Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

  He looked surprised, then said, “Sorry. I’m not used to using people instead of instruments; I forget. Okay, sit down. This is why you m-r people were brought along: for research into the nature of time.”

  I stared. “Sir? I thought we were along to report back on the planets we expect to find.”

  “Oh, that—Well, I suppose so, but this is much more important. There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time—just shoot every other one.”

  Mr. O’Toole said, without looking up, “The thing I like about you, Chief, is your big warm heart.”

  “Quiet in the gallery, please. Now today, son, we have been trying to find out what time it is.”

  I must have looked as puzzled as I felt for he went on, “Oh, we know what time it is…but too many different ways. See that?” He pointed at the display scope, still tirelessly making a peak every second. “That’s the Greenwich time tick, pulled in by radio and corrected for relative speed and change of speed. Then there is the time you were hearing over the earphones; that is the time the ship runs by. Then there is the time you were getting from your brother and passing to us. We’re trying to compare them all, but the trouble is that we have to have people in the circuit and, while a tenth of a second is a short time for the human nervous system, a microsecond is a measurably long time in physics. Any radar system splits up a microsecond as easily as you slice a pound of butter. So we use a lot of runs to try to even out our ignorance.”

  “Yes, but what do you expect to find out?”

  “If I ‘expected,’ I wouldn’t be doing it. But you might say that we are trying to find out what the word ‘simultaneous’ means.”

  Mr. O’Toole looked up from the console. “If it means anything,” he amended.

  Dr. Babcock glanced at him. “You still here? ‘If it means anything.’ Son, ever since the great Doctor Einstein, ‘simultaneous’ and ‘simultaneity’ have been dirty words to physicists. We chucked the very concept, denied that it had meaning, and built up a glorious structure of theoretical physics without it. Then you mind readers came along and kicked it over. Oh, don’t look guilty; every house needs a housecleaning now and then. If you folks had done your carnival stunt at just the speed of light, we would have assigned you a place in the files and forgotten you. But you rudely insisted on doing it at something enormously greater than the speed of light, which made you as welcome as a pig at a wedding. You’ve split us physicists into two schools, those who want to class you as a purely psychological phenomenon and no business of physics—these are the ‘close your eyes and it will go away’ boys—and a second school which realizes that since measurements can be made of whatever this is you do, it is therefore the business of physics to measure and include it…since physics is, above all, the trade of measuring things and assigning definite numerical values to them.”

  O’Toole said, “Don’t wax philosophical, Chief.”

  “You get back to your numbers, O’Toole; you have no soul. These laddies want to measure how fast you do it. They don’t care how fast—they’ve already recovered from the blow that you do it faster than light—but they want to know exactly how fast. They can’t accept the idea that you do it ‘instantaneously,’ for that would require them to go to a different church entirely. They want to assign a definite speed of propagation, such-and-such number of times faster than the speed of light. Then they can modify their old equations and go right on happily doing business at the old stand.”

  “They will,” agreed O’Toole.

  “Then there is a third school of thought, the right one…my own.”

  O’Toole, without looking up, made a rude noise.

  “Is that your asthma coming back?” Babcock said anxiously. “By the way, you got any results?”

  “They’re still doing it in nothing flat. Measured time negative as often as positive and never greater than inherent observational error.”

  “You see, son? That’s the correct school. Measure what happens and let the chips fly where they may.”

  “Hear hear!”

  “Quiet, you renegade Irishman. Besides that, you m-r’s give us our first real chance to check another matter. Are you familiar with the relativity transformations?”

  “You mean the Einstein equations?”

  “Surely. You know the one for time?”

  I thought hard—Pat and I had taken first-year physics our freshman year; it had been quite a while. I picked up a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought it was:

  t0 = t√1-(v2/c2)

  “That’s it,” agreed Dr. Babcock. “At a relative velocity of ‘v’ time interval at first frame of reference equals time interval at second frame of reference multiplied by the square root of one minus the square of the relative velocity divided by the square of the speed of light. That’s just the special case, of course, for constant speeds; it is more complicated for acceleration. But there has been much disagreement as to what the time equations meant, or if they meant anything.”

  I blurted out, “Huh? But I thought the Einstein theory had been proved?” It suddenly occurred to me that, if the relativity equations were wrong, we were going to be away a mighty long time—Tau Ceti, our first stop, was eleven light-years from the Sun…and that was just our first one; the others were a lot farther.

  But everybody said that once we got up near the speed of light the months would breeze past like days. The equations said so.

  “Attend me. How do you prove that there are eggs in a bird’s nest? Don’t strain your gray matter: go climb the tree and find out. There is no other way. Now we are climbing the tree.”

  “Fine!” said O’Toole. “Go climb a tree.”

  “Noisy in here. One school of thought maintained that the equations simply meant that a clock would read differently if you could read it from a passing star…which you can’t…but that there was no real stretching or shrinking of time—whatever ‘real’ means. Another school pointed to the companion equations for length and mass, maintaining that the famous Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the length transformation was ‘real’ and pointing out that the increase of mass was regularly computed and used for particle-accelerator ballistics and elsewhere in nuclear physics—for example, in the torch that pushes this ship. So, they reasoned, the change in time rates must be real, because the corollary equations worked in practice. But nobody knew. You have to climb the tree and look.”

  “When will we know?” I was still worrying. Staying several years, Einstein time, in the ship I had counted on. Getting killed in the course of it, the way Uncle Steve said we probably would, I refused to worry about. But dying of old age in the Elsie was not what I had counted on. It was a grim thought, a life sentence shut up inside these steel walls.

  “When? Why, we know right now.”

  “You do? What’s the answer?”

  “Don’t hurry me, son. We’ve been gone a couple of weeks, at a boost of 124% of one gee; we’re up to about 9,000 miles per second now. We still haven’t come far—call it seven and a half light-hours or about 5,450,000,000 miles. It will be the better part of a year before we are crowding the speed of light. Nevertheless we have reached a sizable percentage of that speed, about five per cent; that’s enough to show. Easy to measure, with the aid of you mind readers.”

  “Well, sir? Is it a real time difference? Or is it just relative?”

  “You’re using the wrong words. But it’s ‘real,’ so far as the word means anything. The ratio right now is about 99.9%.”

  “To put it exactly,” added Mr. O’Toole, “Bartlett’s slippage—that’s a technical term I just invented—his ‘slippage’ in time rate from that of his twin has now reached twelve parts in ten thousand.”

  “So you would make me a liar for one fiftieth of one per cent?” Babcock complained. “O’Toole, why did I let you come along?”

  “So you would have some one to work your arithmetic,” his assista
nt answered smugly.

  Pat told me he did not want me around when they operated, but I came anyway. I locked myself in my room so nobody could disturb me and stuck with him. He didn’t really object; whenever I spoke he answered and the more it got to the deadline the more he talked…a cheerful babble about nothing and everything. It did not fool me.

  When they wheeled him into surgery, he said, “Tom, you should see my anesthetist. Pretty as a sunny day and just lap size.”

  (“Isn’t her face covered with a mask?”)

  “Well, not completely. I can see her pretty blue eyes. I think I’ll ask her what she’s doing tonight.”

  (“Maudie won’t like that.”)

  “You keep Maudie out of this; a sick man is entitled to privileges. Wait a sec, I’ll ask her.”

  (“What did she say?”)

  “She said, ‘Nothing much,’ and that I would be doing the same for a few days. But I’ll get her phone number.”

  (“Two gets you five she won’t give it to you.”)

  “Well, I can try…uh uh! Too late, they’re starting in… Tom, you wouldn’t believe this needle; it’s the size of an air hose. She says she wants me to count. Okay, anything for a laugh…one…two…three…”

  Pat got up to seven and I counted with him. All the way through I kept winding up tighter and tighter to unbearable tension and fear. I knew now what he apparently had been sure of all along, that he was not coming out of it. At the count of seven he lost track but his mind did not go silent. Maybe those around the operating table thought they had him unconscious but I knew better; he was trapped inside and screaming to get out.

  I called to him and he called back but we couldn’t find each other. Then I was as trapped and lost and confused as he was and we groped around in the dark and the cold and the aloneness of the place where you die.

  Then I felt the knife whittling at my back and I screamed.

  * * *

  The next thing I remember is a couple of faces floating over me. Somebody said, “I think he’s coming around, Doctor.” The voice did not belong to anyone; it was a long way off.

  Then there was just one face and it said, “Feeling better?”

  “I guess so. What happened?”

  “Drink this. Here, I’ll hold up your head.”

  When I woke up again I felt fairly wide awake and could see that I was in the ship’s infirmary. Dr. Devereaux was there, looking at me. “You decided to come out of it, young fellow?”

  “Out of what, Doctor? What happened?”

  “I don’t know precisely, but you gave a perfect clinical picture of a patient terminating in surgical shock. By the time we broke the lock on your door, you were far gone—you gave us a bad time. Can you tell me about it?”

  I tried to think, then I remembered. Pat! I called him in my mind. (“Pat! Where are you, boy?”) He didn’t answer. I tried again and he still didn’t answer, so I knew. I sat up and managed to choke out, “My brother…he died!”

  Dr. Devereaux said, “Wups! Take it easy. Lie down. He’s not dead…unless he died in the last ten minutes, which I doubt.”

  “But I can’t reach him! How do you know? I can’t reach him, I tell you!”

  “Come down off the ceiling. Because I’ve been checking on him all morning via the m-r’s on watch. He’s resting easily under an eighth grain of hypnal, which is why you can’t raise him. I may be stupid, son—I was stupid, not to warn you to stay out of it—but I’ve been tinkering with the human mind long enough to figure out approximately what happened to you, given the circumstances. My only excuse is that I have never encountered such circumstances before.”

  I quieted a little. It made sense that I couldn’t wake Pat if they had him under drugs. Under Dr. Devereaux’s questions I managed to tell him more or less what had happened—not perfectly, because you can’t really tell someone else what goes on inside your head. “Uh, was the operation successful, Doctor?”

  “The patient came through in good shape. We’ll talk about it later. Now turn over.”

  “Huh?”

  “Turn over. I want to take a look at your back.”

  He looked at it, then called two of his staff to see it. Presently he touched me. “Does that hurt?”

  “Ouch! Uh, yes, it’s pretty tender. What’s wrong with my back, Doctor?”

  “Nothing, really. But you’ve got two perfect stigmata, just matching the incisions for Macdougal’s operation…which is the technique they used on your brother.”

  “Uh, what does that mean?”

  “It means that the human mind is complicated and we don’t know much about it. Now roll over and go to sleep. I’m going to keep you in bed a couple of days.”

  I didn’t intend to go to sleep but I did. I was awakened by Pat calling me. “Hey, Tom! Where are you? Snap out of it.”

  (“I’m right here. What’s the matter?”)

  “Tom… I’ve got my legs back!”

  I answered, (“Yeah, I know,”) and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER IX

  RELATIVES

  Once Pat was over his paralysis I should have had the world by the tail, for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before he was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: It was because he was going and I wasn’t. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting what I wanted through his misfortune. It didn’t seem right to be happy when he was crippled—especially when his crippled condition had got me what I wanted.

  So I should have been happy once he was well again.

  Were you ever at a party where you were supposed to be having fun and suddenly you realized that you weren’t? No reason, just no fun and the whole world gray and tasteless?

  Some of the things that were putting me off my feed I could see. First there had been Dusty, but that had been cleared up. Then there had been the matter of other people, especially the electron pushers we stood watch with, calling us freaks and other names and acting as if we were. But the Captain had tromped on that, too, and when we got better acquainted people forgot about such things. One of the relativists, Janet Meers, was a lightning calculator, which made her a freak, too, but everybody took it for granted in her and after a while they took what we did for granted.

  After we got out of radio range of Earth the Captain took us out from under Commander Frick and set us up as a department of our own, with “Uncle” Alfred McNeil as head of department and Rupert Hauptman as his assistant—which meant that Rupe kept the watch list while Uncle Alf was in charge of our mess table and sort of kept us in line. We liked old Unc too well to give him much trouble and if somebody did get out of line Unc would look sad and the rest of us would slap the culprit down. It worked.

  I think Dr. Devereaux recommended it to the Captain. The fact was that Commander Frick resented us. He was an electrical engineer and had spent his whole life on better and better communication equipment…then we came along and did it better and faster with no equipment at all. I don’t blame him; I would have been sore, too. But we got along better with Uncle Alf.

  I suppose that the Vasco da Gama was part of my trouble. The worst thing about space travel is that absolutely nothing happens. Consequently the biggest event in our day was the morning paper. All day long each mind reader on watch (when not busy with traffic, which wasn’t much) would copy news. We got the news services free and all the features and Dusty would dress it up by copying pictures sent by his twin Rusty. The communicator on the midwatch would edit it and the m-r and the communicator on the early morning watch would print it and have it in the mess room by breakfast.

  There was no limit to the amount of copy we could have; it was just a question of how much so few people could prepare. Besides Solar System news we carried ships’ news, not only of the Elsie but of the eleven others. Everybody (except myself) knew people in the other ships. Either they had met them at Zurich, or the old spacehands, like the Captain and a lot of others, had friends and acquaintances reaching back
for years.

  It was mostly social news, but we enjoyed it more than news from Earth and the System, because we felt closer to the ships in the fleet, even though they were billions of miles away and getting farther by the second. When Ray Gilberti and Sumire Watanabe got married in the Leif Ericsson, every ship in the fleet held a celebration. When a baby was born in the Pinta and our Captain was named godfather, it made us all proud.

  We were hooked to the Vasco da Gama through Cas Warner, and Miss Gamma Furtney linked us with the Marco Polo and the Santa Maria through her triplets Miss Alpha and Miss Beta, but we got news from all the ships by pass-down-the-line. Fleet news was never cut, even if dirtside news had to be. As it was, Mama O’Toole complained that if the editions got any larger, she would either have to issue clean sheets and pillow cases only once a week or engineering would have to build her another laundry just to wash newspapers. Nevertheless, the ecology department always had clean paper ready, freshly pressed, for each edition.

  We even put out an occasional extra, like the time Lucille LaVonne won “Miss Solar System” and Dusty did a pic of her so perfect you would have sworn it was a photograph. We lost some paper from that as quite a number of people kept their copies for pin-ups instead of turning them back for reclamation—I did myself. I even got Dusty to autograph it. It startled him but pleased him even though he was rude about it—an artist is entitled to credit for his work, I say, even if he is a poisonous little squirt.

  What I am trying in say is that the Elsie Times was the high point of each day and fleet news was the most important part of it.

  I had not been on watch the night before; nevertheless, I was late for breakfast. When I hurried in, everybody was busy with his copy of the Times as usual—but nobody was eating. I sat down between Van and Prudence and said, “What’s the matter? What’s aching everybody?”

  Pru silently handed me a copy of the Times.

  The first page was bordered in black. There were oversize headlines: VASCO DA GAMA LOST.

  I couldn’t believe it. The Vasco was headed out for Alpha Centauri but she wouldn’t get there for another four years, Earth time; she wasn’t even close to the speed of light. There was nothing to have may trouble with, out where she was. It must be a mistake.