“Do you not know the custom, Raul? Were you not told?”
Her tone was teasing. He remembered then. The man’s toga and thongs must be put on the first time by the woman who will partner the man in the first mating dance he is privileged to attend. He paused in confusion.
She drew back and her mouth became unpleasant. “Maybe you think, Raul Kinson, that you would prefer another. It will not be easy for you. You are not liked. Only two of us asked, and the other changed her mind before the drawing.”
“Give those to me,” he said, his anger matching hers.
She backed away. “It is not permitted. It is the law. If you refuse, you must wear child’s clothing.”
He stared at her and thought of Nara with the hair like flame, the dusky body. Compared to Nara this woman was mealy-white, soft. And he saw the unexpected sheen of tears in her eyes, tears that came from the hurt to her pride.
So he stood and closed the panel on his case of dreams and permitted her to drape the toga on his shoulders, fasten the belt, with the slow stylized motions of the custom. She knelt and wound a silver thong around his right ankle, bringing the two ends of the thong around his leg in opposite directions, each turn higher so that the thong made a diamond pattern. She knotted it firmly with the traditional knot just below his knee. He advanced his left leg and she placed the thong on it. She still knelt, staring up at him. He remembered, reached and took her hands, pulled her to her feet.
Together, with not another word, they rode down from the higher levels to the proper corridor. They went back to the room where the others waited. The fat old one who directed the games of the adults glanced at them with relief. He went to the music panel and touched the soft red disc which started the music. The other couples ceased chattering and lined up. Raul felt like a child who had stolen the toga and thongs of a man. His hands trembled and his knees felt weak as he took his place in line, facing Fedra. He watched the other men from the corner of his eye.
The fat old one played a sustained note on the silver tube he wore around his neck. Naked skulls gleamed in the amber glow of the walls. The cold, formal, intricate dance, substitute for urge and need, began. Raul felt that he moved in a dream. The quick harsh world he had visited seemed more to his taste than this stylized substitution. He sensed the amusement in the others, knew that they saw the awkwardness of his hands and feet, knew that this same awkwardness shamed Fedra. This dance was required, he knew, because it meant continuance of the world of the Watchers.
As the music slowly increased in tempo, Raul wished that he were hiding on one of the highest levels. He forced himself to smile like the others.
FOUR
Bard Lane stood at the window of his office staring out across the compound toward a new barracks building that was being constructed between two older ones. The wire mesh had been stretched taut and a crew with spray guns were spreading the plastic on the wire with slow practised strokes.
General Sachson had not underestimated the pressure. It was coming from all directions. A Cal Tech group had published an alleged refutation of the Beatty Theories, and the news services had picked it up, simplified it. Credo, the new micro-magazine, was screaming about “billions being squandered in some crackpot experimentation in the mountains of northern New Mexico.”
A group of lame-duck congressmen was sublimating political frustration by taking a publicity-conscious hack at the top-heavy appropriations for space conquest. A spokesman for the JCS hinted at a complete reorganization of the top management of military-civilian space flight efforts.
Sensing the possibility of cancellation of Project Tempo, the administrative branches in Washington—finance, personnel, procurement—were pulling the reins tight by compounding the numbers of reports necessary.
Sharan Inly tapped at the door and came into Bard’s office. He turned and gave her a weary smile. She wore her usual project costume, jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled high, collar open.
She glanced with distaste at the mound of paper on his desk. “Bard, are you a clerk or a scientist?”
“I’m too busy learning to be the first to do anything about the second. I am beginning to learn something about government paper work, though. You know, I used to try to handle every report—at least set up reasonable procedure for it. Then I found out that before I can get a report in, the whole thing is changed around. Know what I do now?”
“Something drastic?”
“I had rubber stamps made. Take a look. See this one? HOLD FOR ACTION—COORDINATION GROUP. And this one. FOR REVIEW AND REPORT—STATISTICAL COMMITTEE. Here is a pretty one. SUSPENSE FILER—PROGRAMMING BOARD.”
“What on earth are they for?”
“Oh, it’s very simple. Now take this report request right here. See, it came in three copies. The Industrial Research Committee of the Planning Board of the Materials Allocation Group of the Defense Control Board wants a report. And I quote. ‘It is requested that on the twelfth and twenty-seventh of each month, beginning with the month following receipt of this directive, that the planned utilization of the appended list of critical metals be reported for three months in the future, each month’s utilization to be expressed as a percentage of total utilization during the six months period immediately preceeding each report.’ And here is their appended list. Seventeen items. Did you see that new girl in my outer office, in the far corner?”
“The little brunette? Yes, I saw her.”
“Well, I route this report to her. She cuts a stencil and mimeographs the directive, runs off a hundred copies. She’s my Coordination Group, my Statistical Committee and my Programming Board. On the twelfth and twenty-seventh of each month she’ll mail in a copy of the directive with one of the rubber stamp marks on it. She’ll send one to the Defense Control Board and one to the Materials Allocation Group and one to the Planning Board and one to the Industrial Research Committee. I let her use any stamp she happens to feel like using at the moment. It seems to work just as well as making out the report. Probably better. I have her put a mysterious file number on the stencil.”
“Oh, Bard, how terrible that your time has to be taken up with this sort of thing!”
“I don’t mind most of them. But here’s a rough one. No more personnel, Sharan. At least, they’re making it so complicated to put on any new person that the delay will run into months. We’ll have to make do with what we have. They’re hamstringing me, very neatly. And I can’t fight back. There’s no one to fight. Just a big vague monster with carbon-paper tentacles, paper-clip teeth, and a hide made of layers of second sheets.”
“Why, Bard? Why are they turning against the Project? They believed in it once.”
“It’s taking too long, I guess.”
“Can’t you go to Washington?”
“I’m no good at that sort of thing. I get a compulsion. I know what to say, how to butter them, but I can’t quite manage to do it.”
She went over to a heavy oak armchair near the window, dropped into it, hooked one slim leg over the arm. She frowned. He walked over and looked out the window, following her glance. “Well, Sharan, even if it never gets off the ground, they can’t say that we didn’t build a big one.”
Even in the brightest sunshine, the light that shone down on the project area was diffused. Four gigantic steel towers of irregular size had been constructed in the form of an irregular oblong. A square mile of tough fabric, painted with all the art of camouflage, was suspended like a grotesque circus tent over the towers. From the air it would appear to be another barren irregular hill of rock and sage and sand. Bard Lane’s office was near the cave-like lip of the south edge of the outsized tent. The Beatty One stood in the middle of the tent. Around the base of the Beatty One was the constant, ant-like activity that had been going on for over a year.
Some of the labs were set into the solid rock of the surrounding hills. All project buildings not under the protection of the vast tent were designed to look, from the air, like just
another sleepy village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a village where the flagellationists still whip-cut the back of the selected man who labored under the heavy cross at Easter time.
He looked down at her for a moment, and resisted the impulse to rest his hand on her crisp hair, to feel, under his strong fingers, the delicate configuration of skull, the clean bone-line.
Bard locked his hands behind him and looked out to where he could see the dull metal base of the Beatty One, almost exactly one hundred and seventy feet in diameter, and so tall the round snout almost touched the fabric of the enormous tent. A platform elevator inched upward, carrying men in work clothes. The elevator was built on heavy steel circular tracks so that the operator could raise it to any point on the outside skin of the great vehicle.
“Does anybody expect it to fly, Doc?” she asked.
“I personally guarantee to get it at least twelve inches off the ground.”
She smiled up at him, the smile flavored with rue. “News good and bad,” she said. “The good is about Bill Kornal. We took him apart, every reflex, every neurosis, every response to stimuli, and we reassembled him. There is a change, sure. But it measures out as exactly as much as one would expect as an aftereffect of what happened to him. He is as sound and solid as that mountain over there.”
“Good. Put him on. I’ll sign the confirmation in the morning.”
“And the bad news is that I can’t find any real good reason to wash out Major Tommy Leeber. I don’t have to like him, but I can’t wash him out. Once you dig down through a lot of apparent complexities, the whole thing becomes very simple. He has a mind like a brass hinge. It works in just one direction: What is the best thing for Tommy Leeber? Totally directional, and of course he has a top security rating. So he’s all yours, Bard. I brought him over. He’s waiting out there for the deluxe tour.”
Bard Lane glanced at his watch. “There’s time. See you at dinner. Thanks for all the nice things you do for me.”
Major Leeber had the same reaction as did every other newcomer to the project when he was finally taken close enough to the Beatty One to really appreciate the size of it. After he had been walked all the way around it, he finally shook himself out of his stunned air of disbelief, smiled his lazy smile and said, “So … I still don’t believe it.”
Dr. Bard Lane had the elevator brought to ground level and signaled the operator to take it up to the nose. He stood and leaned against a stanchion and watched Leeber move to the exact center of the platform. At the ogive curve, close under the overhead camouflage, the elevator tipped toward the hull and followed the curve on up to the last port. Leeber did not look well as he leaned away from the direction of the tilt.
“Come along,” Bard said as he stepped over the lip of the port. He lowered himself to the deck inside, and began his familiar indoctrination speech as he gave the major a hand. “This will be the entrance port for the crew. The ship is designed for a crew of six. No passengers. The forward tenth of the overall length contains the living quarters, life maintenance systems, supplies and main control panels. We are in the control room. The three chairs there are on gymbals mounted on hydraulic pedestals designed to compensate for sudden increments in acceleration. They are similar to, but an improvement over, the systems previously used. Impulse screen mounted, as you can see, but not yet tied into either manual or computer control.”
Leeber studied the main control panel and said, “Looks like a king size A-six, and not too much different from the A-five. Where are the directional jets?”
“Eliminated in favor of a twenty-ton gyro that can be turned through a ten-degree arc. In free space it will turn her in any desired attitude. A lot of weight to boost, but not much less than standard attitude jet installation and the necessary fuel controls, and we save a lot by eliminating the initial lift-off with chemical fuels, so we have no booster stages to jettison on the way out.”
“Initial lift on atomic drive? Poison the air?”
“With a very short-life emission. Launch site will be clean in ten hours. At half-diameter outbound, they switch to standard A fuel, and keep it on CA. That means that—–”
“—–at twelve thousand miles out they go right onto the same old A-six atomic propulsion fuel and stay in constant acceleration. I’m not a civilian, Doctor. So this marvelous ship is just one big son of a bitch of an oversized A-six with a flywheel gyro, a short-life mix for takeoff. Wonderful!” His smile was ironic, his eyes cold.
“With one more little change, Major. Eighty days of CA will put her clear of the system. Then they switch to Beatty Drive. Drive is an inaccurate word, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet. I worked with Beatty and ran the team that completed his equations after he died two years ago. Do you have any background in theoretical physics?”
“Some exposure. Try me, Doctor.”
“What does ‘frames of reference’ mean to you?”
“The old analogy about three elevators and one man in each one. Elevator A is going up at top speed, Elevator B is going down slowly and Elevator C is stuck between floors. Each one is moving at a different speed in relation to each of the other two.”
“Very good. But you have one motionless elevator. Take it a step further. Your motionless one is at zero velocity. Okay, where is the motionless point in space? You can be hanging in space absolutely motionless in relation to one star, but moving at ten thousand miles per second in relation to a star in some other direction. On a theoretical basis you would find a motionless point in space by computing the velocity and direction of movement of all the stars in all the galaxies and finding that point from which all those velocities both toward you and away from you, on whatever angle of inclination or declination, would average out to zero. If we had the math to solve a problem with an infinite number of unknowns, we do not have all the knowns to feed into it, due to the temporal limits—and physical limits—of observation. Are you with it?”
“I think I … Well, keep going.”
“Here is the heart of it. Beatty called that the space-frame—the problem of finding the zero point in space. So he made the assumption there must also be a time-frame. He pictured a universe curved in upon itself in the Einsteinian concept, but composed of not only varying velocities and directions, but also varying temporal relationships. From this he extrapolated the idea that an average of the time relationships would give you a zero place, a place where time does not exist, just as an average of speed-relationships would give you a zero place where movement does not exist. So he applied that theory to the paradox of the expanding universe, and his equations did what the red shift ‘tired light’ theories failed to do. He proved that the apparent expansion was in fact the interrelationship of the velocity of light with a varying time warp throughout the observable galaxies, with the effect more apparent the greater the warp—i.e., in the most distant galaxies. I think I’ve lost you.”
“Afraid so.”
“Try it this way then. Until Beatty’s work we believed that maximum attainable velocity would always be a fractional percentage point under the speed of light itself, because according to the Fitzgerald equations, at the speed of light the contraction of mass is infinite. Beatty gave us a way to bypass that barrier by thrusting a ship into another frame of reference of time. Here is our standard simplistic analogy. You are driving from El Paso to New York. It will take you three days. You leave on Monday. You expect to get to New York on Wednesday. So as soon as you are outside the El Paso city limits you push a little button on the dashboard labeled ‘Wednesday.’ And there is the skyline of New York, right down the road.”
“Didn’t … the Fitzgerald equations say that time contracts along with mass in ratio to velocity?”
“Excellent, Major! Beatty’s equations showed that the time gradient between different systems, instead of having to be traversed at nearly light speed, can be capsuled into an abrupt time shift, just as when you drive across from one time zone into the next.”
“Your jumps would be a little bigger than Monday to Wednesday, I’d imagine.”
“The increments are in standard segments of one hundred years. But don’t think of it as a hundred years passing in a flash. It is more a distance measurement. You arrive in New York at the precise moment that you left El Paso.”
“So when do you know when to make the jump, how far you’ll jump, and where you’ll be when you get there?”
Bard Lane shrugged and smiled. “That’s what took seven months of programming and three months of integral and digital computer time. Then we built the control panels according to the results of the calculations.”
“And that nut smashed them?”
“Do you mean Doctor Kornal? He did. He is back on the job. My decision to take him back will stand up, so don’t step over the line you seem to be edging too close to.”
“Me? Hell, let’s be friends. Life is too short. It’s your risk, not mine. What do we look at next?”
“Dinner. I’ll take you through the labs tomorrow morning.”
“Where do I find the action?”
“I’ll point out the club on our way back down to the launch pad.”
FIVE
Bard Lane sat on the edge of his bed. It was after midnight on the same day that he had taken Major Leeber on the tour of inspection.
He sat and little rivulets of fear ran through his mind the way that rain will trickle erratically down a window-pane. The night was cool and the wind that came through the screen touched his naked chest and shoulders, but it did not stop the perspiration that made an oiled sheen on his face.
It was like a return to childhood, to the long-dead nights of terror. The scream. “Mommy, Mommy! It was a moldy man and he was sitting on my bed!”
“It’s all right. It was just a dream, dear.”
Wine of the Dreamers: A Novel Page 6