"You're talking as though you knew that your plan would be successful," sneered Haedaecker.
"I believe it will be if I am given the opportunity to try."
"I tell you that it will not, and I forbid you to try." Haedaecker speared Paul with a glance from the icy eyes. "You understand, whether or not the experiment might be successful, if I hear of your trying it, you will be subjected to every bit of punitive action that the law permits."
Paul leaned back easily. "Now," he said with cool candor, "you're assuming that I have all intention of attempting it without official permission."
"I would not put it past you. In fact I believe you are."
"All predicated upon the fact that a footpad belted me and swiped my wallet?"
"Yes. For what other reason?"
"Theft is usually done for—"
Haedaecker stood up angrily. "I've heard enough," he snapped.
Haedaecker strode to the door and hurled it open with one swing of a powerful arm.
What happened next was not too remote a coincidence. It has happened to everybody, several times. Someone with the intention of entering a room will brace themselves, turn the doorknob, and thrust, only to have the door opened from the other side. The net result is that the muscular effort, tensed to strive against the mass and inertia of the door, will find its force expended against no resistance. Doors are pulled from one side and pushed from the other. If the shover pushes first, the would-be puller gets slapped in the hand with the doorknob, sometimes resulting in a broken finger or thumb. But if the puller pulls first, the shover finds himself catapulted forward by his own muscular effort. The results of this latter can be both comic or tragic.
In this case the result was a flurry of splash-printed silk, a bare white arm, a fine length of well-filled nylon, and the frightened cry of a woman.
Paul gulped.
Haedaecker's reflexes worked fast. He caught Nora Phillips before the girl went headlong to the floor and he stood her up, retaining a light grip on her waist until she got her bearings and her breath.
"Young woman," stormed Haedaecker angrily, "Are you used to bustling into closed conferences?"
Nora looked at Haedaecker with eyes large, luminous, and fetching. "I didn't know it was a closed conference," she said in her cool contralto. "I'm most sorry."
"Miss Phillips, Doctor Haedaecker. She is the woman I met last night, Doctor Haedaecker."
"What are you doing here?" demanded Haedaecker.
"I did not know this was any kind of conference," she explained. "I came to see Mister Grayson, and the guard said he was in this room, talking."
"Why didn't you wait?" stormed Haedaecker.
Nora smiled, wanly. "I was excited," she said. "It may have occurred to you, too, that the man who tried to steal Mister Grayson's spacecraft last night was not playing a game. Everything seemed wrong. He was not smart. I got to wondering why he just didn't get into the ship and take off.
"Well, less than fifteen minutes ago a flash came over the air. Among the news was the statement that the criminal killed last night in attempted spacecraft theft was Joel Walsh. He was an escapee from penitentiary in Antarctica. That explained it."
"How?" demanded Haedaecker, "does that explain anything?"
"Of course it does," said Nora. "He was in jail for ten years. He must have been sent away when he was about twenty. How many men are competent space pilots at that age?"
"Not many," agreed Paul.
"And being in jail for the last ten years, it's natural that he did not know how to run the ship."
"Um," grumbled Haedaecker.
"He probably wanted to stow away," said Nora. "Once he did that, he could hold a gun at the pilot's head and make the pilot do his bidding until he learned how to run the ship."
There was one very fine flaw in Nora's reasoning, but Paul did not want to belabor this point at this moment. He had not intended to push Haedaecker to the point of firing him for impertinence, insubordination, or rank carelessness. For on the "BurAst 33.P.G.1" was the Z-wave gear that Haedaecker's vindictive nature accused him of stowing away.
Paul laughed. "So much for your intrigue," he said.
Haedaecker glared at Paul angrily. "Your intrigue," he said with heavy emphasis on the first word. "Just let me find you trying it!"
Paul smiled crookedly and looked Haedaecker in the eye coldly. "Doctor Haedaecker," he said in a level, voice, "if I ever try it and fail, no one will know of my failure. If I try and succeed, I assure you that you will be able to do nothing to me."
Haedaecker nodded, his manner as cold as Paul's voice had been. The gage had been hurled, the swords measured and weighed. So far it was stalemate. But only until Paul Grayson really did something against the rules, large enough to let Haedaecker really clip him deep, lasting, and legally justifiable.
Haedaecker left and Paul turned to Nora Phillips. She smiled at him and asked: "What is this intrigue business, or is it a top secret?"
Paul shook his head. "I'd prefer to tell you after I return."
"Do that," she said. "I'd like to hear about it."
Paul pondered briefly. The obvious thing was to offer her a chance to look over his ship. He could do that, now that he had all of his credentials and papers back. But the Z-wave gear was evidence against him, and even though it was parked in a convenient locker, certain hunks of cable-endings and associated bits of equipment were a dead giveaway; the same sort of evidence in the shape of capped pipes will tell the observer that plumbing once existed in a certain room. Paul had no intention of trusting anybody at this moment.
Mayhap Nora's timely information about the deceased thief were true. Still, there was a hole in her tale. If the thief wanted only to stow away until take-off time, he would pick another spacecraft than the BurAst P.G.33-1. The registry number glowed in luminescent paint a yard high, and matched the numbers on his identification card. Certainly no half-idiot would try to stow away in an official ship that was almost certain to be investigated as soon as the hue-and-cry was heard.
He suspected Haedaecker's hand in this; anything to keep Haedaecker's Theory in high gear, to keep Haedaecker top man in his field. He might as well suspect Nora, too. At least until motive or innocence could be shown.
He decided to lie glibly. "Normally I could take you aboard and show you the crate," he said. "But this is an experimental run and subject to security, though I'll not be able to explain why they think it so."
Nora laughed and shook her head. "Space ships are cold, powerful, and dangerous things to me," she said. "I'd feel uncomfortable on one of them."
"Then let me show you the elecalc."
"What?"
"Elecalc. Short word for electronic calculator. I'm here to get an aiming point for my trip tonight."
"Now that I would like to see," said Nora, hooking an arm in Paul's.
"I'm pointing for Alpha Centauri," said Paul. "And so that's what we calculate for."
Nora looked at the bays of neat equipment and shook her head. "Why not aim at it and run?" she asked. "Surely you do not need this billion dollars' worth of stuff to point out your destination."
"We do," objected Paul. "You see, if I took off with my telescope pointed along the axis of drive with the cross-hairs pointing at Alpha Centauri, I'd be heading for the star where it was four years ago. I intend to be on the way for nine days. So I'll want to point the nose of the ship at the spot where Alpha will be nine days in the future instead of four years in the past. Since Sol and Alpha drift in space, the motion and velocities of both systems must be taken into account, a correction-angle found, and then used to aim my ship. My telescope will angle away from the ship's axis by that correction-angle. Add to that the fact that I am taking off from earth, which will give me some angular velocity and some rotational velocity differing from an hypothetical take-off from Sol itself. Furthermore, I want Proxima Centauri instead of Alpha, and that must be taken into consideration too.
"Then there is the question of velocity and time. We cannot see when we are exceeding the velocity of light. We must run at so many light-velocities for so many seconds. A minor error in timing or velocity will create a rather gross error in position at the end of the run."
"Oh," said Nora, but her tone indicated a lack of comprehension.
Paul smiled. "One second of error at one light-velocity equals a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles of error. One second of error at a hundred times the velocity of light equals eighteen millions of miles error. Not much as cosmic distance goes, but a long way to walk."
Nora understood that, and said so.
Grayson's data had been handed to him by Haedaecker. But apparently the long-range calculations that had been temporarily halted were still halted, for the operator was taking this opportunity of feeding some future flight-constant information to the big machine.
It was not a complex calculation as some computations may go, but there were a myriad of factors. Terran latitude and longitude, the instant of take-off as applied to the day and the year, an averaging of previous dispersion-factors noted from previous trips, velocities, vector angles, momentum, and others, all obtained from tables and entered in the machine before the start lever was pulled. The machine mulled the information over, tossed electrons back and forth, chewed and digested a ream of binary digits, and handed forth a strip of paper printed with an entire set of coordinates in decimal angles.
Paul showed Nora his folder of data. "The rest," he said, "is up to me."
He led Nora from the computation room, intending to hit the dining room for coffee. Half-way across the lobby of the administration building he was hailed by the autocall. He went to the telephone.
It was Stacey.
"I've a couple of things to let you think over," said Stacey.
"So?"
"I've been on the job. I haven't much, but there are a few items you might mull over."
"Shoot."
"One. Your deceased thief was an ex-convict, escaped from the penal colony on Antarctica."
"This I've heard."
"Then I suppose you know that the guy was cashiered from the Neoterra run for smuggling."
"Huh?" blurted Paul.
"An ex-pilot, tossed out on his right ear for conduct hardly becoming a safecracker and a thief, let alone an officer and a gentleman."
"That I didn't know. How long ago?"
"Five years, almost."
It was not quite the ten that Nora had claimed.
"Well, that makes it—"
"That ain't all," came Stacey's voice. "The weapons carried by the Spaceport guards are regulation Police Positives. Our erstwhile felon was shot once, right between the eyes, with a forty-five, which according to all of the expert opinion, came from an automatic at a distance of three feet, plus or minus six inches. Know what that means?"
"I'm just digesting the information now. You tell me."
"It means that the ex-crook was killed by a party or parties unknown, someone other than one of the guards. Furthermore, he was facing his executioner, not taking it on the lam. How do you make that?"
"It doesn't make good sense."
"Sure it does. It keystones nicely. Men of that calibre are often chilled because they fumble a job and the mainspring doesn't enjoy the prospect of having a fumbler running around with information that might lead to the capture, arrest, conviction, and/or demise of aforementioned mainspring. They made one error. They should have used a thirty-eight revolver instead of a forty-five automatic. The forty-five is a gangster's weapon. And they should have drilled their ex-companion from behind between the scapulae to make it look as though the guards were better shots than they really are."
"That's food for thought," said Paul.
"That isn't all," said Stacey. "Here's one more bit of information that may be either juicy or full of sawdust depending upon how you taste it. Your girl friend, Nora Phillips was born and raised on Neoterra."
"You're certain of that?"
"So the Bureau of Vital Statistics claims."
"But how—?"
"Negative evidence, my fine scientist. Negative evidence. I offer you two alternatives. Either she was born on Neoterra, or she is employing an alias, pseudonym, or nom de jour." Stacey's French lacked a certain vocabulary, but it was none the less to the point. "She is certainly not born Nora Phillips of Terra. I'll let you pick your choice. But enough of that. A couple of hours ago she received a telephone call. Nice position she must have. She chinned for about three minutes and then leaped to her feet and took off like jet propelled. Didn't bother to say anything to the management of the joint at all. Then—"
"Where does she work?" asked Paul.
"Timothy, McBride, and Webster, Attorneys-at-Law. We couldn't tap their telephone, but we had a lip-reader peering at her through a telescope from a room in the building opposite hers."
"What did he catch?"
"Nothing, she just listened, and then took off. And can that dame drive! If we didn't have an idea of where she was going after the first few minutes, my man would have lost her for certain. She with you now?"
"Uh-huh."
Paul thought fast. Just what unearthly reason why people would try to stop his plans for creating voice-fast communications with Neosol, Paul could not fathom. Obviously there was one faction working against him. But how had they—
Paul paled.
Had the criminal hoped to lay Paul low enough to keep him quiet until the criminal could take off in Paul's place? True identification would be impossible once the crook were in space. But what could he accomplish? Certainly—
Suppose the thief that clipped him intended to place Paul in a position where he could be captured easily. To take Paul's place to perform certain acts in Paul's name, while Paul was held captive. Then, once these acts were consummated Paul could be found in the wreck of a spacecraft or the ruin of a radio beacon on Proxima Centauri I.
But why? Columbus had been kicked around for having screwy ideas, and the Brothers Wright had been thoroughly laughed-at. But people did not try to murder characters who had cockeyed ideas. Of course, there was Galileo, but Galileo had publicized his screwy ideas, whereas Paul Grayson's theories were known to very few.
But Nora Phillips could not be held as part of that particular mob. It seemed to Paul that the woman had done a fine job towards keeping Paul hale, hearty, healthy, and imbued with ideas available only to a man in the finest of health of mind and body. If Nora belonged to some group intent on stopping Paul Grayson, she was working against them, too. For she had done a fine job of smoothing the headache out of his skull with fingers that acted with experience and practise.
On the other hand, Nora Phillips had behaved as though she wanted Paul to succeed, and she acted—if this were an act—as though she enjoyed her work.
So what had really happened last night when Paul Grayson was clipped unconscious?
Had Nora forestalled them—them?
Nora was quite a woman. Her loveliness was not of the untouchable, fragile, bandbox variety; perfection that must not be marred by a misplaced hair or a wrinkle in the frock—or a clue of rouge, printed offset from her own ripe lips to her own smooth cheek by Paul. Nora was all-desirable woman, and neither complete dishabille nor minor imperfection would mar her appeal. Paul recalled the lithe slenderness of her body. Her sculptured arms were molded with the smooth, well balanced muscle of fine tonus. Her waist was slender but not too soft—
"Hey! Are you there?"
"Yeah, Stacey. I was thinking."
"Don't think so hard."
"Look, Stacey. Can you tell me whether the man who clipped me turned up with scratches on his face?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"Just a loose end."
"I might be able to find out."
"Take a swing at it; but it's not too important."
"Okay, Paul. Have I given you something to think about?"
"More than," said Paul soberly. He hung up, turned, and saw the guard of the previous evening standing near by, about to go on duty. Paul went over and asked: "Hi!"
"Hello. Say, I'm sorry about last night—"
"Forget it, you were doing your duty. But can you tell me: Did the guy who used my identification last night have any scratches on his face?"
The guard frowned in thought. "All he had was some well-applied make-up, and a fine job it was, too. He looked me right in the eye."
"No marks?"
"Not a trace."
Paul smiled and went back to Nora, thinking furiously. Something must have interfered with their little plan. He looked at Nora, lissome, lovely, as lithe as a tiger. All desirable—
But maybe it might be a good idea for him to learn her desires, to ascertain her limit before he took any liberties with her beautiful white body. Intelligent women did not scream or faint these days, nor did they rake their attacker with fingernails. They employed Judo.
Now, if Nora Phillips knew Judo, it was plausible that the erstwhile footpad instead of finding an inert victim and an hysterical woman, discovered that the woman was capable of defending her outraged dignity, revenging their cowardly attack, and thwarting any further plans the criminal held for them both. It would explain in part why the criminal's little idea did not culminate as expected.
If Nora Phillips knew Judo.
Paul smiled faintly. He had not changed his mind about Nora Phillips; she was still the type of woman that would react unfavorably to any crude attempt at approach.
Regardless of whether her interest in him were an act, swift passion, or the awakening of tender love, Paul knew that she would not employ the punishing Judo holds upon him, if she knew Judo. On the other hand, Paul believed that instinct might react faster than intellect, and that her first instinctive move would give her away.
So Paul took her hand as he came close to her. He drew her forward, his free arm gliding towards her waist and around it.
Nora's free hand moved forward, upward, touched his cheek, and then went on around his neck. The hand that he held came free and joined the other. She was warm and supple in his arms and her lips were soft and clinging.
It was a satisfying emotional experience. Intellectually it proved nothing that had not been empirical knowledge for a couple of millions of years.
Paul would never learn whether Nora knew Judo by that method. He abandoned his primary intrigue for the moment and indulged in one of his favorite indoor sports.
Then she moved back a bit, and Paul's hands slipped to either side of her waist. "I could learn to like this sort of thing," he said.
Nora looked up into his eyes. Her own eyes were a trifle dreamy, but a trace of smile lurked in the deep corners of her mouth. "But how do I know you'll be true to me?" she asked him in a voice that sounded like pure soap opera. "In space—"
"I've a dame in every port," he told her. "I'm true to 'em all."
"But why so many?" chuckled Nora.
"Variety." Paul let go of Nora's waist and she stepped back a bit. He turned around and started leading her the rest of the way towards the coffee shop. "I've a couple of hours left," he said. "I'd prefer to soak up some dinner in candlelight, with music, et al. But Ptomaine Joe's is handy. I've hit so many snags so far that I'm inclined to find me an advantage and then sit on it until I'm safe in space."
Nora shuddered a bit. "Safe in space," she said softly. "That's a strange thing to say."
"Why?" he asked.
"So far out there, away from the friendly earth; nothing solid to stand upon, nothing to—"
Paul laughed. "No footpads to raise lumps on the skull, no taxicabs to dodge, no—"
"No women to kiss?"
"You've convinced me! But I'm baffled by you. What kind of job do you hold?"
"Why?"
"It isn't everybody that can pick up and leave their work for an idle afternoon."
"Oh," and her laugh was genuine. "I'm librarian for a large office of lawyers. I can get away because of polite confusion. No matter who misses me, he assumes that I am looking up a batch of stuff for one of the others. There are so many of them that they couldn't possibly get their heads together close enough to check up. Actually I'm doing just that often enough so that I can play hookey once in a while and not get caught."
Paul laughed with Nora. He felt at ease with her and her presence made him forget all of the niggling little questions that bothered him. Time passed swiftly enough to surprise them both when the announcer called the time and number of Paul's spaceflight.
"This is it," he said ruefully.
"So it is," she agreed. "There's another day."
"I'll call for it when I get back."
"Do that," she said. It was not a tone of command. It was more a tone of absolute agreement. It pleased him.
"Raging Vegan Gorgons couldn't stop me," he chuckled. He reached for her and she went into his arms forward for a good-bye kiss. Paul made the most of it; gave it all he knew how to give, and for his efforts he received a pleasant promise for the future in return.
Nora leaned back in his arms, took his hands from around her waist, and turned him to face the spaceport door.
"It's that way," she said in a throaty voice. She gave him a gentle shove. He went through the door and out upon the spacefield, walking across the sandy floor towards the spacecraft numbered BurAst P.G.1.
Actually, the spacecraft was quite close to the shape of a hen's egg. It stood upon its smaller end, supported by four heavy vanes that held the drivers. Above them, the bulge of the hull swelled out in the gentle curve, and about the place where the soft-boiled-egg gourmet cuts the top off of his breakfast food, the hard metal stopped and the upper curving dome of the spacecraft was made of window. Not a clear expanse of glass, but more like the greenhouse roof. Small facets set between rigid girders in a neat and efficient pattern. The girders were reasonably heavy, because each one held shutter flaps that would snap closed if the pane of glass beside it became pierced because of contact with cosmic detritus.
At the very top of this dome the glass was a smooth sheet, polished and unbroken. This section, a full ten feet in diameter, was optically perfect. For through this dome of glass the spacecraft was aimed.
If the stars actually were where they looked to be to the eye, there would have been something less of a problem. A set of precision cross-hairs set along the axis of ship's drive could be used as a line-of-sight aiming point. Like a ship near the shore, the bow could be aimed at the pier, the power set, and then the rest would take care of itself.
But stars move in their heavenly way. A poor ten to fifty miles per second can become a rather awesome gulf after four years. Alpha Centauri is a little more than four light years away. That means that the star as seen by the naked eye will be quite some distance from where it really is. Students of trigonometry will understand; a second of arc will subtend a cosmic sine at the end of four light years.
To help the pilot, the spotter was used. The spotter was a tender spacecraft that roamed the solar system far out from Sol. Two light hours away it was. When one of the star ships was scheduled to fly, the elecalc would compute the course and the big telescopes would direct the spotter spacecraft via the Z-wave until the distant ship was directly in the line of aim between Terra and the calculated spot in the heavens where the distant star would be at the end of the ship's flying time. Once the spotter was properly located, two hours before the take-off time the spotter would emit an atomic spotlight for a half hour.
Two hours later the light from this immense searchlight would arrive at Terra to provide an aiming point for the space pilot. The ship could take off on this line of sight, aiming for it directly. Of course, by the time the space travelling ship reached the spot, the spotter craft would have moved aside; the light would have ceased, and the star ship was heading for deep space with nothing to impede its course.
Paul was handicapped. The spotter was not available. Lacking the spotter to use as a point of aim, Paul was forced to choose the aiming telescope in the dome instead of the more precise cross-hairs on the optical-glass. This added to the error, and to add once more to that error was the fact that spacecraft in flight tend to revolve along their driving axis so that the angle between the true line of flight and the aiming point changed in angle. Paul would have to use Alpha Centauri itself as a point-of-aim. The correction-angle was supplied by the observatory, and applied to the aiming telescope in the dome.
A lot of minute errors that added up to a gross at the end of flight. Basically, the job of the galactic survey would remove one of the errors: That of the crude measurement of distance between the stars themselves.
Paul was a good pilot. He cut the aiming-star close and watched it in the 'scope until it disappeared. He was now in that blackness that surrounded every ship during the faster-than-light speed. He was on his way. Nothing to do for two weeks but wait for the course to end. Nothing to do but to sit and think, and plan, and dream. To think of Haedaecker and the Z-wave; to plan for the future when his discoveries brought him fame and fortune; to dream of Nora Phillips.
Paul began to hum, and after a moment or two the humming broke out into a full-throated, but dubious baritone:
"Round and round and round go the deuteronsRound and round the magnet swings 'emRound and round and round go the deuteronsSMACK! in the target go the microamps!"
"Round and round and round go the deuteronsRound and round the magnet swings 'emRound and round and round go the deuteronsSMACK! in the target go the microamps!"
"Round and round and round go the deuterons
Round and round the magnet swings 'em
Round and round and round go the deuterons
SMACK! in the target go the microamps!"
Buried in the loose, powdery dust that covered Proxima Centauri I, a spacecraft lay concealed. Ten miles across the blazing flatlands of dust, Galactic Survey Station I was clearly visible. From the station the spacecraft blended so well with the dust that it could not be seen. Only a sharp observer who knew where to look and what to look for could have seen the turret of the spacecraft lofting above the dusty plains. The long-barrelled machine rifle would have been invisible to the sharpest of eye.
Several miles to the other side of the Survey Station there were a group of furrows kicked-up in the plain where test-bursts from the machine rifle had landed.
A television detector was set upon the area between the concrete landing deck and the main spacelock of the Survey Station so that any erect, moving object that intersected the detector-line would cause the machine rifle to fire so that its projectiles would pass through the moving object.
The man in the hidden spacecraft had been playing solitaire for day upon day; the record of his score on the wall of the ship was long—and not too honest.
Eventually the detector-alarm rang and he dropped his cards. He ran to shut off all of the detecting equipment because detecting equipment itself could be in turn detected and he wanted no reprisals. He set his eye to the telescope and watched the new arrival.
Paul Grayson landed his ship on the concrete apron and donned space attire for his walk across the airless planet to the Station. He came from his ship—and though he had seen it countless times before—Paul paused to view the beauty of the airless midnight sky. He looked for Sol, hidden in the starry curtain. He looked at Proxima, a tiny star but utterly brilliant at this distance. It blinded him; luckily the beautiful binary of Alpha Centauri was behind the little planet and he was saved the hurt of looking at that brilliance.
With the same thrill of anticipation he had enjoyed for day upon day now, Paul turned from his ship and started to walk toward the Station. What he might learn there would change the thinking of the galaxy. It was the culmination of years of thought and experimentation; it was the crux of the matter, the final evidence that would give Paul the weight and the conviction. From here he could go on and up; here, now, at any rate soon, was the incontrovertible truth.
He checked his gear thoroughly, but it was force of habit caused by the desire of his own safety. He had planned well. He had forgotten nothing.
He chuckled happily.
He had forgotten nothing. The lissome sweetness of Nora Phillips and the promise of complete fulfillment was sweet recollection.
When Paul returned to Terra he would have the world on the palm of his hand—to hold tightly and give to Nora.
His eye caught a bit of glitter in the dust of Proxima I and he stooped to pick it up because Nora might like a crystal from a far planet.
He did not hear the passage of bullets over his bent back because Proxima I possessed no air to carry their sound.
He could not hear the cursing of the man in the spacecraft hidden ten miles across the dusty plain, nor could he see the frantic effort to readjust the sighting mechanism of the machine rifle. Five thousand feet per second was the muzzle velocity of the rifle in space and because there was no impeding air, the bullets had taken two seconds to travel from gun to target position. In those two seconds Paul bent over, causing the burst of fire to miss.
There was no second fullisade. The enemy had had too little time to readjust his sights. The enemy had also been overconfident, so had not prepared for a miss.
The radio was silent. Only the crackle of cosmic static came from the speaker to show that it was alive. The Z-wave was even more silent for there was no interfering cosmic energies to make Z-wave static.
Paul set up the test equipment and checked both. They were obviously 'hot' and awaiting the arrival of some signal in order to burst into full-throated life.
Then he settled back to wait. How long, Paul could not tell. Actually, the measurement of this matter was the basic reason for Paul's being here. The books set Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light years from Sol. Ergo a beam of light or a radio wave should take 4.3 years from transmission to reception. Ten percent error would cause a variable of almost five months; an error of one percent adds up to two weeks.
The observatories had admitted an error of one percent as a maximum and considerable space travel between Proxima I and Terra had diminished this error to an absolute of about three days plus or minus the nominal. Paul had been gratified to discover that despite his delayed take-off, he had arrived at Proxima before the radio signal arrived from Terra.
Paul had been worried about his delay and he had driven his ship hard. Not during the days of faster-than-light travel, of course, but after Paul had come down out of the blackness and could set a course by inspection. He had been either lucky or proficient. Even using a not too precise method of aiming his ship, he had still emerged from the blackness less than five million miles from Proxima, which was very good aiming indeed.
Pilots always aimed for their target on the nose. For one thing, the dispersion was huge because the slightest irregularity in any phase of the maneuver would throw off the point of aim by millions of miles. In years and years of spaceflight, the first direct hit upon target had yet to be recorded. In fact, five million miles was considered brilliant piloting—or as is more possible, it was brilliant luck!
Then as Paul found his landing-spot, he had pushed the BurAst P.G.1 hard enough to make her plates creak and Paul had descended at a full four gravities all the way to the ground. He had arrived before the radio signal had reached the planet and that was all he cared about.
So he settled back to wait. There was little to do but sit and think, and to watch the occasional meteor shower land on the dusty ground.
There had been an extensive shower about ten miles from the station shortly after his arrival. The impact was, of course, both invisible and inaudible. But upon impact the dust spurted upwards, billowing and flowing like the column in miniature that came from an atom bomb explosion. Since there was no air on Proxima I, the billowing dust rose and spread apart until the individual dust mote lost its energy and fell back to Proxima I by gravitational attraction.
He would have liked to inspect that particular spot because the shower had been spectacular. A number of meteors in a close-knit group had landed, sending forth a series of dusty columns—some of the larger of which were still visible when the radio chattered into life three days after his arrival.
It came all at once and its sound dinned his ears and re-echoed from the smooth walls of the Station. The sound snapped Paul from his place by the window-dome. It grated on his ears until he could rush downstairs to the radio room to turn the volume-gain control down so that the audio signal fell below the overload point.
From a raucous, nerve-tingling screech, the volume fell until distortion no longer fouled up the filtered purity of the signal-note broadcast from far-off Terra four years ago. Paul measured the signal strength and found it entirely satisfactory. He coupled the recorders to the gear, and then settled back to await the arrival of the modulated timing signals that were transmitted after an interval of straight tone, the first period to be used for establishing contact before the actual timing of the transmission-time began.
Once the radio signal was coming in perfectly, Paul turned his attention to the Z-wave receiver.
He tuned it gingerly, cautiously.
And then it came to life!
Paul cried in exultation. His was success! True, it was a weakling signal that faded and died at times, but it came in strong and clear enough for recording in the periods of good reception. A bit of work and research, and the construction of a real interstellar Z-wave station would remove this fading.
Paul snapped the extra recorder on, and then began to dream his dream again, this time more strong than ever before.
He had connected the Z-wave equipment at Terra's Z-wave central to the big interstellar radio transmitter, lacking a Z-wave transmitter for his own use. So that now he was hearing the Terran end of conversation. It was a woman's voice that talked from Terra to someone currently on one of the planetary outposts of Sol.
"... but it won't be long, my dear.... Of course, it seems so.... Do that, by all means.... In a month, you say?... I'm very happy about that...." here the signal faded for a full minute. It returned again, "... Terry said so.... How do I know?... By all means, my dear...." and here again the signal faded.
But it was enough.
Exultation filled Paul. This was proof. This was the door, opening for life upon everything he ever hoped to gain, everything he hoped to be. It gave him what he wanted to offer life, and by happy circumstance, he had found the one he wanted to offer it to. He could go to Nora, not as a technician in the Bureau of Astrogation but with a grand future of success and opportunity to build ever upward and ever onward to real fame and fortune. Not the real success in his hand, for when the final success in life comes, ambition and desire begin to wane. But far more exhilarating was the hope of success, the chance to work for a magnificent future together.
He gloated for hours, measuring the radio signal as few radio transmissions have ever been measured before.
Then with his work finished, Paul packed up to leave. The glittering stone he held in his hand was nice, but tiny now, compared to his tale of success. A bright rock from a far-off planet, not much more than a seashell from a distant beach.
With a chuckle, he tossed the stone aside and broke out the sand-jeep. Nora might like a meteorite from far Proxima I. At least, it was a souvenir to be quite in evidence wherever it might end up.
He headed for the meteor shower of three days before, and found it after an hour of running across the featureless sands.
The area was small, which in itself was strange, for meteor showers cover miles of area, not square yards. The sands were pocked with small craters, and Paul looked at them until he found a crater of medium size where the rock was still showing. He hefted the stone from the sky and carried it to the sand-jeep. On his way back to the little buggy, he caught sight of a glitter less than fifty feet away.
He dropped the stone in the back of the jeep and strode over to see what could be glittering this brightly in Proxima's veritable sea of bland, yellow sand.
Then he stood dumbfounded, for the glitter came from the circular disc of glass, the eyepiece of a space suit, which was buried in the sand. A crater of irregular shape surrounded it, and the meteorite was lying in half-exposed view. Paul dropped into the crater and lifted the stone, to disclose a nauseous clot of brownish blood, the remnant of space suit, and contained in it, the remains of a man. Mostly buried by the impact, the man's body stood almost upright, the headpiece at ground level while the rest of the body was curved brokenly backwards down in the crater, driven into the sand instantly by the meteor.
Paul shrugged and removed the helmet.
The face was vaguely familiar. The man wore clothing under the suit but there was no sign of identification in it. The face bothered Paul, however. He believed he had seen it somewhere.
Not only that, but just exactly why any man possessed of sane mind would be on Proxima I (save Paul, who had business there) was mystery at its best.
Paul stood up and looked around the plain.
He caught another glitter, and got into his jeep to investigate. It was the semi-submerged spacecraft, and Paul wondered at it. It was smashed flat by a gigantic meteor, ruined beyond any hope of reconstruction. Paul tried to enter to inspect it. It had been too badly wrecked by the meteor.
Abandoning the spacecraft as a hopeless job for immediate identification, Paul went back to the lone victim. There was still something vaguely familiar about the man's face. The difference was not because the vacuum of Proxima had distorted the face, for the suit had been sealed at the break by the meteor and the sand and there was no distortion.
Paul pondered. Identification might be possible by dental means, by prints, by iris-matching, if the face distorted on his way back. There was his refrigerating gear aboard the ship, Paul could stick the corpse in there and hope that some light could be shed on this mystery.
Paul folded the lower, ruined portion of the space suit to preserve whatever minute bit of air it contained, and packed it onto the jeep. He shoved the body into the freezing cold of the storage bin with a grimace of distaste and determined to dine on canned beans for the duration. It annoyed him to hurl several pounds of fine, well-hung tenderloin steak onto the bald sands of Proxima I to make room for an un-hung corpse. But it had to be done.
Then, with the mystery still gnawing at his mind, Paul fixed the drive-scope on Sol, made a few adjustments, and set his autodrive and micro-timer according to the data supplied before his departure from Terra. It was a corrected-for-duration course, the reverse of his approaching orbit.
Paul clicked the drive and headed for Sol. When the ship dropped into invisibility, he relaxed. Busy all the time of his stay on Proxima I, he felt seedy. While still pondering the problem, Paul shucked his clothing and showered. Water, both hot and then chilled, did not help his memory any. Nor was it the memory of Nora Phillips that made him lather his face and shave. Not entirely. For the three-day beard made his face uncomfortable and it was personal comfort rather than White Man's Burden that prompted Paul to reap his beard. Like most men, shaving was not a pleasant occupation, and when no matter of personal appearance insisted upon a smooth face, shaving was postponed and indulged in only when the factors of discomfort balanced one another equally and in diametrically opposite directions.
Paul grinned at his clean face in the mirror. "Y'know," he said to himself in the glass, "You're vaguely familiar, too."
The idea hit him hard, then.
One of the reasons why a picture of one's self does not resemble one's familiar appearance in a mirror is due to the lack of facial symmetry. The left side of a mirror image is the right side of the face on a photograph and the two seldom match.
Paul gulped and dressed quickly. Then he went to the freeze-locker and hauled out the dead man.
It would take a third observer to tell. But so far as Paul Grayson could tell, this man from Proxima I was his double!
"And that," he said in address to the corpse, "makes two of you!"
Ten days later when Paul's ship dropped out of the realm of invisibility, he was no nearer to the problem's solution. He did have a course of action formulated, however. So his first telephone call was not to Nora Phillips. It was to John Stacey, the detective.
"I'm back."
"Glad to hear it. Wha' hoppen?"
"I've got a corpse on my ship."
"Friend of yours?"
"Nope."
"Look," came the cheerful reply, "if you want to murder someone, go ahead. But there's no sense in putting yourself in jeopardy by carrying the mortal remains around with you. Why didn't you dump the thing out in space?"
"I want it identified."
"Now, for the first time in years, you make sense."
"Thanks."
"But look," said Stacey suddenly, "just what kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?"
"I don't know. I hope to find out."
"Well, it's thick."
Paul blinked. "I know it. But why?"
"You answer that one, it's your question."
"What's new?"
"Nora Phillips is missing."
"Missing?" exploded Paul. "Where did she go?"
"I haven't been able to find out yet."
"What do you know?" demanded Paul.
"Damned little. She left you on your departure day and started to drive back to town. Instead of returning to her office or going home, she turned off on Bridge Street and stopped at a mansion, Number 7111, to be exact. Drove her car into the garage as though she were expected. Hasn't come out since."
"You haven't kept a man watching the place for all this time?"
"No, but I've had a gent prowl the joint at least once a day for the last two weeks, and the car is still in the garage. You can see it through the windows of the door."
"Didn't she come out?"
"Garage is connected to the house. She could have gone into the house without breathing fresh air."
"That's 7111 Bridge Street?"
"Check."
"How about her job?"
"By careful enquiry, we've learned that she resigned. By letter."
"How did you get that?"
"Well, law outfits seldom take kindly to characters asking leading questions. But an advertisement appeared for a librarian and I had Milly fill it. She pored through the personnel files and found a typed letter of resignation. Terse; disappointingly uninformative."
"Her apartment?"
"She ran a three-room job alone. A man appeared, armed with a letter from her. He packed up her stuff and it was removed from the premises by the Howdaille Moving and Storage Company. It is currently there in storage with the bill paid in advance for six months."
"Any more?"
"I had Morton enquire about a rental at that address and he was told that Miss Phillips had to return home because of illness of her father. That's all we could get. Morton got that information from the landlord after expressing first a desire to live there and second asking why the previous tenant moved out. Put it so that the landlord had to show him her letter to prevent a possible tenant from thinking that there was something odious about the premises."
"Then what?"
"That's all. Morton considered the place—apparently—for several days after putting down a twenty-buck deposit. Gave it up and forfeited the deposit on the grounds that his wife wanted a four room place."
"Um. Gone without a trace?"
"Seems so. Excepting that she went into 7111 Bridge, and we've not seen her since."
"How long did you watch?"
"Constantly for ten days. Not a sign or a trace of her there."
"But—"
"Yeah," replied Stacey's unhappy voice, "we cased that joint too. I've had at least seven operatives hit that front door, on every sort of pretext from stolen nylon hosiery to roofing salesmen, and from governmental surveys on this and that to gents who insist that they look at the electric wiring, the plumbing, and the foundation. The joint is owned and tenanted by an elderly gentleman who has retired. His wife lives there too. One servant, a doddering old fogy who must have been the owner's father's gentleman's gentleman."
"What's his name?"
"Hoagland."
"How about the car in the garage?"
Paul could almost hear Stacey shrug. "So far, there is nothing suspicious about it from a legal standpoint," he said. "You'd have one hell of a time proving anything. So a woman—none too well acquainted with you—resigns from her position on a perfectly logical grounds, moves from her apartment on similar grounds, and deposits her car in a strange place and disappears."
"But that last is the important thing. She disappeared."
"Yeah? Where does her father live? Maybe she did go there?"
"You're the detective," said Paul. "Chase it down."
"This will cost like hell," warned Stacey.
Paul laughed. "What I've got will pay for plenty from now on," he said.
"I'll re-open the case, then."
"You shouldn't have closed it."
Stacey groaned. "How did I know you were that anxious?"
"I was."
"Okay. But I wanted your approval before I broke this thing wide open."
"Will it?"
"Sure. The first time I go to 7111 Bridge and ask about that automobile in the garage, which is registered under the name of Nora Phillips, someone is either going to get nasty, call the police, or start asking me embarrassing questions that might lead to Paul Grayson."
"Stacey, the guy I found dead on Proxima I is another dead ringer for myself. That makes two characters killed off that resemble me. It looks like a plot, to me."
"How was the deceased rendered that way?"
"He was hit by a meteorite."
"Act of God, I calls that," muttered Stacey. "You wouldn't go so far as to suggest that God is on your side?"
"When a meteorite hits a man and a spacecraft in the same shower, both of which are prowling on a planet where they had no business and shouldn't have had any curiosity, it begins to look as though celestial mechanics, formerly run by the Act of God, might have been given a little aid and aim by the machiavellian hand of man or men unknown."
"How could you aim a—"
"Haul it to the right spot and drop it from a good height from a spacecraft. That's for the big one that wrecked the ship. Carry a boatload of little ones and drop 'em on the head of the character you desire to erase. Not one of them penetrated to the depths I'd have expected, now that it comes to mind."
"Okay, Paul. I'm on the trail again. I'll send a man to collect your corpse and we'll attempt to identify it. Maybe that will give us a lead."
"Check," said Paul, and he turned away from the telephone with a heavy heart.
He recalled the lissome warmth of her body pressed eagerly against him; could a woman offer herself falsely with that much ardor?
Paul's clenched fist came down upon the palm of his other hand in a loud, determined smack! By all that was holy, Paul intended to find out. He answered his question honestly: Yes. There are women who could play any act, do literally anything humanly possible to obtain their wants. On the other hand, Nora might have run afoul of whatever interest it was that apparently stood in his way towards linking Sol and Neosol by Z-wave.
Had he been uninterested in her as a person, he could have shrugged it off with but a minimum of hurt and wonder. But Paul made up his mind to find out about her, to take either one of two courses as far as Nora Phillips went. If Nora were in league with those who stood against him, he wanted the dubious pleasure of showing her that she could have been better off by following a more naturally honest plan.
And if Nora Phillips were in trouble because she was seen in Paul's company, he wanted the extreme pleasure of belting the living hell out of her abductors personally, while she watched wide-eyed, and then escorting her gallantly to some place where pain and strife could be relegated to the background.
To do either, Paul must not stop working towards his goal. With determined step, Paul headed for the offices of the Terran Physical Society with his personal recorder, upon which the semi-conversation from the Z-wave was impressed.
This time it would be Grayson's Theory. And it would be presented to the T.P.S. without the possibility of Haedaecker's interference or scorn.
Charles Thorndyke was a man well worthy of the scientific honors he owned. Unlike Haedaecker, he did not flaunt them at every hand. He used them only when it was necessary.
And unlike Chadwick Haedaecker, Thorndyke was the kind of man who would have rejected his own pet theory instantly upon the first glimmer of proof that he was in error.
He listened to Paul's tale with growing interest and then he listened to the recording.
"This is a big thing," he told Paul after Grayson was finished.
"It is my greatest hope realized."
"We have a lengthy paper on extra-solar gravitational phenomena to be presented next Tuesday. I am going to cancel that for your presentation." Thorndyke looked at the ceiling. "The chance of voice communication with Neosol is as great an advancement as the discovery of the telegraph," he said. "It must not be delayed one moment!"
"I've always believed that," said Paul.
"Why didn't you speak up before?"
"Doctor Haedaecker has always vetoed any such suggestion."
"Why, for the Love of Heaven?"
"He said that everything had been tried."
"Balderdash!" exploded Thorndyke. "Negative evidence is never conclusive!"
"I could not argue with him."
Thorndyke smiled. He nodded. Being armed with a hope and a firm belief is poor weapon against a man as deeply entrenched as Haedaecker, whose minor pronouncements made news and whose hand could write an appropriation for a million dollars to pursue some experiment.
"Once this is presented, you will no longer be a small voice crying out in a veritable wilderness. You will probably end up with a job to do as big as Haedaecker's. I can't understand him."
"Nor can I."
"You're certain that you presented your idea correctly?"
"So far as I know. I've been talking about this thing for years, ever since I got the idea."
Thorndyke laughed. "I know what happened," he said. "Your initial idea was but half formed and therefore incorrect. But as you improved upon it, your own arguments became trite to yourself and even less convincing to Haedaecker, who was convinced against your idea. He'll have to change his tune next Tuesday."
Paul left in a fine state of mind. He was ahead of the game for the first time in his life and he enjoyed the feeling.
The question of who or what wanted to stop him was something that he could never find out until the other side made another move. As for Nora Phillips, following her trail was a job for an experienced man like Stacey. The third item was Haedaecker.
Paul did not agree with Thorndyke. Haedaecker was not merely misled in this thing. Haedaecker had good reasons why he wanted the Z-wave experiment hushed up. Haedaecker's Theory had been the making of the man himself. Once that theory was broken down and shown incorrect, Haedaecker would no longer be the great mind that he had been. Haedaecker liked power and adulation and naturally was disinclined to let it go lightly.
Paul expected trouble with the physicist.
And Paul would have preferred to circumvent trouble, to go around it, to avoid it. But Paul was experienced enough to know that the act of avoiding trouble more often made the trouble pile up until it reached terrifying proportions.
So instead of staying strictly away from Haedaecker's office, Paul strode boldly in. Forewarning the enemy of your intentions is said to be bad. But now and then, telling the enemy what you are going to do—and then daring him to try and stop you—will make him back up, because it tends to convince him that you are equipped to do as you want to do, regardless of opposition.
Chadwick Haedaecker greeted Paul cordially. "Everything go all right?" he asked.
Paul nodded. "The reports on the radio signal have been turned in, complete with recordings and my own comments."
"Good." Haedaecker turned to a map on the wall. He consulted a list beside the map. Then he turned with a smile. "That was the first," he said. "The next signal doesn't come in for almost six months. Then, my young friend, you will be the busiest man in space for the next two years, hopping hither and thither to check in the network. I'm glad that everything went as expected."
"Everything did."
"Good. This first one was the one that proves we're right. Now that we've got one checked in, we can take the rest with less wonder and concern." Haedaecker looked at Paul sharply. "But this isn't all you came to tell me about."
"No," said Paul quietly. "It is not. Doctor Haedaecker, I am not one to fly a false flag. I dislike the idea of thrusting a man's ideas back down his throat abruptly and in public."
"Just what are you driving at?" demanded Haedaecker.
"Upon Proxima Centauri I, I definitely proved the error of Haedaecker's Theory. I received a Z-wave—"
"Ridiculous!"
"I did," stated Paul flatly. "And so I am telling you because I feel that you should have some opportunity to protect yourself."
"I need no protection."
"You have always defended your theory viciously. You have never permitted the merest possibility that you could be wrong. I have proof, now."
"Impossible."
"I have," said Paul. "And I intend to show it. So, if you care to make any statements which will change your previous attitude, do so."
Haedaecker looked at Paul queerly. "Just what would you recommend?" he asked.
Paul smiled. "If I were you," he said, "I would accept the defeat of your theory graciously."
"Indeed."
Paul made an exasperated noise. "I'm only trying to save your embarrassment—"
"You insolent young puppy! You—trying to help me!"
Paul took a deep breath. This was not going well at all. But on the other hand, Paul knew that he was no longer a small voice, to be throttled by the mere gesture from Haedaecker. Paul was in full control of the situation whether Haedaecker realized it or not. Furthermore, the years-long awe of Haedaecker and his iron-handed rule had not left their ineradicable mark. Unlike the child, ruled by stern parents, who defers to their orders long after maturity because of habit, Paul's former deference was gone. Perhaps the only difference was that parents seldom lose their command of respect because the maturing offspring learns as the years go past that their seemingly arbitrary rules were actually born of wisdom that the child could not understand. Whereas Haedaecker was a god with feet of low-grade clay. When the mighty fall, they fall far and hard.
"I was trying to save you embarrassment," snapped Paul. "Once the truth is known, that you refused to permit any experiment because it might shake the foundations of Haedaecker's Theory, your entire policy will be destroyed."
"So what would you have me do?"
"Why not sponsor this idea?" suggested Paul. "Be the first to proclaim, happily, that Haedaecker's Theory was in error and that you now join in the hope of connecting Sol and Neosol by real communications."
Haedaecker shook his head coldly. "I'll sponsor no such ridiculous thing," he said. "Because it can not be! You—"
"But I have proof!"
Haedaecker stood up. "You have not!"
"I have!" thundered Paul. "And I intend to show it!"
Haedaecker sat down again and placed the fingertips of each hand against the other, making a sort of cage. "Now I'll warn you," he told Paul. "Your proof is false, whatever it is. And if you should make the mistake of making a public spectacle of your efforts to disparage a well-founded law of physics, I shall take measures to ensure that you never make such an idiotic error again."
"Why don't you fire me?" taunted Paul.
"As soon as you publicly violate my rules, I shall."
"Then come to the T.S.P. next Tuesday," snapped Paul, "and watch me break both your rules and your theory with one fell swoop!"
Haedaecker shrugged. "I'll be there to watch you make a fool of yourself," he said.
Paul turned on one heel and left.