Mission to Universe Read online

  When the silence was so complete as to be nearly painful, he began. His voice sounded unnaturally harsh against the walls.

  “I’m standing here to speak to you,” he said, “not as Ben Shore, whom you all know, and who feels as happy about being here off Alpha Centauri as you do—but as Brigadier General Shore, Commander of this ship by authority of the Congress and the President of your country.”

  He paused. They still stared at him, perplexed, but still in silence.

  “I should be saying something congratulatory about our being here,” he said, “but as it happens I don’t think this is the time for it in view of what I have to tell you now.”

  He lifted the dry-copy so that those in the room could see it. —

  “This is a copy of an order,” he said, “signed by the President of the United States. I’ve had to censor out certain references to secret matters, but the message is still readable. As soon as I finish talking here, I’ll thumbtack it on the bulletin board on the wall, there, and you can read it for yourselves. Briefly—” he took a deep breath, “what it does is order us all to search for a habitable world, as proof that the phase ship can find new worlds for our human race to populate—and not to come back until we find it.”

  He paused a moment to let that sink in. Watching, he could not tell if the silence meant it had done so—or only that they were all in shock.

  “I realize,” he said, “as the President himself undoubtedly did, that drafting you into this duty is unfair by any standard. None of you had any inkling of this when you were asked to apply for commissions in the Air Force, which made you subject to such orders, nor even when you came aboard this morning. But the critically tense situation in the world will have to serve as an excuse.”

  He paused again. They still were silent and motionless.

  “We’re here. We’re going to fulfill our mission,” he said, “and we’re going to make the best of it. You’d all better start figuring what special and personal supplies you’ll need from Stores for extended living aboard the ship. And I’ll see Captains Lee Ruiz and Walter Bone and First Lieutenant Nora Taller in my office in five minutes for a conference.”

  Amid a silence that still continued, he got down from the rostrum, picked his way through the crowd to the bulletin board, and thumbtacked there the sheet with the dry-copy of the message. He ran his eye over it, though he knew it by heart now. It read:

  To: Brigadier General Benjamin Allen Shore and officers of Phase Ship Mark III:

  You are hereby ordered to take off, leave the surface of our Earth and the vicinity of our solar system to find and claim a world habitable by the human race.

  That there may be no misunderstanding as to the aim and purpose of such a flight you are hereby ordered to prosecute a search, to such ultimate limits of space and time as the outermost reaches of the physical universe and for a voyage of forever and a day before accounting the search a failure and returning with such a new home for our human race unfound.

  Walter Eugene

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Ben turned and walked out of the Lounge and slowly back through the empty Sections to his own office. He sat down at his desk, and for a moment he merely sat therewith his hands resting flat on the desk top.

  Then he breathed out, a deep, harsh, and determined breath, and reached down to take from the drawer of his desk the original order and its duplicate. Rising, he walked across to the walk-in safe in one wall of his office, opened it, and stepped inside to file the envelope containing the order and its duplicate. He locked the safe again, returned, and sat down at his desk.

  Lee, Walt, and Nora would be here in a minute or so. Meanwhile, he snapped on the small outside TV screenset in one side of his desk at a slant with the surface and looked both down and out into a wilderness of unfamiliar stars. Staring, his eye seemed to plunge on and on into immensity, until it felt as if he would be lost forever. This was the unknown territory into which they would now venture— He tore his eyes away suddenly, snapped off the set, and sat upright at his desk.

  A suit of icy armor seemed to enclose all his body and limbs.

  He, too was afraid. He admitted it to himself squarely at last. But in this flight of wild geese, he held the point of the v-formation and was flock leader. The rest must never know he shared the weakness of fear. They would not know, he promised it now, silently, to himself.

  He put his palms flat on the desk and waited for the coming of his Captains.

  Chapter 3

  “What I want,” said Ben slowly, “is the following: First, to establish aboard here the military kind of discipline that’ll be the only thing to hold us together in the long run,crammed together as we shall be in a small space for months or possibly even years.”

  He paused to let them consider that first point. They were in conference in his office, around the symbol of that activity, a coffeepot and four cups on his desk top. Ben occupied his normal position behind the desk, Nora was on his right, Walt across from him, and Lee on his left.It was the usual arrangement—although in the past it had been around some other desk—and its familiarity had a tendency to soften the impact of Ben’s speech, just minutes past, in the Lounge.

  “Second,” Ben went on, “to set up the training of people in jobs besides the ones they know now. Lee, it’s most important that you train someone right away to replace you as technical officer, and you, Nora, that you train at least one substitute nurse.”

  This last was the weakest point of all Ben’s undercover planning for this moment. His own checkered college years had seen him wander from engineering through psychology and into history in his attempt to find some understanding and place among this human race of half-angels, half-devils into which he had been born. On the way, one part of his studies had been a full schedule of premedical courses and a year in medical school before his inner self-doubts caused him to withdraw. This last year he had supplemented that first small taste of medical information with as much private reading and studying as he had time for. His brain, with its usual flypaper retentiveness, had managed to pack itself with academic knowledge about the practice of medicine. His ears, eyes, nose—and above all his hands—remained ignorant. Nora, however, had actually worked as a registered nurse. She was their real insurance, thought Ben, against sickness or accident aboard.

  “Tessie,” said Nora, making her choice immediately. “And maybe Polly.”

  “Julian,” said Lee. Julian Tyree, Ben remembered, had already been working with Lee in the matter of the recycler, in the lower half of the ship, that reprocessed their air, water, and wastes to make the ship a closed universe. Ben recalled a week ago seeing the two of them bent over atom-down section of the recycler and wondering that they should find each other so congenial to work with. Julian was gentlemanly to the point of being stiff—an attitude his softly British accent underscored. Lee was as informal as his own buccaneering appearance indicated. Apparently, however, they made a natural team.

  “Walt,” went on Ben, “I’m assuming almost anyone could take over as Navigation Officer, after a fashion, and that beyond that point there’d be no hope of your trying to train them on short notice like this, anyway. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” said Walt. He made a simple statement of it, without apology. In a sense, they were all navigators aboard the phase ship. Over and above that, was Walt’s special appreciation of the universe in terms of the phase physics that only he fully understood.

  “Well, then,” said Ben. “Third, I want to set up occupations for the off-duty people beside the training of them in other jobs. Not only a regular program of physical exercise, as the Lounge is set up for, but recreational and study occupations. One of the things that occurred to me was to have everyone aboard keep a personal log with entries once every ship’s period each time they come off duty. If we clear the drug lockers in the top-deck Special Stores room, everyone aboard can have a private, locked compartment in which to keep
his or her logbook—”

  He broke off. There was a knocking at the door on the men’s side of the ship.

  “What is it?” he called, annoyed—not so much at the interruption as at the lack of discipline the interruption implied

  “Kirk—Walish, General,” said the voice of Kirk beyond the metal panels of the door. “We’ve got a stowaway.”

  “Stowaway!” said Lee. They had all sat up at once.Ben remembered just in time to maintain his new, distant formality of attitude.

  “All right,” he said, evenly, “bring him in.”

  “Him or her—we don’t know which,” said Kirk, opening the door and walking in. He was grinning and carrying a brown and yellow brindled object that Ben to his astonishment recognized as a half-grown cat. Its fur stuck out roughly and untidily, and, held to Kirk’s chest as it was by one hand under its stomach, it looked uneasy and antagonistic. It did not fight against Kirk’s grasp, but it kept its four legs stuck out stiff, as if it were a much younger kitten, fearing to be dropped without warning; and it opened its mouth to hiss silently at them all as Kirk brought it forward and set it down in the center of Ben’s desk in their midst.

  “Found it down in the Food Stores Section of the main storeroom below, just now,” said Kirk. “It was my turn to go down and get fresh supplies for the automat in the Lounge. I heard something, and there it was.”

  A corner of Ben’s mind made a note of the fact that the automat, so-called, that automatically cooked and produced the foods punched for in the dining area of the Lounge, should not be needing resupplying this soon. But, before he could go further with that thought, he found his attention claimed by the cat, which was acting unpussylike, to say the least. “Undomesticated,” thought Ben, might be a better word.

  The cat had not moved when it was set down. It had, however, gone immediately into a half-crouch on the desktop, tail-tip twitching and jaws agape in unfriendly fashion.

  “There weren’t any cats around the Surface Installation,were there?” asked Nora. “Or even back at Underground?”

  “It acts wild,” said Lee, staring sympathetically at the animal.

  “That’s not a wild cat!” said Nora.

  “No—I mean, gone wild,” said Lee. Now that the creature was close, Ben could see burrs matted in its fur—that explained the untidy look—and a look of skin-and-bones under the fur. “It might have been some farmer’s cat gone wild. It acts like it’s not used to seeing people at all.”

  This was about the only possible explanation for the cat’s appearance, Ben had to admit to himself. From the moment the Surface Installation had been decided on, Secret Service agents had bought up and occupied the surrounding farms, which they continued to farm, to support the camouflaged, farm-buildings appearance of the Surface Installation itself. A cat left behind by the original owner of one of those farms might easily have ranged as far as the neighboring Installation. But an animal this young could not possibly be such a beast, forgotten four years ago.

  “It was probably born wild,” said Kirk, “from a mother who’d gone wild. It acts as if it expects to be eaten alive at any minute.”

  This was only too true. The cat’s head was turned toward Ben at the moment. He looked directly into the needle teeth and the pink interior of the silently snarling jaws. Motionless except for the twitching tail-tip, the cat still managed to give the expression that it might fly with claws extended on all four feet into Ben’s face at the first suspicious move. There was something about this attitude that reminded a comer of Ben’s mind uncomfortably about their own position in the phase ship, surrounded by the unknown dangers and devils of which the galaxy must be supposed to be equipped.

  “How could a little kitten grow up out in the wild?” Nora was asking.

  “Like the young of any of the wild cats, I suppose,” said Lee. “The mother hunts for them to start with and then takes them out and shows them how. Gets them—what’s the word?”

  “Blooded,” supplied Kirk.

  Ben winced internally—not so much from the word as from the train of thought that sprang instantly to mind from it He had suddenly become aware of something he should have thought of before; and immediately his unsentimental, calculative mental machinery was developing it to its logical conclusion. Filled with a sudden self-hatred for having this facility, he turned roughly on Kirk.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ve seen it Now take the animal out of here and see if some of those bum can’t be cut out of its hair. I’ll make you responsible for it.”

  “I was intending to be,” said Kirk, a little sharply. Ben stared at him until he saw the balding man’s gaze bend before him.

  “From now on,” snarled Ben, in the uncomfortable stillness of the office, “we’ll have the word ‘sir' used to all superior officers unless they specifically say not to use it. And, from now on, when I’m in conference with my assistant officers, we won’t be disturbed for anything that can be put off until the conference is over.”

  “Sir—” said Kirk, grudgingly. But his eyes flashed up under his black eyebrows to meet Ben’s for a second, and Ben caught a fractional glance of pure outrage and fury. “All right then,” said Ben, evenly. “You can go.”

  Kirk picked up the cat and left. The closing of the door behind him left an uncomfortable silence pooled around the desk, to which only Walt in his immobility seemed indifferent.

  “Ben—Sir,” said Lee, hesitatingly, “These people aren’t the kind that take to regimenting easily. And particularly the older ones, like Kirk—”

  Ben stared at Lee—almost as hard as he had stared at Kirk. “That’s the way it’s going to have to be. Without a framework of authority and discipline, this ship will fall apart in two months. We can’t live here the way we lived as research and development people back on the surface of Earth. Sooner or later, we’re going to run into a situation where only everyone’s immediate and automatic obedience to the necessary orders will keep us alive and going. Now, if you don’t see that any of you—” his gaze moved around to Walt and Nora, “I want you to take my word for it. And if you can’t do that and act as if you were convinced of it yourself, I want you to tell me—now.” He waited. None of the three spoke up.

  “Yes sir,” said Lee, at last

  “Good.” Ben cracked the hard held lines of his face in a smile. “Because you three are going to have to demand obedience as well as give it. Now—” He reached for a star projection chart on the desk and pulled it out where they could all have equally good views of it. “I think the wisest step is to begin our search with the nearer stars, even when they don’t resemble a Go type star like our Sun. When we get farther from home, we can begin to be more choosy and pick only Sol-like stars to investigate. Now—” he pointed at the chart, “Sirius and Procyon seem to be the immediate close-in candidates for examination, followed by Altair, Vega, Arcturus, and so forth. Now what order suggests itself to you, individually, in which to make our hops to these stars and their possible systems?”

  “Sirius first don’t you think?” said Lee. “And Procyon second . . .” The talk became technical and therefore impersonal, Walt’s deep voice taking over more, and more of the conversation. They had left the human problem and entered the abstract one of phase ship movement Ben suspected that, after the emotion of the past hour or more, it was a relief to all of them. He knew it was to him.

  In the six weeks that followed, as they calculated their position relative to the galaxy’s theoretical centerpoint the comparable position of their, destination—shifted—and then began the calculations all over again—Ben watched the awareness of their situation sink like some dark dye into the unconscious minds of all those aboard and be as resolutely denied by their conscious minds. He was finding himself generally left alone by the crew members aside from the three senior officers—he had promoted Nora to Captain, immediately following the first day’s conference in his office.

  It had always puzzled Ben that people believed that the
great creative minds that moved the race forward went through the technical barriers in the road of human progress. Hie fact was just the contrary. They went aroundthem. They looked away from the impassable barrier before them to find an alternate solution elsewhere. Man had not solved the problem of ocean crossings by learning to walk upon water, but by building ships. He had not taken to the air by flapping wings attached to his arms, but by building planes heavier than air. Certainly, thought Ben, it should have seemed the most obvious consequence in the world that, faced with the limiting speed of light at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, far too slow to permit reasonable exploration of even the nearer stars, men should look outside the problem for an alternate solution to crossing the vast galactic distances in practical periods of time.

  If distance divided by a fixed speed limit gave an impractical answer to star travel and the speed limit could not be changed—then how about changing the distance factor? Specifically, was it not possible to look at the universe in terms that assumed that the distance between points in the universe did not exist?

  Walt’s mathematics had found that the way, using the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a departure point—that declaration by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 that stated it was impossible to specify or determine simultaneously the position and velocity of a particle as accurately as wished. The determiner could be precise about position only at the expense of being uncertain about velocity—and vice versa.

  Assume therefore that velocity could be absolutely determined—this was the proposition that had fascinated Walt, even when Ben had first known him in the twelfth grade in Rockford, Illinois. Then, theoretically, the position of the particle would be ubiquitous—it would have all points in the physical universe as its position. Starting with this desired end, Walt had begun by mathematically speculating that phase shifts in keeping with the wave theories of quantum mechanics indicated a requirement for an exceedingly small, but calculable, “timeless” interval. This interval—of “no-time” as it was more correctly called—would require an absolute fixing of velocity and an absolute universality (or ubiquity) of position of a particle.