The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?”

  “I do. But I’ve seen five years of it and we’ve got our own Star Trek now.”

  “Yes, but that’s what the surgeon-marshal warned me not to let you two pregnant pretties have too much of our real Star Trek or for too long. A stern Dutch-uncle talk. Or especially in freefall, as he gave me a set of printed instructions that included daily exercise and so forth. Detailed.”

  “Zebbie dear, Deety and I both have exactly the same instruction pamphlet. Betcha.”

  “No doubt. And so had Jake. Dr. Lacy was covering all angles. We’ll cover as many worlds as possible each day, but bulging-belly routines will be strictly followed.”

  “Then let’s get cracking, Cap’n Zebbie.”

  “Copilot.”

  “Captain.”

  “Execute.”

  Earth-Teh-One-Minus replaced Teh-One-Plus. “Jake, it doesn’t look right. Astrogator, I want us a hundred kilometers up, over—not Florida, make it the Mississippi valley about St. Louis or anywhere in that area. Give Jake a setting. Want me to change attitude?”

  “Not necessary, Zebadiah, but quicker if you’ll point Gay at your target—it will let me skip setting angle.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Fine. Pop, set l-axis plus transition nine thousand eight hundred forty minimums.”

  “Set, Captain.”

  “Execute.”

  “Zebbie, that’s what I call a hard winter.”

  “I don’t. It’s a long winter. Actually it’s summer, I think. Earth-analog should be in the same place in orbit as Earth. Jake?”

  “By theory, yes—but we’re dealing with fact. But it doesn’t matter either way, Captain; that’s glaciations. Teh-Two-Plus set.”

  “We can’t homestead on an ice sheet. Execute.”

  “Jake, how many ice ages have we hit so far?”

  “Five, I think. Deety?”

  “Five is right, Zebadiah. Plus two worlds with war going on, one where they shot at us, and one in the Stone Age even in Europe.”

  “So we’re hitting more ice than not.”

  “Five to four has little or no statistical significance, Zebadiah. At least Aunt Hilda hasn’t perceived even one Pankera.”

  “Sharpie, how good is your magic dingus?”

  “Zebbie, if I can’t get ’em on screen at all, I’ll spot ’em, no matter how they’re disguised. In the simulation drills Worsel and LaVerne cooked up for us, I spotted the gait by preceptor every time Deety identified it by computer and Fourier analysis.”

  “I know that. How much confidence do you yourself have in it? In the field, not in sims.”

  “Make that ‘How much confidence do I have in Worsel’s training?’ Plenty. The machine doesn’t do it all; it just lets me see. LaVerne told me to think of it as an electronic telescope.”

  “Yes, yes, the spy-ray gizmo is electronic—a gadget I hope to understand once I get time to study the specs. You feel confident, that’s enough?”

  “Zebbie, I don’t have a real sense of perception; Worsel didn’t have time to train me and I’m not sure I could learn. But for this one purpose—I think I could spot one at a hundred meters without the preceptor and with a blindfold over my eyes. Worsel got me very highly tuned to that awkward gait, both with and without splints. But I wanted to mention something else. According to geologists, when we were home—Earth where we were born, I mean—we were in a brief period of warm climate between two glaciations.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “If their theories are right, we’ll usually hit glaciations.”

  “Probably. ‘If …’ ”

  “Yes, ‘if’…. But you know what they look like now. If you and Jacob can make it a drill, you can flip past ice ages as fast as you spot one.”

  “We’ll try to speed it up. Copilot—execute!”

  “Captain, wait!”

  “Why, Deety? We’re about to translate.”

  “Because I don’t think we’re going about it the right way. Pop is set for Teh-Five-Plus, is he not?”

  “Jake?”

  “That’s right, Captain.”

  “Then what’s the trouble, Astrogator? We’re set to go.”

  “Yes, but … Zebadiah, I said that five-to-four had little statistical significance. That’s true. But I see a pattern—I think.”

  “Spill it dear, spill it!”

  “All glaciations, so far, have been on teh-minus. That still could be random chance but ….”

  “… but it doesn’t look like it. You mean you want us to explore axis teh-plus first? Okay, I guess. Copilot?”

  “No, no, Zebadiah! Captain. I mean I would like us to see enough of teh-minus to have a statistically significant sample. At least a hundred.”

  “Jake?”

  “Captain, if we check in one pseudodirection only—say teh-minus—it’ll be four or five times as fast as hunting back and forth between plus and minus. Alternating is slow; I have to be so very careful. But if I don’t have to alternate, I can set with one click and you can call out ‘Execute!’ as soon as you are satisfied.”

  “Jake, alternation was based on our assumption—pure assumption save for that one datum, the world without the letter ‘J’—that worlds nearest our own in hyperspace would be most like our native world. That assumption turns out to be cockeyed. So we’ll get Deety her statistical sample. But faster. Set Teh-Six-Minus.”

  “Uh … set, Captain.”

  “When I say ‘Start,’ I want you to start flipping them past as fast as you can without waiting for orders. Like slides in a projector. Since all I’ll be looking for is ice ages, I can spot one in a split second. If I see a warm world, I’ll yell ‘Stop!’ Deety, can you count them?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Okay. If Deety or I yell ‘Stop,’ you stop. You, too, Hilda; give your perception a rest—we’re looking for glaciers versus green worlds. Got it, Jake?”

  “Run out teh-minus axis as fast as I can set and translate. Stop when anyone yells. Aye aye, sir.”

  “Start!”

  “STOP!” yelped Deety.

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

  “On the rocks or straight up? I must estimate the amount of ….”

  “Never mind; we don’t have any vermouth. Did you get your sample?”

  “Yes, Captain. One hundred ice ages, no warm worlds. That’s statistically significant; I’m satisfied.”

  “I’m not. Jake, I want to extrapolate Deety’s sample logarithmically—go to a world teh-minus-one-thousand, then ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and so on. How long will it take? Getting Deety her sample took less than two minutes, I think.”

  “One minute forty-nine seconds,” said Deety.

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

  “Elucidate, please. I’m a sky jockey, not a geometer.”

  “And I’m a geometer, not a philosopher—I don’t want to get us lost. The Burroughs-Cardynge transformation appear to be a sufficient description of six-dimensional space of positive curvature; they’ve worked—so far. But Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics worked just fine as long as the human race stayed on Earth-Zero and didn’t monkey with velocities approaching the speed of light. From there on, the approximations weren’t close enough. I don’t know that the final plenum can be described with only six space-time coordinates. It might be more than six—possibly far more. Cardynge and I discussed this at length—but never reached a conclusion, because abstract mathematics has no content. Mathematics can be used for prediction only after experimentation to test it against the real world.”

  “But we’ve been doing that, Jake—transition, translation, and rotation.”

  “But never very far from our point origin, the world we
call Earth-Zero. I think the extrapolation you propose would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle to …. What world, Deety?”

  “World seventeen thousand seven hundred seventy-eight on teh-minus axis, Pop.”

  “Thanks, Deety. Captain, if we arrived there, we could return to Earth-Zero by one positive setting of that many quants. But I said, ‘If’ … Instead of a recursive superhyper great circle we might follow a helix or some other curve through dimensions we know not of.”

  “Wouldn’t Gay return us simply to T, A, K, E, U, S, H, O, M, E?”

  “Possibly. But those voice 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. Captain, if you and I were bachelors, I would say, ‘Let’s go!’ But we aren’t bachelor explorers, we’re married pioneers.”

  “With a deadline to meet. Copilot, set the next one. Teh-Five-Plus, isn’t it?”

  “Right, Captain.”

  “Cap’n Zebbie, I’m game! The long trip!”

  “Me, too!”

  “Quiet in the peanut gallery! Those babies are ours as much as they are yours—and Jake and I are taking no unnecessary risks. So pipe down or be fined three Brownie points each. Copilot?”

  “Set, Captain.”

  “Execute!”

  “Looks like a nice place … to stop for lunch at least. Hilda, start sniffing for Panki.”

  “Take me down lower, Captain Bligh honey. Even set for extreme range my magic eye can’t see much from this altitude. How about ten thousand klicks above ground?”

  “Will you settle for twenty?”

  “Sissy pants. Yes, if you’ll zip us around the nightside to check for city lights. If they don’t have lighted cities, it’s no place for us.”

  “Except a lunch stop … on some lonely tropical island. I don’t care to lunch with dinosaurs or lions—I might be the lunch. Give her what she wants, Jake, but do it by transiting; an orbit at twenty thousand takes too long. ‘Give me operations … way out on some lonely atoll! For … I am too young to diiiie! I just wanta grow old!’ ”

  “You’re off key, Zebbie.”

  “Mutiny. Anybody spot any city lights? I haven’t.”

  No lighted cities were found. A quick spot check of the daylight side at half a dozen places where cities should be—mouths of major rivers primarily—on any inhabited, civilized planet disclosed none. So I put us down for lunch out on a lonely atoll, first making certain that it had nothing on it but a few palm trees. It was so warm that Deety stripped off her flying suit at once, started her prescribed ration of exercises.

  Hilda joined her; Jake and I set out a picnic lunch, also dressed in stylish tropical skin. The only less than idyllic note came when I flatly refused to permit Deety to swim in the lovely clear lagoon. But Hilda backed by me by pointing out to Deety that a coral lagoon could harbor unsuspected dangers.

  “Deety, that’s not a swimming pool despite how clear it is. Anything living in it has defense of some sort or the breed wouldn’t have survived. The first law of biology is eat or be eaten. We didn’t make that law but we live or die by it. The only thing that keeps us from being eaten is being smarter and more careful. A shark could have been washed over the reef years back, eaten all the fish—and now delighted to have us for lunch.”

  “Ugh!”

  “Exactly. But even coral can be dangerous.”

  XLV

  Jake

  My dear wife Hilda (or all of us, properly) found us a satisfactory planet just barely inside our deadline. Axis teh-positive or -plus took longer to search for the very reason that each Earth-analog was indeed so much like our native planet as to invoke nostalgia. In only a few cases was a planet’s shortcomings so obvious that it could be dismissed in less than a day’s search by perceptron.

  The more nearly an Earth-analog resembled the one arbitrarily designated “Earth-Zero,” the longer the search. (I say “arbitrarily designated” because every locus in a closed plenum of any number of dimensions from one to infinity is equally its “center”—there is no unique “zero” locus. But so strong is the egocentric instinct that even I had to keep reminding myself of this elementary geometric notion. But I knew so little about the actual potential of this apparatus I had invented that I was always afraid of getting lost—no matter how bravely I talked to the others.

  For example, theory called for an angular quantum capable of holding a sheaf of universes equal to one radian divided by e raised to the sixth power twice—but I did not include this option in the controls—partly from lack of skill and tools, partly from sheer funk. Even with the help of the little computer we called Gay (and even the best computer can malfunction, as my daughter keeps reminding me). I doubted my ability to lead us back through such a maze. So all rotations by this first model were exactly ninety degrees. No matter, there were still more universes to visit than a man could touch in one lifetime, more analogs of Earth-Zero than we could see in two weeks—if we had given each one only ten minutes and never stopped to sleep, it would have taken over eleven months on teh-axis alone.)

  So the best we could do was to hurry along and hope, knowing full well that our wives were forbidden to search more than eight hours per day for a maximum of two weeks. After that, the hard decision …. An uninhabited planet could be dismissed in ten minutes (other than as a possible way station). A planet too heavily populated took hardly longer. Once we popped out over our cabin-site-analog—and left at once. Not because of climate (analog worlds grew progressively warmer along Teh-Plus) but because those rugged mountains were covered with buildings as densely as in a major city; we translated at once—we did not stop to guess how badly that planet was overpopulated: we left.

  A planet at too low a level of material culture took hardly longer. A hovel is a hovel no matter what its shape, and a culture that has small sailing vessels and animal-drawn carts as its major transpiration we conclusively assumed not to have advanced medicine, surgery, and obstetrics.

  But most analog worlds out that axis were not so easily rejected; they had good climates, population not excessive by our standards, and high technology by the appearance of their cities, roads, harbors, aircraft, and so forth. These we approached most gingerly—that missile fired at us with no warning in the first world we visited had made both Zeb and me very gun-shy. We approached such planets from high up, with our radar screens at maximum—ready to bounce at the first hint of trouble.

  If there was none, Captain Zeb would order me to transit down to Hilda’s maximum perception range. If he still ran into no trouble, he would enter the atmosphere to let Hilda search for Panki at medium range under Gay’s “sightseeing” voice program, while he watched radar screens, and my daughter and I watched visually to learn what we could of the material level of the culture.

  I must say at once that Hilda never did spot Panki in any world on teh-axis—but several we left rather hurriedly because major countries were too quick on the trigger.

  On one world we wasted three days—not totally wasted, as the experience was useful later. A day of “sightseeing” program showed: a) the planet was free of Panki (Hilda felt certain); b) the natives were human; c) they were neither trigger-happy nor (as well as we could tell) engaged in war or any evident warlike preparations; d) the technological level was acceptable—handsome cities, good roads, mechanized farming, plentiful powered ocean travel, radio. This latter enabled us to learn that the prevailing language in North America was a dialect of English.

  This latter fact seemed almost too good to be true … but consistent with the fact, already established, that Earth-analog of Prime Base shared our history up to 1965, that Earth-analog of the world Tau-Ten-Plus shared our background sufficiently that English was a prime asset to tourist couriers such as our friends Tawm Takus and Kach Kachkan. I tentatively hypothesized a very old theory: that universes branched out from a common root at critical points in hi
story.

  My dear wife told me that my hypothesis did not cover all the data—whereas the universes-of-fiction hypothesis did. I still was not quite ready to swallow “multiperson solipsism,” as the idea that I myself was someone’s fictional creation stuck in my craw. But I was forced in honesty to admit that Occam’s Razor served her theory better than it did mine.

  As may be—these people spoke a variety of English. After listening to it by radio for more than a day, we risked grounding.

  How to go about making a first contact had long been a subject of debate. Our captain had cut through the fog by saying: “Look, there are only two major ways. One is to be as sneaky as Panki. The other is ground on the equivalent of the White House lawn and say, ‘Take me to your leader!’ I’m bored with this dithering. Wake me when you three have it whittled down to one opinion.”

  So saying, he pulled himself through the bulkhead door—we were in high orbit—and closed it, and may have napped.

  An hour later, I rapped on the bulkhead; Zeb rejoined us.

  “Captain,” I said, “we have reached a consensus.”

  “Good.”

  “All of us are afraid of the open approach. The authorities might confiscate our vehicle; we might end up as prisoners.”

  “Monkeys in a cage—with our wagon taken away from us.” Zeb added, “Twice we’ve just missed that.”

  “Precisely. The expression ‘sneaky as Panki’ is distasteful to all of us ….”

  “I so intended it. Wanted you all to face the realities.”

  I went doggedly ahead: “… but sneakiness in itself is not immoral. We have no intention to harm; we merely seek information. I am expendable; therefore I will scout on the ground.”

  “Wait a half! This is consensus? Unanimous?”

  My daughter said, “No, Zebadiah, that’s Pop’s idea. He said that Aunt Hilda and I are barred from taking the risk. Pregnant, you know.”