But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. No time out for eating or for sleeping. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years, on one problem, had she wished.
He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew, what keys she had found out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And—she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.
She was talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion that she could be.
“You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector… but with a vast difference in one respect.”
“You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?” asked Kingsley.
She nodded. “Except that they wouldn’t have used it for driving ships…not then. For Jupiter was winning and everyone was desperate. They didn’t care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon.”
“The geosector is no weapon,” Kingsley declared flatly. “You couldn’t use it near a planetary body.”
“But consider this,” said the girl. “If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn’t it?”
Herb whistled. “I’d say it’d be a weapon,” he said, “and how!”
“They wanted to train it on Jupiter,” Caroline explained. “It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well.”
“But think of what it would have done to the solar system,” ejaculated Kingsley. “Even if the space warp hadn’t distorted space throughout the entire system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the other planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth.”
The girl nodded.
“That’s why I wouldn’t turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space.”
“Why,” said Gary, “you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn’t built until a hundred years ago.”
Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn’t laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.
He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.
“Young lady,” rumbled Kingsley, “it seems to me that you don’t need any help from these Cosmic Engineers.”
She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. “But I do,” she said.
The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.
“The instructions,” Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.
The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and the flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.
Gary’s head swam at the thought of it… that slim wisp of a girl talking across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe, Talking and understanding but not perfectly understanding, perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about the equations she had written on the pad. The tip of her pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.
The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.
The pencil made corrections, added notes and jotted down new equations.
Never once hesitating. Then the light blinked off and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.
Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.
He looked questioningly at the girl.
“Do you understand this?” he rasped.
She nodded blithely.
He flung down the pad. “There’s only one other person in the system who could,” he said. “Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowing what it’s all about. That’s Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he’s in a mental institution back on Earth.”
“Sure,” yelled Herb, “he’s the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a picture of him once.”
They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.
“I understand it well enough to start,” she said. “I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened in my mind. But we can always do that when the time comes.”
“Those equations,” said Kingsley, “represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom.”
“Probably,” Caroline suggested, “the Engineers live on a large and massive world, so large that space would be distorted, where stresses such as are shown in the equations would be the normal circumstance. Beings living on such a world would soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably couldn’t be developed because there’d be no such a thing as a plane surface.”
“What do they want us to do?” asked Evans.
“They want us to build a machine,” said Caroline, “a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them.”
She glanced at Kingsley. “We’ll need strong materials,” she said. “Stronger than anything we know of in the system. Something that will stand up under the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space.”
Kingsley wrinkled his brow.
“I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl,” she said. “Have you experimented with it here?”
Kingsley nodded. “We’ve stilled the electron-whirl,” he said. “Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won’t do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be maintained at close to absolute zero. The least heat and they overcome inertia and start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.
“If we could crystallize the atomic orbit after we had stopped it,” he said, “we’d have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down.”
“We can do it,” Caroline said. “We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their places.”
Kingsley snorted. “Is there anything,” he asked, “that you can’t do with space?”
Caroline laughed. “A lot of things I can’t do, doctor,” she told him. “A few things I can do. I was interested in space. That’s how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I figured out ways to control it. It was something to do to while away the time.”
>
Kingsley glanced around the room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking to see if he had forgotten anything.
“Well,” he rumbled, “what are we waiting for? Let us get to work.”
“Now, wait a second,” interrupted Gary. “Do we want to do this? Are we sure we aren’t rushing into something we’ll be sorry for? After all, all we have to go on are the Voices. We’re taking them on face value alone… and Voices don’t have faces.”
“Sure,” piped up Herb, “how do we know they aren’t kidding us? How do we know this isn’t some sort of a cosmic joke? Maybe there’s a fellow out there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he’s got us all stirred up.”
Kingsley’s face flushed with anger, but Caroline laughed.
“You look so serious, Gary,” she declared.
“It’s something to be serious about,” Gary protested. “We are monkeying around with something that’s entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids playing with an atom bomb. We might set loose something we wouldn’t be able to stop. Something might be using us to help it set up an easy way to get at the solar system. We might be just pulling someone’s chestnuts out of the fire.”
“Gary,” said Caroline softly, “if you had heard that Voice you wouldn’t doubt. I know it’s on the level. You see, it isn’t a voice, really… it’s a thought. I know there’s danger and that we must help, do everything we can. There are other volunteers, you know, other people, or other things, from other parts of the universe.”
“How do you know?” asked Gary fiercely.
“I don’t know how,” she defended herself. “I just know. That’s all. Intuition, perhaps, or maybe a background thought in the Engineer’s mind that rode through with the message.”
Gary looked around at the others. Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He looked at Herb.
“What the hell,” said Herb. “Let’s take a chance.”
Just like that, thought Gary. A woman’s intuition, the burning zeal of a scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome spirit of mankind. No reason, no logic… mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.
Once a mad monk had stood before the crowds and shook a sword in air and shrieked invective against another faith, and, because of this, Christian armies, year after year, broke their strength against the walls of eastern cities.
Those were the Crusades.
This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Man again answering the clarion call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his puny strength, his little brain against great cosmic forces. Man… the damn fool… sticking out his neck.
* * *
Chapter Six
« ^ »
A GHOSTLY machine was taking shape upon the hard, pitted, frozen surface of the field… a crazy machine that glimmered weirdly in the half-light of the stars. A machine with mind-wrenching angles, with flashing prisms and spidery framework, a towering skeleton of a machine that stretched out spaceward.
Made of material in which the atomic motion had been stilled, it stood defiant against the most powerful forces of man or void. Anchored magnetically to the core of the planet, it stood firmly planted, a spidery, frail-appearing thing, but with a strength that would stand against the unimaginable drag of a cosmic space-time warp.
From it long cables snaked their way over the frozen surface to the laboratory power plant. Through those slender cables, their resistance lowered by the bitter cold, tremendous power loads could be poured into the strange machine.
“They’re space-nuts,” grumbled Ted Smith at Gary’s elbow. “They’re fixing to blow Pluto all to hell. I wish there was some way for me to get away from here before the fireworks start.”
Herbs’ voice crackled in Gary’s helmet-phones, answering the complaint.
“Shucks, there just won’t nothing happen. That contraption looks more like something a kid would build with a tinker toy set than a machine. I can’t see, for the life of me, how it’ll ever work.”
“I gave up long ago,” said Gary. “Caroline tried to explain it to me, but I guess I’m just sort of dense. I can’t make head or tall of it. All I know is that it’s supposed to be an anchor post, a thing that will help the Engineers set up this space warp of theirs and after it is set up will operate to hold it in position.”
“I never did set any stock in that Engineer talk,” Ted told him, “but there’s been something I’ve been wanting to tell you two. Haven’t been able to catch you, you’ve been so busy. But I wanted to tell you about it, for you’re the only two who haven’t gone entirely star-batty.”
“What is it?” Gary asked.
“Well, you know,” said Ted, “I don’t attach much meaning to it, but it does seem kind of funny. A few days ago I sneaked out for a walk. Against orders, you know. Not supposed to get out of sight of the settlement. Too many things can happen here.
“But, anyhow, I went for a walk. Out along the mountains and over the carbon dioxide glacier and down into the little valley that lies just over the shoulder of the glacier.”
He paused dramatically.
“You found something there?” asked Gary.
“Sure did,” declared Ted proudly. “I found some ruins. Chiseled white stone. Scattered all over the valley floor. As if there had been a building there at one time and somebody had pulled it down stone by stone and threw the stones around.”
“Sure it wasn’t just boulders or peculiar rock formations?” asked Gary.
“No, sir,” said Ted, emphatically. “There were chisel marks on those stones. Workmen had dressed them at some time. And all of it was white stone. You show me any white stone around here.”
Gary understood what the radio operator meant. The mountains were black, black as the emptiness of space. He turned his head to stare at those jagged peaks that loomed over the settlement, their spearlike points faintly outlined against the black curtain of the void.
“Say,” said Herb, “that sounds as if what the Engineers said about someone else living here at one time might be true.”
“If Ted found building stone, that’s exactly what it means,” Gary asserted.
“That would denote a city of some kind, intelligence of some kind, It takes a certain degree of culture to work stone.”
“But,” argued Herb, “how could anyone have lived here? You know that Pluto cooled quick, lost its lighter gases in a hurry. Its oxygen and carbon dioxide are locked up in snow and ice. Too cold for any life.”
“I know all that,” Gary agreed, “but it seems we can’t be too sure of anything in this business. If Ted is right, it means the Engineers were right on at least one point where we all were wrong. It sort of gives a man more faith in what is going on.”
“Well,” said Ted, “I just wanted to tell you. I was going to go out there again some day and look around, but since then I’ve been too busy. Ever since you sent that story out, space has been full of messages…governmental stuff, messages from scientists and cranks. Don’t give a man no time to himself at all.”
As the radio man walked back to his shack, Gary looked toward the laboratory. Two space-suited figures were coming out of the main lock.
“That’s Caroline and Kingsley,” said Herb. “They’ve been up there to talk to the Engineers again. Got stuck on something. Wanted the Engineers to explain it to them.”
“Looks to me like it’s about finished,” said Gary. “Caroline told me she didn’t know just how much longer it would take, but she had hopes of getting it into working order in another day or two. Tommy’s gone without sleep the last twenty hours, working to get his ship in tip-top shape. They’ve gone over the thing from control panel to rocket tubes.”
“What I’d like to know,” said Herb, irritably, “is just how we’re going to use the ship in getting out to where the Engineers are.”
“Those are instructions,” said Gary. “Instructions from the Engineers. We don’t dare do anything around here unless they say it’s all right.
”
The space-suited figures were coming rapidly down the path to the space-field. Gary hailed them as they came nearer. “Find out what was wrong?” he asked.
Kingsley’s voiced boomed at him. “Several things wrong,” he declared. “This ought to put it in working shape.”
The four of them advanced on the machine. Gary fell into step with Caroline and looked at the girl’s face through her helmet visor. “You look fagged out,” he said.
“I am tired,” she confessed. They walked a few steps. “We had so much to do,” she said, “and apparently so little time to do it in. The Engineers sound as if they are getting desperate. They seem to think the danger is very near.”
“What I can’t figure out,” Gary told her, “is what we are going to do when we get there. They seem to be head and shoulders over us in scientific knowledge. If they can’t work it out, I don’t see how we can help them.”
Her voice was full of weariness as she answered him.
“Neither do I,” she said, “but they seemed so excited when they found out who we were, when I described our solar system to them and told them that the race had originated on the third planet. They asked so many questions about what kind of beings we were. It took a lot of explaining to get across the idea that we were protoplasmic creatures, and when they finally understood that they seemed even more excited.”
“Maybe,” suggested Gary, “protoplasmic beings are a rarity throughout the universe. Maybe they never heard of folks like us before.”
She wheeled on him. “There’s something funny about it all, Gary. Something funny about how anxious they are for us to come, how insistent they are in trying to find out so much about us… the extent of our science and our past history.”
He thought he detected a quaver of fear in her voice. “Don’t let it get you,” he said. “If it gets too funny, we can always quit. We don’t have to play their game, you know.”
“No,” she said, “we can’t do that. They need us, need us to help them save the universe. I’m convinced of that.”