Methuselah's Children

"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 strato-mail, 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 try 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 conn; 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, like 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 an 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-s
econds 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 Venetian 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, make "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 ridiculous 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 to pass 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 matter 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 had 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. It 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 relative 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 pseudo-speed 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're 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.

  8

  "First things first," interrupted Barstow. "I'm as fascinated by the amazing scientific aspects of our present situation as any of you, but we've got work to do. We've got to plan a pattern for daily living at once. So let's table mathematical physics and talk about organization."

  He was not speaking to the trustees but to his own personal lieutenants, the key people in helping him put over the complex maneuvers which had made their escape possible-Ralph Schultz, Eve Barstow, Mary Sperling, Justin Foote, Clive Johnson, about a dozen others.

  Lazarus and Libby were there. Lazarus had left Slayton Ford to guard the control room, with orders to turn away all visitors and, above all, not to let anyone touch the controls. It was a make-work job, it being Lazarus' notion of temporary occupational therapy. He had sensed in Ford a mental condition that he did not like. Ford seemed to have withdrawn into himself. He answered when spoken to, but that was all. It worried Lazarus.

  "We need an executive," Barstow went on, "someone who, for the time being, will have very broad powers to give orders and have them carried out. Hell have to make decisions, organize us, assign duties and responsibilities, get the internal economy of the ship working. It's a big job and I would like to have our brethren hold an election and do it democratically. That'll have to wait; somebody has to give orders now. We're wasting food and the ship is-well, I wish you could have seen the 'fresher I tried to use today."