by Anthology
“So?”
“So somebody’s got to take on the formidable task of systematically milking them of everything worth a hoot. That’s why we are where we are: the knowledge of creation is all around and we get it and apply it.”
“It’s been one time and again on other worlds,” agreed the objector. “But this is Eterna, a zombie-inhabited sphere where the clock ticks about once an hour. Any Earthman marooned in this place wouldn’t have enough time if he lived to be a hundred.”
“You’re right,” Leigh told him. “Therefore this ambassadorial post will be strictly an hereditary one. Whoever takes it will have to import a bride, marry, raise kids, hand the grief to them upon his deathbed. It may last through six generations or more. There is no other way.” He let them stew that a while before he asked, “Any takers?”
Silence.
“You’ll be lonely except for company provided by occasional ships but contact will be maintained and the power and strength of Terra will be behind you. Speak up!”
Nobody responded.
Leigh consulted his watch. “I’ll give you two hours to think it over. After that, we blow. Any candidate will find me in the cabin.”
At zero-hour the Thunderer flamed free, leaving no representative of the world. Some day there would be one, no doubt of that. Some day a willing hermit would take up residence for keeps. Among the men of Terra an oddity or a martyr could always be found.
But the time wasn’t yet. On Eterna the time never was quite yet.
The pale pink planet that held Sector Four H.Q. had grown to a large disc before Pascoe saw fit to remark on Leigh’s meditative attitude.
“Seven weeks along the return run and you’re still broody. Anyone would think you hated to leave that place. What’s the matter with you?”
“I told you before. They make me feel apprehensive.”
“That’s illogical,” Pascoe declared. “Admittedly we cannot handle the slowest crawlers in existence. But what of it? All we need do is drop them and forget them.”
“We can drop them, as you say. Forgetting them is something else. They have a special meaning that I don’t like.”
“Be more explicit,” Pascoe suggested.
“All right, I will. Earth has had dozens of major wars in the far past. Some were caused by greed, ambition, fear, envy, desire to save face or downright stupidity. But there were some caused by sheer altruism.”
“Huh?”
“Some,” Leigh went doggedly on, “were brought about by the unhappy fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Big, fast-moving nations tried to lug small, slower-moving ones up to their own superior pace. Sometimes the slow-movers couldn’t make it, resented being forced to try, started shooting to defend their right to mooch. See what I mean?”
“I see the lesson but not the point of it,” said Pascoe. “The Waitabits couldn’t kill a lame dog. Besides, nobody is chivvying them.”
“I’m not considering that aspect at all.”
“Which one then?”
“Earth had a problem never properly recognized. If it had been recognized, it wouldn’t have caused wars.”
“What problem?”
“That of pace-rate,” said Leigh. “Previously it has never loomed large enough for us to see it as it really is. The difference between fast and slow was always sufficiently small to escape us.” He pointed through the port at the reef of stars lying like sparkling dust against the dark. “And now we know that out there is the same thing enormously magnified. We know that included among the numberless and everlasting problems of the cosmos is that of pace-rate boosted to formidable proportions.”
Pascoe thought it over. “I’ll give you that. I couldn’t argue it because it has become self-evident. Sooner or later we’ll encounter it again and again. It’s bound to happen somewhere else eventually.”
“Hence my heebies,” said Leigh.
“You scare yourself to your heart’s content,” Pascoe advised. “I’m not worrying. It’s no hair off my chest. Why should I care if some loony scout discovers life forms even slower than the Waitabits? They mean nothing whatever in my young life.”
“Does he have to find them slower?” Leigh inquired.
Pascoe stared at him. “What are you getting at?”
“There’s a pace-rate problem, as you’ve agreed. Turn it upside-down and take another look at it. What’s going to happen if we come up against a life form twenty times faster than ourselves? A life form that views us much as we viewed the Waitabits?”
Giving it a couple of minutes, Pascoe wiped his forehead and said, unconvincingly, “Impossible!”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because we’d have met them long before now. They’d have got to us first.”
“What, if they’ve a hundred times farther to come? Or if they’re a young species one-tenth our age but already nearly level with us?”
“Look here,” said Pascoe, taking on the same expression as the other had worn for weeks, “there are troubles enough without you going out of your way to invent more.”
Nevertheless, when the ship landed he was still mulling every possible aspect of the matter and liking it less every minute.
A Sector Four official entered the cabin bearing a wad of documents.
“Lieutenant Vaughan, at your service, commodore,” he enthused. “I trust you have had a pleasant and profitable run.”
“It could have been worse,” Leigh responded.
Radiating good will, Vaughan went on, “We’ve had a signal from Markham at Assignment Office on Terra. He wants you to check equipment, refuel and go take a look at Binty.”
“What name?” interjected Pascoe.
“Binty.”
“Heaven preserve us! Binty!” He sat down hard, stared at the wall.
“Binty!” He played with his fingers, voiced it a third time. For some reason best known to himself he was hypnotized by Binty. Then in tones of deep suspicion he asked, “Who reported it?”
“Really, I don’t know. But it ought to say here.” Vaughan obligingly sought through his papers. “Yes, it does say. Fellow named Archibald Boydell.”
“I knew it,” yelped Pascoe. “I resign. I resign forthwith.”
“You’ve resigned forthwith at least twenty times in the last eight years,” Leigh reminded.
“I mean it this time.”
“You’ve said that, too.” Leigh sighed.
Pascoe waved his hands around. “Now try to calm yourself and look at this sensibly. What space-outfit which is sane and wearing brown boots would take off for a dump with a name like Binty?”
“We would,” said Leigh. He waited for blood pressure to lower, then finished, “Wouldn’t we?”
Slumping into his seat Pascoe glowered at him for five minutes before he said, “I suppose so. God help me, I must be weak.” A little glassy-eyed, he shifted attention to Vaughan. “Name it again in case I didn’t hear right.”
“Binty,” said Vaughan, unctuously apologetic. “He has coded it 0/0.9/E5 which indicates the presence of an intelligent but backward life form.”
“Does he make any remark about the place?”
“One word,” informed Vaughan, consulting the papers again. “Ugh!”
Pascoe shuddered.
THE WAVE-FUNCTION COLLAPSE
Steven Utley
All he can do at first is stare dully through the window at the barren Paleozoic landscape. Then focus sharpens, his mind begins to work again, disbelief increases in inverse proportion to subsiding shock, and soon his thoughts seem to outrace the helicopter’s shadow below. He constructs his first hypothesis: Somebody’s made a terrible mistake. By the time the machine swoops in low over the bay and circles to land on the ship’s flight deck, the hypothesis has mutated into a suspicion: Somebody’s playing a terrible practical joke. As he steps down from the cabin, he is almost angry enough to punch somebody, anybody—even the civilian liaison, who emerges from a group of Navy men, but whose
solemn expression disarms him.
The liaison shakes his hand and guides him down into the ship, talking all the while. “We’ll expedite your return, of course, you’ll be home before noon, someone is going to be there to pick you up and, ah, take you wherever you need to go, damn, I’m so sorry.”
Expedite, he thinks. Return. Home.
He gropes for the meanings of the words, cannot quite get hold of them, gives up the effort, consoles himself with the savage thought, Yeah, well, if this is a monstrous prank, somebody’s sure as hell gonna catch seven kinds of hell for it. One doesn’t with impunity throw the jump station off its holy schedule for the sake of a laugh. One doesn’t get away with saying something about a man’s wife that’s neither true nor funny. He is amused by the latter qualification. A laugh or a sob escapes. Especially if it’s not funny.
Despite the general sense of urgency, he does not go immediately to the head of the line at the jump station and, so, through and straight home to the twenty-first century of the Common Era. He does not even go to the jump station to wait, but to sick bay. It takes time to make the station’s tight schedule flex enough to accommodate him, and he has certain preparations to make in the meantime. One does not simply fling oneself through a hole in spacetime or whatever it is. He really wants, would give anything (he tells himself), for a good stiff drink or even a bad limp one, but what he gets instead is a quick physical examination and an emetic. “It’s never a good idea to make the jump on a full stomach,” the Navy doctor reminds him. “Dramamine is ineffective in the prevention or treatment of time-travel sickness.”
While the liaison and the Navy doctor confer in a corner, he cools his heels and the minutes drag on and doubt eats away at his disbelief and the likelihood that this is a joke recedes. A lump of sorrow is forming in the center of his chest. It cannot be, he thinks, no it cannot be cannot cannot.
From a pocket of his patched work shirt (still permeated with the grime of inland proto-North America) he removes an old-fashioned paper envelope on which his name has been inscribed with a calligraphy pen, and from the envelope he takes several folded sheets of old-fashioned stationery, smoothes them across his thigh, and reads, “There’s something very nineteenth-century—at least, something very romantic-novel-heroine-ish (whether fainting from the vapors category or ripped bodice/heaving bosom kind)—about writing letters and sending them floating off into the unknown after you. I suspect I’m going to spend a fortune on postage while you’re gone. I’ve already sent one letter your way this week, but I won’t say I hope it’s caught up with you ‘by now.’ Even traveling by slow boat to wherever you ‘are,’ it must have reached you before the end of the Paleozoic age. Now I’ve made my head hurt. Einstein notwithstanding, these revved-up ape brains of ours cling tenaciously to Newtonian notions of absolute time. We live in the now, trailing, to be sure, a few seconds of the past as we press ahead into the future, but it’s always now wherever (whenever) we go. What’s happening in the Andromeda galaxy this instant? Yes, of course, we can know only what happened there a million years ago, yet I exist in this instant, and the universe, too, and that includes Andromeda. And existence requires that something be happening. (I detest metaphysics. The universe exists even when we aren’t looking at it or thinking about it.) And what about four hundred million years? You are supposed to have a synchronous anchor embedded in your proper matrix, which is here (with moi) (sigh)—so say the physicists, anyhow. But doesn’t that fly in the face of relativity? Isn’t it too too Newtonian? Too too tootsie. Old song, I think. I’ve been too long without sleep. And, already, too long without you.”
He holds the pages close to his face and inhales a subtle scent of her, and this helps him to decide on a course of action.
At length he is transferred to a little room adjoining the jump station. When the senior jump-station technician pops in to say that there will be an open slot in the schedule in about forty-five minutes, he clutches at her sleeve and demands that she refresh his memory on a couple of points.
“Explain,” he says, “this business about the synchronous link.”
He tightens his grip as she tries to pull away. She shoots a look at the doctor, who shoots one back. Its meaning is clear: Please just humor him, he’s suffered a terrible blow.
“The link,” she says, “it’s sort of like a brake or an anchor.”
“Brake, anchor, what does it do?”
“It’s, well, unless you can follow the math—”
“The hell with the math, tell me what it does.”
She jerks her sleeve free and glares first at him, then at the doctor, then back at him. Somehow jump-station techs have got the strange notion into their heads that they are an elite and therefore not quite answerable to just anyone. She would be perfectly within what she regards as her rights were she to tell him to take a flying leap at the moon. Nevertheless, possibly because the Navy doctor is present and Navy officers count for more than, say, someone who has obviously been off in the primeval hinterlands studying weird bugs and pond scum, she says, snappishly, “The link does what a link does. It connects. It synchronizes this spacetime matrix with the one on the, uh, other side.”
“So an hour passes here as it passes there.”
“Right.”
“An hour or a day or a year.”
“Right” (testily).
“So if you leave there on a Friday night and spend a weekend here and then go back, it’s Monday when you get there.”
“Basically that’s it, yes.”
“You can’t twiddle with some knobs, shave off a day or two? So I’d leave here on Monday but get there on Saturday afternoon, say?”
Incredulity and contempt commingle in her expression. “This isn’t some damn sci-fi show.”
“But—”
“Nobody is messing with the link, period.”
Damn, he thinks, scratch one plan of attack. “Then what about the many-worlds thing? Tell me about that.”
The senior jump-station tech grimaces, looks imploringly at the doctor. “I got a schedule to keep, y’know.”
“Please,” says the doctor. “It won’t take but a moment.”
“The idea is,” says the tech, grinding the words between her back teeth, “every possible universe is created at the instant it becomes possible. Like if it’s possible for you to jump to either side, to the left or the right, you jump to the left in one universe and to the right in another. And you don’t jump at all in still another universe.”
“How do you know which universe you’re in?”
“You split and get duplicated along with everything else when the universe splits and duplicates itself. You’re always in the universe you’re supposed to be in.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not. Not yet. Listen. I have a plan.”
The tech glances anxiously at her watch. “And I have a schedule, and I’m off it. Sorry.”
She withdraws toward her ozone-reeking sanctum and has just got through the door when he moves to follow. Just before the door swings shut behind her, he sees her see him coming and hears her yelp for help and feels her not inconsiderable weight thrown against the door. The doctor tries to pull him away, but he is a big man hardened by field work and efficiently stiff-arms the man while pushing the woman on the opposite side of the door steadily backward. Suddenly, she stops resisting. He tumbles through the door, and a couple of junior techs grab him.
They do not grip him quite firmly enough. He sends one of them spinning against their boss and as those two go down together in a noisy heap he simply brushes away the other, who lacks not only the grip but the reach as well. Reinforcements are on the way, however. He bolts. He disappears further into the depths of the ship. By the time the public-address system barks out a “Now hear this!” he has found himself a cubby-hole and a heavy wrench with which to discourage anything as unsubtle as a frontal assault. Thus entrenched, he ponders the puzzle he knows he must solve if he is to save his wife’s life
.
The Navy officers and enlisted personnel are not fools, they know their ship, and in short order they have located the man. Getting him out of his hiding place without hurting him or being hurt by him is another matter. Duly summoned, the liaison arrives with the doctor in tow and without preamble says, “We know you’re upset, you have our deepest sympathy, but we’re here to help you, so just come out of there right now, okay?”
Dangling his wrench negligently, the man answers, “First tell me about the cat in the box.”
Nonplussed, the liaison looks at the doctor and the Navy officer and is met with blank stares.
“I know you’re distraught,” says the liaison, “but,” and is cut short with, “What I am is desperate. I’ve been thinking in here, and I believe I may have the solution to my problem. But I’ve got to be sure I’m remembering stuff correctly. I need to know about the cat in the box.”
Nearby, though out of the man’s line of sight, the doctor abruptly turns and vanishes down a corridor.
“I don’t think I understand,” says the liaison. “What cat in what box? Look, can’t we discuss this back at the jump station? That slot in the schedule won’t be there much longer, you know. The chief tech says she can’t promise there’ll be another one before next shift.”
“The slot can wait until I’m sure of my plan.”
“What plan? Look, why don’t you just come out of there? We’re here for you.”
“I appreciate that. I appreciate everybody’s concern. Thank you, everybody, for your sympathy and condolences. But I’m hoping to obviate the need for sympathy and condolences, and what I really need is your understanding and your cooperation.”