The Complete Serials Page 5

  Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley’s nostrils, sensed the effort he was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question.

  “How do they expect us to get out there?” he asked.

  “My ship is fast,” said Tommy Evans, “faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast.”

  “A space-time warp,” he said, and his voice was oddly calm. “They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps—”

  Caroline smiled at him. “That’s the answer,” she said. “A short cut. Not the long way around. Rip straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in time and space.”

  KINGSLEY’S great fists were opening and closing again. And each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.

  “But . . . but—” Kingsley was stammering.

  “How will we do it?” asked Herb. “There isn’t a damn one of us in this room could do it. We play around with geosectors that drive our ships and think we’re the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control—you’d have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you’d have to make it stay that way.”

  “Maybe the Engineers,” said Tommy. “That’s it,” nodded Caroline. “The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions.”

  “But,” protested Kingsley, “could we understand? That must involve mathematics that are way beyond us.”

  Caroline’s voice cut sharply through his protest. “I can understand them,” she replied bitterly. “Maybe it will take a little thought, but I can work them out. I’ve had . . . practice, you know.”

  Kingsley was dumfounded. “You can work them out?”

  “I worked out new mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship,” she said. “They’re only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point.” She laughed, with just a touch more of bitterness.

  “I had a thousand years to do it,” she reminded him. “I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don’t you see? Something to keep from going crazy.” Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto. That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.

  How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and relaxation. Leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think—to figure out things. And then one died, and all his thoughts were lost. Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Left for someone else to discover if he could—and probably lost forever.

  But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years on one problem had she wished.

  He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew—what keys she had found away out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And—she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal.

  SHE WAS talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion she could be.

  “You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector . . . but with a vast difference in one respect.”

  “You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?” asked Kingsley.

  She nodded. “Except that they wouldn’t have used it for driving ships—not then. For Jupiter was winning, and everyone was desperate. They didn’t care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon.”

  “The geosector is no weapon,” Kingsley declared flatly. “You couldn’t use it near a planetary body.”

  “But consider this,” said the girl. “If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn’t it?”

  Herb whistled. “I’d say it’d be a weapon,” he said, “and how!”

  “They wanted to train it on Jupiter,” Caroline explained. “It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well!”

  “But think of what it would have done to the Solar System,” ejaculated Kingsley. “Even if the warp hadn’t distorted space throughout the whole system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the Solar System. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth.”

  The girl nodded.

  “That’s why I wouldn’t turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the System. They adjudged me a traitor and condemned me to space.”

  “Why,” said Gary, “you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn’t built until a hundred years ago.”

  Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn’t laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her. He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.

  “Young lady,” rumbled Kingsley, “it seems to me that you don’t need any help from these Cosmic Engineers.”

  She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. “But I do,” she said.

  The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly the others watched her. Watched the poised pencil drop to the pad and race across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.

  “The instructions,” Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.

  The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.

  GARY’S HEAD swam at the thought of it. That slim wisp of a girl talking across millions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe. Talking and understanding . . . but not perfectly understanding perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about equations. The tip of the pencil hovered over the pad as her eyes followed along the symbols.

  The hum died in the-room, and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.

  The pencil made correction, added notes, and jotted down new equations. Never once hesitating. And then the light blinked out and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.

  Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.

  He looked questioningly at the girl. “Do you understand this?” he rasped.

  She nodded blithely.

  He flung down the pad. “There’s only one other person in the system who could,” he said. “Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowi
ng what it’s all about. That’s Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he’s in an insane asylum back on Earth.”

  “Sure,” yelled Herb, “he’s the guy that invented three-way ten-man chess. I took a picture of him once.”

  They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.

  “I understand it well enough to start,” she said. “I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened out. But we can do that when the time conies.”

  “Those equations,” said Kingsley, “represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet ever has been able to fathom.”

  “Probably,” Caroline suggested, “the Engineers live on a large and massive world. A world where space is distorted, where stress and strain such as you speak of would be the normal things. Beings living on such a world soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably never could be developed, because there’d be no such a thing as a plane surface.”

  “What do they want us to do?” asked Tommy Evans.

  “They want us to build a machine,” said Carpline. “A machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the millions of light-years that separate us from them.”

  She glanced at Kingsley. “We’ll need strong materials,” she said. “Stronger than anything we know of in the System. Something that will stand up under the strain of millions of light-years of distorted space.”

  Kingsley wrinkled his brow.

  “I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl,” she said. “Have you experimented with it here?”

  Kingsley nodded. “We’ve stilled the electron-whirl,” he said. “Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won’t do us any good. I can suspend all electronic motion, stop the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be kept at close to absolute zero. The least heat, and they overcome inertia, start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.

  “If we could crystallize the atomic system,” he declared, “we’d have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down.”

  “We can do it,” Caroline said. “We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their place.” Kingsley snorted. “Say,” he said, “is there anything you can’t do with space?” Caroline laughed. “A lot of things I can’t do, doctor,” she told him. “A few things I can do. I was interested in space. That’s how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I tried to figure out how to control it. It was something to while away the time.”

  DR. KINGSLEY glanced around the room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking to see if he had forgotten anything.

  “Well,” he rumbled, “what are we waiting for? Let’s get to work.”

  “Now, wait a second,” interrupted Gary. “Do we want to do this? Are we sure we aren’t rushing into something we’ll be sorry for? After all, all we have to go on are those Voices. We’re taking them on face value alone—and Voices don’t have faces.”

  “Sure,” piped up Herb, “how do we know they aren’t kidding us? How do we know this isn’t some sort of a cosmic joke? Maybe there’s a fellow out there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he’s got us all stirred up.”

  Kingsley’s face filled with anger, but Caroline laughed.

  “You look so serious, Gary,” she declared.

  “It’s something to be serious about,” Gary protested. “We are monkeying around with something that’s entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids playing with TNT. We might set loose something we wouldn’t be able to stop. Something might be using us to help it set up an easy way to get at the Solar System. We might just be pulling someone’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  “Gary,” said Caroline softly, “if you had heard that Voice you wouldn’t doubt. I know it’s on the level. I know the Engineers are our friends. You see, it isn’t a Voice, really—it’s a thought. I know there’s danger, and that we must help, do everything we can. There are other volunteers, you know, other people from other parts of the universe.”

  “How do you know?” asked Gary fiercely.

  “I don’t know how,” she defended herself. “I just know. That’s all. Intuition, perhaps, or maybe a background thought in the Engineer’s mind that rode through with the message.

  Gary looked around at the others. Tommy Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He looked at Herb.

  “What the hell,” said Herb. “Let’s take a chance.”

  Just like that, thought Gary. A woman’s intuition, the burning zeal of a scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome spirit of mankind. No reason, no logic—mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.

  Once a mad monk had stood before the crowds and shook a sword in air and shrieked invective against another faith, and, because of this, Christian armies, year after year, broke their strength against the walls of eastern cities.

  Those were the Crusades.

  This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Men again answering the clarion call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his puny strength, his little brain against great cosmic forces. Man—the damn fool—sticking his neck out.

  Tommy Evans was shouting, excitedly: “I started out for Alpha Centauri and look where I’m going now!”

  END OF PART I.

  Part Two of Clifford D. Simak’s great three-part novel of intelligence fighting to save a Universe!

  Synopsis for Part II.

  Caroline Martin, in the year 5980, is a member of the Earth-Mars Research Commission. The Earth and Mars are arrayed against Jupiter in a struggle for the domination of the Solar System. Caroline discovers the secret of controlling a space-time distortion which the military board wishes to use as a weapon against Jupiter. Knowing that the use of such a weapon may spell the doom of the System, Caroline refuses to divulge the secret. She is tried before a military court and sentenced to space. Set adrift in a space-shell just inside the orbit of Pluto, she faces the prospect of living out her life in the desolation of space.

  Prior to her discovery of the spacetime warp, she and a fellow worker, with whom she is in love, have perfected a drug which suspends animation. Her lover has smuggled a supply of the drug aboard the space-shell, and when she finds it, she believes he has a plan to effect her rescue. Accordingly, she puts herself into suspended animation, only to find that while all other physiological functions are suspended, her brain still works. Her lover fails to come and centuries pass, while she lies in suspended animation—but with her brain working at full capacity. Thought is the only thing left for her, and, accordingly, she must think.

  In the year 6948, almost 1,000 years later, she is rescued and restored to animation by Gary Nelson and Herb Harper, newsmen on an assignment to write a series of articles concerning the Solar System.

  Arriving at Trail’s End, Pluto’s only community, they meet Dr. Kingsley, in charge of Solar Government laboratories, and Tommy Evans, who expects to fly a new type ship to Alpha Centauri and thus become the first man to go beyond the Solar System.

  Dr. Kingsley has been receiving strange messages out of space, but is unable to decipher them. Caroline, her brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, is able to understand the messages, finds they are from entities calling themselves the Cosmic Engineers. The Engineers live near the rim of the. exploding universe and are asking for volunteers to fight a menace from outside the universe—a menace that threatens the very existence of the universe. The five, caught up by the old crusading fever, decide to travel to the planet of the Cosmic Engineers and h
elp fight the menace. Under the direction of the Engineers, they start to build apparatus which will enable them to cross the unimaginable light-years to the edge of space-time.

  VI.

  A GHOSTLY machine was taking shape upon the hard, pitted, frozen surface of the field. A crazy, ghostly machine that glimmered weirdly in the half-light of the stars. A machine with mind-wrenching angles, with flashing prisms and spidery framework, a towering skeleton of a machine that stretched out spaceward.

  Made of material in which the atomic motion had been stilled, it stood defiant against the most powerful forces of man or void. Anchored magnetically to the core of the planet, it stood planted firmly, a spidery, frail-appearing thing, but with a strength that would stand against the unimaginable drag of a cosmic space-time warp.

  From it, long cables snaked their way over the frozen surface to the laboratory power plants. Through those slender cables, their resistance lowered by the bitter cold, tremendous power loads could be poured into the strange machine.

  “They’re space-nuts,” grumbled Ted Smith at Gary’s elbow. “They’re fixin’ to blow Pluto all to hell. I wish there was some way for me to get away from here before the fireworks start.”

  Herb’s voice crackled in Gary’s helmet-phones, answering the complaint. “Hell, there just won’t nothing happen. That contraption looks more like something a kid built with building blocks than a machine. I can’t see how it ever will work.”

  “I gave up long ago,” Gary confessed. “Caroline tried to explain it to me, but I guess I’m just sort of dense. I can’t make head or tail of it. All I know is that it’s supposed to be an anchor post, a thing that will help the Engineers set up this space warp and after it is set up, will operate to hold it in position.”

  “I never did set any stock by that Engineer talk,” said Ted, “but there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you two. Haven’t been able to catch you. You’ve been so busy. But I wanted to tell you about it, for you’re the only two who haven’t gone entirely star-batty.”