The Past Through Tomorrow

Chapter 7

LAZARUS HAD his hands full to jockey the Chili into just the right position against the side of the New Frontiers; the overstrained meters made the smaller craft skittish as a young horse. But he did it. The magnetic anchors clanged home; the gas-tight seals slapped into place; and their ears popped as the pressure in the Chili adjusted to that in the giant ship. Lazarus dived for the drop hole in the deck of the control room, pulled himself rapidly hand over hand to the port of contact, and reached the passenger lock of the New Frontiers to find himself facing the skipper-engineer.

The man looked at him and snorted. "You again, eh? Why the deuce didn't you answer our challenge? You can't lock onto us without permission; this is private property. What do you mean by it?"

"It means," said Lazarus, "that you and your boys are going back to Earth a few days early-in this ship."

"Why, that's ridiculous!"

"Brother," Lazarus said gently, his blaster suddenly growing out his left fist, "I'd sure hate to hurt you after you were so nice to me... but I sure will, unless you knuckle under awful quick."

The official simply stared unbelievingly. Several of his juniors had gathered behind him; one of them sunfished in the air, started to leave. Lazarus winged him in the leg, at low power; he jerked and clutched at nothing. "Now you'll have to take care of him," Lazarus observed.

That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the passenger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He assigned two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.

"You aren't really hurt, bub," he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. "Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit's on the after bulkhead of the control room."

"This is piracy! You can't get away with this."

"Probably not," Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. "But I sort of hope we do." He turned his attention back to his job. "Shake it up there! Don't take all day."

The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.

Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger space of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. "Keep 'em moving, just anyhow. I've got to get for'ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me."

A man broke loose, from the stream and approached Barstow. "There's a ship trying to lock onto ours. I saw it through a port."

"Where?" demanded Lazarus.

The man was handicapped by slight knowledge of ships and shipboard terms, but he managed to make himself understood. "I'll be back," Lazarus told Barstow. "Keep 'em moving-and don't let any of those babies get away-our guests there." He holstered his blaster and fought his way back through the swirling mob in the bottleneck.

Number three port seemed to be the one the man had meant. Yes, there was something there. The port had an armor-glass bull's-eye in it, but instead of stars beyond Lazarus saw a lighted space. A ship of some sort had locked against it.

Its occupants either had not tried to open the Chili's port or just possibly did not know how. The port was not locked from the inside; there had been no reason to bother. It should have opened easily from either side once pressure was balanced... which the tell-tale, shining green by the latch, showed to be the case.

Lazarus was mystified.

Whether it was a traffic control vessel, a Naval craft, or something else, its presence was bad news. But why didn't, they simply open the door and walk in? He was tempted to lock the port from the inside, hurry and lock all the others, finish loading and try to run for it.

But his monkey ancestry got the better of him; he could not leave alone something he did not understand. So he compromised by kicking the blind latch into place that would keep them from opening the port from outside, then slithered cautiously alongside the bull's-eye and sneaked a peep with one eye.

He found himself staring at Slayton Ford.

He pulled himself to one side, kicked the blind latch open, pressed the switch to open the port. He waited there, a toe caught in a handihold, blaster in one hand, knife in the other.

One figure emerged. Lazarus saw that it was Ford, pressed the switch again to close the port, kicked the blind latch into place, while never taking his blaster off his visitor. "Now what the hell?" he demanded. "What are you doing here? And who else is here? Patrol?"

"I'm alone."

"Huh?"

"I want to go with you... if you'll have me."

Lazarus looked at him and did not answer. Then he went back to the bull's-eye and inspected all that he could see. Ford appeared to be telling the truth, for no one else was in sight. But that was not what held Lazarus' eye.

Why the ship wasn't a proper deep-space craft at all. It did not have an air1ock but merely a seal to let it fasten to a larger ship; Lazarus was staring right into the body of the craft. It looked like-yes, it was a "Joy-boat Junior," a little private strato-yacht, suitable only for point-to-point trajectory, or at the most for rendezvous with a satellite provided the satellite could refuel it for the return leg.

There was no fuel for it here. A lightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M'Lou in and out of the atmosphere while nursing his skin temperatures-but Lazarus wouldn't want to try it. No, sir! He turned to Ford. "Suppose we turned you down. How did you figure on getting back?"

"I didn't figure on it," Ford answered simply.

"Mmm-- Tell me about it, but make it march; we're minus on minutes."

Ford had burned all bridges. Turned out of office only hours earlier, he had known that, once all the facts came out, life-long imprisonment in Coventry was the best he could hope for-if he managed to avoid mob violence or mindshattering interrogation.

Arranging the diversion was the thing that finally lost him his thin margin of control. His explanations for his actions were not convincing to the Council. He had excused the storm and the withdrawing of proctors from the reservation as a drastic attempt to break the morale of the Families-a possible excuse but not too plausible. His orders to Naval craft, intended to keep them away from the New Frontiers, had apparently not been associated in anyone's mind with the Howard Families affair; nevertheless the apparent lack of sound reason behind them had been seized on by the opposition as another weapon to bring him down. They were watching for anything to catch him out-one question asked in Council concerned certain monies from the Administrator's discretionary fund which had been paid indirectly to one Captain Aaron Sheffield; were these monies in fact expended in the public interest?

Lazarus' eyes widened. "You mean they were onto me?"

"Not quite. Or you wouldn't be here. But they were close behind you. I think they must have had help from a lot of my people at the last."

"Probably. But we made it, so let's not fret. Come on. The minute everybody is out of this ship and into the big girl, we've got to boost." Lazarus turned to leave.

"You're going to let me go along?"

Lazarus checked his progress, twisted to face Ford. "How else?" He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not gratitude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. "Go for broke" took courage and character that most people didn't have. Don't grab a toothbrush, don't wind the cat-just do it! "Of course you're coming along," he said easily: "You're my kind of boy, Slayton."

The Chili was more than half emptied now but the spaces near the interchange were still jammed with frantic mobs. Lazarus cuffed and shoved his way through, trying not to bruise women and children unnecessarily but not letting the possibility slow him up. He scrambled through the connecting trunk with Ford hanging onto his belt, pulled aside once they were through and paused in front of Barstow.

Barstow stared past him. "Yeah, it's him," Lazarus confirmed. "Don't stare-it's rude. He's going with us. Have you seen Libby?"

"Here I am, Lazarus." Libby separated himself from the throng and approached with the ease of a veteran long used to free fall. He had a small satchel strapped to one wrist.

"Good. Stick around. Zack, how long till you're all loaded?"

"God knows. I can't count them. An hour, maybe."

"Make it less. If you put some husky boys on each side of the hole, they can snatch them through faster than they are coming. We've got to shove out of here a little sooner than is humanly possible. I'm going to the control room. Phone me there the instant you have everybody in, our guests here out, and the Chili broken loose. Andy! Slayton! Let's go."

"Later, Andy. We'll talk when we get there?'

Lazarus took Slayton Ford with him because he did not know what else to do with him and felt it would be better to keep him out of sight until some plausible excuse could be dreamed up for having him along. So far no one seemed to have looked at him twice, but once they quieted down, Ford's well-known face would demand explanation.

The control room was about a half mile forward of where they had entered the ship. Lazarus knew that there was a passenger belt leading to it but he didn't have time to look for it; he simply took the first passageway leading forward. As soon as they got away from the crowd they made good time even though Ford was not as skilled in the fishlike maneuvers of free fall as were the other two.

Once there, Lazarus spent the enforced wait in explaining to Libby the extremely ingenious but unorthodox controls of the starship. Libby was fascinated and soon was putting himself through dummy runs. Lazarus turned to Ford. "How about you, Slayton? Wouldn't hurt to have a second relief pilot."

Ford shook his head. "I've been listening but I could never learn it. I'm not a pilot"

"Huh? How did you get here?"

"Oh. I do have a license, but I haven't had time to keep in practice. My chauffeur always pilots me. I haven't figured a trajectory in many years."

Lazarus looked him over. "And yet you plotted an orbit rendezvous? With no reserve fuel?"

"Oh, that. I had to."

"I see. The way the cat learned to swim. Well, that's one way." He turned back to speak to Libby, was interrupted by Barstow's voice over the announcing system:

"Five minutes, Lazarus! Acknowledge."

Lazarus found the microphone, covered the light under it with his hand and answered, "Okay, Zack! Five minutes." Then he said, "Cripes, I haven't even picked a course. What do you think, Andy? Straight out from Earth to shake the busies off our tail? Then pick a destination? How about it, Slayton? Does that fit with what you ordered Navy craft to do? "No, Lazarus, no!" protested Libby. "Huh? Why not?"

"You should head right straight down for the Sun."

"For the Sun? For Pete's sake, why?"

"I tried to tell you when I first saw you. It's because of the space drive you asked me to develop."

"But, Andy, we haven't got it."

"Yes, we have. Here." Libby shoved the satchel he had been carrying toward Lazarus.

Lazarus opened it.

Assembled from odd bits of other equipment, looking more like the product of a boy's workshop than the output of a scientist's laboratory, the gadget which Libby referred to as a "space drive" underwent Lazarus' critical examination. Against the polished sophisticated perfection of the control room it looked uncouth, pathetic, ridiculously inadequate.

Lazarus poked at it tentatively. "What is it?' he asked. "Your model?"

"No, no. That's it. That's the space drive."

Lazarus looked at the younger man not unsympathetically. "Son," he asked slowly, "have you come unzipped?"

"No, no, no!" Libby sputtered. "I'm as sane as you are. This is a radically new notion. That's why I want you to take us down near the Sun. If it works at all, it will work best where light pressure is strongest."

"And if it doesn't work," inquired Lazarus, "what does that make us? Sunspots?"

"Not straight down into the Sun. But head for it now and as soon as I can work out the data, I'll give you corrections to warp you into your proper trajectory. I want to pass the Sun in a very fiat hyperbola, well inside the orbit of Mercury, as close to the photosphere as this ship can stand. I don't know how close that is, so I couldn't work it out ahead of time. But the data will be here in the ship and there will be time to correlate them as we go."

Lazarus looked again at the giddy little cat's cradle of apparatus. "Andy... if you are sure that the gears in your head are still meshed, I'll take a chance. Strap down, both of you." He belted himself into the pilot's couch and called Barstow. "How about it, Zack?" "Right now!"

"Hang on tight!" With one hand Lazarus covered a light in his leftside control panel; acceleration warning shrieked throughout the ship. With the other he covered another; the hemisphere in front of them was suddenly spangled with the starry firmament, and Ford gasped.

Lazarus studied it. A full twenty degrees of it was blanked out by the dark circle of the nightside of Earth. "Got to duck around a corner, Andy. We'll use a little Tennessee windage." He started easily with a quarter gravity, just enough to shake up his passengers and make them cautious, while he started a slow operation of precessing the enormous ship to the direction he needed to shove her in order to get out of Earth's shadow. He raised acceleration to a half gee, then to a gee.

Earth changed suddenly from a black silhouette to a slender silver crescent as the half-degree white disc of the Sun came out from behind her. "I want to clip her about a thousand miles out, Slipstick," Lazarus said tensely, "at two gees. Gimme a temporary vector." Libby hesitated only momentarily and gave it to him. Lazarus again sounded acceleration warning and boosted to twice Earth-normal gravity. Lazarus was tempted to raise the boost to emergency-full but he dared not do so with a shipload of groundlubbers; even two gees sustained for a long period might be too much of a strain for some of them. Any Naval pursuit craft ordered to intercept them could boost at much higher gee and their selected crews could stand it. But it was just a chance they would have to take... and anyhow, he reminded himself, a Navy ship could not maintain a high boost for long; her mile-seconds were strictly limited by her reaction-mass tanks.

The New Frontiers had no such old-fashioned limits, no tanks; her converter accepted any mass at all, turned it into pure radiant energy. Anything would serve-meteors, cosmic dust, stray atoms gathered in by her sweep field, or anything from the ship herself, such as garbage, dead bodies, deck sweepings, anything at all. Mass was energy. In dying, each tortured gram gave up nine hundred million trillion ergs of thrust. The crescent of Earth waxed and swelled and slid off toward the left edge of the hemispherical screen while the Sun remained dead ahead. A little more than twenty minutes later, when they were at closest approach and the crescent, now at half phase, was sliding out of the bowl screen, the ship-to-ship circuit came to life. "New Frontiers!" a forceful voice sounded. "Maneuver to orbit and lay to! This is an official traffic control order."

Lazarus shut it off. "Anyhow," he said cheerfully, "if they try to catch us, they won't like chasing us down into the Sun! Andy, it's a clear road now and time we corrected, maybe; You want to compute it? Or will you feed me the data?"

"I'll compute it," Libby answered. He had already discovered that the ship's characteristics pertinent to astrogation, including her "black body" behavior, were available at both piloting stations. Armed with this and with the running data from instruments he set out to calculate the hyperboloid by which he intended to pass the Sun. He made a half-hearted attempt to use the ship's ballistic calculator but it baffled him; it was a design he was not used to, having no moving parts of any sort, even in the exterior controls. So he gave it up as a waste of time and fell back on the strange talent for figures lodged in his brain. His brain had no moving parts, either, but he was used to it.

Lazarus decided to check on their popularity rating. He switched on the ship-to-ship again, found that it was still angrily squawking, although a little more faintly. They knew his own name now-one of his names-which caused him to decide that the boys in the Chili must have called traffic control almost at once. He tut-tutted sadly when he learned that "Captain Sheffield's" license to pilot had been suspended. He shut it off and tried the Naval frequencies... then shut them off also when he was able to raise nothing but code and scramble, except that the words "New Frontiers" came through once in clear.

He said something about "sticks and stones may break my bones-" and tried another line of investigation. Both by long-range radar and by paragravitic detector he could tell that there were ships in their neighborhood but this alone told him very little; there were bound to be ships this close to Earth and he had no easy way to distinguish, from these data alone, an unarmed liner or freighter about her lawful occasions from a Naval cruiser in angry pursuit.

But the New Frontiers had more resources for analyzing what was around her than had an ordinary ship; she had been specially equipped to cope unassisted with any imaginable strange conditions. The hemispherical control room in which they lay was an enormous multi-screened television receiver which could duplicate the starry heavens either in view-aft or view-forward at the selection of the pilot. But it also had other circuits, much more subtle; simultaneously or separately it could act as an enormous radar screen as well, displaying on it the blips of any body within radar range.

But that was just a starter. Its inhuman senses could apply differential analysis to doppler data and display the result in a visual analog. Lazarus studied his lefthand control bank, tried to remember everything be had been told about it, made a change in the set up.

The simulated stars and even the Sun faded to dimness; about a dozen lights shined brightly.

He ordered the board to check them for angular rate; the bright lights turned cherry red, became little comets trailing off to pink tails-all but one, which remained white and grew no tail. He studied the others for a moment, decided that their vectors were such that they would remain forever strangers, and ordered the board to check the line-of-sight doppler on the one with a steady bearing.

It faded to violet, ran halfway through the spectrum and held steady at blue-green. Lazarus thought a moment, subtracted from the inquiry their own two gees of boost; it turned white again. Satisfied he tried the same tests with view-aft.

"Lazarus-"

"Yeah, Lib?"

"Will it interfere with what you are doing if I give you the corrections now?"

"Not at all. I was just taking a look-see. If this magic lantern knows what it's talking about, they didn't manage to get a pursuit job on our tail in time."

"Good. Well, here are the figures..."

"Feed 'em in yourself, will you? Take the conn for a while. I want to see about some coffee and sandwiches. How about you? Feel like some breakfast?"

Libby nodded absent-mindedly, already starting to revise the ship's trajectory. Ford spoke up eagerly, the first word he had uttered in a long, time. "Let me get it. I'd be glad to." He seemed pathetically anxious to be useful.

"Mmm... you might get into some kind of trouble, Slayton. No matter what sort of a selling job Zack did, your name is probably 'Mud' with most of the members. I'll phone aft and raise somebody."

"Probably nobody would recognize me under these circumstances," Ford argued. "Anyway, it's a legitimate errand-I can explain that."

Lazarus saw from his face that it was necessary to the man's morale. "Okay... if you can handle yourself under two gees."

Ford struggled heavily up out of the acceleration couch he was in. "I've got space legs. What kind of sandwiches?"

"I'd say corned beef, but it would probably be some damned substitute. Make mine cheese, with rye if they've got it, and use plenty of mustard. And a gallon of coffee. What are you having, Andy?"

"Me? Oh, anything that is convenient,"

Ford started to leave, bracing himself heavily against double weight, then he added, "Oh-it might save time if you could tell me where to go." -

"Brother," said Lazarus, "if this ship isn't pretty well crammed with food, we've all made a terrible mistake. Scout around. You'll find some."

Down, down, down toward the Sun, with speed increasing by sixty-four feet per second for every second elapsed. Down and still down for fifteen endless hours of double weight. During this time they traveled seventeen million miles and reached the inconceivable speed of six hundred and forty miles per second. The figures mean little-think instead of New York to Chicago, a half hour's journey even by stratomail, done in a single heartbeat.

Barstow had a rough time during heavy weight. For all of the others it was a time to lie down, try hopelessly to sleep, breathe painfully and seek new positions in which to rest from the burdens of their own bodies. But Zaccur Barstow was driven by his sense of responsibility; he kept going though the Old Man of the Sea sat on his neck and raised his weight to three hundred and fifty pounds.

Not that he could do anything for them, except crawl wearily from one compartment to another and ask about their welfare. Nothing could be done, no organization to relieve their misery was possible, while high boost continued. They lay where they could, men, women, and children crowded together like cattle being shipped, without even room to stretch out, in spaces never intended for such extreme overcrowding.

The only good thing about it, Barstow reflected wearily, was that they were all too miserable to worry about anything but the dragging minutes. They were too beaten down to make trouble. Later on there would be doubts raised, he was sure, about the wisdom of fleeing; there would be embarrassing questions asked about Ford's presence in the ship, about Lazarus' peculiar and sometimes shady actions, about his own contradictory role. But not yet.

He really must, he decided reluctantly, organize a propaganda campaign before trouble could grow. If it did-and it surely would if he didn't move to offset it, and... well, that would be the last straw. It would be.

He eyed a ladder in front of him, set his teeth, and struggled up to the next deck. Picking his way through the bodies there he almost stepped on a woman who was clutching a baby too tightly to her. Barstow noticed that the infant was wet and soiled and he thought of ordering its mother to take care of the matter, since she seemed to be awake. But he let it go-so far as he knew there was not a clean diaper in millions of miles. Or there might be ten thousand of them on the deck above... which seemed almost as far away.

He plodded on without speaking to her. Eleanor Johnson had not been aware of his concern. After the first great relief at realizing that she and her baby were safe inside the ship she had consigned all her worries to her elders and now felt nothing but the apathy of emotional reaction and of inescapable weight. Baby had cried when that awful weight had hit them, then had become quiet, too quiet. She had roused herself enough to listen for its heartbeat; then, sure that he was alive, she had sunk back into stupor.

Fifteen hours out, with the orbit of Venus only four hours away, Libby cut the boost. The ship plunged on, in free fall, her terrific speed still mounting under the steadily increasing pull of the Sun. Lazarus was awakened by no weight. He glanced at the copilot's couch and said, "On the curve?"

"As plotted."

Lazarus looked him over. "Okay, I've got it. Now get out of here and get some sleep. Boy, you look like a used towel."

"I'll just stay here and rest."

"You will like hell. You haven't slept even when I had the com; if you stay here, you'll be watching instruments and figuring. So beat it! Slayton, chuck him out."

Libby smiled shyly and left. He found the spaces abaft the control room swarming with floating bodies but he managed to find an unused corner, passed his kilt belt through a handihold, and slept at once.

Free fall should have been as great a relief to everyone else; it was not, except to the fraction of one per cent who were salted spacemen. Free-fall nausea, likes seasickness, is a joke only to those not affected; it would take a Dante to describe a hundred thousand cases of it. There were anti-nausea drugs aboard, but they were not found at once; there were medical men among the Families, but they were sick, too. The misery went on.

Barstow, himself long since used to free flight, floated forward to the control room to pray relief for the less fortunate. "They're in bad shape," he told Lazarus. "Can't you put spin on the ship and give them some let-up? It would help a lot."

"And it would make maneuvering difficult, too. Sorry. Look, Zack, a lively ship will be more important to them in a pinch than just keeping their suppers down. Nobody dies from seasickness anyhow... they just wish they could."

The ship plunged on down, still gaining speed as it fell toward the Sun. The few who felt able continued slowly to assist the enormous majority who were ill.

Libby continued to sleep, the luxurious return-to-the-womb sleep of those who have learned to enjoy free fall. He had had almost no sleep since the day the Families had been arrested; his overly active mind had spent all its time worrying the problem of a new space drive.

The big ship precessed around him; he stirred gently and did not awake. It steadied in a new attitude and the acceleration warning brought him instantly awake. He oriented himself, placed himself flat against the after bulkhead, and waited; weight hit him almost at once-three gees this time and he knew that something was badly wrong. He had gone almost a quarter mile aft before he found a hide-away; nevertheless he struggled to his feet and started the unlikely task of trying to climb that quarter mile-now straight up-at three times his proper weight, while blaming himself for having let Lazarus talk him into leaving the control room.

He managed only a portion of the trip... but an heroic portion, one about equal to climbing the stairs of a ten-story building while carrying a man on each shoulder... when resumption of free fall relieved him. He zipped the rest of the way like a salmon returning home and was in the control room quickly. "What happened?"

Lazarus said regretfully, "Had to vector, Andy." Slayton Ford said nothing but looked worried.

"Yes, I know. But why?' Libby was already strapping himself against the copilot's couch while studying the astrogational situation.

"Red lights on the screen." Lazarus described the display, giving coordinates and relative vectors.

Libby nodded thoughtfully. "Naval craft. No commercial vessels would be in such trajectories. A minelaying bracket."

"That's what I figured. I didn't have time to consult you; I had to use enough mile-seconds to be sure they wouldn't have boost enough to reposition on us."

"Yes, you had to." Libby looked worried. "I thought we were free of any possible Naval interference."

"They're not ours," put in Slayton Ford. "They can't be ours no matter what orders have been given since I-uh, since I left. They must be Venerian craft."

"Yeah," agreed Lazarus, "they must be. Your pal, the new Administrator, hollered to Venus for help and they gave it to him-just a friendly gesture of interplanetary good will."

Libby was hardly listening. He was examining data and processing it through the calculator inside his skull. "Lazarus... this new orbit isn't too good."

"I know," Lazarus agreed sadly. "I had to duck... so I ducked the only direction they left open to me-closer to the Sun."

"Too close, perhaps."

The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.

At a distance of two and a half million miles the Sun beats out with a flare fourteen hundred times as bright as the worst ever endured in Death Valley, the Sahara, or Aden. Such radiance would not be perceived as heat or light; it would be death more sudden than the full power of a blaster. The Sun is a hydrogen bomb, a naturally occurring one; the New Frontiers was skirting the limits of its circle of total destruction.

It was hot inside the ship. The Families were protected against instant radiant death by the armored walls but the air temperature continued to mount. They were relieved of the misery of free fall but they were doubly uncomfortable, both from heat and from the fact that the bulkheads slanted crazily; there was no level place to stand or lie, The ship was both spinning on its axis and accelerating now; it was never intended to do both at once and the addition of the two accelerations, angular and linear, met "down" the direction where outer and after bulkheads met. The ship was being spun through necessity to permit some of the impinging radiant energy to re-radiate on the "cold" side. The forward acceleration was equally from necessity, a forlorn-hope maneuver to pass the Sun as far out as possible and as fast as possible, in order to spend least time at perihelion, the point of closest approach.

It was hot in the control room. Even Lazarus had voluntarily shed his kilt and shucked down to Venus styles. Metal was hot to the touch. On the great stellarium screen an enormous circle of blackness marked where the Sun's disc should have been; the receptors had cut out automatically at such a ridicubus demand.

Lazarus repeated Libby's last words. "'Thirty-seven minutes to perihelion.' We can't take it, Andy. The ship can't take it."

"I know. I never intended us top this close."

"Of course you didn't. Maybe I shouldn't have maneuvered. Maybe we would have missed the mines anyway. Oh, well-" Lazarus squared his shoulders and filed it with the might-have-beens. "It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget." He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking "space drive." "You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?"

"That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course I don't really know that it will work," Libby admitted. "There is no way to test it."

"Suppose it doesn't?'

"There are three possibilities." Libby answered methodically. "In the first place, nothing may happen."

"In which case we fry."

"In the second place, we and the ship may cease to exist as mattei as we know it."

"Dead, you mean. But probably a pleasanter way."

"I suppose so. I don't know what death is. In the third place, if my hypotheses are correct, we will recede from the Sun at a speed just under that of light."

Lazarus eyed the gadget and wiped sweat from his shoulders. "It's getting hotter, Andy. Hook it up-and it has better be good!"

Andy hooked it up.

"Go ahead," urged Lazarus. "Push the button, throw the switch, cut the beam. Make it march."

"I have," Libby insisted. "Look at the Sun."

"Huh? Oh!"

The great circle of blackness which had marked the position of the Sun on the star-speckled stellarium was shrinking rapidly. In a dozen heartbeats it lost half its diameter; twenty seconds later it had dwindled to a quarter of its original width.

"It worked," Lazarus said softly. "Look at it, Slayton! Sign me up as a purple baboon-it worked!"

"I rather thought it would," Libby answered seriously. "It should, you know."

"Hmm- That may be evident to you, Andy. It's not to me. How fast are we going?"

"Relative to what?"

"Uh, relative to the Sun."

"I haven't had opportunity to measure it, but it seems to be just under the speed of light. It can't be greater."

"Why not? Aside from theoretical considerations."

"We still see." Libby pointed at the stellarium bowl.

"Yeah, so we do," Lazarus mused. "Hey! We shouldn't be able to. I ought to doppler out."

Libby looked blank, then smiled. "But it dopplers right back in. Over on that side, toward the Sun, we're seeing by short radiations stretched to visibility. On the opposite side we're picking up something around radio wavelengths dopplered down to light."

"And in between?"

"Quit pulling my leg, Lazarus. I'm sure you can work out relatively vector additions quite as well as I can."

"You work it out," Lazarus said firmly. "I'm just going to sit here and admire it. Eh, Slayton?"

"Yes. Yes indeed."

Libby smiled politely. "We might as well quit wasting mass on the main drive." He sounded the warner, then cut the drive. "Now we can return to normal conditions." He started to disconnect his gadget.

Lazarus said hastily, "Hold it, Andy! We aren't even outside the orbit of Mercury yet. Why put on the brakes?"

'Why, this won't stop us. We have acquired velocity; we will keep it."

Lazarus pulled at his cheek and stared. "Ordinarily I would agree with you. First Law of Motion. But with this pseudospeed I'm not so sure. We got it for nothing and we haven't paid for it-in energy, I mean. You seem to have declared a holiday with respect to inertia; when the holiday is over, won't all that free speed go back where it came from?"

"I don't think so," Libby answered. "Our velocity isn't 'pseudo' anything; it's as real as velocity can be. You are attempting to apply verbal anthropomorphic logic to a field in which it is not pertinent. You would not expect us to be transported instantaneously back to the lower gravitational potential from which we started, would you?"

"Back to where you hooked in your space drive? No, we've moved."

"And we'll keep on moving. Our newly acquired gravitational potential energy of greater height above the Sun is no more real than our present kinetic energy of velocity. They both exist."

Lazarus looked baffled. The expression did not suit him. '~I guess you've got me, Andy. No matter how I slice it, we seemed to have picked up energy from somewhere. But where? When I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. Seems like you've violated it. How about it?"

"Don't worry about it," suggested Libby. "The so-called law of conservation of energy was merely a working hypothesis, unproved and unprovable, used to describe gross phenomena. Its terms apply only to the older, dynamic concept of the world. In a plenum conceived as a static grid of relationships, a 'violation' of that 'law' is nothing more startling than a discontinuous function, to be noted and described. That's what I did. I saw a discontinuity in the mathematical model of the aspect of mass-energy called inertia. I applied it. The mathematical model turned out to be similar to the real world. That was the only hazard, really-one never knows that a mathematical model is similar to the real world until you try it."

"Yeah, yeah, sure, you can't tell the taste till you bite it- but, Andy, I still don't see what caused it!" He turned toward Ford. "Do you, Slayton?"

Ford shook his head. "No. I would like to know... but I doubt if I could understand it."

"You and me both. Well, Andy?"

Now Libby looked baffled. ~'But, Lazarus, causality has nothing to do with the real plenum. A fact simply is. Causality is merely an old-fashioned-postulate of a pre-scientific philosophy."

"I guess," Lazarus said slowly, "I'm old-fashioned."

Libby said nothing. He disconnected his apparatus.

The disc of black continued to shrink. When it had shrunk to about one sixth its greatest diameter, it changed suddenly from black to shining white, as the ship's distance from the Sun again was great enough to permit the receptors to manage the load.

Lazarus tried to work out in his head the kinetic energy of the ship-one half the square of the velocity of light (minus a pinch, he corrected) times the mighty tonnage of -the New Frontiers. The answer did not comfort him, whether he called it ergs or apples.