Mission to Universe

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Yes,” said Ben. He sat still behind his desk.

  “Then... don’t go.”

  “Wild geese have hunters waiting for them too,” said Ben.

  Marsh stared at him.

  “I don’t understand. . .?” Marsh said.

  “The wild geese and other migratory birds have to fly south, regardless, Marsh!” said Ben, letting his voice sharpen, as the other man opened his mouth to speak again. “You’ll have to go now. We’re about to take off. —I’ve phoned the message center to give clearance to your plane and pilot.”

  Marsh’s fingers loosened, lost their grip on the desk-edge. He slumped back in his chair, then slowly heaved himself up out of it, clutching the blue-sealed envelope. He turned and walked toward that door of the office leading to the women’s side, the corridor, and the airlock.

  “Goodby, Marsh,” said Ben.

  Marsh did not answer. Opening the door, he went out.

  Ben cleared his desk and got to his feet. As he did so, there was a buzz and the red-colored one of four different colored lights on his desk lit up. He paused to reach over and press the “receive” switch on his desk intercom.

  “Ship sealed for takeoff,” said Walt’s deep voice.

  “Thank you,” said Ben. He let go of the switch, which flipped back up into “off” position, and went out through the side door at the right of his desk into the curving corridor on the men’s side of the ship. He walked down past fthe corridor with the series of doors to eighteen roomette-type “staterooms” on his right and the wall of the Control, Computer, and Observation Sections beyond it on his left. The doors of some of the staterooms were open, but no one was in them. Following the curve of the corridor around, he came to the Lounge-Dining room at the front of the ship and saw most of the off-duty people there.

  He nodded at them, followed his casual tour of inspection around and down the other side of the ship, with the women’s staterooms this time on his right-hand side and the wall of the Operating Sections on his left. There wereonly ten staterooms on the women’s side, which accounted for that number of women in proportion to the eighteen men in the crew. Not that the designers of the phase craft had intended any such thing—or Ben, himself, in the beginning, four years before. The present crew, or team, as they should rightly be called, had never been intended actually to take the phase ship far into space. Their job was merely to work the bugs out of the individual jobs aboard her as the ship was developed, and then give place to an all-male crew of trained astronauts.

  Remembering this, Ben came to the end of the women’s staterooms, passed the corridor leading to the airlock by which he had entered the ship four hours earlier, and came up against the wall of the topside storage room. All other storage, together with the phase drive units and the recycling equipment, was in the lower half of the ship, which was divided horizontally by its single main deck, above which were all the rooms he had just been inspecting.

  Having completed his tour, Ben turned back up the corridor, walked back around to the front, or Lounge point of the ship, and turning his back on that single large room,entered the door to the Observation Section.

  “What’s going on—some kind of game?” he snapped. Kirk Walish and his second, Jay Tremple, were out of the seats before their comparison-scopes, and standing in the doorway to the Computer Section. It was true that here on Earth, jumping to a fixed and many times previously calculated position in orbit about the world, and with even the shutters closed on the large observation port over their head, there was nothing for them to do. But they were on duty, as the first of four teams that would hold down this Section around the clock in space, and now was as good a time as any to start cracking down.

  They ducked back to their seats, and Ben walked on through the now unobstructed doorway into the Computer Section. The three here were all in their seats, though at this moment only one of them had anything to do—and that was to be alert for the moment of shift. But then, that one was Matt Duncan, team chief of the first computer team. He looked up at Ben from his traveling tapes, giving the shifting position of this point on Earth’s surface relative to the theoretical centerpoint of the galaxy, second by second.

  “Holding,” he said.

  “Thanks, Matt," said Jen, and stepped on through into the final, Control Section.

  This tiny room held Cooper Malson, at his single control instrument, keeping Matt’s figures reconciled with the equally, but normally more, predictable shifting point of their destination. Standing behind Coop, looming expressionlessly even above Ben in the tiny room, was the overalled figure of Walt, as Duty Officer of the first two teams in all Sections.

  “Holding,” he said briefly to Ben.

  “Computer told me. Thanks,” said Ben. “Clear outside?”

  Out of the comer of his eye, he could see the row of small white lights announcing that the area around the phase ship’s hull was clear of people or impediments to takeoff. But this was something that fell in the province of the Duty Officer.

  “All clear,” said Walt. “Ready to shift, then?”

  “Go ahead. Prepare to shift,” said Ben.

  “Prepare to shift,” said Walt to Coop.

  “Report,” said Coop into the phone grille before him.

  “Match,” said the voice of Kirk Walish, announcing the agreement of Observation with the shift.

  “Match,” said the voice of Matt from Computer, reporting that Coop’s progressive figures were agreeing with the figures his Section was producing on the computer before him.

  “Match,” agreed Coop.

  “Sir,” said Walt, oddly and formally but somehow not ridiculously, to Ben. “Ready to make the shift.”

  “Shift, then,” said Ben, looking above Coop’s head at the TV screen that now showed only the canvas underside of the camouflage dome over the phase ship.

  “Shift,” echoed Coop. His finger came down on a single red key mounted in the middle of the shelf below his instrument.

  There was a momentary, indefinable sensation, like a faint nausea that came and went too quickly to be really unpleasant. Then it disappeared as the artificial gravity of the phase field oscillations took over. Ben looked into the TV screen.

  It showed only the blackness of space, a field of stars,and the giant curve of the Earth occluding the lower third of the screen.

  Ben’s ears rang to the sound of sudden cheering and excitement. The metal walls of the three small Sections threw the uproar back and forth between themselves until it sounded as if the whole ship was vibrating. In the Lounge upfront, Ben thought, the off-duty crew members would be cheering, too. And indeed it was a great moment. For the first time the phase ship had proved Walt’s mathematics and Lee’s technical inventiveness by reducing the normal distance between two points—one on the surface of the Earth, one five hundred miles above it—to practical non-existence.

  Ben let them cheer for several minutes, then he turned to Walt.

  “Shift completed without incident, sir,” said Walt, unmoved as the Colossus of Rhodes might have been at this success that was more his than any man’s. The cheering died suddenly, and Ben was aware of the personnel of all Sections waiting to hear his next words. He made them wait a few seconds, then spoke as dryly as he could.

  “Very well done,” he said. “Please begin observation and computation on the next shift, which will be to the orbit of Saturn, in opposition to the Sun.”

  “Orbit of Saturn, in opposition to the Sun. Yes sir,” said Walt.

  “I’ll be in my quarters. Call me when the shift is ready,”said Ben. He turned and took the back door of the Control Section that let him directly back into his office, leaving Walt to silence the second outburst of cheering that began almost immediately.

  He heard Walt doing just that through the door as he closed it behind him. The noise died. Somehow, though Walt had never been known to show anger—or much emotion of any sort—he got much more instant obedience from everyone than did Lee, wh
om everybody liked. Starting to ponder this for the most recent of uncounted times, Ben suddenly found the mental effort involved was too much for him. He was numb-brained and half-blind from fatigue. Almost stumbling; he stumped across the office,through its back door into the combination bedroom-sitting room that was the other half of his quarters, and literally fell onto the bed there.

  Immediately, it seemed, someone was shaking his shoulder.

  “Yes . . .” he mumbled, and pushed himself up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

  “Saturn,” said Walt, towering over him. “Ready to shift.”

  “Thank you,” croaked Ben. He forced himself reflexively ,to his feet and followed Walt, as the other man led the way back into the Control Room.

  He felt chilled to the bone .. On the verge of opening his mouth to ask Walt about the internal temperature of the ship, he had the sense to realize that the chill was the result of his own exhaustion rather than any coolness in the ship’s atmosphere, the temperature, pressure, content, humidity, and even ionization of which was automatically controlled. He felt he must look like a walking corps; and made a special effort to stand straight and stride purposefully. His sleep-chilled face shaped itself most easily into a scowl, so he scowled.

  “All right,” he said to Walt, as soon as they were both in the Control Section together, standing over a waiting Coop, “prepare to shift.”

  The customary chant of report and counter-report went off smoothly, and the ship shifted. This time, however, there was a slight pause before Walt reported “shift completed without incident” and Ben had to grope mentally for a moment before he remembered the reason for it. Observation would be taking a picture of the stellar scene and computer-comparing it with a slide made up beforehand to show the stars as they should be seen from their point of destination.

  “Observation reporting,” spoke the phone grille. “Destination point achieved.”

  “Shift completed without incident,” said Walt to him.

  “Thank you,” said Ben, groggily. He made himself pause for the minimum time necessary to make the order seem thoughtful and unhurried. “The next shift will be to an orbit—the equivalent distance of the present position of Venus, with respect to our Sun—around the star Alpha Centauri.”

  “Orbit at Venus-distance around the star Alpha Centauri,” acknowledged Walt, unmoved.

  “I’ll be in my quarters,” croaked Ben. He turned and went out, walking as indifferently as he was able until the door between his office and the Control Section was closed behind him. Behind him, this time, he heard no cheering.

  He had managed to exceed their greatest expectations. A test-flight into Earth orbit was something for which they had all hoped. A further jump to the orbit of Saturn was the capping of the wildest dreams on the part of their most optimistic members. A further shift, immediately following to Alpha Centauri, the nearest Sun-like star to the solar system—over twenty-five trillion miles from Earth—that had awed them into silence.

  But right now, Ben did not care. All he wanted was to get back to his bed. It would take more than four hours,even with known data to aid Observation, to calculate the shift to Alpha Centauri. Now he could really sleep.

  He fell once more on the bed. This time he had the sense to drag the bedspread loose and wrap it around him before sleep sucked him down into unconsciousness like a mayfly in a whirlpool.

  This time again, he came awake by himself, with the automatic self-timing to which he was accustomed. With-out looking at his watch, he knew that four hours had passed—and he felt surprisingly refreshed and alert, not tired at all.

  It was a false feeling, he knew. Two more hours and he would have awakened sodden with the slumber that came from tapping a deeper well of tiredness than he had let himself touch in a short four hours of rest. But for the several hours of alertness now required of him, the short rest would do. He sat up, scrubbed a chin that somehow seemed to need shaving again—that was an illusion, he would settle for washing his face—and thought this time with some purpose of coffee and food.

  He decided this once to take advantage of his rank and position and send for what he wanted, instead of going himself to the Lounge, where he was sure to be met with questions—questions that he would not want to answer at this time. He got up and spoke to Lee, who had now taken over as Duty Officer in the Control Room—the second teams in all Sections having just completed their four hour stints to end the first half of the sixteen-hour shipboard “day.”

  Fifteen minutes later, seated in the office at his desk with a tray on it, he was hungrily making inroads on a pot of coffee and a large plate of bacon and eggs from Special Stores. He was just finishing off his third cup of coffee and thinking how unusually good it tasted, when there was a knock on the door leading to the Control Section and Lee came in.

  “Ready to shift, sir,” said Lee, smiling and obviously delighted—with the possibility of such a shift, with the hearty breakfast he could see Ben had made, with the very formalism of military reporting.

  “Already?” said Ben, putting down his cup cheerfully—and instantly regretting the lapse into the familiar habit of friendliness built up over the past eight years. The life of everyone aboard, he told himself savagely, might well depend on the measure of discipline he was able to instill in them—and how could he expect it in them, if he could not produce it in himself? To cover up his mistake, he got up hastily from the table and walked quickly to the door as if impatient with the delay consequent on calling him.

  Lee stood aside. Ben stepped into the Control Room.

  Tessie Sorenson was at the Control desk. She looked up and threw him a smile as he came in, and he was caught between the embarrassment of refusing to return it and his renewed determination to establish discipline on the ship. He produced a fit of coughing as his excuse.

  “Prepare to shift,” he said, turning to Lee in relief.

  Lee repeated the command. As the responses came back from the other two Sections, Ben thought he was aware of a difference this time. Accustomed as nearly four years had made them to the fact that in phase shifting, movement from one end of the universe to the other was theoretically no different than a transfer across the width of a room, the crew could not help seeing, like an ominous ghost hovering in the air before them, the figure 23, followed by twelve zeros and the word “miles.”

  Nor could Ben himself ignore it. The distance was too vast, too great for the mind to capture. He became aware all at once that the sequence of responses were completed. Lee was waiting for him to give the order.

  “To Alpha Centauri,” he found himself saying, unorthodoxly, “shift, then!”

  “Shift!” echoed the voice of Tessie Sorenson—and in the fraction of a second of faint nausea that followed they seemed to feel the universe change position under their feet.

  Ben, Lee, Tessie, stared up into the TV screen. A star, larger than the Sun as seen from Earth, burned almost in the center of it. Like a voice from some unimaginable distance came the voice of Hans Clogh.

  “Observation reporting. Destination point achieved.”

  “Shift completed without incident,” said the voice of Lee. Ben leaned forward over Tessie’s shoulder and pressed the key on the phone that would let him speak to the whole ship at once.

  “All Sections,” he heard his own voice saying, “put their instruments on Hold. Everybody report to the Lounge for a small celebration. Nora, if you’ll come to my office, there’s some special supplies I’d like to have you break out of Stores for the celebration.”

  He turned and went back into his office, hearing the first sound of the jubilation break out behind him. He walked around to sit down at his desk, sat down, and rubbed the heels of both hands hard against his forehead. The door from the corridor on the women’s side of the ship opened and Nora Taller came in.

  “Oh, Nora . . .” he said. “If you’ll look in Special Stores you’ll find a good-sized crate with a ‘Secret’ seal on it, and
the letters A C stamped on its top. If you’ll break it open, you’ll find some food and wine I had put aboard for just this occasion. Maybe you’d better take it down to the Lounge and break it open there—get some of the men to carry it for you.”

  “All right.” She turned away toward the door and then stopped to look back and smile at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “In—in a little while,” he said hastily. “I’ve got some things to do here.”

  He watched the door close behind her. The excuse he had things to do here was the poorest sort of lie, but he did not think she had suspected it. —Only it was beyond mortal man or beyond mortal conscience. He could not go down to the Lounge and eat and drink with them there, knowing all the time what he was going to do to them. And even if he could have, he was not, he told himself, that good an actor.

  He fished out the second dry-copy of the censored message with the President’s signature at the bottom of it. He also found four thumbtacks in his desk. After that there was nothing to do but kill time. He drank the remaining coffee in the pot and thought about what he would do once he had spoken to them all. He had gone over what he would do many times, but once more might suggest an improvement in his plans. . . the important thing would be to get them all busy at something right away . . .

  He came alert to the alarm of his inner clock, warning him that sixty minutes were up. Getting to his feet, and remembering to stand and walk straight he took dry-copy and thumbtacks and went down through the deserted Sections and out the far door of the Observation Section near the front of the ship. He crossed the corridor without being noticed and stepped into a loungeful of noisy people slightly intoxicated with the champagne he had brought aboard in the sealed and insulated cold pack case.

  There was a small rostrum at one end of the lounge, opposite the dining area, and he made his way hardly noticed through the crowd and onto the rostrum before many were aware he was among them. He faced them all. Slowly, heads turned, and the room fell into silence.