Party Line

by Clifford D. Simak

  'And?'

  'You know, Paul, I may finally have a handle on this FTL business. Not for certain, but maybe. A new way to go. For the last several weeks, I've been telling myself time could be the key factor and that I should be paying more attention to it. Has this project ever held any talk with some of our aliens about time?'

  'I think so. Ten or fifteen years ago. We still have the record. It was fairly inconclusive, but we have stacks of data.'

  'Except in a superficial way,' said Martin, 'time can't play too much of a part in any equation, although in many problems it can be a fairly critical factor. If we knew more about time. I told myself, not as a physical, but as a mental factor in FTL, we might turn the trick. Tying a mental concept of time into the equation…'

  'You think it might work?'

  'Not now. Not any more. I have a hunch that time may be a variable, that it runs differently in different sectors of the universe, or differently in the minds of different intelligences. But there is something that would be a constant. Eternity would be a constant factor. It wouldn't vary; it would be the same everywhere.'

  'My God, Jay, you aren't talking about…'

  'Not about arriving at an understanding of it, but I think we might work out a way it could be used as a constant. I'm going to take a shot at it. With it in mind, some of the other factors may come clear.'

  'But eternity, Jay. This business about the universe coming to an end.'

  'Mary Kay told me something else last night. Her hunch of what might be left when the universe is gone.'

  'I know. She was in just a while ago. She spilled it all on me.'

  'And what did you say?'

  'Christ, Jay, what could I say? I patted her on the shoulder and told her to stay in there pitching.'

  'But if she's right, there'd be something beyond the end of the universe. There'd still be eternity. Maybe still infinity. Two constants. And room for something else to happen.'

  'You're getting me in beyond my depth, Jay.'

  'Maybe I'm beyond my depth, too. But it's a new approach.

  Maybe it can be handled. Tell Russell and Brown, when they start hassling you again, that we're going at it from a fresh angle.'

  Thomas sat a long time at the desk after Martin had left.

  Last night, he thought, Allen had been no help when he'd talked with him. All the same old platitudes: don't worry, sit on it, hang in there tight, make a decision only when you have to. And this afternoon he, himself, had been no help when Jay and Mary Kay had sat across the desk from him. Stay in there pitching, he'd told Mary Kay.

  These are special people, he had told Allen. He had been right, of course. They were special, but how special? How far beyond the ordinary run of mankind? Dime store clerks and car hops and raw farm boys. But what happened to them when they ventured out among the stars and made contacts with the intelligences who dwelt on planets orbiting distant suns? Allen had said, or had it been he? that all that came through from the star-flung party line was not recorded in the memory banks — the pain, the sorrow, the doubt, the hope, the fear, the prejudices, the biases, and what else? Something beyond all human experience? Something that was soaked up, that was absorbed into the fiber and the fabric of the human telepaths who listened, who chatted and gossiped with their neighbors strung across the galaxies. A factor, or factors, that made them slightly more than human or, perhaps, a great deal more than human.

  Mary Kay, with her talk of a place that would still persist after the universe was gone, quite naturally was crazy. Jay, with his talk of using eternity as a constant factor, was insane as well. But crazy and insane, of course, only by human standards. And these people, these telepaths of his (perhaps, almost certainly, undeniably) had gone far beyond humanity.

  A special people, a new breed, their humanity cross pollinated by the subtle intricacies of alien contact, the hope of humankind? Ambassadors to the universe? Industrial spies? Snoopers into places where man had little right to go? Explorers of the infinite?

  Dammit, he thought, it made a man proud to be a member of the human race. Even if this special breed should finally become a race apart, they still stemmed from the same origins as all the other humans.

  Might it be, he wondered, that in time some of the specialness would rub off on others such as he?

  And, suddenly, without any thinking on it, without due consideration, without mulling it over, without using the slow, intricate, involved process of human thought, he arrived at faith. And was convinced, as well, that his faith was justified.

  Time to go for broke, he told himself.

  He reached over and punched the button for Evelyn.

  'Get me Senator Brown,' he told her. 'No, I don't know where he is. Track him down, wherever he may be. I want to tell the old bastard that we're finally on the track for FTL.'

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