Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

  I tried it and did not like it. “Pat, just because you can’t explain everything is no reason to talk like the fat old women who go to fortune tellers. We’re muddled, I admit, whether it was drugs or hypnosis. But we couldn’t have been reading each other’s minds or we would have been doing it years ago. We would have noticed.”

  “Not necessarily. There’s never anything much going on in your mind, so why should I notice?”

  “But it stands to reason—”

  “What’s the natural log of two?”

  “‘Point six nine three one’ is what you said, though I’ve got very little use for four-place tables. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I used four-place because she gave it to me that way. Do you remember what she said just before I gave you that number?”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Mabel. Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein. What did she say?”

  “Nobody said anything.”

  “Tom, my senile symbiote, she told me what to do, to wit, read the numbers to you. She told me this in a clear, penetrating soprano. You didn’t hear her?”

  “No.”

  “Then you weren’t in the same room. You weren’t within earshot, even though I was prepared to swear that they had shoved you in right by me. I knew you were there. But you weren’t. So it was telepathy.”

  I was confused. I didn’t feel telepathic; I merely felt hungry.

  “Me, too, on both counts,” Pat agreed. “So let’s stop at Berkeley Station and get a sandwich.”

  I followed him off the strips, feeling not quite as hungry and even more confused. Pat had answered a remark I had not made.

  CHAPTER III

  PROJECT LEBENSRAUM

  Even though I was told to take my time and tell everything, it can’t be done. I haven’t had time to add to this for days, but even if I didn’t have to work I still could not “tell all,” because it takes more than a day to write down what happens in one day. The harder you try the farther behind you get. So I’m going to quit trying and just hit the high spots.

  Anyhow everybody knows the general outline of Project Lebensraum.

  We did not say anything to Mum and Dad about that first day. You can’t expose parents to that sort of thing; they get jittery and start issuing edicts. We just told them the tests would run a second day and that nobody had told us what the results were.

  Dr. Arnault seemed unsurprised when we told her we knew the score, even when I blurted out that we thought we had been faking but apparently weren’t. She just nodded and said that it had been necessary to encourage us to think that everything was commonplace, even if there had to be a little fibbing on both sides. “I had the advantage of having your personality analyses to guide me,” she added. “Sometimes in psychology you have to go roundabout to arrive at the truth.

  “We’ll try a more direct way today,” she went on. “We’ll put you two back to back but close enough together that you unquestionably can hear each other. But I am going to use a sound screen to cut you off partly or completely from time to time without your knowing it.”

  It was a lot harder the second time. Naturally we tried and naturally we flubbed. But Dr. Arnault was patient and so was Dr. Lichtenstein—Pat’s “Dr. Mabel.” She preferred to be called Dr. Mabel; she was short and pudgy and younger than Dr. Arnault and about as cute as a female can be and still look like a sofa pillow. It wasn’t until later that we found out she was boss of the research team and world famous. “Giggly little fat girl” was an act she used to put ordinary people, meaning Pat and myself, at their ease. I guess this proves you should ignore the package and read the fine print.

  So she giggled and Dr. Arnault looked serious and we could not tell whether we were reading minds or not. I could hear Tom’s whispers—they told us to go ahead and whisper—and he could hear mine and sometimes they would fade. I was sure we weren’t getting anything, not telepathy I mean, for it was just the way Pat and I used to whisper answers back and forth in school without getting caught.

  Finally Dr. Mabel giggled sheepishly and said, “I guess that’s enough for today. Don’t you think so, Doctor?”

  Dr. Arnault agreed and Pat and I sat up and faced each other. I said, “I suppose yesterday was a fluke. I guess we disappointed you.”

  Dr. Mabel looked like a startled kitten. Dr. Arnault answered soberly, “I don’t know what you expected, Tom, but for the past hour you and your brother have been cut off from hearing each other during every test run.”

  “But I did hear him.”

  “You certainly did. But not with your ears. We’ve been recording each side of the sound barrier. Perhaps we should play back part of it.”

  Dr. Mabel giggled. “That’s a good idea.” So they did. It started out with all four voices while they told us what they wanted, then there were just my whispers and Pat’s, reading lines back and forth from The Comedy of Errors. They must have had parabolic mikes focused on us for our whispers sounded like a wind storm.

  Pat’s whispers gradually faded out. But mine kept right on going…answering a dead silence.

  We signed a research contract with the Foundation and Dad countersigned it, after an argument. He thought mind-reading was folderol and we did not dispute him, since the clincher was that money was scarce as always and it was a better-paying job than any summer job we could get, fat enough to insure that we could start college even if our scholarships didn’t come through.

  But before the summer was over they let us in on the connection between “Genetics Investigations” and “Project Lebensraum.” That was a horse of another color—a very dark black, from our parents’ standpoint.

  Long before that time Pat and I could telepath as easily as we could talk and just as accurately, without special nursing and at any distance. We must have been doing it for years without knowing it—in fact Dr. Arnault made a surprise recording of our prison-yard whispering (when we weren’t trying to telepath, just our ordinary private conversation) and proved that neither one of us could understand our recorded whispers when we were keeping it down low to keep other people from hearing.

  She told us that it was theoretically possible that everyone was potentially telepathic, but that it had proved difficult to demonstrate it except with identical twins—and then only with about ten per cent. “We don’t know why, but think of an analogy with tuned radio circuits.”

  “Brain waves?” I asked.

  “Don’t push the analogy too far. It can’t be the brain waves we detect with an encephalograph equipment or we would have been selling commercial telepathic equipment long since. And the human brain is not a radio. But whatever it is, two persons from the same egg stand an enormously better chance of being ‘tuned in’ than two non-twins do. I can’t read your mind and you can’t read mine and perhaps we never will. There have been only a few cases in all the history of psychology of people who appeared to be able to ‘tune in’ on just anyone, and most of those aren’t well documented.”

  Pat grinned and winked at Dr. Mabel. “So we are a couple of freaks.”

  She looked wide-eyed and started to answer but Dr. Arnault beat her to it. “Not at all, Pat. In you it is normal. But we do have teams in the project who are not identical twins. Some husbands and wives, a few fraternal siblings, even some pairs who were brought together by the research itself. They are the ‘freaks.’ If we could find out how they do it, we might be able to set up conditions to let anyone do it.”

  Dr. Mabel shivered. “What a terrible thought! There is too little privacy now.”

  I repeated this to Maudie (with Pat’s interruptions and corrections) because the news services had found out what was going on in “Genetics Investigations” and naturally we “mind readers” came in for a lot of silly publicity and just as naturally, under Hedda Staley’s mush-headed prodding, Maudie began to wonder if a girl had any privacy? She had, of course; I could not have read her mind with a search warrant, nor could Pat. She would have believed our simple statement
if Hedda had not harped on it. She nearly managed to bust us up with Maudie, but we jettisoned her instead and we had threesome dates with Maudie until Pat was sent away.

  But that wasn’t until nearly the end of the summer after they explained Project Lebensraum.

  About a week before our contract was to run out they gathered us twins together to talk to us. There had been hundreds that first day, dozens the second day, but just enough to crowd a big conference room by the end of summer. The redheads were among the survivors but Pat and I did not sit by them even though there was room; they still maintained their icicle attitude and were self-centered as oysters. The rest of us were all old friends by now.

  A Mr. Howard was introduced as representing the Foundation. He ladled out the usual guff about being happy to meet us and appreciating the honor and so forth. Pat said to me. “Hang onto your wallet, Tom. This bloke is selling something.” Now that we knew what we were doing Pat and I talked in the presence of other people even more than we used to. We no longer bothered to whisper since we had had proved to us that we weren’t hearing the whispers. But we did subvocalize the words silently, as it helped in being understood. Early in the summer we had tried to do without words and read minds directly but it did not work. Oh, I could latch on to Pat, but the silly, incoherent rumbling that went on his mind in place of thought was confusing and annoying, as senseless as finding yourself inside another person’s dream. So I learned not to listen unless he “spoke” to me and he did the same. When we did, we used words and sentences like anybody else. There was none of this fantastic, impossible popular nonsense about instantly grasping the contents of another person’s mind; we simply “talked.”

  One thing that had bothered me was why Pat’s telepathic “voice” sounded like his real one. It had not worried me when I did not know what we were doing, but once I realized that these “sounds” weren’t sounds, it bothered me. I began to wonder if I was all there and for a week I could not “hear” him—psychosomatic telepathic-deafness Dr. Arnault called it.

  She got me straightened out by explaining what hearing is. You don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain; you don’t see with your eyes, you see with your brain. When you touch something, the sensation is not in your finger, it is inside your head. The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of a chaos of data and gives it meaning. “A new baby does not really see,” she said. “Watch the eyes of one and you can see that it doesn’t. Its eyes work but its brain has not yet learned to see. But once the brain has acquired the habits of abstracting as ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing,’ the habit persists. How would you expect to ‘hear’ what your twin says to you telepathically? As little tinkling bells or dancing lights? Not at all. You expect words, your brain ‘hears’ words; it is a process it is used to and knows how to handle.”

  I no longer worried about it, I could hear Pat’s voice clearer than I could hear the voice of the speaker addressing us. No doubt there were fifty other conversations around us, but I heard no one but Pat and it was obvious that the speaker could not hear anybody (and that he did not know much about telepathy) for he went on:

  “Possibly a lot of you wonderful people—” (This with a sickening smile) “—are reading my mind right now. I hope not, or if you are I hope you will bear with me until I have said my say.”

  “What did I tell you?” Pat put in. “Don’t sign anything until l check it.”

  (“Shut up,”). I told him. (“I want to listen.”) His voice used to sound like a whisper; now it tended to drown out real sounds.

  Mr. Howard went on, “Perhaps you have wondered why the Long Range Foundation has sponsored this research. The Foundation is always interested in anything which will add to human knowledge. But there is a much more important reason, a supremely important reason…and a grand purpose to which you yourselves can be supremely important.”

  “See? Be sure to count your change.”

  (“Quiet, Pat.”)

  “Let me quote,” Mr. Howard continued, “from the charter of the Long Range Foundation: ‘Dedicated to the welfare of our descendants.’” He paused dramatically—I think that was what he intended; “Ladies and gentlemen, what one thing above all is necessary for our descendants?”

  “Ancestors!” Pat answered promptly. For a second I thought that he had used his vocal cords, But nobody else noticed.

  “There can be only one answer—living room! Room to grow, room to raise families, broad acres of fertile grain, room for parks and schools and homes. We have over five billion human souls on this planet; it was crowded to the point of marginal starvation more than a century ago with only half that number. Yet this afternoon there are a quarter of a million more of us than there were at this same hour yesterday—ninety million more people each year. Only by monumental efforts of reclamation and conservation, plus population control measures that grow daily more difficult, have we been able to stave off starvation. We have placed a sea in the Sahara, we have melted the Greenland ice cap, we have watered the windy steppes, yet each year there is more and more pressure for more and more room for endlessly more people.”

  I don’t care for orations and this was all old stuff. Shucks, Pat and I knew it if anyone did; we were the kittens that should have been drowned; our old man paid a yearly fine for our very existence.

  “It has been a century since the inception of interplanetary travel; man has spread through the Solar System. One would think that nine planets would be ample for a race too fertile for one. Yet you all know that such has not been the case. Of the daughters of Father Sol only fair Terra is truly suited to Man.”

  “I’ll bet he writes advertising slogans.”

  (“Poor ones,”) I agreed.

  “Colonize the others we have done, but only at a great cost. The sturdy Dutch in pushing back the sea have not faced such grim and nearly hopeless tasks as the colonists of Mars and Venus and Ganymede. What the human race needs and must have are not these frozen or burning or airless discards of creation. We need more planets like this gentle one we are standing on. And there are more, many more!” He waved his hands at the ceiling and looked up. “There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, countless hordes of them…out there. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the stars!”

  “Here comes the pitch,” Pat said quietly. “A fast curve, breaking inside.”

  (“Pat, what the deuce is he driving at?”)

  “He’s a real estate agent.”

  Pat was not far off: but I am not going to quote the rest of Mr. Howard’s speech. He was a good sort when we got to know him but he was dazzled by the sound of his own voice, so I’ll summarize. He reminded us that the Torchship Avant-Garde had headed out to Proxima Centauri six years back. Pat and I knew about it not only from the news but because mother’s brother, Uncle Steve, had put in for it—he was turned down, but for a while we enjoyed prestige just from being related to somebody on the list—I guess we gave the impression around school that Uncle Steve was certain to be chosen.

  Nobody had heard from the Avant-Garde and maybe she would be back in fifteen or twenty years and maybe not. The reason we hadn’t heard from her, as Mr. Howard pointed out and everybody knows, is that you don’t send radio messages back from a ship light-years away and traveling just under the speed of light. Even if you assumed that a ship could carry a power plant big enough to punch radio messages across light-years (which may not be impossible in some cosmic sense but surely is impossible in terms of modern engineering)—even so, what use are messages which travel just barely faster than the ship that sends them? The Avant-Garde would be home almost as quickly as any report she could send, even by radio.

  Some fuzzbrain asked about messenger rockets. Mr. Howard looked pained and tried to answer and I didn’t listen. If radio isn’t fast enough, how can a messenger rocket be faster? I’ll bet Dr. Einstein spun in his grave.

  Mr. Howard hurried on before there were any more silly interruptions
. The Long Range Foundation proposed to send out a dozen more starships in all directions to explore Sol-type solar systems for Earth-type planets, planets for colonization. The ships might be gone a long time, for each one would explore more than one solar system.

  “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where you are indispensable to this great project for living room—for you will be the means whereby the captains of those ships report back what they have found!”

  Even Pat kept quiet.

  Presently a man stood up in the back of the room. He was one of the oldest twins among us; he and his brother were about thirty-five. “Excuse me, Mr. Howard, but may I ask a question?”

  “Surely.”

  “I am Gregory Graham; this is my brother Grant Graham. We’re physicists. Now we don’t claim to be expert in cosmic phenomena but we do know something about communication theory. Granting for the sake of argument that telepathy would work over interstellar distances—I don’t think so but I’ve no proof that it wouldn’t—even granting that, I can’t see where it helps. Telepathy, light, radio waves, even gravity, are all limited to the speed of light. That is in the very nature of the physical universe, an ultimate limit for all communication. Any other view falls into the ancient philosophical contradiction of action-at-a-distance. It is just possible that you might use telepathy to report findings and let the ship go on to new explorations—but the message would still take light-years to come back. Communication back and forth between a starship and Earth, even by telepathy, is utterly impossible, contrary to the known laws of physics.” He looked apologetic and sat down.

  I thought Graham had him on the hip. Pat and I got good marks in physics and what Graham had said was the straight word, right out of the book. But Howard did not seem bothered. “I’ll let an expert answer. Dr. Lichtenstein? If you please—”

  Dr. Mabel stood up and blushed and giggled and looked flustered and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Graham, I really am, but telepathy isn’t like that at all.” She giggled again and said, “I shouldn’t be saying this, since you are telepathic and I’m not, but telepathy doesn’t pay the least bit of attention to the speed of light.”