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THE MINUS WOMAN
_By Russ Winterbotham_
What made the mass of this tiny asteroid fluctuate in defiance of all known physical laws? It was an impossible fact--but then, so was the girl who they knew couldn't exist!
Red Brewer had plugged his electric razor into the lab circuit and hewas running it over his pink jowls while I tried to discover what washaywire about the balance scales.
"Have you noticed," Red said above the clatter of his shaver, "how muchless you have to shave on an asteroid?"
"I still shave every day," I said. There was something definitely wrongwith the scales. The ten-gram weight didn't balance two five-gramweights. Instead it weighed 7.5 grams. And then, suddenly, the cockeyedscales would get ornery and the two five-gram weights would weigh 7.5grams and the ten-gram slug would weigh what it should.
"I don't," said Red. "I shave once a week. Back on terra I shaved everyday, but not here. And I don't even have a beard to show for it."
I didn't answer. There were tougher problems on my mind than whiskers,but of course Red Brewer wouldn't understand them. He was good atmachinery, and with a camera, and for company on a lonely asteroid whichright now was 300,000,000 miles from the earth, but he certainly wasn'ta brain.
"What do you make of it, Jay?" he asked. "Oh, Mr. Hayling, I'm speakingto you."
"Maybe it's your thyroid," I said. "Shut up."
"I'm twenty-seven," said Red. "Too old to have thyroids."
"You mean adenoids."
Red growled and shut off the razor. He ran his hand over his face. "I'vegot a face like a school-kid's," he said. "If there was only a girl onthis god-forsaken piece of rock to see it."
There were no girls on Asteroid 57GM. This place didn't have anythingexcepting a lonely shack with paper-thin walls made of specialheat-insulating material. There wasn't a blade of grass; not a puff ofwind; no soil for violets; not even a symmetrical shape, it was lopsidedlike a beaten-up baseball. Or at least that was what I thought untilsomething happened to the balance scales.
The idea of sending Jay Hayling, which is me, and ruddy Red Brewer toAsteroid 57GM, was simply to check up on some figures which said thatthis little 10-mile chunk of rock didn't have the right mass. Twice ithad been clocked on near passages to Jupiter and twice it had behaveddifferently, as if it had suddenly lost some of its mass. So Red and Ihad been sentenced to fifteen months alone in space on an asteroid justto find out that somebody had made a mistake in arithmetic.
The sonar equipment showed what kind of rock it was--iron and basalt.And I'd made borings which checked. We'd tested the speed of escapewhich was a good push so we had to be careful, and its force of gravity,which wasn't much. And then I'd discovered that the balance in the labhad a habit of being 25 per cent wrong one way or the other every timeI tried to use it.
Red put away his razor and went through the little door leading to theliving quarters. The partition was crystal clear plastic so I could seehim pulling himself along by the hand rail toward the bookcase. I knewhe would presently find himself something to read while I worked.
* * * * *
We seldom walked in the laboratory. Our muscles, conditioned byterrestrial gravity, were too strong for walking. We'd have bumped ourheads on the ceiling at every step and possibly we might even havepunched a hole in the roof, losing our air. So we sort of pulledourselves along by a system of hand rails on all of the anchored desks,furniture and walls. It was like pulling yourself along the bottom ofthe ocean by hanging onto rocks, since the air in the lab was denseenough to support our almost weightless bodies.
I checked the scales every way I could and finally gave up. I'd tacklethe problem again tomorrow. Maybe something on the asteroid, somemagnetic rock or something, threw it off. I washed my hands in thelaboratory sink and then, while I wiped them on a towel, glanced at Red,who was lying on his bunk reading. For the first time I noticed howskinny he was getting. Lack of exercise, I presumed. We were going tohave to do something to build up our muscles again. I supposed I hadlost weight just as much as he had. It would be tough to weigh ourselveshere, since we had only the balance in the laboratory. Spring scaleswouldn't work on the asteroid--we wouldn't have weighed enough toregister, even though our mass was probably about the same as an averageman's on earth.
Red put the book aside, closed his eyes and smiled. My eyes fell on thebook for some reason. Then suddenly I saw a page flip over. I didn'trealize at first that this couldn't happen.
There wasn't any draft in the place, I was sure of that. A draft wouldmean a leak in the laboratory and alarms would tell us when thathappened. There was no motion, nothing to cause a page in the book toturn.
Another page turned and I was sure I wasn't dreaming. I pulled myselfover to the door, opened it a trifle.
"Red!" I called softly.
"Dollie!" He was dreaming. Dollie was one of the dozen or so girls hewas always talking about in his sleep.
I pulled myself to his side and punched him gently. Red woke up. "You'rea hell of a guy," he said.
"Yes," I said. "You were dreaming about Dollie. But I saw somethinghappen here and I wanted you to see it too." I pointed at the book. Thepages were still now. Suddenly one of them flipped over.
"Somebody, or something is reading your book," I said.
* * * * *
We didn't figure it out then and I wasn't even sure that I'd made theright diagnosis, but things went on every day afterwards that left meconvinced there was something else living on this hunk of rock besidesRed and me. It didn't have mass, apparently, because we tried our bestto touch it.
Once when it got to fooling around with the laboratory balance, Red andI encircled the balance with our arms and then squeezed together withoutfeeling a thing.
It wasn't energy, because we tried every instrument to detectelectricity, heat, light, and radio. But it was alive, because it moved.It read books and monkeyed with the lab scales.
And at last I decided that maybe _it_ had something to do with theapparent discrepancy in the asteroid's change in mass. After that I hada great deal to work on.
Red began behaving queerly too. He swore that he was getting too smallfor his clothing. His shoes, he said, were almost a size too large. Iwas too busy to check, so I put it down as a loss in weight.
We'd spent a year on the asteroid when we were due to pass Mars. So ourfirst anniversary was spent in checking our movements with a telescope,a camera and a chronometer. We discovered our mass--or that of Asteroid57GM--had depreciated another 25 per cent. It now had only half the massit was supposed to have. This was too much of an error for even a gradeschool student.
"I'll bet some astronomers back on earth will get redder than my hairwhen we get home," Red said.
I shook my head. "It hasn't anything to do with their observations," Isaid. "It's what is happening now to you and me. We're losing masssomeway."
There was only one way to check it and that was to weigh ourselves. So Irigged up a rude sort of a balance by weighing out chunks of rock untilwe had a mass equal to what we should weigh, placing them on ateeter-totter arrangement I rigged up in the lab.
"It'll be close enough to learn if we've lost half our mass," I said.
Red showed a weight loss equal to about 20 pounds on earth. I had gaineda little weight. These figures were only relative, and dependent onwhether or not the rocks we'd used on the balance had lost mass also.But something was wrong with Red and I decided to watch him carefully.
"Your scales are cockeyed," Red said. "I feel fine. Never felt better,in fact. Except that I'm lonesom
e ... not that I don't enjoy yourcompany, pal, ole pal, but I'd like Dollie's better."
Something on the far side of the room caught my eye. It was along theglass partition between the lab and the living room. It might have beena reflection of some sort, because the sun was up and its beams werecoming right through the transparent roof at that moment. But for afleeting instant I thought I saw a figure there. A tall, shapely,black-haired girl, dressed in a flowing robe of orange. The next instantshe was gone.
I said I thought it might be a reflection, but I was pretty sure itwasn't. "Red," I said. "We've got company."
"Huh?"
"I'm sure of it, Red.