Wine of the Dreamers (8 page)

“I don’t mind most of them. But here’s a rough one. No more personnel, Sharan. At least, they’re making it so complicated to put on any new person that the delay will run into months. We’ll have to make do with what we have. They’re hamstringing me, very neatly. And I can’t fight back. There’s no one to fight. Just a big vague monster with carbon-paper tentacles, paper-clip teeth, and a hide made of layers of second sheets.”

“Why, Bard? Why are they turning against the Project? They believed in it once.”

“It’s taking too long, I guess.”

“Can’t you go to Washington?”

“I’m no good at that sort of thing. I get a compulsion. I know what to say, how to butter them, but I can’t quite manage to do it.”

She went over to a heavy oak armchair near the window, dropped into it, hooked one slim leg over the arm. She frowned. He walked over and looked out the window, following her glance. “Well, Sharan, even if it never gets off the ground, they can’t say that we didn’t build a big one.”

Even in the brightest sunshine, the light that shone down on the project area was diffused. Four gigantic steel towers of irregular size had been constructed in the form of an irregular oblong. A square mile of tough fabric, painted with all the art of camouflage, was suspended like a grotesque circus tent over the towers. From the air it would appear to be another barren irregular hill of rock and sage and sand. Bard Lane’s office was near the cave-like lip of the south edge of the outsized tent. The Beatty
One stood in the middle of the tent. Around the base of the Beatty One was the constant, ant-like activity that had been going on for over a year.

Some of the labs were set into the solid rock of the surrounding hills. All project buildings not under the protection of the vast tent were designed to look, from the air, like just another sleepy village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a village where the flagellationists still whip-cut the back of the selected man who labored under the heavy cross at Easter time.

He looked down at her for a moment, and resisted the impulse to rest his hand on her crisp hair, to feel, under his strong fingers, the delicate configuration of skull, the clean bone-line.

Bard locked his hands behind him and looked out to where he could see the dull metal base of the Beatty One, almost exactly one hundred and seventy feet in diameter, and so tall the round snout almost touched the fabric of the enormous tent. A platform elevator inched upward, carrying men in work clothes. The elevator was built on heavy steel circular tracks so that the operator could raise it to any point on the outside skin of the great vehicle.

“Does anybody expect it to fly, Doc?” she asked.

“I personally guarantee to get it at least twelve inches off the ground.”

She smiled up at him, the smile flavored with rue. “News good and bad,” she said. “The good is about Bill Kornal. We took him apart, every reflex, every neurosis, every response to stimuli, and we reassembled him. There is a change, sure. But it measures out as exactly as much as one would expect as an aftereffect of what happened to him. He is as sound and solid as that mountain over there.”

“Good. Put him on. I’ll sign the confirmation in the morning.”

“And the bad news is that I can’t find any real good reason to wash out Major Tommy Leeber. I don’t have to like him, but I can’t wash him out. Once you dig down through a lot of apparent complexities, the whole thing
becomes very simple. He has a mind like a brass hinge. It works in just one direction: What is the best thing for Tommy Leeber? Totally directional, and of course he has a top security rating. So he’s all yours, Bard. I brought him over. He’s waiting out there for the deluxe tour.”

Bard Lane glanced at his watch. “There’s time. See you at dinner. Thanks for all the nice things you do for me.”

Major Leeber had the same reaction as did every other newcomer to the project when he was finally taken close enough to the Beatty One to really appreciate the size of it. After he had been walked all the way around it, he finally shook himself out of his stunned air of disbelief, smiled his lazy smile and said, “So … I
still
don’t believe it.”

Dr. Bard Lane had the elevator brought to ground level and signaled the operator to take it up to the nose. He stood and leaned against a stanchion and watched Leeber move to the exact center of the platform. At the ogive curve, close under the overhead camouflage, the elevator tipped toward the hull and followed the curve on up to the last port. Leeber did not look well as he leaned away from the direction of the tilt.

“Come along,” Bard said as he stepped over the lip of the port. He lowered himself to the deck inside, and began his familiar indoctrination speech as he gave the major a hand. “This will be the entrance port for the crew. The ship is designed for a crew of six. No passengers. The forward tenth of the overall length contains the living quarters, life maintenance systems, supplies and main control panels. We are in the control room. The three chairs there are on gymbals mounted on hydraulic pedestals designed to compensate for sudden increments in acceleration. They are similar to, but an improvement over, the systems previously used. Impulse screen mounted, as you can see, but not yet tied into either manual or computer control.”

Leeber studied the main control panel and said,
“Looks like a king size A-six, and not too much different from the A-five. Where are the directional jets?”

“Eliminated in favor of a twenty-ton gyro that can be turned through a ten-degree arc. In free space it will turn her in any desired attitude. A lot of weight to boost, but not much less than standard attitude jet installation and the necessary fuel controls, and we save a lot by eliminating the initial lift-off with chemical fuels, so we have no booster stages to jettison on the way out.”

“Initial lift on atomic drive? Poison the air?”

“With a very short-life emission. Launch site will be clean in ten hours. At half-diameter outbound, they switch to standard A fuel, and keep it on CA. That means that—–”

“—–at twelve thousand miles out they go right onto the same old A-six atomic propulsion fuel and stay in constant acceleration. I’m not a civilian, Doctor. So this marvelous ship is just one big son of a bitch of an oversized A-six with a flywheel gyro, a short-life mix for takeoff. Wonderful!” His smile was ironic, his eyes cold.

“With one more little change, Major. Eighty days of CA will put her clear of the system. Then they switch to Beatty Drive. Drive is an inaccurate word, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet. I worked with Beatty and ran the team that completed his equations after he died two years ago. Do you have any background in theoretical physics?”

“Some exposure. Try me, Doctor.”

“What does ‘frames of reference’ mean to you?”

“The old analogy about three elevators and one man in each one. Elevator A is going up at top speed, Elevator B is going down slowly and Elevator C is stuck between floors. Each one is moving at a different speed in relation to each of the other two.”

“Very good. But you have one motionless elevator. Take it a step further. Your motionless one is at zero velocity. Okay, where is the motionless point in space? You can be hanging in space absolutely motionless in relation to one star, but moving at ten thousand miles per second
in relation to a star in some other direction. On a theoretical basis you would find a motionless point in space by computing the velocity and direction of movement of all the stars in all the galaxies and finding that point from which all those velocities both toward you and away from you, on whatever angle of inclination or declination, would average out to zero. If we had the math to solve a problem with an infinite number of unknowns, we do not have all the knowns to feed into it, due to the temporal limits—and physical limits—of observation. Are you with it?”

“I think I … Well, keep going.”

“Here is the heart of it. Beatty called that the space-frame—the problem of finding the zero point in space. So he made the assumption there must also be a time-frame. He pictured a universe curved in upon itself in the Einsteinian concept, but composed of not only varying velocities and directions, but also varying temporal relationships. From this he extrapolated the idea that an average of the time relationships would give you a zero place, a place where time does not exist, just as an average of speed-relationships would give you a zero place where movement does not exist. So he applied that theory to the paradox of the expanding universe, and his equations did what the red shift ‘tired light’ theories failed to do. He proved that the apparent expansion was in fact the interrelationship of the velocity of light with a varying time warp throughout the observable galaxies, with the effect more apparent the greater the warp—i.e., in the most distant galaxies. I think I’ve lost you.”

“Afraid so.”

“Try it this way then. Until Beatty’s work we believed that maximum attainable velocity would always be a fractional percentage point under the speed of light itself, because according to the Fitzgerald equations, at the speed of light the contraction of mass is infinite. Beatty gave us a way to bypass that barrier by thrusting a ship into another frame of reference of time. Here is our standard simplistic analogy. You are driving from El Paso to New
York. It will take you three days. You leave on Monday. You expect to get to New York on Wednesday. So as soon as you are outside the El Paso city limits you push a little button on the dashboard labeled ‘Wednesday.’ And there is the skyline of New York, right down the road.”

“Didn’t … the Fitzgerald equations say that time contracts along with mass in ratio to velocity?”

“Excellent, Major! Beatty’s equations showed that the time gradient between different systems, instead of having to be traversed at nearly light speed, can be capsuled into an abrupt time shift, just as when you drive across from one time zone into the next.”

“Your jumps would be a little bigger than Monday to Wednesday, I’d imagine.”

“The increments are in standard segments of one hundred years. But don’t think of it as a hundred years passing in a flash. It is more a distance measurement. You arrive in New York at the precise moment that you left El Paso.”

“So when do you know when to make the jump, how far you’ll jump, and where you’ll be when you get there?”

Bard Lane shrugged and smiled. “That’s what took seven months of programming and three months of integral and digital computer time. Then we built the control panels according to the results of the calculations.”

“And that nut smashed them?”

“Do you mean Doctor Kornal? He did. He is back on the job. My decision to take him back will stand up, so don’t step over the line you seem to be edging too close to.”

“Me? Hell, let’s be friends. Life is too short. It’s your risk, not mine. What do we look at next?”

“Dinner. I’ll take you through the labs tomorrow morning.”

“Where do I find the action?”

“I’ll point out the club on our way back down to the launch pad.”

FIVE

Bard Lane sat on the edge of his bed. It was after midnight on the same day that he had taken Major Leeber on the tour of inspection.

He sat and little rivulets of fear ran through his mind the way that rain will trickle erratically down a window-pane. The night was cool and the wind that came through the screen touched his naked chest and shoulders, but it did not stop the perspiration that made an oiled sheen on his face.

It was like a return to childhood, to the long-dead nights of terror. The scream. “Mommy, Mommy! It was a moldy man and he was sitting on my bed!”

“It’s all right. It was just a dream, dear.”

“He was here! He was! I saw him, Mommy.”

“Shh, you’ll wake your father. I’ll sit here and hold your hand until you get back to sleep.”

Sleep voice. “Well he
was
here.”

He shivered violently. Now there was no one to call. There was someone you
should
call, but that might mean … defeat.

You can fight all the outside enemies in the world, but what if the enemy is in your own mind? What then?

It was a decision to make. He made it. He dressed quickly, snatched a leather jacket from the closet hook, shouldered his way into it as he left his quarters. From the slope he looked down on the project buildings. A thin moon rode high, silvering the dark buildings. He knew that inside the darkness there were lights, hum of activity, night shifts in the labs in the caves.

Sharan Inly had a room in the women’s barracks. He walked down the slope and across the street. The girl at
the switchboard was reading a magazine. She glanced up and smiled, “Good evening, Dr. Lane.”

“Good evening. Dr. Inly, please. Would you connect the call in the booth?”

He shut himself in. Her voice was sleepy. “Hello, Bard.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Ten seconds later and you would have. What is it, Bard?”

He glanced through the booth door. The girl had returned to her magazine. “Sharan, would you please get dressed and come down. I must talk to you.”

“You sound … upset, Bard. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

She was better than her word. He was grateful for her promptness. She came out beside him, asking no questions, letting him choose time and place. He led her over to the porch of the club. It was after hours and the chairs had been stacked on the tables. He set two of them on their legs. A dog howled in the hills. Over near the labor barracks someone laughed loudly.

“I want to consult you as a patient, Sharan.”

“Of course. Who are you worried about?”

“Me.”

“That sounds … absurd. Go ahead.”

He made his voice flat, emotionless. “Tonight I had dinner with Major Leeber. I went back to my office to finish up some of the paperwork. It took a bit longer than I expected. When I finished, I was tired. I turned out the light and sat there in the dark for a few moments, waiting for enough energy to get up and go back to my quarters. I turned my chair and looked out the window. Enough moonlight came through the screen so that I could just make out the shape of the Beatty One.