Читать книгу Subspace Explorers - E.E. "Doc" Smith - Страница 7

THE ZETA FIELD

The tremendous Chaytor engines of the Procyon were again putting out their wonted torrents of power. The starship, now a mere spaceship, was on course at one gravity. The lifecraft were in their berths, but the five and the four still lived in them rather than in the vast and oppressive emptiness that the liner then was. And outside of working hours the two groups did not mix.

In Lifecraft Three, four men sat at two tables. Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan were playing cards for small stakes. Ferdy was of medium size, lithe and poised, built of rawhide and spring steel. Moose the Muscle was six feet five and weighed a good two sixty. The two at the other table had been planning for days. They had had many vitriolic arguments, but neither had made any motion toward his weapon.

“Play it my way and we’ve got it made, I tell you!” Newman pounded the table with his fist. “Seventy five megabucks if it’s a dime! Heavier loot than your second-string syndicate ever even thought of in one haul! I’m almost as good an astrogator as Jones is and a better engineer, and at practical electronics I’m just as good as Pretty Boy Deston is.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lopresto sneered. “How come you’re only a crew chief, then?”

“Only a crew chief!” Newman yelled. “D’ya think I’m dumb or something? Or don’t know where the big moola is at? Or ain’t in exactly the right spot to collect right and left? Or I ain’t got exactly the right connections? With Mister Big himself? You ain’t that dumb!”

“Dumb or not, before I make a move I’ve got to be sure that we can get back without ’em.”

“You can be damn sure. I got to get back myself, don’t I? But paste this in your hat—I get the big platinum blonde.”

“You can have her. Too big. The little yellow-head’s my dish.”

Newman sneered into Lopresto’s hard-held face. “But remember this, you small-time, chiseling punk. Rub me out after we kill them and you get nowhere. You’re dead. Chew on that awhile and you’ll know who’s boss.”

After just the right amount of holding back and objecting, Lopresto agreed. “You win, Newman, the way the cards lay. So all that’s left is—when? Tomorrow?”

“Not quite. Let ’em finish figuring course, time, distance, turnover—all that stuff. They can do it a lot faster and some better than I can. I’ll tell you when.”

“Okay, and I’ll give the signal. When I yell NOW we give ’em the business.”

Newman went to his cabin and the muscle called Moose said, “I don’t like that ape, boss. Before you gun him, let me work him over a little, huh?”

“We’ll let him think he’s top dog for a while yet; then you can have him.”

* * * *

A few evenings later, in Lifecraft Two, Barbara said, “You’re worried, Babe, and everything’s going so smoothly. Why?”

“Too smoothly altogether. That’s why. Newman ought to be doing a slow burn and goldbricking all he dares, and he isn’t. And I wouldn’t trust Lopresto as far as I can throw a brick chimney by its smoke. I smell trouble. Shooting trouble.”

“But they couldn’t do anything without you two!” Bernice protested. “Could they, Ted, possibly?”

“They could, and I think they intend to. Being a crew chief, Newman is a jackleg engineer, a good practical ’troncist, and a rule-of-thumb astrogator, and we’re computing every element of the flight. And if he’s what I think he is... ” Jones paused.

“Could be,” Deston said. “One of an organized ring of pirate-smugglers. But there isn’t enough plunder that they could get away with to make it pay.”

“No? Think again. Not plunder; salvage. With either of us alive, none. With both of us dead, can you guess within ten megabucks of how much they’ll collect?”

“Blockhead!” Deston slapped himself on the forehead. “And they aren’t planning on killing the girls until the last act.”

Both girls shrank visibly and Barbara said, “I see.”

Deston went on, “They know they’ll have to get both of us at once—the survivor would lock the ship in null-G and they’d be sitting ducks... and it won’t be until we’ve finished the computations. We very seldom work together. If we make it a point never to be together on duty... ”

“And be sure to always have our talkies turned on,” Jones put in, grimly.

“Check. They’ll have to think up some reason for getting everybody together, which will be the tip-off. Blaine will probably draw on me... ”

“And he’ll kill you,” Jones said, flatly. “You’re fast, I know, but he’s a professional—probably one of the fastest guns in all space.”

“Yes, but... I’ve got a... I mean I think I can... ”

Bernice, smiling now, stopped Deston’s floundering. “Why don’t you fellows tell each other that you’re both very strongly psionic? Bobby and I let our back hair down long ago.”

“Oh—so you’ll have warning, too, Babe?” Jones asked.

“That’s right; but the girls can’t start packing pistols now.”

Bernice laughed. “I wouldn’t know how to shoot one if I did. I’ll throw things—I’m very good at that.”

Jones didn’t know his new wife very well yet, either. “What can you throw hard enough and straight enough to do any good?”

“Anything that weighs less than fifty pounds,” she replied, confidently. “In this case... chairs, I think. Flying chairs are really hard to cope with. I’ll start wearing a couple of knives in leg-sheaths, but I won’t throw ’em unless I absolutely have to. Who will I knock out with the first chair?”

“I’ll answer that,” Barbara said. “If it’s Blaine against Babe, it’ll be Lopresto against Herc. So you’ll throw your chair at that unspeakable oaf Newman.”

“I’d rather brain him than anyone else I know, but that would leave that gigantic gorilla to... in that case, Bobby, you’ll simply have to go armed.”

Barbara held out her hands. “I always do.”

“Against a man-mountain like him? You’re that good? Really?”

“Especially against a man-mountain like him. I’m that good. Really. And we should have a signal—an unusual word—so the first one of us to sense their intent yells ‘BRAHMS!’ Okay?”

That was okay, and the four went to bed.

Three days later, the intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge. All was peace and friendship—until suddenly a four-fold “BRAHMS!” rang out an instant ahead of Lopresto’s stentorian “NOW!”

It was all a very good thing that Deston had had warning for he was indeed competing out of his class. As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine’s head, while the gunman’s went into the carpet. The other pistol duel wasn’t even close and Newman didn’t get to aim his gun at Adams at all.

Bernice, even while shrieking the battle-cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough. It knocked the half-drawn pistol from Newman’s hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston’s second bullet made it certain that he would stay there.

If Moose Mordan had had time to get set, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Deston was very, very fast. She reached him before he even realized that this pint-sized girl actually intended to hit him; thus his belly-muscles were still completely relaxed when her left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.

With an agonized “WHOOSH!” he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. The fingers of her right hand, tightly bunched, were already boring savagely into a spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.

That ended it. To make sure, however—or to keep Barbara from knowing that she had killed a man?—Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the floor.

Both girls flung themselves into their husbands’ arms.

“Oh, I killed him, Carl!” Barbara sobbed. “And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in... ”

“You didn’t kill him, Barbara,” Adams said.

“Huh?” She raised her head from Deston’s shoulder; the contrast between streaming eyes and dawning relief was almost funny. “Why, I did too! I know I did!”

“By no means, my dear. Nor did Bernice kill Newman. Fists and knees and chairs do not kill instantly; bullets through the brain do. The autopsies will show, I’m quite certain, that these four men died instantly of gunshot wounds.”

* * * *

With the gangsters out of the way, life aboardship settled down, but not into a routine. When two spacemen and two grounder girls are trying to do the work of a full crew, no routine is possible. Adams, much older than the others and working even longer hours, became haggard and thin.

“But this work is necessary, my dear children,” he informed the two girls when they remonstrated with him. “This material is all new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved and I have less than a year left to work on them. Less than one year, and it is a task for many men and all the resources of a research center.”

To the officers, however, he went into more detail. “Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the devices employed; it is highly improbable that we are the first survivors of this type of catastrophe to set course for a planet.”

After some discussion, the officers agreed with him.

“While I can not as yet analyze or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass. I am now virtually certain that it is; and I am of the opinion that its discharge is ordinarily of such violence as to destroy the starship carrying it.”

“Good God!” Deston exclaimed. “Oh—that was what you meant by ‘fantastic precautions’?”

“Precisely.”

“Any idea of what those precautions will have to be?”

“No. This is all so new... and I know so little... and am working with pitifully inadequate instrumentation... however, we have months of time yet, and if I am unable to derive a solution before arrival—I don’t mean a rigorous analysis, of course; merely a method of discharge having a probability of success of at least point nine—we will remain in orbit around that sun until I do.”

* * * *

The Procyon bored on through space at one gravity of acceleration; and one gravity, maintained for months, builds up to an extremely high velocity. And, despite the Einstein Effect, that acceleration was maintained, for there was no lack of power. The Procyon’s uranium-driven Wesleys did not drive the ship, but only energized the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the total energy of the universe.

Thus, in seven months of flight, the spaceship had probably attained a velocity of about six-tenths that of light. The men did not know the day or date or what their actual velocity was, since the brute-force machine that was their only clock could not be depended upon for either accuracy or uniformity. Also, and worse, there was of course no possibility of determining what, if anything, the Einstein Effect was doing to their time rate.

At the estimated midpoint of the flight the Procyon was turned end for end; and, a few days later, Barbara and Deston cornered Adams in his laboratory.

“Listen, you egregious clam!” she began. “I know that Bun and I both have been pregnant for at least eight months and we ought to be twice as big as we are. You’ve been studying us constantly with a hundred machines that nobody ever heard of before and all you’ve said is blah. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the truth. Are we in a lot of trouble?”

“Trouble?” Adams was amazed. “Of course not. None at all. Perfectly normal fetuses, both of them. Perfectly.”

“But for what age?” she demanded. “Four months, maybe?”

“But that’s the crux!” Adams enthused. “Fascinating; and indubitably supremely important. A key datum. If this zeta field is causing it, that gives me a tremendously powerful new tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus certain determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by... but you aren’t listening!”

“I’m listening, pops, but nothing is coming through. But I’m awfully glad I’m not going to give birth to a monster,” and she led Deston away. “Carl, have you got the foggiest idea of what he was talking about?”

“Not the foggiest—that was over my head like a cirrus cloud—but if you gals’ slowness in producing will help the old boy lick this thing I’m all for it, believe me.”

Months passed. Two perfect babies—Theodore Warner Deston and Barbara Bernice Jones—were born, four days apart, in perfectly normal fashion. Adams made out birth certificates which were unusual in only one respect; the times, dates, and places of the births were to be determined later.

A couple of weeks before arrival Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. “I have it!” he shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher—very much higher—mathematics.

“Hold it, Doc!” Deston protested. “I read you zero and ten. Can’t you delouse your signal?”

“W-e-l-l.” The scientist looked hurt, but did abandon the high math. “The discharge is catastrophic; energy of the order of magnitude of ten thousand average discharges of lightning. I do not know what it is, but it is virtually certain that we will be able to discharge it, not in the one tremendous blast of contact with the planet, but in successive decrements by the use of long, thin leads extending downward toward a high point of the planet.”

“Wire, you mean? What kind?”

“The material is unimportant except in that it should have sufficient tensile strength to support as many miles as possible of its own length.”

“We’ve got dozens of coils of hook-up wire,” Deston said, “but not too many miles and it’s soft stuff.”

Jones snapped his finger. “Graham wire!”

“Of course,” Deston agreed. “Hundreds of miles of it aboard. We’ll float the senser down on a Hotchkiss... ”

“Tear-out,” Jones objected.

“Bailey it—and spider the Bailey out to eighteen or twenty pads. We can cannibal the whole Middle for metal.”

“Sure. But surges—backlash. We’ll have to remote it.”

“No, problem there; servos all over the place. To Baby Two.”

“Would you mind delousing your signal?” Adams asked caustically.

“ ’Scuse, please, Doc. A guy does talk better in his own lingo, doesn’t he? Graham wire is used for re-wrapping the Grahams, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. What are Grahams?”

“Why, they’re the intermediates between the Wesleys and the Chaytors... okay, okay; Graham wire is one-point-three-millimeter-diameter ultra-high-tensile alloy wire. Used for re-enforcing hollow containers that have to stand terrific pressure.”

“Such wire is exactly what will be required. Note now that our bodies will have to be grounded very thoroughly to the metal of the ship.”

“You’re so right. We’ll wrap up to the eyeballs in silver mesh and run leads as big as my arm to the frame.”

They approached their target planet. It was twice as massive as Earth; its surface was rugged and jagged; its mountain ranges had sharp peaks over forty thousand feet high.

“There’s one more thing we must do,” Adams said. “This zeta field may very well be irreplaceable. We must therefore launch all the lifecraft except Number Two into separate orbits, so that a properly-staffed and properly-equipped force may study that field.”

It was done; and in a few hours the Procyon hung motionless, a thousand miles high, directly above an isolated and sharp mountain peak.

The Bailey boom, with its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the Procyon’s side. A twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire had been mounted on the remote-controlled Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire had been run out over the pulley; a fifteen-pound weight, to act both as a “senser” and to keep the wire from fouling, had been attached; and the controls had been tested.

Now, in Lifecraft Two—as far away from the “business district” as they could be—the human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The whole coil ran out, as expected, with no action. Then, slowly and carefully, Deston let the big ship float straight downward. Until, suddenly, it happened.

There was a blast beside which the most terrific flash of lightning ever seen on Earth would have seemed like a firecracker. Although she was in what was almost a vacuum, the Procyon was hurled upward like the cork of a champagne bottle. And as for what it felt like—the sensation was utterly indescribable. As Bernice said, long afterward, when she was being pressed by a newsman, “Just tell ’em it was the living end.”

The girls were unwrapped and, after a moment of semi-hysteria and after making sure that the babies were all right, were as good as new. Then Deston aimed his plate and gulped. Without saying a word he waved a hand and the others looked. The sharp tip of the mountain was gone: it had become a seething, flaming lake of incandescent lava.

“And what,” Deston managed, “do you suppose happened to the other side of the ship?”

The boom was gone. So were all twenty of the grounding cables that had fanned out in all directions to anchorages welded to the vessel’s skin and frame. The anchorages, too, were gone; and tons upon tons of steel plating and of structural members for many feet around where each anchorage had been. Many tons of steel had been completely volatilized; other tons had run like water.

“Shall I try the subspace radio now, Doc?” Deston asked.

“By no means. This first blast would of course be the worst, but there will be several more, of decreasing violence.”

There were. The second, while it volatilized the boom and its grounding network, merely fused small portions of the anchorages. The third took only the boom itself; the fourth, only the dangling miles of wire. At the fifth trial nothing—apparently—happened; whereupon the wire was drawn in and a two-hundred-pound mass of steel was lowered into firm contact with solid rock.

“Now you may try your radio,” Adams said.

Deston flipped a switch and spoke into his microphone. “Procyon One to Control Six. Flight eight four nine. Subspace radio test number nine five—I think. How do you read me, Control Six?”

The reply was highly unorthodox. It was a wild yell, followed by words not addressed to Deston at all. “Captain Reamer! Captain French! Captain Holloway! ANYBODY! It’s the Procyon, that was lost over a year ago! IT’S THE PROCYON!”

“Line it up! If it’s some damn fool’s idea of a joke... ” a crisp authoritative voice grew louder as its source approached the distant pickup “... he’ll rot in jail for a hundred years!”

“Procyon One to Control Six,” Deston said again. His voice was not quite steady this time; both girls were crying openly and joyfully. “How do you read me, Frenchy old horse?”

“It is the Procyon—that’s the Runt himself—hi, Babe! I read you nine and one. Survivors?”

“Five. Second Officer Jones, our wives, and Doctor Andrew Adams, a fellow of the College of Study.”

“It can’t be a lifecraft after this long—what shape is the hulk in?”

“Bad. Can’t immerge. The whole Top is an ungodly mess and some of the rest of her won’t hold air—air, hell! Section Fourteen won’t hold shipping crates! The Chaytors are okay, but five of the Wesleys are shot, and all of the Q-converters. Most of the Grahams are leaking like sieves, and... ”

“Hold it, Babe. They want this on a recorder down-stairs, too. The newshawks are knocking the doors down. This marriage bit. The brides—who are they?”

Deston told him. Just that; no more.

“Okay. They want a lot more than that; especially the sobbers, but that can wait. What happened?”

“I don’t know. You’d better fly a Fellow of the College over there to talk to Doc Adams. Maybe he can explain it to another Big Brain, but I wouldn’t bet, even on that.”

“Okay. Downstairs is hooked in and so is Brass. Give us everything you know or can guess at.”

Deston spoke steadily for thirty minutes. He did not mention the gangsters, nor psionics, nor the extraordinarily long periods of gestation; otherwise his report was accurate and complete. When it was done, French said:

“Mark off. Off the air, Babe—nice job. Now, Herc, on the air. Mark on. Second Officer Theodore Jones reporting. You’re orbiting the fourth planet of a sun. What sun? Where?”

“I don’t know. Unlisted; we’re in unexplored territory. Standard reference data as follows,” and Jones read off a long list of observations; not only of the brightest stars of the galaxy, but also of the standard reference points, such as S-Doradus, lying outside it. “When you get that stuff all plotted you’ll find a hell of a big confusion, but I hope there aren’t enough stars in it but what you’ll be able to find us sometime.”

“Mark off. Don’t make me laugh, Herc; your probable center will spear it. If there’s ever more than one star in any confusion you set up I’ll eat all the extras. But there’s a dozen Big Brains, gnawing their nails off to the elbows to talk to Adams. So put him on and let’s get back to sleep, huh? They’re cutting this mike now.”

“Hold it!” Deston snapped. “I want some information too, dammit! What’s your Greenwich?”

“Zero seven one four plus thirty seven seconds. So go to bed, you night-prowling owl.”

“Of what day, month, and year?” Deston insisted.

“Friday, Sep... ” French’s voice was replaced by that of a much older man; very evidently that of a Fellow of the College.

After listening for less than a minute, Barbara took Deston’s arm and led him away. “Any at all of that gibberish is exactly that much too much, husband mine. So I think we’d better take Captain French’s advice, don’t you?”

* * * *

Since there was only one star in Jones’ “confusion” (by the book, “Volume of Uncertainty”) finding the Procyon was no problem at all. High Brass came in quantity and the whole story, except for one bit of biology, was told. Two huge subspace-going machine-shops also came, and a battalion of mechanics, who worked on the crippled liner for over three weeks.

Then the Procyon started back for Earth under her own subspace drive, under the command of Captain Theodore Jones. His first and only command for the Interstellar Corporation, of course, since he was a married man. Deston had tendered his resignation while still a First Officer, but his superiors would not accept it until after his promotion “for outstanding services” had come through. Thus Captain Carlyle Deston and his wife and son were dead-heading, not quite back to Earth, but to the transfer point for Newmars.

Just before that transfer point was reached, Deston went “up Top” to take leave of his friend, and Jones greeted him with:

“I’ve been trying to talk to Doc again; but wherever he starts or whatever the angle of approach he always boils it down to this: ‘Subjective time is measured by the number of learning events experienced.’ I ask you, Babe, what in hell does that mean? If anything?”

“I know. Me, too. It sounds like it ought to mean something, but I’ll be damned if I know what. However, if it makes the old boy happy and gives the College a toe-hold on subspace, what do we care?”

And at this same time Barbara had been visiting Bernice. They had of course been talking about the babies, and an awkward silence had fallen.

“Oh,” Barbara licked her lips. “So you get those feelings too.”

“Too?” Bernice’s face paled. “But they’re absolutely normal, Bobby. Perfect. Absolutely perfect in every respect.”

“I know... but once in a while.. an aura or something... it scares me simply witless.”

“I have them too. Not often, but... well, they began even before she was born.”

“Oh? So did mine! But they aren’t monsters, Bun! I just know they aren’t!”

“So do I. Of course they aren’t. They aren’t even mutants. Look, Bobby, let’s think instead of emoting. All four of us are very strongly psychic, but each of us got it from only one side of the family. With both parents psychic the effect would have to be intensified, wouldn’t it?”

“It would, at that. That’s the answer, Bun, you solved the mystery. They have the same thing we have, except more of it. But they can’t have real powers without experience or knowledge, so when they grow up they’ll be stronger than we are and we’ll learn from them.”

“That’s the way it is. I’m sure of it.”

“So am I, now. I feel a lot better, Bun. I’ve got to gallop. This isn’t goodbye, dear—I’ll see you soon and often—it’s just so long.”