The Past Through Tomorrow (120 page)

But the great mass was on Lazarus’ right. He looked at them and saw new animation in their faces; it lifted his heart, for he had been bitterly afraid that he was almost alone in his wish to leave.

He looked back at the small group nearest him. “It looks like you’re outvoted,” he said to them alone, his voice unamplified. “But never mind, there always comes another day.” He waited.

Slowly the group in the middle began to break up. By ones and twos and threes they moved away. A very few drifted over to join those who were staying; most of them merged with the group on the right.

When this secondary division was complete Lazarus spoke to the smaller group on his left. “All right,” he said very gently, “You…you old folks might as well go back up to the meadows and get your sleep. The rest of us have plans to make.”

Lazarus then gave Libby the floor and let him explain to the majority crowd that the trip home would not be the weary journey the flight from Earth had been, nor even the tedious second jump. Libby placed all of the credit where most of it belonged, with the Little People. They had straightened him out with his difficulties in dealing with the problem of speeds which appeared to exceed the speed of light. If the Little People knew what they were talking about—and Libby was sure that they did—there appeared to be no limits to what Libby chose to call “para-acceleration”—“para-” because, like Libby’s own light-pressure drive, it acted on the whole mass uniformly and could no more be perceived by the senses than can gravitation, and “para-” also because the ship would not go “through” but rather around or “beside” normal space. “It is not so much a matter of driving the ship as it is a selection of appropriate potential level in an n-dimensional hyperplenum of n-plus-one possible—”

Lazarus firmly cut him off. “That’s your department, son, and everybody trusts you in it. We ain’t qualified to discuss the fine points.”—

“I was only going to add—”

“I know. But you were already out of the world when I stopped you.”

Someone from the crowd shouted one more question. “When do we get there?”

“I don’t know,” Libby admitted, thinking of the question the way Nancy Weatheral had put it to him long ago. “I can’t say what year it will be…but it will seem like about three weeks from now.”

The preparations consumed days simply because many round trips of the ship’s boats were necessary to embark them. There was a marked lack of ceremonious farewell because those remaining behind tended to avoid those who were leaving. Coolness had sprung up between the two groups; the division on the beach had split friendships, had even broken up contemporary marriages, had caused many hurt feelings, unresolvable bitterness. Perhaps the only desirable aspect of the division was that the parents of the mutant Marion Schmidt had elected to remain behind.

Lazarus was in charge of the last boat to leave. Shortly before he planned to boost he felt a touch at his elbow. “Excuse me,” a young man said. “My name’s Hubert Johnson. I want to go along but I’ve had to stay back with the other crowd to keep my mother from throwing fits. If I show up at the last minute, can I still go along?”

Lazarus looked him over. “You look old enough to decide without asking me.”

“You don’t understand. I’m an only child and my mother tags me around. I’ve got to sneak back before she misses me. How much longer—”

“I’m not holding this boat for anybody. And you’ll never break away any younger. Get into the boat.”

“But—”

“Git!” The young man did so, with one worried backward glance at the bank. There was a lot, thought Lazarus, to be said for ectogenesis.

Once inboard the
New Frontiers
Lazarus reported to Captain King in the control room. “All inboard?” asked King.

“Yeah. Some late deciders, pro and con, and one more passenger at the last possible split second—woman named Eleanor Johnson. Let’s go!”

King turned to Libby. “Let’s go, Mister.”

The stars blinked out.

They flew blind, with only Libby’s unique talent to guide them. If he had doubts as to his ability to lead them through the featureless blackness of other space he kept them to himself. On the twenty-third ship’s day of the reach and the eleventh day of para-deceleration the stars reappeared, all in their old familiar ranges—the Big Dipper, giant Orion, lopsided Crux, the fairy Pleiades, and dead ahead of them, blazing against the frosty backdrop of the Milky Way, was a golden light that had to be the Sun.

Lazarus had tears in his eyes for the second time in a month.

They could not simply rendezvous with Earth, set a parking orbit, and disembark; they had to throw their hats in first. Besides that, they needed first to know what time it was.

Libby was able to establish quickly, through proper motions of nearest stars, that it was not later than about 3700
A.D.
; without precise observatory instruments he refused to commit himself further. But once they were close enough to see the Solar planets he had another clock to read; the planets themselves make a clock with nine hands.

For any date there is a unique configuration of those “hands” since no planetary period is exactly commensurate with another. Pluto marks off an “hour” of a quarter of a millennium; Jupiter’s clicks a cosmic minute of twelve years; Mercury whizzes a “second” of about ninety days. The other “hands” can refine these readings—Neptune’s period is so cantankerously different from that of Pluto that the two fall into approximately repeated configuration only once in seven hundred and fifty-eight years. The great clock can be read with any desired degree of accuracy over any period—but it is not easy to read.

Libby started to read it as soon as any of the planets could be picked out. He muttered over the problem. “There’s not a chance that we’ll pick up Pluto,” he complained to Lazarus, “and I doubt if we’ll have Neptune. The inner planets give me an infinite series of approximations—you know as well as I do that ‘infinite’ is a question-begging term. Annoying!”

“Aren’t you looking at it the hard way, son? You can get a practical answer. Or move over and I’ll get one.”

“Of course I can get a practical answer,” Libby said petulantly, “if you’re satisfied with that. But—”

“But me no ‘
buts’—what year is it, man!
”

“Eh? Let’s put it this way. The time rate in the ship and duration on Earth have been unrelated three times. But now they are effectively synchronous again, such that slightly over seventy-four years have passed since we left.”

Lazarus heaved a sigh. “Why didn’t you say so?” He had been fretting that Earth might not be recognizable…they might have torn down New York or something like that. “Shucks, Andy, you shouldn’t have scared me like that.”

“Mmm…” said Libby. It was one of no further interest to him. There remained only the delicious problem of inventing a mathematics which would describe elegantly two apparently irreconcilable groups of facts: the Michelson-Morley experiments and the log of the
New Frontiers
. He set happily about it. Mmm…what was the least number of para-dimensions indispensably necessary to contain the augmented plenum using a sheaf of postulates affirming—

It kept him contented for a considerable time—subjective time, of course.

The ship was placed in a temporary orbit half a billion miles from the Sun with a radius vector normal to the plane of the ecliptic. Parked thus at right angles to and far outside the flat pancake of the Solar System they were safe from any long chance of being discovered. A ship’s boat had been fitted with the neo-Libby drive during the jump and a negotiating party was sent down.

Lazarus wanted to go along; King refused to let him, which sent Lazarus into sulks. King had said curtly, “This isn’t a raiding party, Lazarus; this is a diplomatic mission.”

“Hell, man, I can be diplomatic when it pays!”

“No doubt. But we’ll send a man who doesn’t go armed to the ’fresher.”

Ralph Schultz headed the party, since psychodynamic factors back on Earth were of first importance, but he was aided by legal, military, and technical specialists. If the Families were going to have to fight for living room it was necessary to know what sort of technology, what sort of weapons, they would have to meet—but it was even more necessary to find out whether or not a peaceful landing could be arranged. Schultz had been authorized by the elders to offer a plan under which the Families would colonize the thinly settled and retrograded European continent. But it was possible, even likely, that this had already been done in their absence, in view of the radioactive half-lifes involved. Schultz would probably have to improvise some other compromise, depending on the conditions he found.

Again there was nothing to do but wait.

Lazarus endured it in nail-chewing uncertainty. He had claimed publicly that the Families had such great scientific advantage that they could meet and defeat the best that Earth could offer. Privately, he knew that this was sophistry and so did any other Member competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win wars. The ignorant fanatics of Europe’s Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably higher Islamic culture; Archimedes had been struck down by a common soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome. Libby, or some one, might devise an unbeatable weapon from their mass of new knowledge—or might not. And who knew what strides military art had made on earth in three quarters of a century?

King, trained in military art, was worried by the same thing and still more worried by the personnel he would have to work with. The Families were anything but trained legions; the prospect of trying to whip those cranky individualists into some semblance of a disciplined fighting machine ruined his sleep.

These doubts and fears King and Lazarus did not mention even to each other; each was afraid that to mention such things would be to spread a poison of fear through the ship. But they were not alone in their worries; half of the ship’s company realized the weaknesses of their position and kept silent only because a bitter resolve to go home, no matter what, made them willing to accept the dangers.

“Skipper,” Lazarus said to King two weeks after Schultz’s party had headed Earthside, “have you wondered how they’re going to feel about the
New Frontiers
herself?”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“Well, we hijacked her. Piracy.”

King looked astounded. “Bless me, so we did! Do you know, it’s been so long ago that it is hard for me to realize that she was ever anything but my ship…or to recall that I first came into her through an act of piracy.” He looked thoughtful, then smiled grimly. “I wonder how conditions are in Coventry these days?”

“Pretty thin rations, I imagine,” said Lazarus. “But we’ll team up and make out. Never mind—they haven’t caught us yet.”

“Do you suppose that Slayton Ford will be connected with the matter? That would be hard lines after all he has gone through.”

“There may not be any trouble about it at all,” Lazarus answered soberly. “While the way we got this ship was kind of irregular, we
have
used it for the purpose for which it was built—to explore the stars. And we’re returning it intact, long before they could have expected any results, and with a slick new space drive to boot. It’s more for their money than they had any reason to expect—so they may just decide to forget it and trot out the fatted calf.”

“I hope so,” King answered doubtfully.

The scouting party was two days late. No signal was received from them until they emerged into normal spacetime, just before rendezvous, as no method had yet been devised for signalling from para-space to ortho-space. While they were maneuvering to rendezvous, King received Ralph Schultz’s face on the control-room screen. “Hello, Captain! We’ll be boarding shortly to report.”

“Give me a summary now!”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. But it’s all right—we
can
go
home!
”

“Huh? How’s that? Repeat!”

“Everything’s all right. We are restored to the Covenant. You see, there isn’t any difference any more.
Everybody is a member of the Families now
.”

“What do you mean?” King demanded.

“They’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“Got the secret of longevity.”

“Huh? Talk sense. There isn’t any secret. There never was any secret.”

“We didn’t have any secret—but they thought we had. So they found it.”

“Explain yourself,” insisted Captain King.

“Captain, can’t this wait until we get back into the ship?” Ralph Schultz protested. “I’m no biologist. We’ve brought along a government representative—you can quiz him, instead.”

KING RECEIVED
Terra’s representative in his cabin. He had notified Zaccur Barstow and Justin Foote to be present for the Families and had invited Doctor Gordon Hardy because the nature of the startling news was the biologist’s business. Libby was there as the ship’s chief officer; Slayton Ford was invited because of his unique status, although he had held no public office in the Families since his breakdown in the temple of Kreel.

Lazarus was there because Lazarus wanted to be there, in his own strictly private capacity. He had not been invited, but even Captain King was somewhat diffident about interfering with the assumed prerogatives of the eldest Member.

Ralph Schultz introduced Earth’s ambassador to the assembled company. “This is Captain King, our commanding officer—and this is Miles Rodney, representing the Federation Council—minister plenipotentiary and ambassador extraordinary, I guess you would call him.”

“Hardly that,” said Rodney, “although I can agree to the ‘extraordinary’ part. This situation is quite without precedent. It is an honor to know you, Captain.”

“Glad to have you inboard, sir.”

“And this is Zaccur Barstow, representing the trustees of the Howard Families, and Justin Foote, secretary to the trustees—”

“Service.”

“Service to you, gentlemen.”

“—Andrew Jackson Libby, chief astrogational officer, Doctor Gordon Hardy, biologist in charge of our research into the causes of old age and death.”

“May I do you a service?” Hardy acknowledged formally.