by Issac Asimov
The message was as private as the unique characteristics of his own brain waves, and in all the universe, with its quadrillions of human beings, the odds against a duplication sufficiently close to allow one man to pick up another’s personal wave was a twenty-figured number to one.
Jonti’s brain tickled to the call as it whined through the endless empty incomprehensibility of hyperspace.
“. . calling . . calling . . calling…calling…
Sending was not quite so simple a job as receiving. A mechanical contrivance was needed to set up the highly specific carrier wave that would carry back to the contact beyond the Nebula. That was contained in the ornamental button that he carried on his right shoulder. It was automatically activated when he stepped into his volume of space polarization, and after that ne had only to think purposefully and with concentration.
“Here I ami” No need for more specific identification.
The dull repetition of the calling signal halted and became words that took form within his mind. “We greet you, sir. Widemos has been executed. The news is, of course, not yet public.”
“It does not surprise me. Was anyone else implicated?”
“No, sir. The Rancher made no statements at any time. A brave and loyal man.”
“Yes. But it takes more than simply bravery and loyalty, or he would not have been caught. A little more cowardice might have been useful. No matter! I have spoken to his son, the new Rancher, who has already had his brush with death. He will be put to use.”
“May one inquire in what manner, sir?”
“It is better to let events answer your question. Certainly I cannot foretell consequences at this early date. Tomorrow he will set off to see Hinrik of Rhodia.”
“Hinrik! The young man will run a fearful risk. Is he aware that—”
“I have told him as much as I can,” responded Jonti sharply. “We cannot trust him too far until he has proved himself. Under the circumstances as they exist, we can only view him as a man to be risked, like any other man. He is expendable, quite expendable. Do not call me here again, as I am leaving Earth.”
And, with a gesture of finality, Jonti broke the connection mentally.
Quietly and thoughtfully, he went over the events of the day and the night, weighing each event. Slowly, he smiled. Everything had been arranged perfectly, and the comedy might now play itself out.
Nothing had been left to chance.
CHAPTER THREE
The view-room was not open to the passengers for the first three hours of the flight, and there was a long line waiting when the atmosphere had been left behind and the double doors were ready to separate. There were present not only the usual hundred-percent turnout of all Planetaries (those, in other words, who had never been in space before), but a fair proportion of the more experienced travelers as well.
The vision of Earth from space, after all, was one of the tourist “musts.”
The view-room was a bubble on the ship’s “skin,” a bubble of curved two-foot-thick, steel-hard transparent plastic. The retractile iridium-steel lid which protected it against the scouring of the atmosphere and its dust particles had been sucked pack. The lights were out and the gallery was full. The faces peering over the bars were clear in the Earth-shine.
Among the watchers was Biron Farrill. He sat by himself in the front row, arms upon the railing, eyes brooding and thoughtful. This was not the way he had expected to leave Earth. It was the wrong manner, the wrong ship, the wrong destination.
His tanned forearm rubbed against the stubble of his chin and he felt guilty about not having shaved that morning. He’d go back to his room after a while and correct that.
Meanwhile, he hesitated to leave. There were people here. In his room he would be alone.
Or was that just the reason he should leave?
He did not like the new feeling he had, that of being hunted; that of being friendless.
All friendship had dropped from him. It had shriveled from the very moment he had been awakened by the phone call less than twenty-four hours earlier.
“Mr. Malaine.”
The name was repeated two or three times before Biron started at the respectful touch upon his shoulder and looked up.
The robot messenger said again, “Mr. Malaine,” and for five seconds Biron stared blankly, until he remembered that that was his temporary name. It had been penciled lightly upon the ticket which Jonti had given him. A stateroom had been reserved in that name.
“Yes, what is it? I am Malaine.”
The messenger’s voice hissed very faintly as the spool within whirled off its message. “I have been asked to inform you that your stateroom has been changed, and that your baggage has already been shifted. If you will see the purser, you will be given your new key. We trust that this will cause no inconvenience for you.”
“What’s all this?” Biron whirled in his seat, and several of the thinning group of passengers, still watching, looked up at the explosive sound. “What’s the idea?”
Of course, it was no use arguing with a machine that had merely fulfilled its function. The messenger had bowed its metal head respectfully, its gently fixed imitation of a human smile of ingratiation unchanging, and had left.
Biron strode out of the view-room and accosted the ship’s officer at the door with somewhat more energy than he had planned.
“Look here. I want to see the captain.”
The officer showed no surprise. “Is it important, sir?”
“It sure as Space is. I’ve just had my stateroom shifted without my permission and I’d like to know the meaning of it.”
Even at the time, Biron felt his anger to be out of proportion to the cause, but it represented an accumulation of resentment. He had nearly been killed; he had been forced to leave Earth like a skulking criminal; he was going he knew not where to do he knew not what; and now they were pushing him around aboard ship. It was the end.
Yet, through it all, he had the uncomfortable feeling that Jonti, in his shoes, would have acted differently, perhaps more wisely. Well, he wasn’t Jonti.
The officer said, “I will call the purser.”
“I want the captain,” insisted Biron.
“If you wish, then.” And after a short conversation through the small ship’s communicator suspended from his lapel, he said urbanely, “You will be called for. Please wait.”
Captain Hirn Gordell was a rather short and thickset man, who rose politely and leaned over his desk to shake hands with Biron when the latter entered.
“Mr. Malaine,” he said, “I am sorry we had to trouble you.
He had a rectangular face, iron-gray hair, a short, well-kept mustache of slightly darker hue, and a clipped smile. So am I,” said Biron. “I had a stateroom reservation to which I was entitled and I feel that not even you, sir, had the right to change it without my permission.”
“Granted, Mr. Malaine. But, you understand, it was rather an emergency. A last-minute arrival, an important man, insisted on being moved to a stateroom closer the gravitational center of the ship. He had a heart condition and it was important to keep ship’s gravity as low as possible for him. We had no choice.”
“All right, but why pick on me as the one to be shifted?”
“It had to be someone. You are traveling alone; you are a young man who we felt would have no difficulty in taking a slightly higher gravity.” His eyes traveled automatically up and down Biron s six-feet-two of hard musculature. “Besides, you will find your new room rather more elaborate than ^our old one. You have not lost by the exchange. No indeed. ’ The captain stepped from behind his desk. “May I show you your new quarters personally?”
Biron found it difficult to maintain his resentment. It seemed reasonable, this whole matter, and then again, not reasonable either.
The captain was saying as they left his quarters, “May I have your company at my table for tomorrow night’s dinner? Our first Jump is scheduled for that time.”
Biro
n heard himself saying, “Thank you. I will be honored.”
Yet he thought the invitation strange. Granted that the captain was merely trying to soothe him, yet surely the method was stronger than necessary.
The captain’s table was a long one, taking up an entire wall of the salon. Biron found himself near the center, taking an unsuitable precedence over others. Yet there was his place card before him. The steward had been quite firm; there was no mistake.
Biron was not particularly overmodest. As son of the Rancher of Widemos, there had never been any necessity for the development of any such characteristic. And yet as Biron Malaine, he was quite an ordinary citizen, and these things ought not to happen to ordinary citizens.
For one thing, the captain had been perfectly correct about his new stateroom. It was more elaborate. His original room had been what his ticket called for, a single, second class, while the replacement was a double room, first. There was a bathroom adjoining, private, of course, equipped with a stall shower and an air dryer.
It was near “officer’s country,” and the presence of uniforms was almost overpowering. Lunch had been brought to his room on silver service. A barber made a sudden appearance just before dinner. All this was perhaps to be expected when one traveled on a luxury space liner, first class, but it was too good for Biron Malaine.
It was far too good, for by the time the barber had arrived, Biron had just returned from an afternoon walk that had taken him through the corridors in a purposely devious path. There had been crewmen in his path wherever he had turned—polite, clinging. He shook them free somehow and reached 140 D, his first room, the one he had never slept in.
He stopped to light a cigarette and, in the interval spent thus, the only passenger in sight turned a corridor. Biron touched the signal light briefly and there was no answer.
Well, the old key had not been taken from him yet. An oversight, no doubt. He placed the thin oblong sliver of metal into its orifice and the unique pattern of leaden opacity within the aluminum sheath activated the tiny phototube. The door opened and he took one step inside.
It was all he needed. He left and the door closed automatically behind him. He had learned one thing immediately. His old room was not occupied; neither by an important personage with a weak heart nor by anyone else. The bed and furnishings were too neat; no trunks, no toilet articles were in sight; the very air of occupancy was missing.
So the luxury they were surrounding him with served only to prevent his taking further action to get back to his original room. They were bribing him to stay quietly out of the old room. Why? Was it the room they were interested in, or was it himself?
And now he sat at the captain’s table with the questions unanswered and rose politely with the rest as the captain entered, strode up the steps of the dais on which the long table was set, and took his place.
Why had they moved him?
There was music in the ship, and the walls that separated the salon from the view-room had been retracted. The lights were low and tinged with orange-red. The worst of such space sickness as there might have been after the original acceleration or as the result of first exposure to the minor gravity variations between various parts of the ship had passed by now; the salon was full.
The captain leaned forward slightly and said to Biron, “Good evening, Mr. Malaine. How do you find your new room?”
“Almost too satisfactory, sir. A little rich for my way of life.” He said it in a flat monotone, and it seemed to him that a faint dismay passed momentarily over the captain’s face.
Over the dessert, the skin of the view-room’s glass bubble slid smoothly back into its socket, and the lights dimmed to nearly nothing. Neither sun, earth, nor any planet was in view on the large, dark screen. They were facing the Milky Way, that longwise view of the Galactic Lens, and it made a luminous diagonal track among the hard, bright stars.
Automatically the tide of conversation ebbed. Chairs shifted so that all faced the stars. The dinner guests had become an audience, the music a faint whisper.
The voice over the amplifiers was clear and well balanced in the gathered quiet.
“Ladies, gentlemen! We are ready for our first Jump. Most of you, I suppose, know, at least theoretically, what a Jump is. Many of you, however—more than half, in point of fact—have never experienced one. It is to those last I would like to speak in particular.
“The Jump is exactly what the name implies. In the fabric of space-time itself, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. That is a natural law, first discovered by one of the ancients, the traditional Einstein, perhaps, except that so many things are credited to him. Even at the speed of light, of course, it would take years, in resting time, to reach the stars.
“Therefore one leaves the space-time fabric to enter the little-known realm of hyperspace, where time and distance have no meaning. It is like traveling across a narrow isthmus to pass from one ocean to another, rather than remaining at sea and circling a continent to accomplish the same distance.
“Great amounts of energy are required, of course, to enter this ‘space within space’ as some call it, and a great deal of ingenious calculation must be made to insure reentry into ordinary space time at the proper point. The result of the expenditure of this energy and intelligence is that immense distances can be traversed in zero time. It is only the Jump which makes interstellar travel possible.
’The Jump we are about to make will take place in about ten minutes. You will be warned. There is never more than some momentary minor discomfort; therefore, I hope all of you will remain calm. Thank you.”
The ship lights went out altogether, and there were only the stars left.
It seemed a long while before a crisp announcement filled the air momentarily: “The Jump will take place in exactly one minute.” And then the same voice counted the seconds backwards: “Fifty . forty . thirty…twenty…ten …five three…two…one…”
It was as though there had been a momentary disconuity in existence, a bump which joggled only the deep inside of a man’s bones.
In that immeasurable fraction of a second, one hundred light-years had passed, and the ship, which had been on the outskirts of the solar system, was now in the depths of interstellar space.
Someone near Biron said shakily, “Look at the stars!”
In a moment the whisper had taken life through the large room and hissed itself across the tables: “The stars! See!”
In that same immeasurable fraction of a second the star view had changed radically. The center of the great Galaxy, which stretched thirty thousand light-years from tip to tip, was closer now, and the stars had thickened in number. They spread across the black velvet vacuum in a fine powder, backdropping the occasional brightness of the nearby stars.
The lights went on then, and Biron’s thoughts were snapped out of space as suddenly as they had entered it. He was in a space liner’s salon again, with a dinner dragging to an end, and the hum of conversation rising to a prosaic level again.
He glanced at his wrist watch, half looked away, then, very slowly, brought the wrist watch into focus again. He stared at it for a long minute. It was the wrist watch he had left in his bedroom that night; it had withstood the killing radiation of the bomb, and he had collected it with the rest of his belongings the next morning. How many times had he looked at it since then? How many times had he stared at it, taken mental note of the time and no note at all of the other piece of information it shouted at him?
For the plastic wristband was white, not blue. It was white!
Slowly the events of that night, all of them, fell into place. Strange how one fact could shake all the confusion out of them.
He rose abruptly, murmuring, “Pardon me!” under his breath. It was a breach of etiquette to leave before the captain, but that was a matter of small importance to him then.
He hastened to his room, striding up the ramps rapidly, rather than waiting for the non-gravity elevators. He locke
d the door behind him and looked quickly through the bathroom and the built-in closets. He had no real hope of catching anyone. What they had had to do, they must have done hours ago.
Carefully he went through his baggage. They had done a thorough job. With scarcely any sign to show that they had come and gone, they had carefully withdrawn his identification papers, a packet of letters from his father, and even his capsular introduction to Hinrik of Rhodia.
That was why they had moved him. It was neither the old room nor the new that they were interested in; merely the process of moving. For nearly an hour they must have legitimately—legitimately, by Space!—concerned themselves with his baggage, and served their own purposes thereby.
Biron sank down upon the double bed and thought furiously, but it didn’t help. The trap had been perfect. Everything had been planned. Had it not been for the completely unpredictable chance of his leaving his wrist watch in the bedroom that night, he would not even now have realized how close-meshed the Tyranni’s net through space was.
There was a soft burr as his door signal sounded.
“Come in,” he said.
It was the steward, who said respectfully, “The captain wishes to know if there is anything he can do for you. You seemed ill as you left the table.”
“I’m all right,” he said.
How they watched him! And in that moment he knew that there was no escape, and that the ship was carrying him politely, but surely, to his death.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sander Jonti met the other’s eyes coldly. He said, “Gone, you say?
Rizzett passed a hand over his ruddy face. “Something is gone. I don’t know its identity. It might have been the document we’re after, certainly. All we know about it is that it had been dated somewhere in the fifteenth to twenty-first century of Earth’s primitive calendar, and that it is dangerous.”
