Part 2

Norton explained the workings of the power pile in a much oversimplified way, showed them the various rooms of machinery for maintaining air and water and electrical circuits throughout the ship. As he had suggested, they started at the bottom, looking out through the below-hatch at the hull of the ship, where the misty blue corona flared down and back from the eight tubular drivers that thrust their blunt cylindrical noses down in a large circle, surrounding the after viewport.

Then Norton worked them aloft slowly, up through the room filled with water for the reaction mass, and hurled out from the throat of the driver tubes as a molecular-atomic gas so highly energized that it was not water, but nascent hydrogen and oxygen, completely ionized. The coronal flare below, he explained, was the recombination of the nuclei with their electrons in shells, and the partial recompositions of the gases into water.

He showed them the warp-generator that created the extra space field around the ship, nullifying every physical attribute of matter. Neither mass nor inertia remained, so that the thrust of the flare had no resistance against which to exert its force, resulting in a drive that violated the Einstein equations. Forward velocity reached terminal when the interstellar matter provided a tenuous medium against which the velocity of the ship found resistance.

He showed them the magnetic-mass detector that protected them against meteors, and explained that while the thing was primitive, it was the best that Mankind had. The infrawave was hopeless because it had an instantaneous velocity of propagation and was also nondirectional, and therefore neither direction-finding nor ranging could be accomplished with the infrawave.

But the magnetic-mass detector was not as hopeless as it looked.

He said casually, "There were a lot of tall stories back in the Early Twentieth Century about spacecraft filled with course-computing gear that measured the course of meteorites, then directed the spacecraft. A more practical study of any such device shows that any extraneous object that does not change its aspect angle is necessarily on a collision course. Ergo, any target that does not move causes the alarm to ring, and the auto-pilot to swerve aside." He grinned and added in a low voice, "We're as safe as if we were all in bed."

As his arm touched Alice's she realized that Jock Norton had been entertaining the idea of bed ever since this tourist's run had started. She smiled because it amused her. Jock Norton had made a snap judgment, probably because he had seen a lot of such shenanigans as man and woman playing employer and secretary before. She almost laughed at Norton, realizing that he was displaying all of his knowledge and his virility in the hope of convincing her that he was probably more fun in bed than the elderly Napoleon type with whom she was traveling.

She stole a look at Andrews, comparing the two men. She wondered whether Andrews had cottoned onto Norton's play and if he had, whether her boss found it funny or irritating.

* * * * *

As they walked along a curved corridor, she saw with some surprise that twice Mr. Andrews had lagged back a bit, then had come forward behind them to walk by her side instead of on the far side of Jock Norton. And both times Norton had quietly lagged back to circle her and step forward between them, explaining quietly that Mr. Andrews could hear his explanation better if he, Norton, walked between.

Alice was still wondering whether Charles Andrews actually held any off-trail notions about his traveling secretary when all hell broke loose.

First came the wild clangor of an alarm, and the automatic cry of a recorded order:

"Your undivided attention, please! This is urgent! You have eleven minutes from the end of this announcement to follow these directions. There has been a partial failure of the warp-generator. If this failure becomes complete, and the space field collapses, the effect will be that of precipitating intrinsic mass into the real Universe while traveling at some high multiple of the velocity of light. The spacecraft then will drop instantly below the speed of light but in doing so will radiate all the energy-mass equivalent to those multi-light speeds, according to the Einstein equation of mass and energy. It is therefore expedient that you repair to the lifeship locks and prepare to debark. The partial failure may or may not continue. If not, there will be no more danger. But in case of continued breakdown--"

The recorded announcement stopped abruptly as a louder alarm bell rang briefly. Then another voice from the squawk-box shouted:

"The warp-generator is failing! You have--"

A third voice came in automatically saying, "Eleven minutes," after which the second voice continued neatly, "to make your way to a lifeship and debark. Please do not panic. You have plenty of time."

"It's this way," Norton said anxiously.

"We'll find it," said Andrews. "I know this spacecraft type. Hadn't you better take care of your other passengers?"

Norton wanted to swear. It would have been so neat if Andrews hadn't insisted upon coming along on this tourist's run of the spacecraft. As it was, Norton couldn't quite bring himself to suggest that Andrews take care of the other customers while Norton himself took care of the girl. On the other hand, Norton had no intention of rushing off to take care of the others when they were probably being taken care of right now by the engineer-technician. He said that, and repeated it to give it force.

"This way," he said.

The announcer bawled, "You now have ten minutes!"

"Couldn't I get my bag?" pleaded Alice.

"Anything of real value in it?" asked Norton.

"Not really."

"Then we'd best leave it." Norton breathed a sigh of relief. Now she wouldn't find it more expedient to travel with the bunch upstairs.

He led them up a flight of curved stairs and around another curved corridor as the announcement howled:

"Nine minutes!"

The squawk-box said, in a more natural voice, "Jock? Look, I've got this section under control. How're you doing?"

"I'm doing fine, Limey. We're almost at the below-station lock."

"Be seein' you. Luck."

The announcement yelled:

"Eight minutes! You all have plenty of time. Remember, safety is more important that blind speed! Listen!"

The tremolo of an organ filled the spacecraft--vibrant, thrilling, brilliant music rising over the _throb, throb, throb_ of heavy bass, beating time just fast enough to keep feet moving briskly, but nowhere fast enough to cause panic or fumbled steps.

"Seven minutes!" came the cry.

* * * * *

Norton's hands closed on the space lock and he twisted the emergency handles. The inner door swung open ponderously and they walked past the portal. The lock swung behind them and the dogs went home.

"Six minutes!" came a less resonant call from a smaller loud-speaker in the lock.

Jock Norton handed Alice through the small space lock of the lifeship, boosted Andrews in after her, then climbed in himself.

"Five minutes!" was almost cut off as the lifeship space lock swung shut.

"Four minutes!" came as the big outer space lock was cracked.

Norton's hands on the lifeship controls moved and the little spacer leaped out of the doorway.

On the infrawave they heard the call of "Three minutes!" then "Two!" and finally the announcement, "You are now all debarked and are in places of safety. The distress call has been sent constantly from the moment of danger. Sit tight and make no foolish moves until help comes. Do not look to the rear, as the explosion of a collapsed field generator is brilliant enough to sear the eyes--"

The voice stopped abruptly as there came a wave of sheer heat. The ports on the side of the lifeship flared blue-white, and the spacecraft bucked as though it were being driven into a heavy gas cloud.

"What was that?" blurted Andrews, picking himself up off the heaving deck.

Norton shrugged. "That was Spaceflight Seventy-nine going to hell in a wicker basket," he said.

"But why? We weren't hit by anything."

"You can bet not," Norton said cheerfully. "Don't you know about spaceflight factors? The Einstein equation?"

Andrews eyed the pilot coldly. For several hours the younger man had been explaining all sorts of things in a condescending manner, showing off his knowledge in a field that he knew far better than any one else present. This was galling to the financier, who was used to paying mathematicians and physicists small change.

"I don't have time to clutter up my mind with equations," he told Norton coldly. "I usually pay people to have them explain these things to me. So go right ahead."

Norton's thick hide sloughed off the insult because he was still the bright one.

He said, "The original Einstein equation of mass and energy shows that as the speed of light is reached, the mass reaches infinite mass. This is an obvious impossibility, since even the total mass of the Universe is not an infinite mass. So when a body traveling at faster-than-light is hurled into the real Universe by the collapse of the warp-generator, for the barest instant it is actually traveling beyond light. This causes it to assume some unknown factor of mass that no physicist has been able to theorize yet, but must be the impossible infinity-plus. At any rate, the fabric of space is twisted, as if by a gravitational field so powerful that the field wraps up around itself and forces the mass into a Universe of its own."

"You're talking gibberish."

"Sure I am. But you find me someone who can explain this effect without talking like an imbecile and I'll buy you a good cigar."

"All right--go on. What is supposed to happen?"

Norton shrugged. "If a volume of space is removed from the structure of space--this is more gibberish, Andrews, believe me--then there must be an instantaneous flow of space back to fill the gap. Now, for God's sake don't ask me why empty space has got to flow into a place where some empty space has been removed. I've always been taught that nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Maybe nothing from nothing leaves less nothing than before, but that sounds as silly as the rest of the whole fool argument. At any rate, every time a warp-generator collapses, the same twist occurs in the structure of space. There have been billions of bucks' worth of equipment shot into nothingness by the White Sands Space Academy in the last hundred years, just to see if someone can come up with a logical answer."

* * * * *

Andrews said coldly, "All right. So now what do we do?"

"We sit it out," Norton said cheerfully.

"Doing what?"

"Decelerating to a velocity below light. We still have our ship's intrinsic to get rid of, you know."

"Why don't we keep on?"

"Because this is a lifeship and not a spacecraft. We have only enough space power to pull ourselves down safely, with some reserve, and then we use the reserve to emit our distress call. Cheer up. We got off safely. This will be a breeze."

"It will? And why are you so happy about it?"

Jock Norton smiled, then said the one thing that removed all and any chance of Alice Hemingway ever looking upon him as a desirable character, virile or not.

"Spaceman's insurance," he said. "For spacewreck, one thousand cold clams. For debarking with every passenger within a reasonable distance of my position at the time of distress, an award of one thousand more frogskins each. This is not so much an insurance award as it is a reward incentive for a spaceman to do the right and proper thing. Then, for every lonely hour adrift in deep space, from the time of distress until we are collected safely, one hundred fish. This should add up to a neat sum by the time we are picked up. Tommy Walton and Joe Lake drifted for eight hours and collected. Sure, we're sitting pretty and we'll be rescued in due time. So let's settle down and take it easy."

Andrews said, "I suppose you've spent half of your time a-space hoping for some disaster so you could collect a neat pile."

"Not quite that bad. This is likely to be sure rough before we're collected. But it does pay off. So let's relax, huh?"

Alice was breathing a silent prayer to Commodore Wilson that he make it a quick run. She was sick and tired of spacing already....

Admiral Stone said, "These are your orders, Wilson. You are to take your squadron out to Cube X-Z-Fifty-nineteen, District Forty-seven. You'll have to comb it inch by inch."

"I'll comb it millimeter by millimeter," asserted Wilson. "Miss Hemingway was on that spacer."

"Don't do anything foolish," warned the space admiral. "Just remember that you're a flight commodore and not a full squadron commander yet. You have your orders."

"I have. And I'll bring them back. Both lifeship loads."

"Then get going. Remember that every hour decreases their chances of a safe rescue. Luck, Wilson. Spaceman's luck!"

"Correct, Admiral Stone."

Less than a quarter-hour later, Ted Wilson's flight of twenty-five swift light spacecraft went barreling up out of Chicago Spaceport and into that region of the sky called Gemini....

Viggon Sarri sat in the main control cabin of the hunter spacecraft, quietly waiting for Linus Brein to finish some involved equations in logic symbols. When the long string of symbols had come to what looked like a satisfactory conclusion, Brein looked up.

"Any success?"

"Oh, yes indeed." Brein nodded. "Of course our interpretations of their speech is only symbolic at this point. But this much we know. This series of sounds--" he snapped a switch on the side of his desk and a wall speaker delivered a series of what sounded to them like sheer gibberish--"connotates as follows: Voice A has called for contact with any receiving station. Voice B has responded, informing A that he is ready to receive. Voice A then delivers a running account of the disaster, delivering his computed position, vector of travel, and space coordinates. I've untangled some of their tongue." Brein replayed the recording and stopped it after the first passage. He parroted the gibberish, "'Spaceflight Seventy-nine calling Distress.' That, Viggon, is interpreted in our tongue as 'Identification Number So-and-so calling to announce disaster.'"

* * * * *

He let the recording run a bit then said, again parroting the gibberish, "'Chicago Spaceport, Interstellar Service to Spaceflight Seventy-nine. We read you five by five, go ahead. What is your distress?' We interpret the reply as, 'Base of Operations has received your distress call. Please elucidate.' What follows defies identification, Admiral Sarri. Until we can meet one of these people and learn more of their physiognomy, we cannot hope to unravel their numerical system. Damn it, we don't even know how many fingers they have."

"Or," suggested Sarri drily, "whether they might have stopped counting on their hands."

"Indeed." Linus Brein nodded thoughtfully. "However, not long after the reception of this distress signal, the entire infrawave band seemed to fill up with all sorts of signals, all of them repeating the sounds that we assume are the space coordinates of this foundered spacecraft."

"Indicating that this is not a completely anarchistic or communal, insect-type culture. The individual is important."

"I would say so."

Regin Naylo smiled. It would have been an odd-looking facial grimace to an Earthman, for it turned the corners of his pencil-thin lips down and furrowed the skin of his head between the gleaming eyes and the low, ragged hairline.

Viggon Sarri said, "What do you find so amusing?"

Regin replied, "If they are individually important, then the culture finds the individual important, as opposed to the insect-type which wouldn't mind losing a few billions so long as the inner hive is intact, or the anarchistic culture where the loss of a unit is not even noticed, because every one of them is so preoccupied with his own affairs that he can take no time to consider the next man."

"Right. So what?"

"I say let's hit 'em while they're all occupied in tracking down the survivors of this wreck."

Faren Twill grunted sourly, "Ever try to interfere with a dog and her pups? You get bitten whether you mean good or ill. If you care for my opinion you'll ... Or do you give a damn?"

"Go ahead."

"I say we just slide in there quietly and collect the lifeships. Then, later, we can go in boldly and establish our superior position."

Regin Naylo shook his head superciliously. "I say we should hit 'em with all we've got and establish our physical superiority. Look, Faren, either way this gang of subhumans is going to end up in some form of servitude to us. Let's make it the quick and dirty way and save manpower. Besides, what can they possibly have that we want?"

Twill shrugged. "Any subject race is a good market."

Naylo laughed. "I'd rather shove it down their throats by taxation. Then we'd collect without having to give them a string of uranium beads for exchange."

Faren Twill asked Viggon Sarri for his opinion.

Viggon said, without changing expression, "There are races that will not abide the idea of collaboration, and there are races that either revolt or die under any superior government. It has been my lifework to expand the Bradian culture, one way and another, across the galaxy. When we finish with this problem here, another world--in this case another series of colonized worlds--will enter one of the forms of economic relationships with Brade. Whether we blast in and smash them, or ooze in and coerce them quietly; take them over, or hail them as an ally."

"Ally?" roared Regin Naylo scornfully. "This bunch of primitives who haven't even got an infrawave detector?"

"Ally?" snarled Faren Twill disgustedly. "This people who cannot protect their spacecraft from warp failure?"

Viggon Sarri held up his doubly-prehensile hand. "Either of you may be right," he said. "But remember that we do have time. So we'll wait until we know more about their basic character before we take any course. Go consult Linus Brein. Watch his computations and his evaluations. Come back when you have more complete data for your own evaluation."

Naylo and Twill left together.

Viggon Sarri called Brein on the ultra-infrawave.

"Linus? My headstrong youths are coming over to look at your data. Like any other kids they know everything, but dammit, like a lot of kids one of them may be right. Maybe I'm overcautious. So give them all the data you have, and let them evaluate it. I'll happily pin a medal on one of them if he's right and I'm wrong. Okay?"

Linus Brein agreed.

III

Under the temporary command of Commodore Theodore Wilson the space squadron sped out into the uncharted wastes of the sky on the true line toward Castor. Slowly, as the squadron flew, its component spacecraft diverged in a narrow cone so that the volume of space to be covered would fall within the scope of the detection equipment aboard each ship. Computers flicked complex functions in variables of the laws of probability, and came up with a long series of "and-or-if" results.

Toby Manning, Master Computer for the squadron, sympathized when Wilson showed the latest sheaf.

Wilson grunted, "This is no damn good at all. It sort of says that the lifeships will be wherever we find them."

Manning nodded. "Like the problem of catching a lion on the Sahara Desert. You get a lion cage with an open door, electronically triggered to close at the press of a distant button. Then the laws of probability state that at any instant there exists a mathematical probability the lion is in the region of the cage. At this instant you shut the door. The lion lies within the cage, trapped."

"Stop goofing off. This is no picnic. Have you any idea of how many square light years we have to comb?"

"Cubic light years, Commodore Wilson."

"Cubic. So I'm sloppy in my speech, too? Look, Manning, all we really want from you is the overall conic volume in which the lifeships must lie. You know the course of Flight Seventy-nine. You know the standard take-off velocity of a lifeship. The forward motion plus the sidewise, escape velocity, produces a vector angle which falls in the volume of a cone because we don't know which escape angle they may have used. We can pinpoint the place of escape fairly close."

"Yeah, within a light year. Maybe two."

"And we know that the lifeship will reduce its velocity below light as soon as possible."

"Naturally."

"So somewhere on that vector cone, or within it, is a lifeship--two lifeships--traveling on some unknown course at some velocity considerably lower than the speed of light."

"We've located 'em before. We'll locate 'em again."

Wilson shook his head worriedly. "That's a lot of vacant space out there. Even admitting that we have the place pinpointed, the pinpoint is a couple of light years in diameter, and will grow larger as time and the lifeship course continues. Or," he added crisply, "shall we take a certain volume of space and assert that a definite mathematical probability exists that the survivors lie within that volume?"

"Sorry, Commodore. I didn't mean to be scornful."

"Well, then, you'd better set up your space grid in the coordinate tank and we'll start combing it cube by cube."

"Correct," said Toby Manning.

The "tank" was not really a tank. It was a stereo projection against a flat glass wall at one end of the big Information Center Room below the bridge section of the flagship. Wilson went there some time later to watch the bustle as the tank was set up to cover the segment of space they intended to comb.

Even looking at the thing required some training. The plotters and watchers wore polaroid glasses to provide the stereo effect. Through the special glasses, the tank looked like a small scale model of this section of the sky. Castor and Pollux and other nearby stars were no longer pinpoints on a flat black surface, but tiny points of light that seemed to hang in space, some in front of and some behind the position of the screen itself.

Behind the glass screen, a technician was carefully laying a curve down on a drawing table with a pantagraph instrument. As he moved the pencil point along the curve, a thin green line appeared in stereo, starting close by and abruptly, and leading towards the dot labeled Castor.

The loud-speaker said, "This green line is the computed course of Spaceflight Seventy-nine."

* * * * *

A red knot was placed on the line.

"This is the approximate point of explosion."

Wilson asked, "Is that nominal or is that placed on the minus side?"

"The spot is placed to give the maximum factor of safety."

"Good."

"Now, after considering the probable velocity of escape from Seventy-nine, which would be a lifeship leaving the mother vessel at a ninety-degree relative course at full lifeship speed, we find a vector combination of velocities and courses that diverge from the main course."

From the red knot another line went out at a small angle to the original course, thin and red.

"But because we have no way of knowing what the axial attitude of Seventy-nine was at the moment of escape, the volume of probability now becomes a cone."

The angled red line revolved about a green course line describing a thin cone, its base pointed toward the star, Castor. As the line revolved about the axis of the cone, it left a faint residue behind it, which became a thin, transparent cone.

Manning said, "Our field of operations lies within this cone."

Someone running the projector went to work. The scene expanded until the thin red cone filled the screen and seemed to project deep into the room, its apex almost at the eyes of the watchers. Then a polar pattern appeared across the cone near the apex, a circular grid marked off in thin white lines, each line numbered, each area or segment, marked with a letter.