The Wanderer

Chapter Six

Paul Hagbolt nervously nudged Margo Gelhorn, warning her to stop giggling as a woman in the second row called to Doc: "What's that hyperspace you were saying planets could come out of?"
"Yes, why not give us a run-down?" Beardy suggested like a veteran panelist, turning to Doc.
"It's a notion that's turned up in theoretical physics and any number of science-fiction stories." Doc launched out, adjusting his glasses and then running his hands back across his bald head.
"As you all know, the speed of light is generally accepted as the fastest possible. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second sounds like a lot, but it's snail slow when it conies to the vast -distances between the stars and within the galaxies  -  a dismal prospect for space travelers.
"However," Doc continued, "it's theoretically possible that space-time may be so warped or crumpled that distant parts of our cosmos touch in a higher dimension  -  in hyperspace, which is where the word comes in. Or even that every part touches every other part. If that is the case, then faster-than-light travel would be theoretically possible by somehow blasting out of our universe into hyperspace and then back in again at the desired point. Of course, hyperspace travel has been suggested only for spaceships, but I don't know why a properly equipped planet couldn't manage it, too  -  theoretically. Professional scientists like Bernal and philosophers such as Stapledon have theorized about traveling planets, not to mention authors like Stuart and Smith."
"Theory!" the Ramrod snorted, adding sotto voce: "Hot air!"
"How about that?" Beardy asked Doc, bringing the question onto the platform with a fine impartiality. "Is there any concrete evidence for the existence of hyperspace or hyperspace travel?"
From beyond Doc, the She-Turban glanced toward him and Beardy curiously.
"Not one shred," Doc said, with a grin. "I've tried to goose my astronomer friends into hunting for clues, but they don't take me very seriously."
"You interest me," Beardy said. "Just what form might such clues take?"
"I've thought about that," Doc admitted with relish. "One idea I've come up with is that the thrust necessary to get a ship into and out of hyperspace might involve the creation of momentary artificial gravitational fields  -  fields so intense that they would visibly distort the starlight passing through that volume of space. So I've suggested to my astronomer friends that they watch for the stars to waver on clear nights of good seeing  -  and especially from satellite 'scopes  -  and that they hunt through short-exposure star photographs for evidence of the same thing happening  -  stars blanking-out briefly or moving twistedly."
The thin woman in the second row said: "I saw a story in the papers about a man seeing the stars twirl. Would that be evidence?"
Doc chuckled. "I'm afraid not. Wasn't he drunk? We mustn't take these silly-season items too seriously."
Paul simultaneously felt a shiver hug his chest and Margo clutch his arm.
"Paul," she whispered urgently. "Isn't Doc describing exactly what you saw in those four photographs?"
"It sounds similar," he temporized, trying to straighten it out in his own mind. "Very similar." Then, wonderingly: "He used the word 'twist'."
"Well, how about it?" Margo demanded. "Has Doc got something or hasn't he?"
"Opperly said - " Paul began...and realized that Doc was speaking to him.
"Excuse me, you two in the back row  -  sorry, I don't know your names  -  do you have a contribution to make?"
"Why, no. No, sir," Paul called rapidly. "We were simply very much impressed by your presentation."
Doc waved his hand once in a good-natured acknowledgment.
"Liar," Margo breathed at Paul with a smile. "I've half a mind to tell him all about it."
Paul hadn't the heart to say no, which was probably a good thing. He was having another guilt attack, unlocalized but acute. Certainly, he told himself, he couldn't spill inside Project information  -  to saucerites, to boot. Still, there was something wrong with a setup in which someone like Doc couldn't know about those photographs.
But then he started thinking about the point at issue, and the shiver returned. Damn it, there was something devilish about the way Doc's guesswork fitted with those photographs. He looked up urieasily at the dark moon. Margo's words resounded thinly in his memory: "What if the stars around it should squiggle now?"
The moon-dust cannisters hanging on their thin metal stalks above the dimly glittering film of carbon dioxide snow looked like the weirdly mechanistic fruits of an ice garden. Moving in his helmet's headlight beam, Don Merriam stepped toward the nearest one as gently as he could, so as to kick up a minimum of contaminating dust. In spite of his caution, some dry-ice crystals arched up in the path of his metal boots and fell back abruptly, as is the way of dust and "snow" on the airless moon. He touched the trigger on the cannister which sealed it hermetically and then he plucked it from its stalk and dropped it in his pouch.
"Highest-paid fruit picker this side of Mars," he told himself judicially. "And even at that I'm finishing this job too fast to suit Union Czar Gompert, the Slow-Down King."
He looked back up at the black earth inside the bronze ring. "Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of them," he told himself, "would agree I'm featherbedding. They think all space exploration is the biggest featherbed since the Pyramids. Or the railroads, anyhow. Air-clams! Troposphere-barnacles!" He grinned. "They've heard about space but they still don't believe in it. They haven't been out here to see for themselves that there isn't any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say 'planet' and 'spaceship' to them, they still think "horoscope' and 'flying saucer'."
As he turned toward the next cannister-bearing reed, his boot scuffed the crystal film, and a faint creaky whir traveled up the leg of his suit. It was an echo, from across the years, of his galoshes singing against the crusty Minnesota snow on a zero day.
Barbara Katz said, "Hey, check me, Mr. Kettering  -  I see a white light flashing near Copernicus."
Knolls Kettering III, creaking a bit at the joints, took her place at the eyepiece. "You're right, Miss Katz," he said. "The Soviets must be testing signal flares, I imagine."
"Thanks," she said. "I never trust myself on moon-stuff  -  I keep seeing the lights of Luna City and Leyport and all the other science-fiction places."
"Confidentially, Miss Katz, so do I! Now there's a red flare."
"Oh, could I see it?  -  But I hate making you get up and down. I could sit on your lap, if you wouldn't mind  -  and if the stool would stand it."
Knolls Kettering III chuckled regretfully. "I wouldn't mind, and the stool might stand it, but I'm afraid the bone-plastic splice in my hip mightn't."
"Oh, gee, I'm sorry."
"Forget it, Miss Katz  -  we're fellow lensmen. And don't feel sorry for me."
"I won't," she assured him. "Why, I think it's romantic being patched up that way, just like the old soldiers that run the space academies in the Heinlein and E. E. Smith stories."
Don Guillermo Walker finally had to admit to himself that the black glisten ahead was water  -  and the little lake, rather than the big one, for there at last were the lights of Managua twinkling no more than ten miles away. A new worry struck him: that he had cut his timing too fine. What if the moon came out of eclipse right now, pinpointing him for el presidente's jets and AA guns, like a premature spotlight catching a stagehand in overalls making a dark-stage scenery change? He wished he were back doing second-rate summer stock near Chicago, or haranguing a "guns-south" Birch splinter group; or ten years old and putting on a backyard circus in Milwaukee, defying death by sliding down a slanting rusty wire from a height of nineteen feet.
That second memory gave him courage. Dead for a backyard circus...dead for a greaser city bombed! He revved the motor to its top speed, and the prop behind him drummed the lukewarm air a shade less feebly. "Guil-ler-mo ge-ron-imo!" Don Guillermo yelled. "La Loma, here I come!"