“BOMB!” Brittain screamed again.
After a few more minutes of questioning, Karnes finally got the rest of the story from him.
The Galactics had found that on this date a nuclear bomb would get through the UN screen and completely destroy most of Greater New York. Only one other bomb would get through, but it would be thrown off course and land somewhere in the Pacific, having missed Los Angeles entirely.
“Anything else?” asked Karnes after a few seconds of silence from Brittain. “Didn’t it say they would have to prevent that?”
Brittain’s voice was dull now. “All it said was that the records would have to be preserved. It said that things must go on exactly as before. It said that nothing must interfere with the complete development, whatever that means.”
Karnes pushed his way out of the room and back towards the pilot’s compartment. What the pilot had to say was no news to Karnes.
“Radio from New York says that a bomb missed LA and hit the ocean. That was a close one.”
Karnes nodded silently, and leaned back in the stewardess’ seat to think.
No wonder Brittain had been so anxious to get out of New York.
New York would be destroyed, but that was inevitable. The thing that had bothered him, his dilemma, was solved.
Was this the real Earth that he lived in, or a museum that had been set up by the Galactics? If it was old Earth, then man would solve his present problems and go on to solve the problem of time travel and interstellar transportation. The present war would be just another little incident in the far past, like the battles of Gettysburg and Agincourt.
And if it were the museum Earth? No difference. For the Galactics had decided not to interfere. They had decided to let the race of Earth go on as it was—exactly as it had gone before. It made no difference, really. No difference at all. A perfect duplication of an original was the original, in every meaningful way.
“Funny,” said the pilot abruptly, “I’m not getting any signal from New York.”
Karnes took a deep breath and bit at his lower lip. But he did not look toward the horror that was New York. The city was gone, but the world was there—solid and real!
You’d better expand your museum a little bit, boys, he thought. We’ll need to include Mars and Venus before very long. And then the stars.
TIME FUZE (1954)
Commander Benedict kept his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the intercom. “All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough here.”
As he released the intercom, Dr. Leicher, of the astronomical staff, stepped up to his side. “Perfectly safe,” he nodded, “although even at this distance a star going nova ought to be quite a display.”
Benedict didn’t shift his gaze from the plate. “Do you have your instruments set up?”
“Not quite. But we have plenty of time. The light won’t reach us for several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights.”
The commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft sigh. “Dr. Leicher, I would say that this is just about the foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar vessel ever to leave the Solar System.”
Leicher shrugged. “In one way of thinking, yes. It is certainly true that we will never know, now, whether Alpha Centauri A ever had any planets. But, in another way, it is extremely fortunate that we should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of scientific information we can obtain. As you say, it is a coincidence, and probably one that happens only once in a billion years. The chances of any particular star going nova are small. That we should be so close when it happens is of a vanishingly small order of probability.”
Commander Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the sweatband. “Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come out of ultradrive a couple of hundred million miles from the first star ever visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the damned thing practically blows up in your face.”
Leicher could see that Benedict was upset; he rarely used the same profanity twice in one sentence.
They had been downright lucky, at that. If Leicher hadn’t seen the star begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn’t known what it meant, or if Commander Benedict hadn’t been quick enough in shifting the ship back into ultradrive—Leicher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship.
The intercom buzzed. The commander answered, “Yes?”
“Sir, would you tell Dr. Leicher that we have everything set up now?”
Leicher nodded and turned to leave. “I guess we have nothing to do now but wait.”
When the light from the nova did come, Commander Benedict was back at the plate again—the forward one, this time, since the ship had been turned around in order to align the astronomy lab in the nose with the star.
Alpha Centauri A began to brighten and spread. It made Benedict think of a light bulb connected through a rheostat, with someone turning that rheostat, turning it until the circuit was well overloaded.
The light began to hurt Benedict’s eyes even at that distance and he had to cut down the receptivity in order to watch. After a while, he turned away from the plate. Not because the show was over, but simply because it had slowed to a point beyond which no change seemed to take place to the human eye.
Five weeks later, much to Leicher’s chagrin, Commander Benedict announced that they had to leave the vicinity. The ship had only been provisioned to go to Alpha Centauri, scout the system without landing on any of the planets, and return. At ten lights, top speed for the ultradrive, it would take better than three months to get back.
“I know you’d like to watch it go through the complete cycle,” Benedict said, “but we can’t go back home as a bunch of starved skeletons.”
Leicher resigned himself to the necessity of leaving much of his work unfinished, and, although he knew it was a case of sour grapes, consoled himself with the thought that he could as least get most of the remaining information from the five-hundred-inch telescope on Luna, four years from then.
As the ship slipped into the not-quite-space through which the ultradrive propelled it, Leicher began to consolidate the material he had already gathered.
* * * *
Commander Benedict wrote in the log:
Fifty-four days out from Sol. Alpha Centauri has long since faded back into its pre-blowup state, since we have far outdistanced the light from its explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It—
“Pardon me, Commander,” Leicher interrupted, “But I have something interesting to show you.”
Benedict took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair. “What is it, Doctor?”
Leicher frowned at the papers in his hands. “I’ve been doing some work on the probability of that explosion happening just as it did, and I’ve come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before, the probability was small. A little calculation has given us some information which makes it even smaller. For instance: with a possibleerror of plus or minus two seconds Alpha Centauri A began to explode the instant we came out of ultradrive!
“Now, the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it should happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seventh seconds.”
It was Commander Benedict’s turn to frown. “So?”
“Commander, the entire universe is only about ten to the seventeenth seconds old. But to give you an idea, let’s say that the chances of its happening are once in millions of trillions of years!”
Benedict blinked. The number, he realized, was totally beyond his comprehension—or anyone else’s.
“Well, so what? Now it has happened that one time. That simply means that it will almost certainly never happen again!”
“True. But, Commander, when you buck odds like that and win, the thing to do is look for some factor that is cheating in your favor. If you took a pair of dice and started throwing sevens, one right after another
—for the next couple of thousand years—you’d begin to suspect they were loaded.”
Benedict said nothing; he just waited expectantly.
“There is only one thing that could have done it. Our ship.” Leicher said it quietly, without emphasis.
“What we know about the hyperspace, or superspace, or whatever it is we move through in ultradrive is almost nothing. Coming out of it so near to a star might set up some sort of shock wave in normal space which would completely disrupt that star’s internal balance, resulting in the liberation of unimaginably vast amounts of energy, causing that star to go nova. We can only assume that we ourselves were the fuze that set off that nova.”
Benedict stood up slowly. When he spoke, his voice was a choking whisper. “You mean the sun—Sol—might.…”
Leicher nodded. “I don’t say that it definitely would. But the probability is that we were the cause of the destruction of Alpha Centauri A, and therefore might cause the destruction of Sol in the same way.”
Benedict’s voice was steady again. “That means that we can’t go back again, doesn’t it? Even if we’re not positive, we can’t take the chance.”
“Not necessarily. We can get fairly close before we cut out the drive, and come in the rest of the way at sub-light speed. It’ll take longer, and we’ll have to go on half or one-third rations, but we can do it!”
“How far away?”
“I don’t know what the minimum distance is, but I do know how we can gage a distance. Remember, neither Alpha Centauri B or C were detonated. We’ll have to cut our drive at least as far away from Sol as they are from A.”
“I see.” The commander was silent for a moment, then: “Very well, Dr. Leicher. If that’s the safest way, that’s the only way.”
Benedict issued the orders, while Leicher figured the exact point at which they must cut out the drive, and how long the trip would take. The rations would have to be cut down accordingly.
Commander Benedict’s mind whirled around the monstrousness of the whole thing like some dizzy bee around a flower. What if there had been planets around Centauri A? What if they had been inhabited? Had he, all unwittingly, killed entire races of living, intelligent beings?
But, how could he have known? The drive had never been tested before. It couldn’t be tested inside the Solar System—it was too fast. He and his crew had been volunteers, knowing that they might die when the drive went on.
Suddenly, Benedict gasped and slammed his fist down on the desk before him.
Leicher looked up. “What’s the matter, Commander?”
“Suppose,” came the answer, “Just suppose, that we have the same effect on a star when we go into ultradrive as we do when we come out of it?”
Leicher was silent for a moment, stunned by the possibility. There was nothing to say, anyway. They could only wait.…
* * * *
A little more than half a light year from Sol, when the ship reached the point where its occupants could see the light that had left their home sun more than seven months before, they watched it become suddenly, horribly brighter. A hundred thousand times brighter!
SUITE MENTALE (1956)
Overture—Adagio Misterioso
The neurosurgeon peeled the thin surgical gloves from his hands as the nurse blotted the perspiration from his forehead for the last time after the long, grueling hours.
“They’re waiting outside for you, Doctor,” she said quietly.
The neurosurgeon nodded wordlessly. Behind him, three assistants were still finishing up the operation, attending to the little finishing touches that did not require the brilliant hand of the specialist. Such things as suturing up a scalp, and applying bandages.
The nurse took the sterile mask—no longer sterile now—while the doctor washed and dried his hands.
“Where are they?” he asked finally. “Out in the hall, I suppose?”
She nodded. “You’ll probably have to push them out of the way to get out of Surgery.”
* * * *
Her prediction was almost perfect. The group of men in conservative business suits, wearing conservative ties, and holding conservative, soft, felt hats in their hands were standing just outside the door. Dr. Mallon glanced at the five of them, letting his eyes stop on the face of the tallest. “He may live,” the doctor said briefly.
“You don’t sound very optimistic, Dr. Mallon,” said the FBI man.
Mallon shook his head. “Frankly, I’m not. He was shot laterally, just above the right temple, with what looks to me like a .357 magnum pistol slug. It’s in there—” He gestured back toward the room he had just left. “—you can have it, if you want. It passed completely through the brain, lodging on the other side of the head, just inside the skull. What kept him alive, I’ll never know, but I can guarantee that he might as well be dead; it was a rather nasty way to lobotomize a man, but it was effective, I can assure you.”
The Federal agent frowned puzzledly. “Lobotomized? Like those operations they do on psychotics?”
“Similar,” said Mallon. “But no psychotic was ever butchered up like this; and what I had to do to him to save his life didn’t help anything.”
The men looked at each other, then the big one said: “I’m sure you did the best you could, Dr. Mallon.”
The neurosurgeon rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead and looked steadily into the eyes of the big man.
“You wanted him alive,” he said slowly, “and I have a duty to save life. But frankly, I think we’ll all eventually wish we had the common human decency to let Paul Wendell die. Excuse me, gentlemen; I don’t feel well.” He turned abruptly and strode off down the hall.
One of the men in the conservative suits said: “Louis Pasteur lived through most of his life with only half a brain and he never even knew it, Frank; maybe—”
“Yeah. Maybe,” said the big man. “But I don’t know whether to hope he does or hope he doesn’t.” He used his right thumbnail to pick a bit of microscopic dust from beneath his left index finger, studying the operation without actually seeing it. “Meanwhile, we’ve got to decide what to do about the rest of those screwballs. Wendell was the only sane one, and therefore the most dangerous—but the rest of them aren’t what you’d call safe, either.”
The others nodded in a chorus of silent agreement.
Nocturne—Tempo di valse
“Now what the hell’s the matter with me?” thought Paul Wendell. He could feel nothing. Absolutely nothing: No taste, no sight, no hearing, no anything. “Am I breathing?” He couldn’t feel any breathing. Nor, for that matter, could he feel heat, nor cold, nor pain.
“Am I dead? No. At least, I don’t feel dead. Who am I? What am I?” No answer. Cogito, ergo sum. What did that mean? There was something quite definitely wrong, but he couldn’t quite tell what it was. Ideas seemed to come from nowhere; fragments of concepts that seemed to have no referents. What did that mean? What is a referent? A concept? He felt he knew intuitively what they meant, but what use they were he didn’t know.
There was something wrong, and he had to find out what it was. And he had to find out through the only method of investigation left open to him.
So he thought about it.
Sonata—Allegro con Brio
The President of the United States finished reading the sheaf of papers before him, laid them neatly to one side, and looked up at the big man seated across the desk from him.
“Is this everything, Frank?” he asked.
“That’s everything, Mr. President; everything we know. We’ve got eight men locked up in St. Elizabeth’s, all of them absolutely psychotic, and one human vegetable named Paul Wendell. We can’t get anything out of them.”
The President leaned back in his chair. “I really can’t quite understand it. Extra-sensory perception—why should it drive men insane? Wendell’s papers don’t say enough. He claims it can be mathematically worked out—that he did work it out—but we don’t have any proof of that.”
<
br /> The man named Frank scowled. “Wasn’t that demonstration of his proof enough?”
A small, graying, intelligent-faced man who had been sitting silently, listening to the conversation, spoke at last. “Mr. President, I’m afraid I still don’t completely understand the problem. If we could go over it, and get it straightened out—” He left the sentence hanging expectantly.
“Certainly. This Paul Wendell is a—well, he called himself a psionic mathematician. Actually, he had quite a respectable reputation in the mathematical field. He did very important work in cybernetic theory, but he dropped it several years ago—said that the human mind couldn’t be worked at from a mechanistic angle. He studied various branches of psychology, and eventually dropped them all. He built several of those queer psionic machines—gold detectors, and something he called a hexer. He’s done a lot of different things, evidently.”
“Sounds like he was unable to make up his mind,” said the small man.
The President shook his head firmly. “Not at all. He did new, creative work in every one of the fields he touched. He was considered something of a mystic, but not a crackpot, or a screwball.
“But, anyhow, the point is that he evidently found what he’d been looking for for years. He asked for an appointment with me; I okayed the request because of his reputation. He would only tell me that he’d stumbled across something that was vital to national defense and the future of mankind; but I felt that, in view of the work he had done, he was entitled to a hearing.”
“And he proved to you, beyond any doubt, that he had this power?” the small man asked.
Frank shifted his big body uneasily in his chair. “He certainly did, Mr. Secretary.”
The President nodded. “I know it might not sound too impressive when heard second-hand, but Paul Wendell could tell me more of what was going on in the world than our Central Intelligence agents have been able to dig up in twenty years. And he claimed he could teach the trick to anyone.
“I told him I’d think it over. Naturally, my first step was to make sure that he was followed twenty-four hours a day. A man with information like that simply could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands.” The President scowled, as though angry with himself. “I’m sorry to say that I didn’t realize the full potentialities of what he had said for several days—not until I got Frank’s first report.”
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