Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  “Why not?” he demanded. “If we face north, the sun rises on our right, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Even in the southern hemisphere.”

  “Well, then. So it doesn’t make any difference which hemisphere they’re in.”

  “You’re correct. But you’re also making the assumptions that Venus rotates on its axis, that the axis is aligned parallel to the Earth’s and that the direction of rotation is the same.”

  “We know that Venus rotates!”

  “We have every reason to believe so,” I agreed. “But only because thermocouples measure a temperature on the darkside that is too high to support the theory that the diurnal period of Venus is equal to the year. I think the latest figures say something between a couple of weeks and a few months. Next, the axis needn’t be parallel to anything. Shucks, Crandall, you know darned well that the solar system is a finely made clock with no two shafts aligned, and elliptical gears that change speed as they turn.”

  “Practically everything in the solar system rotates in the same direction.”

  I looked at him. “Would you like to take a chance that Venus agrees with that statement? You’ve got a fifty percent chance that you’ll be right. Guess wrong and we have a metric ton of hardware trying to occupy the same space as another metric ton of matter.”

  “But—”

  “And furthermore,” I went on, “we’re just lucky that Polaris happens to be a pole star right now. The poles of Mars point to nothing that bright. Even then, we can hardly expect the Venusian to have divided the circumpolar sky into the same zoo full of mythical animals as our forebears—and if we use the commonplace expression, maybe the Venusian never paused to take a long-handled dipper of water from a well. Call them stewpots and the term is still insular. Sure, there’s lots of pointers, but they have to be identified. My mother always insisted that the Pleiades were—er—was the Little Dipper.”

  Teresa Dwight spoke up, possibly for the second or third time in her life without being spoken to first. She said, “Harla has been listening to you through me. Of astronomy he has but a rudimentary idea. He is gratified to learn from you that there is a ‘sun’ that provides the heat and light. This has been a theory based upon common sense; something had to do it. But the light comes and goes so slowly that it is difficult to determine which direction the sun rises from. The existence of other celestial bodies than Venus is also based on logic. If, they claim, they exist, and their planet exists, then there probably are other planets with people who cannot see them, either.”

  “Quoth Pliny the Elder,” mumbled Paul Wallach.

  I looked at him.

  “Pliny was lecturing about Pythagoras’ theory that the Earth is round. A heckler asked him why the people on the other side didn’t fall off. Pliny replied that on the other side there were undoubtedly fools who were asking their wise men why we didn’t fall off.”

  “It’s hardly germane,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. Yes. And time is running out.”

  * * * *

  The laboratory door opened to admit a newcomer, Lou Graham, head of the electronics crew.

  He said, “I’ve got it!”

  The chattering noise level died out about three decibels at a time. Lou said, “When a steel magnet is etched in acid, the north pole shows selective etching!”

  I shook my head. “Lou,” I said, “we don’t know whether Venus has a magnetic field, whether it is aligned to agree with the Earth’s—nor even whether the Venusians have discovered the magnetic compass.”

  “Oh, that isn’t the reference point,” said Lou Graham. “I’m quite aware of the ambiguity. The magnetic field does have a vector, but the arrow that goes on the end is strictly from human agreement.”

  “So how do you tell which is the north pole?”

  “By making an electromagnet! Then using Ampere’s Right Hand Rule. You grasp the electromagnet in the right hand so that the fingers point along the winding in the direction of the current flow. The thumb then points to the north pole.”

  “Oh, fine! Isn’t that just the same confounded problem? Now we’ve got to find out whether Harla is equipped with a right hand complete with fingers and thumbs—so that we can tell him which his right hand is!”

  “No, no,” he said. “You don’t understand, Tom. We don’t need the right hand. Let’s wind our electromagnet like this: We place the steel bar horizontally in front of us. The wire from ‘Start’ leaves us, passes over the top of the bar, drops below the bar on the far side, comes toward us on the under side, rises above the bar on the side toward us, and so on around and around until we’ve got our electromagnet wound. Now if the ‘start’ is positive and the ‘end’ is negative, the north pole will be at the left. It will show the selective etching in acid.”

  I looked at him. “Lou,” I said slowly, “if you can define positive and negative in un-ambiguous terms as well as you wound that electromagnet, we can get Holly home. Can you?”

  Lou turned to Teresa Dwight. “Has this Harla fellow followed me so far?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you speak for him?”

  “You talk, I hear, he reads me. I read him and I can speak.”

  “Okay, then,” said Lou Graham. “Now we build a Le Clanche cell. Ask Harla does he recognize carbon. A black or light-absorbing element. Carbon is extremely common, it is the basis of life chemistry. It is element number six in the periodic chart. Does Harla know carbon?”

  “Harla knows carbon.”

  “Now we add zinc. Zinc is a light metal easily extracted from the ore. It is fairly abundant, and it is used by early civilizations for making brass or bronze long before the culture has advanced enough to recognize zinc as an element. Does Harla know zinc?”

  “He may,” said Teresa very haltingly. “What happens if Harla gets the wrong metal?”

  “Not very much,” said Lou. “Any of the light, fairly plentiful metals that are easily extracted from the ore will suffice. Say tin, magnesium, sodium, cadmium, so on.”

  “Harla says go on.”

  “Now we make an electrolyte. Preferably an alkaline salt.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “Or you’ll be asking Harla to identify stuff from a litmus paper.”

  “No,” said Lou. He faced Teresa and said, “An alkaline substance burns the flesh badly.”

  “So do acids,” I objected.

  “Alkaline substances are found in nature,” he reminded me. “Acids aren’t often natural. The point is that an acid will work. Even salt water will work. But an alkaline salt works better. At any rate, tell Harla that the stuff, like zinc, was known to civilized peoples many centuries before chemistry became a science. Acids, on the other hand, are fairly recent.”

  “Harla understands.”

  “Now,” said Lou Graham triumphantly, “we make our battery by immersing the carbon and the zinc in the electrolyte. The carbon is the positive electrode and should be connected to the start of our electromagnet, whereas the end of the winding must go to the zinc. This will place the north pole to the left hand.”

  “Harla understands,” said Teresa. “So far, Harla can perform this experiment in his mind. But now we must identify which end of the steel bar is north-pole magnetic.”

  “If we make the bar magnetic and then immerse it in acid, the north magnetic pole will be selectively etched.”

  “Harla says that this he does not know about. He has never heard of it, although he is quite familiar with electromagnets, batteries, and the like.”

  I looked at Lou Graham. “Did you cook this out of your head, or did you use a handbook?”

  He looked downcast. “I did use a handbook,” he admitted. “But—”

  “Lou,” I said unhappily, “I’ve never said that we couldn’t establish a common frame of reference. What we lack is one that can be established in minutes. Something physical—” I stopped short as a shadowy thought began to form.

  Paul Wallach looked at me as though he’d like to sp
eak but didn’t want to interrupt my train of thoughts. When he could contain himself no longer, he said, “Out with it, Tom.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered. “Surely there must be something physical.”

  “How so?”

  “The tunnel car must be full of it,” I said. “Screws?”

  I turned to Saul Graben. Saul is our mechanical genius; give him a sketch made on used Kleenex with a blunt lipstick and he will bring you back a gleaming mechanism that runs like a hundred-dollar wrist watch.

  But not this time. Saul shook his head.

  “What’s permanent is welded and what’s temporary is snapped in with plug buttons,” he said.

  “Good Lord,” I said. “There simply must be something!”

  “There probably is,” said Saul. “But this Harla chap would have to use an acetylene torch to get at it.”

  I turned to Teresa. “Can this psi-man Harla penetrate metal?”

  “Can anyone?” she replied quietly.

  Wallach touched my arm. “You’re making the standard, erroneous assumption that a sense of perception will give its owner a blueprint-clear grasp of the mechanical details of some machinery. It doesn’t. Perception, as I understand it, is not even similar to eyesight.”

  “But—” I fumbled on—“surely there must be some common reference there, even granting that perception isn’t eyesight. So how does perception work?”

  “Tom, if you were blind from birth, I could tell you that I have eyesight that permits me to see the details of things that you can determine only by feeling them. This you might understand basically. But you could never be made to understand the true definition of the word ‘picture’ nor grasp the mental impression that is generated by eyesight.”

  “Well,” I persisted, “can he penetrate flesh?”

  “Flesh?”

  “Holly’s heart has stopped,” I said. “But it hasn’t been removed. If Harla can perceive through human flesh, he might be able to perceive the large, single organ in the chest cavity near the spine.”

  Teresa said, “Harla’s perception gives him a blurry, incomplete impression.” She looked at me. “It is something like a badly out-of-focus, grossly under-exposed x-ray solid.”

  “X-ray solid?” I asked.

  “It’s the closest thing that you might be able to understand,” she said lamely.

  I dropped it right there. Teresa had probably been groping in the dark for some simile that would convey the nearest possible impression. I felt that this was going to be the nearest that I would ever get to understanding the sense of perception.

  “Can’t he get a clear view?”

  “He has not the right.”

  “Right!” I exploded. “Why—”

  Wallach held up his hand to stop me. “Don’t make Teresa fumble for words, Tom. Harla has not the right to invade the person of Holly Carter. Therefore he can not get a clearer perception of her insides.”

  “Hell!” I roared. “Give Harla the right.”

  “No one has authority.”

  “Authority be dammed!” I bellowed angrily. “That girl’s life is at stake!”

  Wallach nodded unhappily. “Were this a medical emergency, a surgeon might close his eyes to the laws that require authorization to operate. But even if he saved the patient’s life, he is laying himself open to a lawsuit. But this is different, Tom. As you may know, the ability of any psi-person is measured by their welcome to the information. Thus Teresa and Harla, both willing to communicate, are able.”

  “But can’t Harla understand that the entire bunch of us are willing that he should take a peek?”

  “Confound it, Tom, it isn’t a matter of our permission! It’s a matter of fact. It would ease things if Holly were married to one of us, but even so it wouldn’t be entirely clear. It has to do with the invasion of privacy.”

  “Privacy? In this case the very idea is ridiculous.”

  “Maybe so,” said Paul Wallach. “But I don’t make the rules. They’re natural laws. As immutable as the laws of gravity or the refraction of light. And Tom, even if I were making the laws I might not change things. Not even to save Holly Carter’s life. Because, Tom, if telepathy and perception were as free and unbounded as some of their early proponents claimed, life would be a sheer, naked hell on earth.”

  “But what has privacy to do with it? This Harla isn’t at all humanoid. A cat can look at a king—”

  “Sure, Tom. But how long would the cat be permitted to read the king’s mind?”

  I grunted. “Has this Harla any mental block about examining the outside?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re thinking about a scar or some sort of blemish?”

  “Yes. Birthmark, maybe. No one is perfect.”

  “You know of any?”

  I thought.

  It was not hard for me to conjure up a picture of Holly Carter. Unfortunately, I looked at Holly Carter through the eyes of love, which rendered her perfect. If she had bridgework, I hadn’t found it out. Her features were regular and her hair fell loose without a part. Her complexion was flawless…at least the complexion that could be examined whilst Holly sunned herself on a deck chair beside the swimming pool.

  I shook my head. Then I faced an unhappy fact. It hurt, because I wanted my goddess to be perfect, and if she were made of weak, mortal flesh, I did not want to find it out by asking the man who knew her better than I did.

  Still, I wanted her alive. So I turned to Frank Crandall.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Do I what?”

  “Know of any scars or birthmarks?”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, hell,” I snapped. “Such as an appendix scar that might be used to tell left from right.”

  “Look, Tom, I’m not her physician, you know. I can only give you the old answer: ‘Not until they wear briefer swim suits.’”

  My heart bounced lightly. That Holly was still in mortal danger was not enough to stop my elation at hearing Frank Crandall admit that he was not Holly’s lover, nor even on much better terms than I. It might have been better to face the knowledge that Holly was all woman and all human even though the information had to come from someone who knew her well enough to get her home.

  Then I came back to earth. I had my perfect goddess—in deadly peril—instead of a human woman who really did not belong to any man.

  * * * *

  I hadn’t seen Saul Graben leave, but he must have been gone because now he opened the door and came back. He was carrying a heavy rim gyroscope that was spinning in a set of frictionless gymbals. He looked most confused.

  He said, “I’ve spent what seems like an hour. You can’t tell me that this gizmo is inseparable from the selfish, insular intellect of terrestrial so-called homo sapiens.”

  He turned the base and we all watched the gymbal rings rotate to keep the gyro wheel in the same plane. “It should be cosmic,” he said. “But every time I start, I find myself biting myself on the back of the neck. Look. If you make the axle horizontal in front of you and rotate the gyro with the top edge going away from you, you can define a common reference. But motion beyond that cannot be explained. If the axle is depressed on the right side, the gyro will turn so the far edge looks to the right. But that’s defining A in terms of A. So I’m licked.”

  Frank Crandall shook his head. “There’s probably an absolute to that thing somewhere, but I’m sure none of us know it. We haven’t time to find it. In fact, I think the cause is lost. Maybe we’d better spend our time figuring out a plausible explanation.”

  “Explanation?” blurted Wallach.

  “Let’s face it,” said Crandall. “Holly Carter’s life is slipping away. No one has yet come close to finding a common reference to describe right from left to this Harla creature.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “Death is for the dying,” Crandall said in a monotone. “Let them have their hour in peace and dignity. Life is for the living, and for the living
there is no peace. We who remain must make the best of it. So now in about five minutes Holly will be at peace. The rest of us have got to answer for her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do you propose to explain this unfortunate incident?” asked Crandall. “Someone will want to know what happened to the remains of Holly Carter. I can see hell breaking loose. And I can see the whole lot of us getting laughed right off the Earth because we couldn’t tell right from left. And I can see us all clobbered for letting the affair take place.”

  “You seem to be more worried about your professional reputation than about Holly Carter’s life!”

  “I have a future,” he said. “Holly doesn’t seem to. Hell,” he groaned, “we can’t even gamble on it.”

  “Gamble?”

  “How successful do you think you’d be in getting this Venusian to risk his life by closing his eyes and making a fifty-fifty stab in the dark at one of those buttons?”

  “Well—” started Wallach—“we’d be gambling too, you know. But—”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “I’ve got a sort of half-cracked theory. May I try?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not ‘of course.’ I’ll have to have quiet, with just Teresa to communicate through.”

  “If you have any ideas, try them,” said Wallach.

  “Do you really know what you’re doing?” demanded Frank Crandall.

  “I think so,” I replied. “If it works, it’ll be because I happen to feel close to Holly.”

  “Could be,” he said with a shrug. I almost flipped. Duels have been fought over less. But instead of taking offense, Crandall topped it off by adding, “You could have been a lot closer if you’d tried. She always said you had the alert, pixie-type mind that was pure relaxation instead of a dead let-down after a period of deep concentration. But you were always scuttling off somewhere. Well, go ahead and try, Tom. And good luck!”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Teresa?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Lincoln?”

  “Tell Harla to concentrate on the buttons.”

  “He is.”