Operation: Outer Space Part 5

It would straddle boulders in its path. It could go anywhere in spite of dust and detritus, and its metal body was air-tight and held air for breathing, even out on the moon's surface.

They climbed in. There was the sound of pumping, which grew fainter. The outer lock-door opened. The moon-jeep rolled outside.

Babs stared with pa.s.sionate rapture out of a shielded port. There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years.

The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City. It reached a steep ascent. It climbed. And the way was remarkably rough and the vehicle springless, but it was nevertheless a cushioned ride. A b.u.mp cannot be harsh in light gravity. The vehicle rode as if on wings.

"All right," said Cochrane. "Tell me the worst. What's the trouble with him? Is he the result of six generations of keeping the money in the family? Or is he a freak?"

Holden groaned a little.

"He's practically a stock model of a rich young man without brains enough for a job in the family firm, and too much money for anything else. Fortunately for his family, he didn't react like Johnny Simms--though they're good friends. A hundred years ago, Dabney'd have gone in for the arts. But it's hard to fool yourself that way now. Fifty years ago he'd have gone in for left-wing sociology. But we really are doing the best that can be done with too many people and not enough world. So he went in for science. It's non-compet.i.tive. Incapacity doesn't show up. But he has stumbled on something. It sounds really important. It must have been an accident! The only trouble is that it doesn't mean a thing! Yet because he's accomplished more than he ever expected to, he's frustrated because it's not appreciated! What a joke!"

Cochrane said cynically:

"You paint a dark picture, Bill. Are you trying to make this thing into a challenge?"

"You can't make a man famous for discovering something that doesn't matter," said Holden hopelessly. "And this is that!"

"Nothing's impossible to public relations if you spend enough money,"

Cochrane a.s.sured him. "What's this useless triumph of his?"

The jeep bounced over a small cliff and fell gently for half a second and rolled on. Babs beamed.

"He's found," said Holden discouragedly, "a way to send messages faster than light. It's a detour around Einstein's stuff--not denying it, but evading it. Right now it takes not quite two seconds for a message to go from the moon to Earth. That's at the speed of light. Dabney has proof--we'll see it--that he can cut that down some ninety-five per cent. Only it can't be used for Earth-moon communication, because both ends have to be in a vacuum. It could be used to the s.p.a.ce platform, but--what's the difference? It's a real discovery for which there's no possible use. There's no place to send messages to!"

Cochrane's eyes grew bright and hard. There were some three thousand million suns in the immediate locality of Earth--and more only a relatively short distance way--and it had not mattered to anybody. The situation did not seem likely to change. But--The moon-jeep climbed and climbed. It was a mile above the bay of the lava sea and the dust-heaps that were a city. It looked like ten miles, because of the curve of the horizon. The mountains all about looked like a madman's dream.

"But he wants appreciation!" said Holden angrily. "People on Earth almost trampling on each other for lack of room, and people like me trying to keep them sane when they've every reason for despair--and he wants appreciation!"

Cochrane grinned. He whistled softly.

"Never underestimate a genius, Bill," he said kindly. "I refer modestly to myself. In two weeks your patient--I'll guarantee it--will be acclaimed the hope, the blessing, the greatest man in all the history of humanity! It'll be phoney, of course, but we'll have Marilyn Winters--Little Aphrodite herself--making pa.s.ses at him in hopes of a publicity break! It's a natural!"

"How'll you do it?" demanded Holden.

The moon-jeep turned in its crazy, b.u.mping progress. A flat area had been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of time. Here there was a human structure. Typically, it was a dust-heap leaning against a cliff. There was an airlock and another jeep waited outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat s.p.a.ce, shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to them from the airlock door.

"How?" repeated Cochrane. "I'll get the details here. Let's go! How do we manage?"

It was a matter, he discovered, of vacuum-suits, and they were tricky to get into and felt horrible when one was in. Struggling, Cochrane thought to say:

"You can wait here in the jeep, Babs--"

But she was already climbing into a suit very much oversized for her, with the look of high excitement that Cochrane had forgotten anybody could wear.

They got out of a tiny airlock that held just one person at a time. They started for the laboratory. And suddenly Cochrane saw Babs staring upward through the dark, almost-opaque gla.s.s that a s.p.a.ce-suit-helmet needs in the moon's daytime if its occupant isn't to be fried by sunlight. Cochrane automatically glanced up too.

He saw Earth. It hung almost in mid-sky. It was huge. It was gigantic.

It was colossal. It was four times the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth, and it covered sixteen times as much of the sky. Its continents were plain to see, and its seas, and the ice-caps at its poles gleamed whitely, and over all of it there was a faintly bluish haze which was like a glamour; a fey and eerie veiling which made Earth a sight to draw at one's heart-strings.

Behind it and all about it there was the background of s.p.a.ce, so thickly jeweled with stars that there seemed no room for another tiny gem.

Cochrane looked. He said nothing. Holden stumbled on to the airlock. He remembered to hold the door open for Babs.

And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not wholly familiar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour of most of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was a physics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone and spilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. West and Jamison were already here, their s.p.a.ce-suits removed. They sat before beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. There was a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his new visitors.

Holden clumsily unfastened the face-plate of his helmet and gloomily explained his mission. He introduced Cochrane and Babs, verifying in the process that the dark man was the Jones he had come to see. A physics laboratory high in the fastnesses of the Lunar Apennines is an odd place for a psychiatrist to introduce himself on professional business. But Holden only explained unhappily that Dabney had sent them to learn about his discovery and arrange for a public-relations job to make it known.

Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during Holden's explanation. Otherwise he was poker-faced.

"I was explaining the discovery to these two," he observed.

"Shoot it," said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for an explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable terms.

West said briskly--exactly as if before a television camera--that Mr.

Dabney had started from the well-known fact that the properties of s.p.a.ce are modified by energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants of s.p.a.ce had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of the distance ...

"Cut," said Cochrane.

West automatically abandoned his professional delivery. He placidly re-addressed himself to his beer.

"How about it, Jones?" asked Cochrane. "Dabney's got a variation? What is it?"

"It's a field of force that doesn't spread out. You set up two plates and establish this field between them," said Jones curtly. "It's circularly polarized and it doesn't expand. It's like a searchlight beam or a microwave beam, and it stays the same size like a pipe. In that field--or pipe--radiation travels faster than it does outside. The properties of s.p.a.ce are changed between the plates. Therefore the speed of all radiation. That's all."

Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whose eyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not more polite than politeness required. He did not express employer-like rapture at the mention of his employer's name.

"But what can be done with it?" asked Cochrane practically.

"Nothing," said Jones succinctly. "It changes the properties of s.p.a.ce, but that's all. Can you think of any use for a faster-than-light radiation-pipe? I can't."

Cochrane c.o.c.ked an eye at Jamison, who could extrapolate at the drop of an equation. But Jamison shook his head.

"Communication between planets," he said morosely, "when we get to them.

Chats between sweethearts on Earth and Pluto. Broadcasts to the stars when we find that another one's set up a similar plate and is ready to chat with us. There's nothing else."

Cochrane waved his hand. It is good policy to put a specialist in his place, occasionally.

"Demonstration?" he asked Jones.

"There are plates across the crater out yonder," said Jones without emotion. "Twenty miles clear reach. I can send a message across and get it relayed twice and back through two angles in about five per cent of the time radiation ought to take."

Cochrane said with benign cynicism:

"Jamison, you work by guessing where you can go. Jones works by guessing where he is. But this is a public relations job. I don't know where we are or where we can go, but I know where we want to take this thing."

Jones looked at him. Not hostilely, but with the detached interest of a man accustomed to nearly exact science, when he watches somebody work in one of the least precise of them all.

Holden said: