Through space-four, it might take me twenty minutes (unlikely) or five days (just as unlikely). But a course plotted to anywhere, from where I had painfully found out I was, didn’t exist; instructing my ship was going to be a very interesting job. Space-four routes are usually figured by teams of theorists, sitting at ease in large, airy rooms, over a period of weeks. All your usual traveler has to know is where to feed in his trip card; his ship reads the bumps on it, and does the work.
I am not exactly your usual traveler, but I am not a space-four theorist either, and while my cabin is a little larger and airier than most, I didn’t have weeks to spend on the job. There had to be a quick-and-dirty emergency answer somewhere, and I dug out a Pilot’s Manual and an unreasonably thick book of space-four routings (limited edition, for official use only), and got myself some lox and cream cheese on thick rye bread, along with a jug of iced tea—any more coffee, and I’d be awake for five days, and jittering for seven.
An hour later, I had three possible routings, none of which looked especially helpful. I sighed deeply, finished the last of the tea, and decided to try for two more before arranging them in any sort of order. I flipped through the book of routings again, came to the section I wanted (headed, if you care, “Transductions in d, dx and e”), and began punching in numbers.
I had been doing this for about four minutes, varied by an occasional stare at my boards and a muttered hmm or two, when I was interrupted by a voice.
It was a fairly loud, medium-tenor voice, with no discernible accent (which means it had mine), and it said, and I swear it to you:
“Lonely? Ready for company? Punch 117-62-97, and rejoin your friends and neighbors at their preferred locations. This is a service of Path, Ltd.”
CHAPTER THREE
All right. The strain of my situation had been too much for me, and I was having hallucinations.
Well, what would you have thought? I took several deep breaths. Then I said, to the air around me: “What the Hell?”
“Human,” the same voice said. “Planet resident. Occupying three per cent of locations suitable for growth, within one galaxy only. Resident of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. Visitor to one additional spatial dimension. Limited sensory equipment. Cognition unknown. This is a first cut.”
Obviously, my ship was acting up again. Something had got into the speaker system, and I was fascinated by what the Hell it might be. It didn’t sound like any interactive I had aboard, or had ever had aboard; it didn’t even sound a lot like any interactive I had ever so much as heard of.
Though it is hard to tell, it didn’t sound like random selections from any interactive I was at all likely to own, either. Sensory and cognition are not words I expect to find lying around among my amusements. Concepts, yes; vocabulary, no.
I punched for a sound check, and as I did that the voice said:
“Response inappropriate.”
“All right,” I muttered. “What would be appropriate, you damn fool? Appropriate for a voice coming out of the everywhere, into the here.”
“Identification and reply, of course,” the voice told me promptly.
I was staring at my sound check board. It had informed me, accurately, that I had just muttered something. (I got a db reading and a plot of overtones.)
It was now also informing me, with certainty, that no other sound had existed in the cabin over the previous eighty seconds.
Maybe my sound check had fallen ill. Maybe I was hallucinating.
And just maybe, I told myself, something brand-new was happening in my ship. Or in my head. Or both.
So I said: “Who am I replying to, and what kind of identification?” I have no idea whether I really expected an answer.
But I got one, though not an immediately helpful one. “Who. Does there exist specific individuation?”
“There exist individuals,” I said. “They have identities. I made a request regarding that identity.”
“Individuals,” the voice said. “Sound-coded individuation. Call me Mishmael. Mosh. Kabibble.” A slight pause. “Sound-coded as Folla. Sufficient. Call me Folla.”
I felt as if I’d fallen into somebody’s notion of Surrealism. I felt, in fact, thoroughly cuckoo, and the notion set off an association, somewhere in my collection of scrappy Classical Learning. “Oh cuckoo,” I said, “shall I call thee bird, or but a wand’ring voice?”
The wand’ring voice said: “Response inappropriate,” again, which I suppose it was. I said:
“Translation: who the Hell is Folla, and what are you doing on my ship?”
The voice said: “Reply in series. One: Folla is now an inhabitant of these spaces. Two: I am occupying no space in your ship.”
All right. “Where is your voice coming from?”
I got the answer I should have been expecting. “Out of the everywhere—” it said.
“Into the here. Yes. I said that myself, two minutes ago. Any particular kind of everywhere? And your voice is not affecting my instrumentation.”
“Reply in series,” the voice—Folla, I supposed—said. “One: a non-specific and other everywhere. Two: I will correct, within six seconds of time flow.”
Well, I was getting answers, but the answers did not, for some reason, seem to be helpful. I tried again. “Where is your ship?”
“These spaces are my ship,” Folla said. “Do you wish to change your location, and rejoin your friends and neighbors?” My sound check now told me that the voice was coming from inside my cabin, centered on a point five inches over my head. There was nothing visible five inches over my head.
Beware, the old saying goes, of geeks bearing grifts. Whether Folla was or was not a geek I was not prepared to say; but the offer did sound a lot like a grift. A con. What would happen if I said Yes, get me home?
“I am preparing to do that myself,” I said.
“It can be done without disturbance,” Folla said. “Fret not, and it will be arranged. No payment will be requested at this time.”
“A service of Path, Ltd.,” I said, to fill in time while I thought. Hard.
A slight pause. “What is the planet of your residence?”
“Ravenal,” I lied. “You probably won’t know the coordinates. But let’s discuss this for a—”
I stopped right there, because my boards were showing me that I had changed location. I thought I knew where I’d come to.
“Folla?” I said.
No reply.
“Folla, damn it?”
No reply.
I punched up my locator again, and queried it.
It told me I was in close orbit around Ravenal.
I didn’t believe it for a second. But I punched for Approach Control on-planet anyhow, made some adjustments, and got myself into an approach path.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ravenal is the hard-science center of the galaxy, as far as human beings are concerned—which is putting it mildly. I’ve spent time there on a small variety of occasions, and I have some friends there. It is not my planet of residence, but it was, very definitely, the place I wanted to go. If you need dependable answers, Ravenal is the first place to go and look for them, and some of the people I know there are the first ones to ask.
What had happened to me out there in the unknown had no explanation I could come up with, and no ancestors I could think of; I had never heard of such a thing happening to anybody, anywhere. People do hear voices, of course, but not quite like that.
There is the old joke, for instance. Psychologist to patient: “Do you ever hear voices, and you don’t know whose voices they are, or where they’re coming from?”
Patient. “Yes.”
Psychologist: “Aha. And when does this happen?”
Patient: “When I answer the telephone.”
And there are, of course, people who really do hear voices from the unknown. Some of these people have become heroes of one religion or another, and some of them have become patients in facilities for the he
lpless, and a very few of them have become respected poets.
These were not, on the whole, groups I was comfortable about belonging to. And the experience I’d had hadn’t quite been theirs: my voice had told me that something absolutely impossible was going to happen, and it had then, and very quickly, happened. Even the voices that had come to religious heroes hadn’t been quite that efficient.
I had traveled about sixteen thousand light years in either zero time, or a time interval small enough to measure in eyeblinks. I couldn’t tell which, because I was not sure either that I’d noticed what my boards had told me at the precise millisecond they’d begun to tell me—I’d been just a little distracted—or that the boards had responded instantaneously to my change in location.
It didn’t, as far as I could see, make much difference; either was impossible, Space-four doesn’t work like that; trip time is a fairly large number of minutes, at a minimum, and is usually measured in days. There are studies that seem to have established that the minimum theoretical trip time through space-four is just over eighteen minutes—no trip whatever, from anywhere to anywhere, can ever be shorter than that.
Mine had been—by something over eighteen minutes.
The voice I’d heard, obviously, knew some different theories.
And they’d worked out, in the real world. I got my signals from Tower for Ravenal’s City Two, punched in the course, braking and so on, and was on the ground in ninety minutes; even the landing people on Ravenal are efficient, and there is very little fuzz or delay to the process.
The fuzz and delay happened after I’d left and sealed my ship, of course, and is known everywhere as Customs. I bore up under the various idiocies and indignities gamely, and, a couple of hours later, by now late at night by my body clock, found that a hotel I remembered visiting during my last visit—with the typical Ravenal lack of any literary imagination at all, it was called City Two Rooms and Services—was happy to board me. I settled in, and then, even before I began any serious unpacking, I reached for the phone.
The rasp that answered gave me the feeling that some things never change. “Who?” Master Higsbee said, in a voice like an unoiled camshaft with attitude.
“Gerald Knave, Master,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Gerald. I am glad to hear your voice. It has been too long—nearly eight months Standard. Where are you, and why do you call? It is not, surely, to cheer an old blind man.”
“Well,” I said, trying not to sound either sympathetic or irritated, “any cheering I can do, you’re welcome to. But something strange has happened. Very strange. I’m right here on Ravenal, and I’ve got a story I don’t think you’ve heard before.”
“Indeed,” he said. “You have come to ask me questions, Gerald? It should not be necessary; you have the wit to provide your own answers.”
I sighed. “Not this time, I don’t,” I said. “You may not have any answers either.”
He said it again: “Indeed.” And then: “It is nearly time for my dinner, Gerald. I will come to your hotel, if I may.”
“City Two Rooms and Services,” I said, not bothering about the fairly obvious deduction that I was in a hotel. “We’ll find a restaurant.”
“Room Service will be sufficient for an old and helpless man,” he said. “If you are serious about your story, Gerald, we shall want no distractions.”
An old and helpless man. Oh, God. But though being around the Master meant you had to put up with a lot—you also had to put up with being called Gerald, for instance—it was worth it; he was, after all, the Master.
“I’ll look for you,” I said.
“Do that. Look for a blind and lamed old man, Gerald.”
“Lamed?”
“It is unimportant,” he said. “A small accident, and I am assured temporary. Finished.”
Click. The Master wasted no phone time whatever.
He has been blind for thirty years and more, but I had never seen him with a cane before. He didn’t lean on it unduly and he didn’t flourish it; he used it, with as little waste motion as possible. He stalked into the hotel lobby, a big barrel-shaped man with a large, Roman head and a crown of fine white hair, moving a little slowly but not with a noticeable limp—and when he got to the middle of it he stopped and cocked his big head. The place was full of bustle and movement, for City Two— which, while a full city, is not as crowded as City One, where the bureaucracy lives—but when I said: “Over here,” he heard me without effort. He stalked toward me. People in his path got out of his path.
I think the Master has memorized the entire ground plan of any place on Ravenal he’s at all likely to be; he’s never used a cane for location that I know of. He came within two inches or so of a pillar, on the way to me, but no closer. When he got to me, he said: “I thought you might come down to meet me, Gerald.”
“Of course I would,” I said. “And not because you have difficulties—”
“Blind,” he said. “Not because I am blind. Periphrasis does not become you, Gerald.”
“At any rate,” I said uncomfortably, “simple politeness. What happened to your leg?”
“The room,” he said. “I dislike to chat in large open spaces.”
“Sorry,” I said, and headed for the elevators. He followed me without trouble. A couple of large men walking across the lobby and arguing with each other nearly bumped into him, but they did see him at the last second, and turned aside just enough. A little more than just enough. He affected not to notice, and let them live.
In the room, we got settled into chairs, and he said: “If I remember this establishment, the steak au poivre is edible. We will accept their usual accompaniments. That, and any decent red wine.”
I seconded the motion, called for Room Service, added coffee and a warmer to the menu—well, it would do for a midnight supper, for me, and the coffee would be welcome (though much earlier I’d been filling up on it), after the last few hours of Customs.
I put down the phone, and the Master said: “Tell me.”
“The leg first,” I said. “What happened?”
He shrugged, just a little. “I was examining some files, at the request of a friend,” he said. “Instances of minor theft in specialty shops—unusual lingerie.”
I nodded, trying not to look surprised; God knows what he can notice. “Unusual lingerie?”
“What seem to be called Playtime Wispies,” he said flatly. “I had not myself previously encountered the objects. The records of theft were among several boxes of reader spools.”
I was trying hard not to picture the Master encountering a delicate handful of Playtime Wispies. Some of them are edible. Some play music. Some are rigged to vanish into thin air after set periods of wear—say two hours. Some—well, there are a lot of variations. “And the boxes of spools—”
“Just so,” he said. “A particularly heavy box fell on my foot. There is injured musculature, a small broken bone, a swollen ankle. All, I am assured, quite temporary.”
“Good,” I said. “And the thefts—”
“A very minor matter,” he said. “But my friend was curious as to patterns in the timing as well as in the objects stolen. A private matter, not for police inquiry. It will be settled easily enough, there is no real complexity involved.”
“Well,” I said, “I hope the foot’s better soon.”
“Indeed,” he said, and then: “Tell me.”
So I did. In careful detail, and word for word, second for second. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing I had trouble remembering. He asked no questions until the end, which was pleasing; it meant I was doing a thorough job of reporting events.
When I had brought him to the point at which I was orbiting Ravenal, I stopped. He said nothing at all for over a full minute—which was not usual.
Then he said: “You have left nothing out, and have added nothing?”
“Of course not.”
“Then we have an extraordinary situation,” he said. “You were quite rig
ht, Gerald: this is a story I have not heard before, and one for which I do not have any immediately final answers. There are, of course, a number of suggestive points.”
I said: “I’ve seen a few of them. But I’d like to hear your—” and there was a polite little rap at my door.
Room Service, of course. I got up and let the Totum in, told it where to set up the table and arrange the plates and food and so on, and punched my accept code into its shield. It buzzed faintly, said: “Ank you, Sir, and a pleas evening.”
Well, that it talked at all was evidence of the high ranking of my hotel; expecting perfection, in a machine that saw the kind of heavy use a hotel Totum had to see, would have been silly. “Thank you,” I said, and it went away, and I shut and locked the door and we got down to eating.
“Suggestive points,” I said after a while.
“Let us assume that what you experienced was objectively real,” he said. “In that case—though I hesitate greatly over the conclusion, and of course this Folla may have been lying, or mistaken, or mad—you were hearing the voice—produced I do not know how—of someone who was not, so to speak, from this universe.”
“Not from this galaxy, you mean,” I said. “A total stranger. I did get that. A very strange stranger, too.”
“Not from this universe,” the Master said flatly. “So he claims. Not from this—little sheaf of spaces. Three dimensions of space, and one of time—as Folla said. With visitations, of course, to a fourth dimension of space—which would describe, loosely to be sure, our travels in or through or with space-four.”
I nodded—very tentatively. “He described—space-time— as if it were something special. Odd. Not the kind of thing he’s used to.”
“God alone knows what he might be used to,” the Master said. He cut the last bit of steak au poivre and began to chew. “‘Sensory equipment limited’,” he said. “I wonder what unlimited sensory data would be.”
“Maybe his is limited too,” I said. I chased some peas around my plate, caught them and ate a forkful. “But in different ways.”
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