"That would only be in the worst case, Mac. Don't we expect Abdi to stay close to the place he came in?" Something had gone dreadfully awry, when I was the optimist and McAndrew the pessimist. "We have to look for him. What else can we do?"
"I don't know. Let me think for a minute."
I didn't like the sound of that. McAndrew's "minute" for thinking could sometimes last for days. But after only a few moments he said, "You've spent more time with Abdi than I have. How smart is he?"
"Very. But Mac, he's just a kid."
"Aye. But children often think clearer than older people. They have fewer falsehoods cluttering up their brains. He's sure to have looked outside the pinnace, and he'll have made no more sense of that than we have. Less, because he doesn't have the physics to let him interpret what he sees. So what does he do, Jeanie, assuming he's bright and he's logical?"
I said slowly, "He knows he can't rely on anything he sees outside the pinnace. So all he can rely on is—"
"—what's inside. He won't learn anything from sensors that record external conditions. But the readouts that tell him his absolute position in inertial space should be working, because they're working in our own suits. And mine reset to count from zero when we transferred here."
"So did mine. I saw it happen. But we've been drifting ever since."
"We have indeed. But we can reverse course and take ourselves back to zero position coordinates. That will place us on the edge of the region. Abdi insisted that he could fly the pinnace. Assume that he's right, and that he's smart. Then he can take himself back to zero coordinates, too. That will be where he entered this region."
"But Mac, we have no idea whereabouts he was on the edge when he did that. It could be a long way from where we came in."
"True enough. But it has to be on the boundary of the three-dimensional space. That changes the problem, replacing a three-dimensional search by a two-dimensional one. All we have to do is set up a systematic procedure to cover the boundary."
I knew he would already be working out a plan to search a spherical shell rather than the whole interior. In fact he apparently had one already, because he was zooming off in what seemed to me like an arbitrary direction. Without arguing, I followed McAndrew and his attendant arrays of ghost images. Every wasted breath decreased Abdi's chances.
"Of course," he said as we flew along through nothing, "our strategy for finding Abdi relies on there being a peak probability with respect to his intelligence."
He would philosophize at the gates of Hell, and I knew from experience that there was no point in trying to stop him.
"If Abdi's not smart enough," he went on, "he'll never think to go back to the origin of his inertial coordinates. On the other hand, if he is super-smart he will head back to and through that origin of coordinates, to take himself right through the transition zone and into the universe from which he came. For all we know, Abdi could be safely back on board the Hoatzin, wondering where we are. Maybe we should have taken a quick look there ourselves, before trying this search. Or maybe we had it right the first time, and only one of us should have come here while the other stayed behind in case Abdi returned."
Or maybe we should never have agreed to take a hyperactive eleven-year-old with us into the unknown.
Before I could do more than frame that thought, all discussion of alternatives became academic. If time is Nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once, it failed to fulfill its function. The digits on my suit's inertial coordinate readout, which had been ticking steadily toward zero, became an unreadable blur. I felt an acceleration stronger than the suit was designed to provide. McAndrew said, "What the devil," in a tone somewhere between excitement and astonishment; and in that same single moment, the pinnace sprang into view straight ahead. The hatch was open. Before I had time to think of aiming for it, I was through. McAndrew followed, to sprawl beside me on the deck. A split-second later the pinnace itself was darting off at high acceleration in a new direction. Everything around me became a dazzling whirl of rainbow hues.
The colors faded and vanished at the same moment as the acceleration ceased. I was given no time to catch my breath. McAndrew grabbed hold of my arm. I saw Abdi on his other side, also being towed toward the still-open hatch.
Toward, and through.
We were outside the pinnace again. I recognized familiar star patterns, but had no chance to savor them. The Hoatzin was a few hundred meters away, and McAndrew was dragging all three of us single-mindedly toward it.
"Mac!" It was both a question and a protest.
He said one word: "Inside." Then he was pushing us through the Hoatzin's lock, cycling it at maximum speed before we had cleared the opening.
As the lock filled with air I said, "What's the hurry? We're back in our own space, in our own ship. We're safe."
"Aye. Now we are. But look." He reached a gloved hand down to the waist of his suit, grabbed a handful of material, and pulled. The suit—made to withstand a pressure of up to fifty atmospheres, impervious to radiation, and tougher than the most hardened -composites—ripped away to show McAndrew's unzipped tunic and bare belly.
I gripped the left arm of my own suit in my right hand and tugged. Half the sleeve ripped away like wet paper. If that had happened a few minutes earlier, while we floated in vacuum . . .
"Abdi?" I said.
"I'm—I'm—" His teeth were chattering. "I'm . . ."
Either he was trying to tell me that he was alive, which I already knew; or that he was all right, which he certainly wasn't. I stripped off my useless suit and helped him out of his. He was close to catatonic, nothing like the inquisitive and self-confident lad of yesterday.
"When did you realize, Mac?" I gestured at the remnants of my suit, which had disintegrated as I removed it.
"That they would soon be good for nothing?" His own tattered and discarded suit was on the floor and he was at the Hoatzin's control panel. "Soon after we made the transition. My suit's condition monitors suggested it was protecting me, but destroying itself in order to do it. The physical parameters of the neighboring universe may be close to our own, but they're not close enough for long-term survival."
"And you didn't mention that to me?"
"What good would that do? Anyway, who was to say that the readings meant anything over there. I knew that the only way to make a test could be fatal. The only thought in my head was to find Abdi as fast as we could, and then get back here."
"And you did it. Mac, no one should ever suggest again that I'm needed on your expeditions to get you out of trouble. This proves it. I couldn't have saved us. And I still don't understand how you did it."
He had finished work at the controls and the Hoatzin was turning in space, aligning us so that we were set to accelerate back toward Sol. With the rotation completed but the drive still turned off, he swiveled his chair to face me.
"If I thought for a minute I could get away with that line back at the Institute, Jeanie, I might give it a try. But you know me. I'm the System's most incompetent liar. I didn't find Abdi and the pinnace. I didn't bring us out through the transition zone to our own universe. I didn't save us. You saw the way that your own suit accelerated. How did you imagine I could make that happen, when I wasn't even touching you?"
If McAndrew was the System's worst liar, sometimes I think I'm the slowest person in the System to catch on. "If you didn't," I said. "And I certainly didn't. . . ."
I turned to stare at Abdi, who had not moved a millimeter.
McAndrew said, "No. Of course not."
"Then . . ."
"Not me, you, or Abdi. We didn't save ourselves. Somebody knew we were in trouble, and they gave us a hand."
"Then there's life in the other universe? More than life. Intelligence."
"It looks that way." McAndrew initiated the drive. There was no feeling of acceleration, but the living capsule began edging along the axle toward the mass plate. We were on the way home. "I'm wondering if they will beli
eve that there's intelligence in our universe, given the way we blundered in. We have to return there."
He wasn't looking at me, but he must have sensed my instinctive shake of the head. He went on, "We have to, Jeanie. First contact, and already we owe them. We have to go there again—if only to seek a chance to pay them back."
There's something about youth. I don't know quite what it is. I only know I don't have it any more.
On the fifth day of our return journey to Sol, I was watching Abdi dissect a fragment of the helmet of his ruined suit. He had said not a word regarding his experiences in the neighboring universe, and when I asked him about it he told me he didn't remember anything that had happened. He didn't feel that he had nearly been killed, because at eleven the whole concept of mortality is alien. He seemed his old self again.
Or maybe not quite his old self. I saw a caution that had not been there before, a new look-before-you-leap deliberateness in Abdi's actions. And he was making notes, something he had never done. Fazool el-Fazool had said he hoped that a trip with McAndrew would be a broadening experience for his son. Against all the odds, it seemed to have worked out that way.
And McAndrew himself? Well, Abdi may have learned, but Mac certainly hadn't. He couldn't wait to get back to the Institute, where he planned to organize and outfit a new expedition better prepared for the unknowns of the other side.
He didn't want to hear me play the role of Cassandra, telling him how close he had come to being killed, warning him how next time he might not be so lucky. He wanted to talk to Limperis about his ideas, and he spent most of the return trip sitting impatiently at the communications console.
Of course, the general cussedness of Nature guaranteed that when the first faint carrier signal reached us from the Institute, McAndrew would be taking a food break and I would be at the communications console.
"Can you hear me?" I said. "This is the Hoatzin. We are on our way home, and heading straight to the Institute." At our range it was audio only, and I waited patiently through the round-trip signal delay.
"We are receiving you." The operator's voice was weakened and distorted by extreme distance. "Do you need help?"
"No. We've had difficulties, but we're safe now." Then my brain caught up with my mouth. We had not been in touch with the Institute since we left. The communications equipment was in perfect working condition. How did they know we had been in trouble? "What makes you think we might have problems?"
"Well, the flight plan that you filed shows an outward travel time of sixteen days, and a return travel time almost exactly the same. But you've only been gone for twelve days."
McAndrew had come back to stand behind me after the first exchange. He was holding a huge sandwich and his mouth was crammed too full to speak, but while I sat and gawped at the console, he slapped his knee. As soon as could swallow, he spluttered, "I knew it! Or I would have known it when I sat down to make drive settings, if only I'd had the sense to believe the evidence of my own eyes!"
"Mac, in normal speech, please. Not just your idea of normal speech, either—use the sort of language that I can understand."
"In a minute, Jeanie." He leaned over me and said into the console microphone, "Everything here is just fine, and we have results more exciting than you can ever imagine. Contact Professor Limperis. Ask him to organize a conference for senior Institute staff the minute that the Hoatzin docks. And tell everybody that they'll want to be there."
He turned to me, beaming.
"Mac, I thought we didn't have anything—unless you count nearly getting killed."
"Och, that was nothing." He dismissed the near miss with death with a wave of his hand. "We found a new universe, with intelligence in it—friendly intelligence, by the look of it, because they saved us. What more could you ask? But there's more, a whole lot more. Look at that control panel, and tell me what you see."
Since there were about four hundred separate readouts and dials, I saw far more than I could take in. I said, "How about a hint?"
"Start with the chronometer. You can end there, too."
I stared at the instrument. "It's wrong! Days wrong."
"It is. How many days?"
"A bunch. Twenty-one, or twenty-two. Mac, it's reading earlier now than when we arrived at the caesura. I know, because I recorded the time when we turned off the drive. That instrument is supposed to be foolproof. I can't imagine what could make it malfunction the way it has."
"Nor can I. And I think it didn't. When we passed through the caesura, we entered a universe where time runs in the opposite direction from here. At a different rate, too—we felt we were only there for a short while, but we traveled back more than three weeks. The Hoatzin was close to the caesura. We know matter passes through . . ."
I turned to look around me. Over at the other side of the living capsule, Abdi was quietly at work on his suit helmet. McAndrew's words disturbed him not at all. And McAndrew was smiling at me, not at all like a madman. Was I the one who was losing it?
"Mac, do you realize what you're suggesting? If you're right, anyone could travel out, just the way we did, and they would have a way to move backward in time."
"Aye."
"But that's impossible. Time travel is impossible. The whole idea leads straight into loads of paradoxes."
"It does seem to." He sat down next to me, and suddenly seemed to notice what he was holding. He lifted the sandwich to his nose and sniffed, as though he had never seen it before. He nodded. "Salami. And paradoxes. Right enough. We'll have to work through those, but that will be part of the fun."
"And causality, Mac? What about causality? It's a law of nature."
"It is. It is indeed."
He nodded thoughtfully, and took a bite. His next words were distorted and barely intelligible.
"Causality is a law of nature, true enough. But Jeanie, that's all it is. A law of nature. It's not like the second law of thermodynamics. It's not The Law."
˙
JAILHOUSE ROCK
If you have ever wondered how a dashing hero is made, here is some insight, in a story set on the rough and ready frontier that our solar system will turn into in the next few hundred years. It is the origin of a character whose mature exploits were chronicled in Martian Knightlife. Disclaimer: I don't make the puns, I just print 'em. . . . And hats off to Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, who inspired the author. . . .
James P. Hogan
It was storm season in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Above the turbid orange clouds currently obscuring the western parts of Hellas Planitia and the region toward the equator, the "Mocha" freighter flew on a heading north of west. A thousand yards behind, the Skyguards escort gunship that was accompanying it to Lowell base, still a quarter of the planet away, maintained station slightly above and to starboard. Unseen satellites passing high overhead sent periodic updates on the vessels' progress to a monitoring program running in the computers at Skyguards' headquarters, located at Lowell.
As flying machines went, the Mocha was ugly and ungainly—a boxy, open-frame center-body designed to hold a variety of cargo modules; an independently maneuverable crew module in front; one from a selection of propulsion modules attached behind; and on the sides, either high-lift wings for atmospheric duty, or boosters capable of low-orbit injection to connect with the satellite transfer stations. But it was well suited to its role of hauling miscellaneous loads around the newly opening-up planet. Its name derived from the official designation of MOdular Cargo HAndler. Naturally, everybody called them Mocha ships.
At the rear of the flight deck in the crew module, rookie recruit trooper Kieran Thane sat cramped on a folding jump-seat between the rear bulkhead systems panel and an equipment rack, one arm resting on a run of power cables crossing the wall ribs, a close-quarters autocarbine wedged next to his leg beneath. The vessel was owned and operated by a general carrier at Zerolon base on the far side of Mars from Lowell that styled itself grandly "Haulers of Fame," and was carryin
g a cargo of space weaponry and programmable munitions that would fetch premium bid prices among the various mercenary forces, commercial rivals, and other squabbling enterprises taking form among the Belt habitats and beyond if it happened to go astray. Hence, the armed escort ship. Kieran had been put aboard the Mocha as link man between its crew and the escort commander, as routine required. The vessel was built to minimal surface utility standards, which meant that everyone was wearing EV suits with helmets close by, ready at hand.
"Escort Leader calling Mocha." The voice of Lieutenant Coombs sounded in Kieran's phones. "Acknowledge and report."
"Roger. Everything normal here," Kieran responded over the circuit.
"I read you. Out."
The three-man crew's captain, who was called Ursark and occupied the c-com station on the far side of the nav-display table, looked at Kieran with a mixture of cynicism and amusement. "Right on time again. That's a regulation-scrubbed toy soldier you've got there, kid. Does he come with a key sticking out of his back, or batteries?"
"I . . . guess everyone does things the right way until they get to know where they can cut corners," was all Kieran could think of to say in reply.
"Well, I'm sure glad it's not me who stands to get shot while he's learning," Ursark drawled. He seemed to be trying to goad. Kieran wasn't sure why. Probably just part of his nature. Kieran didn't respond, but kept his eyes on the windshield in front of the other two crewmen and watched the slowly creeping vista of whipped cotton candy stirred by descending canyons of clearer air. Occasional upthrusts of rock loomed as shadows, sometimes breaking through into the sunlight like yellow-brown icebergs riding in an ocean of orange foam.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 4
