Hidden Variables

by Charles Sheffield

  If you've ever been involved in a quiet stock purchase, you know there are two main factors: A low profile, and fast action. If people think there is a take-over in the wind, they get greedy and hold on to what they have. The last percent always costs the most. And if you don't do it fast enough, the professional market analysts will move when they see a lot of quick transactions in a quiet stock, and start buying against you on a speculative basis.

  After eight days, I had things moving along nicely. Six percent of the stock I needed was committed to a forward buy, held for three days, and I was expecting a call or a visit on the remaining two percent. I sat in my Tycho City apartment, one ear tuned to the phone and the other to the door chime. Visions of sugarplums danced in my head, and when the door rang, I leaped to answer it.

  I've become used to some unusual intermediaries in financial deals, but the man who ducked his head in through the doorway was the strangest yet. Huge, straw-haired, jutting-jawed, steely eyed—you can supply the other adjectives yourself. It added up to the cliche hero of a space opera. He came in, looked at me, past me, and around the apartment. Finally he shrugged slightly and looked at me again.

  "Henry Carver?" There was surprise in his voice.

  "Yes. You're from Securities Investment?"

  He made himself at home on my couch. "Never heard of them. Look, let me make sure there's no mistake. Are you Henry Carver, the man who worked with Gerald Mattin on the development of the Mattin Link?"

  Hospitality and politeness have their limits. Anyway, that episode with the Mattin Link is not one of my favorite memories. "I don't know who you are, or what you're doing here. But I have an important business visit due any minute now. If you are not from Securities Investment, I'm afraid I must ask you to leave at once."

  "Sorry, Mr. Carver. I can't do that." He fished in his coverall pocket and pulled out a mag strip I.D. "Check that out, then let's talk."

  He was depressingly sure of himself. I fed the strip through the phone connection and watched the I.D. appear on the screen: Imre Munsen, Special Investigator, United Space Federation; authorized to commandeer the use of equipment, services and personnel for Level Four System Emergencies; classification of current assignment (you've guessed it): Level Four.

  "Now you know who I am, Mr. Carver. Before we go on, I have to be sure that I know who you are. Are you in fact the man who worked on the original Mattin Link—the man who survived those first experiments?"

  "I am, but that was a long time ago. I don't know anything about the Links they have nowadays."

  "That's all right. We need help from someone with a fresh mind, not tied to current theory. First, I must swear you to strictest secrecy. A situation of unprecedented danger to the human race has arisen. If you reveal what I tell you to a third party, you will be guilty of endangering the public welfare and will be charged accordingly. You know the penalties."

  I did indeed. Anything the court chose to inflict. It was rather like the old military court-martial. No appeals, and the prosecutors, jury and judge were all the same people. My stomach began a rumble of anticipatory fear.

  "Mr. Carver," Munsen went on, "it will be simplest if you listen to me first without asking questions. I have studied your file, so I know your capability and pattern of rapid response. But hear me out, please, before you begin."

  What was the man talking about? I wondered what was in the file. And what about my business appointment? Munsen had better get on with it and go away quickly. There were a million credits waiting for me—if I could conclude my mushroom stock purchases in time. I decided to let him have his say, then tell him at once that I couldn't help.

  It's best if I summarize what he said to me. Munsen was just the sort of starry-eyed, deep-chested idiot he looked. Patriotic, fearless, decisive, clean-living—we seemed to have absolutely nothing in common, the two of us. His explanation was full of irrelevant stirring speeches about our future, and the need for all of us to give our utmost to human advancement. It was enough to make a rational man sick.

  Six weeks earlier, as Munsen told it, a party of six had chartered a space yacht for a scenic tour of the inner Solar System. Milton Kaneely, the holovision star, had made the rental. Three men and three women were on board—and with Milton Kaneely, for 'scenic tour' you could safely read 'drunken orgy.' They had careered randomly around the Moon and off past Mars into the asteroid belt. Blundering along there, they had landed on a rock fragment less than a kilometer long—and stumbled across the first evidence of an alien race. On the asteroid, in a big rock chamber, sat the space warp. Kaneely and friends didn't know it was a space warp—or even that they had found evidence of aliens. They thought they'd found an unmanned USF Navy station. They sent a joking message back to Tycho City, complaining about the lack of a station emergency grog supply, and rocketed off for Chryse City.

  The USF Communications Group would have written the call off as a joke, except that on the way to Chryse City the Kaneely party had encountered another asteroid—this time at a relative velocity of five kilometers a second. The accident, so far as anyone could tell, had nothing to do with their earlier landing, but the investigation group had taken a look at that asteroid too, to make their report complete. They found the space warp. Not knowing quite what it was, they were still smart enough to recognize it as an alien artifact. That was when Imre Munsen had been called in.

  "The most irritating thing," he said to me, "is the complete randomness of it. The Kaneelians didn't try to hide the space warp from us, but they didn't give it any kind of beacon, either. For all the help we had from them, it could have been another thousand years before we stumbled across it. We still have no idea how long they were on that asteroid, what they were doing in the Solar System, or when they left. They might come back any time."

  He looked gloomy and irritated. I stole a glance at my watch. It was getting late, my tooth was aching again, and there was still no sign of my mushroom man.

  "This whole matter is really interesting, Mr. Munsen," I said to him, polite and insincere. "But I'm a lawyer, you know, not a scientist. I can't think why you want me involved in all this—unless you are planning to sue the aliens for negligence."

  He cheered up a little and smiled at me. "You underrate yourself, Mr. Carver. I like to see that in a man. Our computer selected your file from millions, as the best person we could get for this job. I read your background myself before I came here, and I won't be fooled by a modest appearance. The first man to transfer through the Mattin Link—and the only survivor of those early experiments. The man to whom Peter Pinton entrusted the secret of Pintonite, and one of two men to come out of that alive when Pinton was killed. The only man to survive the Deimos Plague."

  Munsen shook his head admiringly. "It's not just a question of hard work and intelligence, Mr. Carver. Lots of people have those. You also have good luck—and you've got guts."

  Not only that, I fully intended to keep them. I had no idea where Munsen had got all that information—accurate, as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. I felt like saying, "No, no, you've got it all wrong. I'm not brave at all. I'm a certified coward." But I didn't think it would make any difference. Munsen looked like a very determined man. Instead, I said, "I only wish I could help you, Mr. Munsen. But really I have no idea what I could do for you. I have pressing business obligations, and I know nothing about the aliens."

  "You know as much as we do, Mr. Carver. I want you to take a look at that space warp and use your intuition and experience. "

  My intuition and experience told me to stay as far away from it as I could.

  "It has our group baffled," Munsen went on. "It provides instantaneous transfer, the same as the Mattin Link, but it's a lot more flexible. For one thing, it seems as though the exit points can be anywhere. For another, you don't need Link equipment at the exit. We've been able to send signalling devices—not people—through it, and they come out some place in the Solar System. Some random place. Two disappeare
d, and we think they must have gone into the Sun."

  Worse and worse. So far, it sounded riskier than the Mattin Link, and I'd had my fill of that long ago. "You tried to send people?" I asked.

  He nodded. "Volunteers. But there's some kind of a sensing device on the side of the warp chamber. It won't send living multi-celled organisms. Just sits there humming when we try it. It's very disappointing. The Kaneelians built in some kind of control on it and we have no idea how to change the settings."

  "Why not take it apart?"

  "We'd love to. As soon as we know how it works, we will. At the moment we're afraid we may ruin it completely if we tamper with it. We'd like to study the separate pieces. For one thing, it seems as though there are all-temperature superconductors in the control box."

  What was an all-temperature superconductor? I shook my head firmly. "There's not a thing I could do for you, Mr. Munsen. It's outside my field."

  Munsen turned three moods meaner. "Mr. Carver, I don't think you understand the situation. I am requesting your cooperation. But I am not really offering you a choice. We need you. If you persist in your attitude, I will be forced to send you for a hearing—on Earth." He smiled a horrid smile. "Your record suggests that you prefer not to visit Earth. In any case, I expected you would welcome a chance to serve humanity."

  A hearing on Earth. I shuddered at the thought. There were people there who'd love to get their hands on me. Whatever Munsen's project, I couldn't imagine it would be worse than that. Even so, I wasn't prepared to give up my million credits without a struggle.

  "Don't get me wrong, Mr. Munsen. I'd be only too happy to go with you and take a look at the alien machines. But I have big responsibilities here. I can't spare the time, particularly just now."

  His manner warmed a little. "Of course, I know you're a busy man. What I have in mind wouldn't take long. I want you to take a quick look at the alien equipment, then you can come back here to the Moon and think it over, see what ideas it suggests to you. If necessary, we'll arrange a second trip later—but that might not be needed, if we can use your ideas without your presence."

  "But can't that first trip wait a week?"

  He shook his head. "I'm afraid not. Time is important. Every day wasted could mean danger to us all. Until we understand the space warp, we won't feel safe—the Kaneelians could come back any day, and we'd be helpless. I will guarantee you that if we leave tonight, I'll have you back from this trip in forty-eight hours. That's the best I can offer, and I tell you that I'm stretching the rules to promise that."

  Two days away would leave only two more days to finish the stock deal. I didn't like it at all, but I sensed that it was the best offer I'd get. For a Level Four emergency like this one, Munsen could have me shot, and no one would ask him for the reason until it was too late.

  "Give me the time to make one videophone call," I said. "Then I'll be ready to go. What do I need to bring with me?"

  "Not a thing—we'll fit you out at Headquarters." He looked pleased with himself, and what he probably thought of as his subtle powers of persuasion. "I must say, Carver, I'm feeling relieved to know you'll be working on this job."

  I postponed my mushroom meeting for two days—much to my contact's surprise, who knew something tricky was going on financially. Timing on these deals is everything. Then I swallowed a pill for my aching tooth, and off we went. It made me very pessimistic for the future of humanity, to think that they had to rely on people like me to handle their emergencies.

  Two hours later we lifted away from Tycho Base on a high-speed USF Navy cutter. Free fall never did agree with me, and never will. I was all right during the eight-hour trip to Kaneely's asteroid, a forlorn chip of rock in the middle of nowhere, because the ship was under acceleration all the way. But the temporary station that the Navy had set up on the rock itself had no gravity to speak of.

  We didn't bother to dock in the usual way—there was only a big pressure dome, on the surface of the asteroid. We hovered close to that, and went across to it in our suits. Inside the bubble about forty men and women had assembled. Munsen, like the ham he was, made a fool of both of us.

  He made a stand-up speech. "Men," he said—ignoring the women completely. "We've had a hard time of it, this last month. Now there's a ray of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. Here is the man we've all waited to see, Henry Carver. Henry Carver, the only man—." And away he went.

  I endured it, averting my eyes from the audience, which seemed to be lapping it up. After Munsen dried up, they went into a very long and—to me, at any rate—completely meaningless briefing on the work that had been done so far to explore the Kaneelian chamber in the rock. I nodded occasionally, but the technical discussion was beyond me.

  Boiling off the jargon and gibberish, what was left seemed to be simple enough. The asteroid chamber was completely empty except for the space warp, and nobody had any idea at all how that worked.

  You put a signalling beacon, or some other object, inside it and then pressed a bar on the outside. Instantly, the beacon or whatever appeared somewhere else, anywhere from ten thousand to five hundred million miles away. The beacons that had been recovered—they had lost another since Munsen briefed me—were all intact and apparently unscathed by the jump. But their positions when they appeared were completely random. Put a man or an animal inside the warp cylinder, and press the bar again. Nothing at all happened, except a slight hum from the machine.

  They had tried men in twos and men in threes; men in lead suits to screen testing radiation; men in suspended animation; men who had been knocked unconscious; and—Munsen would try anything—dead men. Of these, only the last were accepted for transfer and as usual they told no tales.

  The Navy still had plenty of volunteers, going dutifully into the space-warp enclosure and then, hours later, floating back out again when it was clear that nothing was going to happen. There was no doubt that they were all getting discouraged.

  I wasn't keen to go near the Kaneelian machine—you never knew when it might suddenly decide to work, explode or otherwise do something drastic. On the other hand, I very much wanted to get the thing over with and go back to Tycho City for my unfinished business. When the briefing ended, Munsen and I floated together down into the big chamber under the surface of the asteroid.

  It was actually three big spaces, inter-connected through tall archways. Two were completely empty and in a corner of the third sat a solitary, dull-grey metal cylinder, about two meters wide and three meters high. The space warp. You climbed in through the open top, and on the outside there was a gray bar that activated the system—or failed to if there was a man inside.

  "Why are the arches so big?" I asked Imre Munsen over my suit radio. "Were the Kaneelians all ten meters tall?"

  "We don't know. They might have been. On the other hand, they should have been our size, or near to it, to fit into the warp. For all we know now, they may come in a variety of sizes. Why do you ask?"

  A good question. I was just making conversation to put off the next step. Then I had an idea. "You say it will send single-celled animals through. Is it possible that the Kaneelians were single-celled? Could a single cell grow to the size of a man?"

  "I don't see why not. It wouldn't solve our problem. It would explain why a single-celled animal can get through—but not why multi-celled animals can't. Why would they want to stop a transfer?"

  I shrugged. Since I don't understand human behavior at all, it seemed presumptuous to guess at the motives of the aliens. Munsen gestured at the top of the warp cylinder.

  "I'm going to take a look at the inside, Henry. Coming?"

  "Best if I stay outside, I think," I said casually. "The control unit's out here. I want to watch what happens to it when you go inside."

  Munsen had made it quite clear that at some point he expected me to take a look inside that ghastly cylinder, but I saw no reason to rush in. He nodded at me. "Makes sense. Once I'm inside, press the bar. You never know, I might g
et lucky."

  He floated up, then down into the open top of the cylinder. After a couple of seconds, his voice came over the suit radio. I worked the bar, and hoped. There was a low, steady humming from one of two square boxes on the side of the warp. It went on for about five seconds, then stopped. I waited.

  After twenty seconds I heard Munsen's disappointed voice. "No good. I might as well come out again. There's a sort of metal piece inside here that moved backwards and forwards when I was waiting for the warp. I think it's the scanner. Let's change places and you can take a look."

  It was the moment of truth. If one of the boxes contained the scanner control, then the other box was presumably the warp mechanism itself. While Munsen was getting out of the cylinder, I took a multi-purpose belt attachment from the waist of my suit and opened up a long dur-steel spike. Its use had always mystified me—it looked like an ice pick, but presumably wasn't. I drove it as hard as I could into the soft-plastic middle of the box that I thought contained the warp mechanism. Then—a bad mistake, as I later realized—to be on the safe side, I drove it just as hard into the other box.

  There was a satisfying sizzling noise, like a damp onion ring dropped into very hot fat. Feeling much reassured, I put the spike away and waited for Munsen to join me.

  "Let me stand here and watch what happens," he said. "Did you see anything at this end when I was inside?"

  I shrugged, then realized he couldn't see that well inside my suit. "Just the hum you told me about—from that box."

  I hoped my efforts to gain a little insurance would not be visible to Munsen. With the old butterflies in my stomach, I pushed gently off from the floor, floated up and then, with a slight down-boost from the jets, dropped slowly into the warp cylinder.