Читать книгу Subspace Explorers - E.E. "Doc" Smith - Страница 8

DESTON THE DOWSER

For a week the Destons were busy settling down in their low, sprawling home on Newmars. Deston had not had time to think about a job, and Barbara did not intend to let him think about one. Wherefore, the first free evening they had, while they were sitting close together on a davenport near the fireplace in their living-room, she said:

“I know how much you really want to explore deep space. I do, too. I’m sure we could accomplish something worth while, and I’d like very much to leave a size five-bee footprint on the sands of time, too. There’s a way we can do it.”

Deston stiffened. “I’d like to believe that, pet. I’d give my right leg to the hip and one eye—but what’s the use of kidding ourselves? Your last buck, even if I’d lay it on that kind of a line, wouldn’t cover the nut.”

“The way things are now, no. But listen. What is the one single thing that all civilization needs most desperately?”

“Uranium. You know that as well as I do.”

“I know; but I want you to think very seriously about the reality, the intensity, and the importance of that need. So elucidate.”

“Okay.” Deston shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the sine qua non of interstellar flight; of running the Chaytor engine. While all the uranium does is trigger the power intake, the bigger the Chaytor the bigger its Wesley has to be and the faster the uranium gets used up. Uranium’s so scarce that except for controls its price would be fantastic. Hence the black market, where its price is fantastic. Hence bribery, corruption, and so forth. Half of the deviltry and skulduggery on all ninety six planets is due to the hard fact that the supply of uranium cannot be made to equal the demand. Sufficient?”

“Sufficient. Now for it. I’ve been hinting, but you’ve been shying away from psionics as though it were something to be ashamed of, and it isn’t. In space we were all too horribly busy to do anything about it, but now I’m going to slug you with it. Carl, I know that you’re the first real metal-dowser that ever lived. Don’t ask me how I know; I just know. If you’ll just get serious and really work on your latent abilities you’ll be able to find any metal you please as easily as I can find oil.”

Tightening his arm, he swung her around and stared into her eyes. “I know all about things that way. Hunches. So how do I go about learning to dowse metal?”

“Like I did. I started on coal, holding a lump in my hand. I concentrated on it until I could sense everything about it, clear down to its atomic structure. Then, looking at a map and spreading it out, I could see every coal deposit on the planet. So here’s a piece of copper tube and a blueprint of this house. Concentrate as hard as you possibly can; then you’ll know what I mean.”

“Oh—so you’ve been laying for me.”

“Of course I have. This is the first time we’ve had any time.”

“Okay. I’ll give it the good old college try.”

He tried it. He tried over and over again. For half an hour he put everything he had into the effort. Then, coming out of his near-trance, he wiped his sweating face and said, “I can’t swing it alone, pet. There must be some way for you to show me how the damn thing goes—if I’ve got what it takes.”

“Of course you have!” she snapped. “Don’t think for a single second you haven’t—I know you have, I tell you!”

“If you know it, it’s so and I believe it. But the question still is—how? But say, you can read my mind, can’t you?”

Her eyes widened. “Why, I don’t know. I never tried to, of course... but what good would that do?”

“Just a hunch. With that close a contact, maybe some of your knowledge will rub off onto me. Especially if you push.”

“I’ll push, all right; but remember, no resistance. With such a chilled-steel mind as yours, nothing could get through.”

“No resistance. Just the opposite. I’ll pull you in with every tractor I can bring to bear. Across a table?”

“Uh-uh, this is better. Closer.”

They gripped hands and stared into each other’s eyes. For a long two minutes nothing happened; then Barbara broke contact. “I got a little,” she said. “You were fighting with a boy twice your size. A red-haired boy with a lot of freckles.”

“Huh? Spike McGonigle—that was twelve or fifteen years ago and I haven’t thought of the guy since! But I got something, too. You were at a party, wearing a red dress cut down to here and emerald ear-rings. You put a slightly pie-eyed chicken colonel flat on his face because he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Not on his face, surely... oh, yes, I remember. But this isn’t what we wanted, at all. However, it’s something; so let’s keep on with it, shall we?”

They kept it up until bedtime, and went at it again immediately after breakfast next morning. Progress was maddeningly slow, but it was progress. Progress marked by a succession of stabbing, fleeting pains, each of which was followed by the opening of an entire vista of one-ness. They did not complete the operation that day, or in three more, or in a week; but finally, the last vista opened, they sat for minutes in what was neither ecstasy nor consternation, but something having the prime elements of both. For full mental rapport is the ultimate intimacy; more intimate by far than any other union possible.

Barbara licked her bloodless lips and said, not in words but purely in thought, “Oh, Carl! So this is what telepathy really is!”

“Must be.” He was not speaking aloud, either. “What the people who talk about telepathy don’t know about it!”

“Oh, this is wonderful! But it isn’t what we were after at all.”

“But it may very well be a prerequisite, hon. I won’t be just watching you do it now; we’ll be doing it as one. So break out your bottle of crude oil.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary. I know oil so well that we won’t need a sample, not even a map. Look—it goes like this... see?”

“See! Listen, Bobby. How could anybody ever learn such an incredibly complex technique as that all by himself? How did you ever learn it?”

“Looked at that way... I guess maybe I didn’t. I must have been born with it.”

“That makes sense. Now let’s link up and take that copper atom apart clear down to whatever makes up its theta, mu, and pi mesons.”

But they didn’t. Much to the dismayed surprise of both, their combined attack was no more effective than Deston’s alone had been. He frowned at the sample in thought, then said, “Okay. The thing’s beginning to make sense.”

“What sense?” she demanded. “Not to me, it isn’t. Is this another of your hunches?”

“No. Logic. I’m not sure yet, but one more test and I will be. Water. You won’t need a sample?”

“No more than with oil. It’s just about the same technique. Like this... there. But it doesn’t get me anywhere. Does it you?”

“Definitely. Look, Bobby. Water, gas, oil, and coal. Oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Oxygen, the highest, is atomic number eight. Maybe you can—what’ll we call it? ‘Handle’?—handle the lower elements, but not the higher ones. So maybe both of us together can handle ’em all. If this hypothesis is valid, you already know helium, lithium, beryllium,... ”

“Wait up!” she broke in. “I wouldn’t recognize any one of them if it should stop me on the street and say hello.”

“You just think you wouldn’t. How about boron, as in boric acid? Eye-wash, to you?”

Her mind flashed to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “I do know it, at that. I’ve never handled it, but I can.”

“Nice. How about sodium, as in common salt?”

“Can do.”

“Chlorine, the other half of salt?”

“That hurt a little—took a little time—but I made it.”

“Fine! The hypothesis begins to look good. Now we’ll tackle calcium together. In bones—my thick skull, for instance.”

“Ouch! That really hurt, Carl. And you did it. I couldn’t have, possibly, but I followed you in and I know it now. But golly, it felt like... like it was stretching my brain all out of shape. Like giving birth to a child, something. I told you you’re stronger than I am, Carl, but I want to learn it all. So go right ahead, but take it a little slower, please.”

“Slow it is, sweetheart,” and they went ahead.

And in a couple of days they could handle all the elements of the periodic table.

Then and only then did they go back to what they had started out to do. Seated side by side, each grasping the short length of metal, they stared at the blueprint and allowed—or, rather, impelled—their perception to pervade the entire volume of the house.

“We’ve got it!” Deston yelled, aloud. “It is a new sense—a sixth sense—and what a sense!”

They could see—sense—perceive—every bit of copper in, under, and around the building; the network of tubes and pipes stood out like the blood-vessels in a plastic model of the human body. While the metal was not transparent in the optical sense, they could perceive in detail the outside, the inside, and the ultimately fine structure of the material of each component part of the whole gas-and-water-supply installation.

“Oh, you did it, Carl!”

“We did it—whatever it is. But I can do it alone now; I know exactly how it goes. This is really terrific stuff.” He lost himself in thought, then went on, “And the cardinal principle of semantics is that the map is not the territory. Let’s go in the library, roll out the big globe of Newmars, and give this planet a going-over like no world ever got before.

“Oh, that’ll be fun! Let’s!”

“And you wouldn’t, by any chance, just happen to have samples of uranium oxide, pitchblende, and so forth, on hand, would you?”

“Not by chance, no. I done it on purpose. Here they are.”

There is no need to go into detail as to the exact fashion in which they explored the enormous volume of the planet, or as to exactly what they found. It is enough to say that they learned; and that, having learned, the techniques became almost automatic and the work itself became comparatively easy.

The next morning Deston made another suggestion. “Bobby, what do you say about seeing what we can do with that forty-eight-inch globe of Tellus?”

“Tellus! Light-years and light-years from here? Are you completely out of your mind?”

“Maybe I’m a little mad with power, but listen. If the map actually is the territory it’s scale that counts, not distance. It’s inconceivable, of course, that there isn’t a limit somewhere—but where is it? I’ve got an urge to spread our wings a little.”

“A highly laudable objective, I’d say, but I’ll bet you a cookie that Tellus is ’way beyond that limit. Drag out the globe,... ah, there you are, sweet mother world of the race! Now watch out, Mom; ready or not, here we come!”

They went; and when they found out that they could scan and analyze the entire volume of Earth, mile by plotted cubic mile, as easily and as completely as they could that of Newmars on whose surface they were, they stared at each other, appalled.

“Well... I... that is... ” Barbara licked her lips and gulped. “I owe you a cookie, I guess, Carl.”

“Yeah.” But Deston was not thinking of cookies. “That tears it. It really does. Wide open. Rips it up and down and sideways.”

“It does for a fact. But it makes the objective even more laudable than ever, I’d say. How do you think we should go about it?”

“There’s only one way I can see. I said I’d never spend a dime of your money, remember? I take it back. I think we’d better charter one of WarnOil’s fast subspacers and buy all the off-Earth maps, star-charts, and such-like gear we can get hold of.”

“Charter? Pfooie! We own WarnOil, silly, subspacers and everything else. In fee simple. So we’ll just take one. I’ll arrange that; so you can take off right now after your maps and charts and whatever. Scoot!”

“Wait up a bit, sweet. We’ll have to have Doc Adams.”

“Of course. He’ll be tickled silly to go.”

“And Herc Jones for captain.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” Barbara nibbled at her lower lip. “A little premature, don’t you think, to unsettle him and Bun—raise hopes that may very well turn out to be false—before we find out what we can actually do?”

“Could be. Okay, fellow explorer—the count-down is on and all stations are in condition GO.”

* * * *

Of all the preparations for the first expedition into the unknown, only one is really noteworthy; the interview with Doctor Adams in his home. For months he had been concentrating on the subether and his zeta field; and when he learned what the purpose of the trip was, and that he would have a free hand and an ample budget, he became enthusiastic indeed.

To a mind of such tremendous power and range as his, it was evident from the first that his young friends had changed markedly since he had last seen them. This fact was of course a challenge. Adams was tall and lean and gray; and, though he was sixty years old, he almost never worked at a desk. He thought better, he said, on his feet. He had always reminded Deston of a lean, gray tomcat on the prowl for prey. He was on his feet now, pacing about.

Suddenly, he stopped, clasped his hands behind his back, and stared at Deston through the upper sections of his gold-rimmed trifocals. “You two youngsters,” he said flatly, “are using telepathy. Using it consciously, accurately, and completely informatively—a thing that, to my knowledge, has never before been demonstrated.”

“Oh?” Barbara’s eyes widened. “When we thought we were talking did we sometimes forget to?”

“Only in part. Mainly because of a depth of understanding—deduced, to be sure, but actual nonetheless—impossible to language.” Then, Adams-like, he went straight to the point. “Will you try to teach it to me?”

“Why, of course!” Barbara exclaimed. “That, Uncle Andy, was very much on the agenda.”

“Thank you. And Stella, too, please? Her mind is of precisionist grade and is of greater sensitivity than my own.”

“Certainly,” Deston assured him. “The more we can spread this ability around the better it will be for everybody.”

Adams left the room then, and in a minute or so came back with his wife; a slender, graceful, gray-haired woman of fifty-odd.

Both Andrew and Stella Adams had been students all their lives. They knew how to study. They had the brain capacity—the blocked or latent cells—to learn telepathy and many other things. They learned rapidly and thoroughly. Neither of them, however, could or ever did learn how to “handle” any substance. In fact, very few persons of their time, male or female, ever did learn more than an insignificant fraction of the Destons’ unique ability to dowse.

In compensation, however, the Adamses had nascent powers peculiarly their own. Thus, before they went to bed that night, Andrew and Stella Adams were exploring vistas of reality that neither of the Destons would ever be able to perceive.

* * * *

Out in deep space, the Destons worked slowly at first. They actually landed on Cerealia, the most fully surveyed of all the colonized planets; and on Galmetia, only a little less so, as it was owned in toto by Galactic Metals; and on Lactia, the dairy planet.

Deston worked first on copper; worked on it so long and so intensively that he could find and handle and tri-di any deposit of the free metal or of any of its ores with speed and precision, wherever any such might be in a planet’s crust. Then he went on up the line of atomic numbers, taking big jumps—molybdenum and barium and tungsten and bismuth—up to uranium, which was what he was after.

Barbara did not work with him on metals very long; just long enough to be sure that she could be of no more help. She didn’t really like metals, and she had her own work to do. It was just as important to have on file all possible data concerning water, oil, gas, and coal.

They worked together, however, at perfecting their techniques. Any thought of determining the working limits of psionic abilities had been abandoned long since; they were trying with everything they had to minimize the necessity of using maps and charts. They succeeded. Just as Barbara, while still a child, had become able to work without samples; so both of them learned how to work without maps. All they had to know, finally, was where a solar system was; they could fix their sense of perception upon any star they could see, and hence could study all its planets. They tried to work independently of star-charts—to direct their attention to any point in space at will—but it was to be years before they were able to reach that peak of ability.

Deston found many deposits of copper, one of them very large, on the colonized planets; but he was interested in copper only as a means, not as an end. What he wanted was a mountain of uranium; and uranium was just as scarce on all ninety five colonized planets as it was on Earth.

He knew that his sensitivity to his wife’s money was the only flaw in their happiness. He knew what Barbara thought about his attitude, with the sure knowledge possible only to full mental rapport. She did not like it; and she, who had never had a money problem in her whole life, could not fully understand it. He should be big enough, she thought deep down and a little disappointedly, not to boggle so at such an unimportant thing as money.

But that attitude was innate and so much a part of Deston’s very make-up that he could not have changed it had he tried, and he would not try. Almost everyone who knew them had him labelled as a fortune-hunter, and that label irked him to the core. It would continue to irk him as long as it stuck, and the only way he could unstick it was to do something—or make money enough—to make him as important as she was. A mountain of uranium—even a small mountain—would do it two ways. It would make him a public benefactor and a multi-millionaire. So—by the living God!—he would find uranium before he went back to civilization.

Adams and his scientists and engineers had developed an ultra-long-range detector for zeta fields, and they had not been able to find any other hazards to subspace flight. Hence they had been constantly stepping up their vessel’s speed. Originally a very fast ship, she was now covering in hours distances that had formerly required days.

On and on, then, faster and faster, deeper and deeper into the unexplored immensities of deep space the mighty flyer bored; and Deston finally found his uranium. They landed upon a mountainous, barren continent of a lifeless world. They put on radiation armor and labored busily for nineteen hours.

Then Deston told the captain, “Line out for Newmars, please, and don’t drag your feet.”

And that night, in the Destons’ cabin: “Why so glum, chum?” Barbara asked. “That’s the best thing for civilization that ever was and the biggest bonanza there ever was. I’d think you’d be shrieking with joy—I’ve almost been—but you look as though you’d just lost your pet hound.”

Deston shrugged off his black mood and smiled. “The trouble is, petsy, it’s too big. Too damned big altogether. And look at our planet Barbizon. Considering the size of the deposits and what and where the planet is, nobody except Galactic Metals could handle the project the way it should be handled.”

“Well, would that be bad? To sell it or lease it to them?”

“Not bad, honey; impossible. All those big outfits are murder in the first degree. Before I could get anywhere with them—if they find out I found it, even—GalMet would own not only Barbizon, but my shirt and pants, too.”

Barbara laughed gleefully. “How well I know that routine! Do you think they don’t do it in oil, too? But WarnOil’s legal eagles know all about skulduggery and monkey-business and fine print—none better. So here’s what let’s do. File by proxy... and maybe you and I had better incorporate ourselves. Just us two; Deston and Deston, say. Develop it by another proxy, making darn sure that they don’t find any uranium at all and nothing else that’s worth more than three or four dollars a ton... ”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because GalMet’s spy system, darling, is very good indeed.”

“All right, but we’ve still got to make the approach... dammit, I’d give it to GalMet for nothing if it’d give us a half-hour face-to-face with Upton Maynard, to show him what you and I together can do.”

“Not free. Ever. Just a bargain that he can’t possibly resist. You figure out what that would be and I’ll arrange the face-to-face with His High Mightiness Maynard.”

“Oh? Could be, at that, since you’re a Big Time Operator yourself. You could go through the massed underlings like a snow-plow, hurling ’em kicking, far and wide.”

“Oh, no, I won’t go through channels at all with a thing as big as this is. Shock treatment—I’ll hit ’em high and hard.”

“Fine, gal—fine! So I’ll write to Herc; tell him he can start getting organized. He’ll be tickled to death—he doesn’t like flying a desk any better than I do.”

“Write? Call him up, right now.”

“I’ll do that, at that. I’m not used yet to not caring whether a call is across the street or across half of space.”

“And I want to talk to Bun, anyway.”

The call was put through and Barbara talked to Bernice for some fifteen minutes. Then Deston took over, finding that Jones was anything but in love with his desk job. When Deston concluded, “... family quarters aboard. Full authority and full responsibility of station. Full captain’s pay and rank plus a nice bonus in stock,” Captain Theodore Jones was fairly drooling.