The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Gay Deceiver—stop! Hilda, do you still see it?”

  “Yes. A fuzzy star. Jacob, let me turn your head toward it.” Mrs. Burroughs leaned forward, took her husband’s head between her hands, gently turned it to the right and up. “See it, dear one?”

  “Uh … yes, I do! Hilda, the binoculars, please!”

  I waited. Shortly my copilot said slowly, “Captain, it looks to me like a lenticular or spiral galaxy seen not quite on edge. Or it might be an entire family of galaxies still more distant. Whatever it is, it is a long, long way off. Millions of light years … but how many millions I have no way of guessing.”

  “Can you reach it by transition?”

  “I think so. I would set middle range on six, then keep punching until I could see some change in angular width. Then either increase or decrease scale to let me sneak up on it. It might take an hour. Do you want to look at it, Captain? I think you’ll have to unstrap to do so.”

  “No, I wouldn’t learn anything that you haven’t already reported. You say it’s at least a million light years away?”

  “Several millions of light years, at least—if this universe is at all similar to ours. But on that I lack sufficient data for an opinion.”

  “In any case, that is fossil light … isn’t it?”

  “Eh? Oh! Yes, the light we are seeing it by has been traveling for some millions of years.”

  “That’s my point. We’re seeing something that happened a long, long time ago. If we did try to sneak up on it, we might find that all those millions of stars had burned out. Maybe some neutron stars, maybe some black holes. Or maybe not. But fossil light doesn’t tell us anything that we can use. Hilda, designate that galaxy as ‘Last Chance.’ All hands, stand by to rotate.”

  “Zebadiah, can’t I look at it?”

  “No, Deety. We are not sightseeing; we are looking for a good obstetrician on an Earth-like planet with no Panki vermin.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Did you stick your tongue out?”

  “No, Zebadiah. That’s childish behavior; I shan’t do it again.”

  “Oh, honey! Don’t change—I love you just as you are. Mature adult whenever the chips are down—delightful little girl when there is time to relax. Deety darling, I’ve laughed more since I met you than I had in many years before I met you. You’re an entire harem in one. I wouldn’t trade you for Dej’, Thuv, and Tira, combined.”

  “How about Hilda?”

  “I have no hesitation in saying that I have no comment—and you can quote me that that is strictly off the record. Copilot … execute!”

  Blinding light …. “Jake! Rotate! Execute!”

  Suddenly we were in a starry void, almost homelike but with more and brighter stars. I heaved a sigh of relief. “Jake, what in hell did we fall into?”

  “I don’t know, Captain. Fortunately I had my head down over the verniers; I didn’t get dazzled—or I might not have been able to set the escape rotation.”

  “Well … we could have gotten out by the T, U, H, scram. Or by the deadman switch. But I did get dazzled … and wouldn’t have been able to wrassle this heap manually. New standing order: at each time of “execute,” both pilot and copilot will close their eyes and duck their heads … and stay that way until each is certain that he is safe from dazzle. I goofed again … but I won’t pull that goof again. Sorry, folks.”

  “Next rotation is set, Captain.”

  “Thank you. But we’re going to sit right here until I get my eyes back. This looks like a pretty nice universe—what I can see of it around the purple spots floating in front of my eyes. Hilda, Deety, either of you have any notion of what we fell into?”

  “Not me, Zebadiah.”

  “Cap’n Zebbie, I have three hypotheses, not one of them worth much.”

  “Modesty ill becomes you, Sharpie. Give.”

  “Interior of a global star cluster, or near the nucleus of a galaxy, or—just possibly—the early part of an expanding universe when the new stars are almost rubbing shoulders with each other.”

  “Hmm … all of them jolly places to be. Jake, do you suppose we could have picked up an unhealthy dose of radiation?”

  “I’ve no way to guess, Captain.”

  “Well … the shell of this buggy is opaque to most radiation, and that sandwich windshield has one layer that is heavily leaded glass—but no way to tell, so I’ll quit worrying.”

  “Zebadiah, there may be one way to tell. If the film in the camera is ruined, some fairly heavy stuff got through. But if the next picture is okay, we’re probably okay.”

  Hilda said, “I’m glad you thought of that, Deety. I wasn’t going to mention it—but I don’t like the idea of penetrating radiation while I’m pregnant. And you, too, hon.”

  Zebadiah said, “I’m sorry I opened the subject, since there is nothing we can do about it. Hilda, do you want to shoot one film to check?”

  “No, Zebbie, it’s a waste of film.”

  “As you wish. My eyes are coming back; I’ll start the pigeon tumble. Jake, do you want to try for spectral readings?”

  “Captain, I think that it is almost certain that there are G-type stars out there and that some of them have Earth-type planets. But the search could take a long, long time. Unless the tumble maneuver shows that we are quite close to a star resembling Sol, I think we should mark this down for later exploration … unless we find exactly what we need on teh-axis.”

  “Okay.” I put us through one pigeon tumble. “Report, Hilda?”

  “Just lots of big beautiful stars, Zebbie, but I didn’t see a one close enough to show a disc.”

  “Me, too, Zebadiah. But what a beautiful sky!”

  “Null report, Captain.”

  “Nothing new from the tumble, then. Hilda, mark it down as ‘promising.’ All hands, stand by for fifth rotation. Pilot and copilot will keep eyes closed and heads down. Astrogator and science officer are advised but not ordered to do so. Here goes. Execute!”

  I gasped. “Where in hell are we?”

  “In Hell, I think, Zebbie.”

  “Copilot?”

  “Hilda wasn’t too far off, Captain. It’s something I could not have believed three months ago, before we discovered that the fantastic romances about Barsoom are essentially factual. This is some sort of inside-out universe.”

  “Pellucidar!” said Deety.

  “No, my dear daughter. One: we are not inside our home planet; we are in another universe entirely. Two: this universe has physical laws that differ from those of our own universe. The inside of a spherical shell does not and cannot have a gravitational field by the physical laws of our universe. Yet I see a large river flowing below us … and we seem to be falling toward it. Captain, are we in air or in vacuuo?”

  I wiggled the manual controls. “Got a little bit of air. Probably could get some support with the wings fully extended.”

  “Then I would advise the captain to do so—unless you want us to rotate out of here at once.”

  I brought my car, manually, into a dead-stick glide just short of stalling. “Does anyone want to homestead here? I don’t, because this place gives me simultaneously both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. It’s so damn big—ten thousand kilometers in diameter, at a guess. Nevertheless it’s completely enclosed. No sky. No horizons. Never again to see a night sky sprinkled with stars. I don’t know what that light at the center is, but it’s not a star even though it looks like the Sun. Too small—much too small. But if and when we do leave, we aren’t coming back—because the god who takes care of fools and explorers let us arrive in empty space … instead of maybe ten thousand kilometers underground.”

  “It may not have been luck, Captain, but logical necessity.”

  “Huh? You’ve lost me, Jake.”

  “You’re thinking of this place as a spherical shell. But there is no basis for assuming that it has no outside. It may not have an outside of any sort.”

  “What? Endless millions of light years o
f solid rock?”

  “No, no! Nothing outside. And by nothing I do not mean space; I mean a total absence of existence of any sort. Different physical laws and a different topology. We may be seeing the totality of this universe. A small universe with a different sort of closed space.”

  “I can’t visualize it, Jake.”

  “Deety, my dear, rephrase for the captain.”

  “I’ll try, Pop. Zebadiah, I’m not a geometer … but Pop is right. Depends on what postulates you select … and the geometry of this place may require a different set of postulates from those that work back home. I’m sure you have played with Möbius strips ….”

  “Certainly. A surface with only one side. But this is a sphere.”

  “Pop is saying that it may be a hollow sphere with only side, the inside. Have you ever tried to figure out a Klein bottle?”

  “I got cross-eyed and a headache.”

  “This could be sort of a Klein-bottle thing. It might turn out that if you tunneled down in a straight line anywhere down there on the ground, you might emerge at the top opposite point, still inside. And that straight line might be—would be, I think—shorter than the distance across. Maybe much shorter.”

  “Point three one eight zero nine is the ratio by the simplest postulates,” agreed Doctor Burroughs. “The reciprocal of pi—if pi is the same here as it is at home, a point on which I have no opinion. But the geometry of this place may not be that simple. However, Captain, assuming that this is a total universe—and I think it is—our chances of arriving in open space were far greater than the chance of conflicting with a mass. But to answer your first question: no, I would not wish to homestead here—pretty as it is—unless Hilda wants to. Nevertheless, we might check it out for obstetricians.”

  “No obstetricians,” I answered firmly.

  “Why so, Captain?”

  “If there are human beings here, they do not have an advanced culture. I’ve been following a curved glide path that approximates that big river below us. Did you notice where the other largish river joined it? Also look dead ahead where it meets the sea. No city either place. No warehouses. No traffic on the river. No air traffic and no signs of roads. That means to me no hospitals and no medical schools. We don’t need to check elsewhere, as this is choice real estate by human standards. Ergo, no advanced culture anywhere and a small population, if any. If anyone wants to refute me, please do so in the next five minutes; I can’t hold this heap in the air much longer than that without using power—power more precious than fine gold.”

  “I check you, Cap’n Zebbie. They might be so advanced that they can make the whole joint look like a national park. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Let’s continue shopping.”

  “Deety?”

  “The Hillbilly is right, Zebadiah. But it’s so pretty!”

  “That makes it unanimous; we scram. Hilda, expend one film on it, as a souvenir. Then we rotate.” I nosed the car down a bit to permit a better picture.

  A click …. “Got it, Zebbie.”

  “Stand by to rotate! Execute!”

  Mars of Universe-Zero lay to starboard.

  I sighed. “Pretty as it was, I’m glad to be out of there. It upsets me to see rivers run uphill. Sharpie, did you get a picture?”

  “Hold the phone,” she drawled. “Hmm … yuup, picture coming up!”

  “Good!”

  “Zebbie, I thought you didn’t like that inside-out world?”

  “I don’t. But I wanted to check the film. If that picture is sharp—not fogged—you two knocked-up broads weren’t hit by radiation where it counts. No fogging?”

  “Not a bit, Cap’n Honey … and brighter color every second. Here … look.”

  “I don’t need to see it. I’ve been there. My sole interest was in radiation. Jake, I’m beginning to have misgivings about this rotation schedule. The sampling called for fifteen. We’ve tried five, and only one—number four—was even vaguely homelike. One of the five had a serious radiation hazard to our wives and unborn kids. While we seem to have lucked through on that one—how about the next ten? So far, the pickings have been slim and the dangers seem excessive; rotations take us into some very weird universes. But we already know that Earth-analogs along tau- and teh-axis are quite Earth-like ….”

  “With monsters,” put in Hilda. “Panki.”

  “On tau-axis, probably. Or almost certainly. But we haven’t explored teh-axis. Jake, are we justified in exposing our wives to conditions we can’t even imagine?

  “Pop and Zebadiah, may I say something first?”

  XXXII

  Hilda

  If Zebbie and my husband, Jacob, have a fault in common, it is over-protectiveness toward Deety and me. Me, I don’t find this a fault. Having always been the runt of the litter, I have always been quite willing to accept protection from anyone larger than I am. But Deety sometimes rebels.

  When Captain Zebbie asked Jacob whether or not they were justified in exposing us to unknown dangers of ten more universes, Deety stuck her oar in—and Zebbie tried to hush her.

  Zebbie should have known better!

  But he is just her husband and barely getting acquainted with her, whereas I’ve known her since her diaper days. Once, when I was taking care of her for Jane and Deety was, oh, possibly four, I started to tie her shoes for her. She pulled away from me. “Deety do!” she announced indignantly—and Deety did: a loose half-bow on one shoe that came apart almost at once, and a Gordian knot on the other that no Boy Scout ever heard of, but which required the Alexandrian solution; come her bedtime, I cut that shoestring with scissors.

  It’s been “Deety do!” ever since, backed by native genius and indomitable will.

  Deety answered him, “Zebadiah, I realize that you’re commanding this craft … but you have asked the opinions of the rest of us up ’til now. Is there some reason to exclude Hilda and me from discussions of this decision?”

  “Damn it, Deety, this is one that husbands have to decide!”

  “Damn it, Zebadiah, this is one time when wives must be consulted!”

  Our Zebbie was shocked. I feel certain that she had never before spoken to him that way. But he could not possibly show anger even if he felt it; Deety had simply matched him in manner and rhetoric.

  Zebbie is no fool; he backed down from his impossible position at once. “I’m sorry, hon,” he said soberly. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. I will make the final decision—I must; I can’t avoid it. But I should get opinions from everyone. Go ahead, you have the floor.”

  “Yessir. I do have something to say, for Hilda and me—and Hilda will want to add her opinion, too. I know I speak for both of us when I say that we both appreciate that both you and Pop would each die bravely for either one of us … and that you both feel this more intensely now that we are pregnant.

  “But we have not been pregnant long enough to be physically handicapped by it. Our ‘bulging bellies’ do not, in fact, bulge, not yet. They will bulge, I know, and that gives us a deadline that we must meet. But for that very reason we will either sample those other ten rotation universes today … or we will never sample them. Never!”

  “Why do you say ‘never,’ Deety?”

  “Because of timing and the deadline of our bellies. We’ve sampled five in less than an hour and, scary as some of it has been, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We can take at least a quick look at the other ten in the next couple of hours or so. But if we break off at this point and start searching the axis for a suitable analog of Earth, there is no predicting how long it will take. We may check hundreds before we find what we are looking for—I don’t know. But I offered that definition of the sort of world we must find in an attempt to make it possible to eliminate unsatisfactory worlds quickly.

  “Let’s say we find it. What then? We’ll be strangers; we may not—probably not—even speak the local language. But we’ll settle down somehow and Hilda and I will have our babies with skilled medical attention. Then w
hat? Zebadiah, my beloved, are you going to be more willing to take two women and two babies into ten strange universes than you are to take us today without babies?”

  “Uh … I don’t think that’s quite the way to put it, Deety.”

  “How would you put it, sir? Are you possibly thinking that you and Pop might check out those ten while Hilda and I stay home and take care of the kids?”

  “Well … yes, I suppose I was. Something of that sort.”

  “Zebadiah, I married you for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health … but I did not marry you to walk the widow’s walk! I can’t speak for Hilda on this point—but where you go, I go!—’til death do us part.”

  “Deety speaks for me,” I said and shut up. I wasn’t as dead set on seeing ten more universes as she seemed to be—but Sharpie durn well wasn’t going to walk a widow’s walk, nuther! And Deety had it figured out exactly. If Jacob and Zebbie didn’t finish that schedule of rotations today, then they would both have that “far horizons” look in their eyes the rest of their lives, no matter how utopian a planet we found—and they wouldn’t want to take us along. Not with kids. But Sharpie wasn’t going to hold still for that. No, Sir!

  “Deety, are you through?”

  “Not quite, sir. I know that I sound like a spoiled brat. But I’m not and I don’t want to leave that impression. All humans are created unequal, and anyone who can count above ten with his shoes on can see it. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least number of years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius … but he concentrates so hard and so long when he tackles a problem that he forgets to eat—unless he has a nursemaid to watch over him, as Mama did, as I did, and as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the most all-around practical man I’ve ever met, whether you are handling a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous half-truths to get us all out of jams. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees … but Aunt Hilda is a walking encyclopedia just from having an insatiable curiosity and an extraordinary memory. Two of us are baby factories, two of us are not—but one man can impregnate fifty women … or five hundred. I could go on listing the many ways that we are un-equal, no two of us are alike. But in one supremely important way all four of us are equals.