Time For The Stars

XVI "JUST A MATHEMATICAL ABSTRACTION"

That morning seemed a million years long. Vicky checked with me at the usual time, but I told her that the watch list was being switched around again and that I would get in touch with her later. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

"No, hon, we're just having a little reorganization aboard ship."

"All right. But you sound worried."

I not only didn't tell her that I was in a jam, I didn't tell her anything about the disaster. Time enough later, after it had aged—unless she found out from official news. Meanwhile there was no reason to get a nice kid upset over something she couldn't help.

Twenty minutes later Mr. Eastman showed up. I answered the door when he knocked and told him, "I'm not to have any visitors. Sorry."

He didn't leave. "I'm not a visitor, Tom; I'm here officially, for the Captain."

"Oh." I let him in.

He had a tool kit with him. He set it down and said, "The regular and special communication departments have been consolidated, now that we are so shorthanded, so it looks like I'm your boss. It won't make any difference, I'm sure. But I'm to make a reconnection on your recorder, so that you can record directly into the comm office."

"Okay. But why?"

He seemed embarrassed, "Well... you were due to go on watch a half hour ago. We're going to fix this so that you can stand your watches conveniently from here. The Captain is annoyed that I didn't arrange it earlier." He started unscrewing the access plate to the recorder.

I was speechless. Then I remembered something Uncle Steve had told me. "Hey, wait a minute!"

"Eh?"

"Oh, go ahead and rewire it, I don't care. But I won't stand any watches."

He straightened up and looked worried. "Don't talk like that, Tom, You're in enough trouble now; don't make it worse. Let's pretend you never said it. Okay?"

Mr. Eastman was a decent sort and the only one of the electronics people who had never called us freaks. I think he was really concerned about me. But I said, "I don't see how it can be worse. You tell the Captain that I said he could take his watches and—" I stopped. That wasn't what Uncle Steve would say. "Sorry. Please tell him this: 'Communicator Barlett's respects to the Captain and he regrets that he cannot perform duty while under arrest' Got it?"

"Now look here, Tom, that's not the proper attitude. Surely, there is something in what you say from a standpoint of regulations. But we are shorthanded; everybody has to pitch in and help. You can't stand on the letter of the law; it isn't fair to the rest."

"Can't I?" I was breathing hard and exulting in the chance to hit back. "The Captain can't have his cake and eat it too. A man under arrest doesn't perform duty. It's always been that way end it always will be. You just tell him what I said."

He silently finished the reconnection with quick precision.

"You're sure that's what you want me to tell him?"

"Quite sure."

"All right. Hooked the way that thing is now"—he added, pointing a thumb at the recorder—"you can reach me on if you change your mind. So long."

"One more thing—"

"Eh?"

"Maybe the Captain hasn't thought about it, since his cabin has a bathroom, but I've been in here some hours. Who takes me down the passageway and when? Even a prisoner is entitled to regular policing."

"Oh. I guess I do. Come along."

That was the high point of the morning. I expected Captain Urqhardt to show up five minutes after Mr. Eastman had left me at my room—breathing fire and spitting cinders. So I rehearsed a couple of speeches in my head, carefully phrased to keep me inside the law and quite respectful. I knew I had him.

But nothing happened. The Captain did not show up; nobody showed up. It got to be close to noon. When no word was passed about standing by for boost, I got in my bunk with five minutes to spare and waited.

It was a long five minutes.

About a quarter past twelve I gave up and got up. No lunch either. I heard the gong at twelve-thirty, but still nothing and nobody. I finally decided that I would skip one meal before I complained, because I didn't want to give him the chance to change the subject by pointing out that I had broken arrest. It occurred to me that I could call Unc and tell him about the failure in the beans department, then I decided that the longer I waited, the more wrong the Captain would be.

About an hour after everybody else had finished eating Mr. Krishnamurti showed up with a tray. The fact that he brought it himself instead of sending whoever had pantry duty convinced me that I must be a Very Important Prisoner

—particularly as Kris was unanxious to talk to me and even seemed scared of being near me. He just shoved it in and said, "Put it in the passageway when you are through."

"Thanks, Kris."

But buried in the food on the tray was a note: "Bully for you! Don't weaken and we'll trim this bird's wings. Everybody is pulling for you." It was unsigned and I did not recognize the handwriting. It wasn't Krishnamurti's; I knew his from the time when I was fouling up his farm. Nor was it either of the Travers's, and certainly not Harry's.

Finally I decided that I didn't want to guess whose it was and tore it in pieces and chewed it up, just like the Man in the Iron Mask or the Count of Monte Cristo. I don't really qualify as a romantic hero, however, as I didn't swallow it; I just chewed it up and spat it out. But I made darn sure that note was destroyed, for I not only did not want to know who had sent it, I didn't want anybody ever to know.

Know why? That note didn't make me feel good; it worried me. Oh, for two minutes it bucked me up; I felt larger than life, the champion of the downtrodden.

Then I realized what the note meant...

Mutiny.

It's the ugliest word in space. Any other disaster is better.

One of the first things Uncle Steve had told me—told Pat and myself, way back when we were kids—was: "The Captain is right even when he is wrong." It was years before I understood it; you have to live in a ship to know why it is true. And I didn't understand it in my heart until I read that encouraging note and realized that somebody was seriously thinking of bucking the Captain's authority... and that I was the symbol of their resistance.

A ship is not just a little world; it is more like a human body. You can't have democracy in it, not democratic consent at least, no matter how pleasant and democratic the Captain's manner may be. If you're in a pinch, you don't take a vote from your arms and legs and stomach and gizzard and find out what the majority wants. Darn well you don't! Your brain makes a decision and your whole being carries it out.

A ship in space is like that all the time and has to be. What Uncle Steve meant was that the Captain had better be right, you had better pray that he is right even if you disagree with him... because it won't save the ship to be right yourself if he is wrong.

But a ship is not a human body; it is people working together with a degree of selflessness that doesn't come easy—not to me, at least. The only thing that holds it together is a misty something called its morale, something you hardly know it has until the ship loses it. I realized then that the Elsie had been losing hers for some time. First Doc Devereaux had died and then Mama O'Toole and both of those were body blows. Now we had lost the Captain and most of the rest... and the Elsie was falling to pieces.

Maybe the new captain wasn't too bright, but he was trying to stop it. I began to realize that it wasn't just machinery breaking down or attacks from hostile natives that lost ships; maybe the worst hazard was some bright young idiot deciding that he was smarter than the Captain and convincing enough others that he was right. I wondered bow many of the eight ships that were out of contact had died proving that their captains were wrong and that somebody like me was right.

It wasn't nearly enough to be right.

I got so upset that I thought about going to the Captain and telling him I was wrong and what could I do to help? Then I realized that I couldn't do that, either. He had told me to stay in my room—no 'if's' or 'maybe's.' If it was more important to back up the Captain and respect his authority than anything else, then the only thing was to do as I had been ordered and sit tight.

So I did.

Kris brought me dinner, almost on time. Late that evening the speakers blared the usual warning, I lay down and the, Elsie boosted off Elysia. But we didn't go on, we dropped into an orbit, for we went into free fall right afterwards. I spent a restless night; I don't sleep well when I'm weightless.

I was awakened by the ship going into light boost, about a half gravity. Kris brought me breakfast but I didn't ask what was going on and he didn't offer to tell me. About the middle of the morning the ship's system called out: "Communicator Bartlett, report to the Captain." It was repeated before I realized it meant me... then I jumped up, ran my shaver over my face, decided that my uniform would have to do, and hurried up to the cabin.

He looked up when I reported my presence. "Oh, yes. Bartlett, Upon investigation I find that there is no reason to prefer charges. You are released from arrest and restored to duty. See. Mr. Eastman."

He looked back at his desk and I got sore. I had been seesawing between a feeling of consecrated loyalty to the ship and to the Captain as the head thereof, and an equally strong desire to kick Urqhardt in the stomach. One kind word from him and I think I would have been his boy, come what may. As it was, I was sore.

"Captain!"

He looked up. "Yes?"

"I think you owe me an apology."

"You do? I do not think so. I acted in the interest of the whole ship. However, I harbor no ill feelings, if that is of any interest to you." He looked back at his work, dismissing me... as if my hard feelings, if any, were of no possible importance.

So I got out and reported to Mr. Eastman. There didn't seem to be anything else to do.

Mei-Ling was in the comm office, sending code groups. She glanced up and I noticed that she looked tired. Mr. Eastman said, "Hello, Tom. I'm glad you're here; we need you. Will you raise your telepartner, please?"

One good thing about having a telepath run the special watch list is that other people don't seem to realize that the other end of each pair—the Earthside partner—is not a disembodied spirit. They eat and sleep and work and raise families, and they can't be on call whenever somebody decides to send a message. "Is it an emergency?" I asked, glancing at the Greenwich and then at the ship's clock, Vicky wouldn't check with me for another half hour; she might be at home and free, or she might not be.

"Perhaps not 'emergency' but 'urgent' certainly."

So I called Vicky and she said she did not mind. ("Code groups, Freckle Face,") I told her. ("So set your recorder on 'play back.' ")

"It's quivering, Uncle Tom. Agitate at will."

For three hours we sent code groups, than which there is nothing more tedious. I assumed that it was probably Captain Urqhardt's report of what had happened to us on Elysia, or more likely his second report after the LRF had jumped him for more details. There was no reason to code it so far as I was concerned; I had been there—so it must be to keep it from our telepartners until LRF decided to release it. This suited me as I would not have relished passing all that blood and slaughter, in clear language, to little Vicky.

While we were working the Captain came in and sat down with Mr. Eastman; I could see that they were cooking up more code groups; the Captain was dictating and Eastman was working the encoding machine. Mei-Ling had long since gone. Finally Vicky said faintly, "Uncle Tom, how urgent are these anagrams? Mother called me to dinner half an hour ago.

("Hang on and I'll find out.") I turned to the Captain and Mr. Eastman, not sure of which one to ask. But I caught Eastman's eye and said, "Mr. Eastman, how rush is this

stuff? We want to—"

"Don't interrupt us," the Captain cut in. "Just keep on transmitting. The priority is not your concern."

"Captain, you don't understand; I'm not speaking for myself. I was about to say—"

"Carry on with your work."

I said to Vicky, ("Hold on a moment, hon.") Then I sat back and said, "Aye aye, Captain. I'm perfectly willing to keep on spelling eye charts an night. But there is nobody at the other end."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it is dinner time and way past for my partner. If you want special duty at the Earthside end, you'd better coordinate with the LRF comm office. Seems to me that somebody has the watch list all mixed up."

"I see." As usual he showed no expression. I was beginning to think he was all robot, with wires instead of veins.

"Very well, Mr. Eastman, get Mr. McNeil and have him relieve Mr. Bartlett."

"Yes, Captain."

"Excuse me, Captain..."

"Yes, Bartlett?"

"Possibly you don't know that Unc's partner lives in Greenwich zone minus-two. It's the middle of the night there—and she is an old lady, past seventy-five. I thought maybe you would want to know."

"Mmm, is that right, Eastman?"

"I believe so, sir."

"Cancel that last order. Bartlett, is your partner willing to go on again after an hour's break for chow? Without clearing it with LRF?"

"I'll see, sir." I spoke to Vicky; she hesitated. I said, ("What is it, Freckle Face? A date with George? Say the word and I'll tell Captain Bligh he can't have you.")

"Oh, it's all right. I'll throw the switch on George. I just wish they would give us something besides alphabet soup. Okay, one hour."

("One hour, sugar plum. Run and eat your salad. Mind your waistline.")

"My waistline is just line, thank you."

"Okay, Captain."

"Very well. Please thank him for me."

He was so indifferent about it that I added a touch of my own. "My partner is a girl, Captain, not a "him." Her mother has placed a two-hour curfew on it. Otherwise it must be arranged with LRF."

"So. Very well." He turned to Eastman. "Can't we manage to coordinate these communication watches?"

"I'm trying, Captain. But it is new to me. .. and we have only three watchstanders left."

"A watch in three should not be too difficult. Yet there always seems to be some reason why we can't transmit. Comment?"

"Well, sir, you saw the difficulty just now. It's a matter of coordinating with Earth. Uh, I believe the special communicators usually arranged that themselves. Or one of them did."

"Which one? Mr. McNeil?"

"I believe Bartlett usually handled it, sir."

"So. Bartlett?"

"I did, sir."

"Very well, you have the job again. Arrange a continuous watch." He started to get up.

How do you tell the Captain he can't have his bucket ofpaint? Aye aye, sir. But just a minute, Captain—"

"Yes?"

"Do I understand you are authorizing me to arrange a continuous watch with LRF? Signed with your release number?"

"Naturally."

"Well, what do I do if they won't agree to such long hours for the old lady? Ask for still longer hours for the other two? In the case of my partner, you'll run into parent trouble; she's a young girl."

"So. I can't see why the home office hired such people."

I didn't say anything. If he didn't know that you don't hire telepaths the way you hire butchers I wasn't going to explain.

But he persisted. "Comment?"

"I have no comment, sir. You can't get more than three or four hours a day out of any of them, except in extreme emergency. Is this one? If it is, I can arrange it without bothering the home office."

He did not answer directly. Instead he said, "Arrange the best watch list you can. Consult with Mr. Eastman." As he turned to leave I caught a look of unutterable weariness on his face and suddenly felt sorry for him. At least I didn't want to swap jobs with him.

Vicky took a trick in the middle of the night, over Kathleen's objections. Kathleen wanted to take it herself, but the truth was that she and I could no longer work easily without Vicky in the circuit, at least not anything as difficult as code groups.

The Captain did not come in to breakfast and I got there late. I looked around and found a place by Janet Meers. We no longer sat by departments—just one big horseshoe table, with the rest of the mess room arranged to look like a lounge, so that it would not seem so empty.

I was just digging into scrambled yeast on toast when Mr. Eastman stood up and tapped a glass for attention. He looked as if he had not slept for days. "Quiet, please. I have a message from the Captain." He pulled out a sheet and started to read:

" 'Notice to All Hands: By direction of the Long Range Foundation the mission of this ship has been modified. We will remain in the neighborhood of Beta Ceti pending rendezvous with Foundation Ship Serendipity. Rendezvous is expected in approximately one month. Immediately thereafter we will shape orbit for Earth.

" 'F. X. Urqhardt, commanding Lewis and Clark.'"

My jaw dropped. Why, the silent creeper! All the time I had been lambasting him in my mind he had been arguing the home office into canceling our orders ... no wonder he had used code; you don't say in clear language that your ship is a mess and your crew has gone to pot. Not if you can help it, you don't. I didn't even resent that he had not trusted us freaks to respect the security of communications; I wouldn't have trusted myself, under the circumstances.

Janet's eyes were shining... like a woman in love, or like a relativistic mathematician who has just found a new way to work a transformation. "So they've done it!" she said in a hushed voice.

"Done what?" I asked. She was certainly taking it in a big way; I hadn't realized she was that anxious to get home.

"Tommie, don't you see? They've done it, they've done it, they've applied irrelevance. Dr. Babcock was right."

"Huh?"

"Why, it's perfectly plain. What kind of a ship can get here in a month? An irrelevant ship, of course. One that is faster than light." She frowned. "But I don't see why it should take even a month. It shouldn't take any time at all.

It wouldn't use time."

I said, "Take it easy, Janet. I'm stupid this morning—I didn't have much sleep last night. Why do you say that ship

... uh, the Serendipity... is faster than light? That's impossible."

"Tommie, Tommie... look, dear, if it was an ordinary ship, in order to rendezvous with us here, it would have had to have left Earth over sixty-three years ago."

"Well, maybe it did."

"Tommie! It couldn't possibly—because that long ago non body knew that we would be here now. How could they?"

I figured back. Sixty-three Greenwich years ago... mama, that would have been sometime during our first peak. Janet seemed to be right; only an incredible optimist or a fortune teller would have sent a ship from Earth at that time to meet us here now. "I don't understand it."

"Don't you see, Tommie? I've explained it to you, I know I have. Irrelevance. Why, you telepaths were the reason the investigation started; you proved that "simultaneity' was an admissible concept ,...nd the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist."

I felt my head begin to ache. "They don't? Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?"

"Just a mathematical abstraction, dear. Nothing more." She smiled and looked motherly. "Poor 'Sentimental Tommie.' You worry too much."

I suppose Janet was right, for we made rendezvous with F. S. Serendipity twenty-nine Greenwich days later. We spent the time moseying out at a half gravity to a locus five billion miles Galactic-north of Beta Ceti, for it appeared that the Sarah did not want to come too close to the big star. Still, at sixty-three light-years, five billion miles is close shooting—a very near miss. We also spent the time working like mischief to arrange and prepare specimens and in collating data. Besides that, Captain Urqhardt suddenly discovered, now that .we were expecting visitors, that lots and lots of things had not been cleaned and polished lately. He even inspected staterooms, which I thought was snoopy.

The Sarah had a mind reader aboard, which helped when it came time to close rendezvous. She missed us by nearly two light-hours; then their m-r and myself exchanged coordinates (referred to Beta Ceti) by relay back Earthside and got each other pinpointed in a hurry. By radar and radio alone we could have fiddled around for a week—if we had ever made contact at all.

But once that was done, the Sarah turned out to be a fast ship, lively enough to bug your eyes out. She was in our lap, showing on our short-range radar, as I was reporting the coordinates she had just had to the Captain. An hour later she was made fast and sealed to our lock. And she was a little ship. The Elsie had seemed huge when I first joined her; then after a while she was just the right size, or a little cramped for some purposes. But the Sarah wouldn't have made a decent Earth-Moon shuttle.

Mr. Whipple came aboard first. He was an incredible character to find in space; he even carried a briefcase. But he took charge at once. He had two men with him and they got busy in a small comportment in the cargo deck. They knew just what compartment they wanted; we had to clear potatoes out of it in a hurry. They worked in there half a day, installing something they called a "null-field generator," working in odd clothes made entirely of hair-fine wires, which covered them like mummies. Mr. Whipple stayed in the door, watching while they worked and smoking a cigar—it was the first I had seen in three years and the smell of it made me ill. The relativists stuck close to him, exchanging excited comments, and so did the engineers, except that they looked baffled and slightly disgusted. I heard Mr., Regato say, "Maybe so. But a torch is reliable. You can depend on a torch."

Captain Urqhardt watched it all, Old Stone Face in person.

At last Mr. Whipple put out his cigar and said, "Well, that's that, Captain. Thompson will stay and take you in and Bjorkenson will go on in the Sarah. I'm afraid you will have to put up with me, too, for I am going back with you."

Captain Urqhardt's face was a gray-white. "Do I understand, sir, that you are relieving me of my command?"

"What? Good heavens, Captain, what makes you say that?"

"You seem to have taken charge of my ship... on behalf of the home office. And now you tell me that this man... er, Thompson—will take us in."

"Gracious, no. I'm sorry. I'm not used to the niceties of field work; I've been in the home office too long. But just think of Thompson as a... mmm, a sailing master for you. That's it; he'll be your pilot. But no one is displacing you; you'll remain in command until you can return home and turn over your ship. Then she'll be scrapped, of course."

Mr. Regato said in a queer, high voice, "Did you say "scrapped," Mr. Whipple?" I felt my stomach give a twist. Scrap the Elsie? No!

"Eh? I spoke hastily. Nothing has been decided Possibly she will be kept as a museum. In fact, that is a good idea." He took out a notebook and wrote in it. He put it away and said, "And now, Captain, if you will, I'd like to speak to all your people. There isn't much time."

Captain Urqhardt silently led him back to the mess deck.

When we were assembled, Mr. Whipple smiled and said, "I'm not much at speechmaking. I simply want to thank you all, on behalf of the Foundation, and explain what we are doing. I won't go into detail, as I am not a scientist; I am an administrator, busy with the liquidation of Project Lebensraum, of which you are part. Such salvage and rescue operations as this are necessary; nevertheless, the Foundation is anxious to free the Serendipity, and her sister ships, the Irrelevant, the Infinity, and Zero, for their proper work, that is to say, their survey of stars in the surrounding space."

Somebody gasped. "But that's what we were doing!"

"Yes, yes, of course. But times change. One of the null-field ships can visit more stars in a year than a torchship can visit in a century. You'll be happy to know that the Zero working alone has located seven Earth-type planets this past month."

It didn't make me happy.

Uncle Alfred McNeil leaned forward and said in a soft, tragic voice that spoke for all of us, "Just a moment, sir. Are you telling us that what we did... wasn't necessary?"

Mr. Whipple looked startled. "No, no, no! I'm terribly sorry if I gave that impression. What you did was utterly necessary, or there would not be any null ships today. Why, that's like saying that what Columbus did wasn't necessary, simply because we jump across oceans as if they were mud puddles nowadays."

"Thank you, sir, " Unc said quietly.

"Perhaps no one has told you just how indispensably necessary Project Lebensraum has been. Very possibly—things have been in a turmoil around the Foundation for some time—I know I've had so little sleep myself that I don't know what I've done and left undone. But you realize, don't you, that without the telepaths among you, all this progress would not have taken place?" Whipple looked around. "Who are they? I'd like to shake hands with them. In any case—I'm not a scientist, mind you; I'm a lawyer—in any case, if we had not had it proved beyond doubt that telepathy is truly instantaneous, proof measured over many light-years, our scientists might still be looking for errors in the sixth decimal place and maintaining that telepathic signals do not propagate instantaneously but simply at a speed so great that its exact order was concealed by instrumental error. So I understand, so I am told. So you see, your great work has produced wondrous results, much greater than expected, even if they are not quite the results you were looking for."

I was thinking that if they had told us just a few days sooner, Uncle Steve would still be alive.

But he never did want to die in bed.

"But the fruition of your efforts," Whipple went on, "did not show at once. Like so many things in science, the new idea had to grow for a long time, among specialists... then the stupendous results burst suddenly on the world. For myself, if anyone had told me six months ago that I would be out here among the stars today, giving a popular lecture on the new physics, I wouldn't have believed him. I'm not sure that I believe it now. But here I am. Among other things, I am here to help you get straightened away when we get back home." He smiled and bowed.

"Uh, Mr. Whipple," Chet Travers asked, "just when will we get home?"

"Oh, didn't I tell you? Almost immediately... say soon after lunch."