"Donderevo knows Planner—Creery," Horrocks finished faintly. "Thinks we can trust—trust him to understand—that man is more—important than the Plan. If we can show him a working drive. But he says—he says trust—nobody—nobody else."
Even after his message was delivered, Horrocks didn't want a doctor. He let Ryeland give him a eubiotic emergency shot from the survival kit that he had stolen from the Cristobal Colon, and hid in the rest room across the corridor before Angela Zwick came back with the sandwiches and coffee. By the time Ryeland had got rid of her, Horrocks was gone.
The message was Unbelievable—but Horrocks had left the red-spattered space bag. Ryeland dumped it on his desk, and shivered with wonder. There was a great, glowing octahedral crystal of carbon coral. There were dazzling stereos of reefs and pyropods and spacelings. There was a notebook of Ron Donderevo's observations, proving that the spacelings really flew without reaction.
Forced to believe, Ryeland's mind reacted. As Donderevo had told Horrocks to tell him, all he needed to know was the fact that the spacelings flew. With that simple datum actually accepted, the rest was obvious.
As a mathematician, he knew that equations had to balance. As a physicist, however, he had learned that the balancing quantity might be physically elusive. The neutrino, required to balance the equations of a nuclear reaction, was one such example. In his own equations of mass-creation and space-expansion, which described the Hoyle effect, the new mass equalled x — an unknown quantity, more elusive than even the neutrino, which he had failed to identify in nature.
But now he saw it. Printed in the simple fact of the spaceling's flight, it was plain as the fact that two plus two is four. The unknown quantity which equalled the new mass in his equations was at last identified.
It was momentum! The momentum of the expanding universe, which ultimately pushed the receding galaxies beyond the velocity of light!
With a professional satisfaction, he noted that the Third Law of Motion had not been violated. It had simply been transformed. The kinetic energy of the flying spaceling was balanced by a precisely equivalent energy of new mass. The reaction was governed by the classical equation of energy and mass, E=mc2. The enormous last factor, the squared velocity of light, meant that a tiny mass was the equivalent of enormous kinetic energy. That was what had made his x so hard to identify. On its longest jetless flight, a spaceling would add only an imperceptible breath of new hydrogen to the cloud of atoms that its own motion had created.
Locked alone in his office, Ryeland went to work. A surging elation had swept away all his fatigue, and even the fear that Horrocks had brought. That single substitution of momentum for the unknown quantity in his own cosmological equations had given him the theory. A simple transformation described the field conditions required for the creation of new mass and the equivalent momentum. The problems of material and design were more troublesome, but by Sunday noon he had set up the complete specifications for a reactionless propulsion system with an effective thrust of half a million tons.
Suddenly hungry and groggy, he stumbled across the hushed dimness of the tunnel to wash his face in the laboratory that had not been scrubbed since Horrocks had sprayed the basin with blood. He ate the last dry beef algae sandwich, and the last bitter drops of cold yeast coffee and went to sleep in his chair, wondering dully how to go about reaching Planner Creery without trusting anybody else.
He woke early Monday morning with a stiff neck and the fading recollection of a nightmare in which he had been running with Horrocks from the Plan Police. He hid the space bag behind a filing cabinet, stuffed the blood-sprayed teletapes into the incinerator, and packed his specifications and the stereos in his briefcase.
Two hours before the time for Angela and Oporto to come, he hurried away, into the maze of gray-walled tunnels that housed all the linked computers of the Planning Machine and the working quarters of the Planner's staff.
Trust nobody ...
The tunnels were dim and empty. Cool air roared here and there from the ducts. The Monday morning white-collar rush hadn't begun, but now and then he met a maintenance man in gray overalls. It was strange to think of the solid miles of Earth above, when he had the key to the stars in his hands.
Through he had never been to the Planner's office, he knew the way. Outside the automatic elevator, a guard looked at him sharply and waved him on past the warning sign: RESTRICTED! RISKS REQUIRE ESCORT BEYOND THIS POINT.
He was not a Risk. He wore no security collar.
Outside the Planner's suite, another guard studied his badge and tapped the number into a teletype. Waiting for the Machine to answer, Ryeland held his breath. But the guard looked up from the clattering machine, with a reluctant respect easing his official frown.
"Go in, sir."
A teletype girl in the waiting room wanted to know his business. He informed her that he had a confidential report for Planner Creery. She wanted to know the nature of it. When he insisted that it was too confidential for any ears except the Planner's, she made an appointment for him to see an executive associate.
The executive associate was a huge, blue-faced frog of a man. A polished wood slab on his desk was impressively lettered: General Rudolph Fleemer. His bulging eyes were sharp, with a quick curiosity about Ryeland's confidential report.
Unfortunately, Planner Creery had not returned from a weekend cruise with his .family. He would doubtless be in his office later in the week, but even then pressure of accumulated work would be extreme. Although Planner Creery was well aware that Ryeland's distinguished achievements in helical field engineering had been useful to the Plan, the extent of his duties forced him to delegate most responsibilities to subordinates. General Fleemer implied that people who refused to trust the Planner's associates were seldom able to see the Planner himself.
Reluctantly, when he saw that he could do no better, Ryeland left a message stating that his business involved Ron Donderevo and a new space propulsion system. General Fleemer promised sullenly to signal him later in the week, if Planner Creery chose to see him.
Noon had passed before Ryeland got back to his office. If Oporto and the teletype girl had come to work, he saw no sign of them. The blood-spattered space bag was still in place behind the filing cabinet, and a long yellow strip of teletape from the untended machine was piling up on the floor. He locked the office door and looked around for a place to hide his specifications for the jetless drive.
There was no space behind his reference books. The gap between the filing cabinet and the wall was already dangerously conspicuous. His desk had no drawers. In fact, he reflected, there was no room in the Plan for personal secrets or private documents. He found no hiding place—none better than his memory.
He was dropping the specifications into the incinerator slot, when he heard the loud impatient knocking on his door...
Again in the dream he was an unwilling guest in the deeply buried recreation center. The suites on both sides of him were occupied by disloyal surgeons who had been trapped in some plot against the Plan. The therapy room down the tunnel held the unplanned thing that they had assembled from scraps of waste tissue, which raved insanely in its straps and bandages while it was alive.
Then the surgeons were gone. There was only Horrocks, in the next suite, and Oporto in the one across the corridor. He was seldom aware even of them, because the stewards kept him most of the time in the therapy room where the junk man had died.
He was strapped to the couch, with the iron collar on his neck and electrodes clamped to his shivering flesh. Merciless light blazed down on his face. The white-smocked fat therapist stood over him, wheezing questions in a soft apologetic voice.
What was the message that Horrocks had brought him from Ron Donderevo? Where were fusorians and pyropods and spacelings? What was the way to build a jetless drive?
At first he could have answered, but a burning shock from the collar paralyzed his voice whenever he tried to speak. Even when he was utterly brok
en, abjectly willing to trust anybody with what he knew, they wouldn't let him say a word. They gave him no chance to understand, left him no will even to dream of escape.
Donderevo? Reefs of space? Jetless drive?
The soft insistent voice and the agony went on, until all his past was lost in a fog of pain and insane contradiction. Even when the collar didn't shock him, he didn't try to speak. He didn't even try to think of the answer. His mind had been erased.
Chapter 20
Ryeland awoke, blinking against a glare of light and found a man in white bending over him.
It took him a long time to understand that it was not Dr. Thrale, but Donderevo; longer still to realize that the crystal glint and glowing color of the cave was right and natural, so sure he had been that he would find himself in the aseptic white of the therapy room. He was in the operating cradle. The straps on his body had been loosened. Things began to click into place. There was Donderevo, yes, and the girl with her back to him undoubtedly was Donna Creery, and the other figure—
He sat up involuntarily, eyes wide. For the third figure in the room was not Quiveras. It was a Technicorps officer, watching him with the calculation of a poised cobra.
With a sudden spasm of desperate hope and fear Rye-land's hands came up to his neck.
They touched the familiar hard curve of the collar. He still wore it. He was still a Risk, his life hanging on the whim of every guard with a radar pistol or on the flipover of a relay in the distant synapses of the Machine.
"What—" For a moment his voice was paralyzed, still half in the dream, remembering the violence of the shocks that had conditioned him not to speak the truths he knew. But he fought to get words out: "What went wrong?"
Donderevo said compassionately, "We were too late. Before we had more than started the spacelings let us know the Plan cruiser was nearby. It breached the bubble around this reeflet. We sewed you up, and now we are all back in the Plan of Man." Unconsciously his hand touched the scar on his own throat. 'Tm sorry about your collar, Ryeland," he said, "but if I'm not mistaken it will be no long time before I'm once more wearing one of my own."
The nurse turned, and Ryeland had his third shock. For it was not Donna. "Where is she?" he demanded.
"Safe," rumbled Donderevo. "Or as safe as any one under the Plan. Her father was in the cruiser. She's with him now."
"May I—" Ryeland had to stop and gulp, because a memory of agony had paralyzed his throat "May I see them?"
"I'll tell them you're awake," Donderevo said. He moved toward the doorway, and turned back with a hesitant expression. "I had better warn you that you can't expect much help from Creery. You see, he's not the Planner any longer. In fact, he's wearing a collar of his own."
Ryeland was sitting on the edge of the portable cradle with a sheet wrapped around him, when Donna brought her father into that crystal-lighted cave of space. Though the former Planner was smiling tenderly at his daughter, his face looked pinched and gray. He wore the thin denim of a Risk. The chrome-steel collar shimmered with reflected crystal glints.
Two officious men followed Creery. One was a stocky Technicorps colonel, who looked bleakly Satanic with his radar horns. The other was a communications sergeant, with a gray-cased portable teleset slung to his body.
Donna nervously repeated what Donderevo had already told Ryeland about her father's arrival.
"I was hoping," she finished wistfully, "that Father could unlock your collar."
"Not even my own." Creery's stiff smile faded. "You can see that things have changed. Our old friend General Fleemer is acting Planner now. I have been reclassified, and assigned to this hazardous special mission." He glanced uncomfortably back at the colonel.
Donna's face twitched. She whispered, "What's your special mission, Father?"
"It is concerned with the Plan of Man," he said. "You see, since the Machine has been reliably informed of the limitless extent of the Reefs of Space, it has been projecting a new phase of the Plan. In this second phase, the abundant resources of the space frontier will end any need for the strict regimentation of the original Plan. Unfortunately, this second phase cannot begin until the new frontier is actually open to the masses of mankind. Obviously, that requires a reactionless space drive."
The former Planner paused. His haggard eyes looked sharply at Donderevo, regretfully at Ryeland, blankly at the Technicorps colonel.
"General Fleemer managed to convince the Machine that I was no longer competent," he said. "I suppose you know about the numerous failures of the helical field equipment that you had designed." His dull stare came back to Ryeland. "Fleemer laid all those disasters at my feet. As a result of such apparent executive errors, I was replaced.
"I insisted on one last chance to find a reactionless drive. I had enough power left so that Fleemer was unable to block the assignment. That's my mission now. I saw the spacelings that came out to meet the cruiser. I must learn how they fly!" His voice was hopeless.
"If Ryeland couldn't find the answer," Donderevo said, "I doubt that it exists." "But—I found it!"
The collar was very tight. For a moment Ryeland's throat was paralyzed again. The old fog of agony and contradiction thickened in his mind. He looked at the man and at Donna. Her smile was sunshine, clearing the fog.
He remembered. He could speak.
He explained his theory of the equivalence of momentum and new mass, which related the flight of the space-lings to the expansion of the universe. He recited the specifications that he had memorized before the Plan Police burst into his office on that lost Monday.
The colonel watched, a skeptical Satan, while they discussed the design and dictated the specifications to the sergeant at the portable teleset. They waited, while the message was digested by the special section of the Planning Machine aboard the cruiser.
Time passed—while slow radio pulsed the message to Earth.
Ryeland looked at Donna Creery's anxious face—and remembered the bandaged patchwork man who had raved and died in the therapy room down the tunnel from his suite in the recreation center.
Then he himself was not the junk man!
That part of Angela's story had been a malicious lie!
The teleset clattered.
Ryeland crowded with the former Planner and Donderevo and the girl to read the tape. Officiously, the colonel waved them back. He peered at the tape, and reached to finger the buttons of his radar gear.
But his expression changed.
"I knew it, Mr. Planner." His voice was suddenly smoothly affable. "I knew that Fleemer was nothing better than a conniving traitor, who will certainly get his comeuppance now! Any man with a spark of wit knew that jetless flight had to come."
Grinning, he offered his hand to Creery.
"I want to be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Planner. And you, too, Mr. Ryeland. The special section of the Planning Machine in the cruiser Has completed its preliminary evaluation of your invention.
"It has relayed a message to the master complex of the Machine on Earth, alerting it to prepare the Plan of Man for transition to the second phase, in which the freedom of the space frontier will render our present strict security controls both impossible and unnecessary.
"As a first step toward the effectuation of that second phase, it is propagating a radar pulse—"
Ryeland heard a click at this throat.
His collar snapped open.
As if moved by the same pulse, the girl stepped forward and into his arms. Together they moved out of the cave into the faerie shimmer of the reeflet. To one side hung the great gray mass of the Plan cruiser, no longer an enemy. Beyond lay the stars.
The stars. The limitless frontier for mankind—the space between suns, where hydrogen is constantly born to make new worlds, as freedom is constantly born in the hearts of men.
"A billion billion new worlds," whispered Ryeland.
And the girl said firmly: "Our children will see them all."
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Reefs of Space Page 18