Rogue Ship

35

In his excitement, Lesbee shook Tellier awake.

'Hey! I've figured out the true nature of the universe.'

The thin, intellectual face of his friend seemed to gain a little color. The pale, 'watery skin looked more alive. 'You've what?'

As Tellier sat up sleepily, Lesbee repeated his statement, adding: 'With what I've analyzed, we can do anything: land on Earth, retake the ship... anything.'

Tellier turned red. 'For God's sake, John,' he whispered, 'are you serious? You know what respect I have for your ideas when you tell me you mean them.'

'Listen – ' said Lesbee. 'First, the facts as we've seen them, or had them accurately described -'

He thereupon outlined the aspects of the long voyage related to the physics of space: the initial impossibility of accelerating particles to light velocity, the discovery through the Karn of the correct pattern -

He continued his summation: 'Hewitt's story of the Hope of Man arriving in the solar system in a special matter-state, which turned out to mean that the ship was traveling faster than light in some space of its own. Finally, as the ship reduced to light-speed, Hewitt was precipitated into the world of the ship -

'These are the facts, aren't they?' Lesbee demanded.

Tellier nodded, wide-eyed.

'Actually, there are more points,' Lesbee continued. 'For example, the time and pressure ratios were 973 to one. But the outside of the ship remained round. And the corridors inside were only three to one. I understand all that now.'

'But what's the practical value?'

'Watch!' said Lesbee.

He disappeared.

...Vanished inside a small craft millions of miles from anywhere... Tellier was frantically looking around, when he heard a sound behind him. He whirled. Lesbee stood there, a triumphant grin on his face.

The smile faded and was succeeded by a grim expression. 'We're going back to the ship!' Lesbee said.

'Whatever for?' Tellier was astonished.

The steely eyes gazed at him. 'For your wife – for mine – To make sure that the ship lands... We had to forget all that when it was life or death. But that doesn't apply any more.'

Tellier grasped his hand gratefully. 'Good man!' he said. Then he stepped back. 'For God's sake, tell me what it is you've discovered.'

'First, let's get started,' said Lesbee. He turned to the control board, went on, 'Now, theoretically, it should be possible to go there, literally, in a moment. The machine could. But remember what happened to Hewitt – the squeeze feeling. Human cells would not long survive instantaneity. So we've got to accept that life has to have a little time.'

'But– '

'The universe is a lie,' said Lesbee, a few moments later. 'That's the secret! Listen-'

It was a subjective plenum that he described then, consisting essentially of levels of motion. In that universe, life had got its start by holding onto bits and pieces of dead matter. From this precarious vantage point, like a bug clinging to a straw in a whirlpool, it surveyed the heavens and itself.

Tentatively, it explored the great flows of motion all around, enclosed itself in sealed containers so that it could confront the energy at the lower levels, at the higher levels, and beyond light-speed.

Here, in an environment of infinite expansion and zero size, was the real norm of time and space. 'Below' was the nether darkness of stopped motion and matter. 'Above' was the infinite, timeless light of foreverness.

As life in the sealed containers – spaceships – crossed the dividing line and entered the norm, the barriers went down. It was as if a man had crawled out of a black well, and now he stood on the meadow, and gazed into the bright blue of the sky. The laws governing the meadows were different from, though related to, those in the well.

Lesbee said, 'We could theoretically go instantly from no motion to millions of times the speed of light. But as I've said, from a practical point of view, the inner motions of cells hold us back a little. We fear at some level that the movement is threatening, and we grab for a handrail, and hold on for dear life.'

He finished, 'My thought is, naturally, that we respect that feeling of the cells, and proceed with caution, but proceed.'

Tellier stared at him blankly, 'I don't get it,' he said. 'All right, so the matter-state beyond light is the norm. I've been there, too. Nothing that I could notice happened to me.'

'That is because you lay very still during the whole time,' said Lesbee. 'That's because you weren't tuned in to a landing device that could operate on thought impulses.'

Tellier looked at him blankly. Then he blurted out: 'You don't mean to tell me you left that connected all this time?'

'No. But that's the one thing I reconnected when I was fooling around with the drive controls.'

As he explained it, he had been striving to think of every possible precaution before they left the ship. And so he had come early to the thought that the arrangement whereby the lifeboat-landing mechanism operated through the controls of the Hope of Man – exactly as he had used it with Dzing -would enable them to control the big vessel from a distance, if necessary.

'It was really all just scheming,' he confessed. 'I pictured Miller being used to follow us or something – and so I did one thing that might give us control at a key moment. I had no other purpose in mind than that. All the rest of this came when I was reviewing, among other things, what happened to Dzing when I operated that switch.'

'Didn't he just blow up?'

'That's what it looked like.'

'The corridor was a shambles; the explosion literally almost dissolved him. The pieces found were like pieces of fluff, without weight.'

'Don't you think that was odd?' Lesbee was smiling faintly but tautly.

'Well– ' Tellier looked baffled.

Gazing at the other's face, Lesbee realized anew how difficult it was for people to have creative thoughts. His own brain had evidently attained some peak of quick comprehension from his years of operating under the basically hostile control of the Brownes. Overstimulated by fear, rage, envy, feelings of the rightness of his cause... he had seen the whole picture, as he now understood it, in a single flash of vivid comprehension.

Tellier, lacking that background, would have to have the explanation spelled out for him.

Lesbee hesitated before the fact of the other's inability. For the first time he questioned his impulse to share with Tellier.

He had been sitting on the edge of the control chair. The doubt brought him to his feet. He stood, eyes narrowed, considering what it was he had to say.

What remained to tell was fantastic but simple, unquestionably related to the basic structure of the universe – but explainable. When he had activated Dzing's self-destruct system, he had destroyed the robot. The evidence was the shattered wall and the indented ceiling and floor of the corridor where it had happened. But the Karn had been at the norm period when it happened.

Throughout, Dzing had operated and functioned outside the space-time limitations of the Hope of Man. The robot had been unaffected by four g's of acceleration. That could not be explained by energy flows. Even more important, the light weight of what was left of the robot body fitted what Browne had said about the nature of matter at light-speed. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction Theory applied in all its remarkable meaning.

And so he had – while Tellier slept – reached into his pocket and pressed a control button of the landing mechanism; and he had let its energy amplify his thought.

Instantly, he was in the norm state of the universe, at light-speed and beyond. He had set the time ratio at 973 to one, because of Hewitt's experience. Lesbee decided that the cells of a human body – perhaps of all bodies – had some natural balance at that ratio. He preferred not to go counter to such a native state of being without a lot of experimentation.

That first time, he had stared down at Tellier, eager to wake him up, and tell him the great discovery. Now, the excitement faded, he changed his mind.

He turned, and faced his friend, and said quietly, 'Armand, I can see I've given you as much new data as your brain should absorb at one time.'

Tellier did not reply. The high excitement of what he had seen and heard was fading from him. There was something in his friend's manner, a certain hardness, the presence of which had always surprised him. It surprised him again now. Suddenly, he saw that such a momentous discovery by a man who, despite his many likable qualities, was at heart a dictator... was not a good thing.

Lesbee was speaking once more, his voice friendly, his manner kind, as always. He said, 'I'll tell you the rest at some later time.'

But he never did.