“I know all that. But Elissa, I think there’s another reason. I think everything is relative, and we had spent over a month in S-space before we came here. I’ll tell you my theory, and it’s one that makes me uncomfortable. I think that S-space isn’t right for humans, in ways that we haven’t been told.” “Even though we will live many times as long there? I don’t just mean long in S-time, I mean live subjectively longer. Doesn’t that suggest S-space is good for our bodies?”
Peron sighed. Elissa didn’t know it, but she was presenting arguments to him that he had wrestled with for days, and found no satisfactory answers. “It looks that way. It seems so logical: we live longer there, so it must be good for us. But I don’t believe it. Think of the way you feel. S-space didn’t give you the same sense of vitality. Think of our love-making. Wasn’t it wonderful on Pentecost, and hasn’t it been even better in the last few days on Earth?”
Elissa reached out and ran her fingers gently up Peron’s thigh. “You know the answer to that without asking. Be careful now, or you’ll give me ideas.” He placed his hand gently over hers, but his voice remained thoughtful and unhappy. “So you agree, some things just don’t feel right in S-space. We’ve known that, deep inside, but I assumed it was all part of the adjustment process. Now I feel just as sure that’s not the case. And everybody who has lived in S-space for any length of time must know it, too.”
Peron rose slowly to his feet. Elissa followed suit, and they both stood there for a few moments, shivering in the seaward night wind sweeping off the snowy eastern peaks.
“Suppose you’re right,” said Elissa. “And you have me fairly well persuaded. What can we do about it?”
Peron hugged her close to him, sharing their warmth; but when he spoke his voice was as cold as the wind. “Love, I’m tired of being manipulated, and I’m tired of blind guesswork. We must go back to orbit now. We must stop allowing ourselves to be fobbed off with sweet reasonableness and bland answers, from Olivia, or Jan de Vries, or anyone else. And we have to push as hard as we can for the real answers about S-space civilization: who, how, and why?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At Elissa’s insistence, they set a meeting with Sy as their first priority on returning to orbit and to S-space. Elissa agreed with Peron’s ideas, but she wanted Sy’s unique perspective on them.
Their journey back up the Beanstalk took place in a totally different atmosphere from the trip down. The cable car was as crowded as ever, but the travellers were subdued, the mood somber. After a few days on the surface, everyone had sensed at some deep level that Earth was now alien, a world so affected by wars and changing climate that permanent return there was unthinkable. Humanity had left its original home. There would be no going back. The travellers looked down at the planet’s glittering clouds and snow cover, and said their mental farewells.
Olivia Ferranti had mentioned that few people made more than one visit to Earth. Now Peron and Elissa knew why.
When they arrived at the set of stations that formed the upper debarkation point of the Beanstalk, Elissa queried the information system for Sy’s location. While she did so, Peron prepared to transfer them back to S-space. It proved surprisingly easy. Since almost everyone returning from a visit to Earth moved at once back to S-space, the procedure had been streamlined to become completely routine. Peron gave their ID codes, and was quickly offered access to a pair of suspense tanks.
“Ready?” he said to Elissa.
She was still sitting at the information terminal. She shook her head and looked puzzled. “No. Not ready at all. Hold off on booking us into the tanks.” “What’s the problem? Can’t you find Sy.”
“I found him — but he isn’t in S-space any more. He moved to normal space even before we did.”
“You mean he went down to Earth, too?”
“Not according to the information service. He’s been here all the time we were on Earth. And he left S-space a quarter of an S-hour before we did — so that means he’s been in normal space for over twenty days!”
“What’s he been doing?”
Elissa shook her head again. “Lord knows. That information isn’t in the computer bank. But he was last reported on one of the stations here in the synchronous complex. If we want to get our heads together with his, there’s no point in going to S-space yet.”
Peron cancelled the suspense tank request. “Come on then. I don’t know how to do it, but we have to discover some way to track him down.”
That task proved easier than Peron had imagined. Sy had made no attempt to conceal his whereabouts. He had lived in one room for the whole time, with an almost continuous link to the orbiting data banks and central computer network. He was sitting quietly at a terminal when Elissa and Peron slid open his door. He took his eyes away from the screen for a second and nodded to them casually. “I’ve been expecting you for a few days now. Give me a moment to finish what I’m doing.”
Elissa looked curiously around the small room. It was a one-fifth gee chamber, with few material signs of Sy’s presence. The service robots had cleared away all food and dishes, and there were no luxury or entertainment items. The bed looked unused, and the small desk top was completely empty. Sy was neatly groomed, clean-shaven and dressed in tight-fitting dark clothes.
“No hurry,” she said. She sat herself down calmly on the bed.
“Got a message from Kallen,” said Sy, without taking his eyes off the screen. “Lum and Rosanne are delayed, won’t be here as soon as they thought. How was Earth?”
“Thought-provoking.” Peron seated himself next to Elissa, and waited until Sy had completed data storage, signed off, and swung to face them. “You ought to make a trip there, Sy. It’s something you’d never forget.”
“I thought of it,” said Sy. “Then I decided I had higher priorities. Plenty of time for Earth later — it won’t go away.”
“But what are you doing here, in normal space?” asked Elissa. “According to the information service, you’ve been here forever.”
“Twenty-six days.” Sy grinned. “You know what’s wrong with S-space? You can’t get anything done there in a hurry. I had things I wanted to do, and things I wanted to know — fast — and I wasn’t sure that our Immortal friends would give permission. So I came here. I’ve been here for only nineteen minutes of S-time. By the time they register the fact that I’ve gone, I’ll be all finished.” “I had the same feeling,” said Peron. “We’re too slow in S-space. We have a lot less control over what happens to us there. But finished doing what?” “Several things. First, I’ve been testing Kallen’s Law — my name for it, not his. Remember what he said? ‘Anything that can be put into a data bank by one person can be taken out of it by another, if you’re smart enough and have enough time.’ That’s one problem with a computer-based society, and one reason why computers were so tightly controlled on Pentecost: it’s almost impossible to prevent access to computer-stored information. I decided that if there were another headquarters for the Immortals, and one that they preferred not to talk about, there must be clues to its location somewhere in the data banks. Well-hidden, sure, but they should be there. Is there a secret installation, and if so, where is it? Those were two questions I set out to answer. And I had another thing that worried me. When we met the Gossameres and Pipistrelles, Ferranti said that the Immortals couldn’t really communicate with them. But she did communicate with them, even if they didn’t send a message back. And I couldn’t be sure that was true, either. Suppose they did send a message? — we don’t know what the ship was receiving. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer yet to that one. I’ve been working here flat out, but it takes time.”
“Do you mean you have answered the other questions?”
“Think so.” Sy cradled his left elbow thoughtfully in his right hand. “Wasn’t easy. There’s a pretty strong cover-up going on. None of the data that’s available for the usual starship libraries will tell you a thing. I had to get there by internal consistency
checks. What do you make of these data base facts? First, the official flight manifests show one hundred and sixty-two outbound trips initiated from Sol in the past S-month. The maximum fuel capacity of any single ship is 4.4 billion tons. And the fuel taken out of supplies in the Sol system in the past S-month is 871 billion tons. See the problem? I’ll save you the trouble of doing the arithmetic. There is too much fuel being used — enough for a minimum of twenty-six outbound flights that don’t show on the manifests.” “Did you check other periods?” asked Peron.
Sy looked at him scornfully. “What do you think? Let’s go on. This one is suggestive, but not conclusive. The navigation network around the Sol system is all computer controlled, and it’s continuously self-adapting to changing requirements. Generally speaking, the most-travelled approach routes to Sol are the ones with the most monitoring radars and navigation controls. The information on the placement of radars is available from the data banks, so you can use it to set up an inverse problem: Given the disposition of the equipment, what direction in space is the most-travelled approach route to and from Sol? I set up the problem, and let the computers grind out an answer. When I had it I was puzzled for days. The solution indicated a vector outward from Sol that seemed to lead nowhere at all — not to any star, or toward any significant object. It pointed at nothing. I was stuck.
“I put that to one side and chased another thought. Suppose there were a hidden Headquarters somewhere in space. It would communicate with the Sol system, not just with the ships — they only travel at a tenth of light-speed — but with radio signals, too. There are thousands of big antennae and phased arrays scattered all around the Sol system, and the computers keep track of their instantaneous pointings. So I accessed that pointing data base, and I asked the computer a question: Of all the places that the antennae and arrays point to, what direction was pointed to most often? Want to guess the answer?”
“The same one as you got from the navigation system solution,” said Peron. “That’s wild. But damn it, how does it help? You have the same mystery.” “Not quite.” Sy looked unusually pleased with himself. For the first time, Peron realized that even Sy liked to have an appreciative audience for his deductions. “You’re right in one way,” Sy went on. “I got the same answer as from the navigation system solution. I had a vector that pointed to nothing. But there’s one other thing about the antennae. The computer points them all very accurately, but of course they’re scattered all over the solar system, from inside the orbit of Mercury to out past Saturn. So if you want to beam a message to a precise point in space, rather than merely in a specified direction, each antenna would be aimed along a slightly different vector. In other words, the computer pointing must allow for parallax of the target. So I took the next step. I asked if there was parallax on the previous solution, for the most common antennae pointings, and if so, what was the convergence point? I got a surprising answer. There is parallax — it’s small, only a total of a second of arc — and the convergence point is twenty-eight light-years from Sol, in just the direction I’d determined before. But when you check the star charts and the positions of kernels and hot collapsed bodies, there’s nothing there. Nothing. The antennae are aimed at the middle of nothing. I called that place Convergence Point, just for lack of a better name. But just what place is it? That was the question. And that’s where I stuck again, for a long time. Know what finally gave me the answer?”
Elissa was sitting on the bed, her expression dreamy. “Olivia Ferranti. Remember what she told us — ‘You can’t learn all about the Universe crouching in close by a star.’ And you, Sy, you said maybe you should be looking at nothing to find new mysteries, rather than at the center of the galaxy. Convergence Point is a nothing point.”
Sy was looking at her in amazement. “Elissa, I was asking a rhetorical question. You’re not supposed to give me the right answer. How the devil did you work it out?”
Elissa smiled. “I didn’t. You gave it away yourself. You’ll never be a good liar, Sy, even though your face doesn’t give you away. It was your choice of words. Even before you knew the distance, the twenty-eight light-years, you said several times that the antennae were pointing ‘at nothing.’ But you couldn’t know there was no dark object there, if you went out far enough. And from your voice, it was the ‘nothing’ that was important, not the coordinates of the target point.”
Sy looked at Peron. “She’s a witch. If she reads you like that, you’ll never keep any secrets from her. All right, Elissa, take it one step farther. Can you tell me what’s so special about that particular nothing?”
Elissa thought for a few moments, then shook her head. “No data.” “That’s what I thought, too. How can nothing be special? But then I remembered what else Olivia Ferranti said: ‘You have to know what’s going on out in deep space.’ So I asked myself, what is deep space? I went back to the star charts and the kernel coordinates, and I asked the computer another question: Give me the coordinates of the point of open space within one hundred light-years of Sol that is farthest from every known material body. Uncertainties in our knowledge of distances make the answer slightly ambiguous, but the computer gave back only two candidates. One is ninety-one light-years away; half a year’s trip, even in S-space. The other is — no prizes for guessing — just twenty-eight light-years from Sol, in the right direction. Convergence Point is a real nothing point. Communication time: five S-days.”
Sy called a holographic starscape display on to the space in front of them. He moved the 3-D pointer to an empty location within the star field. “Would you like to visit the real power center of the Immortals? Then I say that’s where you want to be. Nowhere Station. S-space travel time: less than two months.” Elissa looked puzzled. “But Sy, why would anyone build a Headquarters out there, in the middle of nowhere?”
Sy shook his head. “I can’t answer that.”
Peron was still staring at the display. “We may have to go there to find out. And it won’t be easy. You can be sure that the Immortals don’t want us there — they don’t even want us to know the place exists. You’ve solved the ‘where’ puzzle, Sy, I feel sure of it. But that just leaves a bigger problem: how can we find a way to make the trip, when the whole system is set up to prevent it?”
Sy looked smug. “I told you I’ve been working hard. If we want to make an S-space trip out to Convergence Point, I’ve identified the major problems we’ll have to solve. Solving them, now — that’s another matter, and I’ll need help.” He called out a numbered list onto the display. “First, we have to find the departure time and place of the next starship to Convergence Point. Second, we have to find a way to get ourselves onto that departing starship — preferably in a way no one else will notice. Third, we have to explain our absence, so that no one wonders where we have gone. Fourth, we’ll have to do something with the ship’s crew. Fifth, before we get there we’ll need a plan of action for what we’ll do when we reach Convergence Point. Where do you want to begin?” “Can’t we put the crew in cold sleep and take them with us?” asked Elissa. “That’s my thought. It won’t do them any harm, and it’s a lot better than leaving them somewhere in the Sol system. I’m confident that we can handle the mechanics of the ship — the service robots do almost everything, and we learned the rest on our trip from Cassay. The other problems are not so easy. I’d like your thoughts.”
“The third one — explaining our absence,” said Elissa. “All we need is enough time to get us well on our way to our real destination. Once we’re gone, they’ll never catch us.”
“That’s true. But we don’t want them to know where we’re going. If they find out, they’ll send a radio signal to warn Headquarters we’re coming their way.” “Why should they learn where we’re heading? Jan de Vries already implied that we’re more of a nuisance to him than anything else. If we can show we’ve departed for a plausible place, I don’t think he’ll take much interest. Pentecost would be a natural — it was our home. The most I would expect
him to do would be to warn them to watch for our arrival. Can you do a fake data bank entry, indicating that we are shipping out for Pentecost?”
Sy shrugged. “I can try. One nice thing about the information system, it doesn’t expect the sort of changes we’ll be making. The logic is protected against the usual screw-ups and programmer meddling, but not against systematic sabotage. I’ll do it. I’ve learned the software pretty well in the past few weeks.” “Well enough to answer your first question?” asked Peron. “You said it, Sy — the information about starship departure has to be in the data banks somewhere. It’s just a question of finding it. But if anybody can pull it out, you can.” Sy grimaced. “Not without a long, horrible grind.”
“It would be for me or Elissa — but you’ll come up with a smart approach to it.” “Cut out the flattery.”
“I’m serious. And if you can do it, find out when and where. I think I have the key to the problem of how we get on board the starship.”
Sy frowned. “Do you, now? What have I missed?”
“You lack one piece of information. Elissa and I learned this the hard way, and we can vouch for it: there is no way that the crew will stay in S-space for the acceleration phase of their journey. It’s just too damned uncomfortable. They’ll be in cold sleep when the journey begins. See what that means?” He pulled the terminal entry pad closer. “Let me sketch an approach. Then we can look at some timings.”
* * *
“T MINUS 4 MINUTES, COUNTDOWN PROCEEDING,” said a disembodied voice. “ — FUEL MASS CHECK IN PROCESS.”
“ — THRUST PROTOCOL COMPLETE.”
“ — CARGO CHECK PROCEEDING.”
“ — OUTBOUND TRAJECTORY TO GULF CITY CONFIRMED AND APPROVED.”
Between the Strokes of Night Page 23
