And Now the News (49 page)

 … I said nothing where the CG could hear me, and tightened up in painful empathy when I saw one or another of the ship's company floundering and defending and doubting when she repeated his words.

I did nothing about any of these annoyances, except maybe the time I suggested to the skipper that he feed the CG at times other than our mess, so I wouldn't have to witness her purposeless wreckage of even the little things men believe in. He bought that, and it had a double advantage. We not only were spared the sight of her at meals, but she took to spending her time aft in the “monkey's cage” among the mops and drums of cleaning aerosol and sewer-line scrapers. If Nils Blum objected, then, monkeylike, he could pass it off by scratching and chewing a straw.

 … I came through there once and saw them sitting across from each other at Blum's little table, elbows almost touching, not speaking and not looking at each other. And, by the Lord, she was crying, and I must say it did me good. I had a mind to go ask the monkey how he managed it, but I don't involve myself with the unskilled.

We got where we were going and snapped out of the nothing into the something. We took a bearing on the Luanae Galaxy and it was quite a sight, a long irregular sausage of an island galaxy, with its unmistakable signpost, the long regular black swatch of the Barrier's edge where it impinged on, and shut out, the rest of the bodies in the formation. We ducked under again for half an hour and came up again too close to see the swatch, but close enough at last to get the Luanae greeting.

That I can't tell you about.

Captain Steev piped us all into the mess hall in midmorning,
which would have annoyed me if I could think of anything I'd rather be doing—but there just wasn't anything to do, or to want to do, instead. So I shuffled in with the rest of them—Potter, England, Donato. Blum and the CG were back with the mops, I imagine. The captain let us all be seated and stood at the end of the table and knocked on a coffee mug self-consciously.

He said, “We have arrived at our site of operations. We have, among the four of you, four different specialists with, as I understand it, four attacks on the problem of penetrating the Luanae Barrier. I need not,” he says, and then went right on as if he needed to anyway, “need not tell you of the vital importance of this task. The entire history of humanity might—not might,
does
—depend on it. If you, or men like you, fail to solve this problem soon, we can expect our entire civilization to explode, like a dying sun, through the internal pressures of its own contracting mass.”

He coughed to cover up the floridity of his phrasing, and little Donato happily joined in. I saw one of England's wide flat hands move on the table, to cover the other and hold it down.

“Now, then,” said the captain. He bent from the waist and removed his hand from his side pocket. In it was a sleek little remote mike. “This is for the record, gentlemen. You first, Mr. Palmer?”

“Me first what?” I wanted to know.

“Your plan, sir. Your approach, attack, whatever it pleases you to call it. Your projected method of cracking the Barrier.”

I looked around at what passed for an audience, coughing, picking, glowering wetly.

I said, “In the first place, my plan has been fully detailed and filed with the proper authorities—men who are in a position to understand my specialty. I believe that copies of these papers are on file with you. I suggest that you look at them and save us both the trouble.”

“I'm afraid you don't understand,” said the captain, looking flustered. He gestured at the mike. “This is for the record. I've got to have the oral rundown. It's—it's—well, for the record.”

“Then I say to the recording, for the record,” I barked, right into the mike, “that I am not accustomed to being asked to make speeches
before a lay audience, which cannot be expected to understand one word in ten of what I have to say. And I refer the recording and its auditors, whoever they may be, to the files in which my detailed report is presented, for proof not only of my project but of the fact that these assembled, and no doubt those listening to this record, would in all likelihood not know what I was talking about. Not at all.”

I glared up at the skipper. “Does that satisfy the record, Lieutenant?”

“Captain,” corrected the captain mildly. “Really.”

“A mistake,” I allowed. “I never make mistakes accidentally, you understand.” I waved at the mike. “Let's let the record stand with that, do you mind?”

“Mr. Potter,” said the captain, and I leaned back, pleased with myself.

Potter removed and immediately replaced his perennial pinch. “Well I don't bind telling you bine,” he said adenoidally. “I'm in field bechanics, as you dough. I have bade certain calculations which indicate that the stresses present in the barrier skin are subject on bobentary distortion under the stress of sball area, high intenstidty focused bagnetic fields of about one hudred billion gauss per square centimeter at focus. That's
billion
,” he amended, “dot
billion
.”

I wondered how the record would make out the difference.

“Very good, Mr. Potter,” said the captain. “Unless I am mistaken, you propose to breach the Barrier momentarily with a high-intensity focused magnetic field. Is that correct?”

Potter nodded, a gesture which carried through his right wrist.

“Very well,” said the captain.

I blew disgustedly through my nostrils, looking at Potter. His business was as disgusting as his hobby of picking at his cuticles. If I knew as little about my specialty as he did about his, I'd never get trapped into talking about it.

“Mr. Donato?”

“Yes, Captain Steev, yes, sir!” Donato cried, all blushes and eagerness. “Well, sir, I'm in ballistics. What I propose is a two-part missile aimed to graze the Barrier in such a way that, at the moment of
contact, it separates, one segment glancing back outside, the other entering and proceeding inward. This is on the theory that, although the control planetoid reacts instantaneously, its sensors report only one event at one locality at a given moment. I feel I have a fifty-fifty chance, then, of slipping one part through while the other part is reported, grazed and gone. I think a minimum of one hundred thirty shots, fired in four groups and at four slightly different approach angles, would establish whether or not the theory is tenable.”

“Tenable?” I gasped. “Why, you—nincompoop!” That's the first time in my entire life I ever called anyone that, but as I looked at him, blushing and grinning and wanting to do right, there just wasn't another applicable term. “What makes you think—”

“Mr. England?” said the skipper, much louder than I have ever heard him speak before.

I confess I was startled. Before I could quite recover myself, England answered.

“In the area of mis,” he said in a whispery voice which at that point failed him. He swallowed with all his might and then made a weak, flickery smile. “In the field of missiles, my chief concern is, first, a series of tests to determine the exact nature of the internal control pulses in the hunting missiles, the frequency and wave height of the command pulses in the guided missiles, with a view to jamming or redirecting them. Second, I plan to lob some solids through the Barrier at low velocities in order to study the metallurgical content of the missiles, with a view to the design of sensor-dodging equipment, and possibly some type of repulsion field, designed to force the missiles into a near miss.”

“Very succinct,” said the captain, and I wondered how he knew what was succinct or not about a specialty. “Now that we've got the swing of this little discussion, perhaps, Mr. Palmer, you would like to reconsider and join it.”

“Perhaps I would at that,” I said, stopping to think it over.

After all, a little sense ought to be added to this exhibition of maundering incompetence, if only for balance.

“Then if you must know,” I said, “the only tenable method of approaching the problem lies in the area of explosive stress. No one
but myself seems to have noticed the almost perfectly spherical shape of the Barrier. A sphere in any flexing material is a certain indication of some dynamic tension, a container and the contained in equilibrium, with the analog of some fluid differential like the air inside and outside an inflated balloon. You don't follow me.”

“Go on,” said the captain, holding his head as if he was listening.

“Why, all it will take is a toroidal mass equipped with a subspace generator and an alternator. If this is placed upon the Barrier margin and caused to vibrate into and out of the subspace state, there will be a portion of the Barrier—that which is surrounded by the toroid—which will be included in the vibration. The effect then is in causing a circular section of the Barrier to be in nonexistence for part of the time. It is my conclusion that this small breach will cause the Barrier to collapse like that toy balloon I mentioned. Q.E.D. Lieutenant.” I leaned back.

“Captain,” said the captain tiredly. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “I regret to inform you, Mr. Palmer, that you are completely wrong. Blum!” he bellowed suddenly. “Coffee out here!”

“Hah!” came the monkey's voice. It was as near as he ever let himself get to aye-aye, sir.

He must have had the tray ready before the skipper called, because he came out with it loaded and steaming. He set it down in the middle of the table and retired to a corner. At the side of my eye, I saw the CG sidle out of the “cage” and go to stand silently beside him.

But I wasn't in a mood for anything but this preposterous allegation from the captain. I got to my feet so I could look down at him.

“Did I understand you to say,” I ground out, cold as Neptune, “that in
your
opinion
I
am wrong?”

“Quite wrong. The Barrier is a position, an infinite locus, not a material substance, and is therefore not subject to the laws and treatments of matter per se.”

I have been known to splutter when I am angry, unless I try not to. I found myself trying very hard not to.

“I have reduced every observation on that surface known to Man,”
I informed him, “to mathematical symbology, and from it have written a consecutive sequence of occasions which proves beyond doubt that the surface is as I say and will act as I say. You seem to forget that this is on the record, Admiral, and this may mean you are making a permanent rather than a temporary fool of yourself.”

I sat down, feeling better.

“Captain,” said the captain wearily.

He turned and took a paper from the stack of folders which I noticed for the first time lay there. He flashed it; at first glance, it looked like a page of figures over which a child superimposed a crude and scratchy picture of a Christmas tree in red.

He said, “Equation number 132, four pi sigma over theta plus the square root of four pi sigma quantity squared.” I could not help noticing that, as he reeled it off, he was waving the paper, not reading from it.

I said, “I recognize the equation. Well?”

“Well nothing,” snapped the captain. “Unwell, I'd call it. Heh.” He slid the sheet over to me. “If you will observe, to be consistent with the preceding series, the integer sigma is not whole but factorial, in view of which an increasing error is introduced wherein—but see for yourself.”

I looked. What resembled a crude picture of a Christmas tree was the correction, in red, of the symbol he had mentioned, and the scrawled figures of three corrected factors in the next equation and seven in the third following, until the red marks became a whole line.

I said, “Might I ask who has had the effrontery to scribble all over these calculations?”

“Oh, I did,” said the captain. “I thought it might be a good idea to rework the whole series, just in case, and I'm glad I did. You ought to be, too.”

I looked again at the sheet and swallowed sand. A man has to major for a considerable time in some highly creative math to be able to do what had been done here. A thing or two came to my lips, but I would not say them, because they were for my figures and against his, yet it could not be denied that his were right.

To save something out of this, I growled at him, “I think, sir, you owe me an explanation as to why you have chosen publicly to humiliate me.”

“I didn't humiliate you. Those figures humiliated you, and they're your figures,” he said, and shrugged.

I glanced at Potter and England. They were grinning broadly. I looked up suddenly and caught the CG's flat gray stare.

“They're your figures,” she murmured, and anyone hearing her would swear she knew for certain that I had copied them from somebody else's work. There was such a flame of insistence burning up in me that they were
so
my figures that I could barely contain it. But contain it I did; they were not figures I was anxious to claim at the moment.

I was very confused. I slumped down in my chair.

“You're next, Mr. Potter. I'm sorry to have to inform you that although, in theory, the Barrier does yield under the stress of a magnetic field such as you describe, it would take a generator somewhat larger than this ship to supply it; the affected area would be just about what you said—a square centimeter; and, finally, it wouldn't be a hole in the Barrier, but what you might call a replacement patch. In other words, the affected area will, when surrounded by the so-called Barrier skin, act precisely like part of that skin in all respects.”

Potter put his hobby finger out for inspection and was so distressed he forgot to look at it. “Are … are you sure?”

“That's what happened the last seven times it was tried.”

Potter made a wordless sound, a sort of moan, or sigh. I did not feel like grinning at him as he had at me. England did not grin, either, because I think he realized what was coming. He just sat there wondering how it would come.