Takeoff!

by Randall Garrett

  When John suggested it, I thought, “Mmmmm. Given a hundred thousand years, that ought to put the action somewhere in the middle of Isaac’s Second Empire. What the hell—why not?”

  “Imitation,” said Ducem Palver, “is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Nikol Buth inspected what was left of his cigar and decided that between the ash and the chewed stub there was not enough tobacco to make further puffing worthwhile. He dropped it into the disposal and watched the bright flash of light that marked the question that Palver had asked.

  “In a way, I suppose—if you can call it imitation to take a hint from a myth and develop something from it.”

  Ducem Palver leaned back in his chair. His blue eyes seemed to twinkle beneath his slightly arched brows, although there was no obvious trace of a smile on his round face. “Then,” he said, “you consider mathematical treatment of vast numbers of human beings to be a myth?”

  Dr. Buth considered that for a moment. He hardly knew how to speak to his visitor. Palver, he knew, occupied some small post in the Imperium—Imperial Librarian, Third Class—but Buth wasn’t sure just how important the man was nor exactly why he had come. Nor did he know how much Palver knew of archaeology.

  Buth said: “I realize that people once believed in such a thing—seven or eight hundred years ago. But the barbaric period of the Interregnum, before the establishment of the Second Galactic Empire, was hardly a period of vast scientific knowledge.” He gestured with one hand. “Oh, I’ll grant you that there may just possibly be something to the old story that a mathematical treatment of the actions of vast masses of human beings was worked out by a scientist of the First Empire and then lost during the Interregnum—but I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh?” Palver’s face was bland. “Why not?”

  “It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Discoveries are never lost, really. We still have all the technological knowledge that the First Empire had, and much more; myths and legends, on the other hand, have no basis, except in easily explained exaggerations.”

  Palver looked the slightest bit defensive. “Why do you call them legends? It seems to me to be a bit too pat to say that those arts which were not lost were real and that those which were lost are legendary.”

  Dr. Nikol Buth had long since made up his mind that Ducem Palver was nothing but another small-time, officious bureaucrat who had decided, for some reason, to make a thirty thousand light-year trip from the Imperial capital just to get in his, Buth’s, hair. Inwardly, he sighed. He had walked on eggs before.

  Outwardly, he was all smiles. “I’ll admit it sounds odd when you put it that way. But look at it from another angle. We have fairly accurate information on the history of the First Empire; the last ten thousand years of its existence are very accurately documented, thanks to the information found in the old Imperial Library. And we have no mention of ’lost arts’ or anything else like that. None of the records is in the least mysterious. We know that one nonhuman race was found, for instance. Nothing mysterious there; we know what happened to them, how they escaped the First Imperial Government, and their eventual fate.”

  Dr. Buth fished in his pocket for another cigar and found none. He got up and walked over to the humidor on his desk, saying: “On the other hand, the records of the Interregnum are scanty, inaccurate, and, in some cases, patently falsified. And it is during the Interregnum that we find legends of supermen, of mental giants who can control the minds of others, and of ‘lost’ sciences which can do wonders.”

  Buth lit his cigar, and Ducem Palver nodded his head slowly.

  “I see,” the librarian said at last. “Then you don’t believe that a mathematical treatment of the future actions of a mass of people could be formulated?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Dr. Buth said, somewhat testily. “I said that I did not believe it was ever done in the past.” Then he forced a smile back onto his face and into his voice. “Not having any such thing as a mathematical system of prediction, I can hardly predict what may be done in the future along those lines.”

  Ducem Palver steepled his hands pontifically. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Dr. Buth—however, I understood that you had evolved such a system.”

  Dr. Buth exhaled a cloud of smoke slowly. “Tell me, Mr. Palver, why is the Imperial Government interested in this?”

  Palver .chuckled deprecatingly. “I am sorry, Dr. Buth. I didn’t intend to lead you to believe that the Imperium was interested. In so far as I know, they are not.” He paused, and his blue eyes seemed to sparkle for a moment with an inner, barely hidden mirth. “Ah, I see that you’re disappointed. I don’t blame you; it would be quite a feather in your cap to have your work recognized by the Imperium, would it not? I’m truly sorry if I misled you.”

  Buth shook his head. “Think nothing of it. As a matter of fact, I should be...uh...rather embarrassed if my work came to Imperial notice at this time. But...”

  “...But, then, why am I here?” Palver finished for him. “Purely out of personal curiosity, my dear sir, nothing more. Naturally, the records of your published works are on file in the Imperial Library; my position at the Library is that of Keeper of the Files. Have you ever seen the Files?”

  Dr. Buth shrugged. “No—but I’ve read descriptions.”

  “I’m sure you have. It’s a vast operation to feed all the information of the galaxy into that one great machine to be correlated, cross-indexed, filtered, digested, and abstracted so that it may be available at any time. Only about one billionth of the total information flowing into that machine ever comes to my direct notice, and even then it is fleetingly glanced over and forgotten.

  “But my hobby, you see, is History.” He pronounced the word with a respect touching on reverence. “I’m especially interested in the-as you pointed out-incomplete history of the Interregnum. Therefore, when your mathematical theories of archaeology came to my attention, I was interested. It happens that my vacation period came due some weeks ago, so I decided to come here, to Sol III, to...ah...have a chat, as it were.”

  Dr. Buth dropped some cigar ash into the dispenser and watched it flare into oblivion. “Well, I’m afraid you may find you’ve come for nothing, Mr. Palver. We’re not investigating Interregnum history, you see.”

  Ducem Palver’s blue eyes widened slightly and a faint look of puzzlement came over his cherubic face. “But I understood that you were working on pre-Imperial civilization.”

  Dr. Nikol Buth smiled tolerantly. “That’s right, Mr. Palver. Pre-First-Imperial. We’re digging back more than thirty thousand years; we’re looking for the origin of the human race.”

  Palver’s face regained its pleasant impassivity. “I see. Hm-m-m.”

  “Do you know anything of the Origin Question, Mr. Palver?” Buth asked.

  “Some,” admitted Palver. “I believe there are two schools of thought, aren’t there?”

  Buth nodded. “The Merger Theory, and the Radiation Theory. According to the Merger Theory, mankind is the natural product of evolution on all worlds with a water-oxygen chemistry and the proper temperatures and gravitational intensities. But according to the Radiation Theory, mankind evolved on only one planet in the galaxy and spread out from that planet after the invention of the first crude hyperspace drive. I might point but that the Merger Theory has been all but abandoned by modern scholars.”

  “And yourself?” Palver asked.

  “I agree. The Merger Theory is too improbable; it requires too many impossible coincidences. The Radiation Theory is the only probable-one might almost say the only possible-explanation for the existence of Man in the galaxy.”

  Palver leaned over and picked up the carrying case which he had placed beside his chair. “I transdeveloped a copy of your ‘Transformations of Symbolic Psychology and Their Application to Human Migration” It was, in fact, this particular work which decided me to come here to Sol III. I’m not much of a mathematician, myself, you understand, but this rem
inded me so much of the old legends that...well, I was interested.”

  Dr. Buth chuckled. “There have been, I recall, legends of invisibility, too—you know, devices which would render a human being invisible to the human eye so that he could go where he pleased, undetected. If you had heard that I had written a paper on the transparency of glass, would you be interested?”

  “I see the connection, of course,” said Ducem Palver. “Just how does it apply here?”

  “The legend,” Buth said, puffing vigorously on his cigar, “concerns a mathematical system which can predict the actions of vast masses of people—the entire population of the galaxy.

  “My work has nothing to do with prediction whatever—unless you want to call it prediction in reverse. I evolved the” system in order to work backwards, into the past; to discover, not what the human race was going to do, but what it had done. You see, there is one fatal flaw in any mathematical prediction system; if people know what they are supposed to do, they will invariably try to do something else, and that can’t be taken into account in the system. It becomes a positive feedback which automatically destroys the system, you see.”

  Palver nodded wordlessly, waiting for Dr. Buth to continue.

  “But that flaw doesn’t apply to my work because there can’t be any such feedback into the past. What I have done is trace the human race backwards in time—back more than thirty millennia, through the vast migrations, the movements through the galaxy from one star to another, taking every lead and tracing them all back to their single focal point.”

  “‘And have you found that focal point?” Palver asked.

  “I have. It is here—Sol III. My system shows positively that this is—must be—the birthplace of the human race.”

  Ducem Palver looked out the transparent wall at one end of the room. “I understand that archaeologists have always supposed the Origin Planet to be somewhere here in the Sirius Sector, but I wouldn’t have thought such a bleak planet as this would be the one. Still”—he laughed pleasantly—”‘perhaps that’s why they left.”

  Dr. Buth allowed his gaze to follow that of his visitor to the windswept, snow-covered terrain outside. “It wasn’t always like this,” he said. ‘“For reasons we haven’t nailed down exactly as yet, this planet shows a definitely cyclic climate. There appear to be long ice ages, followed by short periods of warmth. Perhaps, in the long run, the cycle itself is cyclic; we’re not too sure on that score. At any rate, we’re quite sure that it was fairly warm here, thirty to fifty thousand years ago.”

  “And before that?” Palver asked.

  Buth frowned. “Before that, another ice age, we think. We’ve just barely started, of course. There is a great deal of work yet to be done.”

  “No doubt. Ah—what have you uncovered, so far?”

  Dr. Buth stood up from his chair. “Would you like to see? I’ll show you the lab, if you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” said Ducem Palver, rising. “I’d like very much to see it.”

  A well-equipped, operating archaeological laboratory is like no other laboratory in the galaxy. This one was, if the term can be used, more than typical. Huge radio dating machines lined one wall, and chemical analyzers filled another. Between them were other instruments of all sizes and shapes and purposes.

  The place was busy; machines hummed with power, and some technicians labored over bits of material while others watched recorders attached to the machines in use.

  Dr. Buth led his visitor through the room, explaining the function of each instrument briefly. At the end of the room, he opened a door marked: SPECIMEN CHAMBER and led Ducem Palver inside. He waved a hand. “Here are our specimens—the artifacts we’ve dug up.”

  The room looked, literally, like a junk bin, except that each bit of junk was carefully tagged and wrapped in a transparent film.

  “All these things are artifacts of Man’s pre-space days?” Palver asked.

  Buth laughed shortly. “Hardly, Mr. Palver. This planet was a part of the First Empire, you know. These things date back only ten or eleven thousand years. They prove nothing. They are all from the upper layers of the planet’s strata. They’ve been duly recorded and identified and will doubtlessly be forgotten.

  “No, these are not important; it is only below the D-stratum that we’ll find anything of interest.”

  “The D-stratum?”

  “We call it that. D for Destruction. There is an almost continuous layer over the land of this planet, as far as we’ve tested it. It was caused, we believe, by atomic bombardment.”

  “Atomic bombardment? Allover the planet?” Ducem Palver looked shocked.

  “That’s right. It looks as though uncontrolled atomic reactions were set off allover the planet at once. Why? We don’t know. But we do know that the layer is nearly twenty-five thousand years old, and that it does not antedate space travel.”

  “How so?”

  “Obviously,” Buth said dryly, “if such a thing had happened before mankind discovered the hyperspace drive, there would be no human race today. Man would have died right here and would never have been heard of again.”

  “Of course, of course. And what have you found below that...uh...D-stratum?”

  A frown came over the archaeologist’s dark eyes. “Hardly anything, as yet. Come over here.”

  Ducem Palver followed his host across the room to a pair of squat objects that reposed on the floor. They looked like pieces of grayish, pitted rock, crudely dome-shaped, sitting on their flat sides. From the top of the irregular dome projected a chimney of the same material. They were, Palver estimated, about thirty-six centimeters high, and not quite that big in diameter at their base.

  “We haven’t worked on these two yet,” Dr. Buth said, “but they’ll probably turn out the same as the one we’ve already sectioned.”

  “What are they?” Palver asked.

  Buth shook his head slowly. “We don’t know. We have no idea what their function might have been. They’re hollow, you notice—you can see the clay in that chimney, which was deposited there during the millennia it lay in the ground.

  “See this flange around the bottom? That’s hollow, too. It’s a channel that leads to the interior; it’s connected with this hole back here.” He pointed to another hole, about the same size as that in the top of the chimney, but located down near the base. It was perhaps seven centimeters in diameter.

  “And you haven’t any definite idea what they were used for?” Palver said.

  Buth spread his hands in a gesture of temporary bafflement. “Not yet. Ober Sutt, one of my assistants, thinks it may have been some sort of combustion chamber. He thinks that gases—hydrogen and oxygen, for instance—might have been fed into it, and the heat utilized for something. Or perhaps they were used to synthesize some product at high temperatures—a rather crude method, but it might have been effective for making...oh, ammonia, maybe. I’m not a chemist, and Sutt knows more about that end of it than I do.”

  “Why does he think it’s a high-temperature reaction chamber? I mean, why high-temperature, specifically?”

  Dr. Buth waved his cigar at the objects. “They’re made out of a very crude ceramic, a heavy mass of fired silicon and aluminum oxides, plus a few other things. They’re eroded, of course, and rather fragile now, but to stand up under all the abuse of three or four hundred centuries, they must have been pretty strong when they were made.”

  “Perhaps the ceramic was used because of its structural strength?” Palver said, half questioningly.

  “That’s doubtful. We know they used metals; there are oxides of iron, copper, zinc, chromium, and aluminum everywhere, in deposits that indicate the metals once formed artifacts of some kind. It wouldn’t be logical to use a ceramic, brittle as it is, when metals were used.”

  “So you think the combustion chamber idea is the most likely?”

  Dr. Buth took a long pull at his cigar and looked abstractedly at the glowing ash. “Well, Ober Sutt puts up a good argu
ment for it, but I don’t know...” He waved again with the cigar. “Those things don’t have any bottom, either, and I don’t think they ever did—not connected directly, at least. Sutt counters that by saying that they must have sat on a ceramic plate of some kind, but so far we haven’t found any of those plates, if they exist.”

  Palver looked carefully at the two objects, then shrugged. “What else have you found?”

  “Aside from a few shards,” Dr. Buth said carefully, “that’s all we’ve found below the D-layer. However, as I said, we’ve just begun.”

  Back in Buth’s office, Ducem Palver picked up his carrying case, snapped it shut. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you, Dr. Buth,” he said. “I must admit, however, that the solution of the Origin Question holds little interest for me. The history of the latter part of the First Empire, and that of the Great Interregnum —ah, those are deeply interesting. But, as to how Man came to be spread throughout the galaxy—” He lifted his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. His blue eyes seemed very deep for a moment. “Well, Man is here. I will leave it to others to find out how he got here, eh?”

  Dr. Buth smiled tolerantly. “It’s just as well that we’re not all interested in the same thing, isn’t it?” He walked over to the transparent wall and looked out at the bleak whiteness of the windswept snowscape. “But to me, the fascinating thing about Man is his peculiar drives. Imagine a time when men had no spaceships, no modern instruments of any kind. What must it have been like to look out at the stars and feel trapped on one single planet?”

  Behind him, Ducem Palver’s voice said: “Perhaps you could draw a parallel from the planet Kaldee. During the Interregnum, they were cut off from the rest of the galaxy; they lost all their history—everything. They knew nothing of the spaceship, nor of the stars themselves. They thought those lights in the sky were nothing more than bits of glass, reflecting the light of their sun. They believed the night sky was a black bowl a few miles above their heads, upon which these pieces of broken glass were fixed.”