Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol VIII

by Various

  "Good for you," Martha said. She picked up her book and started reading. Dr. Hargrave put the gun back in his pocket and went to the door.

  "Take a few days off starting tomorrow," he said before going out. "I'm going to be slowly going crazy trying to figure this mess out. That's why I insisted to Dr. Bemis that I be confined with the crew of the Endore--just in case."

  His heels made loud noises on the marble floor of the corridor. He pushed through the revolving doors to the sidewalk.

  There was an argument going on between a small newsboy and an elderly gentlemen type of man.

  "I tell you there's only two pennies," the boy insisted.

  "There's four," the man insisted just as strongly. "See?"

  He pried open the boy's fingers and looked.

  "Sorry," he said. "You're right." His hand went into his pocket to make up the deficit.

  "Hey! Wait a minute," the boy said. "I was wrong. You gave me two pennies too much."

  A small pudgy finger took two of the pennies. The boy glanced at the others to make sure the right number were left.

  Nale was close enough to see what happened. He saw the pennies taken from what seemed to be seven or eight in the boy's palm. When the two were taken away there seemed to be a slight blur--and there was only a solitary penny left.

  He didn't wait. The paper boy and the customer were still patiently arguing as he climbed into his car and drove away. He drove slowly with his foot close to the brakes.

  Although his eyes were warily watching each car on the street, his mind was busy. He was trying to figure out who had been shot.

  "It might even have been me!" he thought. And there was no way of knowing.

  He drove the car another block. There was doubt growing in his mind. On a sudden impulse he pulled the car over to the curb and stopped the motor. Getting out, he started walking rapidly. There would be three miles of walking before he reached observation, but it would be safer to walk.

  A block further he stopped abruptly in surprise. The spaceport observation hospital was just in front of him.

  "I should have guessed," he muttered as he pushed through the heavy doors. "The speedometer, of course. Naturally it would go first."

  * * * * *

  Martha Ryan saw the door close on Dr. Hargrave, then started reading again. She finished the page and turned it over. The first few words of the opposite side of the sheet showed the continuity to be difficult.

  Thinking she might have turned two sheets by mistake, she turned back one. It was still wrong. She sighed exasperatedly. She distinctly remembered that she had been on page twenty-five, so the next page should be twenty-six. Since it hadn't been, she would have to look for twenty-six.

  She looked through the book, page by page, and it wasn't there. Getting over her exasperation she made a game of it. Finally she developed to the stage where she would open the book at random, note the number of the page, close the book, and then try to find that page she had just seen.

  It was a very peculiar book. She found that, (a) she could find any page number she wasn't looking for, and (b) any page number she looked for was not in the book, even though it had been a moment before.

  Resting thoughtfully for several minutes on this achievement of deduction she decided to try another experiment. She counted the number of sheets of paper in the book and wrote the number down. It was one hundred twenty-four.

  Then she counted them again. There were one hundred eighty-six. She counted them five more times, making seven times she had counted them. She got nine different numbers of sheets in the book. She decided she couldn't get nine different numbers after counting only seven times, and counted the numbers. There were five. She closed her eyes and counted to ten rapidly, then counted them again. There were fourteen.

  She held out her hands. She had seven fingers on her right hand and three on her left. She chuckled dryly and thought, "Well, anyway there are ten altogether." She counted them to be sure, and there were thirteen.

  Pursing her lips stubbornly she held up two fingers and counted them. There were two. She held them rigid and closed her eyes, counting rapidly to ten. Opening her eyes she looked cautiously at the upraised fingers. There were two.

  She raised a third finger to join the other two, and there were five upraised fingers. Not only that, there were seven of them clenched. She closed her eyes and counted to ten quickly, then opened them. There were three upraised fingers. She counted the clenched ones and there were two. Relieved, she checked on the upraised fingers again--and there were seven.

  She gave up in disgust. Deciding she ought to go home she stood up and started to cross to the coat tree.

  The door to the corridor opened and Ren Gravenard stepped in.

  "Hello!" Martha said in surprise. "I thought you were sent to observation."

  "I was," Ren said. "That's where I am now, but when there are forty of you, you can sort of get lost in the group and wind up anywhere you want to."

  "Well, I'm glad you're here," Martha said dryly. "Maybe you can explain a few things."

  Ren grinned crookedly.

  "Suppose I do the explaining over something to eat," he said. "I almost stopped and had something on the way over here, but I wanted to wait and eat with you. Do you mind?"

  "Of course not," Martha frowned. She was taking a closer look at this spaceman second class. He had a nice way of smiling at her. His eyes had depths she hadn't noticed before.

  * * * * *

  The illogical thought came to her that maybe now that things didn't behave the way they should, maybe he and his fellow spacemen were the only ones that knew what it was all about.

  "All this," Martha waved her hand vaguely. "It must have been caused by something about the Endore, mustn't it?"

  Ren nodded, holding the door open for her. They walked along the corridor to the revolving doors, his hand tucked protectively under her arm.

  "Is it mental?" Martha asked when they were on the sidewalk.

  "No," Ren answered. "But let's wait until we eat. I'm starved to death. If you run into any trouble I'll help you out. You see, I know how to work things."

  "Like finding page twenty-six in the book I'm reading?" Martha asked.

  "That's simple," Ren said. "All you have to do is look for page twenty-nine and you'll run across page twenty-six right away. Things like that are mental, partly. I mean, you have to have the right attitude to get results you want."

  "I don't understand," Martha said.

  "Well, it's like this," Ren explained. "If you're looking for page twenty-six it won't be one of the first two pages you look at, regardless of where you open the book. But after you've looked at three of them you've passed the page you want unless you're not looking for it. If you're not looking for it you REACH the right page."

  "But why page twenty-nine to find twenty-six?" Martha persisted.

  "It has to do with the new arithmetic," Ren said.

  "Oh," Martha said dully. "So that's the whole trouble with everything."

  "No, that's only part of it," Ren said. "But here's a good place to eat." He guided her through the door.

  An hour later Ren lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it, his eyes looking longingly into Martha's. He exhaled the smoke in a long white plume. Then he began talking.

  "I don't know whether you read it on the report sheet or not, but the trip of the Endore began from this same spaceport two years ago. The observatory on Pluto had reported a free planet passing within two hundred quadrillion miles of the solar system. The Endore was assigned the task of landing on it, if feasible.

  "I had been a member of the crew for only four months when the Endore turned outward from its position just the other side of Mars' orbit."

  Ren smiled apologetically.

  "I hadn't exactly planned on being a spaceman, second class. I don't know whether you know the system, but whether you do or not, it should suffice to say that I had studied for five years to become a research scientist,
and failed. I decided to take out my disappointment by joining up for two years. I planned on making another try at research when I got out.

  "Everything went along fine on the trip out. We were a very congenial crew with a fine, human commander. He made it a point to get personally acquainted with every member of the crew eventually. He seemed to take a particular liking to me for some reason. By the time we were half-way out to Metapor, as we found out it was called later, I was an unofficial first mate or something with free run of the pilot room and the instruments.

  "I had guessed by now that when I enlisted they looked up my record and passed the word along to Commander Dunnam to sell me on the idea of a career as a spaceman.

  "At any rate, I was in an ideal position to see all that went on first hand. We were within three hundred thousand miles of Metapor when we got the first indication of the change in metaphysics. I discovered it myself. I was helping the astrogator get the constants for the planet ..."

  * * * * *

  "Take a look at the gravy board, Ren," Ford Gratrick, the astrogator said. "What's she say?"

  Ren looked at the fine black pointer on the gravity potentiometer. It pointed to a spot just two marks above the number ten on the dial.

  "Ten and two tenths," Ren read.

  "That can't be right," Ford frowned. "At this distance that would make this baby a super."

  He came over and looked himself. While he was looking the pointer moved up to twenty and then down to six tenths.

  "Must be out of order," Ford muttered. "Well, this'll give you experience with emergency equipment. Break out the manual gravy dish, Ren."

  It was a fine coil spring in a glass tube. Other glass tubes fastened on, to make the length almost ten feet. At one g the spring with its weight would stretch out to the bottom. From there to a ten thousandth of a g the spring rose up to a point half-way.

  Ren put it together speedily, placing it in the wall clamps designed to hold it. The glass itself was graduated with the scale of gravity strength. The cylindrical weight at the free end of the spring had a line on it that would coincide with the proper reading.

  In practice it vibrated up and down so that it had to be read by estimation of the half-way point of the up and down motion.

  Ren and Ford watched the red weight with its black line. It moved slowly and uniformly from the bottom to the top of the scale, from a full g to ten thousandth of a g, and back down again.

  Meanwhile the gravity potentiometer (gravy board) was changing its reading constantly and erratically.

  Ford licked his lips nervously and said, "Don't know what the old man'll say about this, but it looks like all we can say is that the thing has gravity."

  "Why not call him and let him see for himself?" Ren asked.

  Ford looked out the viewport at the round object in the distance and shook his head.

  "I've got a hunch he knows it already," he said slowly. "The ship is probably on a nonsense track and the automatic tracker is either trying to find out what the law of gravity is, or is exploring for clues to light aberration. One gets you ten he'll give me a buzz in another minute."

  He was right. The phone rang almost at once. It was Hugh Dunnam himself, asking for the gravy reading.

  "You'll have to see it to believe it," Ford Gratrick said over the phone. "The manual swing is uniform over the whole range. The gravy board can't make up its mind where to settle at. It tries this and that reading."

  He listened briefly. "Yes, sir," he said, and hung up. "He wants you in the pilot room, Ren," he added.

  Ren started out of the central instrument room through the axis tube.

  "Better be careful," Ford shouted after him. "No telling how this gravitation will behave. Don't let it slam you against anything."

  Ren heard his words. He had a sudden, crazy thought that it was his own voice, and that he, as he sped along through the ship, was in reality Ford Gratrick. The thought startled him. He promptly forgot it.

  There was a frown of concentration on his face. He was trying to visualize a gravity pull whose intensity was not a single-valued pressure but a uniform continuum of pressure values from a minimum to a maximum.

  It was like--well, like having an air pressure in a car tire that wasn't thirty pounds or thirty-two pounds, but every value from zero to thirty-five pounds.

  It was like transforming the points and intervals on a line to a domain where there had previously been only points!

  * * * * *

  Hugh Dunnam was waiting for him when he arrived in the pilot room. His iron grey hair was mussed from exasperated hair-pulling. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the automatic pilot without speaking.

  Ren saw that it had been cut out. The first mate was controlling the ship manually. The robot mechanism was still turning out its data sheets, however. In five minutes Ren saw that the only consistent detail was the distance of the ship from the planet.

  Commander Dunnam watched him silently for several minutes. Finally Ren laid down the data sheets and looked at him with a slow smile.

  "Well?" Dunnam asked.

  "It reminds me of a kid I knew quite well when I was in grade school," Ren said. "He was an incurable liar, so you could never take anything he said, but always had to figure out the truth yourself and act on it regardless of what he might claim to be the truth."

  "You mean the instruments have all become liars?" Hugh Dunnam asked, amazed at the idea.

  "No," Ren replied. "I don't think that. I think nature is the liar, in a way. I mean she is according to our standards. We'll have to outguess her, that's all."

  "Now you're cooking," Hugh exclaimed. "What would you suggest?"

  "We know this planet has gravity," Ren replied. "There's no way of knowing how much or how little. Suppose we kill our tangential speed and just fall in? The gravity will take care of that, regardless of its value or set of values."

  "But we'll crash!" Hugh objected.

  Ren took one of the report sheets and figured rapidly on its back.

  "Unless I'm radically wrong," he said, "our speed of impact will be every speed from zero to a thousand miles a minute. Not only that, no matter how we try to land that will be the set of values for our speed. Naturally the thousand miles a minute will smash us flat, but the zero speed will let us down easy."

  "And so?" Hugh asked suspiciously.

  "No matter how we go in," Ren smiled, "we'll smash the ship and kill everybody--and we'll land safely."

  "Are you crazy?" Hugh snorted.

  "I--I'm not quite sure," Ren said seriously. "I think that we've run across a bit of matter that works from different basics than what we are used to. You might call it a different metaphysics. That's what it really amounts to."

  A pain of remembrance appeared on his face.

  "That's why I didn't get my degree," he said softly. "I insisted that it might be possible there were no absolute rules underlying all reality, but only relative rules that might be changeable. In other words, I questioned the validity of asserting that natural law was universal. They flunked me in stability."

  "Yes, I know," Commander Dunnam said sympathetically. "One of the most unjust rules of modern education in the opinion of many, but no way of changing it unless the educators themselves did it. Since they all passed O.K. in stability, they think everyone else should. Maybe they're afraid they would be considered unstable if they wanted to make such a major change."

  * * * * *

  Ren glanced toward the screen that showed the magnified image of the interstellar wanderer, and back again to the commander.

  "Of course," he said, "I'm trying to use ordinary basics transposed onto the basics of this system, which is wrong. Or it may be right. It might be better if we just turned around and went back. There's no way of knowing ahead of time whether we'd be killed on landing or not."

  "Look, Ren," the commander said seriously. "I like you. You--you're just about like my son would have been today if he had lived. I'm just a space
man. I depend on instruments. They don't work here. All of us are just as helpless as if we didn't know the first thing about our trade. We can't go back without landing on this stray planet. If we tried to tell them the reasons, I'd be retired and the whole crew would be stuck on various routine tub runs. Suppose you unofficially take charge. If we get killed--we all expect to end that way in our trade. If we don't, we'll be able to take back something with us to prove what we've run into. Maybe it will vindicate you and make you a reputation. You'll get all the credit I can turn your way."

  "Thank you, sir," Ren said, his voice choked with gratitude. In his heart he knew that he would have sold his soul to the devil for this coming experience that had been given him without his asking.

  He had spent years preparing for this--years that his teachers had felt were wasted. He had explored all the crazy systems of logic abandoned in the march of progress. He had even devised systems of his own, synthesized from undefined symbols according to strange patterns outside the field of logic.

  Yes. He felt that even if the basics of natural law in operation here were purely nonsense laws, he would be able to penetrate to a rational manipulation and control of things. Perhaps he might even set up the pattern operating, and join it in some way with so-called normal science.

  Commander Dunnam came to attention, a twinkle in his eyes.

  "At your command, sir," he said, saluting.

  "Not that," Ren objected. "Let me just play the part of a scientist under your command, whose part it is to advise only."

  "No," Hugh Dunnam said. "Until we leave this part of space you're in sole command. Call it what you want--a hunch maybe; but I feel that there is a purpose in things, and it wasn't chance that gave you the type of mind you have and threw you under my command on this trip."

  "Very well, sir," Ren said, returning the salute. He smiled. Behind his smile his analytical mind was working rapidly.

  "The commander's reactions are not normal," his thoughts said. "They could not be dictated by anything in his past. Therefore they are dictated by something outside him--something on that planet below!"

  It was a wild conjecture. The more he thought of it the more certain Ren became that there was some intelligence down there that had already made contact with the minds in the ship.