The Paradox Men Page 14

  He looked at her in triumph. “What I’m saying is, that it is a necessary and sufficient condition for trans-photic velocities that the ship move backward in time.”

  “Then,” she said wonderingly, “a ship traveling faster than the speed of light would land before it ever blasted off. So there never were three or even two ships but only one. The ship that brought you to earth five years ago—”

  “Really is the T-twenty-two, which won’t be launched until July twenty-first.”

  The woman leaned dizzily against the curving cabin wall.

  Alar continued with bitter amusement. “Do I hop into the T-twenty-two next week for a five-year cruise backward in time? Is the original unwitting Alar walking the earth at this moment, planning on the same thing? Will he take the original of that little ape of Haze-Gaunt’s as a mascot?” He laughed unsteadily. “Why, it’s the damnedest thing I ever—” He broke off abruptly. “I’m not returning to Earth with you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Alar blinked. “You mean, you knew just now, after I told you.”

  “No. The Phobos is en route to the sun. You think you’ll be able to find some of my husband’s old friends who can tell you something about yourself. The Meganet Mind said you’d try to go if the opportunity arose.”

  “He did?”

  “He further stated that you’d discover your identity there.”

  “Ah!” The Thief’s eyes flamed up. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  The woman studied the floor. “Life in a solarion is dangerous.”

  His laughter was soft, brittle. “Since when has danger been a determining factor with either of us? What’s the real reason for holding back?”

  She turned up her quiet eyes to his. “Because when you learn about yourself, the information will be useless. The Mind said that in the act of dying, you would remember everything.” She studied his face anxiously. “If you want to die, why not return to the Society and do it profitably? Does it really matter who you were five years ago?” Color was flooding into her face.

  “I said that we must not give up until we know who I really am,” he replied quietly. The Mind’s prediction was a shock to him. This was a factor he had never expected.

  “But surely,” she pleaded, “you don’t want to throw your life away to do it?”

  “I don’t plan to throw it away. You know that.”

  “Forgive me,” she said and shut her eyes tight for a moment as though to control herself. “I must argue with you because of what you said to me back on the floor not so many minutes ago. I thought, perhaps, that my words now might mean something to you.”

  “But they do, Keiris,” he said emphatically.

  “But not enough.”

  Alar sighed. He was at a crossroads now, he knew, and what direction he took no longer concerned him alone. Keiris must be affected by his decision. He regretted nothing he had said to her at that moment when he had allowed the recognition of her mutilation to unseal his lips and reveal his emotions. But by so doing he had given her a claim on him. He was proud of the claim—yet he must bear the consequences.

  “Keiris,” he said, “I’m not indifferent to your feelings. I would much rather stay with you.”

  “Then stay.”

  “You know I can’t. I’ve faced death before. That can’t deter me. If I stayed, something important within me would be lost.”

  “But this time you are forewarned.”

  “Even if the Mind’s prophecy means this specific trip, we can’t be certain it will happen. The Mind is not infallible.”

  “But he is, Alar! He is!”

  For the first time within his remembered life Alar found it impossible to make a quick decision. Recovering his past at the cost of his future would be a poor bargain. Perhaps it would be better to return with Keiris and spend a longer, more useful life as a Thief.

  He took her by the shoulders. “Goodbye, Keiris.”

  She turned her head away. “Captain Andrews of the Phobos is waiting for Dr. Talbot, of the Toynbeean Institute. Remember Talbot at the ball? He’s a Thief and has orders from the Mind to let you go in his place.”

  Free will!

  For a moment it seemed to him that every man in the solar system was just a pawn on the Mind’s horizonless chessboard. “You have a stage goatee for me, of course? Like Talbot’s?” he asked blandly.

  “You’ll find it in an envelope in my coat pocket, along with his passport, stateroom key, and tickets. You’d better fix it on now.”

  The situation was here. It just had to be accepted. He fished the envelope out quickly, patted the beard in place, then hesitated.

  “Don’t bother about me,” Keiris assured him. “I can jet the ship back without trouble. I’m going to bury—them—in deep space. Then I’m going on in to Earth to check on something at the central morgue.”

  He was only half listening. “Keiris, if you were only the wife of a man other than Kennicot Muir—or if I thought he were dead—”

  “Don’t miss the Phobos.”

  He gave her one last remembering look, then turned silently and vanished down the hatchway. She heard the space lock spin shut.

  “Goodbye, darling,” she whispered, knowing that she would never see him alive again.

  15

  Hotspot Madness

  EVER BEEN ON the sun before, Dr. Talbot?” Captain Andrews appraised the new passenger curiously. They were together in the observation room of the Phobos.

  Alar could not admit that everything on the run from Luna to Mercury (which planet they had left an hour ago) had seemed tantalizingly familiar, as though he had made the trip not once but a hundred times. Nor could he admit that astrophysics was his profession. A certain amount of celestial ignorance would be forgiven—indeed required—in a historian.

  “No,” said the Thief. “This is my first trip.”

  “I thought perhaps I’d brought you out before. Your face seems vaguely familiar.”

  “Do you think so, Captain? I travel quite a bit on Earth. At a Toynbeean lecture possibly?”

  “No. Never go to them. It would have to be somewhere along the solar run or nothing. Imagination, I guess.”

  Alar writhed inwardly. How far could he push his questioning without arousing suspicion? He stroked his false goatee with nervous impatience.

  “As a newcomer,” continued Captain Andrews, “you might be interested in how we pick up a solarion.” He pointed to a circular fluorescent plate in the control panel. “That gives us a running picture of the solar surface in terms of the H line of calcium Two—ionized calcium, that is.

  “It shows where the solar prominences and faculae are because they carry a lot of calcium. You can’t see any prominences on the plate here—they’re only visible when they’re on the limb of the sun, spouting up against black space. But here are plenty of faculae, these gassy little puffs floating above the photosphere—they can be detected almost to the center of the sun’s disc. Hot but harmless.”

  He tapped the glass with his space-nav parallels. “And the place is swarming with granules—‘solar thunderheads’ might be a better name. They bubble up several hundred miles in five minutes and then vanish. If one of them ever caught the Phobos…”

  “I had a cousin, Robert Talbot, who was lost on one of the early solar freighters,” said Alar casually. “They always thought a solar storm must have got the ship.”

  “Very likely. We lost quite a few ships before we learned the proper approach. Your cousin, eh? Probably it was he I was thinking of, though I can’t say the name is familiar.”

  “It was some years ago,” said Alar, watching Andrews from the corner of his eye, “when Kennicot Muir was still running the stations.”

  “Hmm. Don’t recall him.” Captain Andrews returned noncommittally to the plate. “You probably know that the stations work at the edges of a sunspot, in what we call the penumbra. That procedure has several advantages.

  “It’s a little
cooler than the rest of the chromosphere, which is easier on the solarion refrigerating system and the men, and the spot also provides a landmark for incoming freighters. It would be just about impossible to find a station unless it were on a spot. It’s hard enough to locate one on the temperature contour.”

  “Temperature contour?”

  “Yes—like a thirty-fathom line on a seacoast. Only here it’s the five-thousand line. In a few minutes, when we’re about to land, I’ll throw the jets over on automatic spectrographic steering and the Phobos will nose along the five-thousand degree Kelvin contour until she finds Solarion Nine.”

  “I see. If a station ever lost its lateral jets and couldn’t stay on the five-thousand line, how would you find it?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Captain Andrews curtly. “Whenever a station turns up missing, we always send out all our search boats—several hundred of them—and work a search pattern around that sunspot for months. But we know before we start that we won’t find anything. We never have. It’s futile to look on the surface for a station that has been long volatilized deep at the vortex of a sunspot.

  “The stations are under automatic spectrographic control, of course, and the spec is supposed to keep them on the five-thousand line, but sometimes something goes wrong with the spec or an unusually hot Wilson gas swirl spills out over the edge of the spot and fools the spec into thinking the station is standing way out from the spot, say on the hotter five-thousand four hundred line.

  “So the automatic spec control moves the station farther in toward the spot, maybe into the slippery Evershed zone at its very lip. From there the station can slide on into the umbra. I know of one ship that crawled out of the Evershed. Its crew had to be replaced in toto. But no solarion ever came out of the umbra. So you can’t rely entirely on the spec control.

  “Every station carries three solar meteorologists, too, and the weather staff issues a bulletin every quarter-hour on the station’s most probable position and on any disturbances moving their way. Sometimes they have to jump fast and in the right direction.

  “And even the finest sunmen can’t foresee everything. Four years ago the Three, Four and Eight were working a big ‘leader’—spots are like poles in a magnet—always go in pairs, and we call the eastern spot the ‘leader,’ the western one the ‘follower’—when the Mercury observatory noticed the leader was rapidly growing smaller.

  “By the time it occurred to the observatory what was happening, the spot had shrunk to the size of Connecticut County. The patrol ship they sent to take off the crews got there too late. The spot had vanished. They figured the stations would try to make it to the ‘follower’ and settle somewhere in its five-thousand line.

  “The Eight did—barely. Luckily, it had been working the uppermost region of the leader and, when the spot vanished from beneath it, it had to drift down toward the solar equator. But while it was drifting it was also crawling back toward the follower with its lateral jets and it finally caught the follower’s southern tip.”

  “What about the other two stations?” said Alar.

  “No trace.”

  The Thief shrugged mental shoulders. A berth in a solarion wasn’t exactly like retiring on the green benches of La Paz. He had never had any illusions about that. Perhaps the Mind had considered the possibilities of his survival in a solarion purely on cold statistics.

  The captain moved away from the fluorescent plate toward a metal cabinet bolted to the far wall. He turned his head, spoke over his shoulder. “A glass of foam, doctor?”

  Alar nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

  The captain unsnapped the door, fished in the shelves, withdrew a plastic bottle with one hand. With his other hand he found two aluminum cups.

  “Sorry I can’t offer you wine,” the captain said, coming back across the cabin and setting the bottle and cups down on a small circular table. “This foam doesn’t have any kick to it, but it’s cold and that’s plenty welcome in a place like this.” His tone was faintly ironic. He poured out two drinks by squeezing the bottle, ejecting the liquid in a creamy ribbon that settled slowly in the cups. Then he took the bottle back to the refrigerated cabinet. The door slammed shut under a swipe from a huge hand.

  Alar raised his cup and tasted the beverage. It had a sharp lemon taste, cold and spicy.

  The Thief said, “It’s delicious.” He wasn’t certain, but he seemed to have remembered tasting it before. That could have been just a similarity to one of the more common refreshments he’d had during the past five years. Then again, it might have been for another reason…

  The captain smacked his lips. “I’ve unlimited quantities of it, I drink it often and I never tire of it.” He looked into the cup. “I’ve got boxes of it in my quarters. Little dehydrated pills. When a bottle’s empty, I just drop in a pill, squirt in some drinking water and let it get cold. Then,” he snapped his fingers, “I’ve got a new supply.” He was as much in earnest speaking of his foam as he had been in describing the operation of the solarions.

  “I assume you’ve briefed yourself on the history of our stations,” Captain Andrews said abruptly. He indicated a tubular chair for Alar, kicked another one over to the table for himself.

  “Yes, I have, Captain.”

  “Good.”

  Alar recognized an undertone behind the succinctness of the question and the comment. Sunmen didn’t relive the past. The past was too morbid. Of the twenty-seven costly solarions, towed one by one to the sun during the past ten years, sixteen remained. The average life of a station was about a year. The staff was rotated continuously, each man, after long and arduous training, being assigned a post for sixty days—three times the twenty-day synodic period of rotation of the sun with respect to the eighty-eight-day sidereal period of Mercury.

  The captain finished his drink and took Alar’s empty cup. “I’ll clean them later,” he said as he put one inside the other and replaced them in the cabinet. He resumed his seat again, heavily, and asked, “Have you met the replacements?”

  “Not yet,” Alar said. When the Mercury observatory reached opposition with a given solar station, as it did every twenty days, a freighter carried in replacements for one-third of the staff and took away the oldest one-third along with a priceless cargo of muirium. The Phobos, he knew, was bringing in eleven replacements, but so far they had confined themselves closely to their own quarter of the ship, and he had been unable to meet any of them.

  Captain Andrews had apparently dismissed the problem of Alar’s pseudo-familiarity, and the Thief could think of no immediate way to return to the subject. For the time being he would have to continue to be Dr. Talbot, the historian, ignorant of things solar.

  “Why,” he asked, “if the stations are in such continual danger, aren’t they equipped with full space drives, instead of weak lateral jets? Then, if the station skidded into a spot beyond the present recovery point, she could simply blast free.”

  Andrews shook his head. “Members of parliament have been elected and deposed on that very issue. But it has to be the way it is now when you consider the cost of the solarion. It’s really just a vast synthesizer for making muirium with a little bubble of space in the middle for living quarters and a few weak lateral jets on the periphery.

  “A space ship is all converter, with a little bubble here amidships for the crew. To make a space ship out of a solarion you’d have to build it about two hundred times the present solarion size, so that the already tremendous solarion would be just a little bubble in an unimaginably enormous space ship.

  “There’s always a lot of talk about making the stations safe, but that’s the only way to do it and it costs too much money. So the Spaceways Ministers rise and fall, but the stations never change. Incidentally, on the cost of these things, I understand that about one-fourth of the annual Imperium budget goes into making one solarion.”

  The intercom buzzed. Andrews excused himself, answered it briefly, then replaced the instrument. “Doctor?” The office
r seemed strangely troubled.

  “Yes, captain?” His heart held no warning beat, but it was impossible not to realize that something unusual and serious was in store.

  Andrews hesitated a moment as though he were about to speak. Then he lifted his shoulders helplessly. “As you know, I’m carrying a relief crew to Nine—your destination. You haven’t met any of them before because they keep pretty much to themselves. They would like to see you in the mess—now.”

  It was clear to Alar that the man wanted to say more, perhaps give him a word of warning.

  “Why do they want to see me?” he asked bluntly.

  Andrews was equally curt. “They’ll explain.” He cleared his throat and avoided Alar’s arched eyebrows. “You aren’t superstitious, are you?”

  “I think not. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered. It’s best not to be superstitious. We’ll land in a few minutes, and I’m going to be pretty busy. The catwalk on the left will take you to the mess.”

  The Thief frowned, stroked his false goatee, then turned and walked toward the exit panel.

  “Oh, doctor,” called Andrews.

  “Yes, captain?”

  “Just in case I don’t see you again I’ve discovered whom you remind me of.”

  “Who?”

  “This man was taller, heavier and older than you, and his hair was auburn while yours is black. And he’s dead, anyway, so really there’s no point in mentioning—”

  “Kennicot Muir?”

  “Yes.” Andrews looked after him rather meditatively.

  Always Muir! If the man were alive and could be found, what an inquisition he would face! Alar’s footsteps clanged in hollow frustration as he strode across the catwalk over an empty decontaminated muirium hold.

  Muir must certainly have been on the T-22 when it crashed at the end of its weird journey backward in time; the log book was evidence of that. But he, Alar, had crawled out of the river carrying the book. What had happened to Muir? Had he gone down with the ship? Alar chewed his lower lip in exasperation.