The Past Through Tomorrow Part 86

"You!" said Lazarus. "For the- What did you do to him?"

He checked himself and switched to speech that Sarloo could understand. "What has happened to my brother Ford?"

"Take him away," said Sarloo, his lips twitching. "This is a bad thing. This is a very bad thing."

"You're telling me!" said Lazarus. He did not bother to translate.

Chapter 3.

THE SAME CONFERENCE as before, minus its chairman, met as quickly as possible. Lazarus told his story, Shultz reported on Ford's condition. "The medical staff can't find anything wrong with him. All I can say with certainty is that the Administrator is suffering from an undiagnosed extreme psychosis. We can't get into communication with him."

"Won't he talk at all?" asked Barstow.

"A word or two, on subjects as simple as food or water. Any attempt to reach the cause of his trouble drives him into incoherent hysteria."

"No diagnosis?"

"Well, if you want an unprofessional guess in loose language, I'd say he was scared out of his wits. But," Schultz added, "I've seen fear syndromes before. Never anything like this."

"I have," Lazarus said suddenly.

"You have? Where? What were the circ.u.mstances?'

"Once," said Lazarus, "when I was a kid, a couple of hundred years back, I caught a grown coyote and penned him up. I had a notion I could train him to be a hunting dog. It didn't work.

"Ford acts just the way that coyote did."

An unpleasant silence followed. Schultz broke it with, "I don't quite see what you mean. What is the parallel?'

"Well," Lazarus answered slowly, "this is just my guess. Slayton is the only one who knows the true answer and he can't talk. But here's my opinion: we've had these Jockaira doped out all wrong from scratch. We made the mistake of thinking that because they looked like us, in a general way, and were about as civilized as we are, that they were people. But they aren't people at all. They are . . . domestic animals.

"Wait a minute now!" he added. "Don't get in a rush. There are people on this planet, right enough. Real people. They lived in the temples and the Jockaira called them G.o.ds. They are G.o.ds!"

Lazarus pushed on before anyone could interrupt. "I know what you're thinking. Forget it. I'm not going metaphysical on you; I'm just putting it the best I can. I mean that there is something living in those temples and whatever it is, it is such heap big medicine that it can pinch-hit for G.o.ds, so you might as well call 'em that. Whatever they are, they are the true dominant race on this planet-its people! To them, the rest of us, Jocks or us, are just animals, wild or tame. We made the mistake of a.s.suming that a local religion was merely superst.i.tion. It ain't."

Barstow said slowly, "And you think this accounts for what happened to Ford?'

"I do. He met one, the one called Kreel, and it drove him crazy."

"I take it," said Schultz, "that it is your theory that any man exposed to this . . . this presence . . . would become psychotic?"

"Not exactly," answered Lazarus. "What scares me a d.a.m.n' sight more is the fear that I might not go crazy!"

That same day the Jockaira withdrew all contact with the Earthmen. It was well that they did so, else there would have been violence. Fear hung over the city, fear of horror worse than death, fear of some terrible nameless thing, the mere knowledge of which would turn a man into a broken mindless animal. The Jockaira no longer seemed harmless friends, rather clownish despite their scientific attainments, but puppets, decoys, bait for the unseen potent beings who lurked in the "temples."

There was no need to vote on it; with the single-mindedness of a crowd stampeding from a burning building the Earthmen wanted to leave this terrible place. Zaccur Barstow a.s.sumed command. "Get King on the screen. Tell him to send down every boat at once. We'll get out of here as fast as we can." He ran his fingers worriedly through his hair. "What's the most we can load each trip, Lazarus? How long will the evacuation take?"

Lazarus muttered.

"What did you say?

"I said, 'It ain't a case of how long; it's a case of will we be let.' Those things in the temples may want more domestic animals-us!"

Lazarus was needed as a boat pilot but he was needed more urgently for his ability to manage a crowd. Zaccur Barstow was telling him to conscript a group of emergency police when Lazarus looked past Zaccur's shoulder and exclaimed, "Oh oh! Hold it, Zack-school's out."

Zaccur turned his head quickly an4 saw, approaching with stately dignity across the council hail, Kreel Sarloo. No one got in his way.

They soon found out why. Zaccur moved forward to greet him, found himself stopped about ten feet from the Jockaira. No clue to the cause; just that-stopped.

"I greet you, unhappy brother," Sarloo began.

"I greet you, Krecl Sarloo."

"The G.o.ds have spoken. Your kind can never be civilized (?).You and your brothers are to leave this world."

Lazarus let out a deep sigh of relief. - "We are leaving, Kreel Sarloo," Zaccur answered soberly.

"The G.o.ds require that you leave. Send your bother Libby to me."

Zaccur sent for Libby, then turned back to Sarloo. But the Jockaira had nothing more to say to them; he seemed indifferent to their presence. They waited.

Libby arrived. Sarloo held him in a long conversation. Barstow and Lazarus were both in easy earshot and could see their lips move, but heard nothing. Lazarus found the circ.u.mstance very disquieting. d.a.m.n my eyes, he thought, I could figure several ways to pull that trick with the right equipment but I'll bet none of 'em is the right answer-and I don't see any equipment.

The silent discussion ended, Sarloo stalked off without farewell. Libby turned to the others and spoke; now his voice could be heard. "Sarloo tells me," he began, brow wrinkled in puzzlement, "that we are to go to a planet, uh, over thirtytwo light-years from here. The G.o.ds have decided it." He stopped and bit his lip.

"Don't fret about it," advised Lazarus. "Just be glad they want us to leave. My guess is that they could have squashed us flat just as easily. Once we're out in s.p.a.ce we'll pick our. own destination."

"I suppose so. But the thing that puzzles me is that he mentioned a time about three hours~away as being our departure from this system."

"Why, that's utterly unreasonable," protested Barstow. "Impossible. We haven't the boats to do it."

Lazarus said nothing. He was ceasing to have opinions.

Zaccur changed his opinion quickly. Lazarus acquired one, born of experience. While urging his cousins toward the field where embarkation was proceeding, he found himself lifted up, free of the ground. He struggled, his arms and legs met no resistance but the ground dropped away. He closed his eyes, counted ten jets, opened them again. He was at least two miles in the air.

Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.

The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.

They were sucked into cl.u.s.ters around the open ports of the New Frontiers like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes. Whew! he sighed to himself, watch that first step-it's a honey!

Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo's message.

King seemed undecided. "I don't know," he said. "You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my pa.s.sengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed."

"I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir," Libby answered unhumorously. "Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I'm glad you had the ship's access ports open."

"I didn't," said King tersely. "They were opened for me."

They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. "This planet that Sarloo described to you," said King, "does it belong to a G-type star?"

"Yes," Libby confirmed, "an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could. identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away.'

"So . . ." King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story.

With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the New Frontiers was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.

"I can't tell you much," admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. "I was able to determine, before we pa.s.sed the speed of light-or appeared to-that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his G.o.ds. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astrogational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going,"

"Loosen up, Andy," suggested Lazarus. "Make a guess."

"Well . . . if our world line is a smooth function-if it is, and I have no data-then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going."

"Rummph!" Lazarus turned to King. "Have you tried slowing down?"

"Yes," King said shortly. "The controls are dead."

"Mmmm . . . Andy, when do we get there?"

Libby shrugged helplessly. "I have no frame of reference. What is time without a s.p.a.ce reference?"

Time and s.p.a.ce, inseparable and one- Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the s.p.a.ce framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship's time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physio-chemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.

But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.

What universe?

There was no universe. It was gone.

Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?

Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to what? thought Libby. Could it be that s.p.a.ce held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded "ether" thatthe cla.s.sic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that-had denied the very possibility of its existence? -had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually pa.s.sed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as pa.s.sengers, going nowhere at no time?

But Libby itched between his shoulder blades and was forced to scratch; his left leg had gone to sleep; his stomach was beginning to speak insistently for food-if this was death, he decided, it did not seem materially different from life.

With renewed tranquility, he left the control room and headed for his favorite refectory, while starting to grapple with the problem of inventing a new mathematics which would include all the new phenomena. The mystery of how the hypothetical G.o.ds of the Jockaira had teleported the Families from ground to ship he discarded. There had been no opportunity to obtain significant data, measured data; the best that any honest scientist could do, with epistemological rigor, was to include a note that recorded the fact and stated that it was unexplained. It was a fact; here he was who shortly before had been on the planet; even now Schultz's a.s.sistants were overworked trying to administer depressant drugs to the thousands who had gone to pieces emotionally under the outrageous experience. But Libby could not explain it and, lacking data, felt no urge to try. What he did want to do was to deal with world lines in a plenum, the basic problem of field physics.

Aside from his penchant for mathematics Libby was a simple person. He preferred the noisy atmosphere of the "Club," refectory 9-D, for reasons different from those of Lazarus. The company of people younger than himself rea.s.sured him; Lazarus was the only elder he felt easy with.

Food, he learned, was not immediately available at the Club; the commissary was still adjusting to the sudden change. But Lazarus was there and others whom he knew; Nancy Weatheral scrunched over and made room for him. "You're just the man I want to see," she said. "Lazarus is being most helpful. Where are we going this time and when do we get there?" - Libby explained the dilemma as well as he could. Nancy wrinkled her nose. "That's a pretty prospect, I must say! Well, I guess that means back to the grind for little Nancy."

"What do you mean?"

"Have you ever taken care of a somnolent? No, of course you haven't. It gets tiresome. Turn them over, bend their arms, twiddle their tootsies, move their heads, close the tank and move on to the next one. I get so sick of human bodies that I'm tempted to take a vow of chast.i.ty."

"Don't commit yourself too far," advised Lazarus. "Why would you care, you old false alarm?"

Eleanor Johnson spoke up. "Fm glad to be in the ship again. Those slimy Jockaira-ugh!"

Nancy shrugged. "You're prejudiced, Eleanor. The Jocks are okay, in their way. Sure, they aren't exactly like us, but neither are dogs. You don't dislike dogs, do you?'

"That's what they are," Lazarus said soberly. "Dogs."

"Huh?"

"I don't mean that they are anything like dogs in most ways-they aren't even vaguely canine and they certainly are our equals and possibly our superiors in some things . . . but they are dogs just the same. Those things they call their 'G.o.ds' are simply their masters, their owners. We couldn't be domesticated, so the owners chucked us out."

Libby was thinking of the inexplicable telekinesis the Jockaira-or their masters-had used. "I wonder what it would have been like," he said thoughtfully, "if they had been able to domesticate us. They could have taught us a lot of wonderful things"

"Forget it," Lazarus said sharply. "It's not a man's place to be property."

"What is a man's place?"

"It's a man's business to be what he is . . . and be it in style!" Lazarus got up. "Got to go."

Libby started to leave also, but Nancy stopped him. "Don't go. I want to ask you some questions. What year is it back on~ Earth?"

Libby started to answer, closed his mouth. He started to answer a second time, finally said, "I don't know how to answer that question. It's like saying, 'How high is up?"

"I know I probably phrased it wrong," admitted Nancy. '1 didn't do very well in basic physics, but I did gather the idea that time is relative and simultaneity is an idea which applies only to two points close together in the same framework. But just the same, I want to know something. We've traveled a lot faster and farther than anyone ever did before, haven't we? Don't our clocks slow down, or something?"

Libby got that completely baffled look which mathematical-physicists wear whenever laymen try to talk about physics in nonmathematical language. "You're referring to the Lorentz-2 FitzGerald contraction. But, if you'll pardon me, anything one says about it in words is necessarily nonsense."

"Why?" she insisted.

"Because . . . well, because the language is inappropriate. The formulae used to describe the effect loosely called a contraction presuppose that the observer is part of the phenomenon. But verbal language contains the implicit a.s.sumption that we can stand outside the whole business and watch what goes on. The mathematical language denies the very possibility of any such outside viewpoint. Every observer has his own world line; he can't get outside it for a detached viewpoint."

"But suppose he did? Suppose we could see Earth right now?"

'~There I go again," Libby said miserably. "I tried to talk about it in words and all I did was to add to the confusion. There is no way to measure time in any absolute sense when two events are separated in a continuum. All you can measure is interval."

"Well, what is interval? So much s.p.a.ce and so much time."

"No, no, no! It isn't that at all. Interval is . . . well, it's interval. I can write down formulae about it and show you how we use it, but it can't be defined in words. Look, Nancy, can you write the score for a full orchestration of a symphony in words?" - "No. Well, maybe you could but it wonld take thousands of times as long."

"And musicians still could not play it until you put it back into musical notation. That's what I meant," Libby went on, "when I said that the language was inappropriate. I got into a difficulty like this once before in trying to describe the lightpressure drive. I was asked why, since the drive depends on loss of inertia, we people inside the ship had felt no loss of inertia. There was no answer, in words. Inertia isn't a word; it is a mathematical concept used in mathematically certain aspects of a plenum. I was stuck."

Nancy looked baffled but persisted doggedly. "My question still means something, even if I didn't phrase it right. You can't just tell me to run along and play. Suppose we turned around and went back the way we came, all the way to Earth, exactly the same trip but in reverse-just double the ship's time it has been so far. All right, what year would it be on Earth when we got there?'

"It would be . . . let me see, now-" The almost automatic processes of Libby's brain started running off the unbelievably huge and complex problem in accelerations, intervals, difform motion. He was approaching the answer in a warm glow of mathematical revery when the problem suddenly fell to pieces on him, became indeterminate. He abruptly realized that the problem had an unlimited number of equally valid answers.

But that was impossible. In the real world, not the fantasy world of mathematics, such a situation was absurd. Nancy's question had to have just one answer, unique and real.

Could the whole beautiful structure of relativity be an absurdity? Or did it mean that it was physically impossible ever to backtrack an interstellar distance?

"I'll have to give some thought to that one," Libby said hastily and left before Nancy could object.

But solitude and contemplation gave him no clue to the problem. It was not a failure of his mathematical ability; he was capable, he knew, of devising a mathematical description of any group of facts, whatever they might be. His difficulty lay in having too few facts. Until some observer traversed interstellar distances at speeds approximating the speed of light and returned to the planet from which he had started there could be no answer. Mathematics alone has no content, gives no answers.