“Huh?” It hit me. Dad wasn’t dead! Mother wouldn’t even have gray hair. “Maybe an hour.”
“A little over. It would have been less if they had had a ship ready…then they might have found you in the tunnel instead of me. No time for the message to reach here. Half an hour frittered away getting a ship ready—the Mother Thing was vexed. I hadn’t known she could be. You see, a ship is supposed to be ready.”
“Any time she wants one?”
“Any and all the time—the Mother Thing is important. Another half-hour in atmosphere maneuvering—and that’s all. Real time. None of those funny contractions.”
I tried to soak it up. They take an hour to go twenty-seven light-years—and get bawled out for dallying. Dr. Einstein must be known as “Whirligig Albert” among his cemetery neighbors. “But how?”
“Kip, do you know any geometry? I don’t mean Euclid—I mean geometry.”
“Mmm… I’ve fiddled with open and closed curved spaces—and I’ve read Dr. Bell’s popular books. But you couldn’t say I know any geometry.”
“At least you won’t boggle at the idea that a straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points.” She made motions as if squeezing a grapefruit in both hands. “Because it’s not. Kip—it all touches. You could put it in a bucket. In a thimble if you folded it so that spins matched.”
I had a dizzying picture of a universe compressed into a teacup, nucleons and electrons packed solidly—really solid and not the thin mathematical ghost that even the uranium nucleus is said to be. Something like the “primal atom” that some cosmogonists use to explain the expanding universe. Well, maybe it’s both—packed and expanding. Like the “wavicle” paradox. A particle isn’t a wave and a wave can’t be a particle—yet everything is both. If you believe in wavicles, you can believe in anything—and if you don’t, then don’t bother to believe at all. Not even in yourself, because that’s what you are—wavicles. “How many dimensions?” I said weakly.
“How many would you like?”
“Me? Uh, twenty, maybe. Four more for each of the first four, to give some looseness on the corners.”
“Twenty isn’t a starter. I don’t know, Kip; I don’t know geometry, either—I just thought I did. So I’ve pestered them.”
“The Mother Thing?”
“Her? Oh, heavens, no! She doesn’t know geometry. Just enough to pilot a ship in and out of the folds.”
“Only that much?” I should have stuck to advanced finger-painting and never let Dad lure me into trying for an education. There isn’t any end—the more you learn, the more you need to learn. “Peewee, you knew what that beacon was for, didn’t you?”
“Me?” She looked innocent. “Well…yes.”
“You knew we were going to Vega.”
“Well…if the beacon worked. If it was set in time.”
“Now the prize question. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well—” Peewee was going to twist that button off. “I wasn’t sure how much math you knew and—you might have gone all masculine and common-sensical and father-knows-best. Would you have believed me?”
(“I told Orville and I told Wilbur and now I’m telling you—that contraption will never work!”) “Maybe not, Peewee. But next time you’re tempted not to tell me something ‘for my own good,’ will you take a chance that I’m not wedded to my own ignorance? I know I’m not a genius but I’ll try to keep my mind open—and I might be able to help, if I knew what you were up to. Quit twisting that button.”
She let go hastily. “Yes, Kip. I’ll remember.”
“Thanks. Another thing is fretting me. I was pretty sick?”
“Huh? You certainly were!”
“All right. They’ve got these, uh, ‘fold ships’ that go anywhere in no time. Why didn’t you ask them to bounce me home and pop me into a hospital?”
She hesitated. “How do you feel?”
“Huh? I feel fine. Except that I seem to be under spinal anesthesia, or something.”
“Or something,” she agreed. “But you feel as if you are getting well?”
“Shucks, I feel well.”
“You aren’t. But you’re going to be.” She looked at me closely. “Shall I put it bluntly, Kip?”
“Go ahead.”
“If they had taken you to Earth to the best hospital we have, you’d be a ‘basket case.’ Understand me? No arms, no legs. As it is, you are getting completely well. No amputations, not even a toe.”
I think the Mother Thing had prepared me. I simply said, “You’re sure?”
“Sure. Sure both. You’re going to be all right.” Suddenly her face screwed up. “Oh, you were a mess! I saw.”
“Pretty bad?”
“Awful. I have nightmares.”
“They shouldn’t have let you look.”
“They couldn’t stop me. I was next of kin.”
“Huh? You told them you were my sister or something?”
“What? I am your next of kin.”
I was about to say she was cockeyed when I tripped over my tongue. We were the only humans for a hundred and sixty trillion miles. As usual, Peewee was right.
“So I had to grant permission,” she went on.
“For what? What did they do to me?”
“Uh, first they popped you into liquid helium. They left you there and the past month they have been using me as a guinea pig. Then, three days ago—three of ours—they thawed you out and got to work. You’ve been getting well ever since.”
“What shape am I in now?”
“Uh…well, you’re growing back. Kip, this isn’t a bed. It just looks like it.”
“What is it, then?”
“We don’t have a name for it and the tune is pitched too high for me. But everything from here on down—” She patted the spread. “—on into the room below, does things for you. You’re wired like a hi-fi nut’s basement.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I’m afraid you can’t. You don’t know, Kip. They had to cut your space suit off.”
I felt more emotion at that than I had at hearing what a mess I had been. “Huh? Where is Oscar? Did they ruin him? My space suit, I mean.”
“I know what you mean. Every time you’re delirious you talk to ‘Oscar’—and you answer back, too. Sometimes I think you’re schizoid, Kip.”
“You’ve mixed your terms, runt—that’ud make me a split personality. All right, but you’re a paranoid yourself.”
“Oh, I’ve known that for a long time. But I’m a very well adjusted one. You want to see Oscar? The Mother Thing said that you would want him near when you woke up.” She opened the closet.
“Hey! You said he was all cut up!”
“Oh, they repaired him. Good as new. A little better than new.”
(“Time, dear! Remember what I said.”)
“Coming, Mother Thing! ’Bye, Kip. I’ll be back soon, and real often.”
“Okay. Leave the closet open so I can see Oscar.”
Peewee did come back, but not “real often.” I wasn’t offended, not much. She had a thousand interesting and “educational” things to poke her ubiquitous nose into, all new and fascinating—she was as busy as a pup chewing slippers. She ran our hosts ragged. But I wasn’t bored. I was getting well, a full-time job and not boring if you are happy—which I was.
I didn’t see the Mother Thing often. I began to realize that she had work of her own to do—even though she came to see me if I asked for her, with never more than an hour’s delay, and never seemed in a hurry to leave.
She wasn’t my doctor, nor my nurse. Instead I had a staff of veterinarians who were alert to supervise every heartbeat. They didn’t come in unless I asked them to (a whisper was as good as a shout) but I soon realized that “my” room was bugged and telemetered like a ship in flight test—and my “bed” was a mass of machinery, gear that bore the relation to our own “mechanical hearts” and “mechanical lungs” and “mechanical kidneys” that
a Lockheed ultrasonic courier does to a baby buggy.
I never saw that gear (they never lifted the spread, unless it was while I slept), but I know what they were doing. They were encouraging my body to repair itself—not scar tissue but the way it had been. Any lobster can do this and starfish do it so well that you can chop them to bits and wind up with a thousand brand-new starfish.
This is a trick any animal should do, since its gene pattern is in every cell. But a few million years ago we lost it. Everybody knows that science is trying to recapture it; you see articles—optimistic ones in Reader’s Digest, discouraged ones in The Scientific Monthly, wildly wrong ones in magazines whose “science editors” seem to have received their training writing horror movies. But we’re working on it. Someday, if anybody dies an accidental death, it will be because he bled to death on the way to the hospital.
Here I was with a perfect chance to find out about it—and I didn’t.
I tried. Although I was unworried by what they were doing (the Mother Thing had told me not to worry and every time she visited me she looked in my eyes and repeated the injunction), nevertheless like Peewee, I like to know.
Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don’t even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee’s yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?
He’ll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he’ll learn that a purple trefoil means: “Danger!”
That’s all. Not because he can’t; remember he’s a supergenius—but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.
I asked questions and always got answers and formed notions. But I’m not going to record them; they are as confused and contradictory as the notions a savage would form about design and operation of atomic equipment. As they say in radio, when noise level reaches a certain value, no information is transmitted. All I got was noise.
Some of it was literally “noise.” I’d ask a question and one of the therapists would answer. I would understand part, then as it reached the key point, I would hear nothing but birdsongs. Even with the Mother Thing as an interpreter, the parts I had no background for would turn out to be a canary’s cheerful prattle.
Hold onto your seats; I’m going to explain something I don’t understand: how Peewee and I could talk with the Mother Thing even though her mouth could not shape English and we couldn’t sing the way she did and had not studied her language. The Vegans—(I’ll call them “Vegans” the way we might be called “Solarians”; their real name sounds like a wind chime in a breeze. The Mother Thing had a real name, too, but I’m not a coloratura soprano. Peewee used it when she wanted to wheedle her—fat lot of good it did her.) The Vegans have a supreme talent to understand, to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. I don’t think it was telepathy, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many wrong numbers. Call it empathy.
But they have it in various degrees, just as all of us drive cars but only a few are fit to be racing drivers. The Mother Thing had it the way Novaës understands a piano. I once read about an actress who could use Italian so effectively to a person who did not understand Italian that she always made herself understood. Her name was “Duce.” No, a “duce” is a dictator. Something like that. She must have had what the Mother Thing had.
The first words I had with the Mother Thing were things like “hello” and “good-bye” and “thank you” and “where are we going?” She could project her meaning with those—shucks, you can talk to a strange dog that much. Later I began to understand her speech as speech. She picked up meanings of English words even faster; she had this great talent, and she and Peewee had talked for days while they were prisoners together.
But while this is easy for “you’re welcome” and “I’m hungry” and “let’s hurry,” it gets harder for ideas like “heterodyning” and “amino acid” even when both are familiar with the concept. When one party doesn’t even have the concept, it breaks down. That’s the trouble I had understanding those veterinarians. If we had all spoken English I still would not have understood.
An oscillating circuit sending out a radio signal produces dead silence unless there is another circuit capable of oscillating in the same way to receive it. I wasn’t on the right frequency.
Nevertheless I understood them when the talk was not highbrow. They were nice people; they talked and laughed a lot and seemed to like each other. I had trouble telling them apart, except the Mother Thing. (I learned that the only marked difference to them between Peewee and myself was that I was ill and she wasn’t.) They had no trouble telling each other apart; their conversations were interlarded with musical names, until you felt that you were caught in Peter and the Wolf or a Wagnerian opera. They even had a leitmotif for me. Their talk was cheerful and gay, like the sounds of a bright summer dawn.
The next time I meet a canary I’ll know what he is saying even if he doesn’t.
I picked up some of this from Peewee—a hospital bed is not a good place from which to study a planet. Vega Five has Earth-surface gravity, near enough, with an oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water life cycle. The planet would not suit humans, not only because the noonday “sun” would strike you dead with its jolt of ultraviolet but also the air has poisonous amounts of ozone—a trace of ozone is stimulating but a trifle more—well, you might as well sniff prussic acid. There was something else, too, nitrous oxide I think, which was ungood for humans if breathed too long. My quarters were air-conditioned; the Vegans could breathe what I used but they considered it tasteless.
I learned a bit as a by-product of something else; the Mother Thing asked me to dictate how I got mixed up in these things. When I finished, she asked me to dictate everything I knew about Earth, its history, and how we work and live together. This is a tall order—I’m not still dictating because I found out I don’t know much. Take ancient Babylonia—how is it related to early Egyptian civilizations? I had only vague notions.
Maybe Peewee did better, since she remembers everything she has heard or read or seen the way Dad does. But they probably didn’t get her to hold still long, whereas I had to. The Mother Thing wanted this for the reasons we study Australian aborigines and also as a record of our language. There was another reason, too.
The job wasn’t easy but there was a Vegan to help me whenever I felt like it, willing to stop if I tired. Call him Professor Josephus Egghead; “Professor” is close enough and his name can’t be spelled. I called him Joe and he called me the leitmotif that meant “Clifford Russell, the monster with the frostbite.” Joe had almost as much gift for understanding as the Mother Thing. But how do you put over ideas like “tariffs” and “kings” to a person whose people have never had either? The English words were just noise.
But Joe knew histories of many peoples and planets and could call up scenes, in moving stereo and color, until we agreed on what I meant. We jogged along, with me dictating to a silvery ball floating near my mouth and with Joe curled up like a cat on a platform raised to my level, while he dictated to another microphone, making running notes on what I said. His mike had a gimmick that made it a hush-phone; I did not hear him unless he spoke to me.
Then we would stumble. Joe would stop and throw me a sample scene, his best guess of what I meant. The pictures appeared in the air, positioned for my comfort—if I turned my head, the picture moved to accommodate me. The pix were color-stereo-television with perfect life and sharpness—well, give us another twenty years and we’ll have them as realistic. It was a good trick to have the projector concealed and to force images to appear as if they were hanging in air, but those are just gimmicks of stereo optics; we can do them anytime we really want to—after all, you can pack a lifelike view of the Grand Canyon into a viewer you hold in your hand.
The thing that did impress me was the organization behind it. I asked Joe about it. He sang to his microphone and we went on a galloping tour o
f their “Congressional Library.”
Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key—and that we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn’t look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.
This “library” had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vegans viewing pictures and listening to sound tracks, each with a silvery sphere in front of him. Joe said they were “telling the memory.” This was equivalent to typing a card for a library’s catalog, except that the result was more like a memory path in brain cells—nine-tenths of that building was an electronic brain.
I spotted a triangular sign like the costume jewelry worn by the Mother Thing, but the picture jumped quickly to something else. Joe also wore one (and others did not) but I did not get around to asking about it, as the sight of that incredible “library” brought up the word “cybernetics” and we went on a detour. I decided later that it might be a lodge pin, or like a Phi Beta Kappa key—the Mother Thing was smart even for a Vegan and Joe was not far behind.
Whenever Joe was sure that he understood some English word, he would wriggle with delight like a puppy being tickled. He was very dignified, but this is not undignified for a Vegan. Their bodies are so fluid and mobile that they smile and frown with the whole works. A Vegan holding perfectly still is either displeased or extremely worried.
The sessions with Joe let me tour places from my bed. The difference between “primary school” and “university” caused me to be shown examples. A “kindergarten” looked like an adult Vegan being overwhelmed by babies; it had the innocent rowdiness of a collie pup stepping on his brother’s face to reach the milk dish. But the “university” was a place of quiet beauty, strange-looking trees and plants and flowers among buildings of surrealistic charm unlike any architecture I have ever seen—I suppose I would have been flabbergasted if they had looked familiar. Parabolas were used a lot and I think all the “straight” lines had that swelling the Greeks called “entasis”—delicate grace with strength.
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