Alternating Currents
Page 13
Literally, he told himself wryly.
In fact, he continued, counting up the entries in red ink on their ledger, they were just about out of luck now. For even if their next jump took them within cruising distance of Earth, there was still the time factor to be considered. They had left only twenty-four minutes of jet-time before Terra II’s hull temperature passed the critical sixty-degree mark.
True, he had maintained some slight reserve in that not all their expansible gas had been used. There remained a certain amount in the compressed tanks. And even beyond that, it would be possible to valve off some of the ship’s ambient air itself, dropping the pressure to, say ten pounds to the square inch or even less.
That might give them manoeuvring time in normal space -provided they were God-blessed enough to come out of one of the three remaining jumps within range of Earth, provided all the angels of heaven were helping them. . . .
Which, it was clear, he told himself, they weren’t.
‘Sir,’ said Commander Broderick’s voice, ‘I think you can proceed now.’
The captain opened his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said gravely and nodded to the Exec. It was a quick job by now. The kerosene lamps were already lit, the main electric circuits already cut; it was only a matter of double-checking and of getting the nucleophoretic generators up to speed.
The captain observed the routine attentively. It did not matter that the fitness reports for which he was taking mental notes might never be written. It was a captain’s job to make his evaluations all the same.
‘Stand by to jump!’ called the Exec, and the talker repeated it into the tubes. Down in the generator-room, the jumpmen listened for the command. It came; they heaved on the enormous manual clutches.
And Terra II slipped into Riemannian space once more.
~ * ~
The stars whirled before the captain’s eyes and became geometrical figures in prismatic colours. The slight, worn figure of the Library, the girl named Eklund, ballooned and wavered and seemed to float around the bridge. The captain looked on with composure; he was used to the illusions of hyperspace. Even - almost - he understood them. From the girl’s vast stored knowledge, he had learned of the connexion between electric potential and the three-dimensional matrix.
Light and electrons: in hyperspace, they lied.
Matter was still matter, he thought; the strange lights beyond the viewing pane were stars. And the subtler flow within his body was dependable enough, for he could hear as reliably as ever and if he touched something hot, the nerve ends would scream Burn! to his brain. But the messenger between the stars and the brain - the photons and electrons that conveyed the image - were aberrants; they followed curious Riemannian courses, and no brain bound by the strictures of three dimensions could sort them out.
Just as now, thought the captain with detached amusement, I seem to be seeing old Groden here on the bridge. Ridiculous, but as plain as life. If I didn’t know he was asleep in the sickbay, I’d swear it was he.
‘Captain! Captain!’ Ensign Lorch’s voice penetrated over the metronome-cadenced commands of the Exec and the bustling noises of the bridge.
The captain stared wonderingly at the phantasms of light. ‘Ensign Lorch?’ he demanded. ‘But -’
‘Yes, sir! I’m really here and so is Groden.’ Lorch’s voice went on as the captain peered into the chaos of shifting images. Lorch himself wasn’t visible - unless that sea-green inverted monstrosity with a head of fire was Lorch. But the voice was Lorch’s voice, and the figure of Groden, complete with the white wrappings over the eyes, was shadowy but real. And the voices were saying - astonishing things.
‘You mean,’ said the captain at last, ‘that Groden can pilot us home ?’
‘That,’ said Groden, in the first confident voice he had been able to use in days, ‘is just what he means.’
~ * ~
Blind man’s bluff. And what better player can there be than a blind man ?
Lieutenant Groden, eyeless and far-seeing, stood by the Exec’s left hand and clipped out courses and directions. The Exec marvelled, and stared unbelievingly at the fantastic patterns outside the bridge, and followed orders.
And presently Groden gave the order to stop all jets and drop back into normal space. In a moment, he was blind again - and the rest of the bridge complement found themselves staring at a reddish sun with a family of five planets, two of them Earthlike and green.
‘That’s not Sol!’ barked the captain.
‘No,’ said Groden wearily, ‘but it’s a place to land and cool the ship and replenish our air. You ran us close to the danger line, Captain.’
Terra II came whistling down on to a broad, sandy plain, and lay quiet, its jet tubes smoking, while the Planetology section put out its feelers and reported:
‘Temperature, pressure, atmospheric analysis and radiation spectrum - all Earth normal. No poisons or biotic agents apparent on gross examination.’
‘There won’t be any on closer examination either,’ said Groden. ‘This planet’s clean, captain.’ He stood hanging on to a stanchion, pressed down by the gravity of the world he had found for them.
The captain looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but there were more important things to attend to.
‘Bleed in two pounds,’ ordered the captain and the Duty Officer saluted and issued orders into the speaking tube.
They had run close to the danger line, indeed; the ambient pressure inside Terra II’s hull had been bled down to a scant ten pounds, in order to use as much cooling effect from releasing gas as possible. Whether it was clean or not, no man could step out on to the surface of the new planet until the pressures had been brought back to normal.
They stood at the view panel looking out on the world. They were near its equator, but the temperature was cool by Earth standards. Before them was a broad, gentle sea; behind them, a rim of green-clad hills.
The captain made ready to send his first landing party on to a new and liveable planet.
~ * ~
The scouting parties were back and the captain, for once, was smiling. ‘Wonderful!’ he exulted. ‘A perfect planet for colonization - and we owe it all to you, Groden.’
‘That’s right,’ said Groden. He was lying down on a wardroom bench - Broderick’s orders. Broderick had wanted to put him under sedation again, in fact, but that had brought Groden too close to mutiny.
The captain glanced at his navigator. The swathed bandages hid Groden’s expression, and after a moment the captain decided to overlook the remark.
He went on, ‘It’s a medal for you. You deserve it, Groden.’
‘He’ll need it, sir,’ said Commander Broderick. ‘There won’t be any new eyes for Lieutenant Groden.’ He looked old and sicked defeated. ‘The optic nerves are too far gone. New eyes wouldn’t help now; there’s nothing that would help. He’ll never have eyes again.’
‘Sure,’ said Groden casually. ’I knew it before I brought you here, captain.’
The captain frowned uncomprehendingly, but Broderick caught the meaning in an instant. ‘You mean you could have brought us back to Earth ?’ he demanded.
‘In two jumps,’ Groden told him easily.
‘Then why didn’t you?’ snapped the captain. ‘I have a responsibility to my crew - I can’t let a man go blind because of phony heroics!’
Groden swung his feet down, sat up. ‘Who’s a hero? I just didn’t want to trade what I have now for what I used to have, that’s all.’
‘Meaning what?’ asked Broderick.
‘It’s more than seeing. Want to know how many Sol-type systems there are within five thousand light-years of here ? I can tell you. Want to know what the Universe looks like in hyperspace ? I can tell you that, too, only I can’t describe it. It makes sense, captain! The whole thing is as orderly and chart-able as our own space. And I could see it, all of it. And you offer me eyes!’
‘But why don’t I see it,
Groden?’ the captain puzzledly wanted to know. ‘Surely we’ve all closed our eyes for a moment in hyperspace - why didn’t we see it then ?’
‘Sleep and death are alike, but they’re not the same. Neither is closing your eyes and being blind. I’m blind in normal space; you’re blind in hyperspace - that isn’t much of an answer, but the medics will work it out.’
The surgeon looked piercingly at Groden’s bandaged face. ‘Then the odds are that any blind person can see in hyperspace?’
‘I think so,’ Groden agreed. ‘In fact, I’m practically certain.’
‘Then,’ said the captain, ‘it’s our duty to return to Earth and let them know. They can equip each mapmaking ship with a blind person.’
Groden gave his head a shake. ‘Plenty of time for that, Skipper. We have a quadrant of hyperspace to chart. With me on hand to “see” during the jumps, we’ll finish up fast. Then we can go back and tell them. But I think we should get on with the job we’ve been assigned.’
‘Right,’ said the captain after a pause. ‘We’ll bring the ship to stand-by for takeoff.’
~ * ~
The rockets thundered and Terra II split the atmosphere on its way to deeper space.
As soon as they were clear, the ship readied for the jump and the captain said, ‘Good luck, Groden. It’s all yours - give us our course.’
Groden felt the quiver of the generators, far below, and at once the Universe lay spread before him.
No more darkness, no blind fumblings. An end to basket-weaving and the dreary time-passing fingering of Braille for Earth’s incurable blind. They would be the eyes of the proud new hyperspace fleet that was yet to come!
‘It’s all yours, Groden,’ the captain repeated.
Groden cleared his throat, issued his course vectors.
Captain, you don’t know how right you are, he thought. Only it won’t be just mine - it’ll be the blind leading the sighted!
Now there, he chuckled, was a switch. But he’d have to wait until he was back on Earth, among the blind, for it to be appreciated.
<
~ * ~
Rafferty’s Reasons
It was the year of the Projects, and nearly Election time. Vote for Mudgins! screamed the posters. He put us back to work!
Even Rafferty was back at work, taken off the technological dole, and he sat there in his boss’s office, looking at him and hating him. Fat old John Girty, his boss. A Mudgins man from the old Fifth Precinct days, a man with the lowest phase number in the state.
‘Riffraff!’ Girty stormed. ‘A good job is wasted on a bum like you. You wish you were back on relief?’
Rafferty only nodded, his face full of misery, his heart black murder.
‘Mark my words, you’ll wreck the whole project!’ Girty said ominously. ‘And when the Projects go, the Machine will come back.’
Rafferty nodded again. He wasn’t listening, although he appeared to be. He was watching his hand on the desk. The hand was moving, crawling slowly over the chipped plastic top like a thick-legged spider. It was crawling towards a letter opener.
‘Take warning, Rafferty,’ said Girty. ‘You’re a troublemaker. Thank heaven I’ve got a few loyal workers in the Project, to tell me about skunks like you! Don’t let me hear about any complaints from you again. If you don’t like your job, you can quit.’ Of course, he couldn’t, and Girty knew it. But it was a way to end the conversation, and he turned and stalked out of the room.
Rafferty sat there, watching his hand, but it was only a hand again. His hand, weak and helpless like himself; and the letter opener was only a letter opener. He got up after a while and leaned absently against the hooded computer that could have unemployed them all - if it weren’t for Mudgins and his New Way. You couldn’t say he was thinking, exactly, although there was a lot to think about in the silent computer under its sealed plastic cover. But he couldn’t be doing that.
Not under the New Way.
It was half an hour before Rafferty opened his books again, before he dipped his pens in the red ink and the black ink and wrote down the figures. If Rafferty was capable of pride, he was proud of the way he kept the Project’s books. Machines had taught him how to keep books, and even Mudgins granted that machines were useful for that sort of thing. The dark fever inside him slowly receded, and the artist that lived in Rafferty, the creator inside of every man, admired the cool neat numbers that he made.
He lived with the cool numbers all the long afternoon. (Vote for Mudgins and the Ten-Hour Day! the slogans said.) And they calmed him. But when the end of the day came and fat John Girty came out of his office and took down his black hat and walked out, without a smile, without a word -
Then it was that the black heat inside Rafferty surged up again, and the smoke of it bit his nostrils. Not for ten minutes did he get up to leave himself, not until all the others had gone and no one was there to see him tremble as he walked out with a look of utter desperation in his eyes.
~ * ~
Rafferty walked past the lines of tables, walked up the slide-way, and to the far corner of the balcony before he put down his tray. All by himself he sat there, as far as he could get from the other people who were eating their Evening Issue meal. He sat down and ate what was before him, not caring what it was or how it tasted, for everything tasted alike to Rafferty. All bitter with the bitterness that is the taste of hatred.
‘I hate him,’ Rafferty said woodenly. ‘I would like very much to kill him. I think it would be nice to kill him. Fat Girty, some day I will kill you.’
Rafferty talked to himself, hardly making a sound, never moving his lips. It wasn’t thinking out loud, because it wasn’t thinking, only talking, and it was not out loud. Wherever he was, Rafferty talked to himself. No one heard him, no one was meant to hear him.
‘I hate your lousy guts,’ Rafferty would say, and the man beside him would smile and bob his head and never know that Rafferty had said anything at all.
He would talk to people who weren’t there. When he first went on the Projects, Rafferty thought that some day he would say those things to people. Now he knew that he would never say them to anyone but himself.
‘You are a cow,’ Rafferty said. He was talking to Girty, who wasn’t anywhere near the New Way Caféteria where the Projects personnel ate. ‘You say I’m a trouble-maker, when I only want them to leave me alone. You think I make mistakes with the numbers in the books. I don’t. I never make mistakes when I write down numbers and add them. But you think I do.’
If Girty had been there, he would have denied it - because how could Rafferty make mistakes after the machines had taught him? Girty wasn’t there, and the rest of the people around Rafferty in the Caféteria went on eating and talking and reading, except for a few as silent and solitary as Rafferty himself. None of them heard him.
Rafferty picked up the big dish and put it away from him, picked up a smaller dish and put it down in front of him, touched a fork to the soggy but vitamin-rich and expertly synthesized pie.
‘Your secretary,’ said Rafferty in his silent voice, ‘she makes mistakes, though. Perhaps I should kill her too, cow.’
Rafferty finished the pie and went down the stairs.
‘You blame me for everything,’ Rafferty said, pushing silently through the crowd at the coffee-beverage urn. He put a Project slug in the slot and held the lever down while his cup filled with three streams of fluid, one black, one white, one colourless. ‘You don’t treat me right, cow,’ he said, and turned away.
A man jostled him and scalding pain ran up Rafferty’s wrist as the hot drink slopped over.
Rafferty turned to him slowly. ‘You are a filthy pig,’ he said voicelessly, smiling.,’ Your mother walked the streets.’
The man muttered,’ Sorry,’ over his shoulder.
Rafferty sat down at another table with a party of three young Project girls who never looked at him, but talked loudly among themselves.
‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ Rafferty said, as he stirred the coffee-beverage and drank it.
‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ he said, and went home to his dormitory bed.
~ * ~
John Girty said peevishly: ‘I want you all to try to act like human beings this morning. We have an important visitor from Phase Four.’