The Number of the Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “But, Captain, I did not ask for written orders.”

  “Eh?” I thought back. He hadn’t, quite. “It sounded as if you were about to.”

  “I was stalling. I must advise you to follow the prudent course. Unofficially, I prefer to risk the test. But I should not have stalled. I’m sorry that my intransigence caused you to consider relinquishing command.”

  “I didn’t just consider it; I have. Resignation effective the first time we ground. You’ve bought it, Jake.”

  “Captain—”

  “Yes, Deety?”

  “You are correct; the test I suggested is useless, and could be fatal. I should not have asked for it. I’m sorry…sir.”

  “Me, too! I felt you were being too strict with Deety. But you weren’t; you were taking care of us, as you always do, Zebbie. Captain Zebbie. Of course you shouldn’t make a risky test we don’t need.”

  I said, “Anyone anything to add?” No one spoke up, so I added, “I’m heading west,” and did so. “Gay Deceiver—Bug Out!”

  Black sky above us; that “dead sea bottom” far below… I remarked, “Looks as if a Russian, or one of their flappy craft, is in our parking spot. Deety, your revised program worked perfectly.”

  “But, Zebadiah—why did you risk it?” She sounded terribly distressed.

  “Because all of you wanted to, despite what you said later. Because it’s my last chance to make such a decision.” I added, “Jake, I’m going to tilt her over. Grab the binox and see if you can identify where we were parked. If that fire is smoking, you can use it for reference.”

  “But, Captain, I’m not taking command. I won’t accept it.”

  “Pipe down and carry out your orders! It’s this damned yack-yack and endless argument that’s giving me ulcers. If you won’t accept command, then it’s up for grabs. But not me! Oh, I’ll pilot as the new C.O. orders. But I won’t command. Deety, how long did Gay pause to make that radar check? At what height?”

  “H-above-G was half a klick. Duration I don’t know but I can retrieve it. Darling—Captain! You’re not really going to quit commanding us?”

  “Deety, I don’t make threats. Pipe down and retrieve that duration. Jake, what do you see?”

  “I’ve located the fire. Several ornithopters are on the ground. My guess places one of them about where we were parked. Captain, I advise not dropping lower.”

  “Advice noted. Deety, how about that duration?” I didn’t know how to ask for it myself, not having written the program.

  Deety retrieved it smoothly: 0.071 seconds—call it a fifteenth of a second. Radar is not instantaneous; Gay had to stop and sweep that spot long enough for a “picture” to form in her gizzards, to tell her whether or not she could park there. A fifteenth of a second is loads of time for the human eye. I hoped that Colonel Frimpsky had been watching when Gay popped up and blinked out.

  “Five klicks H-above-G, Captain.”

  “Thanks, Jake.” The board showed dive rate—straight down!—of over seven hundred kilometers per hour, and increasing so fast that the units figure was an unreadable blur, and the tens place next to it was blinking one higher almost by the second.

  Most carefully I eased her out of dive, and gently, slowly opened her wings part way for more lift as she slowed, while making a wide clockwise sweep to the east—slowed her dive, that is, not her speed through the air. When I had completed that sweep, and straightened out headed for that column of smoke on course west, I was making over eight hundred kilometers per hour in unpowered glide and still had almost a klick H-above-G I could turn into greater speed.

  Not that I needed it—I had satisfied myself by eye of what I had been certain of by theory: an ornithopter is slow.

  Jake said worriedly, “May I ask the Captain his plans?”

  “I’m going to give Colonel Pistolsky something to remember us by! Gay Deceiver.”

  “Still aboard, Boss.”

  I kept my eye on the flappy birds still in the air while I let Gay fly herself. Those silly contraptions could not catch us but there was always a chance that a pilot might dodge the wrong way.

  Most of them seemed anxious to be elsewhere: they were lumbering aside right and left. I looked at the smoke—dead ahead—and saw what I had not noticed before: an ornithopter beyond the smoke.

  Jake gasped but said nothing. We were on collision course closing at about 900 kms/hr, most of it ours. Suicide pilot? Idiot? Panicked and frozen?

  I let him get within one klick of us, which brought us almost to the smoke and near the deck, about 200 meters H-above-G—and I yelped, “Scout!”

  Yes, Deety is a careful programmer; the sky was black, we were ten klicks H-above-G, and so far as I could tell, the same barren hills under us that we had left five minutes earlier—and I was feeling cocky. My sole regret was that I would not hear Colonel Snarfsky try to explain to the Grand Duke the “ghost” craft now used by “British spies.”

  Did Russian nobility practice “honorable hara-kiri”? Perhaps the loaded-pistol symbol? You know that one: The officer in disgrace returns to his quarters and finds that someone has thoughtfully loaded his pistol and placed it on his desk…thereby saving the regiment the scandal of a court.

  I didn’t want the bliffy dead but busted to buck private. With time to reflect on politeness and international protocol while he cleaned stables.

  I checked our heading, found that we were still pointed west. “Gay Deceiver, Scout!”

  Black sky again, the same depressing landscape—“Copilot, is it worthwhile to tilt down for a better look? That either takes juice—not much but some—or it takes time to drop far enough to bite air and do it with elevons. We can’t afford to waste either time or juice.”

  “Captain, I don’t think this area is worth scouting.”

  “Careful of that participle; better say ‘exploring.’”

  “Captain, may I say something?”

  “Deety, if you are speaking as Astrogator, you not only may but must.”

  “I could reprogram to put us lower if I knew what altitude was just high enough to let you use elevons. Conserve both time and juice, I mean.”

  “It seems to be about eight klicks H-above-G, usually. Hard to say since we don’t have a sea-level.”

  “Shall I change angle to arrive at eight klicks H-above-G?”

  “How long does it take us to fall two klicks when we arrive?”

  She barely hesitated. “Thirty-two and a half seconds.”

  “Only half a minute? Seems longer.”

  “Three-two point six seconds, Captain, if this planet has the same surface gravity as Mars in our own universe—three-seven-six centimeters per second squared. I’ve been using it and haven’t run into discrepancies. But I don’t see how this planet holds so much atmosphere when Mars—our Mars—has so little.”

  “This universe may not have the same laws as ours. Ask your father. He’s in charge of universes.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I revise the program?”

  “Deety, never monkey with a system that is working well enough—First Corollary of Murphy’s Law. If it is an area as unattractive as this, we’ll simply get out. If it has possibilities, half a minute isn’t too long to wait, and the additional height will give us a better idea of the whole area. Gay Deceiver, Scout!”

  We all gasped. Thirty kilometers and those barren hills were gone; the ground was green and fairly level—and a river was in sight. Or a canal.

  “Oh, boy! Copilot, don’t let me waste juice—be firm with me. Deety, count seconds. Everybody eyeball his sector, report anything interesting.”

  Deety started chanting “…thirteen…fourteen…fifteen—” and each second felt like ten. I took my hands off the controls to keep from temptation. That was either a canal or a stream that had been straightened, revetted, and maintained for years, maybe eons. Professor Lowell had been right—right theory, wrong universe.

  “Deety, how far is the horizon?”

  “—sevente
en—about two hundred fifty klicks—twenty—”

  I placed my hands gently on the controls. “Hon, that’s the first time you’ve ever used the word ‘about’ with reference to a number.”

  “—twenty-four—insufficient data!—twenty-six—”

  “You can stop counting; I felt a quiver.” I put a soft nose-down pressure on the elevons and decided to leave her wings spread; we might want to stretch this one. “Insufficient data?”

  “Zebadiah, it was changing steadily and you had me counting seconds. Horizon distance at ten klicks height above ground should be within one percent of two hundred and seventy kilometers. That assumes that this planet is a perfect sphere and that it is exactly like Mars in our universe—neither is true. It ignores refraction effects, tricky even at home—and unknown to me here. I treated it as geometry, length of tangent for an angle of four degrees thirty-seven minutes.”

  “Four and half degrees? Where in the world did you get that figure?”

  “Oh! Sorry, dear, I skipped about six steps. On Earth one nautical mile is one minute of arc—check?”

  “Yes. Subject to minor reservations. With a sextant, or in dead reckoning, or on a chart, a mile is a minute, a minute is a mile. Makes it simple. Otherwise we would be saying a minute is one thousand eight hundred fifty-three meters and the arithmetic would get hairy.”

  “One-eight-five-three point one-eight-seven-seven-oh-five plus,” she corrected me. “Very hairy. Best not convert to MKS until the last step. But, Zebadiah, there is a simpler relation here. One minute of arc equals one kilometer, near enough not to matter. So I treated H-above-G, ten klicks, as a versine, applied the haversine rule and got four degrees thirty-seven minutes or two hundred seventy-seven kilometers to the theoretical horizon. You see?”

  “I see everything but how you hide haversine tables in a jump suit. Me, I hide ’em in Gay…and make her do the work.” Yes, I could nose her over now—easy does it, boy.

  “Well, I didn’t, exactly. I calculated it, but I did it the easy way: Naperian logarithms and angles in radians, then converted back to degrees to show the relationship to kilometers on the ground.”

  “That’s ‘the easy way’?”

  “It is for me, sir!”

  “If you’re quivering your chin, stop it. I told you it was your luscious body, not your brain. Most idiots-savants are homely and can’t do anything but their one trick. But you’re an adequate cook, as well.”

  That got me a stony silence. I kept easing her nose down. “Time for binox, Jake.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Captain, I am required to advise you. With that last remark to the Astrogator you risked your life.”

  “Are you implying that Deety is an inadequate cook? Why, Jake!”

  Hilda interrupted. “She’s a gourmet cook!”

  “I know she is, Sharpie…but I don’t like to say it where Gay can hear—Gay can’t cook. Nor has she Deety’s other talent which ’tis death to hide. Jake, that’s a settlement below.”

  “Of sorts. A one-church village.”

  “Do you see ornithopters? Anything that could give us trouble?”

  “Depends. Are you interested in church architecture?”

  “Jake, this is no time for a cultural chat.”

  “I’m required to advise you, sir, This church has towers, something like minarets topped off with onion-shaped structures.”

  “Russian Orthodox!”

  Hilda said that. I said nothing. I eased Gay’s nose up to level flight, lined her up with what I thought was downstream, and snapped, “Gay, Scout!”

  The canal was still in sight, almost under us and stretching over the horizon. I was almost lined up with it. Gay, Scout!

  “Anybody see that settlement that was almost ahead before this last transition? Report.”

  “Captain Zebbie, it’s much closer now but on this side.”

  “I see. Or don’t. Jake isn’t transparent.”

  “Captain, the city—quite large—is about a forty-five-degree slant down to starboard, not in sight from your seat.”

  “If forty-five degrees is a close guess, a minimum transition on that bearing should place us over the city.”

  “Captain, I advise against it,” Jake told me.

  “Reasons, please.”

  “This is a large city that might be well defended. Their ornithopters look odd and ineffective but we must assume they have spaceships as good or better than ours or the Tsar could not have a colony here. This causes me to suspect that they may have smart missiles. Or weapons utterly strange. I would rather check for onion towers from a distance. And not stay long in one place—I think we’ve been here too long. I’m jumpy.”

  “I’m not”—my sixth sense was not jabbing me—“but set verniers for a minimum transition along L axis, then execute at will. No need to be a slow fat target.”

  “One minimum, L axis—set!”

  Suddenly my guardian angel goosed me. “Execute!”

  I noticed the transition principally because Gay was now live under my hand—air bite. Perhaps she had not been quite level. I turned her nose down to gather maneuvering speed unpowered, then did a skew turn—and yelped, “Gay Bounce!” having seen all that I wanted to see: an expanding cloud. Atomic? I think not. Lethal? You test it; I’m satisfied.

  I told Gay to bounce three more times, placing us a bit less than fifty klicks above ground. Then I spent a trifle of power to nose her over. “Jake, use the binox to see how far this valley runs, whether it is all cultivated, whether it has more settlements. We are not going to get close enough to look for onion spires; that last shot was unfriendly. Rude. Impetuous. Or am I prejudiced? Science Officer? Le mot juste, s’il vous plait.”

  “Nye kultoorni.”

  “I remember that one! Makes Russians turn green. What does it mean? How did you happen to know it, Sharpie?”

  “Means what it sounds like: ‘uncultured.’ I didn’t just ‘happen,’ Cap’n Zebbie; I know Russian.”

  I was flabbergasted. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “Sharpie, if you handled the negotiations, we might not have had trouble.”

  “Zebbie, if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. He was calling you a spy and insulting you while the palaver was still in French. I thought it might be advantageous if they thought none of us knew Russian. They might spill something.”

  “Did they?”

  “No. The colonel was coaching his pilot in how to be arrogant. Then you told them to halt, in French, and no more Russian was spoken save for meaningless side remarks. Zebbie, when they tried to shoot us down just now, would they have refrained had they known that I had studied Russian?”

  “Mmm—Sharpie, I should know better than to argue with you. I’m going to vote for you for captain.”

  “Oh, No!”

  “Oh, Yes. Copilot, I’m going to assume that everything this side of the hills and involved with this watercourse—courses—twin canals—is New Russia and that honorary Englishmen—us!—aren’t safe here. So I’m going to look for the British colony. It may turn out that they won’t like us, either. But the British are strong on protocol; we’ll have a chance to speak our piece. They may hang us but they’ll give us a trial, with wigs and robes and rules of evidence and counsel who will fight for us.” I hesitated. “One hitch. Colonel Snotsky said there was no such country as the United States of America and I had the impression that he believed it.”

  Sharpie said, “He did believe it, Cap’n Zebbie. I caught some side chatter. I think we must assume that, in this universe, there was no American Revolution.”

  “So I concluded. Should we all be from the East Coast? I have a hunch that the West Coast may be part Russian, part Spanish—but not British. Where are we from? Baltimore, maybe? Philadelphia? Suggestions?”

  Sharpie said, “I have a suggestion, Cap’n Zebbie.”

  “Science Officer, I like your suggestions.”

  “You w
on’t like this one. When all else fails, tell the truth.”

  XXI

  —three seconds is a long time—

  Deety:

  Zebadiah is convinced that I can program anything. Usually I can, given a large and flexible computer—but my husband expects me to manage it with Gay Deceiver and Gay is not big. She started life as an autopilot and is one, mostly.

  But Gay is sweet-tempered and we both want to please him.

  While he and my father were looking over the area that we thought of as “Russian Valley” or “New Russia,” he asked me to work up a program to locate the British colony in minimum time, if it were in daylight. If not, then we would sleep near the sunrise line, and find it on the new daylight side.

  I thought of bouncing out about a thousand kilometers and searching for probable areas by color. Then I realized that I didn’t know that much about this planet. “Dead sea bottoms” from space looked like farm land.

  At last I recalled something Zebadiah had suggested yesterday—no, today! less than two hours ago. (So much had happened that my sense of time played tricks. It was still accurate—but I had to think instead of just knowing.)

  Random numbers—Gay had plenty of them. Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being.

  I defined a locus for Gay: nothing east of where we were, nothing in “Russian Valley,” nothing on the dark side, nothing north of 45°, nothing south of 45° south. Yesterday I could not have told her the latter; but Mars has a good spin, one a gyrocompass can read. While we slept, Gay had noted that her gyrocompass did not have its axis parallel to that of this strange planet and had precessed it until it did.

  Inside that locus I told Gay to take a Drunkard’s Walk, any jumps that suited her, a three-second pause at each vertex, and, if one of us yelled “Bingo!” display latitude, longitude, and Greenwich, and log all three, so we could find it again.

  Oh, yes—she was to pause that three seconds exactly one minimum H-above-G at each vertex.

  I told her to run the program for one hour…but that any of us could yell “Stop!” and then say “Continue” and that would be time-out, not part of the hour. But I warned my shipmates that yelling “Stop!” not only slowed things but also gave Russians (or British or anybody) a chance to shoot at us. I emphasized that three seconds is a long time (most people don’t know it).