Part 3

"That's a fine idea," said Rober. "You might as well postulate that as anything else. Furthermore, the cancellation energy derived might be used to drive the ship; and as far as the loss is concerned, a half mile of space is like bailing Lake Michigan with a teaspoon. The expanding universe is expanding much faster than mankind's puny efforts to trim it down at a half mile per trim."

"Why didn't you tell me this before instead of giving me a lot of guff?" roared Hanson.

"Because the shoe is on the other foot," snapped Rober. "This time you need help. And like the rest of us idiots who show our ignorance when we ask medical questions, you show your ignorance of physics by the damfool questions you ask. But I've done some piddling with Maculay's Equations and the guy has something real and something far above my head, too. Why not ask Maculay?"

"He's not available right now."

"Tough. Probably working on the streak itself, huh? Good thing. He'll get it ironed out. But if you can't get Maculay, get his assistant Redmond. Redmond is a young squirt, but he'll talk if he's urged."

"I've met Redmond."

"Um," grunted Rober. "So that's why you're calling me? Say! Redmond didn't scare you, did he?"

"Sure did."

"Don't let him; Maculay will keep him down."

Hanson decided that this was the time to let the story out. "Redmond came here seeking Maculay. Maculay is on Venus having himself a vacation at my orders, and Redmond wanted him back."

"Wanted him back my foot! Redmond--if anything--wanted to be certain that Maculay was out of the way so that he could plunge into the secret files, using the emergency as reason. What are you doing about it?"

Hanson smiled to himself. "I've done it," he said. "I was just confirming some of my fears by calling you. I've just sent Miss Longacre to get him."

"Pray that she hurries," said Rober. "Redmond is the guy made from the same mold as the Sorcerer's Apprentice."

"You mean the kind of student we used to explain the process of making nitroglycerine to carefully because we knew they'd make it anyway, and blow hell out of themselves if they didn't violate the rules correctly?"

"More'n that," said Rober. "I said Sorcerer's Apprentice and I meant just that. Redmond is the kind of dope who would start manufacturing negative space and not be able to stop the process."

"Someone--or something--has done it."

"Yeah. But they--and Maculay alone on earth--knows what they're doing. And Maculay when I last saw him knew enough to leave it alone."

"Well, it's up to Ava Longacre."

"Hope she's successful."

Hanson remembered the girl's new attitude. "She'll get him," he said.

* * * * *

Doctor Hanson would not have been able to locate Maculay at all. But he had equipped Ava with the same set of ideas, plus the desire to catch up with the physicist wherever he might have gone; because she was thus equipped, Ava went where Maculay would--and had--gone.

Melaxis, Venus, was a mad mixture of culture and frontier. It boiled with the same sort of teeming millions as New York City; it was a modern city, with white granite buildings, subways, and broad streets filled with racing traffic. But along these broad streets went the rough-shod colonists. They were, for the most part, cut of the same cloth as the colonists of Early America. Men who went to Venus to escape whatever particular hell they felt on earth. Men who objected to taxes, laws, responsibilities, oppressions, regimentations, legalities, religions, and the rest. They were a hardy lot, a bit quick on the trigger and quite inclined to stand upon their own personal integrity. They were just, but their justice was hard-boiled. A man was innocent--or he was guilty enough to get the works.

And it was among this churning metropolis that Ava Longacre landed to seek out Maculay.

Her progress from the spaceport to Maculay was not too arduous, since she knew about where to find him. Ava found a lavish hotel, dragged the bar, picked up a likely-looking character who wanted to visit a gambling hell. Enjoying a chance to show off before this interesting female, the character took her to a mid-town casino where, he told her, "Mac" was likely to be this night.

"Mac?" she asked.

"Mac is a gambler from way back," he told her. "Luckier than hell."

"Let's go," said Ava.

"That's Mac," he said. It was. Cliff Maculay was sitting before a large card table playing Red Dog. Before him he had a large pile of blue chips, and standing at his elbow watching the pile was a dark-eyed Venusian girl, who swayed langorously to the strains of the music coming from the dance floor next door.

"Would you like to make a hundred?" asked Ava.

"Who do you want killed?"

"Pick up that woman from Mac."

"What's the pitch?" he demanded; "a hundred ain't enough to get me killed."

Ava looked him in the eye. "This is the end of your line," she told him. "If you expect any fun tonight, you'll be better off trying for her, because you're out of a girl friend and Maculay is going to be swapping women shortly."

He looked at Ava, compared her against the Venusian girl in a brazen mental listing of their charms, and repeated a statement made earlier: "Luckier than hell, Mac."

Ava went over to the Red Dog table and stood so that her hip brushed Maculay's arm. Cliff looked up in annoyance, but the frown ceased as he saw her. "Hello," he said cheerfully.

It was obvious that he did not know her, and it was equally obvious that the Venusian girl did not care for the competition. "How are we doing?" she asked.

"Fine," he said.

"Yes, we are," said the Venusian girl, emphasizing her use of the 'we'.

"Cliff will do better now," said Ava.

"The lady knows me," chuckled Maculay.

"Every sharpshooter in Melaxis knows you," snapped the Venusian. "But do you know her?"

Ava laughed. Her voice was a pleasant contralto, throaty, suggestive as she said, "No, he doesn't know me. Yet. Which, darling, gives me an advantage, doesn't it?"

"Don't darling me--"

* * * * *

Ava's previous escort was a man of experience, possessor of a fresh hundred, and willing to play the game. His was the simple logic of the wolf; far better to have a woman you might be able to get than one who wanted someone else. Furthermore, he knew enough about human nature to toss a few cupfuls of oil on an already interesting fire. "See here," he said to Maculay, "what's the idea of making passes at my girl?"

Maculay laughed uproariously. He pushed his chair back and stood up, alert. "If she were your girl she'd not be asking me how 'we're' doing," he told the man.

Housemen started to move, slowly, towards the scene of imminent battle.

Ava's escort was willing to start a fire, but he was in no way interested in getting his face pushed in to keep it burning. Yet he could not back out without some show of determination. "I suppose she's _your_ girl?" he asked superciliously.

The housemen relaxed. Badinage and billingsgate made noise but it ruined no furniture. The contestants were talking; the kind of fight the housemen were prepared to stop was the kind that took the: "Who--Me?" "Yes, You," Whack! formula which left one of the contenders ready to avenge the lump on his jaw, and willing to use the furniture to do the job.

Cliff relaxed against the card table. "Maybe she is."

"Maybe she isn't!"

"Maybe she'd like to be."

"No accounting for taste."

Ava turned upon her escort coldly. "You haven't any taste. How would you recognize it?"

The Venusian girl knew the situation all too well; she had been looking out for herself for a number of years, and this project included making the best of an opportunity. Her hand strayed behind Maculay.

Then the peacemakers saw something that they were entirely unprepared to stop. Ava Longacre took Maculay by one hand and half-hurled him away from the table, unbalancing him across one hip. Cliff staggered forward--to be caught and supported by his possible assailant. But in the meantime Ava had gone to the edge of the table and had taken the Venusian girl by one wrist. She turned, ducked under the arm, and came up behind in a hammer-lock.

Chips from Maculay's stack dribbled out of the tortured fingers of the Venusian. Ava turned with the girl and hurled her forward into the still-unbalanced men.

The Venusian screamed in anger.

Ava's former escort caught her and kept her from falling, and in doing so he let Maculay slip to one knee.

Someone yelled: "Fight!"

* * * * *

Hell broke loose. A man clipped his neighbor because the other was luckier than he; a Venusian latched onto a handful of chips from one of the tables and had his wrist broken by the owner of the chips who came down on the arm with a heavy fist. Chips flew through the air and rained down, and many, not caught in the fight, dropped to the floor to pick them up. They got into fights with other gleaners, and the melee spread like a crown fire in a piney woods. Critical mass had been reached, and the fission from civilized human beings to outraged primates spread throughout the room.

Cliff found an ornate chair and separated it to get the back-stringer for a club. The other side was clutched by Ava's escort, who plied it well. Ava came up between them clutching a small, wicked-looking stilletto and waving it viciously. Maculay slapped it out of her hand.

"Don't start _that_!" he snarled, caving in a likely-looking head with the hunk of chair. He up-ended a table and used it as a protective wall, shoving it forward towards the door. He lost his club over another head and tossed the stub into the face of a third. He splattered the nose of a fourth all over his face, and trampled one fighting pair down to the floor. They paid no attention to him; they had their own private grievance.

Someone yelled: "Police!" and then the lights went out. Maculay steered another course from the door, back through the room full of flailing men and women who were trying now to extricate themselves and make the appearance of innocent bystanders.

Ava opened a door, and the light from inside spilled out over one of the finest barroom shambles ever committed in a high-class gambling hell, where he who wore no evening clothes was not permitted.

Then they were inside.

"Damn," chuckled Maculay. "This is the first time I've ever been inside of a powder room."

"Like it?"

He looked at her. They had lost her former escort in the melee. They had lost some composure, too, and also whatever formality might have been expected.

"Not as well as I thought," he told her. "Where's the hell out?"

Ava pointed to a window.

They left via the window as the door opened. They landed in the gangway between the two buildings, raced for the alley, and ran into a burly man in uniform that stood there stolidly.

Maculay clipped him in a rolling block; the policeman had expected practically anything but a football rush. The pair went down, rolling.

The officer fired one shot at them as they headed into a side-gangway and through to the street beyond. Cliff whistled for a convenient taxicab; they piled into it and were off before the alarm sounded from their rear.

They repaired what damage they could in the taxicab, and carried the rest with them boldly through the finest hotel in Melaxis.

* * * * *

Once in Maculay's suite, Ava opened her handbag and rolled a horde of chips on the table.

Maculay roared with laughter. "Souvenirs," he chortled.

"Can't you cash 'em?"

"M'lady, you are an angel. You turned up just in time to create a diversion. I got out with a whole skin, anyway."

Maculay looked at her curiously. Her eyes were glowing with excitement; her face was flushed, and she bore that slight dishevelment that brings a beautiful woman down from the pedestal of showcase perfection and makes a warm human of her.

She smiled cheerfully. "What do you mean?"

Cliff stepped to the small bar at the end of the room and mixed two very Herculean drinks before answering. Then he said--after Ava had tasted and approved: "They thought I had the cards marked. I didn't; I was playing a formula."

"But aren't formula players usually losers?"

Maculay laughed. "Baby doll," he laughed, "when you've been trained by the best mathematician in the solar system, you remember the sequence of the cards, evolve a formula of probabilities regarding the shuffling, and then play them according to absolute mathematics. In Red Dog, if there's a Heart Six to beat, each and every card played changes the formula as it lands; if you know your mathematics, you can compute your chances about as well as the Interplanetary Life Insurance Company can compute your expectancy."

"But I spoiled your game."

"That game was ruined anyway."

"It was fun," said Ava, taking a fine pull at the drink.

"A nice shindy, m'lady. And far more better than the game they'd have played once they grabbed me."

"But where will we play tomorrow night?"

"Venus is full of places," chuckled Maculay. "Fact is, the evening is young. Wait'll I collect me a fresh shirt; and I'll have to forget the white jacket since it's a mess. But we can see a bit more Venusian Night Life."

"Done!"

Maculay emerged from the dressing room a few moments later. "By the way, m'lady, what's your name?"

"Ava Longacre."

"I'm--"

"I know. Cliff Maculay."

"Such is fame," sighed Cliff. "You know me?"

Ava nodded. "I've met you before," she said. A faint, subdued recollection of her previous meeting with Clifford Maculay stirred her. She recalled, very dimly, the upsurge of emotion, the pounding of her heart, the complete relaxation of defensive mechanism. Something had been started but never finished, before. Now it was all past, gone, and a new day was yet to be born. "Someone gave me a message for you, but I've forgotten it."

"Maybe we can bring it back," chuckled Maculay. He took her by the arm and led her from the room.

4

Hanson had committed one pardonable error; pardonable because Hanson, for all of his years and his experience, was no worker of miracles, to whom nothing is hidden, and who can be called omniscient.

For all of his experience in wending his way through the hidden recesses of the labyrinth we call the human mind, Hanson did not know everything and would have been the first to admit this honestly. But he did know that the trouble with both Maculay and Ava Longacre laid in the subsurfaces of the conscious mind. Blocks, inhibitions, and fears instilled as a youth had driven Maculay to seek his excellence in mathematics as a goal rather than as the means to the normal goal of a happy, balanced life. In the filing-cabinet of the mind, however; in the subconscious mind of Clifford Maculay was all of the data of the life he should have led, held there subdued by the blocks of the conscious mind. Hanson had opened the doorway by removing these blocks, and he had done a fine job.

In much the same fashion he had removed the blocks and impediments from Ava Longacre's mind.

Both had suffered from too puritanical an upbringing. In the long distance that lies between white saint and black evil, there is a long dimension lying just below center that is the despair of reformers and do-gooders. This region contains many people and many ideals that are _mal in dictu_. Some impractical reformer had decided, for instance, that liquor is to be abhorred; ergo it is against the desires of society for a man to take a drink. Just one. The idea is, of course, to create a race of saints and Little Lord Fauntleroy sweetness--which probably wouldn't last out the century since the desire to poke someone in the nose for stepping on your rights--or your toe--is the same belligerency that has made mankind fight its way up from the swamps to seek the stars.

Below this region of morals or ethics lies the _mal in facto_ behaviour. It is bad in fact and practice to murder, steal, and lie.

Hanson had opened the minds of his pair to the enjoyment of the middle region after a short life of the stilted upper bracket. Like the swing of the pendulum, both Ava and Clifford had dropped about as far as they could go without getting into the truly evil region.

But the doctor's error was in not realizing that the human mind, once released of its inhibitions, can make a shrewd calculation. In the case of Ava Longacre, whose mental blocks would have rendered her undesirable to Cliff Maculay; when once released, the woman's mind reversed its tactics. Where the conscious mind had the balanced life distorted into undesirability, now her mind distorted into undesirability--the more responsible way of living--because she was beginning to enjoy excitement.

All of her quiet life she had been suppressing the love of excitement; now released, Ava Longacre's mind refused to consider the task she had been sent to do; once it was finished, she would be returned to the quiet, unexciting life that she no longer wanted.

So instead of employing her woman's wiles to involve Maculay and bring him back to earth where Hanson could get him to go back to work on his negative space, Ava was helping Cliff cut a wide, rosy-hued swathe through the not-too-holy city of Melaxis.

They consumed a bit more alcohol than was necessary; they danced a bit more close together than would have been called proper at a Boston cotillion, and hazarded sums of money on the roll of a pair of dice or the turn of a card just for the thrill of high blood pressure.

* * * * *

It was near dawn when Ava lifted her head from Cliff's shoulder in the taxicab and wiped the lipstick from his cheek with a caressing forefinger. Cliff smiled down at her.

"Baby doll," he said, "let's get married or something."

Ava laughed lightly. "We'll get married--or nothing!"

The sun was above the horizon when Maculay carried his bride--now asleep--over the threshold of his hotel suite. It was late afternoon when the Maculays, man and wife, checked out of their hotel to take a honeymoon in the jungle cities of Venus.

And Hanson fumed and fretted because he had no word from Ava, and worried because he knew that Redmond was poring through Maculay's secret file of computations and beginning to unravel the data that would permit Redmond to create and establish negative space.

On the third day of such worrying, Hanson knew then he had mis-calculated or over-stepped his reasoning. It was at that moment that Hanson did something that he had stoutly insisted that not even a man should do to his wife, or the reverse. Like reading another's mail, one did not paw through desk drawers nor inspect the corners of another's soul to see whether they concealed something. But Hanson went through the desk drawers of his nurse, attempting to learn how he had erred.

He came up with a small package, neatly tied in a very ornamental manner under the plain store-bag. The name on the fancy ribbon was that of a highly gilded women's shoppe where the salesgirls were very beautiful, the silk very sheer, and the prices very high.

Hanson opened the package. It disgorged a petticoat and bra, through either of which the doctor could have read the telephone directory without his glasses. A scant concession to the custom that a woman should wear lingerie--for the sake of the custom but not necessarily for warmth, protection, fire or famine.

It might have been a gift.

It might have been her own.

It made no difference whether Ava had selected this daring set of scanties for herself or for a gift, wedding or Christmas. It displayed her taste, showed her subconscious desires.

"Damn!" exploded Hanson. "I've been working with a courtesan concealed behind an armor of white starch. Oh, brother!"

The doctor knew. Like two small streams, turned here and there by the minor hills and rocks of fate, they had been joined by Hanson into a flowing river, complete unto itself--themselves--which would go its way as it damn well pleased and overflow its banks to the ruination of anything in its path if it were constrained.

They would not be back until Maculay came back in one year--at which point Ava would subtly change, too, to conform with Maculay's desire.

This left Hanson helpless for one year, during which time Redmond would be working towards destruction with no barriers to his course. Hanson could express no more than an unfounded opinion of the fear of danger; he had neither prestige nor formal education in the field of high-geared physics. The first objection he voiced would be taken with a nod by whomever official heard it, accepted for what it was: an opinion by a medical savant of seventy years regarding a problem in spacial physics. Then this opinion would be referred to Redmond for official regard. Hanson knew the answer without asking the question. Redmond would laugh in scorn. Redmond would--

Hanson shook his head unhappily. Redmond would be a tough nut to crack. Belligerent, automatically biassed against the doctor, any attempt at hypnosis would be fought against most vigorously. Yet--

Jay Hanson had been in his business for a long time, but he had had no challenge such as this for years. And though old in body, he was young enough in mind to contemplate the mental challenge with a certain amount of interest.

He bought tickets and flew to the laboratory site where Maculay and his gang worked on spatial physics; he used his medical prestige as key to admittance, and found Redmond sitting at Maculay's desk checking a huge blueprint of a spacecraft.

* * * * *

Redmond looked up. It was obvious that this little scene was one prepared by Redmond. Men who have visitors announced by secretaries, after having signed passes to let the visitor into the inner sanctum, after learning as he must have learned that the famous doctor had come to the huge laboratory site, should not look up from their desks in surprise.

Hanson understood; Redmond was morally right and ethically wrong. He had every moral right to take over Maculay's position during Maculay's absence; that was his appointed job. But ethically, he had no right to paw through Maculay's desk, and take from Maculay's secret files the information that Maculay had forbidden him to see. Now he was play-acting the part of a busy man who had all of the power he needed.

Redmond said: "Yes, Doctor Hanson?"

Hanson paid no attention to the blueprint. "I thought you'd like to know," he said softly, "that I've been unable to locate Maculay."

"Damn!" objected Redmond. Only one who understood what was in Redmond's ambitious mind would know that the disappointment was very false.

"So I came to tell you and also to be curious."

"Curiosity killed a cat," said Redmond.

The doctor laughed. "It's created more kittens than the cats it's killed. Is this still super-top secret or can you let an old man in on it?"

Redmond glowed inwardly at the chance to show off before the doctor. "According to the latest calculations," he said, "the generation of negative space by the force-fields of diagravitic force takes the form of a sphere. Obviously the proper shape for a spacecraft employing one of these generators would be spherical. But we are using a converted spacecraft of the torpedo shape, and I feel that--well, to generate a sphere large enough to enclose the spacecraft in one gulp would produce far too much power. So we are using two of them placed so that their spherical fields produce a pattern something like two equal-sized soap bubbles stuck together. The ship lies longwise through the centers of the circles, since the generators are in the ship, of course."

Hanson nodded. His head bobbed gently, in a measured motion. He was sitting with his back to the room, the window in front of him. He knew that the reflection of the window was in his glasses and that Redmond was watching this spot of light instead of watching the doctor's eyes. Redmond continued to watch as he spoke.