Beyond This Horizon (22 page)

“Thorgsen? Your boss?”

“Yes. He had been telling her about the outstations, particularly the ones on Pluto, of course, but he mentioned Mars and the rest, I suppose. They don’t get much recreation, other than canned shows and reading.” Hamilton knew what he meant, although he had never thought much about it. With the exception of the tourist cities on Luna there was nothing to attract human beings to the other planets, save for exploration and research. The devoted few who put up with the unearthly hardships necessarily lived a monklike existence. Luna was a special case, naturally; being practically in Earth’s front yard and an easy jump, it was as popular for romantic holidays as Southpole had once been.

“She got the idea, or Thorgsen suggested it to her, of getting together a diversified travelling troupe to play a circuit of all the outposts.”

“It doesn’t sound commercial.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Thorgsen took the matter up for subsidy. He argued that, if research and exploration were necessary, then morale of the personnel involved was a government matter, in spite of the longstanding policy against government participation in the entertainment business, luxury business, or fine arts.”

Hamilton whistled. “Nice going! Why, that principle was almost as rock solid as civil rights.”

“Yes, but it was a matter of constitution. And the Planners are no fools. They don’t necessarily follow precedent. Look at this job we’re on.”

“Yes, surely. Matter of fact, that was what I dropped in to see you about. I wanted to see how you were getting along.” At the time of this conversation Hamilton was feeling his way into the whole picture of the Great Research. Carruthers had given him no fixed instructions, but had told him to spend a few weeks sizing up the problem.

The phase of the research occupying Monroe-Alpha’s attention—Thorgsen’s project, the Grand Eidouraniun—was much further advanced than any other aspect of the whole project, since it had been conceived originally as a separate matter before the Great Research, which included it, had been thought of. Monroe-Alpha had come into it rather late, but Hamilton had assumed that his friend would be the dominant figure in it. This, Monroe-Alpha maintained, was not true.

“Hargrave is much more fitted for this sort of work than I am. I take my directions from him—myself, and about sixty others.”

“How come? I thought you were tops in the numbers racket.”

“I have my specialty and Hargrave knows how to make the best use of it. You apparently have no idea of how diversified and specialized mathematics is, Felix. I remember a congress I attended last year—more than a thousand present, but there weren’t more than a dozen men there I could really talk to, or understand.”

“Hmmm… What does Thorgsen do?”

“Well, naturally, he isn’t much use in
design
—he’s an astrophysicist, or, more properly, a cosmic metrician. But he keeps in touch and his suggestions are always practical.”

“I see. Well—got everything you want?”

“Yes,” admitted Monroe-Alpha, “unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.”

“Thanks. You can hand me back my leg now. I see I’ve been wrong again—you
are
acquiring a sense of humor.”

“I am quite serious about it,” Cliff answered without cracking a smile, “even though I haven’t the slightest idea where I could find such nor how I could manipulate it if I did.”

“For
why?
Give.”

“I would like to set up a four-dimensional integrator to integrate from the solid surface of a four-dimensional cam. It would greatly shorten our work if we could do such a thing. The irony of it is that I can describe the thing I want to build, in mathematical symbology, quite nicely. It would do work, which we now have to do with ordinary ball-and-plane integrators and ordinary three-dimensional cams, in one operation whereas the system we use calls for an endless series of operations. It’s a little maddening—the theory is so neat and the results are so unsatisfactory.”

“I grieve for you,” Hamilton had answered, “but you had better take it up with Hargrave.”

He had left soon after that. It was evident that those human calculating machines needed nothing from him, and that they knew what they were doing. The project was important, damned important, he thought it was—to investigate what the Universe had been and what it would become. But it was certainly a long-distance matter and he himself would never live to see the end of it. Cliff had told him with a perfectly straight face that they hoped to check their preliminary calculations in a matter of three or three and a half centuries. After that they could hope to build a really worthwhile machine which might tell them things they did not already know.

So he dismissed the matter. He admired the sort of intellectual detachment which would permit men to work on such a scale, but it was not his horse.

The Great Research in its opening phases seemed to fall into half a dozen major projects, some of which interested him more than others because they gave some hope of producing results during his lifetime. Some, however, were almost as colossal as the building of the Grand Eidouraniun. The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, non-human intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men.

In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How.”

It had been pointed out that it might be extremely dangerous, psychologically, for human beings to encounter such superior creatures. There had been the tragic case of the Australian Aborigines in not too remote historical times—demoralized and finally exterminated by their own sense of inferiority in the presence of the colonizing Anglish.

The investigators serenely accepted the danger; they were not so constituted as to be able to do otherwise.

Hamilton was not sure it
was
a danger. To some it might be, but he himself could not conceive of a man such as Mordan, for example, losing his morale under any circumstances. In any case it was a long distance project. First they must reach the stars, which required inventing and building a starship. That would take a bit of doing. The great ships which plied the lonely reaches between the planets were simply not fast enough. Some new drive must be found, if the trips were not to take generations for each leg.

That they would find life elsewhere in the universe he was quite sure, although a millennia of exploration might intervene. After all, he considered, the universe was roomy! It had taken Europeans four centuries to spread throughout the two continents of the “New World”—what about a galaxy!

But Life they would find. It was not only an inner conviction; it was just short of scientific fact, for it was a tight inference of only one stage from established fact. Arrhenius the Great had set forth the brilliant speculation, sometime around the beginning of the XXth century, that life-potent spores might be carried from planet to planet, from star to star, pushed along by light pressure. The optimum size for motes to be carried along by light pressure happens to be on the same order as the sizes of bacilli. And bacilli spores are practically unkillable—heat, cold, radiation, time—they sleep through it until lodged in a favorable environment.

Arrhenius calculated that spores could drift to Alpha Centauri in around nine thousand years—a mere cosmic blink of the eye.

If Arrhenius were right, then the universe was populated, not just the earth. It mattered not whether life had originated first on earth, first elsewhere, or in many different neighborhoods, once started it had to spread. Millions of years before spaceships it had spread—if Arrhenius were right. For spores alone, lodging and multiplying, would infect an entire planet with whatever forms of life were suited to that planet. Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.

Arrhenius had been spectacularly vindicated, in part, in the early days of interplanetary exploration. Life had been found on all the planets, save Mercury and Pluto; even on Pluto there were signs of feeble, primitive life in the past. Furthermore, protoplasm seemed to be much the same wherever found—incredibly varied but presumably related. It was disappointing not to have found recognizable intelligence in the solar system—it would have been nice to have had neighbors! (The poor degenerate starveling descendants of the once-mighty Builders of Mars can hardly be described as intelligent—except in charity. A half-witted dog could cheat them at cards.)

But the most startling and satisfying vindication of Arrhenius lay in the fact that
spores
had been trapped out in space itself, in the supposedly-sterile raw vacuum of space!

Hamilton admitted that he did not expect the search for other living intelligences to bear fruit during his tenure on Terra, unless they got a hump on themselves in dreaming up that starship and then hit the jackpot on the first or second try. And again it was not his forte—he might cook up a few gadgets for them as auxiliary mechanicals in making the ship more livable, but for the key problem, motive power, he was about twenty years too late in specializing. No, keep in touch, kibitz a little, and report to Carruthers—that was all he could do.

But there were still several other research possibilities already underway, things that had to do with human beings, with men, in their more esoteric and little-studied aspects. Things that nobody knew anything about anyhow and which he could, therefore, tackle on an equal footing with others, catch-as-catch-can, and no holds barred. Where does a man go after he’s dead? And, conversely, where does he come from? He made a mental note of that latter—it suddenly occurred to him that most of the attention had been given to the first half of the paired question. What is telepathy and how do you make it tick? How is it that a man can live another life in his dreams? There were dozens more, all questions science had refused to tackle because they were too slippery—had in fact walked away from like a disgruntled cat. All of them related to some troublesome characteristic of the human personality—whatever that was—and any of them might lead to an answer as to
purpose—meaning
.

He felt toward these questions the free and easy attitude of the man who was asked if he could pilot a rocket: “I don’t know—I’ve never tried.”

Well, he would try. And he would help Carruthers see to it that many others tried, strongly, consistently, following out every approach that could be thought of, and keeping meticulous, full, scientific records. They would track down the Ego, trap it, and put a band on its leg.

What was an ego? He didn’t know, but he knew he was one. By which he did not mean his body, nor, by damn, his genes. He could localize it—on the centerline, forward of his ears, back of his eyes, and about four centimetres down from the top of the skull—no, more like six. That was where he
himself
lived—when he was home—he would bet on it, to the nearest centimetre. He
knew
closer than that, but he couldn’t get in and measure it.

Of course, he wasn’t home all the time.

Hamilton could not figure out just why Carruthers wanted him, but then, he had not been present at an exchange between Mordan and Carruthers. “How is my Problem Child getting along?” Mordan had inquired.

“Quite well, Claude. Quite well indeed.”

“What are you using him for?”

“Well…” Carruthers pursed his lips. “I’m using him as a philosopher, only he does not know it.”

Mordan chuckled. “Better not let him know. I. think he might be offended to be called a philosopher.”

“I shan’t. Really, he’s quite useful to me. You know how impossible most specialists are, and how pedantic most of our brother synthesists.”

“Tut, tut. Such heresy.”

“Isn’t it, though? But Felix is useful to me. He has an active, uninhibited mind. His mind
prowls
.”

“I told you he was a star line.”

“Yes, you did. Every now and then you genetics laddies come out with the right answer.”

“May your bed spring a leak,” Mordan answered. “We can’t always be wrong. The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.”

“Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.”

“That’s different,” said Mordan. “
I’m
the one who loves oysters. Have you had dinner?”

Felix sat up with a start. The house phone at his elbow was chiming. He flipped the come-along tab and heard Phyllis’s voice. “Felix, my dear, will you come in and say goodbye to Madame Espartero?”

“Coming, dear.”

He returned to the lounge, feeling vaguely unsettled. He had forgotten the presence in their home of the ancient Planner.

“Madame, will you graciously permit—”

“Come here, lad!” she said sharply. “I want to see you in the light.” He came forward and stood before her, feeling somewhat as he always had as a child when the development center therapists checked over his growth and physical development. Damnation, he thought, she looks at me as if I were a horse and she a buyer.

She stood up suddenly and grasped her stick. “You’ll do,” she stated, as if the knowledge somehow annoyed her. She extracted a fresh cigar from somewhere about her person, turned to Phyllis, and said, “Goodbye, child. And thank you.” Whereupon she started for the door.

Felix had to hurry to catch up with her and let her out.

Felix returned to Phyllis, and said savagely, “A man that ’ud do that ’ud be challenged.”

“Why, Felix!”

“I detest,” he stated, “these damned emphatic old women. I have never seen why politeness should be the obligation of the young and rudeness the privilege of age.”

“Why, Felix, she’s not like that at all. I think she’s rather a dear.”

“She doesn’t act like it.”

“Oh, she doesn’t mean anything by that. I think she’s just always in a hurry.”