain his nonexistent bodily heat. . . . Would you care for some glucose?”

Kobler did not turn around, but his shoulders shook convulsively. Captain Mauris interpreted the movement as one of silent laughter.

“One minute to deceleration point,” boomed the autoannouncer.

Men with strained faces lay strapped on their contour berths awaiting the indefinable shock, of total stillness. They stared with unseeing eyes at their neighbors, at the bulkhead, at the fat, ominous copper cylinder. Phylo’s lips were quivering; Captain Mauris, in spite of his lighthearted precautions, felt a strange icy finger probing his heart; even Kobler’s massive confidence wavered as the critical moment drew near.