Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Nek, are you willing to go back to your island, lay in a really huge supply for me and then go on a long journey? Would more of your people get in on the act, if I told what I’ve found and some other off-worlder came to investigate?”

  “I will be quite willing to listen to reason,” the giant assured him.

  1976

  LONGLINE

  “We must have missed it! You could see we were going to miss it! What happened? Where are we?” Wattimlan’s voice carried more than a tinge of panic. Feroxtant did not exactly nod, since this implies not only a head but a shape, but he made a reassuring gesture in his own way.

  “We did miss it. We also missed the fact that it was double—two stars so close together that we sensed only one. We missed the first, and are in the other—a perfectly good landing. If you can calm down enough to do reliable work, we’d better go through post-flight check. I’d like to be able to go home again even if this star turns out to be as nice as it seems, and I won’t fly a ship on guesswork. Are you all right now?”

  “I—I think so.” Wattimlan was young, and unavoidably short in both experience and self-confidence. This, the longest flight ever made through the void between stars where energy became so nearly meaningless, had been his first. He had done his routine work competently, but routine adds little to maturity. “Yes. I can do it, sir.”

  “All right. It’s all yours.” Feroxtant knew better than to put the youngster through any more of an inquisition; neither of the explorers was even remotely human, but some qualities are common to all intelligence. They set carefully to work. The mechanism which permitted them to exist in and to travel through a medium almost devoid of quantum-exchange niches had to be complex and delicate, and was almost alive in its occasional perversity. Until they were certain that it was in perfect order, ready to carry them back over the incredibly long line they had just traced, they could feel little interest in anything else, even their new environment.

  Just how long the check required is impossible to say, but eventually the Longline floated, stable and ready for flight, in an equally stable pattern of potential niches, and her crew was satisfied. “Now what?” Wattimlan’s question, the captain suspected, was rhetorical; the youngster probably had already made up his mind about what to do next. “I’ve never seen any star but home before, and I suppose we should learn enough about this one to permit a useful report when we announce our arrival—at least, we should have seen more than just the boundary film. On the other spin, though, there’s the other star you say must be close to this one—should we start casting for it right away? If it’s really close, maybe we’d hit it without too many tries.”

  “You really want to get back into space so quickly?”

  “Well—I thought you’d prefer to make the casts, at least at first, but we can take turns if you prefer. Frankly, I’d rather look over the landscape first.”

  “I agree,” Feroxtant replied rather dryly. “Let’s reinforce our identities and get to it.”

  Landscape is of course a hopelessly crude translation of Wattimlan’s communication symbol. Inside a neutron star there is no close analogy to hills and valleys, rivers and forests, sky, sunlight, or clouds. It is a virtually infinite complex of potential levels—some unoccupied, others occupied by one or more of the fundamental particles which made up the universe known to the two explorers, some in flux among the various possible states. This is equally true, of course, of the matter universe, and just as a man groups the patterns of electrons and other force fields around him into perceived objects, so did Wattimlan and Feroxtant. A pattern capable of identity maintenance, growth, and duplication, which maintained its existence by ingesting and restructuring other such patterns, might be called a lion or a shark by a human being; such an entity would also possess an identification symbol in the minds of the explorers, but translating that symbol into any human word would be unwise, since the hearer could probably not help clothing the central skeleton of abstraction with very misleading flesh.

  It is therefore not correct to say that Wattimlan was charged by a lion and saved himself by climbing a tree during their preliminary examination of the new star. It would be even less accurate, however, to say that the exploration was uneventful. It would be most accurate, but still very incomplete, to say that when he got back to the Longline the younger traveller held a much more tolerant attitude toward the boring aspects of space-casting than had been the case earlier. They had learned enough for an acceptable report. They had named their discovery Brother, intending to add the prefix of Big or Little when they reached the companion star and found out which word applied. They had amused themselves, each in his own way—they were individuals, as different from each other as any two human beings. As a natural consequence, they had even perceived Brother differently, and had already developed different attitudes toward it.

  The length of time all this had taken is impossible to state, since their time is not really commensurable with that in the Einstein-matter universe. Eventually they made their call to their home star, along the incomprehensibly extended line of uniform potential which their ship had marked in space. They reported their finds, and received acknowledgment. They received assurance that other ships would follow. They spent more time at their equivalents of working, eating, drinking, and merry-making; and finally they faced the question of trying to reach Big or Little Brother, as it might turn out to be—the companion star which Feroxtant had identified in the instant of their landing.

  “I feel a little funny about this,” Wattimlan admitted as they began the Longline’s preflight check. “I’ve heard of stars which were close companions of each other, but there was always one difference. You could see one from the other just about anywhere, as long as you hadn’t gone below the surface film, but you could see it only half the time. This one you can see all the time if you’re in the right place in the film, but not at all if you’re anywhere else. It scares me. Can it be a real star?”

  “I’m not sure.” Feroxtant would not admit to fear, but he was admittedly as puzzled as his junior. “At least, we don’t have to worry about starting time. Since we can always see it from here, we can lift any time we choose.”

  “That’s just what bothers me. Of course, no one minds flying when he knows where he’s going—when there’s a steady-pot line to follow. I didn’t mind the blind start we made on this trip, since we’d either hit another star sooner or later or be able to reverse and go home. Now I don’t know what we may hit. This constant visibility situation bothers me. Could this other thing actually be a part of the star we’re in now, separated by some strange potential pattern instead of ordinary space?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Feroxtant replied. “It’s a bit wild an idea. I had thought there might be some connection between this situation and a lecture I once heard on something called direction.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s as abstract a notion as I’ve ever heard of, and I can’t put it into ordinary words.”

  “Does it suggest any special risks?”

  “It makes no suggestions at all on the personal level. You knew when you volunteered for exploration that it involved the unknown, and therefore meant some risk. Now you’re worrying, apparently without even considering all the peculiarities we are facing.”

  “What? What haven’t I considered?”

  “You’ve said nothing about the neutrino source which must also be in this neighborhood, since it is bright enough to see, but which is behaving normally—visible half the time, out of sight the other half.”

  Wattimlan was silent for a time, checking his own sensory impressions, his memories, and the Longline’s instrument recordings. Finally he switched attention back to his commander, and asked another question.

  “Can that possibly be a star?”

  “I doubt it. More probably it’s a protostar—one of the neutrino sources which we think finally condenses to an ordinary star. Pr
esumably the neutrinos carry off whatever energy manifestations prevent the formation of a normal star. In any case, it’s harmless—people have probably flown through them without any effect. There’s no way to tell whether this one is nearer or farther than the star we’re casting for, but it’s nothing to worry about. Now—do you want to make the first few casts, or shall I?”

  The youngster hesitated only a moment. “I’ll do it, if you trust me to make an open-space reversal.”

  “Sure. You know the routine. I’m not worrying, and you shouldn’t be. Take her out.”

  “You can’t make a guess at strike probability, I suppose?”

  “No. It depends on target distance, and apparently on target size, though no one knows why—maybe it’s another of those direction phenomena. Anyway, we know only that the distance is small—which makes the chances fairly high—and I’m not suggesting that there’s any way to guess at something’s size just by looking at it. Ready for final checkout?”

  “Ready.”

  “Pressor lens?”

  “Open.”

  “Film field one?”

  “In synch.”

  “Line track power . . .”

  The Longline emerged from the surface film of the neutron star and hurtled away from the tiny body, leaving far behind the burst of neutrino emission which accompanied the lift. The explorers had only a rough idea of the possible distance to their target, and none at all of their vessel’s speed in open space. It had been discovered by experience that slowing down sufficiently to let neutrinos overtake them was apparently impossible. The more advanced theories in fundamental mechanics implied that substance as they understood it became mathematically unreal below neutrino speed; what this implied in terms of observable properties was anyone’s guess. It was generally believed that stars in galaxies—that is, the neutron stars which were all they could sense of such bodies—were separated by a few hundred to a few thousand of their own diameters. Space travel had given them, in addition, the concept of galaxies separated by a dozen or two times their own size, on the average.

  Wattimlan and Feroxtant, therefore, could only guess at the distance needed for their casts. They had set up an arbitrary travel time; if the pilot failed to make a landing before that was up, he would reverse and return to the starting point along the new constant-pot line his trip would have established. The time was short enough so that even the youngster, Feroxtant hoped, could hardly get either bored or nervous.

  The chance of landing on any one cast was presumably very small, though there was no way of calculating just how small. Feroxtant’s suggestion that this might become possible when the concept of direction was finally clarified by the advanced mathematicians was not really a serious prediction, since he had no real idea of what the theory was all about; it was more like the suggestions in Earth’s early twentieth century that radium might prove a cure for cancer and old age.

  Wattimlan, therefore, gave no serious thought to what he would do if and when the Longline made starfall. It would be routine, anyway. He flew. He readied himself for his first open-space reversal with some uneasiness, but missed its time only slightly. The miss annoyed him as a reflection on his professional skill, but it was in no way dangerous; the Longline was suddenly retracing its outward path. There was none of the deceleration which a human pilot would have had to plan and experience; the concept of inertia was even stranger and more abstract to Wattimlan than that of direction—or would have been if anyone had ever suggested it to him. The only observable phenomenon marking the reversal was another burst of neutrinos, vaguely analogous to the squeal of tires from a clumsily handled ground vehicle but—unlike the time error or a tire squeal—not indicative of poor piloting.

  In the sub-light universe, a simple direction reversal does not involve change in kinetic energy, except for whatever entropy alteration may be involved; equal speed means equal kinetic energy. In the tachyon universe, momentum is naturally as meaningless as direction, kinetic energy almost equally so, and the interactions between forces and the various fundamental particles follow very different rules. However, the rules were the ones Wattimlan knew, and the time interval between the reversal and reentry into the neutron star’s surface film was for him boringly uneventful. He landed.

  Feroxtant was nowhere to be seen; he had apparently gone off either working or playing. Wattimlan decided to be pleased at the implied compliment to his competence rather than hurt at the suggested indifference to his welfare, and went through post-flight and pre-flight checks without waiting for his commander and instructor to appear. He made another cast, and another, and another . . .

  “So pay up!” Sforza leaned back from the display tank which dominated the Manzara’s maneuvering console, and just barely managed to refrain from smirking.

  Jeb Garabed, a quarter century younger and correspondingly less restrained, glared first into the tank and then at the two-liter silvery cube beside it. He didn’t quite snarl—the captain was also present—but there was a distinct edge to his voice.

  “I should know better than to let myself get fooled by that old line about mechanical brains. I know that thing is made of doped diamond, but I didn’t realize how much weight the first word carried!”

  Sforza lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t seem to appreciate your humor as much as I used to.”

  “Don’t bother to put that eyebrow on top of your head. It would be conspicuous. I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

  “That’s just as well. You—” Sforza cut himself off with an effort, and fell silent. For a moment each of the men wondered if he had said too much, as Garabed’s face and Sforza’s scalp both flushed.

  Captain Migna Sarjuk listened to the exchange without too much concern; she knew both men well, and could tell that the jibes were not serious. When arguments became too frequent, of course, it was a temptation to separate the disputants for a few months by judicious watch-shifting; but it was possible to be too hasty with this solution. One could break up good working teams, and even run out of possible combinations. With over eighty people on the Manzara the latter seemed mathematically improbable, but since most of the possible combinations were in fact eliminated by conditions of specialty training it was not entirely impossible. The ship had spent eighteen months—subjective time—en route, would be at least that long going back, and might remain several years at this end of the flight line; the captain had no intention of running out of solutions to the most likely personnel problems any sooner than she could help. She waited silently, paying close attention to Sforza’s reactions; the younger man, she knew, would not lose his temper in her presence.

  He didn’t. The young radiometrist caught himself in turn, grinned, and tossed a couple of time-slugs onto the console. Sforza gathered them up. Garabed half-apologized as he continued to stare into the display.

  It was not a picture in the conventional sense. The three-dimensional presentation did show images of a number of celestial bodies, but they were festooned with numbers, vector arrows in various colors, and other symbols. To Sforza, it was a completely informative description of all the detectable objects within a light-day of the ship. Garabed would have felt happier with the images alone, stripped of the extra symbols. He could then have thought of it as a simple bead-and-wire model.

  He greatly preferred the direct view of space from the Manzara’s observation dome, even though human perception was not really adequate for its analysis. For most of the trip it had been an unchanging Milky Way—unchanging, that is, except as his own intellect changed it. He had found he could change its appearance from a flat spray-paint job on a screen a few yards outside the dome to a more nearly correct, but far from complete, impression of infinite star-powdered depths. His home star had been fading throughout the journey, of course, though the change in a single day had been imperceptible except at the very beginning. It was now an unimpressive object about as bright as Polaris.

  The Manzara’s target star was now overwhelmingly brigh
t, and the human mind had no trouble accepting that it was far closer than Sol; but its white dwarf companion had only recently grown brighter than the sun the explorers had left some ten objective years before.

  But Garabed could read the display symbols even if he preferred to visualize differently, and now one of them caught his attention. It was typical of him that he did not call immediate attention to it; his first reaction was to recoup his betting losses. At this distance, a few minutes’ delay in reporting a discovery would not be of importance to the ship’s safety—or, more important, to the captain. He continued the conversation, and even Sarjuk failed to catch any change in his manner.

  “So I was wrong. It just means we’ll have to spend a year and a half of our personal time flying back—unless I turn right while we’re here.”

  “I’ll cover another bet on that, if you like.”

  Garabed shook his head. “I guess not. Now that real work is starting, I don’t need so much distraction—and probably can’t afford it. It was different on the way, when I needed amusement. Conning my way out of boring jobs by smart bets provided that—even when I lost, the jobs themselves made a change. Now it’s time to be serious, though, if you’ll pardon the pun. How do things look to you?”

  The ballistician gestured toward the display into which Garabed was still staring. “There you are. Cutting drive didn’t make much difference. It adds up to what we’ve known for a couple of centuries, plus what we’ve picked up in the last few months. One type A main sequence sun, known since before human history began—with an unexplained, not to mention unproved, charge of having been red instead of white a couple of millennia ago. One white dwarf in a fifty-year orbit with it, known since the nineteenth century. Four high-density planets discovered by us in the last few weeks. No gas giants, which would be out where the white dwarf would perturb them hopelessly anyway. And no trace of the faster-than-light ship you were betting would be here from Earth waiting for us.”