Cosmic Engineers

Chapter Five

Dr. Kingsley glanced at his watch.

"It's almost time for the signals to begin," he said. "In another few minutes we will be swinging around to face the Great Nebula. If you looked out you would see it over the horizon now.”

Caroline Martin sat in the chair before the thought machine, the domed helmet settled on her head. All eyes in the room were glued on the tiny light atop the mechanism. When the signals started coming that light would blink its bright-red eye.

"Lord, it's uncanny," whispered Tommy Evans. He brushed at his face with his hand.

Gary watched the girl. Sitting there so straight, like a queen with a crown upon her head. Sitting there, waiting, waiting to hear something that spoke across a gulf that took light many years to span.

Brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, a woman who was schooled in hard and simple logic. She had thought of many things out in the shell, she said, had set up problems and had worked them out. What were those problems she had thought about? What were the mysteries she had solved? She was a young, rather sweet-faced kid, who ought to like a good game of tennis, or a dance and she'd thought a thousand years.

Then the light began to blink and Gary saw Caroline lean forward, heard the breath catch sharply in her throat. The pencil she had poised above the pad dropped from her fingers and fell onto the floor.

Heavy silence engulfed the room, broken only by the whistling of the breath in Kingsley's nostrils. He whispered to Gary: "She understands! She understands…”

Gary gestured him to silence.

The red light blinked out and Caroline swung around slowly in the chair.

Her eyes were wide and for a moment she seemed unable to give voice to the words she sought.

Then she spoke. "They think they are contacting someone else," she said.

"Some great civilization that must have lived here at one time. The messages come from far away. From even farther than the Great Nebula. The Nebula just happens to be in the same direction. They are puzzled that we do not answer. They know someone has been trying to answer. They're trying to help us to get through. They talked in scientific terms I could not understand. Something to do with the warping of space and time, but involving principles that are entirely new. They want something and they are impatient. It seems there is a great danger someplace. They think that we can help.”

"Great danger to whom?" asked Kingsley.

"I couldn't understand," said Caroline.

"Can you talk back to them?" asked Gary. "Do you think you could make them understand?”

"I'll try," she said.

"All you have to do is think," Kingsley told her. "Think clearly and forcefully. Concentrate all that you can, as if you were trying to push the thought away from you. The helmet picks up the impulses and routes them through the thought projector.”

Her slim fingers reached out and turned a dial. Tubes came to life and burned into a blue intensity of light. A soaring hum of power filled the tiny room.

The hum became a steady drone and the tubes were filled with a light that hurt one's eyes.

"She's talking to them now," thought Gary. "She is talking to them.”

The minutes seemed eternities, and then the girl reached out and closed the dial. The hum of power receded, clicked off and was replaced by a deathly silence.

"Did they understand?" asked Kingsley, and even as he spoke the light blinked red again.

Kingsley's hand closed around Gary's arm and his harsh whisper rasped in Gary's ear.

"Instantaneous!" he said. "Instantaneous signals! They got her message and they are answering. That means the signals are routed through some extra-dimension.”

Swiftly the red light blinked. Caroline crouched forward in the chair, her body tensed with what she heard.

The light blinked off and the girl reached up and tore the helmet off.

"It can't be right," she sobbed. "It can't be right.”

Gary sprang forward, put an arm around her shoulder.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Those messages," she cried. "They come from the very edge of all the universe… from the farthest rim of exploding space!”

Kingsley leaped to his feet.

"They are like the voices I heard before," she said. "But different, somehow. More kindly… but terrifying, even so. They think they are talking to someone else. To a people they talked to here on Pluto many years ago… I can't know how many, but it was a long, long time ago.”

Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.

"At first," Caroline whispered, "they referred to us by some term that had affection in it… actual kinfolk affection, as if there were blood ties between them and the things they were trying to talk to here. The things that must have disappeared centuries ago.”

"Longer ago than that," Kingsley told her. "That the thought bombardment is directed at this spot would indicate the things they are trying to reach had established some sort of a center, perhaps a city, on this site. There are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone was ever here, every sign of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, nothing to erode, nothing to blow away. A billion years would be too short a time — ”

"But who are they?" asked Gary. "These ones you were talking to. Did they tell you that?”

She shook her head. "I couldn't exactly understand. As near as I could come, they called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. 'That's a very poor translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it.”

She paused as if to marshal a definition. "As if they were self-appointed guardians of the entire universe," she explained. "Champions of all things that live within its space-time frame. And something is threatening the universe. Some mighty force out beyond the universe out where there's neither space nor time.”

"They want our help," she said.

"But how can we help them?" asked Herb.

"I don't know. They tried to tell me, but the thoughts they used were too abstract. I couldn't understand entirely. A few clues here and there.

They'll have to reduce it to simpler terms.”

"We couldn't even get there to help them," said Gary. "There is no way in which we can reach the rim of the universe. We haven't yet gone to the nearest star.”

"Maybe," suggested Tommy Evans, "we don't need to get there. Maybe we can do something here to help them.”

The red light was blinking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge of power.

Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. "The edge of space. But that's impossible!”

Gary laughed at him silently.

The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.

Gary felt the cold wind from space again, flicking at his face, felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.

Kingsley was jittery. And he was jittery. Who wouldn't be at a time like this? A message from the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area where time and space still surged outward into that no-man's-land of nothingness… into that place where there was no time or space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever, where there was no place and no circumstance and no possibility of event that could allow anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer was nothing. But what was nothing?

Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe, of these two things he constructed the sum total of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn't space?

Caroline was closing the dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

He watched the girl closely, saw her body tense and then relax. She bent forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.

Kingsley's face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his side.

Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things: that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few miles… or a few feet… distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.

Caroline was taking off her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.

"I understand a little better now," she said. "They are friends of ours.”

"Friends of ours?" asked Gary.

"Friends of everyone within the universe," said Caroline. "Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some outside danger — from some outside force.”

She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.

"They want us to come out to the edge of the universe," she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.

Herb's chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. "They want us…" he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.

Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley's nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.

"How do they expect us to get out there?" Kingsley asked.

"My ship is fast," Tommy Evans said, "faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!”

"A space-time warp," said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. "They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps….”

Caroline smiled at him. "That's the answer," she said.

"A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time.”

Kingsley's great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.

"How will we do it?" asked Herb. "There isn't a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we're the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you'd have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you'd have to make it stay that way.”

"Maybe the Engineers," said Evans.

"That's it," nodded Caroline. "The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions.”

"But," protested Kingsley, "could we understand? It would involve mathematics that are way beyond us.”

Caroline's voice cut sharply through his protest. "I can understand them,”

she replied, bitterly. "Maybe it will take a little while, but I can work them out, I've had… practice, you know.”

Kingsley was dumfounded. "You can work it out?”

"I worked out new mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship," she said. "They're only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point.”

She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.

"I had a thousand years to do it," she reminded him. "I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don't you see?

Something to keep from going crazy.”

Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto.

That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.

How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that was wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and in relaxation, leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think, to figure out things. And then one died and all one's thoughts were lost.

Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Lost and left for someone else to discover if he could… and probably lost forever.

But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. No time out for eating or for sleeping. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years, on one problem, had she wished.

He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew, what keys she had found out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And — she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.

She was talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion that she could be.

"You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector… but with a vast difference in one respect.”

"You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?" asked Kingsley.

She nodded. "Except that they wouldn't have used it for driving ships…

not then. For Jupiter was winning and everyone was desperate. They didn't care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon.”

"The geosector is no weapon," Kingsley declared flatly. "You couldn't use it near a planetary body.”

"But consider this," said the girl. "If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn't it?”

Herb whistled. "I'd say it'd be a weapon," he said, "and how!”

"They wanted to train it on Jupiter," Caroline explained. "It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well.”

"But think of what it would have done to the solar system," ejaculated Kingsley. "Even if the space warp hadn't distorted space throughout the entire system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the other planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth.”

The girl nodded.

"That's why I wouldn't turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space.”

"Why," said Gary, "you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn't built until a hundred years ago.”

Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn't laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.

He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.

"Young lady," rumbled Kingsley, "it seems to me that you don't need any help from these Cosmic Engineers.”

She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. "But I do," she said.

The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.

"The instructions," Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.

The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and the flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.

Gary's head swam at the thought of it… that slim wisp of a girl talking across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe, Talking and understanding but not perfectly understanding, perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about the equations she had written on the pad. The tip of her pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.

The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.

The pencil made corrections, added notes and jotted down new equations.

Never once hesitating. Then the light blinked off and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.

Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.

He looked questioningly at the girl.

"Do you understand this?" he rasped.

She nodded blithely.

He flung down the pad. "There's only one other person in the system who could," he said. "Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowing what it's all about. That's Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he's in a mental institution back on Earth.”

"Sure," yelled Herb, "he's the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a picture of him once.”

They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.

"I understand it well enough to start," she said. "I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened in my mind. But we can always do that when the time comes.”

"Those equations," said Kingsley, "represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom.”

"Probably," Caroline suggested, "the Engineers live on a large and massive world, so large that space would be distorted, where stresses such as are shown in the equations would be the normal circumstance. Beings living on such a world would soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably couldn't be developed because there'd be no such a thing as a plane surface.”

"What do they want us to do?" asked Evans.

"They want us to build a machine," said Caroline, "a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them.”

She glanced at Kingsley. "We'll need strong materials," she said. "Stronger than anything we know of in the system. Something that will stand up under the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space.”

Kingsley wrinkled his brow.

"I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl," she said. "Have you experimented with it here?”

Kingsley nodded. "We've stilled the electron-whirl," he said. "Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won't do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be maintained at close to absolute zero. The least heat and they overcome inertia and start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.

"If we could crystallize the atomic orbit after we had stopped it," he said, "we'd have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down.”

"We can do it," Caroline said. "We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their places.”

Kingsley snorted. "Is there anything," he asked, "that you can't do with space?”

Caroline laughed. "A lot of things I can't do, doctor," she told him. "A few things I can do. I was interested in space. That's how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I figured out ways to control it. It was something to do to while away the time.”

Kingsley glanced around the room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking to see if he had forgotten anything.

"Well," he rumbled, "what are we waiting for? Let us get to work.”

"Now, wait a second," interrupted Gary. "Do we want to do this? Are we sure we aren't rushing into something we'll be sorry for? After all, all we have to go on are the Voices. We're taking them on face value alone… and Voices don't have faces.”

"Sure," piped up Herb, "how do we know they aren't kidding us? How do we know this isn't some sort of a cosmic joke? Maybe there's a fellow out there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he's got us all stirred up.”

Kingsley's face flushed with anger, but Caroline laughed.

"You look so serious, Gary," she declared.

"It's something to be serious about," Gary protested. "We are monkeying around with something that's entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids playing with an atom bomb. We might set loose something we wouldn't be able to stop. Something might be using us to help it set up an easy way to get at the solar system. We might be just pulling someone's chestnuts out of the fire.”

"Gary," said Caroline softly, "if you had heard that Voice you wouldn't doubt. I know it's on the level. You see, it isn't a voice, really… it's a thought. I know there's danger and that we must help, do everything we can. There are other volunteers, you know, other people, or other things, from other parts of the universe.”

"How do you know?" asked Gary fiercely.

"I don't know how," she defended herself. "I just know. That's all.

Intuition, perhaps, or maybe a background thought in the Engineer's mind that rode through with the message.”

Gary looked around at the others. Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He looked at Herb.

"What the hell," said Herb. "Let's take a chance.”

Just like that, thought Gary. A woman's intuition, the burning zeal of a scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome spirit of mankind. No reason, no logic… mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.

Once a mad monk had stood before the crowds and shook a sword in air and shrieked invective against another faith, and, because of this, Christian armies, year after year, broke their strength against the walls of eastern cities.

Those were the Crusades.

This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Man again answering the clarion call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his puny strength, his little brain against great cosmic forces. Man… the damn fool… sticking out his neck.