Prescription for Chaos (21 page)

"What does it do?"

"When an efflux ray strikes ordinary matter, that matter is converted into ordinary radiation, traveling in precisely the opposite direction. The total effect is that the atoms of the object sent, and everything in it
are converted into electromagnetic radiation, which is sent out through the focused transmitter, and reassembled far away
."

Dave nodded slowly. "You said I was needed. Why?"

"The trouble with this process is that we have great difficulty bringing about the form of instability that generates efflux radiation. The worst of it is that the proper form of instability must occur simultaneously, in
both twins
, if the process is to be successful."

"What do you mean?"

"Both of these cylinders are fitted out as colonization spaceships. We have a whopping government contract for this work, which is certain—was certain—to put this country far ahead of any other in space. Because after one of these two ships transmits the other, that
other ship focuses on and transmits the first
. But the proper type of instability to generate efflux radiation must occur in both ships simultaneously, because if only one has it, the other may be carried out of range before it can do its part."

"What can I do about that? I never heard of efflux radiation before. I don't know the first thing about it."

Barrow smiled. "Last night you were wrestling an intruder when a volley of shots was fired at him. He was killed. You were not touched. A moment before that volley of shots, he was shooting at you himself from a distance of possibly two feet. You weren't touched. Shortly after, you were in a deadly situation on the highway, again untouched."

"Yes, but what did
I
have to do—"

"Did you ever hear the expression 'wild talents'?"

"Yes. Sure, but—"

"Within limits, I can foresee the future—that's precognition. But you have a deeper control of time and motion relationships. It may be as automatic and unconscious as the blink of an eye, but it's there. And we need it."

The crowd was coming into Project "S" building. They looked tense, white-faced, scared.

Dave could feel the pressure, all but unbearable.

"What do I
do
?"

Barrow led him inside one of the huge cylinders, and down a corridor that had wide strips of strong black mesh on both walks.

"For getting around," said Barrow, "when we're in space. You take hold of the mesh. We have no arrangement for artificial gravity on these ships."

He unlocked a door marked "No Admittance," and there before Dave was a softly-polished panel with a large black circular screen marked off in radians, and two centers of intense violet light, surrounded by an oscillating purple region, its boundary shifting irregularly from moment to moment. Just beside the panel was a lever marked "Danger—Manual Interlock." On the pale green wall nearby was an intercom unit.

Barrow said, "These two centers of light represent the ships' fusion reactors. As long as a band of purple exists around either center, conditions are wrong to move the ship. When the purple disappears, and there are only the two centers of violet light, we have simultaneous efflux instability.
Then
pull back that lever."

"We have just a few minutes," said Barrow. "When everyone's on board, I'll speak to you through that intercom."

The door clicked shut.

Dave looked at that pale-green door, then turned to urgently will the writhing purple boundary out of existence.

Unaffected, the two bright violet centers swam in a twisting pool of purple.

Dave's heart pounded, and he felt dizzy with effort. But nothing happened.

There was a click from the wall speaker.

"All right, Dave. Everyone's on board. We've opened the dome of the building. Go ahead."

Dave opened his mouth to demand more time, to insist on an explanation—and a calmness slid over him suddenly. The intensity of the pressure was suddenly gone, the writhing purple shrank into the violet centers of light.

Unhesitatingly, Dave pulled back the lever.

There was blurring of consciousness, suggesting a room seen in a rapidly flickering light.

Then Barrow's voice was saying, "Break interlock."

Dave shoved forward the lever.

Once more, consciousness was continuous. He had a strange feeling as if he had raced over the precisely-spaced railroad ties after a train, and had finally caught it and hauled himself aboard.

He glanced at the intercom.

"Will you need me right away?"

"Not where you are. Come up to the viewer. You turn to your left as you go out, and up the ladder to your right."

"Be right up."

Dave tried to turn around, and promptly drifted up from the floor. It was only then that he really believed it.

It had worked.

They were out in space.

Earth hung on the screen before them like a big blue-green basketball with a tiny incandescent plume bursting from its equator.

Anita, her face pale, was clinging to Dave as they watched the screen. The crowd around them was tense and silent, their gaze riveted on the screen.

Bardeen and Barrow were nearby. Bardeen murmured, "It's started?"

"Yes." Barrow's eyes were shut.

"Self-sustaining?"

"It must be."

On the screen, the blazing plume strengthened and grew brighter. Dave held his breath.

The single flame erupted into a blazing circle that shot around the globe.

The terrible heat flashed the nearby seas into vapor, huge cracks appeared, and the sudden violence hurled up chunks of the solid planet that were the size of mountains. Then the blinding scene was blurred by dense expanding clouds of vapor.

How long they'd watched, Dave didn't know, but he felt worn-out and sick. He held Anita, who was crying miserably and quietly.

Bardeen turned wearily from the screen. "Any chance of the fragments fusing themselves together again?"

Barrow shook his head. "Just another asteroid belt. Maybe that's what caused the first one."

Dave forced his dulled mind to assess the situation. Science had destroyed a planet. And science had enabled a few survivors to escape in ships especially equipped to colonize another planet.

Bardeen, apparently thinking along the same line, said, "At least these ships are equipped to make us self-sustaining. We have advanced equipment, and the reactors put more energy at our disposal than the whole human race had twenty years ago. We can start again."

Anita looked up. "And try
more
scientific experiments? How long before the
next
mistake?"

"Ask Dave," Bardeen said quietly, "and he'll tell you our method is different. An experiment isn't an experiment when you can foresee the result, and stop in time."

He turned to the screen where the blaze of light glowed through boiling clouds of vapor.

"That," he said, "was the last experiment."

Lost Bear Jct., Alaska 99731
Wednesday; Fog, No Snow

 
Mr. William T. Whittaker
626 Campus Drive
Blickweiler U.
Sandrigham, Illinois 60054
 
Dear Bill:

As you know, I have trouble writing letters. Why, I don't know—after all, I write stories for a living. But anyway, Margin Books just paid for that spy opus, and the bank tells me the check cleared all right, so you can count on my answering letters a little sooner.

The reason? You may not be aware, in your ivory tower, that your old roommate is up to the latest technological marvels and prepared to take full advantage of them at the first chance that offers. It takes effort, but it is worth it. What I have done is to take advantage of the current little downblip in the computer industry—sales off forty per cent, 16,000 laid off, four major manufacturers bankrupt—that sort of thing—to buy myself, at fire-sale prices, a completely new Vectrosupermax Business System, with all its bundled software (16 different programs: total value, if bought individually, $6,472.89).

As you may know, before the market took its downturn, Vectrosupermax was probably the leading manufacturer of hardware using the KBCDOS operating system and the 99Q processor. Two years ago, Vectrosupermax was a comet lighting the sky both day and night with new sales records. Today, they're selling them out of the back of a truck down in Mosquito Forks, and very grateful for a sale. Well, that's high tech, for you.

But to get back to what this means from my viewpoint, the fact is that the Vectrosupermax may be a drag on the market, but it works as well today as it did two years ago. This calamity in the marketplace means it is possible for me to make this initial comment on the old manual typewriter, connect the Vectrosupermax plug to the outlet (I mentioned we got electricity in my last letter), hit 10 on the keyboard (a special command so it will just print what I tell it to, and not reproduce the commands themselves), and then I simply reel this length of paper into the Vectrosuperprinter's maw, and you have a vivid record of technological progress as applied to the art of letter writing:

Sdfl;ksdkasdgf;saasdfiuas8u 234]?

SYNTAX ERROR 66

Memory munged

1234567890-=°!@#$%
²
[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]

1234567890-=°!@#$%
²
[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]

1234567890-=°!@#$%
²
[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]

WARNING! DIVISION BY ZERO!

EITHER YOU OR I HAS MADE A MISTAKE. I CAN'T FILE THIS FILE.

PLEASE GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING AND TRY AGAIN.

(Buffer Overflow)

SYNTAX ERROR 96

Well, I have to admit, that was

n't much fun. I suppose I should

have read the manual, but tha

t wasn't very attractive either.

There are sixteen different man

uals, and Now, what the—

00001Well, I have to admit, that was

00002have reread the manual, but tha

00003There are sixteen different man

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. . .$.opy..E..@@#..cC..?

.X..18.p..6ro,,1982.tt.

. . ...righj..4.##..7.##.

Vectrosuperwriter is protected by a sophisticated lockup program keyed to your individual computer and its included hardware and software. If you attempt to use our proprietary DEBUGG utility to crack the copy-protection, our built-in safeguards will lock up your computer every time you use the software, and we will be automatically notified at once when you try to use the modem. Just take this as a friendly warning and GET YOUR GUMMY LITTLE FINGERS OUT OF OUR CODE BEFORE WE CHOP THEM OFF!!

(Use VDUMP for non-ASCII.)

WARNING! SQRT OF NEG NUMBER!

gods and little fishes!

this is "user friendly"?

re's the stuff I typed?

ll with all this! What

o now? This son-of-a-

ch squeezes everthing

o a narrow column and

nts it out with letters

sing on the left. The

trosupermax Quikcard

mand summary is around

e somewhere. Ah, yes,

e we are. "Escape-LM"

t could be simpler?

x Error 111!

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Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock

This session: 02H29M14.7S

Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock

This session: 14H46M11.96S

Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock

This session: 42H21M38.6S

Bill—As you may notice from a close inspection of the typeface and the unevenness of the print, we are back to the old manual again. It is Friday now, and there really was a pretty good length of letter there on Thursday, but it sort of disappeared when I hit the X on the keyboard instead of the S. It seems that X is the easy mnemonic for "eXpunge," and I was reaching for the S but got the X by mistake. Oh, well. My error, of course.

There's a kind of long scratch across the top of the machine, where I only just managed to catch myself in time—I all of a sudden had the axe in my hand, and must have let out a yell because it was the middle of the night and out back the rooster started to crow. I see the dog just crawling out from under the bed now, and there were two cats in the room when I started, but I haven't seen them since I read the Vectrosupermax "Easy-Does-It" manual. It has a lot of cute pictures in it. Heh-heh. And a sheet of last-minute corrections and changes that aren't noted anywhere else. Heh-heh-heh.

Well, Bill, I guess progress has its price, so it will take me maybe just a little longer than I expected. But if I have this thing really mastered before I go in for next month's groceries, count on me to add a few good long pages after this paragraph.

All the best,
Jim

Randy Pratt, under the hanging ad lettered "Sharke Computers," looked down pityingly on the woman customer standing clench-fisted by the showroom door. Because of the glare of the morning sun on the windows of a car parked outside, he had a little trouble even seeing her. But he strained hard to be fair.

"If," he said, locating a business card in his jacket pocket, "there is anything we can realistically do for you, just get in touch with me. But what you're asking here is not realistic. Now, I hope you'll excuse me. I am speaking shortly at the seminar." Randy favored her with a conversation-closing smile, and handed her his business card.