Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (5 page)

"If I've got to cook up a story-line," observed Bell, "I have to know
the set. Who'll act? You know how amateurs can ham up any script! How
about a part for Babs? Nice kid!"

Cochrane found himself annoyed, without knowing why.

"We just have to wait until we know what our job is," he said curtly,
and turned to go.

Bell said:

"One more thing. If you're planning to use a news cameraman up
here—don't! I used to be a cameraman before I got crazy and started to
write. Let me do the camera-work. I've got a better idea of using a
camera to tell a story now, than—"

"Hold it," said Cochrane. "We're not up here to film-tape a show. Our
job is psychiatry—craziness."

To a self-respecting producer, a psychiatric production would seem
craziness. A script-writer might have trouble writing out a
psychiatrist's prescription, or he might not. But producing it would be
out of all rationality! No camera, the patient would be the star, and
most lines would be ad libbed. Cochrane viewed such a production with
extreme distaste. But of course, if a man wanted only to be famous, it
might be handled as a straight public-relations job. In any case,
though, it would amount to flattery in three dimensions and Cochrane
would rather have no part in it. But he had to arrange the whole thing.

He went back to the table and rejoined Babs. She confided that she'd
been talking to Johnny Simms' wife. She was nice! But homesick. Cochrane
sat down and thought morbid thoughts. Then he realized that he was
irritated because Babs didn't notice. He finished his drink and ordered
another.

Half an hour later, Holden found them. He had in tow a sad-looking
youngish man with a remarkably narrow forehead and an expression of deep
anxiety. Cochrane winced. A neurotic type if there ever was one!

"Jed," said Holden heartily, "here's Mr. Dabney. Mr. Dabney, Jed
Cochrane is here as a specialist in public-relations set-ups. He'll take
charge of this affair. Your father-in-law sent him up here to see that
you are done justice to!"

Dabney seemed to think earnestly before he spoke.

"It is not for myself," he explained in an anxious tone. "It is my work!
That is important! After all, this is a fundamental scientific
discovery! But nobody pays any attention! It is extremely important!
Extremely! Science itself is held back by the lack of attention paid to
my discovery!"

"Which," Holden assured him, "is about to be changed. It's a matter of
public relations. Jed's a specialist. He'll take over."

The sad-faced young man held up his hand for attention. He thought.
Visibly. Then he said worriedly:

"I would take you over to my laboratory, but I promised my wife I would
call her in half an hour from now. Johnny Simms' wife just reminded me.
My wife is back on Earth. So you will have to go to the laboratory
without me and have Mr. Jones show you the proof of my work. A very
intelligent man, Jones—in a subordinate way, of course. Yes. I will get
you a jeep and you can go there at once, and when you come back you can
tell me what you plan. But you understand that it is not for myself that
I want credit! It is my discovery! It is terribly important! It is
vital! It must not be overlooked!"

Holden escorted him away, while Cochrane carefully controlled his
features. After a few moments Holden came back, his face sagging.

"This your drink, Jed?" he asked dispiritedly. "I need it!" He picked up
the glass and emptied it. "The history of that case would be
interesting, if one could really get to the bottom of it! Come along!"
His tone was dreariness itself. "I've got a jeep waiting for us."

Babs stood up, her eyes shining.

"May I come, Mr. Cochrane?"

Cochrane waved her along. Holden tried to stalk gloomily, but nobody can
stalk in one-sixth gravity. He reeled, and then depressedly accommodated
himself to conditions on the moon.

There was an airlock with a smaller edition of the moon-jeep that had
brought them from the ship to the city. It was a brightly-polished metal
body, raised some ten feet off the ground on outrageously large wheels.
It was very similar to the straddle-trucks used in lumberyards on Earth.
It would straddle boulders in its path. It could go anywhere in spite of
dust and detritus, and its metal body was air-tight and held air for
breathing, even out on the moon's surface.

They climbed in. There was the sound of pumping, which grew fainter. The
outer lock-door opened. The moon-jeep rolled outside.

Babs stared with passionate rapture out of a shielded port. There were
impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no
weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years.
The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the
rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City. It reached a steep
ascent. It climbed. And the way was remarkably rough and the vehicle
springless, but it was nevertheless a cushioned ride. A bump cannot be
harsh in light gravity. The vehicle rode as if on wings.

"All right," said Cochrane. "Tell me the worst. What's the trouble with
him? Is he the result of six generations of keeping the money in the
family? Or is he a freak?"

Holden groaned a little.

"He's practically a stock model of a rich young man without brains
enough for a job in the family firm, and too much money for anything
else. Fortunately for his family, he didn't react like Johnny
Simms—though they're good friends. A hundred years ago, Dabney'd have
gone in for the arts. But it's hard to fool yourself that way now. Fifty
years ago he'd have gone in for left-wing sociology. But we really are
doing the best that can be done with too many people and not enough
world. So he went in for science. It's non-competitive. Incapacity
doesn't show up. But he has stumbled on something. It sounds really
important. It must have been an accident! The only trouble is that it
doesn't mean a thing! Yet because he's accomplished more than he ever
expected to, he's frustrated because it's not appreciated! What a joke!"

Cochrane said cynically:

"You paint a dark picture, Bill. Are you trying to make this thing into
a challenge?"

"You can't make a man famous for discovering something that doesn't
matter," said Holden hopelessly. "And this is that!"

"Nothing's impossible to public relations if you spend enough money,"
Cochrane assured him. "What's this useless triumph of his?"

The jeep bounced over a small cliff and fell gently for half a second
and rolled on. Babs beamed.

"He's found," said Holden discouragedly, "a way to send messages faster
than light. It's a detour around Einstein's stuff—not denying it, but
evading it. Right now it takes not quite two seconds for a message to go
from the moon to Earth. That's at the speed of light. Dabney has
proof—we'll see it—that he can cut that down some ninety-five per
cent. Only it can't be used for Earth-moon communication, because both
ends have to be in a vacuum. It could be used to the space platform,
but—what's the difference? It's a real discovery for which there's no
possible use. There's no place to send messages to!"

Cochrane's eyes grew bright and hard. There were some three thousand
million suns in the immediate locality of Earth—and more only a
relatively short distance way—and it had not mattered to anybody. The
situation did not seem likely to change. But—The moon-jeep climbed and
climbed. It was a mile above the bay of the lava sea and the dust-heaps
that were a city. It looked like ten miles, because of the curve of the
horizon. The mountains all about looked like a madman's dream.

"But he wants appreciation!" said Holden angrily. "People on Earth
almost trampling on each other for lack of room, and people like me
trying to keep them sane when they've every reason for despair—and he
wants appreciation!"

Cochrane grinned. He whistled softly.

"Never underestimate a genius, Bill," he said kindly. "I refer modestly
to myself. In two weeks your patient—I'll guarantee it—will be
acclaimed the hope, the blessing, the greatest man in all the history of
humanity! It'll be phoney, of course, but we'll have Marilyn
Winters—Little Aphrodite herself—making passes at him in hopes of a
publicity break! It's a natural!"

"How'll you do it?" demanded Holden.

The moon-jeep turned in its crazy, bumping progress. A flat area had
been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of
time. Here there was a human structure. Typically, it was a dust-heap
leaning against a cliff. There was an airlock and another jeep waited
outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat space,
shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to them from the
airlock door.

"How?" repeated Cochrane. "I'll get the details here. Let's go! How do
we manage?"

It was a matter, he discovered, of vacuum-suits, and they were tricky to
get into and felt horrible when one was in. Struggling, Cochrane thought
to say:

"You can wait here in the jeep, Babs—"

But she was already climbing into a suit very much oversized for her,
with the look of high excitement that Cochrane had forgotten anybody
could wear.

They got out of a tiny airlock that held just one person at a time. They
started for the laboratory. And suddenly Cochrane saw Babs staring
upward through the dark, almost-opaque glass that a space-suit-helmet
needs in the moon's daytime if its occupant isn't to be fried by
sunlight. Cochrane automatically glanced up too.

He saw Earth. It hung almost in mid-sky. It was huge. It was gigantic.
It was colossal. It was four times the diameter of the moon as seen from
Earth, and it covered sixteen times as much of the sky. Its continents
were plain to see, and its seas, and the ice-caps at its poles gleamed
whitely, and over all of it there was a faintly bluish haze which was
like a glamour; a fey and eerie veiling which made Earth a sight to draw
at one's heart-strings.

Behind it and all about it there was the background of space, so thickly
jeweled with stars that there seemed no room for another tiny gem.

Cochrane looked. He said nothing. Holden stumbled on to the airlock. He
remembered to hold the door open for Babs.

And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not wholly
familiar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour of
most of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was a
physics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone and
spilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. West
and Jamison were already here, their space-suits removed. They sat
before beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. There
was a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his new
visitors.

Holden clumsily unfastened the face-plate of his helmet and gloomily
explained his mission. He introduced Cochrane and Babs, verifying in the
process that the dark man was the Jones he had come to see. A physics
laboratory high in the fastnesses of the Lunar Apennines is an odd place
for a psychiatrist to introduce himself on professional business. But
Holden only explained unhappily that Dabney had sent them to learn about
his discovery and arrange for a public-relations job to make it known.

Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during
Holden's explanation. Otherwise he was poker-faced.

"I was explaining the discovery to these two," he observed.

"Shoot it," said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for an
explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable
terms.

West said briskly—exactly as if before a television camera—that Mr.
Dabney had started from the well-known fact that the properties of space
are modified by energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and
electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or
that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants
of space had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields
had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of
the distance ...

"Cut," said Cochrane.

West automatically abandoned his professional delivery. He placidly
re-addressed himself to his beer.

"How about it, Jones?" asked Cochrane. "Dabney's got a variation? What
is it?"

"It's a field of force that doesn't spread out. You set up two plates
and establish this field between them," said Jones curtly. "It's
circularly polarized and it doesn't expand. It's like a searchlight beam
or a microwave beam, and it stays the same size like a pipe. In that
field—or pipe—radiation travels faster than it does outside. The
properties of space are changed between the plates. Therefore the speed
of all radiation. That's all."

Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whose
eyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not more
polite than politeness required. He did not express employer-like
rapture at the mention of his employer's name.

"But what can be done with it?" asked Cochrane practically.

"Nothing," said Jones succinctly. "It changes the properties of space,
but that's all. Can you think of any use for a faster-than-light
radiation-pipe? I can't."

Cochrane cocked an eye at Jamison, who could extrapolate at the drop of
an equation. But Jamison shook his head.

"Communication between planets," he said morosely, "when we get to them.
Chats between sweethearts on Earth and Pluto. Broadcasts to the stars
when we find that another one's set up a similar plate and is ready to
chat with us. There's nothing else."

Cochrane waved his hand. It is good policy to put a specialist in his
place, occasionally.

"Demonstration?" he asked Jones.

"There are plates across the crater out yonder," said Jones without
emotion. "Twenty miles clear reach. I can send a message across and get
it relayed twice and back through two angles in about five per cent of
the time radiation ought to take."