The music slid into a soft passage and a vibrant voice announced:
"Dusty Britton, Commander in Chief of The Junior Division of The Terran Space Patrol. Barbara Crandall, Thespian and Vocal Musician of Terra. In attendance, Lela Brandis, Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine."
The music crashed, the scent came heavy and sharp, and the lights flashed like the licking of summer lightning and came to rest outlining them brilliantly.
Gant Nerley crossed the huge room and held out his hand to Dusty Britton.
"We need no introduction, Dusty Britton," he said in a ringing tone. "I say 'Greeting' to you with all my heart!"
Another stab of music, a touch of cinnamon-scent, and a play of lights.
Gant Nerley turned. "Stop the dramatics," he commanded. "What are we, children to be impressed by theatrical tricks?"
The music shifted back to the string ensemble, the scent smoothed out to something pleasant and pungent, and the lights faded back to their neutral medium-key. Dusty thought that if this lights-and-music stuff was strictly off the cuff, ad-lib, someone was a past master at the art of extemporaneous composition. He liked it. And if it took Marandanian children to appreciate it, you could give him ten years in school and call him the Marandanian child.
Gant Nerley was holding out an elbow to Barbara. She took it and the Marandanian led her towards the head of the table. Dusty looked around; then he offered his own elbow to the nurse—Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine, Lela Brandis.
It was many years before Dusty identified the things he had for breakfast. It was exotic and well-prepared; none of it was remotely familiar but all of it was good.
Then over the after-dinner drinks and smokes, Gant Nerley rose, rapped the table with his knuckles, and proposed the problem for the day.
"What are we going to do about Sol?" asked Gant Nerley seriously. Dusty eyed the Marandanian soberly. "Leave it alone, I hope."
"You realize what you are asking?"
"My God! Do we have to go through all that mishmash again?"
"Again?"
Dusty slammed the table with his fist hard enough to make the glassware jump. "Again and again. I'm getting sick and tired of explaining all the many reasons why none of us want to move to another star and lose a thousand years. And then being told that after all it won't hurt a bit, and besides this move is necessary—and if we don't move willingly we'll be moved anyway forcibly."
"Why are you so angry?"
Dusty looked at Gant Nerley and sat down wearily. "Because," he said patiently, "all of us know that no matter what, you're going to go on and do it anyway—but not until you've forced yourself to believe that you have convinced us that we should accept this kick in the pants gracefully."
"It isn't that simple."
"No?"
"No, it isn't. You see, we are bound by our own laws to hold to certain programs under certain conditions. It is the conditions which prevail that we are attempting to define, outline, determine, and pin down so that we know what lawful action may be taken."
"You sound like a bureaucrat explaining away an awkward situation. Just what do you mean by conditions and programs?"
Gant picked them off on his fingers. "There are the following," he said. "First would be a race—remember I am talking about all the races of mankind strewn across the galaxy; the races that are us, you and we and all the rest that stem from a single source, the origin of which is lost in the antiquity of a hundred thousand years. So, first would be a race which was still in the growing-up stage, say the mound building, early agricultural, perhaps later, in early metal. An age of no true scientific grasp; what little of science they know has come by guesswork, blundering discovery and hit-or-miss experiment. Such a race could be moved across space without a qualm, because it would only bring about a rather deep period of superstitious horror and a religious fear. A few hundred years later the tale would be completely discounted, because the astronomers would be rising and stating flatly that no agency in the universe could change the constant stars. The old sky would be wiped out of men's memory in a couple of generations, although it might remain in myth and fairy tale for a long time. Such a set of conditions would permit the moving program without a qualm."
Gant looked at Dusty. "Understand?"
"Sure," replied Dusty indifferently. "Go on."
"Then on the other end of the scale we have the advanced race. They have discovered the phanobands, know about space flight and perhaps have colonized the planets of other stars say within ten to fifty light-years. A race of this stage of development would understand and grasp the problem quickly. Then having been shown the problem, they would make the move willingly and no doubt help, because they would understand that their destiny is a part of the Galactic Destiny."
"Oh, yeah? You mean to say that if Marandis were found to lie across the road like a stone wall you would all happily toss Marandis into a barytrine field for a thousand years?"
Gant smiled serenely at his objection. "Well, doubt it as you will, but we would. Of course, we know that no such case would ever come up. But if it did—"
"Y'know what you remind me of," snapped Dusty. "You remind me of a parent explaining to his kid that this castor oil is good for the kid, and that if the parent needed it he would take it with a happy smile—excepting of course that the parent does not need anything of that nature. We have an old adage: he dies well who never faced a sword! I think it applies here. Well, go on, Gant. Tell me where Terra lies in your scale of values."
"That's what we are trying to determine. You are obviously not of the pre-aware stage. You have your limited space travel and your historical records which will preclude any attempt at forcing the affair upon you and causing you to put the change as superstition that would be wiped out."
"Thanks."
"On the other hand you are not of the advanced stage which could accept a change in your night sky without trouble, nor will you accept it willingly."
"How true. Now this brings us to the impasse, doesn't it?"
"Yes."
From across the table a man waved for attention. "It's more than that. The moment Dusty Britton opened the distress phanoband, the secret of the galactic rift was let out. Like everybody else, we put direction finding equipment on the signal and have it located rather well. Then we went back through our files and found that as far as we can tell, Sol was mentioned as a possible beacon by one of our early exploratory parties. One that disappeared. One that—"
"So what?" barked a man down the table from Dusty. "Seems to me that Intercluster sits on its duff and waits for us to find rifts for them."
"Transgalactic isn't the only outfit with a spacecraft," snarled the man from Intercluster angrily. "We've done our share."
"Not on my books," said the Transgalactic representative.
Intercluster eyed Transgalactic sourly. "What's the matter?" asked Intercluster softly, "Are you mad because Intercluster happens to have records on the rift you re-discovered?"
"Re-discovered my—"
Intercluster turned to Gant. "I leave it up to you," he said. "Our records show that we, too, have rights to this rift."
Transgalactic hammered on the table. "Like hell!" he roared. "If you have rights, why aren't you using them?"
"Because you and your gang concealed them from us until Scyth Radnor got into trouble. A fine bunch of incompetents you are! A fine group to be representatives of our culture. You can't even keep your hands off native females—"
Barbara rose with a single lithe motion and hurled the contents of her glass in the Intercluster man's face. He staggered back, floundered back into his chair, landed hard and tilted it back on hind legs to go over backward in a crash.
"Native female?" spat Barbara.
The room went breathlessly silent; the music stopped on a flubbed note; the scent soured in a brief wave as though the man at the valves had miscued. The lights flickered awkwardly.
Barbara stood there tense and ready. Her breasts were pushed against the nylosheer of her dress; her stomach was flat and hard. She was poised like a healthy wild animal daring any onlooker to try to tame her.
Dusty rose lazily and pushed her back into her chair with a hand on her shoulder. No other man in the room would have dared to lay a hand on her except Dusty. This he somehow realized, and it gave him personal gratification to know that he had once more done that which the Marandanians would not have dared.
Then he went over and picked up the Intercluster man with one hand, standing the man on his feet like a puppet.
"We apologize for reacting to your unfortunate choice of words," he said smoothly. "We admit to being a bit primitive and impulsive. I came unarmed," and he pointed to the band across his hips where the Dusty Britton Blaster belt had protected the whipcord from the sun, "because we are advanced enough to realize that we are impulsive and perhaps a trifle inclined to act before considering the matter fully."
He turned away from the man and sauntered over to Gant Nerley. "I apologize again," he said. "But I do suggest that our nerves are a bit short. After all it is hard to sit here and listen to your friends and fellow-citizens discuss the ways and means of making use of that rift through the galaxy without once recognizing that we poor devils have to move out whether we like it or not."
Gant smiled nervously. "I am trying to appreciate your position," he said. "And in a way I do. But you must try to appreciate ours. We are not taking anything away from you that you will miss. After all, Dusty, what do you stand to lose, really?"
Dusty swallowed. It dawned on him what he was doing and why. And also how he had managed to get away with it so far.
And in these fractions of a second, Dusty probably matured more than he had grown during the great part of his life.
He realized suddenly that he was only Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol and as phony as The Space Patrol itself. To date he had done as good a job of wool-pulling as the best statesmen or scientists, but only because he was an actor. He had succeeded in convincing the whole bunch of them that the cultural level of Sol was higher than it was. A scientist would have admitted his lack because that was the way scientists operate. A businessman would have been baffled, and a statesman would have tried to cover his indecision in a gout of flowery language that would be known for what it was by this bunch of high-brain characters.
But Dusty was an actor, blunt and not too smart. Modesty is not part of an actor, while the ability to submerge himself is. He had become Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol and the hero of a hundred adventures in space among a people who were hard and fast because they were still in struggle against their environment. He was tall and strong and young and handsome, and he was Dusty Britton, fast on the draw, hard on the trail, and the bes' dam' cabba-yero in all Mehi-co and he had them all convinced that he and his friends spent their time racing around in dangerous, imperfect spacecraft powered by reaction motors.
He was Dusty Britton who had plugged Scyth Radnor for playing games with his woman. Then Dusty Britton had taken the controls of a completely foreign spacecraft and had driven the ship halfway across the galaxy through danger and God-knew-what (Dusty did not) horrors and possible fates. The fact that Gant Nerley and a corps of engineers and a bank of computing machines had supervised Dusty's every motion and move did not detract from the feat in their eyes. It added, because of the sheer guts of a man who would enter an alien ship and have the self-confidence to touch the tiniest push-button.
He sauntered over to Gant Nerley and said, "Well?"
Gant Nerley was impressed with Dusty's swagger and self-confidence. So were the rest of the men in the room, with the exception of the representatives of the two shipping companies, and they had chips on their shoulders. So Gant Nerley looked around from face to face and then said, in an official tone:
"It would appear that Terra is of a level of development that mitigates against immediate action. Therefore we shall declare a recess, during which time we shall study the Terran people. If Terra measures up, other steps must be taken."
There was a chorus of "Aye!" and the sound of chairs being pushed back and the noise of feet on the floor. The babble of voices arose as the members broke into little groups and began discussing the problem.
But Dusty did not hear them. The self-confidence had oozed out of him and he slumped in his chair, staring at some shine on a bit of the table silver, trying to think of something other than the horrible certainty. For while Dusty Britton had bluffed the Marandanians, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that his bluff was being called and it would not stand up. All it would take was the Marandanian Investigating Committee scouring Terra to find one single man who had one shred of reason to believe that matter could exceed the velocity of light. Oh, there were such people. But the man who professed such opinions believed it because he wanted to believe it; because he hoped someday that it might be accomplished. He was the man who shrugged off experiments that followed the rules and acted according to the equations. He was the man who had faith but no proof.
Beyond a doubt, the report of any such committee would recommend that Terra be bundled into its barytrine field with no delay, and that Sol be nudged into the three-day variable needed for the beacon on this particular dogleg of the journey across the galaxy.
Dusty had succeeded in his own way, but now he knew that it was not enough. He, himself, had convinced them that Terra was worthy of notice. The rest of Terra would let him down. Still lost in his own unhappy thoughts, he became vaguely aware that the babble of discussion was stopping and that one man was raising his voice to get an audience.
It was the Transgalactic representative. He was standing by his place at the table, talking in the tone of voice used by a professional lecturer hammering home an unpleasant fact:
"—obvious by the animal ferocity of this Terran, his threats and his willingness to plunge into physical combat, that he and his kind cannot be of high culture. I am asked whether or not we may judge an entire race of people by one man, and I agree that we cannot. But then view the reaction of his companion who flares up in a fit of red, raw anger, taking offense at being properly catalogued. I ask you, gentlemen, is there any excuse for this? Am I not a native male of Marandis? Is she not a native female of Terra?
"And so by their actions, both violent in nature and unpredictable in direction, they have shown themselves to be uncouth. Who knows what offense they will take next? Does a man among us dare to speak freely with either man or woman of Terra alone and unprotected? No, because no one can ever know beforehand what peculiarity of their own limited semantics will be rubbed the wrong way, setting them into a violent fury. Dusty Britton has boasted that he can take any of us out and wipe up the street with us. This cannot be denied. But what does it prove? Only that his shoulders are broad and his back strong and his fists hard. And that he has been trained in violence.
"Now, gentlemen, consider this next argument: What has Terra to lose? No more than a familiar night sky, really. The time under the barytrine field will pass without their notice. As for the time lost in respect to the rest of the galaxy, since they have had no contact with it, they cannot be affected by the loss. They prate about losing a thousand years of advancement. Consider how soon they would be taking to space if we had not found them. Might it not be yet a thousand years before contact with the galaxy took place? Yet as it stands now, this man and this woman will live to see galactic commerce, whereas they would be dead and gone without ever knowing of the galaxy if Marandis had not found them. And having been granted that, they still show the ignorant rebellion of children.
"They have not the foresight to understand that so far as they are concerned, less than a week of their apparent time will pass before the ships and men of Marandis will land on Terra in its new surroundings, to treat with them, to lead them, to educate them, to bring to Terra all of the glories and benefits of galactic civilization—no, gentlemen,to return to Terra its galactic heritage, lost so long ago. Its birthright returned!
"And yet what response do we get? Objection and rebellion and threats of violence. So I ask you, are we to be frightened by this small primitive world that lies like a barrier across our path? Are we to be cowed by a show of force? Are we? And if we are, shall we run in fear from a race of men who bear missile-propelling weapons?
"Look at Dusty Britton and his companion. They sit there angry, possibly planning their own form of revenge to take place if we have the temerity to proceed. Then let me ask you, supposing they do object? Suppose they do resent our meddling in their small lives? Are we to be frightened of bomb and gun—we who can put them back into their barytrine field and keep them there until they are willing to agree?And without the loss of a life?Gentlemen, this whole meeting reminds me far too much of parents who try to argue logically with children over bedtime instead of packing the infant off. Who knows what is best? Child or parent?"
The man from Transgalactic paused a moment to let this point sink in. Then he said, "Gant Nerley, I object to your proposal. We need no more investigation. We know what these Terrans are and how they react. They offer little to Marandis at present. They are no more than a responsibility to us and as such they owe us our superior rights. Therefore, unless I am ordered at this moment to cease and desist, I am going to proceed. Do I hear such an order?"
A babble of voices rose.
"Gentlemen," said Transgalactic, suavely, "I offer you a short and quick route to the Spiral Cluster."
He stood there for fully a minute listening to the clamor of individual discussions going on in the smaller groups around the table. Then he hit the table with his fist, bowed sardonically to Dusty and Barbara, and strode out.
Dusty looked at Gant. "Can't we do something about this? Can that guy go do as he pleases?"
Gant shrugged. "We are a government that guides but does not rule, suggests but does not demand, recommends but goes not force. I can and will put a stop to his activity providing that you show direct evidence that Terra and Sol are of importance in their present location, that Terra has something to offer Marandis, that you are not what he claims. However, if what he said is true, then what he is about to do is acceptable."
"But we—" and Dusty stopped short. He had no argument strong enough to convince this Marandanian that Terra would lose anything but its own jealous prestige.
Dusty stood up slowly. "Come on, Barbara, let's go home. At least we can be among friends. I'd hate to be marooned here while Terra was smothered in the barytrine field."
Barbara stood up and leaned against his side. "Yes, Dusty," she said in a throaty contralto.
Gant smiled wanly. "I'll see that you get home," he said. "Forgive us, Dusty. You'll really lose little and gain much. I—"
Dusty looked at Gant. Then he looked down at Barbara. Then up at Gant again.
"So I've failed," he said in a low voice. "I've tried and failed. And I am aware of the fact that Terra will not lose much. That isn't the point. It's just that I, Dusty Britton, am a personal failure. I should like to be able to say that I don't give a damn what other people think, but I can't. I care a lot what other people think, because for the next forty or fifty years or more I've got a living to make, and making a living is a lot easier if the entire world is not convinced that I am a no-goodnik. But then, who am I to stand in the way of galactic progress."
"Dusty, I regret that the rest of your people will not be able to see the thing I am going to show you. Maybe you can describe it when you return. Come with me."
Gant led them from the hall, then to a moving walk that hurled them out and across one of the flamboyant arches between buildings. Here Gant stopped to display his credentials to a man in uniform, and to sign a register that also listed Dusty and Barbara and their home planet Terra.
They went along a corridor that curved gently; through a heavy metal door that opened on response to a signal sequence delivered against a button.
The room inside was vast, truly vast. It was a vertical cylinder and it must have been more than a thousand feet in diameter and three or four hundred feet tall. They stood inside of the door on a narrow metal catwalk that ran completely around the circle, its far side lost in the distance and the dimness, for the room was not lighted from above, but from below.
It was a pleasant glow, a flat, hazy, wispy glow from a gas-like cloud that floated in the room a hundred feet below the catwalk ... a scale model of the galaxy.
It looked like any photographs of one of the galaxies taken through a telescope except that this model was dotted here and there with winking pinpoints and stringed through and through with thin lines that glowed in many colors, some solid colors and some in two-color spirals, like coded wire cable. Here and there were faintly glowing spherical volumes containing many stars, or rectangular volumes confined by planes of faint color-glow. Certain of these clusters were linked with other clusters by the zigzag lines that wound and interwove around and through in a tangled skein.
Gant Nerley picked up a small cylinder from a rack on the railing of the catwalk. A narrow pencil of light pointed out, and he aimed it towards the center, some five hundred feet out to the middle of the hall. "Marandis," he said. Then he brought the pointer-light across towards them slowly, to stop a hundred feet from their position. "Sol," he said. "The lines are courses surveyed and registered by the various companies, you can gather that the colored stars are our inhabited systems and the volumes register certain clusters. That faint greenish-yellow course that ends out there by Sol is the Transgalactic course set up to reach from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster which lies almost at our feet."
The magnificence of the spectacle was enhanced by the silence in the room. The galaxy, it seemed, lay at their feet and with no irreverence, and only awe, the viewer felt as though he were standing by the side of God, looking down at his Work.
In a hushed voice, Dusty asked, "Is this where they survey the courses? Couldn't figure out a way around Sol?"
Gant laughed sympathetically, breaking the hushed awe. "Look at it and think, Dusty Britton."
Dusty looked, and Barbara looked, both in awed silence as Gant Nerley went on:
"In that model, which looks like a wisp of gas, there are fifteen billion individual pinpoints. Think, Dusty. One-five, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero stars in one galaxy. Across the breadth of this room it lies, scaled down to represent the hundred thousand light-years of its diameter at the rate of a hundred light-years to the foot. Eight and one third light years per inch, Dusty Britton, so your Sol and your Sirius lie about an inch apart. Now, Dusty, in order to make the stars visible, they must be above a certain intrinsic size, and in the size of the stars the scale of the model is violated. Each tiny glowing point is about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. That makes the scalar size of the stars about a half light year in diameter. The diameter of the colored lines that represent courses is of the same magnitude, so as we go into the model—as we may—we will find that the courses touch, intersect, and lie tangent to stars that are actually far from the flight in real space.
"What I am saying, of course, is only a new concept of something that you already know, but pertaining to another subject with which you have every right to be more familiar. Take a globe of your Terra. It is excellent for locating areas, finding cities, lakes, oceans, mountain ranges; anything gross enough to find physical size upon the map. But you cannot use it for a road map to direct you to the home of a friend, because the details of such a trip are much too fine. So we use it for large-scale mapping, but could not possibly use it for the delicate business of course mapping."
"But if you enlarged a section?"
Gant Nerley nodded. "It has been tried. No good. You see, Dusty, this was made by going deep into space and making stereograms from all angles. The transparencies are used in projectors all around the hall. But as you may know, the finest photogram loses definition when it is enlarged too much. As for delicate operations, Dusty, just to prove our point we are going to enter the model."
Gant led them to a control panel in the railing and from a sheet of paper in his hand he set the dials.
The vast circular runway lowered all around the hall and the galaxy-model rose, giving the appearance of turning upward past them. "We are coming down toward and below the plane of our galaxy at the scalar rate of about a hundred thousand light-years per minute," said Gant. Then a segment of the catwalk detached from the wall and went forward on a long girder.
The bright pinpoints leaped out at them, giving Dusty the same feeling as he had had in the space flight, except that the model lacked the waves of heat as the little pinpoints passed. He looked at Barbara and watched the tiny points plunge into her skin to disappear, then reappear behind her, as if they passed through her body harmlessly. He looked at his hand as the points streamed through, and he waggled his fingers around a cluster and watched them twinkle. They penetrated clusters and dark-cloud areas, placed where fifty stars occupied a volume of less than a couple of cubic inches, spots where dusky, shapeless masses represented globs of fifty light-years in diameter. Rusty caught on. Thoughtfully he looked at Barbara and made a rough computation that he and she were a couple of hundred light-years apart. His eyes, he thought, must be about thirty light-years apart, and the diameter of his head, at eight-and-a-third light-years per inch—
Dusty began to feel light-headed.
Through and through the model ran the colored lines, tangled and skeined and then they were facing the point where the greenish-yellow course-line ended.
Above the control panel was a faintly glowing sphere about two inches in diameter.
"Sol?" asked Gant.
Dusty shrugged. "Sol? How can we—"
He leaned forward and set his right eye close to the pinpoint of light and looked outward. Was it—could it be—familiar. He changed his angle of sight. Was Galactic North aligned with Terrestrial North? Dusty could not remember. The center of the Galaxy? Somewhere in or near Sagittarius, he believed, but Dusty was not familiar with the constellation. There! Was that the Belt of Orion? It looked strange, distorted. The constellation as he remembered it of old, was not like that. Pinpoints, of course, could not begin to look like these tiny discs, or vice versa. Was it this that made them seem unfamiliar or was it that he was displaced in scalar space by enough light-years to distort the constellation? Was that—there—Polaris and the Dippers, large and small and Andromeda? Or, thought Dusty with wry self-disgust creeping into his mind, was thatW-shaped thing Cassiopeia? He wished that he had paid more attention to astronomy.
Pleiades? He shook his head. That was a cluster and unless one remembered very carefully the configuration as it looked from Sol, the conglomeration of stars would probably look about the same from the same number of light-years from the opposite side.
Sol—if that sprinkle of glow were Sol—must be near bright Sirius. An inch away and a double star. And Alpha Centauri should lie about a half inch from Sol and it should be a fine trinary; two bright ones in a binary and a less bright one making the triple. And Procyon—or was that only a single like Sol? He ran through his sorry list of stars remembered as being within fifteen or sixteen light-years of Sol, and was appalled to see the number of pinpoints that were surrounded by that tiny sphere that represented the sixteen light-year diameter. His mental catalogue had holes in the listings—more hole than listing, he considered truthfully.
Confused thoughts and vague remembrances plagued him. Wearily Dusty shook his head. For here, up close to the sprinkles themselves, he knew that they were not scaled. How could the scale show a binary when the size of the stars was scaled at a half light-year in diameter? If that bright one were Sirius as he supposed, it was a single blob because Sirius and its companion were quite lost in the half light-year diameter of the glowing spot that represented the system. And so, of course, was Centauri. No, one could not scale a hundred-thousand light-years down to a thousand feet and hope to retain enough detail to calculate a course.
He nodded unhappily and looked along the green-yellow line that ended at Sol and realized that at least at one place in the course there was a change of direction that was so shallow that the diameter of the line representing the course was so wide that the ship, in actuality, only traversed space from one side of the line to the other, changed course, and returned to the first side.
Dusty leaned forward again, looking along the yellow-greenish line that marked the Transgalactic course. At the far end he noted the wink ... wink ... wink of the star-beacon, not much different than it had appeared in Scyth Radnor's spacecraft. "Where," he asked, "does their course lead from Sol?"
"The prospectus, of course, is not shown as finished," said Gant. "But we can show it momentarily." He pressed a button and a dotted line of yellow-green flashed into view, extending from the end of the solid line out and out until it was lost to their view through the star-field toward the outward Spiral Cluster.
Dusty looked at the line. "I suppose it isn't to scale or anything," he said. "But I can't help hoping—Gant, look, suppose this model were truly to scale, couldn't they save themselves a beacon here?"
"Save a beacon?"
Dusty nodded and the little spreckles blinked at his eyes. Gant shook his head. "This model was built in the hope that we could play gods standing in our galaxy with a measuring stick. We failed because we are no nearer to the stature of gods than this model is to the stature of the galaxy itself. We cannot play gods, Dusty Britton."
"I'm not trying to play God," said Dusty solemnly. "I'm just thinking that if you can move a planet away from a star you want to convert into a three-day variable, you might be able to take your barytrine field and slap it around this star here," Dusty pointed to one with a forefinger, "Then you move it aside and that gives you a long run from this beacon to that beacon—missing Sol by a full inch, or—eight-and-a-third light-years."
Gant blinked. Slowly, he said, "Move the star—" and let his voice trail away into a mutter. "Move the interfering star—" he repeated again. "Then—my Lord!"
"What's the matter?" asked Dusty.
"Yours is the glimmer of an idea that makes for the birth of a new concept!" breathed Gant. "Take it from there, Dusty. Don't you see? Move a star and straighten out one dogleg, move two and iron out the course even more. Maybe we could drill a free channel completely through from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. Maybe from Marandis to Star's End, to Vannevarre, to Rescrustes—perhaps from Laranonne to Ultimane across the whole galaxy, a hundred thousand light-years of free flight without a change in course. I—"
A tiny spot of light came crawling along the yellow-green course to disappear into the tiny pinpoint of light that represented Sol.
Gant said, "That must have been Transgalactic, returning to Sol to—" then Gant jumped. "Dusty! Come on! There's no time to waste!"
He hit the buttons on the control panel viciously and the little flying catwalk swung noiselessly back across thousands of light-years of scaled distance to fit into its niche once more. The circular catwalk rose high above the wispy model to its former position.
XIII
Of course Dusty had expected there would be quite a difference between his handling of Marandanian spacecraft and the professional. But he did not realize how great this difference was. In a larger ship than Scyth Radnor's, spearheading a conical flight of twelve more ships, he rode behind the pilot and admired the smoothness of the man's operation.
The color of the plate was high in the blue-violet and the stars leaped out of their background to whip past with hardly a flick. Beacons fairly buzzed and they grew into flaming balls and were gone behind as the pilot moved the 'Tee' bar with a deft motion of one hand and used the other hand to flick back and forth across the controls, changing the viewpanel co-ordinates and adjusting the various factors for flight. He skirted gas fields dangerously close and zipped between the cluster by the double zigzag with a swaying motion, then humped the spacer down tight and made a dead run for it.
And behind him in a cone came the rest, in tight formation, conically arranged below the leader in tiers, three, four, five.
They soared around another beacon, its flashing fire bright blue and the coronal glow reaching out for them, and then the pilot was calling out numbers and a man at the computer was punching keys. On the viewpanel before them lay another beacon, winking ... winking ... winking.
Behind them, a continuous tape was running through the recording machine, playing its words on the phanoband communication channels: "Calling Transgalactic. Government Priority and Emergency! Calling Transgalactic! You are to disable your barytrine generator, you are to discontinue all operations at once! By Order of the Bureau Of Galactic Affairs!"
A man sat tense in his chair peering at a greenish screen that had a halo-spot in the middle. The halo was growing larger, but so slow as to be almost steady. The man held a micrometer thimble between his thumb and forefinger and was turning it slowly, keeping a pair of dark lines tangent to the bright edge of the halo. From time to time he would call out a figure which another man would pluck out on a keyboard.
"Why don't they answer?" breathed Barbara.
Gant smiled sourly. "Because they are going to go through with it if they can."
"But—?"
"They have every legal right to maintain communication silence, even though at the present time there is small point in maintaining secrecy about this rift. Their legal position is one of fair safety; one cannot be convicted of disobeying orders that one does not hear."
Dusty eyed Gant angrily. "You mean to say they can't hear that signal?"
"Of course they hear it. But can you prove that they hear it?"
"On Terra we have a maxim that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is to keep people from shooting people and then claiming that they didn't know that shooting people was forbidden by law."
"Very sensible. We have the same laws and the same interpretation," smiled Gant. "But in this case we have a different situation. As of the last acknowledged contact with Transgalactic, and specifically that part which is dealing with Sol and Terra, they had every right to proceed. The law has been changed. Now it is up to the law to see that the change in law has been properly delivered to the interested parties and that the change is acknowledged. Follow?"
Dusty nodded. "Ex post factosort of thing. If you pass a law forbidding neckties on Tuesday, you cannot arrest a man for having appeared on Monday without one."
"Right."
"But this is already Tuesday."
"But to be effective, newly-passed laws must be properly posted. Then must be acknowledged from the farthest point in space. And Transgalactic is playing communication-silence."
Dusty grunted angrily. "And that was the character that yelped about our vengeful nature? Isn't he guilty of the same?"
Gant Nerley nodded. "Of course! Aren't we all of the same cut of human?"
The phanoband signal went on:
"Calling Transgalactic! Discontinue all operations by Order of—" and so forth.
The squawk box on the wall said, "Calling Gant Nerley with report."
"Report!"
"Report slight increase in phanoradiation high in the subnuclear region. Cross semi-collateral traces indicating an increase in lower-level nuclear activity."
The squawk box clicked off and Dusty looked with puzzlement at Gant Nerley. "What was all that?" he pleaded.
"He means that Transgalactic is hard at work. The lower level of nuclear reactions has increased in intensity, meaning in simple prediction that the business of making a variable star out of Sol is under way."
The Marandanian with the filar micrometer on the barytrine detector grumbled. "It's going to be a bit rough."
"Why?" asked the pilot. "If it weren't for that barytrine we'd never find Sol out of that mess dead ahead. We'd be canvassing the stellar region around there for weeks if we didn't have a focal point—"
"I know," grunted the detector operator. "First you need a barytrine field large enough to make a homing run on, but then once you're home you'll want a tiny one so you can locate the generator precisely. Well, you can't have 'em both, Jann."
Jann Wilkor shook his head. "I wish I'd made this run before. I could make it faster."
Gant pointed at the screen and nudged Dusty. The color-scale was still high in the blue-violet and there were a couple of places on the viewpanel that were a dead black, tiny spots that did not move as Jann Wilkor's delicate touch corrected the course. Spots burned out of the substance of the panel like over-exposed film burned through.
"It takes a master pilot to make a run this fast. Even so, we're taking a rather high risk. But if the channel was free and open from Marandis to Spiral Cluster, with only a big phanobeacon at either end, we could make it with the screen burning black-violet. We may even have to develop a new supraradiant material for ultra-high velocities."
"How fast can you go?"
Jann Wilkor soared around a beacon and centered on the next before the flicking wave of heat was gone. He did it easily and with the negligent reflex of the master pilot. "Fitt Mazorn took one of the high speed jobs into intergalactic space for a speed run a year ago and claims to have made it from Laranonne to Ultimane in slightly less than an hour. Or," corrected the pilot, "an equivalent distance, out in deep-deep space. Some of this is probably guff; I doubt that he could do it. That's a hundred thousand light-years per hour and just a bit fantastic. Trouble is that the phanobands propagate at a finite speed, according to Hahn Tratter, and therefore the true velocity is difficult to check, since no one has been able to measure phanoband velocity."
"At any rate, it's fast," said Dusty, who did not understand half of what the pilot said.
Gant nodded. "It's fast. It's what we'll be doing in your clear channels, Dusty. That will make you rich and famous, that idea of yours."
"Iffing and providing we can get there in time."
"No matter. If Terra is lost to you, you'll still—"
"Look," said Dusty, "if that bunch wins out, I'll—"
"And I won't blame you," replied Gant.
There came a double report. The man on the barytrine detector said, "Barytrine field just went into the second phase," at the same time that the pilot said, "Last lap!" and turned his point of aim around the beacon to center the hairs on a small star that did not wink.
"Our next problem is to scour Terra inch by inch to find their barytrine generator," said Gant worriedly.
Dusty groaned. He thought of the trackless wastes of the planet; the Upper Amazon jungles, the tundra of Alaska and Siberia, the hidden reaches of Africa, high Tibet, and for that matter the cornfields of Iowa and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. The fathomless, staggering area of the sea bottoms was too vast a hopeless search-problem to contemplate.
Gant looked at Dusty. "It's bad, Dusty. I'll not fool you, but it's bad. We have perhaps a day or two, perhaps three. We're late. By the time we arrive, the phase-two growth will be heavy enough to cause leakage-reaction in our detector and render the detector completely ambiguous."
"Meaning what?"
"What I said. That we must scour Terra inch by inch. And here is where you must help."
"Me?"
"Yes. You must issue orders to your Space Patrol to comb the landscape. You must find that barytrine generator."
Dusty looked at Gant Nerley blankly. "You realize what you're asking? That within a matter of hours we must set up a land-scouring search and completely cover the entire earth? I haven't even got the foggiest notion of how many million square miles of earth there are, let alone the ocean-bottom which we couldn't even touch, lacking the equipment."
"They wouldn't plant it on a sea bottom."
"No? Look, Gant, remember that they're planning on keeping this thing running for a thousand years. They'll have to hide it good."
Gant shook his head with a wan smile. "Not at all. You forget that so far as anybody within the barytrine field is likely to see it, the total time will be from right now until the field goes on in a few hours. Then the enclosure-time will elapse instantaneously for those within. Anybody who finds it once the job goes on will find it after you have been freed of the field. The chances are high that they've dropped it in some comfortable climate, possibly near a large city, just as Scyth Radnor did."
Dusty eyed Gant sourly. "For the same purpose?" he asked.
"Probably. After all, Dusty—" Gant let the statement hang, suggesting silently that Dusty was the kind of human who would think of the same thing and act on it. "So you must issue orders to your Patrol—"
Dusty grunted. His Patrol? Discredited, his position shot to bits, his public appeal running somewhere near absolute zero, who would even listen to him? His former admirers had shucked their Space Patrol clothing for the costume of Jack Vandal, Space Rover.
Then he sat up with a puzzled smile.
"You have an idea?"
"I hope so."
"And—?"
Dusty smiled wistfully. "From the time Scyth Radnor opened his spacelock and blasted off the end of my antenna, I've been running a losing battle," he said. "I've been playing a game far over my head; outpointed, overbid, overdrawn and sinking. About the only reason I'm still here fighting is that some of the rules of this cockeyed game seem to fall into my own act. Yes, dammit, I've got an idea. Can I call the orders, Gant?"
"Take over, Dusty."
Dusty turned to the pilot. "When we get there," he said, "Circle the planet several times as fast and as low as you can. Create a stir. Radiate like mad, anything you can radiate. Call attention to us in a bold fashion and show 'em that what we've got is big, important and powerful." Then to Gant Nerley he put the question, "You wouldn't have anything as primitive as a radio set aboard, would you?"
"You mean a radiomagnetic communication device? Well, not for communications but we do have a small receiver for detecting the lower-radiation stars and one for scanning planetary systems for primitive cultures. What did you have in mind?"
Dusty looked Gant in the eye. "I want to broadcast orders to my Patrol."
"Oh. An excellent idea. We'll save time that way. The scanner-type radiomagnetic wave equipment is two-way and connected to a menslator for contacting primitive peoples, you know, and—"
"Get it fired up," said Dusty shortly. "Full power."
The screech of air came first as a thin whistle, and then thundered and slammed down at Earth below as the thirteen Marandanian spacecraft were inched lower and lower into the complaining atmosphere. The howling racket dinned into the ears of Russian and Chinese and Hawaiian and Californian and New Yorker and Briton and Frenchman and Indian and Malayan and Indonesian and Argentinian and South African and Australian and Mexican and Floridian. Around it went, across the land and the sea, a thunder blast of rent air that piled shock wave on shock wave and sent them tearing down at the ground below. The thunder cracked windows and made plaster sift down from ceilings. It dinned down a tree or two, and it hurled some people to the ground. It flipped a parked fleet of jetplanes over in crumpled ruin like a windstorm hitting a deck of cards.
Across the world, radar operators looked blankly at the signal pips that raced across their screens and began to make apologetic reports. Interceptors tried to rise, but were tossed madly in the racing shock-stream to lose ground and return to earth limping.
But in the lead spacecraft of this mad fleet, the barytrine operator watched his detector hopefully. The entire screen was aglow, but he watched it and finally said, "I think it's down there somewhere."
He pointed to a region in Indiana not far from the lower tip of Lake Michigan.
The fleet circled Terra once more, swung high for the long dive, and then came howling down on a long slant, while Dusty took the radio and cried: "Junior Spacemen of The Space Patrol,Attention!"
The radio, powered by machinus forces, hammered down and blanketed the radio broadcast stations. It broke up the video screens in a mash of spots, flecks and snowflakes. Dusty's voice roared into telephone lines and onto the commercial radio links and chattered indistinctly in direction-finding equipment and made incomprehensible squiggles clutter the radar screens.
"Junior Spacemen, Attention to Official Orders! By now you are aware that your Commander, Dusty Britton, flies with a fleet of spacecraft above you. Now hear this!
"Within a few hundred miles of the lower tip of Lake Michigan there is concealed somewhere a dangerous device known as a barytrine generator. This must be located and stopped.
"Now! To the Junior Spaceman who locates this machine I will personally award the Medal of Merit. And to the entire Group Command of which he is a member I will award full scholarships as Space Midshipmen in a real Space Academy, to make them real spacemen.
"Now, Junior Spacemen, go out and find me that barytrine generator!"
Dusty signed off as the down-rushing fleet swaybacked close to the ground and pulled out to swap ends and go screaming up in a stark vertical climb, its drivers fighting the rise to a standstill fifty miles in the sky.
Here they hovered for a second to turn rightside up and then the flight formed into a pattern and began to land, coming down slowly.
Before they were halfway down, Dusty saw results. In the telescope were moving dots scouring the landscape. And along highways that led from town and city were boys on bicycles and a few in cars driven by parents. Across the fields they went, peering under trees and behind bushes, scouring the cornfields and the farms and stamping through woodsy sections like swarming ants.
But then as the flight landed in a neat pattern in a bald field, the barytrine detector hissed once and gave up, smoke curling out of the cabinet.
"Close," said the operator.
But Dusty, with a yell, was at the airlock. For across the field a thousand yards away was a faint bluish haze that shimmered iridescent in the sunlight. He pawed at the door as it swung open ponderously, then he looked around wildly for something to use. His eyes fell upon a small cabinet.
Scyth had placed that fluted-barrelled thing back in the airlock after he burned Dusty's antenna off. Dusty tore a cabinet open and grabbed one of the fluted-barrelled things from a clip.
Then he jumped to the ground and raced across the field.
"Dusty!" roared Gant Nerley. "That's dangerous. You can't—"
Gant let his voice trail away as Dusty plunged into the blue haze, fingering the trigger-button at the top of the pistol grip. The searing beam lashed out and slashed at the air as Dusty's heels caught the ground in a braking slide. Then the knifing beam slashed down across the metal case and into the ground before it. Curls of smoke arose and the ground sizzled. He cross-slashed and cut another ribbon out of the air and the barytrine generator, then cut down again.
There was a hiss and a sputter and the blue haze ceased—there was a blinding flash and a flat bark of something exploding violently. Dusty felt a wave of almost-intolerable heat, his closed eyes were seared by a flare of brightness, and the explosion hurled him backwards on his spine. He turned and scrambled back, stumbling over the rough ground, blinded.
At that moment four members of the Junior Space Patrol came through a small thicket of trees.
"Gee," said their Group Leader. "Gee—the Commander found it first!"
They stood on a small reviewing stand, Dusty Britton and the Group Command that had come through the thicket of trees in time to steer their blinded Commander away from the flaring barytrine generator. Dusty's face and hands were a super-sunburned red, and his eyes were still puffy but open enough to see.
From a sheet of paper he read:
"It is not within my power to grant a medal that is worth the tin it is made of. But for the diligence and their quick action I do hereby grant and guarantee them full scholarships in White Sands University, which by the time they graduate will have become a full Space Academy. So I here hand them their Certificates of Entry, and to the President of White Sands University I deliver a certified check to be held in trust and used for their education.
"I salute the future Commanders of The Space Patrol and step down from my position to leave it open for them!"
There came a roar from the crowd that thundered across the field as Dusty stepped from the platform into a spaceport jeep and was hustled out to Gant Nerley's flagship. Inside there were a number of men waiting.
"Now see here, Dusty, you can't go galaxy-hopping when we've got plans for you."
Dusty eyed Martin Gramer with a grunt. "Last time we met in a place like this you had me all scheduled to take a space hop when I had other plans for myself. No dice, Gramer."
"But look at the money—"
"I'll make millions out of this clear-channel idea, according to Gant, here."
"That's right," said Gant.
"So," said Dusty, "if you think I'm going to go on playing the part of a broken-down hero-spaceman when there are real spacemen around, you're nuts, Gramer. Include me—as you've said so often—out."
"But what are you going to do?"
"Me? I'm going to Marandis. Barb and I have an offer from Supergalaxy Spectacles to make a series of what they call 'Primitives.' You know, old-timers with men using chemical rockets and learning their first feeble steps into space."
He grinned at Barbara knowingly. "I've got a script ofDestination MoonI swiped from Central Files. It should oughta wow 'em cold!"
[Transcriber's Note: No Chapter XII heading in original publication.]