by Bob Shaw
Tallon ripped off the eyeset and lay back in the big chair with his hands pressed over his eyes, his mind racing. He had forgotten the flash that had burned into his optic nerves when he'd jumped the Lyle Star out of New Wittenburg. There was nothing in any book that dealt with light flashes occurring in null-space; in fact most people experienced a momentary blindness during the transition. He listened to the computer and it was quiet, which meant he had not materialized within range of any planet in any part of the big, cold galaxy.
Mentally shrugging, he prepared to make another jump. This time he lowered the eyeset's sensitivity to almost zero, and when the flash came it was greatly reduced in intensity. He took the eyeset off and made another jump that produced no light at all. With the eyeset back on, he made a fourth jump, and the flash was there again.
Tallon began to get excited, without knowing why. The flash was associated with the eyeset -- that much seemed certain. But what was causing it? Was there some form of radiation in null-space that the eyeset was picking up? Hardly, because the circuits were designed to screen out anything except the incredibly subtle "phasing-of-phases" emanations from glial cells. What else then? There were no people in the null-space continuum.
Tallon got up from the seat and began to pace the control room -- eight steps to the wall, turn, eight steps back.
He remembered the conversation with Helen Juste about her brother's work for the Emm Luther probe-design center. Carl Juste had been working on an idea that the null-space universe might be extremely small, perhaps only a matter of yards in diameter. Could the reason no normal radio equipment ever worked in null-space (thus preventing humans from mapping its topography) be that they swamped themselves in their own signals, the troughs in the wave profiles filling up as they traveled endlessly around the tiny universe? If that were so, then the human eye -- which transmitted its information not by amplitude, frequency, or even phase modulation, but by phasing of phases -- could very well be the only piece of "electronic" equipment capable of operating in null-space without completely obliterating its own signal characteristics. And the eyeset could be the first receiver to work in null-space. But the question remained: What was causing the flash?
Tallon stopped short as the answer hit him: There were people in the null-space universe! The time taken for the warp generators to set up their field and collapse it again was less than two seconds on a minimum increment jump, but the trade lanes of the empire were busy. Millions of tons of freight and passengers passed through the zigzag routes of galactic commerce every hour, so at any given instant there were thousands of human beings in the null-space continuum. The blurring effect, caused by the signal repetition in the claustrophobic universe, could be enough to unite all their optic-nerve emanations into one vast, unorchestrated output.
He felt his heart pound with excitement. The glial-cell emanations were so weak as to be practically nonexistent. It was just possible they could cross the null-space universe only a few times before dying out, which meant there might well be directional information in the flash they produced in the eyeset -- to say nothing of the possibility of a form of null-space travel controlled by human will instead of by the dictates of an alien geometry.
Tallon stood still for a moment. Then he started down the corridor heading for the Lyle Star's maintenance workshop.
After a few minutes of fumbling among the tool racks, Tallon managed to identify a heavy power saw with a conventional reciprocating blade. He chose it in preference to a laser saw, on which it would be too easy for a blind man to lose his fingers.
Carrying the saw on his shoulder, he went to the stern of the ship, skirting the bales of compressed protein plant, and went to work on the first layer of radiation screening. He cut three panels, each measuring five feet by two feet, from the inch-thick material; then cut a smaller one, two-feet square. The metal-seeded plastic was cumbersome, and he fell several times while getting it up to the control deck.
With the screens in position, he made several attempts to use a multiwelder on them, but his blindness was too much of a handicap. Putting the welder aside, he made crude angle brackets by flattening and bending empty food cans, and bolted them to the plastic panels. The work took a long time -- even a familiar hand drill became a tricky thing to use without sight -- but in the end he had constructed something like a sentry box. He changed the bit in the drill and bored a single pinhole in the central wall of the box.
Tallon's heart sank when be tried to move the box to where he wanted it and felt its uncompromising weight. He levered it unsuccessfully for a few minutes before remembering he was in a spaceship, an environment in which weight was a contrived luxury. He found the master switch for the artificial gravity system and turned it off, and the box was a lot easier to handle. He positioned it in front of the captain's chair, with the hollow side facing aft, and turned the gravity on again.
Hoping for success and fearing disappointment, Tallon clambered over the central chair and worked himself forward into the box. The open side was almost in contact with the footrest of the chair, and when he knelt on the square of deck enclosed by the box's three walls he was effectively screened from the direct-vision panels. He put his right hand around the side of the box, drew the null-space drive console close to him, and found the jump button. With his left hand he located the pinhole -- now the only channel by which optic-nerve signals could reach him -- and positioned his eyes directly behind it.
This time when he hit the jump button the flash was -- as he had hoped -- no more than a sudden brief glow of bearable intensity. Now it was time for the crucial test. He made a series of jumps, being careful to keep his head in the same relationship to the pinhole; then he got out of the box, grinning with satisfaction. The flashes had varied in intensity.
Ignoring his insistent hunger pangs, Tallon de-activated the null-space drive' unit and threw the warp generators over to manual control. The Lyle Star was now set up to make extended visits to the null-space universe without altering its position in either plane of existence.
Tallon detached a simple numerical computing module from the main installation and spent some time familiarizing himself with its keyboard, working to recover the old and almost forgotten skill by which his fingers made the instrument an extension of his brain. When he was ready he visualized himself as being at the center of a hollow sphere, and he assigned basic coordinates to two thousand regularly spaced points on the sphere's inner surface.
The next step of the project was to rotate the Lyle Star about its three major axes, lining up the prow with every point in turn. At each position he made the transit into null-space, estimated on a simple arbitrary scale the brightness of the signal he was receiving, then came back and fed the information into the computer.
He had to stop for sleep three times before it was finished, but in the end he had in his hands -- pitifully incomplete though it was -- man's first map of the null-space universe.
Precisely, it was a low-definition computer model of the disposition of the galactic trade lanes, as seen from one point in null-space. What he needed now was a similar model of the normal-space universe as seen from the same point. With that, he could turn both over to the big computer and let it draw a comparison. There were nineteen worlds in the empire, and as the initial and terminal portals for all but two of them were close to Earth, the normal-space model would show a marked concentration in that region. The null-space map would not show an identical concentration, as there was not a one-to-one correspondence between the two continuums, but Tallon hoped a computer would find some correlation between the two. And if it did -- he was home, in more than one sense.
As a kind of hubristic celebration, he decided to treat himself to a fine meal while thinking over the next step. He cooked an extra large steak and began methodically reducing his stock of beer. When he had eaten he sat quietly on a stool in the galley and assessed the situation. He had done pretty well without eyes so far, but that was because he was
tackling familiar problems with instruments he could handle almost by instinct. Building up a computer model of his own normal-space universe would, paradoxically, be more difficult. He would not be able to "see" the density of the interwoven space routes, and the alternative was to feed in the galactic coordinates of every portal. This would be a big job -- the journey from Emm Luther to Earth, for example, would involve feeding in three coordinates for every one of the eighty thousand portals. It could be done, of course -- the data would be in storage somewhere -- but without eyes, the going would be . . . rough. The word "impossible" had sprung into his mind and been thrust aside.
Tallon drank steadily, feeling his earlier elation subside. Because of his blindness it looked as though he would have to explore the main computing facility, taking it apart and assembling it again in the dark, merely to get to know it. Then he would have to listen to everything in its random access memory, until he obtained the data he needed. That could take five or ten years. He could starve to death before he accomplished what a sighted man, able to read the computer's language, could do in hours.
Tallon began to doze, but was awakened by a furtive, squeaking noise he had not heard for many years. He froze for a moment before identifying the sound. He was listening to a descendant of the first stowaway that had ever slipped on board a ship back in the dawn ages when man was pitting his first flimsy ships against the seas of Earth.
It was a rat.
twenty-two
Tallon had forgotten there were no lights shining in the cargo hold. He found the lighting panel on the control deck and clicked on every tube in the ship, but even with the eyeset at full gain he picked up nothing. This, he concluded, was because there was too much screening between him and the rat, or because the rat was hiding beyond the reach of light. Either or both of these factors had prevented him from discovering the animal before it came forward in search of food.
He went out of the control room and along the central corridor. Standing at the handrail of the transverse catwalk he detected something, not so much a glimmer of light as a slight lessening of darkness. It was a new type of problem. He had not only to adjust to having his eyes separated from his body, but also to deduce exactly where his eyes were, from very slender clues.
The rat was probably somewhere in the bales of protein plant, but remembering how quickly it had vanished when he'd grabbed for it in the galley, Tallon felt there was no point in shifting the cargo. He decided to set a nonlethal trap.
There was the old trick of upending a box, tilting it with a short stick propped under one side, and jerking the support away when the quarry was underneath. He changed his mind about it when he recalled a boyhood experiment that had resulted in an unexpectedly speedy mouse being flattened by an edge of the box. In the present circumstances, the rat, which had probably crept aboard at Parane, was more valuable than a champion racehorse.
Tallon took some bread from the galley, put it down near the bales of cargo, and lay down close by. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. As the minutes dragged by he found himself dozing off. He fought it determinedly for a while; then he began to notice a gradual increase in brightness. There was a shifting of dim planes, areas of patchy grayness emerged from the darkness, followed by an irregular area of brightness like the mouth of a cave. A huge shape stirred near by, frighteningly; red eyes gleamed, speculatively and coldly. Tallon kept his breathing steady. He knew that his rat had merely passed close to another rat on its way out of their lair.
Quite suddenly he could see bright metal floor plates from close up, stretching away toward dark horizons like a lifeless desert. There was an alien sky above, a suggestion of cavernous vastness. The interior of the hold, as viewed by a rat, was an alien and unfriendly universe in which the natural instinct was to run for the safety of dark corners, for the solace of red-eyed mates in the black caves.
Tallon wondered, uneasily, if the eyeset might be a more effective receiver than he had imagined. What if there were a link-up between the signals fed to the visual cortex and the other mental processes of the animal or person concerned, a kind of emotional overlap? Perhaps if he tuned in on a bull that was looking at a waving cloth he would pick up undertones of anger. Perhaps using Cherkassky's eyes had made him a ruthless killer, an instrument that turned the little man's own feral instincts back on himself in a new manifestation of poetic justice. In that case, had Helen's eyes brought him love?
Absorbed with this idea, Tallon barely noticed the little mound of bread come into view as the rat neared it. The mound got nearer, became a tumbled mountainside of food; then his own gigantic, bearded, dreaming face loomed on the threatening horizon. The scene froze for a long time, and Tallon forced himself to remain motionless. Finally the rat began to advance again. Tallon waited until the glistening cellular structure of the bread was very close before springing forward. Seen through the rat's eyes, his attempt to snatch it was almost laughable.
At the first movement of the slumbering giant's tree-trunk fingers everything blurred, and he was back in the half-world of dimly seen shapes. He tried three more times, with the same result, before admitting to himself that he would have to find a better way. What happens, he thought, if I can't catch it? The tableau becomes even more ridiculous. In the metal bubble of light and air a man with plastic eyes crawls in endless pursuit of a rodent, never catching it because the only time he can see it is when it sees him. . . .
"If a good swordsman challenges you to a duel," Tallon said aloud, "you insist on fighting with pistols."
The sound of his voice in the lonely stillness of the ship reminded him that he was, after all, a human being, a member of the species whose special weapon was thought, something it was disturbingly easy to forget while his eyes crept in darkness under the cargo.
He picked up the bread and carried it forward, setting it on the plates at the end of the control-deck corridor. He stopped for a moment in the galley, then went on into the control room and sat down. This time Tallon waited until the rat was nose-deep in the mountain of food before he made his move.
He switched off the artificial gravity.
As the struggling, shrilling rat floated into the air Tallon swam toward it, ready with a transparent plastic jar taken from the galley. At the sight of him the rat became frantic, whipping its body about in the air like a landed fish, presenting Tallon -- who got only fragmentary, whirling glimpses of himself -- with a delicate problem in ballistics. On the second attempt he scooped up the writhing animal, put the lid loosely back on the jar, and moved forward again, smiling slightly as the plastic container vibrated in his hand.
The first thing Tallon did with his new eyes was to instruct the Lyle Star to find out where it was.
It took the astrogation complex only a few seconds to take crude bearings from the other seventeen galaxies of the home cluster, then refine and confirm its findings with quasar readings. The ship was about 10,000 light-years from the galactic center, and about 35,000 light-years from Earth. Tallon was a hardened star tramp, but it was difficult to look at the glowing figures hanging in the air above the computer without an icy sense of dismay. The distance across which he hoped to pick his way was so great that the light from Sol could not reach him; it would have been absorbed by interstellar dust on the way. But if there were no dust, and if he had a telescope of unlimited power and resolution, he could have looked at Earth and seen Upper Paleolithic men beginning to assert supremacy over the forests of Earth, proudly carrying their newly perfected weapons of flint.
Tallon tried to visualize himself successfully crossing that unimaginable void -- seated in the big chair, plastic button eyes blind to the flowing starscapes, a captive rat blinking malevolently in a plastic jar on Tallon's knees -- guided only by an idea born in blindness in his own mind and now spinning endlessly in the brain cells of a computer.
Fantastic as the vision was, he had to go ahead and try.
To build his model of the space routes, Tallon transfer
red the position of every portal, expressed as absolute coordinates, into the computer's working volume and converted them to coordinates based on the Lyle Star's present position. This took some time, but it gave him a map that was the normal-space equivalent of the one he already had of null-space. He then plugged the module containing the latter back into the main facility and programmed it to find the correspondence, if any existed. There was also the possibility that there was a genuine correspondence so attenuated that it would be found only by one of the planet-wide computer networks such as existed on Earth, but he refused to dwell on that.
An hour later the computer chimed softly and a set of equations was born in the air above it, the glowing symbols hanging silently over its solution projector. There was no necessity for Tallon to understand it -- the astrogation complex was capable of absorbing and acting on the information by itself -- but he had a natural interest in seeing for himself what could very well be the mathematical touchstone that would convert null-space lead to normal-space gold.
For a moment the equations looked completely incomprehensible, as though he were taking them in with not only a rat's eyes but a rat's brain as well. He stared at the figures, holding the plastic jar up in front of them, then they seemed to shift into focus as his dormant mathematical facilities were stirred into activity. Tallon recognized the elements of a four-dimensional wave surface, the quartic, and suddenly realized he was looking at an incomplete and camouflaged definition of a Kummer surface. That meant null-space was analogous to a second-degree singularity surface -- a knobbly interconnected entity, with sixteen real nodes and as many double tangent planes. No wonder then that, with a negligible sample of referent points, the years of research into null-space astrogation had got precisely nowhere.
