“Fortunately, one can discover what this determination for the future is. Time has what you can call side bands—a sort of harmonic. We can read directly what time will cause to be formed, up to twenty-four hours in the future. Mathematicians have an inkling of this when they calculate object paths and positions. But it can be read directly.”
He reached down and pulled a case out of a locker. It was one of the two time-sights which he had brought aboard. He showed me where the variable knob was and had me point it at the door.
I didn’t know what I expected to see. The instrument was easy to hold, like a little camera. So I thought I would humor him and pretend to work it. The image was awful when seen through the eyepiece: it was green; it was more like a picture done on a printing machine with dots than a true picture of something. Still, I could make out the entrance to the room.
I twiddled the big knob on the side of it, not expecting more than additional dots. Then I seemed to see a shape. It seemed to be leaving the room. I looked at the door not through the machine. There was nobody there. I twiddled the knob again and got the shape back.
If you stretched your eyeballs and were good at reading dots, that image looked an awful lot like my back!
I twiddled the knob again. It made the image leave again. The image, now that I was more accustomed to it, looked defeated, all caved in! It made me angry. I wouldn’t be leaving this room, all caved in! I thrust the time-sight back at him.
He read the dial: “Six minutes and twenty-four seconds. What did you see?”
I wasn’t going to let him win anything. I shrugged. But I was cross.
“You have to have this to steer a ship running at high speeds,” he said. “It tells you in advance whether you have run into anything and you can, in now, steer to avoid doing that. Life can alter things.”
I determined right then to change leaving this room, caved in. “None of this excuses running these engines flat out just to get there so we can wait!”
“Oh, yes,” said Heller, recollecting what we were supposed to be talking about. “The Will-be Was engines.
“Now, in the center of a Will-be Was there is an ordinary warp-drive engine just to give power and influence space. There is a sensor, not unlike this time-sight, but very big. It reads where time predetermines a mass to be. Then the engine makes a synthetic mass that time incorrectly reads to be half as big as a planet. The ordinary power plant thrusts this apparent mass against time itself. According to the time pattern, that mass, apparently HUGE, should not be there. Time rejects it. You get a thrust from the rejection. But, of course, the thrust is far too great as the mass is only synthetic. This causes the engine base to be literally hurled through space.
“You can feel a slight unsteadiness in the ship. A jumpiness. That’s because the drive is operating intermittently. As soon as it is hurled, it then sends another false message to time and is hurled again.
“Unfortunately, on a ship this light, having so little mass, the cycle just keeps on adding up. The sensors read the new time determination, the synthetic mass is again slammed against time, time rejects it. ‘Will-be,’ says the mass synthesizer. ‘Was,’ insists time. Over and over. And the speed simply tries to rise up to infinity. There’s no friction except an energy wake, no real work to do, so fuel efficiency is good.
“The ship travels in the opposite direction to which the core drive in the Will-be Was converter is pointed. So steering is done by moving the direction of the small internal engine.
“As you are traveling far, far faster than the speed of light, the visual image of an obstruction can’t reach you in time and you have to guide the vessel by spotting future collisions. You see yourself collide, using the time-sight, with some heavenly mass in the future, so you change your course in the present and you don’t collide. Life can control such things.
“Battleships have big time-sights geared to their speed. But this one is manual and has to be adjusted.”
With a pop, the screen blew out. That startled me. I said, “You should shield those engines so they don’t spray power all over the ship!”
“Oh, these sparks aren’t from the engine room. We’re traveling so fast that we are intercepting too many photons—light particles from stars. We’re also crossing force lines of gravity you wouldn’t ordinarily detect, but at this speed, it kind of makes us into an electric motor. We are picking up incidental charge faster than we can use it or shed it.”
“You were going to fix that!” I had him there.
He shrugged. Then he brightened. “You want to see it?”
Before I could protest, he reached over and hit the buttons that turned the whole black surround of walls into a viewscreen which gave the exterior scene of space we were in!
Suddenly, I was just perched on a chair and floor that existed like a platform in space.
I almost fainted.
I have seen a high-speed boat going through a lake, throwing up enormous fans of spray and leaving a vast turbulence of writhing wake. Turn that yellow-green* and make it three-dimensional and that was what I was looking at.
________
*The color “yellow-green” is as close as I can come in Earth language to the actual color as there is not yet a vocabulary (or physics) for hyperluminary phenomena.—Translator.
Horrifying!
The energy shedding flared out in twisting, terrifying swirls to every side!
Behind us, for what might be a hundred miles, the collisions of tortured particles still churned!
“My Gods!” I yelled. “Is that why Tug Two blew up?”
He seemed to be admiring the churning Hells around us. It took him a bit to notice I had spoken.
“Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t think that was why she blew up. Could have been, but not really likely.”
He was punching some buttons on the small independent viewscreen he had been playing the game on. “I was calculating what my ability to jump and my rate of fall would be on Blito-P3. The figures are still in the bank, so I’ll use the gravity of Earth to show you.”
The Hells around us roared on. The small screen lit up. “Our average speed of this trip is 516,166,166 miles a second. Our top speed at midvoyage when we changed over to decelerate was 1,032,885,031 miles per second. This is pretty small, really, as the trip is only about twenty-two light-years. Intergalactic travel, where one goes at least two million light-years, attains speeds much greater than that. It’s the distance that determines the speed, you see.
“There’s not much dust and not many photons between galaxies, so you don’t get all this electronic wake like you do inside a galaxy where there’s lots of energy.” He looked at the horrible wash. “Pretty, isn’t it.”
He recalled himself to his task. “Anyway, my theory is that Tug Two never blew up because of that stuff.”
Heller hit some more buttons. “Anyway, I was figuring what my jump and fall on Blito-P3 would be, so we’ll use Earth gravity as the amount for G. Also, I set our ship up for Earth G, as it will be operating there and I wanted to get used to it.
“This ship has gravity synthesizers, of course. You couldn’t ride in it at these speeds if it didn’t. Our acceleration has been 42,276,330 feet per second per second. You have to have that much constant acceleration to attain these speeds. A body can tolerate no more than two or three Gs for any period of time. Actually, if you experienced four to six Gs longer than six seconds, you could expect restricted muscular activity because of apparent increased body weight; you would lose peripheral vision and gray out; then you would lose central vision, black out and go unconscious because the blood would be pulled from the head to pool in the lower parts of the body.
“At this acceleration the gravity synthesizers are handling an awful lot more than that. I think Tug Two blew up because her gravity synthesizers failed.”
“Well,” I said, refusing to be impressed. “How many gravities are they handling?”
“To counteract the acceleration, thi
s equipment is handling . . .” He pointed at the screen.
It said:
1,289,401.409 Gs!
I tried to get my heart back down out of my throat. It meant my body, in the absence of synthesizers, would weigh 1,289,401.409 times what it normally did, due solely to acceleration and, now, deceleration!
“So,” said Heller, “I don’t think Tug Two blew up at all. I think the gravity synthesizers failed and her crew simply went splat! She may be somewhere in the universe now, still hurtling along as plasma. They only knew she disappeared. That’s why I didn’t bother with the problem. I hope the contractors did a good job on the gravity synthesizers. We were pushed to leave so fast that I didn’t get too much chance to test the new installation.”
He smiled reassuringly as the screen spark-flashed and blew out. “So don’t be worried about the tug blowing up. It won’t. It’s we who would go bang, not the tug.”
Heller put the button plate down. “As to arrival time, we would have found it easy to keep. But one has to be able to read screens very well to land in an area one has never seen before.
“Captain Stabb is just a bit nervous. He’s a bit of a grouch like some old subofficers and he’s gotten too careful.” He shrugged. “He wants to see a place in daylight before he goes in for the first time, that’s all. So he’ll hang up about five hundred miles and study it in daylight for hours and when he’s sure there aren’t sudden traffic movements and that the base isn’t a trap, he’ll take it in, in the first darkness.
“Too bad. I planned a predawn arrival because I thought you’d want to be up and on the job early. You probably have things to do at the base.
“But it all has its advantages. I’ll be able to look this so-called base over, too. I’ll tell you what. Right now you look pretty shaky. Why don’t you go get some more sleep and when we’re hanging above that area in daylight, say about noon, come back here and have some lunch with me and you can show me the various points of interest. Right now, if I were you, I’d get some more rest. You don’t look good, you know.”
I didn’t even tell him to please turn off that awful churning wake that still surrounded us at every hand.
I cursed feebly to myself.
I was walking out that (bleeped) door just like that (bleeped) time-sight had shown—shoulders slumped and all caved in!
PART TWELVE
Chapter 5
As noon approached, I felt infinitely improved. We had come down out of time-drive smoothly. We were now on auxiliaries, barely running. I had had a marvelous long sleep and as seventy-six hours had now passed since I had taken that (bleeping) speed, it was out of my bloodstream.
I had watched some Homeview comedies in the crew’s salon and had even had a dice game with one of the engineers—he had lost half a credit to me.
But what made it really good was Stabb. He had seated himself in the captain’s chair and when the dice game was over, he put his huge mouth near my ear. He whispered, “I been watching you, Officer Gris, and if I read the signs right, we’re going to get a crack at that (bleeping) (bleepard) Royal officer, ain’t we?”
I felt good enough to be witty. I whispered back, “I heard you very extinctly.”
He laughed. It’s a bit awesome to see an Antimanco laugh: their mouths and teeth are so big in proportion to their triangular faces. It was an uproarious laugh. In fact, it was the first time any of them had laughed and it so startled the off-duty pilot that he burst in to see if something was wrong.
The captain whispered to him and he whispered to the off-duty engineer and they both went off to whisper to their mates and very shortly there was a lot of pleased laughing in the forward end of the ship.
Captain Stabb took me by the hand as I was leaving. “Officer Gris, you’re all right! My Gods, Officer Gris, you’re all right!”
So when I went back to have lunch with Heller, I was feeling great.
Heller was in the upper lounge. He had laid out a tray of sparklewater and sweetbuns and he waved me to a seat.
He had the starboard viewscreens on to see the exterior view. We were hanging in the sun, five hundred miles above our base, just a hundred miles inside the Van Allen belts. And there, way below, was Turkey!
The ship was really on its side. Spacers are crazy. They don’t really care whether they are right side up or down. It was a bit disconcerting to me to have a vertical tray and sit on a vertical seat. It always makes me feel like I’ll fall for sure. The gravity synthesizers, of course, take care of it all but nevertheless I was very careful with my canister. It is such moments that make me glad I am not a spacer!
Regardless, I felt good and I actually enjoyed the sparklewater. When I had finished my lunch, life looked pretty good. We had all but arrived, had not blown up and the gravity compensators had held.
I noticed Heller had out all the computer papers I had given him on Voltar and several books and charts. I also saw the “delete” notice which said Lombar had removed all cultural and such material from the Earth data banks.
“I’ve been identifying these seas by local names,” he said. “But you better verify them for me.”
The day below was bright and almost cloudless. It was just past the middle of August in local seasons so it was somewhat dry and the only slight haze in some places was dust.
I was glad to know that he didn’t know everything. “That sea at the bottom,” I said, “below western Turkey, the bright blue one, is the Mediterranean. Just above Turkey there is the Black Sea—although as you can see for yourself, it isn’t black. Over to your left, there, the one with all the little islands in it, is the Aegean Sea. And that little landlocked one in northwest Turkey, is the Sea of Marmara: that city you see at the top of it is Istanbul, once known as Byzantium and before that, Constantinople.”
“Hey, you really know this place.”
I was pleased. Yes, I really knew this place. And, factually speaking, while he might know engineering and space flight, he didn’t know a ten-thousandth of what I knew about my own trade: covert operations and espionage. He would learn that to his sorrow in due course.
But I said, “Just to the left of the center of Turkey, there is a large lake. See it? That’s Lake Tuz. Now look to the west of it and slightly south and you’ll see another lake. That’s Lake Aksehir. There’s some more lakes just southwest of it. See them?”
He did. But he said, “Point out Caucasus.”
Oh, my Gods, here we went on that stupid theme. “Over there, just east of the Black Sea, there’s an arm of land that comes down and joins Turkey. That’s Caucasus. Way over on the horizon is the Caspian Sea and that bounds Caucasus on the east. But you can’t go in there. That’s communist Russian country. Georgia and Armenia are right there on the Russian side of the border. But Caucasus is out of bounds. Forget it. I’m trying to show you something.”
“Very pretty planet,” said Heller irrelevantly. “You mean nobody can go into the Caucasus?”
I let him have it. “Listen, northeast of Turkey and clear to the Pacific Ocean on the other side of this planet, that’s all communist Russia! They don’t let anybody in, they don’t let anybody out. They are a bunch of mad nuts. They’re run exclusively by a secret police organization called the KGB!”
“Like the Apparatus?” he said.
“Yes, like the Apparatus! No! I mean you can’t go there. Now will you pay attention?”
“That’s awful,” he said. “A piece of the planet that big being run by secret police. And it’s such a pretty planet. Why does the rest of the planet let them get away with something crazy like that?”
“Russia stole the secrets of atomic fission and it’s a thermonuclear power and you have to be careful of them because they’re so crazy they could blow up the whole planet.”
He was busy writing on a pad and, unlike him, was saying the words as he wrote: “‘Russia crazy. Run by KGB secret police like Apparatus. Could blow up the world with stolen thermonuclear power.’ Got it.”
I finally had his attention. “Now get off this Caucasus fixation and pay attention.”
“So poor Prince Caucalsia even lost his second home! The Russians got it!”
I raised my voice. “Look west from Lake Tuz in a straight line across the top of Lake Aksehir and about a third of that distance further west. That is Afyon. That’s the landmark!”
Well, I had gotten him unfixed from that stupid Folk Legend 894M! He obediently reached for a control panel and the whole scene swooped up at us. I felt I was falling and grabbed hold of my seat.
“Oho!” said Heller, staring at the enlarged scene. “Hello, hello, hello! Looks just like Spiteos!”
Actually, I sometimes wondered if that was why this base long ago had been chosen by the Apparatus. But I said, “No, no. Just coincidence. Its name is Afyonkarahisar.”
“What’s that mean in Voltarian?”
I wasn’t going to tell him the real meaning: Black Opium Castle. I said, “It means ‘Black Fortress.’ The base rock rises 750 feet. The ramparts on top of it are the remains of a Byzantine fort which replaced the original built by the Arzawa, a tribe of an ancient people called the Hittites.”
“It would probably be blacker if it wasn’t for that factory near it pouring out white dust.”
“That’s the cement plant. Afyon is a town of about seventy thousand people.”
He pulled back the scene to get a wider view and sat there admiring it. There were still some white streaks of snow on the taller mountains around Afyon. The tiny outlying villages were a patchwork. None of the savage winds which came down from the high plateau were felt from such a height as this. Turkey is a pretty brutal country for the most part.
“What’s all this yellow and orange?” He was looking at the vast panorama of flowers which blanket the valleys. And before I could stop him he twisted the controls and we were looking at them very close. It made me feel awful, like I’d fallen five hundred miles. Spacers are really crazy.
“Flowers?” said Heller.
“The yellow ones in the fields near the road are sunflowers. They are huge. They produce a vast number of seeds in the center which people love to eat. It’s a food crop.”