From the Ocean from teh Stars (44 page)

He made his own conditions, however. What he was doing he did
largely for love, notwithstanding the fact that it was earning him more money than anything he had ever done before in his life. He would take
no assistants, and would remain in his little workshop. All that he wanted to do was to produce the prototypes, the basic designs. The mass produc
tion could be done somewhere else—he was a craftsman, not a factory.

The arrangement had worked well. Over the last six months Captain
Zipp had been transformed and was now the despair of all the rival space
operas. This, his viewers thought, was not just a serial about the future.
It
was
the future—there was no argument about it. Even the actors
seemed to have been inspired by their new surroundings: off the set, they
sometimes behaved like twentieth-century time travelers stranded in the
Victorian Age, indignant because they no longer had access to the gadgets
that had always been part of their lives.

But Hans knew nothing about this. He toiled happily away, refusing
to see anyone except the producer, doing all his business over the tele
phone—and watching the final result to ensure that his ideas had not
been mutilated. The only sign of his connection with the slightly fantastic
world of commercial TV was a crate of Crunche in one corner of the workshop. He had sampled one mouthful of this present from the grateful
sponsor and had then remembered thankfully that, after all, he was not
paid to eat the stuff.

He was working late one Sunday evening, putting the final touches to a new design for a space helmet, when he suddenly realized that he
was no longer alone. Slowly he turned from the workbench and faced
the door. It had been locked—how could it have been opened so silently?
There were two men standing beside it, motionless, watching him. Hans
felt his heart trying to climb into his gullet, and summoned up what cour
age he could to challenge them. At least, he felt thankfully, he had little
money here. Then he wondered if, after all, this was a good thing. They
might be annoyed. . . .

"Who are you?" he asked. "What are you doing here?"

One of the men moved toward him while the other remained watching alertly from the door. They were both wearing very new overcoats, with hats low down on their heads so that Hans could not see their faces.
They were too well dressed, he decided, to be ordinary holdup men.

"There's no need to be alarmed, Mr. Muller," replied the nearer
man, reading his thoughts without difficulty. "This isn't a holdup. It's
official. We're from—Security."

"I don't understand."

The other reached into a portfolio he had been carrying beneath his

coat, and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. He riffled through them un
til he had found the one he wanted.

"You've given us quite a headache, Mr. Muller. It's taken us two
weeks to find you—your employers were so secretive. No doubt they
were anxious to hide you from their rivals. However, here we are and I'd
like you to answer some questions."

"I'm not a spy!" answered Hans indignantly as the meaning of the
words penetrated. "You can't do this! I'm a loyal American citizen!"

The other ignored the outburst. He handed over the photograph.

"Do you recognize this?" he said.

"Yes. It's the inside of Captain Zipp's spaceship."

"And you designed it?"

"Yes."

Another photograph came out of the file.

"And what about this?"

"That's the Martian city of Paldar, as seen from the air."

"Your own idea?"

"Certainly," Hans replied, now too indignant to be cautious.

"And
this?"

"Oh, the proton gun. I was quite proud of that."

"Tell me, Mr. Muller—are these all your own ideas?"

"Yes, / don't steal from other people."

His questioner turned to his companion and spoke for a few minutes
in a voice too low for Hans to hear. They seemed to reach agreement on
some point, and the conference was over before Hans could make his
intended grab at the telephone.

"I'm sorry," continued the intruder. "But there has been a serious
leak. It may be—uh—accidental, even unconscious, but that does not
affect the issue. We will have to investigate you. Please come with us."

There was such power and authority in the stranger's voice that Hans
began to climb into his overcoat without a murmur. Somehow, he no longer doubted his visitors' credentials and never thought of asking for
any proof. He was worried, but not yet seriously alarmed. Of course, it was obvious what had happened. He remembered hearing about a
science-fiction writer during the war who had described the atom bomb
with disconcerting accuracy. When so much secret research was going on,
such accidents were bound to occur. He wondered just what it was he
had given away.

At the doorway, he looked back into his workshop and at the men
who were following him.

"It's all a ridiculous mistake," he said. "If I
did
show anything secret

in the program, it was just a coincidence. I've never done anything to
annoy the FBI."

It was then that the second man spoke at last, in very bad English
and with a most peculiar accent.

"What is the FBI?" he asked.

But Hans didn't hear him. He had just seen the spaceship.

☆
NO MORNING AFTER

Bu
t this is terrible!" said the Supreme Scientist. "Surely there is
something
we can do!"

"Yes, Your Cognizance, but it will be extremely difficult. The planet
is more than five hundred light-years away, and it is very hard to maintain
contact. However, we believe we can establish a bridgehead. Unfortu
nately, that is not the only problem. So far, we have been quite unable to
communicate with these beings. Their telepathic powers are exceedingly
rudimentary—perhaps even nonexistent. And if we cannot talk to them,
there is no way in which we can help."

There was a long mental silence while the Supreme Scientist analyzed
the situation and arrived, as he always did, at the correct answer.

"Any intelligent race must have
some
telepathic individuals," he
mused. "We must send out hundreds of observers, tuned to catch the first hint of stray thought. When you find a single responsive mind, concen
trate all your efforts upon it. We
must
get our message through."

"Very good, Your Cognizance. It shall be done."

Across the abyss, across the gulf which light itself took half a thou
sand years to span, the questing intellects of the planet Thaar sent out their tendrils of thought, searching desperately for a single human being whose
mind could perceive their presence. And as luck would have it, they en
countered William Cross.

At least, they thought it was luck at the time, though later they were not so sure. In any case, they had little choice. The combination of cir
cumstances that opened Bill's mind to them lasted only for seconds, and
was not likely to occur again this side of eternity.

There were three ingredients in the miracle: it is hard to say if one
was more important than another. The first was the accident of position. A flask of water, when sunlight falls upon it, can act as a crude lens,
concentrating the light into a small area. On an immeasurably larger

scale, the dense core of the Earth was converging the waves that came from Thaar. In the ordinary way, the radiations of thought are unaffected by matter—they pass through it as effortlessly as light through glass. But there is rather a lot of matter in a planet, and the whole Earth was acting as a gigantic lens. As it turned, it was carrying Bill through its focus, where the feeble thought impulses from Thaar were concentrated a hundredfold.

Yet millions of other men were equally well placed: they received no message. But they were not rocket engineers: they had not spent years thinking and dreaming of space until it had become part of their very being.

And they were not, as Bill was, blind drunk, teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness, trying to escape from reality into the world of dreams, where there were no disappointments and setbacks.

Of course, he could see the Army's point of view. "You are paid, Dr. Cross," General Porter had pointed out with unnecessary emphasis, "to design missiles,
not
—ah—spaceships. What you do in your spare time is your own concern, but I must ask you not to use the facilities of the establishment for your hobby. From now on, all projects for the computing section will have to be cleared by me. That is all."

They couldn't sack him, of course: he was too important. But he was not sure that he wanted to stay. He was not really sure of anything except that the job had backfired on him, and that Brenda had finally gone off with Johnny Gardner—putting events in their order of importance.

Wavering slightly, Bill cupped his chin in his hands and stared at the whitewashed brick wall on the other side of the table. The only attempt at ornamentation was a calendar from Lockheed and a glossy six-by-eight from Aerojet showing L'il Abner Mark I making a boosted takeoff. Bill gazed morosely at a spot midway between the two pictures, and emptied his mind of thought. The barriers went down. . . .

At that moment, the massed intellects of Thaar gave a soundless cry of triumph, and the wall in front of Bill slowly dissolved into a swirling mist. He appeared to be looking down a tunnel that stretched to infinity. As a matter of fact, he was.

Bill studied the phenomenon with mild interest. It had a certain novelty, but was not up to the standard of previous hallucinations. And when the voice started to speak in his mind, he let it ramble on for some time before he did anything about it. Even when drunk, he had an old-fashioned prejudice against starting conversations with himself.

"Bill," the voice began, "listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important."

Bill doubted this on general principles.
Nothing
was important any
more.

"We are speaking to you from a very distant planet," continued the
voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. "You are the only human being we
have been able to contact, so you
must
understand what we are saying."

Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it
was now rather hard to focus on his own problems. How serious was it,
he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get
excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr. Cross, he told himself. Let's take
it until it gets to be a nuisance.

"O.K.," he answered with bored indifference. "Go right ahead and
talk to me. I won't mind as long as it's interesting."

There was a pause. Then the voice continued, in a slightly worried
fashion.

"We don't quite understand. Our message isn't merely
interesting.
It's vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government im
mediately."

"I'm waiting," said Bill. "It helps to pass the time."

Five hundred light-years away, the Thaarns conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide
precisely what. There was no doubt that they had established contact,
yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could
only proceed and hope for the best.

"Listen, Bill," they continued. "Our scientists have just discovered
that your sun is about to explode. It will happen three days from now—
seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop it. But there's no need
to be alarmed. We can save you, if you'll do what we say."

"Go on," said Bill. This hallucination was ingenious.

"We can create what we call a bridge—it's a kind of tunnel through
space, like the one you're looking into now. The theory is far too com
plicated to explain, even to one of your mathematicians."

"Hold on a minute!" protested Bill. "I am a mathematician, and a
darn good one, even when I'm sober. And I've read all about this kind of
thing in the science-fiction magazines. I presume you're talking about some kind of short cut through a higher dimension of space. That's old
stuff—pre-Einstein."

A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into Bill's mind.

"We had no idea you were so advanced scientifically," said the
Thaarns. "But we haven't time to talk about the theory. All that matters is this—if you were to step into that opening in front of you, you'd find