Mars' orbit."
Ren smiled apologetically.
"I hadn't exactly planned on being a spaceman, second class. I don'tknow whether you know the system, but whether you do or not, it shouldsuffice to say that I had studied for five years to become a researchscientist, and failed. I decided to take out my disappointment byjoining up for two years. I planned on making another try at researchwhen I got out.
"Everything went along fine on the trip out. We were a very congenialcrew with a fine, human commander. He made it a point to get personallyacquainted with every member of the crew eventually. He seemed to takea particular liking to me for some reason. By the time we were half-wayout to Metapor, as we found out it was called later, I was an unofficialfirst mate or something with free run of the pilot room and theinstruments.
"I had guessed by now that when I enlisted they looked up my record andpassed the word along to Commander Dunnam to sell me on the idea of acareer as a spaceman.
"At any rate, I was in an ideal position to see all that went on firsthand. We were within three hundred thousand miles of Metapor when we gotthe first indication of the change in metaphysics. I discovered itmyself. I was helping the astrogator get the constants for theplanet ..."
* * * * *
"Take a look at the gravy board, Ren," Ford Gratrick, the astrogatorsaid. "What's she say?"
Ren looked at the fine black pointer on the gravity potentiometer. Itpointed to a spot just two marks above the number ten on the dial.
"Ten and two tenths," Ren read.
"That can't be right," Ford frowned. "At this distance that would makethis baby a super."
He came over and looked himself. While he was looking the pointer movedup to twenty and then down to six tenths.
"Must be out of order," Ford muttered. "Well, this'll give youexperience with emergency equipment. Break out the manual gravy dish,Ren."
It was a fine coil spring in a glass tube. Other glass tubes fastenedon, to make the length almost ten feet. At one g the spring with itsweight would stretch out to the bottom. From there to a ten thousandthof a g the spring rose up to a point half-way.
Ren put it together speedily, placing it in the wall clamps designed tohold it. The glass itself was graduated with the scale of gravitystrength. The cylindrical weight at the free end of the spring had aline on it that would coincide with the proper reading.
In practice it vibrated up and down so that it had to be read byestimation of the half-way point of the up and down motion.
Ren and Ford watched the red weight with its black line. It moved slowlyand uniformly from the bottom to the top of the scale, from a full g toten thousandth of a g, and back down again.
Meanwhile the gravity potentiometer (gravy board) was changing itsreading constantly and erratically.
Ford licked his lips nervously and said, "Don't know what the old man'llsay about this, but it looks like all we can say is that the thing _has_gravity."
"Why not call him and let him see for himself?" Ren asked.
Ford looked out the viewport at the round object in the distance andshook his head.
"I've got a hunch he knows it already," he said slowly. "The ship isprobably on a nonsense track and the automatic tracker is either tryingto find out what the law of gravity is, or is exploring for clues tolight aberration. One gets you ten he'll give me a buzz in anotherminute."
He was right. The phone rang almost at once. It was Hugh Dunnam himself,asking for the gravy reading.
"You'll have to see it to believe it," Ford Gratrick said over thephone. "The manual swing is uniform over the whole range. The gravyboard can't make up its mind where to settle at. It tries this and thatreading."
He listened briefly. "Yes, sir," he said, and hung up. "He wants you inthe pilot room, Ren," he added.
Ren started out of the central instrument room through the axis tube.
"Better be careful," Ford shouted after him. "No telling how thisgravitation will behave. Don't let it slam you against anything."
Ren heard his words. He had a sudden, crazy thought that it was his ownvoice, and that he, as he sped along through the ship, was in realityFord Gratrick. The thought startled him. He promptly forgot it.
There was a frown of concentration on his face. He was trying tovisualize a gravity pull whose intensity was not a single-valuedpressure but a uniform continuum of pressure values from a minimum to amaximum.
It was like--well, like having an air pressure in a car tire that wasn'tthirty pounds or thirty-two pounds, but every value from zero tothirty-five pounds.
It was like transforming the points and intervals on a line to a domainwhere there had previously been only points!
* * * * *
Hugh Dunnam was waiting for him when he arrived in the pilot room. Hisiron grey hair was mussed from exasperated hair-pulling. He jabbed afinger in the direction of the automatic pilot without speaking.
Ren saw that it had been cut out. The first mate was controlling theship manually. The robot mechanism was still turning out its datasheets, however. In five minutes Ren saw that the only consistent detailwas the distance of the ship from the planet.
Commander Dunnam watched him silently for several minutes. Finally Renlaid down the data sheets and looked at him with a slow smile.
"Well?" Dunnam asked.
"It reminds me of a kid I knew quite well when I was in grade school,"Ren said. "He was an incurable liar, so you could never take anything hesaid, but always had to figure out the truth yourself and act on itregardless of what he might claim to be the truth."
"You mean the instruments have all become liars?" Hugh Dunnam asked,amazed at the idea.
"No," Ren replied. "I don't think that. I think nature is the liar, in away. I mean she is according to our standards. We'll have to outguessher, that's all."
"Now you're cooking," Hugh exclaimed. "What would you suggest?"
"We know this planet has gravity," Ren replied. "There's no way ofknowing how much or how little. Suppose we kill our tangential speed andjust fall in? The gravity will take care of that, regardless of itsvalue or set of values."
"But we'll crash!" Hugh objected.
Ren took one of the report sheets and figured rapidly on its back.
"Unless I'm radically wrong," he said, "our speed of impact will beevery speed from zero to a thousand miles a minute. Not only that, nomatter how we try to land that will be the set of values for our speed.Naturally the thousand miles a minute will smash us flat, but the zerospeed will let us down easy."
"And so?" Hugh asked suspiciously.
"No matter how we go in," Ren smiled, "we'll smash the ship and killeverybody--and we'll land safely."
"Are you crazy?" Hugh snorted.
"I--I'm not quite sure," Ren said seriously. "I think that we've runacross a bit of matter that works from different basics than what we areused to. You might call it a different metaphysics. That's what itreally amounts to."
A pain of remembrance appeared on his face.
"That's why I didn't get my degree," he said softly. "I insisted that itmight be possible there were no absolute rules underlying all reality,but only relative rules that might be changeable. In other words, Iquestioned the validity of asserting that natural law was universal.They flunked me in stability."
"Yes, I know," Commander Dunnam said sympathetically. "One of the mostunjust rules of modern education in the opinion of many, but no way ofchanging it unless the educators themselves did it. Since they allpassed O.K. in stability, they think everyone else should. Maybe they'reafraid they would be considered unstable if they wanted to make such amajor change."
* * * * *
Ren glanced toward the screen that showed the magnified image of theinterstellar wanderer, and back again to the commander.
"Of course," he said, "I'm trying to use ordinary basics transposed ontothe basics of this system, which is wrong. Or it may be right. I
t mightbe better if we just turned around and went back. There's no way ofknowing ahead of time whether we'd be killed on landing or not."
"Look, Ren," the commander said seriously. "I like you. You--you're justabout like my son would have been today if he had lived. I'm just aspaceman. I depend on instruments. They don't work here. All of us arejust as helpless as if we didn't know the first thing about our trade.We can't go back without landing on this stray planet. If we tried totell them the reasons, I'd be retired and the whole crew would be stuckon various routine tub runs. Suppose you unofficially take charge. If weget killed--we all