The noise of the car grew louder, died down, and grew louder still. Brett knew, of course, the logical place for Cable to go. To the place where he had left his victims, because they had gathered riches for themselves. It would be literally the one place where he could add most of his loot with the least trouble. And of course, to a man with the maniacal vanity of Cable, there would be the added attraction of proving to them their own exceeding stupidity and his wisdom.
* * * *
Brett halted short of his destination, his jaws taut and the revolver from the tugboat out and ready in his hand. He waited grimly. The car stopped. He heard Cable get out, invisible in the mist. He heard the car-door slam. Habit is so strong that, although believing himself the only living person at large on an entire planet in the Eternal-now time, Cable had closed the car-door behind him. He marched into the building. Brett saw the dim, yellowish glow of his flashlight. Savagely Brett moved forward.
To cut off Cable’s escape, Brett went first to the car. He opened the door and fumbled for the ignition-key. It was gone. Habit had made Cable take it, before getting out of the car. Brett used his own flash to make sure. Yes, the key was gone. But the back was loaded with loot—and there was a nullifier on the front seat! Cable had been using it to gather his loot, but here and here alone he would not need it.
Brett took the nullifier away from the car. He knotted its field-cable over his shoulder. Then he heard a sound from inside the building. He could picture it in detail—Cable stunned, to see candlelight flooding the foyer once more when he had left his victims in the gray twilight alone, Cable creeping cautiously to see where his prisoners had been left to go mad in hopelessness, to find the ropes strewn on the floor and the men and women in unmistakable stasis, in iron-hard immobility, returned to normal time-rate, and then Cable frenziedly trying to work the nullifier he could see so plainly with its field-cable encircling the group. He could not stir it, of course. Brett heard him cry out in his rage. He almost bellowed. Brett heard him curse horribly.
Then, an instant later, he came running and raging out of the street door. It is most likely that he meant to get his own nullifier from the car, to fetch back his victims one by one and wreak upon them an insane vengeance for outwitting him. The point at which vanity merges into insanity is hard to find. The only offense anyone had committed against Cable was the discovery that he was a fool, but that offense had driven him to maniacal cruelty!
“Hold it!” snapped Brett coldly, from the mist. “Put up your hands!”
Cable gasped. Then he roared in crazy wrath. The gray mist was split by gun-flashes. An automatic pistol roared itself empty. Cable swerved in his running and rushed toward Brett’s voice. Brett fired. Cable stopped short. He had come to have an implicit belief that only he possessed weapons. Brett fired again, though not to wound.
“You’re going to drop that gun,” said Brett harshly, “and put up your hands!”
Cable screamed with impotent rage. It was unearthly to hear such a cry from human lips. It echoed and reechoed from all the tall towers hidden in the twilight. Then Cable turned and plunged for the car. Brett fired yet again. Glass tinkled from a car-window.
“I only need an excuse to kill you,” raged Brett. “Stop!”
The car-starter whirred. The motor caught. Cable must have moved like an uncannily precise automaton in the midst of all his passion, to have put in the key and turned it without fumbling. Gears clashed. The car roared into motion. Brett ran toward it. It rolled away.
He emptied his revolver after it, but it vanished in the mist. It turned a corner. He heard its brakes squeal, and then it roared on, and turned again. He heard its sound go away and away, headed north on one of the wide north-and-south avenues. Even a man in a passion of outraged vanity and terror could thread the motionless traffic. The car turned west. If It reached the Hudson Drive, it could go on for hundreds of miles, and pursuit would be useless and discovery impossible. And if Cable did not miss the nullifier from beside him—and with all the interior of the car a shadowless gray luminosity he was not likely to—he might go on and on until his gasoline went low and he needed more. Then he would seek out a tank-truck, or another car from which he could siphon fuel. In either case he would need, the mass-nullifier to make the gasoline a liquid. And then he would discover that he had no nullifier.
Brett felt sick. But then he heard Laura calling desperately in the gray silence. “Harry! Harry!”
He moved toward her.
“I’m all right,” he said unsteadily. “You heard the shots?”
“Did he shoot you?”
“No, but he’s dead,” Brett lied quickly. “Don’t come here.”
He went quickly toward the sound of her voice. She appeared in the mist. She clung to him.
“I was afraid you’d been killed,” she sobbed.
Brett kissed her and firmly led her away.
“We’re going to your uncle’s office,” he said evenly. “We’ll turn the switches of our two nullifiers there.”
Then he stopped suddenly. He slipped Cable’s nullifier from his shoulder and put it on the ground. He crushed it under his heel. He stamped it into uselessness, into a merely cryptic mass of battered metal. Then he fumbled at the next corner and dropped it into a street-drainage opening. It was in accelerated time, and if it should ever be found in normal time it would be after thousands of millions of years of its own time-rate’s rusting. It would be merely a lump of oxide, which no one would think of examining.
He led the way on again. He was haunted by the knowledge of what was bound to happen somewhere a hundred or two hundred miles away, in this time-rate. Cable would discover that his nullifier was gone. He would have a car, almost out of gasoline, and probably millions of dollars in money and gems. But he would have no food or water, and there would not be one drop of water or one morsel of food anywhere on earth that he could use.
He might find his way into towns, and into groceries and fruit-markets, and feel food and drink beneath his fingers. He might cast a light upon it and look at it. But he could not stir it. He might try hopelessly to walk back to New York, because there might be crumbs remaining where he had left his victims to die. But he would never make it. Somewhere, sometime, stumbling through a gray mist, he would fall from weakness and not be able to rise again… And—well—in normal time someone might notice a little heap of dust and a few fragments of rotted bone, but it would not be conspicuous. Nobody would notice a hopelessly oxidized watch or other trinket, so far gone in rust as not to be recognizable…
Brett hoped Laura hadn’t heard the car in flight. If she ever mentioned it, he would try to persuade her that she was mistaken. Because there was absolutely nothing that could be done now. Nothing whatever.
“I pick your uncle’s office to go back to normal time in, because we’ll make less fuss turning up there than anywhere else,” he said, in an attempt at a conversational tone. “When Cable’s friends turn up, in a state of nervous collapse, in somebody’s drawing-room, it is going to make talk. But what we want is to get quietly down to the City Hall and get married.”
She stopped, and he kissed her.
“And then, I’ve something to do. I’ve a new line to work out on those mass-nullifiers.”
“No!” she said fearfully. “Once we’re back in normal time, you mustn’t ever touch one again.”
“This will be different,” he told her. “While I was laid up on the tug, I figured out a way to regulate the amount of mass one would take out of a substance. I think I can put a thing in any time-rate I want. And radium or uranium would be deadly at a time-rate approaching infinity, like ours, but if we could choose a half-period of five hundred years, or one hundred, why, that would be power! Atomic power! There’d be no reason to worry about the exhaustion of coal and oil, then.”
She stopped again. Again he kissed her.
“And I’d like to make some money,” he told her humbly, “because I want to give you things. Also I
think I ought to pay for the damage Cable did with the nullifiers I invented. That will run into pretty big sums. And I’d like to put up a monument to him. Poor devil! He threw away his life trying to be a great man. But if he’s responsible for my solving the problem of atomic power, why not a monument to him?”
“You nice, foolish darling!” said Laura, tremulously.
They went on. They went into the office of Laura’s uncle, the office of Burroughs and Lawson in the Chanin Building. Laura laughed shakily.
“Let’s stand as we are,” she said with a little catch in her voice.
They stood as they had been. Days and weeks ago—or maybe it was the thousandth of the thousandth of a second—Laura’s uncle had said, “And Mr. Brett, this is my niece, Miss Hunt.” And they’d shaken hands, and as their hands were clasped, everything began.
* * * *
Now they clasped hands again, smiling at each other.
“Contact!” said Harry.
They threw over the switches of the two irreversible nullifiers at the same instant…
There was sunlight. There were colors. There were noises. There were smells in the air. The world was alive around them. They stood in a perfectly normal office, on a perfectly normal afternoon, in a perfectly normal world. A typist was at work in an adjoining office. An elevator-door clicked. There was a deep humming noise in the air, which was the city itself, vividly alive and in motion.
“—My niece, Miss Hunt,” said Laura’s uncle, comfortably. “I think she’ll be inter-”
He stopped and gasped. Because his niece—a very well-behaved young woman—walked straight into the arms of the young man to whom she had just been introduced—whom she had first laid eyes on not more than a minute before. She clung to him, and put up her face to be kissed, and caught her breath in something suspiciously like a sob of joy.
“Harry!”
Dr. Harry Brett kissed her hungrily and then spoke with an air of extreme earnestness and satisfaction.
“We’d better hurry,” he said. “Come on! The marriage license bureau closes at four o’clock. We don’t want to be late!”
*
THE ETHICAL EQUATIONS
(Originally Published in 1945)
It is very, very queer. The Ethical Equations, of course, link conduct with probability, and give mathematical proof that certain patterns of conduct increase the probability of certain kinds of coincidences. But nobody ever expected them to have any really practical effect. Elucidation of the laws of chance did not stop gambling, though it did make life insurance practical. The Ethical Equations weren’t expected to be even as useful as that. They were just theories, which seemed unlikely to affect anybody particularly. They were complicated, for one thing. They admitted that the ideal pattern of conduct for one man wasn’t the best for another. A politician, for example, has an entirely different code—and properly—from a Space Patrol man. But still, on at least one occasion—
* * * *
The thing from outer space was fifteen hundred feet long, and upward of a hundred and fifty feet through at its middle section, and well over two hundred in a curious bulge like a fish’s head at its bow. There were odd, gill-like flaps just back of that bulge, too, and the whole thing looked extraordinarily like a monster, eyeless fish, floating in empty space out beyond Jupiter. But it had drifted in from somewhere beyond the sun’s gravitational field—its speed was too great for it to have a closed orbit—and it swung with a slow, inane, purposeless motion about some axis it had established within itself.
The little spacecruiser edged closer and closer. Freddy Holmes had been a pariah on the Arnina all the way out from Mars, but he clenched his hands and forgot his misery and the ruin of his career in the excitement of looking at the thing.
“No response to signals on any frequency, sir,” said the communications officer, formally. “It is not radiating. It has a minute magnetic field. Its surface temperature is just about four degrees absolute.”
The commander of the Arnina said, “Hrrrmph!” Then he said, “We’ll lay alongside.” Then he looked at Freddy Holmes and stiffened. “No,” he said, “I believe you take over now, Mr. Holmes.”
Freddy started. He was in a very bad spot, but his excitement had made him oblivious of it for a moment. The undisguised hostility with which he was regarded by the skipper and the others on the bridge brought it back, however.
“You take over, Mr. Holmes,” repeated the skipper bitterly. “I have orders to that effect. You originally detected this object and your uncle asked Headquarters that you be given full authority to investigate it. You have that authority. Now, what are you going to do with it?”
There was fury in his voice surpassing even the rasping dislike of the voyage out. He was a lieutenant commander and he had been instructed to take orders from a junior officer. That was bad enough: But this was humanity’s first contact with an extrasolar civilization, and Freddy Holmes, lieutenant junior grade, had been given charge the matter by pure political pull.
Freddy swallowed.
“I…I—” He swallowed again and said miserably, “Sir, I’ve tried to explain that I dislike the present set-up as much as you possibly can. I…wish that you would let me put myself under your orders, sir, instead of—”
“No!” rasped the commander vengefully. “You are in command, Mr. Holmes. Your uncle put on political pressure to arrange it. My orders are to carry out your instructions, not to wet-nurse you if the job is too big for you to handle. This is in your lap! Will you issue orders?”
Freddy stiffened.
“Very well, sir. It’s plainly a ship and apparently a derelict. No crew would come in without using a drive or allow their ship to swing about aimlessly. You will maintain your present position with relation to it. I’ll take a spaceboat and a volunteer, if you will find me one, and look it over.”
He turned and left the bridge. Two minutes later he was struggling into a spacesuit when Lieutenant Bridges—also junior grade—came briskly into the spacesuit locker and observed:
“I’ve permission to go with you, Mr. Holmes.” He began to get into another spacesuit. As he pulled it up over his chest he added blithely: “I’d say this was worth the price of admission!”
Freddy did not answer. Three minutes later the little space-boat pulled out from the side of the cruiser. Designed for expeditionary work and tool-carrying rather than as an escape-craft, it was not inclosed. It would carry men in spacesuits, with their tools and weapons, and they could breathe from its tanks instead of from their suits, and use its power and so conserve their own. But it was a strange feeling to sit within its spidery outline and see the great blank sides of the strange object draw near. When the spaceboat actually touched the vast metal wall it seemed impossible, like the approach to some sorcerer’s castle across a monstrous moat of stars.
It was real enough, though. The felted rollers touched, and Bridges grunted in satisfaction.
“Magnetic. We can anchor to it. Now what?”
“We hunt for an entrance port,” said Freddy curtly. He added: “Those openings that look like gills are the drive tubes. Their drive’s in front instead of the rear. Apparently they don’t use gyros for steering.”
The tiny craft clung to the giant’s skin, like a fly on a stranded whale. It moved slowly to the top of the rounded body, and over it, and down on the other side. Presently the cruiser came in sight again as it came up the near side once more.
“Nary a port, sir,” said Bridges blithely. “Do we cut our way in?”
“Hm-m-m,” said Freddy slowly. “We have our drive in the rear, and our control room in front. So we take on supplies amidships, and that’s where we looked. But this ship is driven from the front. Its control room might be amidships. If so, it might load at the stern. Let’s see.”
The little craft crawled to the stern of the monster. “There!” said Freddy.
It was not like an entrance port on any vessel in the solar system. It slid aside, with
out hinges. There was an inner door, but it opened just as readily. There was no rush of air, and it was hard to tell if it was intended as an air lock or not.
“Air’s gone,” said Freddy. “It’s a derelict, all right. You might bring a blaster, but what we’ll mostly need is light, I think.”
The magnetic anchors took hold. The metal grip shoes of the spacesuits made loud noises inside the suits as the two of them pushed their way into the interior of the ship. The spacecruiser had been able to watch them, until now. Now they were gone.
The giant, enigmatic object which was so much like a blind fish in empty space floated on. It swung aimlessly about some inner axis. The thin sunlight, out here beyond Jupiter, smote upon it harshly. It seemed to hang motionless in mid-space against an all-surrounding background of distant and unwinking stars. The trim Space Patrol ship hung alertly a mile and a half away. Nothing seemed to happen at all.
* * * *
Freddy was rather pale when he went back to the bridge. The pressure mark on his forehead from the spacesuit helmet was still visible, and he rubbed at it abstractedly. The skipper regarded him with a sort of envious bitterness. After all, any human would envy any other who had set foot in an alien spaceship. Lieutenant Bridges followed him. For an instant there were no words. Then Bridges saluted briskly:
“Reporting back on board, sir, and returning to watch duty after permitted volunteer activity.”
The skipper touched his hat sourly. Bridges departed with crisp precision. The skipper regarded Freddy with the helpless fury of a senior officer who has been ordered to prove a junior officer a fool, and who has seen the assignment blow up in his face and that of the superior officers who ordered it. It was an enraging situation. Freddy Holmes, newly commissioned and assigned to the detector station on Luna which keeps track of asteroids and meteor streams, had discovered a small object coming in over Neptune. Its speed was too high for it to be a regular member of the solar system, so he’d reported it as a visitor and suggested immediate examination. But junior officers are not supposed to make discoveries. It violates tradition, which is a sort of Ethical Equation in the Space Patrol. So Freddy was slapped down for his presumption. And he slapped back, on account of the Ethical Equations’ bearing upon scientific discoveries. The first known object to come from beyond the stars ought to be examined. Definitely. So, most unprofessionally for a Space Patrol junior, Freddy raised a stink.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 27