The Number of the Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “She’s doing so, Captain. We both are.”

  “Okay. I’m going to give my magic specs a rest—we’re looking for nothing but glaciers versus green worlds. Questions?”

  “Run out Teh-minus as fast as I can set and translate. Stop when anyone yells. Aye aye, Cap’n Hillbilly honey.”

  Sharpie nodded to me; I snapped, “Go!”

  “STOP!” yelped Deety.

  “Jacob, I’ve never seen so much ice! Deety, how many martinis would that make?”

  “On the rocks or straight up?”

  “Never mind; we’re out of vermouth. Did you get your sample?”

  “Yes, Captain. One hundred ice ages, no warm worlds. I’m satisfied.”

  “I’m not. Zebbie, I want to extrapolate logarithmically—go to Teh-minus-one-thousand, then ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and so on. Jacob?”

  Jake looked worried. “Hilda, my scales can be set for vernier setting five, or one hundred thousand. But that translation would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle—I think.”

  “Elucidate, please.”

  “I don’t want to get lost. My equations appear to be a description of six-dimensional space of positive curvature; they’ve worked—so far. But Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics worked as long as our race didn’t monkey with velocities approaching the speed of light. Then the approximations weren’t close enough. I don’t know that the plenum can be described with only six space-time coordinates. It might be more than six—possibly far more. Mathematics can be used for prediction only after test against the real world.”

  “Jacob, what is the ‘real world’?”

  “Ouch! Hilda, I don’t know. But I’m afraid to get too many quanta away from our world—world-zero, where we were born. I think the extrapolation you propose would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle to—What world, Deety?”

  “World-six-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-eight on Teh-minus axis, Pop. Unless it’s skewed.”

  “Thanks, Deety. Captain, if we arrived there, we could return to Earth-zero by one setting. ‘If—’ Instead of a superhyper great circle we might follow a helix or some other curve through dimensions we know not of.”

  “Pop, you took what I said and fancied it up.”

  “R.H.I.P., my dear. You will appear as junior author on the monograph you’ll write and I’ll sign.”

  “Pop, you’re so good to me. Wouldn’t Smart Girl return us simply by G, A, Y, H, O, M, E?”

  “Those programs instruct a machine that has built into it only six dimensions. Perhaps she would…but to our native universe so far from Earth-zero that we would be hopelessly lost. If Zeb and I were bachelors, I would say, ‘Let’s go!’ But we are family men.”

  “Deety, set the next one. Teh-five-plus?”

  “Right, Zebadiah. But, Captain Auntie, I’m game! The long trip!”

  “Me, too,” agreed Captain Sharpie.

  I said in a tired voice, “Those babies are ours as much as they are yours—Jake and I are taking no unnecessary risks. Captain Sharpie, if that doesn’t suit you, you can find another astrogator and another chief pilot.”

  “Mutiny. Deety, shall we pull a ‘Lysistrata’?”

  “Uh…can’t we find some reasonable middle ground?”

  “Looks like a place to stop for lunch. Sharpie, want to sniff for ‘Black Hats’?”

  “Take me down, please. About two thousand klicks above ground.”

  “Will you settle for five?”

  “Sissy pants. Yes, if you’ll first have Jacob zip us around night side to check for city lights.”

  “Give her what she wants, Jake, by transiting; an orbit takes too long. ‘Give me operations…way out on some lonely atoll! For I…am too young to diiiie! I just want to grow old!’”

  “You’re off key, Zebbie.”

  “Deety likes my singing. Anybody spot city lights?”

  We found no cities. So Jake put us down for lunch on a lonely atoll, Hilda first making certain that it had nothing on it but palm trees. Deety stripped, started exercises.

  Hilda joined her; Jake and I set out lunch, having first dressed in stylish tropical skin. The only less-than-idyllic note came from my objecting to Deety’s swimming in the lagoon. Hilda backed me up. “Deety, that’s not a swimming pool. Anything in it has defenses or couldn’t have survived. The first law of biology is eat or be eaten. A shark could have washed over the reef years back, eaten all the fish—and now be delighted to have you for lunch.”

  “Ugh!”

  “Deety, you’d be very tasty,” I soothed.

  XXXVIII

  “—under his vine and under his fig tree;

  and none shall make them afraid—”

  Jacob:

  Teh-positive took longer to search than Teh-negative for the very reason that its analogs were so much like our native planet.

  An uninhabited planet could be dismissed in ten minutes; one heavily populated took no longer. A planet at too low a level of culture took hardly longer—a culture with animal-drawn carts and sailing ships as major transport we assumed not to have advanced medicine. But most took longer to reject.

  At the end of a week we had rejected ninety-seven…which left us only 40.000 + to inspect!

  That evening, at “Picnic Island,” our private atoll, my daughter said, “Cap’n Auntie, we’re doing this wrong.”

  “How, Deetikins?”

  “Ninety-seven in a week, over forty thousand to go. At that rate we finish in eight years.”

  Her husband said, “Deety, we’re getting faster.”

  My beloved said, “Astrogator, do you know more about calculating than does the Copilot?” Zeb shut up. We had learned that when Hilda addressed us by titles, she was speaking as captain. I flatter myself that I learned it quicker whereas Zeb was a bit slow. “Go ahead, Deety.”

  “If we go on checking this way, it won’t get better; it will get worse. Here’s the first weeks’ score”—she passed around her summary; it read:

  Earth analogs checked 97

  Average time per planet 34 mins 38½ sec

  Maximum time 2 days 3 hrs 52 mins

  Minimum time 13 seconds

  Median time 12 mins 07 sec

  I studied it. “Deety, we can reduce that average time. Over two days was much too long to check analog twenty-six.”

  “No, Pop, we should have taken longer on twenty-six. It’s that thirteen seconds that is bankrupting us.”

  “Daughter, that’s preposter—”

  “Chief Pilot.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Please let the Copilot finish…without interruption.” I retired from the field, annoyed, to wait until my advice was indispensable—soon, I felt sure.

  “Aunt Hilda, if we gave each analog thirteen seconds, it would take us eighteen and a half days…and we would learn nothing. I want to cut the minimum time way, way down—make it routine—and learn something. I wish Gay could talk, I do.”

  “But, dear, she can. We can be in Oz in two minutes. The dirty dishes can wait.”

  My daughter looked startled. “Pass me the Stupid Hat.”

  “But we won’t go to Oz before tomorrow. We need to figure out what the problem is, first—and I need a night of cuddle with Jacob for the good of my soul.” Hilda reached out and took my hand.

  Hilda went on, “Deety, remember how fast we mapped Mars-Tau-ten-positive once we let Gay do it her way? Isn’t there some way to define a locus—then turn her loose?”

  We discussed it until bedtime. I set the locus myself by vetoing going past Earth-analog-Teh-positive-five-thousand until we were certain that no satisfactory analog existed in those first five thousand. “Family,” I told them, “call me chicken, to use Zeb’s favorite excuse. I know so little about this gadget I invented that I am always afraid of getting lost. All rotations have been exactly ninety degrees. In theory I can define a quantum of angle and each such quantum should render accessible another shea
f of universes. In practice I can’t do machining of that quality. Even if I could, I would be afraid to risk our necks on a gadget required to count angular quanta.

  “But I have another objection—a gut feeling that worlds too far out Teh axis will be too strange. Language, culture, even dominant race—I confess to prejudice for human beings, with human odors and dandruff and faults. Supermen or angels would trouble me more than vermin. I know what to do with a ‘Black Hat’—kill it! But a superman would make me feel so inferior that I would not want to go on living.”

  Deety clapped. “That’s my Pop! Don’t worry, Pop; the superman who can give you an inferiority complex hasn’t been hatched.” I think she meant that as a compliment.

  We worked the parameters down to three: climate warm enough to encourage nudity; population comfortably low; technology high. The first parameter was a defense against B.H. vermin: they require antinudity taboo to bolster their disguises. The last parameter would tend to indicate advanced obstetrics. As for population, every major shortcoming of our native planet could be traced to one cause: too many people, not enough planet.

  Hilda decided to standardize: one locale, one H-above-G. The locale was (in Earth-zero terminology) Long Beach, California, over its beach one klick H-above-G—dangerously low were it not that Gay would never be in any universe longer than one second. Any speed-of-light weapon can destroy in less than a second, but can its human-cum-machine operators identify a target, bear on it, and fire in one second? We thought not. We hoped not.

  At analogs of Long Beach, it should be midsummer, hot, dry, and cloudless. If that beach was comfortably filled but not crowded, if the people were nude, if area adjacent to the beach showed high technology by appearance, then that analog should be checked further.

  Forty minutes in Oz changed much of our planning.

  Tik-Tok was waiting for his lady friend as usual but kept politely quiet while Deety talked with Gay—and so did Zeb and so did I, not because we have Tik-Tok’s courtly manners but because Captain Hilda was blunt. Gay understood the Celsius scale, i.e., both freezing and boiling water temperatures lay in her experience and splitting the interval into one hundred parts was no trouble. She had enough parts that needed to be neither too hot nor too cold that awareness of her surroundings both ambient and radiant was as automatic as breathing is for me. As for radio and television (both gauges of technical level) she could sample all infrared flux (as she had done at Windsor City). Crowds on beach? Would it suffice to count bodies on a sample one hundred meters square?

  But Gay had a quite un-human complaint: “Deety, why must I hang around a thousand milliseconds for a job I can do in ten? Don’t you trust me?”

  So instead of 57 years—or 8 years—or 18½ days—or 11.4 hours—our preliminary survey was complete less than a minute after we left Oz—5000 universes in fifty seconds. Gay Deceiver displayed her results as three curves representing temperature, body count, density of communication-frequency radiation—abscissa for all running from Earth-zero to Earth-analog-5000-Teh-plus.

  Those curves told one thing at once: No need to search past analog 800; glaciation had returned.

  In the lower right corner was displayed: 87. Zeb asked why. “Nulls,” said Deety. “Gay couldn’t get readings. Storm, earthquake, war, anything. Gay Deceiver.”

  “Hi, Deety! We whupped ’em!”

  “You surely did, Smart Girl; Tik-Tok will be proud of you. Change scale. Display zero through eight hundred.”

  As scale expanded, figure 87 dropped to 23. Zeb said, “Deety, I’m curious about those twenty-three. Will you have S.G. display their designations?”

  “Certainly, Zebadiah, but may I take it in planned order?”

  “Sure but just let me find out first—”

  “Astrogator,” Sharpie said flatly, “isn’t this your day as K.P.?”

  We were at Picnic Island, examining results. I suppressed a smile; “slunk” describes the way Zeb left the cabin. Later I was unsurprised to see my tiny treasure giving Zeb an unusually warm hug and kiss. Our Captain has an efficient system of rewards and punishments—never so described.

  Deety instructed Gay to eliminate all worlds with a body count higher than that of the Earth-zero beach, and all worlds chillier by five degrees (my daughter was bracketing to avoid false readings from unseasonable weather).

  With elimination of high population, cold climate, and low technology as indicated by low or nil flux of communication frequencies, my daughter had us down to seventy-six worlds, plus twenty-three to reexamine—had eliminated over four thousand worlds—and it was still two hours till lunch time!

  Deety had Gay display temperatures of the seventy-six. The curve was no longer continuous, but a string of beads, with clumps. I said, “Hilda my love, I’ll wager ten back rubs that at least half of the nulls fit into that gap”—and indicated a break at the maximum of the temperature curve.

  Hilda hesitated. “Why, Jacob?”

  “My dear, figures mean little to me until expressed geometrically. Curves are bold print. I’ll give you odds.”

  “What odds?”

  “Don’t be suckered, Auntie Cap’n! Pop, I’ll take your end of the bet, give you two to one, and spot you a point.”

  A back rub from Deety is a treat; she has strong hands and knows how. But I answered, “Ladies, I must start lunch. Deety, when we make visual check, let’s include Antarctica as well as Greenland, at that break.”

  “Two points, Pop?” I pretended not to hear.

  That same day we trimmed it down to six worlds, all warm, all free of body taboos, all high technology, all acceptably low in population, all free of major war or overt preparations, all with some version of English as the major North American language. It was time to pick a world by inspection on the ground.

  How to make contact was much discussed. Hilda chopped it by saying: “One way is to land on the White House lawn and say, ‘Take me to your leader!’ The other is to be as sneaky as a ‘Black Hat.’ Let me know when you reach consensus.” She went through the bulkhead and dogged the door.

  An hour later I rapped on the bulkhead; she rejoined us. “Captain,” I reported formally, “we have reached consensus. Each is afraid of the open approach; authorities might confiscate our car, we might wind up as prisoners.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Twice we just missed it.”

  “Precisely. The expression ‘sneaky as a “Black Hat”’ is distasteful—”

  “I so intended.”

  I went doggedly on: “—but sneakiness is not immoral per se. A mouse at a cat show is justified in being inconspicuous; so are we. We merely seek information. I am expendable; therefore I will scout on the ground.”

  “Hold it. This is unanimous? Deety? Zebbie?”

  “No,” my daughter answered. “I didn’t get a vote. You and I are barred from taking risks. Pregnant, you know.”

  “I certainly do know! Jacob, I asked for consensus on method. I did not ask for volunteers. I’ve picked the scout I consider best qualified.”

  I said, “My dear, I hope you have picked me.”

  “No, Jacob.”

  “Then I’m your boy,” said Zebbie.

  “No, Zebbie. This is spying, not fighting. I’m doing this job myself.”

  I interrupted, “Hilda, where you go, I go! That’s final.”

  Our captain said gently, “Beloved, I hope you don’t stick to that. If you do, we’ll elect another skipper. You are my candidate.”

  “Dear, I was trying to—”

  “—take care of me. Nevertheless you are my candidate. Deety is too reckless; Zebbie too cautious. I’ll carry out whatever duties you assign, including using the magic spectacles. Are you sticking to that ultimatum?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Even though your stubbornness could result in my death? I love you, dear, but I won’t take you with me on a spying mission. What happened to that ‘All for one and one for all’ spirit?”

  “Uh…”
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  “Captain!”

  “Yes, Zebbie?”

  “You proved that you can be tough with your husband. Can you be tough with yourself? Look me in the eye and tell me that you know more about intelligence than I do. Or that you can fight your way out of a rumpus better than I can.”

  “Zebbie, this isn’t military intelligence. You look me in the eye and tell me that you know more about obstetrics than I do. How do you prepare for leapfrog transfusion and when is it likely to be needed? Define eclampsia. What do you do about placenta previa? I am less likely to get into a rumpus than you are…and if I do, I’ll throw my arms around his neck and cry. However…convince me that you know as much about obstetrics as I do and I’ll consider letting you make contacts. In the meantime pick a midwestern town big enough for a fair-sized hospital and public library, and select a point for grounding and rendezvous; you will be in command while I’m gone.”

  I interrupted. “Hilda, I absolutely forbid—”

  “Chief Pilot! Pipe down!” My wife turned her face away from me. “Chief Master at Arms, restore discipline.”

  “Aye aye, Ma’am! Jake, she means you.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up! Crewmen don’t give orders to the C.O., and I’ve had a bellyful of your attempts.”

  Two hours later I was in Zeb’s seat, biting my nails and sweating, while Zeb had my seat. I had given unconditional parole—the alternative having been to go (or be stuffed) through the bulkhead, then wait, locked in. I am not a total fool; I gave my word.

  Zeb held us in cloud cover while my daughter, wearing earphones, stayed in contact with Hilda. Gay’s cabin speaker was paralleled with the phones so that we could follow in part what went on below. Deety reported, “That fade is from entering a building; I could hear her footsteps. Zebadiah, if I fiddle with the gain, I might miss her as she comes out.”

  “Don’t shift. Wait.”

  Eternities later we heard Hilda’s sweet voice: “I’m heading for rendezvous. I no longer have to pretend that this is a hearing aid—but everybody accepted it as such. You needn’t be cautious picking me up; we’re leaving.”