I had been in the Elsie a week when it was decided to operate on Pat. Pat told me they were going to do it, but he did not talk about it much. His attitude was the old iron-man, as if he meant to eat peanuts and read comics while they were chopping on him. I think he was scared stiff . . . I would have been.
Not that I would have understood if I had known the details; I'm no neural surgeon, nor any sort; removing a splinter is about my speed.
But it meant we would be off the watch list for a while, so I told Commander Frick. He already knew from messages passed between the ship and LRF; he told me to drop off the watch list the day before my brother was operated and to consider myself available for extra duty during his convalescence. It did not make any difference to him; not only were there other telepairs but we were still radio-linked to Earth.
Two weeks after we started spacing and the day before Pat was to be cut on I was sitting in my room, wondering whether to go to the communications office and offer my valuable services in cleaning waste baskets and microfilming files or just sit tight until somebody sent for me.
I had decided on the" latter, remembering Uncle Steve's advice never to volunteer, and was letting down my bunk, when the squawker boomed: "T. P. Bartlett, special communicator, report to the Relativist!"
I hocked my bunk up while wandering if there was an Eye-Spy concealed in my recto-taking down my bunk during working hours seemed always to result in my being paged. Dr. Babcock was not in the control room and they chased me out, but not before I took a quick look around—the control room was off limits to anyone who did not work there. I found him down in the computation room across from the communications office, where I would have looked in the first place if I hadn't wanted to see the control room.
I said, "T. P. Bartlett, communicator tenth grade, reporting to the Relativist as ordered."
Dr. Babcock swung around in his chair and looked at me. He was a big raw-boned man, all hands and feet, and looked more like a lumberjack than a mathematical physicist. I think he played it up-you know, elbows on the table and bad grammar on purpose. Uncle Steve said Babcock had more honorary degrees than most people had socks.
He stared at me and laughed. "Where did you get that fake military manner, son? Siddown. You're Bartlett?"
I sat. "Yes, sir."
"What's this about you and your twin going off the duty list?"
"Well, my brother is in a hospital, sir. They're going to do something to his spine tomorrow."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I didn't answer because it was so unreasonable; I wasn't even in his department. "Frick never tells me anything, the Captain never tells me anything, now you never tell me anything. I have to bang around the galley and pick up gossip to find out what's going on. I was planning on working you over tomorrow. You know that don't you?"
"Uh, no, sir."
"Of course you don't, became I never tell anybody anything either. What a way to run a ship! I should have stayed in Vienna. There's a nice town. Ever have coffee and pastries in the Ring?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Nevertheless I was going to work you and your twin over tomorrow-so now we'll have to do it today. Tell him to stand by."
"Uh; what do you want him to do, Doctor? He's already been moved to a hospital."
"Just tell him to stand by. I'm going, to calibrate you two, that's what. Figure out your index error."
"Sir?"
"Just tell him-"
So I called Pat. I hadn't spoken to him since breakfast; I wondered how he was going to take it
But he already knew. "Yes, yes," he said in a tired voice.
"They're setting up apparatus in my hospital room right now.
Mother made such a fuss I had to send her out."
("Look, Pat, if you don't want to do this, whatever it is, I'll tell them nothing doing. It's an imposition.")
"What difference does it make?" he said irritably. "I've got to sweat out the next sixteen hours somehow. Anyhow, this may be the last time we work together."
It was the first time he had shown that it was affecting his nerve. I said hastily, ("Don't talk that way, Pat. You're going to get well. You're going to walk again. Shucks, you'll even be able to ski if you want to.")
"Don't give me that Cheerful Charlie stuff. I'm getting more of it from the folks than I can use. It makes me want to throw up."
("Now see here, Pat—")
"Stow it, stow it! Let's get on with what they want us to do."
("Well, all right.") I spoke aloud: "He's ready, Doctor."
"Half a minute. Start your camera, O'Toole." Dr. Babcock touched something on his desk. "Commander Frick?"
"Yes, Doctor," Frick's voice answered.
"We're ready. You coming in?"
"All set here," I heard my boss answer. "We'll come in."
A moment later he entered, with Anna Horoshen. In the meantime I took a look around. One whole wall of the computation room was a computer, smaller than the one at Los Alamos but not much. The blinking lights must have meant something to somebody. Sitting at right angles to it at a console was Mr. O'Toole and above the console was a big display scope; at about one-second intervals a flash of light would peak in the center of it.
Anna nodded without speaking; I knew she must be linked. Pat said, "Tom, you've got a girl named Anna Horoshen aboard: Is she around?"
("Yes. Why?")
"Say hello to her for me—1 knew her in Zurich. Her sister Becky is here." He chuckled and I felt better. "Good looking babes, aren't they? Maudie is jealous."
Babcock said to Frick, "Tell them to stand by. First synchronizing run, starting from their end."
"Tell them, Anna,"
She nodded. I wondered why they bothered with a second telepair when they could talk through myself and Pat. I soon found out: Pat and I were too busy.
Pat was sounding out ticks like a clock; I was told to repeat them... and every time I did another peak of light flashed on the display scope. Babcock watched it, then turned me around so that I couldn't see and taped a microphone to my voice box. "Again."
Pat said, "Stand by—" and started ticking again. I did my best to tick right with him but it was the silliest performance possible. I heard Babcock say quietly, "That cut out the feedback and the speed-of-sound lag. I wish there were some way to measure the synaptic rate arose closely."
Frick said, "Have you talked to Dev about it?"
I went on ticking.
"A reverse run now, young lady," Babcock said, and slipped headphones on me. I immediately heard a ticking like the ticks Pat had been sending. "That's a spectral metronome you're listening to, young fellow, timed by monochrome light. It was synchronized with the one your brother is using before we left Earth. Now start ticking at him,"
So I did. It had a hypnotic quality; it was easier to get into step and tick with it than it was to get out of step. It was impossible to ignore it. I began to get sleepy but I kept on ticking; I couldn't stop.
"End of run," Babcock announced. The ticking stopped and I rubbed my ears.
"Dr. Babcock?"
" "Huh?"
"How can you tell one tick from another?"
"Eh? You can't. But O'Toole can, he's got it all down on film. Same at the other end. Don't worry about it; just try to stay in time."
This silliness continued for more than an hour, sometimes with Pat sending, sometimes myself. At last O'Toole looked up and said, "Fatigue factor is cooking our goose, Dec. The second differences are running all over the lot."
"Okay, that's all," Babcock announced. He turned to me.
"You can thank your brother for me and sign off."
Commander Frick and Anna left. I hung around. Presently Dr. Babcock looked up from his desk and said, "You can go, bub. Thanks."
"Uh, Dr. Babcock?"
"Huh? Speak up."
"Would you mind telling me what this is all about?"
He looked surprised, then said, "Sorry. I'm not used to using people instead of instruments; I forget. Okay, sit down. This is why you m-r people were brought along: for research into the nature of time."
I stared. "Sir? I thought we were along to report back on the planets we expect to find."
"Oh, that—Well, I suppose so, but this is much more important. There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time—just shoot every other one."
A Mr. O'Toole said, without looking up, "The thing I like about you, Chief, is your big warm heart."
"Quiet in the gallery, please. Now today, son, we have been trying to find out what time it is."
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt for he went on, "Oh, we know what time it is . . . but too many different ways. See that?" He pointed at the display scope, still tirelessly making a peak every second. "That's the Greenwich time tick, pulled in by radio and corrected for relative speed and change of speed. Then there is the time you were hearing over the earphones; that is the time the ship runs by. Then there is the time you were getting from your brother and passing to us. We're trying to compare them all, but the trouble is that we have to have people in the circuit and, while a tenth of a second is a short time for the human nervous system, a microsecond is a measurably long time in physics. Any radar system splits up a microsecond as easily as you slice a pound of butter. So we use a lot of runs to try to even out our ignorance."
"Yes, but what do you expect to find out?"
"If I 'expected," I wouldn't be doing it. But you might say that we are trying to find out what the word "simultaneous" means."
Mr. O'Toole looked up from the console. "If it means anything," he amended.
Dr. Babcock glanced at him. "You still here? "If it means anything." Son, ever since the great Doctor Einstein, 'simultaneous' and 'simultaneity' have been dirty words to physicists. We chucked the very concept, denied that it had meaning, and built up a glorious structure of theoretical physics without it. Then you mind readers came along and kicked it over. Oh, don't look guilty; every house needs a housecleaning now and then. If you folks had done your carnival stunt at just the speed of light, we would have assigned you a place in the files and forgotten you. But you rudely insisted on doing it at something enormously greater than the speed of light, which made you as welcome as a pig at a wedding, you've split us physicists into two schools, those who want to class you as a purely psychological phenomenon and no business of physics—these are the 'close your eyes and it will go away' boys—and a second school which realizes that since measurements can be made of whatever this is you do, it is therefore the business of physics to measure and include it . . . since physics is, above all, the trade of measuring things and assigning definite numerical values to them."
O'Toole said, "Don't wax philosophical, Chief."
"You get back to your numbers, O'Toole; you have no soul These laddies want to measure how fast you do it. They don't care how fast—they've already recovered from the blow that you do it faster than light—but they want to know exactly how fast. They can't accept the idea that you do it 'instantaneously,' for that would require them to go to a different church entirely. They want to assign a definite speed of propagation, such-and-such number of times faster than the speed of light. Then they can modify their old equations and go right on happily doing business at the old stand."
"They will," agreed O'Toole.
"Then there is a third school of thought, the right one.. . my own."
O'Toole, without looking up, made a rude noise.
"Is that your asthma coming back?" Babcock said anxiously. "By the way, you got any results?"
"They're still doing it in nothing flat. Measured time negative as often as positive and never greater than inherent observational error."
"You see, son? That's the correct school. Measure what happens and let the chips fly where they may."
"Hear hear!"
"Quiet, you renegade Irishman. Besides that, you m-r's give us our first real chance to check another matter. Are you familiar with the relativity transformations?"
"You mean the Einstein equations?
"Surely. You know the one for time?"
I thought hard Pat and I had taken first-year physics our freshman year; it had been quite a while. I picked up a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought it was:
"That's it," agreed Dr. Babcock. "At a relative velocity of 'v' time interval at first frame of reference equals time interval at second frame of reference multiplied by the square root of one minus the square of the relative velocity divided by the square of the speed of light. That's just the special case, of course, for constant speeds; it is more complicated for acceleration. But there has been much disagreement as to what the time equations meant, or if they meant anything."
I blurted out, "Huh? But I thought the Einstein theory had been proved?" It suddenly occurred to me that, if the relativity equations were wrong, we were going to be away a mighty long time—Tau Ceti, our first stop, was eleven light-years from the Sun... and that was just our first one; the others were a lot farther.
But everybody said that once we got up near the speed of light the months would breeze past like days. The equations said so.
"Attend me. How do you prove that there are eggs in a bird's nest? Don't strain your gray matter: go climb the tree and find out There is no other way. Now we are climbing the tree."
"Fine!" said O'Toole. "Go climb a tree."
"Noisy in here. One school of thought maintained that the equations simply meant that a clock would read differently if you could read it from a passing star . . . which you can't... but that there was no real stretching or shrinking of time-whatever 'real' means. Another school pointed to the companion equations for length and mass, maintaining that the famous Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the length transformation was 'real' and pointing out that the increase of mass was regularly computed and used for particle-accelerator ballistics and elsewhere in nuclear physics—for example, in the torch that pushes this ship. So, they reasoned, the change in time rates must be real, because the corollary equations worked in practice. But nobody knew. You have to climb the tree and look."
"When will we know?" I was still worrying. Staying several years, Einstein time, in the ship I had counted on. Getting killed in the course of it, the way Uncle Steve said we probably would, I refused to worry about. But dying of old age in the Elsie was not what I had counted on. It was a grim thought, a life sentence shut up inside these steel walls.
"When? Why, we know right now."
"You do? What's the answer?"
"Don't hurry me, son. We've been gone a couple of weeks, at a boost of 124% of one gee; we're up to about 9,000 miles per second now. We still haven't come far—call it seven and a half light-hours or about 5,450,000,000 miles. It will be the better part of a year before we are crowding the speed of light. Nevertheless we have reached a sizable percentage of that speed, about five per cent; that's enough to show. Easy to measure, with the aid of you mind readers."
"Well, sir? Is it a real time difference? Or is it just relative?"
"You're using the wrong words. But it's 'real,' so far as the word means anything. The ratio right now is about 99.9%."
"To put it exactly," added Mr. O'Toole, "Bartlett's slippage—that's a technical term I just invented-his 'slippage' in time rate from that of his twin has now reached twelve parts in ten thousand."
"So you would make me a liar for one fiftieth of one per cent?" Babcock complained. "O'Toole, why did I let you come along?"
"So you would have some one to work your arithmetic," his assistant answered smugly.
Pat told me he did not want me around when they operated, but I came anyway. I locked myself in my room so nobody could disturb me and stuck with him. He didn't really object; whenever I spoke he answered and the it got to the deadline the more he talked… a cheerful babble about nothing and everything. It did not fool me.
When they wheeled him into surgery, he said, "Tom, you should see my anesthetist. Pretty as a sunny day and just lap size."
("Isn't her face covered with a mask?")
"Well, not completely. I can see her pretty blue eyes. 1 think I'll ask her what she's doing tonight."
("Maudie won't like that.")
"You keep Maudie out of this; a sick man is entitled to privileges. Wait a sec, I'll ask her."
("What did she say?")
"She said, "Nothing much," and that I would be doing the same for a few days. But I'll get her phone number."
("Two gets you five she won't give it to you.")
"Well, I can try... uh uh! Too late, they're starting in . . . Tom, you wouldn't believe this needle; it's the size of an air hose. She says she wants me to count. Okay, anything for a laugh… one . . . two… three..."
Pat got up to seven and I counted with him. All the way through I kept winding up tighter and tighter to unbearable tension and fear. I knew now what he apparently had been sure of all along, that he was not coming out of it. At the count of seven he lost track but his mind did not go silent. Maybe those around the operating table thought they had him unconscious but I knew better; he was trapped inside and screaming to get out.
I called to him and he called back but we couldn't find each other. Then I was as trapped and lost and confused as he was and we groped around in the dark and the cold and the aloneness of the place where you die.
Then I felt the knife whittling at my back and I screamed.
The next thing I remember is a couple of faces floating over me. Somebody said, "I think he's coming around, Doctor." The voice did not belong to anyone; it was a long way off.
Then there was just one face and it said, "Feeling better?"
"I guess so. What happened?"
"Drink this. Here, I'll hold up your head."
When I woke up again I felt fairly wide awake and could see that I was in the ship's infirmary. Dr. Devereaux was there, looking at me. "You decided to come out of it, young fellow?"
"Out of what, Doctor? What happened?"
"I don't know precisely, but you gave a perfect clinical picture of a patient terminating in surgical shock. By the time we broke the lock on your door, you were far gone-you gave us a bad time. Can you tell me about it?"
I tried to think, then I remembered. Pat! I called him in my mind. ("Pat! Where are you, boy?")
He didn't answer. I tried again and he still didn't answer, so I knew. I sat up and managed to choke out, "My brother ... he died!"
Dr. Devereaux said, "Wups! Take it easy. Lie down. He's not dead . . . unless he died in the last ten minutes, which I doubt."
"But I can't reach him! How do you know? I can't reach him, I tell you!"
"Come down off the ceiling. Because I've been checking on him all morning via the m-r's on watch. He's resting easily under an eighth grain of hypnal, which is why you can't raise him. I may be stupid, son—I was stupid, not to warn you to stay out of it—but I've been tinkering with the human mind long enough to figure out approximately what happened to you, given the circumstances. My only excuse is that I have never encountered such circumstances before."
I quieted a little. It made sense that I couldn't wake Pat if they had him under drugs. Under Dr. Devereaux's questions I managed to tell him more or less what had happened—not perfectly, because you can't really tell someone else what goes on inside your head. "Uh, was the operation successful, Doctor?"
"The patient came through in good shape. We'll talk about it later. Now turn over."
"Huh?"
"Turn over. I want to take a look at your back."
He looked at it, then called two of his staff to see it. Presently he touched me. "Does that hurt?"
"Ouch! Uh, yes, it's pretty tender. What's wrong with my back, Doctor?"
"Nothing, really. But you've got two perfect stigmata, just matching the incisions for Macdougal's operation . . . which is the technique they used on your brother."
"Uh, what does that mean?"
"It means that the human mind is complicated and we don't know much about it. Now roll over and go to sleep. I'm going to keep you in bed a couple of days."
I didn't intend to go to sleep but I did. I was awakened by Pat calling me. "Hey, Tom! Where are you? Snap out of it."
("I'm right here. What's the matter?")
"Tom... I've got my legs back!"
I answered, ("Yeah, I know,") and went back to sleep.
Once Pat was over his paralysis I should have had the world by the tail, for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before he was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: it was because he was going and I wasn't. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting what I wanted through his misfortune. It didn't seem right to be happy when he was crippled—especially when his crippled condition had got me what I wanted.
So I should have been happy once he was well again,
Were you ever at a party where you were supposed to be having fun and suddenly you realized that you weren't? No reason, just no fun and the whole world gray and tasteless?
Some of the things that were putting me off my feed I could see. First there had been Dusty, but that had been cleared up. Then there had been the matter of other people, especially the electron pushers we stood watch with, calling us freaks and other names and acting as if we were. But the Captain had tromped on that, too, and when we got better acquainted people forgot about such things. One of the relativists, Janet Meers, was a lightning calculator, which made her a freak, too, but everybody took it for granted in her and after a while they took what we did for granted.
After we got out of radio range of Earth the Captain took us out from under Commander Frick and set us up as a department of our own, with "Uncle" Alfred McNeil as head of department and Rupert Hauptman as his assistant—which meant that Rupe kept the watch list while Uncle Alf was in charge of our mess table and sort of kept us in line. We liked old Unc too well to give him much trouble and if somebody did get out of line Unc would look sad and the rest of us would slap the culprit down. It worked.
I think Dr. Devereaux recommended it to the Captain. The fact was that Commander Frick resented us. He was an electrical engineer and had spent his whole life on better and better communication equipment . . . then we came along and did it better and faster with no equipment at all. I don't blame him; I would have been sore, too. But we got along better with Uncle Alf.
I suppose that the Vasco da Gama was part of my trouble. The worst thing about space travel is-that absolutely nothing happens. Consequently the biggest event in our day was the morning paper. All day long each mind reader on watch (when not busy with traffic, which wasn't much) would copy news. We got the news services free and all the features and Dusty would dress it up by copying pictures sent by his twin Rusty. The communicator on the midwatch would edit it and the m-r and the communicator on the early morn ing watch would print it and have it in the mess room by breakfast.
There was no limit to the amount of copy we could have; it was just a question of how much so few people could prepare. Besides Solar System news we carried ships' news, not only of the Elsie but of the eleven others. Everybody (except myself) knew people in the other ships. Either they had met them at Zurich, or the old spacehands, like the Captain and a lot of others, had friends and acquaintances reaching back for years.
It was mostly social news, but we enjoyed it more than news from Earth and the System, because we felt closer to the ships in the fleet, even though they were billions of miles away and getting farther by the second. When Ray Gilberti and Sumire Watanabe got married in the Leif Ericsson, every ship in the fleet held a celebration. When a baby was born in the Pinta and our Captain was named godfather, it made us all proud.
We were hooked to the Vasco da Gama through Cas Warner, and Miss Gamma Furtney linked us with the Marco Polo and the Santa Maria through her triplets Miss Alpha and Miss Beta, but we got news from all the ships by pass-down-the-line. Fleet news was never cut, even if dirtside news had to be. As it was, Mama O'Toole complained that if the editions got any larger, she would either have to issue clean sheets and pillow cases only once a week or engineering would have to build her another laundry just to wash newspapers. Nevertheless, the ecology department always had clean paper ready, freshly pressed, for each edition.
We even put out an occasional extra, like the time Lucille LaVonne won "Miss Solar System" and Dusty did a pic of her so perfect you would have sworn it was a photograph. We lost some paper from that as quite a number of people kept their copies for pin-ups instead of turning them back for reclamation—I did myself. I even got Dusty to autograph it. It startled him but pleased him even though he was rude about it—an artist is entitled to credit for his work, I say, even if he is a poisonous little squirt.
What I am trying in say is that the Elsie Times was the high point of each day and fleet news was the most important part of it.
I had not been on watch the night before; nevertheless, I was late for breakfast. When I hurried in, everybody was busy with his copy of the Times as usual—but nobody was eating. I sat down between Van and Prudence and said, "What's the matter? What's aching everybody?"
Pru silently handed me a copy of the Times.
The first page was bordered in black. There were oversize headlines: VASCO DA GAMA LOST
I couldn't believe it. The Vasco was headed out for Alpha Centauri but she wouldn't get there for another four years, Earth time; she wasn't even close to the speed of light. There was nothing to have may trouble with, out where she was. It must be a mistake.
I turned to see-story-on-page-two. There was a boxed dispatch from the Commodore in the Santa Maria: "(Official) At 0334 today Greenwich time TS Vasco da Gama (LRF 172) fell out of contact. Two special circuits were operating at the time, one Earthside and one to the Magellan. In both cases transmission ceased without warning in midst of message and at the same apparent instant by adjusted times. The ship contained eleven special communicators; it has not proved possible to raise any of them. It must therefore be assumed that the ship is lost, with no survivors."
The LRF dispatch merely admitted that the ship was out of contact. There was a statement by our Captain and a longer news story which included comments from other ships; I read them but the whole story was in the headlines . . . the Vasco was gone wherever it is that ships go when they don't come back.
I suddenly realized something and looked up. Cas Warner's chair was empty. Uncle All caught my eye and said quietly, "He knows, Tom. The Captain woke him and told him soon after it happened. The only good thing about it is that he wasn't linked with his brother when it happened."
I wasn't sure that Uncle Alf had the right slant. If Pat got it, I'd want to be with him when it happened, wouldn't I? Well, I thought I would. In any case I was sure that Unc would want to be holding Sugar Pie's hand if something happened and she had to make the big jump before he did. And Cas and his brother Caleb were close; I knew that.
Later that day the Captain held memorial services and Uncle Alfred preached a short sermon and we all sang the "Prayer for Travelers." After that we pretended that there never had been a ship named the Vasco da Gama, but it was all pretense.
Cas moved from our table and Mama O'Toole put him to work as an assistant to her. Cas and his brother had been hotel men before LRF tapped them and Cas could be a lot of help to her; keeping a ship with two hundred people in it in ecological balance is no small job. Goodness, just raising food for two hundred people would be a big job even if it did not have to be managed so as to maintain atmospheric balance; just managing the yeast cultures and the hydroponics took all the time of nine people.
After a few weeks Cas was supervising entering and housekeeping and Mama O'Toole could give all of her time to the scientific and technical end—except that she continued to keep an eye on the cooking.
But the Vasco da Gama should not have made me brood; I didn't know anybody in that ship. If Cas could pull out of it and lead a normal, useful life, I certainly should not have had the mulligrubs. No, I think it was my birthday as much as anything.
The mess room had two big electric clocks in it, controlled from the relativists' computation room, and two bank-style calendars over them. When we started out they were all right together, showing Greenwich time and date. Then, as we continued to accelerate and our speed got closer to that of light, the "slippage" between Elsie and the Earth began to show and they got farther and farther out of phase. At first we talked about it, but presently we didn't notice the Greenwich set... for what good does it do you to know that it is now three in the morning next Wednesday at Greenwich when it is lunch time in the ship? It was like time zones and the date line back on Earth: not ordinarily important. I didn't even notice when Pat groused about the odd times of day he had to be on duty because I stood watches any time of day myself.
Consequently I was caught flat-footed when Pat woke me with a whistle in the middle of the night and shouted, "Happy birthday!"
("Huh? Whose?")
"Yours, dopey. Ours. What's the matter with you? Can't you count?"
("But—")
"Hold it. They are just bringing the cake in and they are going to sing "Happy Birthday." I'll echo it for you."
While they were doing so I got up and slipped on a pair of pants and went down to the mess room. It was the middle of "night" for us and there was just a standing light here. But I could see the clocks and calendars—sure enough, the Greenwich date was our birthday and figuring back zone time from Greenwich to home made it about dinner time at home.
But it wasn't my birthday. I was on the other schedule and it didn't seem right.
"Blew 'em all out, kid," Pat announced happily, "That ought to hold us for another year. Mum wants to know if they baked a cake for you there?"
("Tell her 'yes.' ") They hadn't, of course. But I didn't feel like explaining. Mother got jittery easily enough without trying to explain Einstein time to her. As for Pat, he ought to know better.
The folks had given Pat a new watch and he told me that there was a box of chocolates addressed to me—should he open it and pass it around? I told him to go ahead, not knowing whether to be grateful that I was remembered or to be annoyed at a "present" I couldn't possibly see or touch. After a while I told Pat that I had to get my sleep and please say good night and thank you to everybody for me. But I didn't get to sleep; I lay awake until the passageway lights came on,
The following week they did have a birthday cake for me at our table and everybody sang to me and I got a lot of pleasantly intended but useless presents—you can't give a person much aboard ship when you are eating at the same mess and drawing from the same storerooms. I stood up and thanked them when somebody hollered "Speech!" and I stayed and danced with the girls afterwards. Nevertheless it still did not seem like my birthday because it had already been my birthday, days earlier.
It was maybe the next day that my Uncle Steve came around and dug me out of my room. "Where you been keeping yourself, youngster?"
"Huh? Nowhere."
"That's what I thought." He settled in my chair and I lay back down on my bunk. "Every time I look for you, you aren't in sight. You aren't on watch or working all the time. Where are you?"
I didn't say anything. I had been right where I was a lot of the time, just staring at the ceiling. Uncle Steve went on, "When a man takes to crouching in a corner aboard ship, it is usually best, I've found, to let him be. Either he will pull out of it by himself, or he'll go out the airlock one day without bothering with a pressure suit. Either way, he doesn't want to be monkeyed with. But you're my sister's boy and I've got a responsibility toward you. What's wrong? You never show up for fun and games in the evenings and you go around with a long face; what's eating you?"
"There's nothing wrong with me!" I said angrily.
Uncle Steve disposed of that with a monosyllable. "Open up, kid. You haven't been right since the Vasco was lost. Is that the trouble? Is your nerve slipping? If it is, Doc Devereaux has synthetic courage in pills. Nobody need know you take 'em and no need to be ashamed—everybody finds a crack in his nerve now and again. I'd hate to tell you what a repulsive form it took the first time I went into action."
"No, I don't think that is it." I thought about it—maybe it was it. "Uncle Steve, what happened to the Vasco?"
He shrugged. "Either her torch cut loose, or they bumped into something."
"But a torch can't cut loose... can it? And there is nothing to bump into out here."
"Correct on both counts. But suppose the torch did blow?
The ship would be a pocket-sized nova in an umpteenth second. But I can't think of an easier way to go. And the other way would be about as fast, near enough you would never notice. Did you ever think how much kinetic energy we have wrapped up in this bucket at this speed? Doc Babcock says that as we reach the speed of light we'll be just a flat wave front, even though we go happily along eating mashed potatoes and gravy and never knowing the difference."
"But we never quite reach the speed of light."
"Doc pointed that out, too. I should have said 'if.' Is that what is bothering you, kid? Fretting that we might go boom! like the Vasco? If so, let me point out that almost all the ways of dying in bed are worse . . . particularly if you are silly enough to die of old age—a fate I hope to avoid."
We talked a while longer but did not get anywhere. Then be left, after threatening to dig me out if I spent more than normal sack time in my room. I suppose Uncle Steve reported me to Dr. Devereaux, although both of them claimed not.
Anyhow, Dr. Devereaux tackled me the next day, took me around to his room and sat me down and talked to me. He bad a big sloppy-comfortable stateroom; he never saw anybody in surgery.
I immediately wanted to know why he wanted to talk to me.
He opened his frog eyes wide and looked innocent. "Just happened to get around to you, Tom." He picked up a pile of punched cards. "See these? That's how many people I've had a chat with this week. I've got to pretend to earn my pay."
"Well, you don't have to waste time on me. I'm doing all right."
"But I like to waste time, Tom. Psychology is a wonderful racket. You don't scrub for surgery, you don't have to stare down people's dirty throats, you just sit and pretend to listen while somebody explains that when he was a little boy he didn't like to play with the other little boys. Now you talk for a while. Tell me anything you want to, while I take a nap. if you talk long enough, I can get rested up from the poker party I sat in on last night and still chalk up a day's work."
I tried to talk and say nothing. While I was doing so, Pat called me. I told him to call hack; I was busy. Dr. Devereaux was watching my face and said suddenly, "What was on your mind then?"
I explained that it could wait; my twin wanted to talk to me.
"Hmm... Tom, tell me about your twin. I didn't have time to get well acquainted with him in Zurich."
Before I knew it I had told him a lot about both of us. He was remarkably easy to talk to. Twice I thought he had gone to sleep but each time I stopped, he roused himself and asked another question that got me started all over again.
Finally he said, "You know, Tom, identical twins are exceptionally interesting to psychologists—not to mention geneticists, sociologists, and biochemists. You start out from the same egg, as near alike as two organic complexes can be. Then you become two different people. Are the differences environmental? Or is there something else at work?"
I thought about this. "You mean the soul, Doctor?"
"Mmm . . . ask me next Wednesday. One sometimes holds personal and private views somewhat different from one's public and scientific opinions. Never mind. The point is that you m-r twins are interesting. I fancy that the serendipitous results of Project Lebensraum will, as usual, be far greater than the intended results."
"The "Sarah" what, Doctor?"
"Eh? 'Serendipitous.' The Adjective for "Serendipity." Serendipity means that you dig for worms and strike gold. Happens all the time in science. It is the reason why "useless" pure research is always so much more practical than 'practical' work. But let's talk about you. I can't help you with your problems—you have to do that yourself. But let's kick it around and pretend that I can, so as to justify my being on the payroll. Now two things stick out like a sore thumb: the first is that you don't like your brother."
I started to protest but he brushed it aside. "Let me talk.
Why are you sure that I am wrong? Answer: because you have been told from birth that you love him. Siblings always `love' each other; that is a foundation of our civilization like Mom's apple pie. People usually believe anything that they are told early and often. Probably a good thing they believe this one, because brothers and sisters often have more opportunity and more reason to hate each other than anyone else."
"But I like Pat. It's just—"
" 'It's just' what?" he insisted gently when I did not finish.
I did not answer and he went on, "It is just that you have every reason to dislike him. He has bossed you and bullied you and gabbed what he wanted. When he could not get it by a straight fight, he used your mother to work on your father to make it come his way. He even got the girl you wanted. Why should you like him? If a man were no relation-instead of being your twin brother—would you like him for doing those things to you? Or would you hate him?"
I didn't relish the taste of it. "I wasn't being fair to him, Doctor. I don't think Pat knew he was hogging things . . . and I'm sure our parents never meant to play favorites. Maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself."
"Maybe you are. Maybe there isn't a word of truth in it and you are constitutionally unable to see what's fair when you yourself are involved. But the point is that this is the way you do feel about it . . . and you certainly would not like such a person—except that he is your twin brother, so of course you must 'love" him. The two ideas fight each other. So you will continue to be stirred up inside until you figure out which one is false and get rid of it. That's up to you."
"But... doggone it, Doctor, I do like Pat!"
"Do you? Then you had better dig out of your mind the notion that he has been handing you the dirty end of the stick all these years. But I doubt if you do. You're fond of him—we're all fond of things we are used to, old shoes, old pipes, even the devil we know is better than a strange devil. You're loyal to him. He's necessary to you and you are neces sary to him. But 'like' him? It seems most improbable. On the other hand, if you could get it through your head that there is no longer any need to 'love' him, nor even to like him, then you might possibly get to like him a little for what he is. You'll certainly grow more tolerant of him, though I doubt if you will ever like him much. He's a rather unlikeable cuss."
"That's not true! Pat's always been very popular."
"Not with me. Mmm . . . Torn, I cheated. I know your brother better than I let on. Neither one of you is very likeable, matter of fact, and you are very much alike. Don't take offense. I can't abide 'nice' people; 'sweetness and light' turns my stomach. I like ornery people with a good, hard core of self-interest—a lucky thing, in view of my profession. You and your brother are about equally selfish, only he is more successful at it. By the way, he likes you."
"Huh?"
"Yes. The way he would a dog that always came when called. He feels protective toward you, when it doesn't conflict with his own interests. But he's rather contemptuous of you; he considers you a weakling—and, in his book, the meek are not entitled to inherit the earth; that's for chaps like himself."
I chewed that over and began to get angry. I did not doubt that Pat felt that way about me—patronizing and willing to see to it that I got a piece of cake . . . provided that he got a bigger one.
"The other thing that stands out," Dr. Devereaux went on, "is that neither you nor your brother wanted to go on this trip."
This was so manifestly untrue and unfair that I opened my mouth and left it open. Dr. Devereaux looked at me. "Yes? You were about to say?"
"Why, that's the silliest thing I ever heard, Doctor! The only real trouble Pat and I ever had was because both of us wanted to go and only one of us could."
He shook his head. "You've got it backwards. Both of you wanted to stay behind and only one of you could. Your brother won, as usual."
"No, he didn't... well, yes, he did, but the chance to go; not the other way around. And he would have, too, if it hadn't been for that accident."
" 'That accident." Mmm . . . yes." Dr. Devereaux held still, with his head dropped forward and his hands folded across his belly, for so long that I thought again that he was asleep. "Tom, I'm going to tell you something that is none of your business, because I think you need to know. I suggest that you never discuss it with your twin . . . and if you do, I'll make you out a liar, net. Because it would he bad for him. Understand me?"
"Then don't tell me," I said surlily.
"Shut up and listen." He picked up a file folder. "Here is a report on your brother's operation, written in the talk we doctors use to confuse patients. You wouldn't understand it and, anyhow, it was sent sidewise, through the Santa Maria and in code. You want to know what they found when they opened your brother up?"
"Uh, not especially."
"There was no damage to his spinal cord of any sort."
"Huh? Are you trying to tell me that he was faking his legs being paralyzed? I don't believe it!"
"Easy, now. He wasn't faking. His legs were paralyzed. He could not possibly fake paralysis so well that a neurologist could not detect it. I examined him myself; your brother was paralyzed. But not from damage to his spinal cord—which I knew and the surgeons who operated on him knew."
"But—" I shook my head. "I guess I'm stupid."
"Aren't we all? Tom, the human mind is not simple; .it is very complex. Up at the top, the conscious mind has its own ideas and desires, some of them real, some of them impressed on it by propaganda and training and the necessity for putting up a good front and cutting a fine figure to other people. Down below is the unconscious mind, blind and deaf and stupid and sly, and with—usually—a different set of desires and very different motivations. It wants its own way ... and when it doesn't get it, it raises a stink until it is satisfied. The trick in easy living is to find out what your unconscious mind really wants and give it to it on the cheapest terms possible, before it sends you through emotional bank ruptcy to get its own way. You know what a psychotic is, Tom?"
"Uh... a crazy person."
"Crazy' is a word we're trying to get rid of, A psychotic is a poor wretch who has had to sell out the shop and go naked to the world to satisfy the demands of his unconscious mind. He's made a settlement, but it has ruined him. My job is to help people make settlements that won't ruin them—like a good lawyer, We never try to get them to evade the settlement, just arrange it on the best terms.
"What I'm getting at is this: your brother managed to make a settlement with his unconscious on fairly good terms, very good terms considering that he did it without professional help. His conscious mind signed a contract and his unconscious said flatly that he must not carry it out. The conflict was so deep that it would have destroyed some people. But not your brother. His unconscious mind elected to have an accident instead, one that could cause paralysis and sure enough it did—real paralysis, mind you; no fakery. So your brother was honorably excused from an obligation he could not carry out. Then, when it was no longer possible to go on this trip; be was operated on. The surgery merely corrected minor damage to the bones. But he was encouraged to think that his paralysis would go away—and so it did." Devereaux shrugged.
I thought about it until I was confused. This conscious and unconscious stuff—I'd studied it and passed quizzes in it . . . but I didn't take any stock in it. Doc Devereaux could talk figures of speech until he was blue in the face but it didn't get around the fact that both Pat and I had wanted to go and the only reason Pat had to stay behind was because be had hurt himself in that accident. Maybe the paralysis was hysterical, maybe be had scared himself into thinking he was hurt worse than he was. But that didn't make any difference.
But Doc Devereaux talked as if the accident wasn't an accident. Well, what of it? Maybe Pat was scared green and had been too proud to show it—I still didn't think he had taken a tumble on a mountainside on purpose.
In any case, Doc was dead wrong on one thing: I had wanted to go. Oh, maybe I had been a little scared and I knew I had been homesick at first—but that was only natural.
("Then why are you so down in dumps, stupid?")
That wasn't Pat talking; that was me, talking to myself. Shucks, maybe it was my unconscious mind, talking out loud for once, "Doc?"
"Yes, Tom."
"You say I didn't really want to come along?"
"It looks that way."
"But you said the unconscious mind always wins. You can't have it both ways."
He sighed. "That isn't quite what I said. You were hurried into this. The unconscious is stupid and often slow; yours did not have time to work up anything as easy as a skiing accident. But it is stubborn. It's demanding that you go home . . . which you can't. But it won't listen to reason. It just keeps on nagging you to give it the impossible, like a baby crying for the moon."
I shrugged. "To hear you tell it, I'm in an impossible moss."
"Don't look so danged sourpuss! Mental hygiene is a process of correcting the correctable and adjusting to the inevitable. You've got three choices."
"I didn't know I had any."
"Three. You can keep on going into a spin until your mind builds up a fantasy acceptable to your unconscious • . . a psychotic adjustment, what you would call 'crazy.' Or you can muddle along as you are, unhappy and not much use to yourself or your shipmates... and always with the possibility of skidding over the line. Or you can dig into your own mind, get acquainted with it, find out what it really wants, show it what it can't have and why, and strike a healthy bargain with it on the basis of what is possible. If you've got guts and gumption, you'll try the last one. It won't be easy." He waited, looking at me.
"Uh, I guess I'd better try. But how do I do it?"
"Not by moping in your room about might-have-beens, that's sure."
"My Uncle Steve—Major Lucas, I mean"—I said slowly, "told me I shouldn't do that. He wants me to stir around and associate with other people. I guess I should."
"Surely, surely. But that's not enough. You can't chin yourself out of the hole you are in just by pretending to be the life of the party. You have to get acquainted with yourself."
"Yes, sir. But how?"
"Well, we can't do it by having you talk about yourself every afternoon while I hold your hand. Mmm . . . I suggest that you try writing down who you are and where you've been and how you got from there to here. You make it thorough enough and maybe you will begin to see 'why' as well as 'how.' Keep digging and you may find out who you are and what you want and how much of it you can get."
I must have looked baffled for he said, "Do you keep a diary?"
"Sometimes. I've got one along."
"Use it as an outline. 'The Life and Times of T. P. Bartlett, Gent.' Make it complete and try to tell the truth—all the truth."
I thought that over. Some things you don't want to tell anybody. "Uh, I suppose you'll want to read it, Doctor?"
"Me? Heaven forbid! I get too little rest without misguided people. This is for you, son; you'll be writing to yourself . . . only write it as if you didn't know anything about yourself and had to explain everything; Write it as if you expected to lose your memory and wanted to be sure you could pick up the strings again. Put it all down." He frowned and added grudgingly, "If you feel that you have found out something important and want a second opinion, I suppose I could squeeze in time to read part of it, at least. But I won't promise. Just write it to yourself—to the one with amnesia."
So I told him I would try... and I have. I can't see that it has done any special good (I pulled out of the slump anyhow) and there just isn't time to do the kind of job he told me to do. I've had to hurry over the last part of this because this is the first free evening I've had in a month.
But it's amazing how much you can remember when you really try.
There have been a lot of changes around the Elsie. For one thing we are over the hump now and backing down the other side, decelerating as fast as we boosted; we'll be at Tau Ceti in about six months, ship's time.
But I am getting ahead of myself. It has been about a year, S-time, since I started this, and about twelve years, Earth time, since we left Earth. But forget E-time; it doesn't mean anything. We've been thirteen months in the ship by S-time and a lot has happened. Pat getting married-no, that didn't happen in the ship and it's the wrong place to start.
Maybe the place to start is with another marriage, when Chet Travers married Mei-Ling Jones. It met with wide approval, except on the part of one of the engineers who was sweet on her himself. It caused us freaks and the electron pushers to bury the hatchet to have one of us marry one of them, especially when Commander Frick came down the aisle in the mess room with the bride on his arm, looking as proud and solemn as if she had been his daughter. They were a good match; Chet was not yet thirty and I figure that Mei-Ling is at least twenty-two.
But it resulted in a change in the watch list and Rupe put me on with Prudence Mathews.
I had always liked Pru without paying much attention to her. You had to look twice to know that she was pretty. But she had a way of looking up at you that made you feel important. Up to the time I started standing watches with her I had more or less left the girls alone; I guess I was "being true to Maudie." But by then I was writing this confession story for Doe Devereaux; somehow writing things down gives them finality. I said to myself, "Why not? Tom, old boy, Maudie is as definitely out of your life as if one of you were dead. But life goes on, right here in this bucket of wind."
I didn't do anything drastic; I just enjoyed Pru's company as much as possible... which turned out to be a lot.
I've heard that when the animals came aboard the Ark two by two, Noah separated them port and starboard. The Elsie isn't run that way. Chet and Mei-Ling had found it possible to get well enough acquainted to want to make it permanent. A little less than half of the crew had come aboard as married couples; the rest of us didn't have any obstacles put in our way if we had such things on our minds.
But somehow without its ever showing we were better chaperoned than is usual back dirtside. It didn't seem organized . . . and yet it must have been. If somebody was saying good night a little too long in a passageway after the lights were dimmed, it would just happen that Uncle Alfred had to get up about then and shuffle down the passageway. Or maybe it would be Mama O'Toole, going to make herself a cup of chocolate "to help her get to sleep."
Or it might be the Captain. I think he had eyes in the hack of his head for everything that went on in the ship. I'm convinced that Mama O'Toole had. Or maybe Unc was actually one of those hypothetical wide-range telepaths but was too polite and too shrewd to let anybody know it.
Or maybe Doe Devereaux had us all so well analyzed those punched cards of his that he always knew which way the rabbit would jump and could send his dogs to head him off. I wouldn't put it past him.
But it was always just enough and not too much. Nobody objected to a kiss or two if somebody wanted to check on the taste; on the other hand we never had any of the scandals that pop up every now and then in almost any community. I'm sure we didn't; you can't keep such things quiet in a ship. But nobody seemed to see a little low-pressure lalligagging.
Certainly Pru and I never did anything that would arouse criticism.
Nevertheless we were taking up more and more of each other's time, both on and off watch. I wasn't serious, not in the sense of thinking about getting married; but I was serious in that it was becoming important. She began to look at me privately and a bit possessively, or maybe our hands would touch in passing over a stack of traffic and we could feel the sparks jump.
I felt fine and alive and I didn't have time to write in these memoirs. I gained four pounds and I certainly wasn't homesick.
Pru and I got in the habit of stopping off and raiding the pantry whenever we came off a night watch together. Mama O'Toole didn't mind; she left it unlocked so that anyone who wanted a snack could find one—she said this was our home, not a jail. Pru and I would make a sandwich, or concoct a creative mess, and eat and talk before we turned in. It didn't matter what we talked about; what mattered was the warm glow we shared.
We came off watch at midnight one night and the mess room was deserted; the poker players had broken up early and there wasn't even a late chess game. Pru and I went into the pantry and were just getting set to grill a yeast-cheese sandwich. The pantry is rather cramped; when Pru turned to switch on the small grill, she brushed against me:
I got a whiff of her nice, clean hair and something like fresh clover or violets. Then I put my arms around her.
She didn't make any fuss. She stopped dead for an instant, then she relaxed.
Girls are nice. They don't have any bones and I think they must be about five degrees warmer than we are, even if fever thermometers don't show it. I put my face down and she put her face up and closed her eyes and everything was wonderful
For maybe half a second she kissed me and I knew she was as much in favor of it as I was, which is as emphatic as I can put it.
Then she had broken out of my arms like a wrestler and was standing pressed against the counter across from me and looking terribly upset. Well, so was I. She wasn't looking at me; she was staring at nothing and seemed to be listening • .. so I knew; it was the expression she wore when she was linked—only she looked terribly unhappy too.
I said, "Pru! What's the matter?"
She did not answer; she simply started to leave. She had taken a couple of steps toward the door when I reached out and grabbed her wrist. "Hey, are you mad at me?"
She twisted away, then seemed to realize that I was still there. "I'm sorry, Tom," she said huskily. "My sister is angry."
I had never met Patience Mathews—and now I hardly wanted to. "Huh? Well, of all the silly ways to behave I—"
"My sister doesn't like you, Tom," she answered firmly, as if that explained everything. "Good night."
"But—"
"Good night, Tom."
Pru was as nice as ever at breakfast but when she passed me the rolls the sparks didn't jump, I wasn't surprised when Rupe reshuffled the watch list that day but I did not ask why. Pru didn't avoid me and she would even dance with me when there was dancing, but the fire was out and neither of us tried to light it again.
A long time later I told Van about it. I got no sympathy.
"Think you're the first one to get your finger mashed in the door? Pru is a sweet little trick, take it from Grandfather van Houten. But when Sir Galahad himself comes riding up on a white charger, he's going to have to check with Patience before he can speak to Pru... and I'll bet you the answer is 'No!' Pru is willing, in her sweet little half-witted way, but Patience won't okay anything more cozy than 'Pease Porridge Hot.'"
"I think it's a shame. Mind you, it doesn't matter to me now. But her sister is going to ruin her life."
"It's her business. Myself, I reached a compromise with my twin years ago—we beat each other's teeth in and after that we cooperated on a businesslike basis. Anyhow, how do you know that Pru isn't doing the same to Patience? Maybe Pru started it."
It didn't sour me on girls, not even on girls who had twin sisters who were mind readers, but after that I enjoyed the company of all of them. But for a while I saw more of Unc. He liked to play dominoes, then when we had finished all even up for the evening he liked to talk about Sugar Pie—and to her, of course. He would look at his big photograph of her and so would I and the three of us would talk, with Unc echoing for both of us. She really was a nice little girl and it was a lot of fun to get to know a little six-year-old girl—it's very quaint what they think about.
One night I was talking with them and looking at her picture, as always, when it occurred to me that time had passed and that Sugar Pie must have changed—they grow up fast at that age. I got a brilliant idea. "Unc, why don't you have Sugar Pie mail a new photograph to Rusty Rhodes? Then he could transmit it to Dusty and Dusty could draw you one as perfect as that one, only it would be up to date, show you what she looks like now, huh? How about it, Sugar Pie? Isn't that a good idea?"
"It isn't necessary."
I was looking at the picture and I nearly popped my fuses. For a moment it wasn't the same picture. Oh, it was the same merry little girl, but she was a little older, she was shy a front tooth, and her hair was different.
And she was alive. Not just a trukolor stereo, but alive. There's a difference. -
But when I blinked it was the same old picture.
I said hoarsely, "Unc, who said, 'It isn't necessary?' You? Or Sugar Pie?"
"Why, Sugar Pie did. I echoed,"
"Yes, Unc . . . but I didn't hear you; I heard her." Then I told him about the photograph.
He nodded. "Yes, that's the way she looks. She says to tell you that her tooth is coming in, however."
"Unc... there's no way to get around it. For a moment I crowded in on your private wave length." I was feeling shaky.
"I knew. So did Sugar Pie. But you didn't crowd in, son; a friend is always welcome."
I was still trying to soak it in. The implications were more mind-stretching, even, than when Pat and I found out we could do it. But I didn't know what they were yet. "Uh, Uric, do you suppose we could do it again? Sugar Pie?"
"We can try."
But it didn't work... unless I heard her voice as well as Unc's when she said, "Good night, Tommie." I wasn't sure.
After I got to bed I told Pat about it. He was interested after I convinced him that it really had happened. "This is worth digging into, old son. I'd better record it. Doc Mabel will want to kick it around."
("Uh, wait until I check with Uncle Alf.")
"Well, all right. I guess it is his baby . . . in more ways than one. Speaking of his baby, maybe I should go see her? With two of us at each end it might be easier to make it click again. Where does his niece live?"
("Uh, Johannesburg.")
"Mmm . . . that's a far stretch down the road, but I'm sure the LRF would send me there if Doc Mabel got interested."
("Probably. But let me talk to Unc.")
But Unc talked to Dr. Devereaux first. They called me in and Doc wanted to try it again at once. He was as near excited as I ever saw him get. I said, "I'm willing, but I doubt if we'll got anywhere; we didn't last night. I think that once was just a fluke."
"Fluke, spook. If it can be done once, it can be done again, We've got to be clever enough to set up the proper conditions." He looked at me. "Any objection to a light dose of hypnosis?"
"Me? Why, no, sir. But I don't hypnotize easily."
"So? According to your record, Dr. Arnault found it not impossible. Just pretend I'm she."
I almost laughed in his face. I look more like Cleopatra than he looks like pretty Dr. Arnault. But I agreed to go along with the gag.
"All either of you will need is a light trance to brush distractions aside and make you receptive."
I don't know what a "light trance" is supposed to feel like. I didn't feel anything and I wasn't asleep.
But I started hearing Sugar Pie again.
I think Dr. Devereaux's interest was purely scientific; any new fact about what makes people tick could rouse him out of his chronic torpor. Uncle Alf suggested that Doc was anxious also to set up a new telepathic circuit, just in case. There was a hint in what Unc said that he realized that he himself would not last forever.
But there was a hint of more than that. Uncle Alf let me know very delicately that, if it should come to it, it was good to know that somebody he trusted would be keeping an eye on his baby. He didn't quite say it, not that baldly, so I didn't have to answer, or I would have choked up. It was just understood—and it was the finest compliment I ever received. I wasn't sure I deserved it so I decided I would just have to manage to deserve it if I ever had to pay off.
I could "talk" to Uncle Alf now, of course, as well as to Sugar Pie. But I didn't, except when all three of us were talking together; telepathy is an imposition when it isn't necessary. I never called Sugar Pie by myself, either, save for a couple of test runs for Doc Devereaux's benefit to establish that I could reach her without Unc's help. That took drugs; Unc would wake up from an ordinary sleep if anyone shouted on that "wave length." But otherwise I left: her alone; I had no business crowding into a little girl's mind unless she was ready and expecting company.
It was shortly after that that Pat got married.
My relations with Pat got steadily better all during that first boost, after Dr. Devereaux took me in hand. I found out, after I admitted that I despised and resented Pat, that I no longer did either one. I cured him of bothering me unnecessarily by bothering him unnecessarily—he could shut off an alarm clock but he couldn't shut off me. Then we worked out a live-and-let-live formula and got along better. Presently I found myself looking forward to whatever time we had set for checking with each other and I realized I liked him, not "again" but "at last," for I had never felt that warm toward him before.
But even while we were getting closer we were falling apart; "slippage" was catching up with us. As anyone can see from the relativity formulas, the relationship is not a straight-line one; it isn't even noticeable at the beginning but it builds up like the dickens at the other end of the scale.
At three-quarters the speed of light he complained that I was drawling, while it seemed to me that he was starting to jabber. At nine-tenths of the speed of light it was close to two for one, but we knew what was wrong now and I talked fast and he talked slow.
At 99% of c, it was seven to one and all we could do to make ourselves understood. Later that day we fell out of touch entirely.
Everybody else was having the same trouble. Sure, telepathy is instantaneous, at least the trillions of miles between us didn't cause any lag, not even like the hesitation you get in telephoning from Earth to Luna nor did the signal strength drop off. But brains are flesh and blood, and thinking takes time... and our time rates were out of gear. I was thinking so slowly (from Pat's viewpoint) that he could not slow down and stay with me; as for him, I knew from time to time that he was trying to reach me but it was just a squeal in the earphones so far as making sense was concerned.
Even Dusty Rhodes couldn't make it. His twin couldn't concentrate on a picture for the long hours necessary to let Dusty "see" it.
It was upsetting, to say the least, to all of us. Hearing voices is all right, but not when you can't tell what they are saying and can't shut them off. Maybe some of the odd cases in psychiatry weren't crazy at all; maybe the poor wretches were tuned in on a bad wave length.
Unc took it the worst at first and I sat with him all one evening while we both tried together. Then he suddenly regained his serenity; Sugar Pie was thinking about him; that he knew; so being, words weren't really necessary.
Pru was the only one who flourished; she was out from under the thumb of her sister. She got really kissed, probably for the first time in her life. No, not by me; I just happened to be wandering down for a drink at the scuttlebutt, then I backed away quietly and let the drink wait. No point in saying who it was, as it didn't mean anything—I think Pru would have kissed the Captain at that point if he had held still. Poor little Pru!
We resigned ourselves to having to wait until we slid back down closer into phase. We were still hooked ship-to-ship because the ships were accelerating to the same schedule, and there was much debate back and forth about the dilemma, one which apparently nobody had anticipated. In one way it was not important, since we would not have anything to report until we slowed down and started checking the stars we were headed for, but in another way it was: the time the Elsie spent at the speed of light (minus a gnat's whisker) was going to seem very short to us—but it was going to be ten solid years and a bit over to those back Earth side. As we learned later, Dr. Devereaux and his opposite numbers in the other ships and back in LRF were wondering bow many telepathic pairs they would have still functioning (if any) after a lapse of years. They had reason to worry. It had already been established that identical twins were hardly ever telepairs if they had lived apart for years—that was the other reason why most of those picked were young; most twins are separated by adult life.
But up to then, we hadn't been "separated" in Project Lebensraum. Sure, we were an unthinkable distance apart but each pair had been in daily linkage and in constant practice by being required to stand regular watches, even if there was nothing to send but the news.
But what would a few years of being out of touch do to rapport between telepartners?
This didn't bother me; I didn't know about it. I got a sort of an answer out of Mr. O'Toole which caused me to think that a couple of weeks of ship's time would put us back close enough in phase to make ourselves understood. In the meantime, no watches to stand so it wasn't all bad. I went to bed and tried to ignore the squeals inside my head.
I was awakened by Pat.
"Tom . . . answer me, Tom. Can you hear me, Tom? An- ("Hey, Pat, I'm here!") I was wide awake, out of bed and standing on the floor plates, so excited I could hardly talk.
"Tom! Oh, Tom! It's good to hear you, boy-it's been two years since I was last able to raise you."
("But—") I started to argue, then shut up. It had been less than a week to me. But I would have to look at the Greenwich calendar and a check with the computation office before I could even guess how long it had been for Pat.
"Let me talk, Tom, 1 can't keep this up long. They've had me under deep hypnosis and drugs for the past six weeks and it has taken me this long to get in touch with you. They don't dare keep me under much longer."
("You mean they've got you hypped right now?")
"Of course, or I couldn't talk to you at all. Now—" His voice faded out for a second "Sorry. They had to stop to give me another shot and an intravenous feeding. Now listen and record this schedule: Van Houten—" He reeled off precise Greenwich times and dates, to the second, for each of us, and faded out while I was reading them back. I caught a "So long" that went up in pitch, then there was silence.
I pulled on pants before I went to wake the Captain but I did not stop for shoes. Then everybody was up and all the daytime lights were turned on even though it was officially night and Mama O'Toole was making coffee and everybody was talking. The relativists were elbowing each other in the computation room and Janet Meers was working out ship's time for Bernie van Houten's appointment with his twin without bothering to put it through the computer because he was first on the list.
Van failed to link with his brother and everybody got jittery and Janet Meers was in tears because somebody suggested that she had made a mistake in the relative times, working it in her head; But Dr. Babcock himself pushed her solution through the computer and checked her to nine decimals. Then he announced in a chilly tone that he would thank everyone not to criticize his staff thereafter; that was his privilege.
Gloria linked with her sister right after that and everybody felt better. The Captain sent a dispatch to the flagship through Miss Gamma and got an answer back that two other ships were back in contact, the Nautilus and the Cristoforo Colombo.
There was no more straggling up to relieve the watch and stopping to grab a bite as we passed the pantry. If the recomputed time said your opposite number would be ready to transmit at 3:17:06 and a short tick, ship's time, you were waiting for him from three o'clock on and no nonsense, with the recorder rolling and the mike in front of your lips. It was easy for us in the ship, but each one of us knew that his telepair was having to undergo both hypnosis and drastic drugging to stay with us at all—Dr. Devereaux did not seem happy about it.
Nor was there any time for idle chit-chat, not with your twin having to chop maybe an hour out of his life for each word. You recorded what he sent, right the first time and no fumbles; then you transmitted what the Captain had initialed. If that left a few moments to talk, all right. Usually it did not ... which was how I got mixed up about Pat's marriage.
You see, the two weeks bracketing our change-over from boost to deceleration, during which time we reached our peak speed, amounted to about ten years Earthside. That's 250 to 1 on the average. But it wasn't all average; at the middle of that period the slippage was much greater, I asked Mr. O'Toole what the maximum was and he just shook his head. There was no way to measure it, he told me, and the probable errors were larger than the infinitesimal values he was working with.
"Let's put it this way," he finished. "I'm glad there is no hay fever in this ship, because one hard sneeze would push us over the edge."
He was joking, for, as Janet Meers pointed out, as our speed approached the speed of light, our mass approached infinity.
But we fell out of phase again for a whole day.
At the end of one of those peak "watches" (they were never more than a couple of minutes long, S-time) Pat told me that he and Maudie were going to get married. Then he was gone before I could congratulate him. I started to tell him that I thought Maudie was a little young and wasn't he rushing things and missed my chance. He was off our band.
I was not exactly jealous. I examined myself and decided that I was not when I found out that I could not remember what Maudie looked like. Oh, I knew what she looked like—blonde, and a little snub nose with a tendency to get freckles across it in the summertime. But I couldn't call up her face the way I could Pru's face, or Janet's. All I felt was a little left out of things.
I did remember to check on the Greenwich, getting Janet to relate it back to the exact time of my last watch. Then I saw that I bad been foolish to criticize. Pat was twenty-three and Maudie was twenty-one, almost twenty-two.
I did manage to say, "Congratulations," on my next linkage but Pat did not have a chance to answer. Instead he answered on the next. "Thanks for the congratulations. We've named her after Mother but I think she is going to look like Maudie."
This flabbergasted me. I had to ask for Janet's help again and found that everything was all right—I mean, when a couple has been married two years a baby girl is hardly a surprise, is it? Except to me.
All in all, I had to make quite a few readjustments those two weeks. At the beginning Pat and I were the same age, except for an inconsequential slippage. At the end of that period (I figure the end as being the time when it was no longer necessary to use extreme measures to let us telepairs talk) my twin was more than eleven years older than I was and had a daughter seven years old.
I stopped thinking about Maudie as a girl, certainly not as one I had been sweet on. I decided that she was probably getting fat and sloppy and very, very domestic—she never could resist that second chocolate éclair. As a matter of fact; Pat and I had grown very far apart, for we had little in common now. The minor gossip of the ship, so important to me, bored him; on the other hand, I couldn't get excited about his flexible construction units and penalty dates. We still telecommunicated satisfactorily but it was like two strangers using a telephone. I was sorry, for I had grown to like him before he slipped away from me.
But I did want to see my niece. Knowing Sugar Pie had taught me that baby girls are more fun than puppies and even cuter than kittens. I remembered the idea I had had about Sugar Pie and braced Dusty on the subject.
He agreed to do it; Dusty can't turn down a chance to show how well he can draw. Besides, he had mellowed, for him; he no longer snarled when you tried to pet him even though it might be years before he would learn to sit up and beg.
Dusty turned out a beautiful picture. All Baby Molly lacked was little wings to make her a cherub. I could see a resemblance to myself—to her father, that is. "Dusty, this is a beautiful picture. Is it a good likeness?"
He bristled. "How should I know? But if there is a micron's s difference, or a shade or tone off that you could pick up with a spectrophotometer, from the pic your brother mailed to my brother, I'll eat it! But how do I know bow the proud parents had the thing prettied up?"
"Sorry, sorry! It's a swell picture. I wish there were some way I could pay you."
"Don't stay awake nights; I'll think of something. My services come high."
I took down my pic of Lucille LaVonne and put Molly in her place. I didn't throw away the one of Lucille, though.
It was a couple of months later that I found out that Dr. Devereaux had seen entirely different possibilities in my being able to use the "wave length" of Uncle Alf and Sugar Pie from the obvious ones I had seen. I had continued to talk with both of them, though not as often as I had at first. Sugar Pie was a young lady now, almost eighteen, in normal school at Witwatersrand and already started practice teaching. Nobody but Unc and I called her "Sugar Pie" and the idea that I might someday substitute for Unc was forgotten—at the rate we were shifting around pretty soon she could bring me up.
But Doe Devereaux had not forgotten the matter. However the negotiations had been conducted by him with LRF without consulting me. Apparently Pat had been told to keep it to himself until they were ready to try it, for the first I knew of it was when I told him to stand by to record some routine traffic (we were back on regular watches by then). "Skip it, old son," he said. "Pass the traffic to the next victim. You and I are going to try something fresh."
("What?")
"LRF orders, all the way down from the top. Molly has an interim research contract all of her own, just like you and I had."
("Huh? She's not a twin.")
"Let me count her. No, there's just one of her—though she sometimes seems like an entire herd of wild elephants. But she's here, and she wants to say hello to Uncle Tom."
("Oh, fine. Hello, Molly.")
"Hello, Uncle Tom."
I almost jumped out of my skin. I had caught it right off, with no fumbling. ("Hey, who was that? Say that again!")
"Hello, Uncle Tom." She giggled. ``I've got a new hair bow."
I gulped. ("I'll bet you look mighty cute in it, honey. I wish I could see you. Pat! When did this happen?")
"On and off, for the past ten weeks. It took some tough sessions with Dr. Mabel to make it click. By the way, it took some tougher sessions with, uh, the former Miss Kouric before she would agree to let us try it."
"He means Mommy," Molly told me in a conspirator's whisper. "She didn't like it. But I do, Uncle Tom. I think it's nice."
"I've got no privacy from either one of them," Pat complained. "Look, Tom, this is just a test run and I'm signing off. I've got to get the terror back to her mother."
"She's going to make me take a nap," Molly agreed in a resigned voice, ``and I'm too old for naps. Good-by, Uncle Tom. I love you."
("I love you, Molly.")
I turned around and Dr. Devereaux and the Captain were standing behind me, ears flapping. "How did it go?" Dr. Devereaux demanded, eagerly—for him.
I tried to keep my face straight. "Satisfactorily. Perfect reception." ....
"The kid, too?"
"Why, yes, sir. Did you expect something else?"
He let out a long breath. "Son, if you weren't needed, I'd beat your brains out with an old phone list."
I think Baby Molly and I were the first secondary communication team in the fleet. We were not the last. The LRF, proceeding on a hypothesis suggested by the case of Uncle Alfred and Sugar Pie, assumed that it was possible to form a new team where the potential new member was very young and intimately associated with an adult member of an old team. It worked in some eases. In other cases it could not even be tried because no child was available.
Pat and Maude had a second baby girl just before we reached the Tau Ceti system. Maudie put her foot down with respect to Lynette; she said two freaks in her family were enough.
By the time we were a few light-hours from Tan Ceil we knew that we had not drawn a blank; by stereo and doppler-stereo Harry Gates had photographed half a dozen planets. Harry was not only senior planetologist; he was boss of the research department. I suppose he had enough degrees to string like beads, but I called him "Harry" because everybody did. He was not the sort you call "Doctor"; he was eager and seemed younger than he was.
To Harry the universe was a complicated toy somebody had given him; he wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. He was delighted with it and willing to discuss it with anybody at any time. I got acquainted with him in the bottle-washing business because Harry didn't treat lab assistants like robots; he treated them like people and did not mind that he knew so much more than they did—he even seemed to think that he could learn something from them.
How lie found time to marry Barbara Kuiper I don't know, but Barbara was a torch watchstander, so it probably started as a discussion of physics and drifted over into biology and sociology; Harry was interested in everything. But he didn't find time to he around the night their first baby was born, as that was the night he photographed the planet he named Constance, after the baby. There was objection to this, because everybody wanted to name it, but the Captain decided that the ancient rule applied: finders of astronomical objects were entitled to name them.
Finding Constance was not an accident. (I mean the planet, not the baby; the baby wasn't lost.) Harry wanted a planet about fifty to fifty-one million miles from Tau, or perhaps I should say that the LRF wanted one of that distance. You see, while Tan Ceti is a close relative of the Sun, by spectral types, Tau is smaller and gives off only about three-tenths as much sunshine—so, by the same old tired inverse square law you use to plan the lights for a living room or to arrange a photoflash picture, a planet fifty million miles from Tau would catch the same amount of sunlight as a planet ninety-three million miles from Sol, which is where Earth sits. We weren't looking for just any planet, or we would have stayed home in the Solar System; we wanted a reasonable facsimile of Earth or it would not he worth colonizing.
If you go up on your roof on a dear night, the stars look so plentiful you would think that planets very much like Earth must he as common as eggs in a hen yard. Well, they are: Harry estimates that there arc between a hundred thousand and a hundred million of them in our own Milky Way-and you can multiply that figure by anything you like for the whole universe.
The hitch is that they aren't conveniently at hand. Tau Ceti was only eleven light-years from Earth; most stars in our own Galaxy average more like fifty thousand light-years from Earth. Even the Long Range Foundation did not think in those terms; unless a star was within a hundred light-years or so it was silly to think of colonizing it even with torchships. Sure, a torchship can go as far as necessary, even across the Galaxy—but who is going to he interested in receiving its real estate reports after a couple of ice ages have come and gone? The population problem would he solved one way or another long before then . . . maybe the way the Kilkenny cats solved theirs.
But there are only fifteen-hundred-odd stars within a hundred light-years of Earth and only about a hundred and sixty of these are of the same general spectral type as the Sun. Project Lebensraum hoped to check not more than half of these, say seventy-five at the outside—less since we had lost the Vasco da Gama.
If even one real Earth-type planet was turned up in the search, the project would pay off. But there was no certainty that it would. A Sol-type star might not have an Earth-type planet; a planet might be too close to the fire, or too far, or too small to hold an atmosphere, or too heavy for humanity's fallen arches, or just too short on the H20 that figures into everything we do.
Or it might be populated by some rough characters with notions about finders-keepers.
The Vasco da Gama had had the best chance to find the first Earth-type planet as the star she had been beading for, Alpha Centauri Able, is the only star in this part of the world which really is a twin of the Sun. (Able's companion, Alpha Centauri Baker, is a different sort, spectral type K.) We had the next best chance, even though Tan Ceti is less like the Sun than is Alpha Centauri-B, for the next closest G-type is about thirteen light years from Earth . . . which gave us a two-year edge over the Magellan and nearly four over the Nautilus.
Provided we found anything, that is. You can imagine how jubilant we were when Tau Ceti turned out to have pay dirt.
Harry was jubilant, too, but fur the wrong reasons. I had wandered into the observatory, hoping to get a sight of the sky—one of the Elsie's shortcomings was that it was almost impossible to see out—when he grabbed me and said, "Look at this, pal!"
I looked at it. It was a sheet of paper with figures on it; it could have been Mama O'Toole's crop-rotation schedule.
"What is it?"
"Can't you read? It's Bodes Law, that's what it is!"
I thought back. Let me see.., no, that was Ohm's Law—then I remembered; Bode's Law was a simple geometrical progression that described the distances of the Solar planets from the Sun. Nobody had ever been able to find a reason for it and it didn't work well in some cases, though I seemed to remember that Neptune, or maybe Pluto, had been discovered by calculations that made use of it. It looked like an accidental relationship.
"What of it?" I asked.
"'What of it?' the man says! Good grief! This is the most important thing since Newton got conked with the apple."
"Maybe so, Harry, but I m a little slow today. I thought Bode's Law was just an accident. Why couldn't it be an accident here, too?"
Accident! Look, Tom, if you roll a seven once, that's an accident. When you roll a seven eight hundred times in a row, somebody has loaded the dice."
"But this is only twice."
"It's not the same thing. Get me a big enough sheet of paper and I'll write down the number of zeros it takes to describe how unlikely this 'accident' is." He looked thoughtful. "Tommie, old friend, this is going to be the key that unlocks how planets are made. They'll bury us right alongside Galileo for this. Mmm . . . Tom, we can't afford to spend much time in this neighborhood; we've got to get out and take a look at the Beta Hydri system and make sure it checks the same way—just to convince the mossbacks back Earthside, for it will, it will! I gotta go tell the Captain we'll have to change the schedule." He stuffed the paper in a pocket and hurried away. I looked around but the anti- radiation shutters were over the observatory ports; I didn't get to see out.
Naturally the Captain did not change the schedule; we were out there looking for farm land, not trying to unscrew the inscrutable. A few weeks later we were in orbit around Constance. It put us into free-fall for the first time during the trip, for we had not even been so during acceleration- deceleration change-over but had done it in a skew path instead; chief engineers don't like to shut a torch down unless there is time for an overhaul before starting up again—there was the case of the Peter the Great who shut hers off, couldn't light up again; and fell into the Sun. '
I didn't like free-fall. But it's all right if you don't overload your stomach.
Harry did not seem disappointed. He had a whole new planet to play with, so he tabled Bode's Law and got busy. We stayed in orbit, a thousand miles up, while research found out everything possible about Connie without actually touching it: direct visual search, radiation survey, absorption-spectra of her atmosphere. She had two moons, one a nice size, though smaller than Luna, so they were able to measure her surface gravity exactly.
She certainly looked like a home away from home. Commander Frick had his boys and girls set up a relay tank in the mess room, with color and exaggerated stereo, so that we all could see. Connie looked like the pictures they show of Earth from space stations, green and blue and brown and half covered with clouds and wearing polar ice like skullcaps. Her air pressure was lower than ours but her oxygen ratio was higher; we could breathe it. Absorption spectra showed higher carbon dioxide but not as high as Earth had during the Coal Age.
She was smaller but had a little more land area than Earth; her oceans were smaller. Every dispatch back to Earth carried good news and I even managed to get Pat's mind off his profit-and-loss for a while . . . he had incorporated us as "Bartlett Brothers, Inc." and seemed to expect me to be interested in the bookkeeping simply because my accumulated LRF salary had gone into the capitalization. Shucks, I hadn't touched money for so long I had forgotten anybody used the stuff.
Naturally our first effort was to find out if anybody was already in occupation . . . intelligent animal life I mean, capable of using tools, building things, and organizing. If there was, we were under orders to scoot out of there without landing, find fuel somewhere else in that system, and let a later party attempt to set up friendly relations; the LRF did not want to repeat the horrible mistake that had been made with Mars.
But the electro-magnetic spectrum showed nothing at all, from gamma radiation right up to the longest radio wavelengths. If there were people down there, they didn't use radio and they didn't show city lights and they didn't have atomic power. Nor did they have aircraft, nor roads, nor traffic on the surface of their oceans, nor anything that looked like cities. So we moved down just outside the atmosphere in an "orange slice" pole-to-pole orbit that let us patrol the whole surface, a new sector each half turn.
Then we searched visually, by photography, and by radar. We didn't miss anything more conspicuous than a beaver dam, I'm sure. No cities, no houses, no roads, no bridges, no ships, nobody home; Oh, animals, surely—we could see herds gazing on the plains and we got lesser glimpses of other things. But it looked like a squatter's paradise.
The Captain sent a dispatch: "I am preparing to land."
I promptly volunteered for the reconnaissance party. First I braced my uncle Major Lucas to let me join his guard. He told me to go roll my hoop. "If you think I have any use for an untrained recruit, you're crazier than you apparently think I am. If you wanted to soldier, you should have thought of it as soon as we torched off."
"But you've got men from all the departments in your guard."
"Every one of 'em trained soldiers. Seriously, Tom, I can't afford it. I need men who will protect me; not somebody so green I'll have to protect him. Sorry."
So I tackled Harry Gates to let me join the scientific party the ship's guard would protect. He said, "Certainly, why not? Plenty of dirty work that my gang of prima donnas won't want to do. You can start by checking this inventory."
So I checked while he counted. Presently he said, "How does it feel to be a little green man in a flying saucer?"
"What?"
"An oofoe. We're an oofoe, do you realize that?"
I finally understood him-an U.F.O., an "unidentified flying object." There were accounts of the U.F.O. hysteria in all the histories of space flight. "I suppose we are an U.F.O., sort of."
"It's exactly what we are. The U.F.O.'s were survey ships, just as we are. They looked us over, didn't like what they saw, and went away. If they hadn't found Earth crawling with hostile natives, they would have landed and set up housekeeping, just as we are going to do."
"Harry, do you really believe the U.F.O.'s were anything but imagination or mistakes in reporting? I thought that theory was exploded long ago.”
"Take another look at the evidence, Tom. There was something going on up in our sky shortly before we took up space jumping ourselves. Sure, most of the reports were phonies. But some weren't. You have to believe evidence when you have it in front of you, or else the universe is just too fantastic. Surely you don't think that human beings are the only ones who ever built star ships?"
"Well . . . maybe not. But if somebody else has, why haven't they visited us long ago?"
"Simple arithmetic, pal; it's a big universe and we're just one small corner of it. Or maybe they did. That's my own notion; they surveyed us end Earth wasn't what they wanted—maybe us, maybe the climate. So the U.F.O.'s went away." He considered it. "Maybe they landed just long enough to fuel."
That was all I got out of my tenure as a member of the scientific party; when Harry submitted my name an his list, the Captain drew a line through it. "No special communicators will leave the ship."
That settled it; the Captain had a will of iron. Van got to go, as his brother had been killed in an accident while we were at peak—so I called Pat and told him about Van and suggested that Pat drop dead. He didn't see anything funny in it.
The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as I know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been unable to do while underway. They didn't care where they were or where they were going so long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.
"Is that normal?" I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.
"For his breed of cat, it's robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the keyhole."
Sam Rojas was as annoyed as I was at the discrimination against us telepaths; he had counted on planting his feet on strange soil, like Balboa and Columbus and Lundy. He came around to see me about it. "Tom, are you going to stand for it?"
"Well, I don't want to—but what can we do?
"I've been talking to some of the others. It's simple. We don't."
"We don't what?"
"Mmm . . . we just don't. Tom, ever since we slowed down, I've detected a falling off in my telepathic ability. It seems to be affecting all of us—those I've talked to. How about yourself?"
"Why, I haven't—"
"Think hard," he interrupted. "Surely you've noticed it. Why, I doubt if I could raise my twin right now. It must have something to do with where we are . . . maybe there is something odd about the radiation of Tau Ceti, or something. Or maybe it comes from Connie. Who knows? And, for that matter, who can check on us?"
I began to get the pattern. I didn't answer, because it was a tempting idea.
"If we can't communicate," he went on, "we ought to be useful for something else . . . like the landing party, for instance. Once we are out of range of this mysterious influence probably we would be able to make our reports back to Earth all right. Or maybe it would turn out that some of the girls who didn't want to go with the landing party could manage to get in touch with Earth and carry the reports ... provided us freaks weren't discriminated against."
"It's an idea," I admitted.
"Think about it. You'll find your special talent getting weaker and weaker. Me, I'm stone deaf already." He went away.
I toyed with the idea. I knew the Captain would recognize a strike when he saw one . . . but what could he do? Call us all liars and hang us by our thumbs until we gave in? How could he be certain that we hadn't all gone sour as m-r's? The answer was that he could not be certain; nobody but a mind reader knows what it feels like, nobody but the mind reader himself can tell that he is doing it. When we slipped out of contact at peak he hadn't doubted us, he had just accepted it. He would have to accept it now, no matter what he thought.
For he had to have us; we were indispensable.
Dad used to he arbitration representative in his guild local; I remembered his saying once that the only strike worth calling was one in which the workers were so badly needed that the strike would be won before a walkout. That was the pinch we had the Captain in; he had to have us. No strikebreakers closer than eleven light-years. He wouldn't dare get rough with us.
Except that any one of us could break the strike. Let's see—Van was out of it and so was Cas Warner; they were no longer telepaired, their twins were dead. Pru's sister Patience was still alive, but that telepair had never been mended after peak—her sister had refused the risky drugs and hypnosis routine and they never got back into rapport. Miss Gamma did not count, because the ships her two sisters were in were still peaking, so we were cut off from sidewise relay back to Earth until one of them decelerated. Not counting Sam and myself, whom did that leave? And could they be counted on? There was Rupe, Gloria, Anna, and Dusty . . . and Unc of course. And Mei-Ling.
Yes, they were solid. Making us feel that we were freaks when we first came aboard had consolidated us, Even if one or two didn't feel right about it, nobody would let the others down. Not even Mei-Ling who was married to an outsider. It would work. If Sam could line them up.
I wanted to go dirtside the worst way.., and maybe this was the worst way, but I still wanted to.
Just the same, there was something sneaky about it, like a kid spending his Sunday School collection money.
Sam had until noon the next day to get it lined up, because we were down to one watch a day. A continuous communication watch was not necessary and them was more ship's work to do now that we were getting ready to explore. I tabled the matter and went down to tag the rats that would he used by the scientific survey.
But I did not have to wait until the following day; Unc called us together that evening and we crowded into his room—all but Miss Gamma and Van and Pru and Cas. Unc looked around, looking horse-faced and sad, and said he was sorry we couldn't all sit down but he wouldn't keep us long. Then he started a meandering speech about how he thought of us all as his children and he had grown to love us and we would always be his children, no matter what. Then he started talking about the dignity of being a human being.
"A man pays his bills, keeps himself clean, respects other people, and keeps his word. He gets no credit for this; he has to do this much just to stay even with himself. A ticket to heaven comes higher."
He paused and added, "Especially he keeps his promises." He looked around and added, "That's all I had to say. Oh, I might as well make one announcement while we are here. Rupe has had to shift the watch list around a little bit." He picked out Sam Rojas with his eyes. "Sam, I want you to take next watch, tomorrow noon. Will you do it?"
There wasn't a sound for about three heart heats. Then Sam said slowly, "Why, I guess so, Unc, if you want me to."
"I'd he much obliged, Sam. One way and another, I don't want to put anybody else on that watch... and I wouldn't feel like standing it myself if you couldn't do it. I guess I would just have to tell the Captain there wasn't anybody available. So I'm pleased that you'll do it."
"Uh, why, sure, Unc. Don't worry about it,"
And that was the end of the strike.
Unc didn't let us go quite yet. "I thought I'd tell you about the change in the watch list while I had you here and save Rupe from having to take it around to have you initial it. But I called you together to ask you about something else. The landing party will be leaving the ship before long. Nice as Constance looks, I understand that it will he risky . . . diseases that we don't know about; animals that might turn out to he deadly in ways we didn't expect, almost anything. It occurred to me that we might be able to help. We could send one of us with the landing party and keep one of us on watch in the ship—and we could arrange for their telepairs to relay by telephone. That way we'd always be in touch with the landing party, even if radios broke down or no matter what. It would be a lot of extra work and no glory.., but it would be worth it if it saved the life of one shipmate."
Sam said suddenly, "Who are you figuring on to go with the landing party, Unc?"
"Why, I don't know. It isn't expected of us and we don't rate special-hazard pay, so I wouldn't feel like ordering anybody—I doubt if the Captain would back me up. But I was hoping for enough volunteers so that we could rotate the dirtside watch." He blinked and looked unsure of himself. "But nobody is expected to volunteer. I guess you had better let me know privately. "
He didn't have to wait; we all volunteered. Even Mei- Ling did and then got mad and cried when Unc pointed out gently that she had better have her husband's consent—which she wasn't going to get; the Travers family was expecting a third.
Unc tackled the Captain the next morning. I wanted to hang around and hear the outcome but there was too much work to do. I was surprised, a half hour later, to be paged by speaker down in the lab; I washed my hands and hurried up to the Old Man's cabin.
Unc was there, looking glum, and the Captain was looking stern. I tried to call Unc on the Sugar-Pie band, to find out where things stood, but for once he ignored me. The Captain looked at me coldly and said, "Bartlett, Mr. McNeil has proposed a plan whereby the people in your department want to help out in the dirtside survey. I'll tell you right off that I have turned it down. The offer is appreciated—but I have no more intention of risking people in your special category in such duty than I would approve of modifying the ship's torch to sterilize the dinner dishes. First things first!"
He drummed on his desk. "Nevertheless, the suggestion has merit. I won't risk your whole department . . . but I might risk one special communicator to increase the safeguards for the landing party. Now it occurred in me that we have one sidewise pair right in this ship, without having to relay through Earth. You and Mr. McNeil. Well? What have you to say?"
I started to say, "Sure!"—then thought frantically. If I got to go after all that had happened, Sam was going to take a very dark view of it... and so was everybody. They might think I had framed it.
"Well? Speak up!"
Doggone, no matter what they thought, it wasn't a thing you could refuse. "Captain, you know perfectly well I volunteered for the landing party several days ago."
"So you did. All right, I'll take your consent for granted.
But you misunderstood me. You aren't going; that will he Mr. McNeil's job. You'll stay here and keep in touch with him."
I was so surprised that I almost missed the next thing the Captain said. I shot a remark to Unc privately: ("What's this, Unc? Don't you know that all of them will think you swindled them?")
This time he answered me, distress in his voice: "I know it, son. He took me by surprise."
("Well, what are you going to do?")
"I don't know. I'm wrong both ways."
Sugar Pie suddenly cut in with, "Hey! What are you two fussing about?"
Unc said gently: "Go away, honey. This is man talk."
"Well!" But she didn't interrupt again. Perhaps she listened.
The Captain was saying: "—in any doubly-manned position, we will never risk the younger when the older can serve.
That is standard and applies as much to Captain Urqhardt and myself as it does to any other two. The mission comes first. Bartlett, your expected usefulness is at least forty years longer than that of Mr. McNeil. Therefore he must be preferred for a risk task. Very well, gentlemen. You'll receive instructions later."
("Unc—what are you going to tell Sam? Maybe you agree—I don't!")
"Don't joggle my elbow, son." He went on aloud: "No, Captain."
The Captain stared. "Why, you old scoundrel! Are you that fond of your skin?"
Unc faced him right back. "It's the only one I have, Captain. But that doesn't have anything to do with the case. And maybe you were a little hasty in calling me names."
"Eh?" The Captain turned red. "I'm sorry, McNeil. I take that back. But I think you owe me an explanation for your attitude."
"I'm going to give it, sir. We're old men, both of us. I can get along without setting foot on this planet and so can you. But it looks different to young people. You know perfectly well that my people volunteered for the landing party not because they are angels, not scientists, not philanthropists... but because they are aching to go ashore. You know that; you told me as much, not ten minutes ago. If you are honest with yourself, you know that most of these children would never have signed up for this trip if they had suspected that they were to be locked up, never permitted to have what they call an "adventure.' They didn't sign up for money; they signed up for the far horizons. Now you rob them of their reasonable expectations."
The Captain looked grim. He clenched end unclenched a fist, then said, "There may be something in what you say. But I must make the decisions; I can't delegate that. My decision stands. You go and Bartlett stays."
I said: ("Tell him he won't get a darn' message through!")
Unc didn't answer me. "I'm afraid not, Captain. This is a volunteer job... and I'm not volunteering."
The Captain said slowly, "I'm not sure that volunteering is necessary. My authority to define a man's duty is broad. I rather think you are refusing duty."
"Not so; Captain. I didn't say I wouldn't take your orders; I just said I was not volunteering. But I'd ask for written orders, I think, and I would endorse them: 'Accepted under protest,' and ask to have a copy transmitted to the Foundation. I don't volunteer."
"But-confound it, man! You volunteered with the rest. That's what you came in here for. And I picked you."
Unc shook his head. "Not quite, Captain. We volunteered as a group. You turned us down as a group. If I gave you the impression that I was volunteering, any other way, I am sorry . . . but that's how it is. Now if you will excuse me, sir, I'll go back and tell my people you won't have us."
The Captain turned pink again. Then he suddenly started to roar with laughter. He jumped up and put his arm around Unc's narrow shoulders. "You old scoundrel! You are an old scoundrel, a mutinous black-hearted scoundrel. You make me long for the days of bread-and-water and the rope's end. Now sit back down and we'll work this out. Bartlett, you can go,"
I left, reluctantly, and then stayed away from the other freaks because I didn't want to answer questions. But Unc was thoughtful; he called me, mind to mind, as soon as he was out of the Captain's cabin and told me the upshot. It was a compromise. He and I and Rupe and Sam would rotate, with the first trick (considered to be the most dangerous) to be his. The girls would take the shipside watch, with Dusty classed with them because of age. But a bone was thrown to them: once medicine and research classed the planet as safe, they would be allowed sightseeing, one at a time. "I had to twist his arm on that part," Unc admitted, "but he agreed."
Then it turned out to be an anticlimax; Connie was about as dangerous as Kansas. Before any human went outside the ship other than encased in a quarantine suit we exposed rats and canaries and hamsters to natural atmosphere; they loved it. When the first party went ashore, still in quarantine suits but breathing Connie's air after it had passed through electrostatic precipitators, two more experimental animals went with them-Bernhard van Houten and Percival the Pig.
Van had been down in the dumps ever since his twin was killed; he volunteered and I think Dr. Devereaux urged the Captain to let him. Somebody had to do it; you can make all the microscopic and chemical tests you like—the day comes when a living man has to expose his. skin to a planet to find out if it is friendly. As Dr. Babcock says, eventually you must climb the tree. So Van went ashore without a quarantine suit, wearing shorts and shirt and shoes and looking like a scoutmaster.
Percival the Pig did not volunteer, but he thought it was a picnic. He was penned in natural bush and allowed to forage, eating anything from Connie's soil that he thought was fit to eat. A pig has advantages as an experimental animal; he eats anything, just as rats and men do, and I understand that his metabolism is much like ours—pigs even catch many of the same diseases. If Percival prospered, it was almost certain that we would, particularly as Percy had not been given the inoculations that we had, not even the wide-spectrum G.A.R. serum which is supposed to give some protection even against diseases mankind has never encountered before.
Percy got fat, eating anything and drinking brook water, Van got a sunburn and then tanned. Both were healthy and the pioneer party took off their quarantine suits. Then almost everybody (even Percy) came down with a three-day fever and a touch of diarrhea, but everybody recovered and nobody caught it twice.
They rotated after that and all but Uncle Steve and Harry and certain ones whom they picked swapped with someone in the ship. Half of the second party were inoculated with serum made from the blood of those who bad recovered from three-day fever; most of these did not catch it. But the ones who returned were not allowed back in the ship at once; they were quarantined on a temporary deck rigged above the top bulge of the Elsie.
I don't mean to say that the planet was just like a city park—you can get killed, even in Kansas. There was a big, lizardlike carnivore who was no bargain. One of those got Lefty Gomez the first time our people ran into one and the beast would have killed at least two more if Lefty had been the kind of man who insists on living forever. I would never have figured Lefty as a hero—he was assistant pastry cook and dry-stores keeper back in the ship—but Uncle Steve says that ultimate courage is the commonest human virtue and that seven out of ten are Medal of Honor men, given the circumstances.
Maybe so. I must be one of the other three. I don't think I would have stood my ground and kept poking away at the thing's eyes, armed only with a campfire spit.
But tyrannosaurus ceti was not dangerous enough to give the planet a down check, once we knew he was there and what he was. Any big cat would have been much more dangerous, because cats are smart and he was stupid. You had to shoot first, but an explosive bullet made him lie down and be a rug. He had no real defense against men and someday men would exterminate him.
The shore party camped within sight of the ship on the edge of beautiful Babcock Bay, where we were anchored. The two helicopters patrolled each day, always together so that one could rescue the men in the other if it went down, and never more than a few hundred miles from base. Patrols on foot never went more than ten miles from base; we weren't trying to conquer the country, but simply trying to find out if men could conquer and hold it. They could... at least around Babcock Bay... and where men can get a toe hold they usually hang on.
My turn did not come until the fourth rotation and by then they were even letting women go ashore; the worry part Was over.
The oddest thing about being outdoors was the sensation of weather; I had been in air-conditioning for two years and I had forgotten rain and wind and sunshine in your face. Aboard the Elsie the engineer on watch used to cycle the temperature and humidity and ozone content on a random schedule, which was supposed to be good for our metabolisms. But it wasn't weather; it was more like kissing your sister.
The first drop of rain I felt startled me; I didn't know what it was. Then I was running up and down and dancing like a kid and trying to catch it in my mouth. It was rain, real rain and it was wonderful!
I couldn't sleep that night. A breeze on my face and the sounds of others sleeping around me and the distant noises of live things outside our snooper fences and the lack of perfect darkness all kept me awake. A ship is alive, too, and has its noises, but they are different from those outdoors; a planet is alive in another way.
I got up quietly and tip-toed outside. In front of the men's quarters about fifty feet away I could see the guardsman on watch. He did not notice me, as he had his head bent over dials and displays from the inner and outer fences and from the screen over us. I did not want to talk, so I went around behind the hut, out of sight of even the dim light from his instruments. Then I stopped and looked up.
It was the first good view of the sky I had had since we had left Earth and the night was clear. I stood there, dazzled and a little drunk from it.
Then I started trying to pick out constellations.
It was not hard; eleven light-years is just down the street for most stars. The Dipper was overhead, looking a little more battered than it does from Earth but perfectly recognizable. Orion blazed near the horizon ahead of me but Procyon had moved over a long way and Sirius was not even in sight—skidded below the skyline, probably, for Sirius is even closer to the Earth than is Tau Ceti and our position would shift him right across the sky. I tried to do a spherical triangle backwards in my head to figure where to look for Sirius and got dizzy and gave up.
Then I tried to find Sol. I knew where he would be, in Boötes, between Arcturus and Virgo—but I had to find Bootes, before I could look for Father Sol.
Boötes was behind me, as close to the skyline as Orion was on the other side. Arcturus had shifted a little and spoiled the club shape of Bootes but there was no doubt in my mind.
There it was! A yellow-white star, the color of Capella, but dimmer, about second magnitude, which was right, both position and magnitude. Besides, it had to be the Sun, because there hadn't been any star that bright in that location when Pat and I were studying for our astrogation merit badge. It was the Sun.
I stared at it, in a thoughtful melancholy, warm rather than sad. I wondered what Pat was doing? Walking the baby, maybe. Or maybe not; I couldn't remember what the Greenwich ought to be. There he was, thirty years old and a couple of kids, the best part of his life behind him... and here I was, just old enough to be finishing my sophomore year in college if I were home.
No, I wouldn't be; I'd be Pat's age.
But I wasn't thirty.
I cheered up and decided that I had the best break after all, even if it had seemed not so good at first. I sighed and walled around a bit, not worrying, for not even one of those lizard brutes could get close to our night defenses without bringing thunder and lightning down around his ears. If he had ears. Percy's pen was not far in that rear direction; he heard me and came to his fence, so I walked up and scratched his snout. "Nice place, eh, boy?" I was thinking that when the Elsie did get home—and I no longer believed Uncle Steve's dire predictions—when I did get back, I would still be in my early twenties, just a good age to emigrate. And Connie looked like a fine place to come back to.
Percy answered with a snuffling grunt which I interpreted to mean: "You didn't bring me anything to eat? A fine way to treat a pal!" Percy and I were old friends; aboard ship I fed him, along with his brothers and the hamsters and the rats.
"Percy, you're a pig."
He did not argue but continued to snuffle into my empty hand. I was thinking that eleven light-years wasn't far; it was about right. The stars were still familiar.
Presently Percy got tired of it and so did I, so I wiped my hand on my pants and went back to bed.