Nemesis (23 page)

“He’s a merciless fellow.”

“He’s a stupid fellow. You’d think that even if a society doesn’t know science, they would know something
about
science, about how it works. If they give you a million global credits in the morning, they shouldn’t expect anything definite by evening the same day. They should at least wait till the next morning and give you the whole night to work in. Do you know what he said to me last time we spoke, when I said I might have something to show him?”

“No, you hadn’t told me. What did he say?”

“You’d think he’d say: ‘It’s amazing that in a mere three years you’ve worked out something so astonishing and new. We must give you enormous credit and the weight of gratitude we feel toward you is immeasurable.’ That’s what you would
think
he would say.”

“No, not in a million years would I think that Tanayama would say anything like that. What
did
he say?”

“He said, ‘So you have something finally, after three years. I should hope so. How long do you think I have to live? Do you think I have been supporting you, and paying for you and feeding you an army of assistants and workers in order to have you produce something after I’m dead and can’t see it?’ That’s what he
did
say, and I tell you I would like to delay the demonstration till he is dead, for my own satisfaction, but I suppose that the work comes first.”

“Do you really have something that will satisfy him?”

“Only superluminal flight.
True
superluminal flight, not that hyper-assistance nonsense. We now have something that will open the door to the Universe.”

The site where Tessa Wendel’s research team labored, intent on shaking the Universe, had been prepared for her even before she had been recruited and come to Earth. It was inside a vast mountainous redoubt that was totally off-limits to Earth’s teeming population, and in it a veritable city of research had been built.

And now Tanayama was there, seated in a motorized chair. Only his eyes, behind their narrowed lids, seemed alive—sharp, glancing this way and that.

He was by no means the highest figure in Earth’s government, not even the highest figure then present, but he had been, and still was, the force behind the project and all automatically gave way to him.

Only Wendel seemed unintimidated.

His voice was a rustling whisper. “What will I see, Doctor? A ship?”

There was no ship in view, of course.

Wendel said, “No ship, Director. Ships are years away. I have only a demonstration, but it is an exciting one. You will see the first public demonstration of true superluminal flight, something that is far beyond hyper-assistance.”

“How am I going to see that?”

“It was my understanding, Director, that you have been briefed.”

Tanayama coughed wrackingly and had to pause to catch his breath. “They tried to talk to me,” he said, “but I want it from you.” His eyes, baleful and hard, were fixed on her. “You’re in charge,” he said. “It is your scheme. Explain.”

“I can’t explain the theory. That would take too long, Director. It would tire you.”

“I want no theory. What am I going to
see?
”

“What you are going to see are two cubical glass containers. Both contain a hard vacuum.”

“Why a vacuum?”

“Superluminal flight can only be initiated in a vacuum, Director. Otherwise the object made to move faster than light drags matter with it, increasing energy expenditures and decreasing controllability. It must end in a
vacuum, too, or else the results can be catastrophic because—”

“Never mind the ‘because.’ If this superluminal flight of yours must begin and end in a vacuum, how do we make use of it?”

“It is necessary, first, to move out into outer space by ordinary flight and then move into hyperspace and stay there. You arrive near your destination and move out into ordinary space, and then make the final move by ordinary flight.”

“That takes time.”

“Even superluminal flight can’t be done instantaneously, but if you can move from the Solar System to a star forty light-years away in forty days rather than forty years, it would be ungrateful to grumble over the time lapse.”

“All right, then. You have these two cubical glass containers. What of them?”

“They are holographic projections. Actually, they are three thousand kilometers apart through the body of the Earth, each in a mountain fastness. If light could travel from one to the other through unobstructed vacuum, it would take that light fully 1/1000th of a second—one millisecond—to make the passage. We’re not going to use light, of course. Suspended in the middle of the cube at the left, held in space by a powerful magnetic field, is a small sphere, which is actually a tiny hyperatomic motor. Do you see it, Director?”

“I see something there,” said Tanayama. “Is that all you have?”

“If you will watch carefully, you will see that it will disappear. The countdown is progressing.”

It was a whisper in each person’s ear, and, at zero, the sphere was gone from one cube and present in the other.

“Remember,” said Wendel, “those cubes are really three thousand kilometers apart. The timing mechanism shows that the duration between the departure and the arrival was a little over ten microseconds, which means that the passage took place at almost a hundred times the speed of light.”

Tanayama looked up. “How can I tell? The whole thing could be a trick designed to fool someone you believe to be a gullible old man.”

“Director,” said Wendel sternly. “There are hundreds of scientists here, all with reputations, a number of them Earthmen. They will show you anything you want to see, explain how the instruments work. You will find nothing here but honest science done well.”

“Even if all is as you say, what does it mean? A little ball. A Ping-Pong ball, traveling a few thousand kilometers. Is that what you have after three years?”

“What you have seen is perhaps more than anyone had a right to expect, Director, with all due respect. What you have seen may be the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and it may have traveled no more than three thousand kilometers, but it is true superluminal flight just as much as if we had moved a starship from here to Arcturus at a hundred times the speed of light. What you have seen is the first public demonstration of true superluminal flight in human history.”

“But it’s the starship I want to see.”

“For that you will have to wait.”

“I have no time. I have no time,” rasped Tanayama in a voice that was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. A fit of coughing shook him again.

And Wendel said in a low voice that perhaps only Tanayama heard, “Even
your
will cannot move the Universe.”

The three days devoted to officialdom in what was unofficially known as Hyper City had passed grindingly, and now the interlopers were gone.

“Even so,” said Tessa Wendel to Crile Fisher, “it will take two or three more days to recover and get back to work with full intensity.” She looked haggard and intensely displeased as she said, “What a vile old man.”

Fisher had no trouble divining the reference to be to Tanayama. “He’s a sick old man.”

Wendel shot an angry look at him. “Are you defending him?”

“Just stating a fact, Tessa.”

She lifted a finger in admonishment. “I am quite certain that that miserable relic was as irrational and unreasonable in days past when he was not sick, or, for that
matter, when he was not old. How long has he been Director of the Office?”

“He’s a fixture. Over thirty years. And before that he was Chief Deputy for almost as long and probably the real power behind a succession of three or four figurehead Directors. And no matter how old or sick he gets, he’ll stay Director till he dies—maybe for three days afterward, while people wait to make sure he doesn’t rise from the dead.”

“I gather you think this is funny.”

“No, but what can you do but laugh at the spectacle of a man who, without open power, without even being known to the general public, has kept everyone in the government in fear and subjection for nearly half a century simply because he has firm control over everyone’s disreputable secrets and would not hesitate to make use of them.”

“And they endure him?”

“Oh yes. There’s not a person in the government who has ever been willing to sacrifice his own career with certainty, merely on the chance of bringing down Tanayama.”

“Even now when his hold on matters must be growing tenuous?”

“You’re making a mistake. His grip may fail with death, but until his actual death that grip of his will never be tenuous. It will be the last that goes, sometime after his heart stops.”

“What drives people so?” asked Wendel with distaste. “Is there no desire to let go early enough to have a chance to die in peace?”

“Not Tanayama. Never. I wouldn’t say I’m an intimate of his, but in fifteen years or so, I have made contact with him now and then, never without being badly bruised in the process. I knew him when he was still vigorous, and I always knew he would never stop. To answer your earlier question, different things drive different people, but in Tanayama’s case, it’s hatred.”

“I should think so,” said Wendel. “It shows. No one that hateful can fail to hate. But who does Tanayama hate?”

“The Settlements.”

“Oh, he does?” Wendel was obviously remembering that she was a Settler from Adelia. “I’ve never heard a
Settler say a kind word for Earth either. And you know
my
feelings for any place without variable gravity.”

“I’m not talking dislike, Tessa, or distaste or contempt. I’m talking blind scarlet hatred. Almost any Earthman dislikes the Settlements. They have all the latest. They’re quiet, uncrowded, comfortable, middle-class. They have ample food, ample recreation, no bad weather, no poor. They have robots that are kept smoothly out of sight. It’s only natural for people who consider themselves deprived to dislike those who seem to have everything. But with Tanayama, it’s active boiling hatred. I think he would like to see the Settlements destroyed, every one.”

“Why, Crile?”

“My own theory is that what gets him is none of the things I have listed. What he can’t stand is the cultural homogeneity of the Settlements. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“The people of the Settlements select themselves. They select people like themselves. There’s a shared culture, even, to some extent, a shared physical appearance on each Settlement. Earth, on the other hand, is, and through all of history has been, a wild mixture of cultures, all enriching each other, competing with each other, suspicious of each other. Tanayama and many other Earthmen—myself, for instance—consider such a mixture to be a source of strength, and feel that cultural homogeneity on the Settlements weakens them and, in the long run, shortens their potential life span.”

“Well, then, why hate the Settlements for possessing something you consider a disadvantage to them? Does Tanayama hate us for being better off
and
for being worse off? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to. Who would bother hating, if it had to be reasoned out into sensibleness first? Perhaps—just perhaps—Tanayama is afraid that the Settlements will succeed too well and will prove cultural homogeneity to be a good thing after all. Or perhaps he thinks that the Settlements are as anxious to destroy the Earth as he himself is to destroy the Settlements. The matter of the Neighbor Star infuriated him.”

“The fact that Rotor discovered the Neighbor Star and did not inform the rest of us?”

“More than that. They did not bother to warn us that it was speeding toward the Solar System.”

“They might not have known, I suppose.”

“Tanayama would never believe that. I’m sure that he feels that they knew and deliberately refused to warn us, hoping that we would be caught unprepared, and that Earth, or at least Earth’s civilization, would be destroyed.”

“Has it been decided that the Neighbor Star will approach closely enough to damage us? I haven’t heard
that
. It’s my understanding that most astronomers think it will pass at a great enough distance to leave us substantially untouched. Have you heard differently?”

Fisher shrugged. “No, I haven’t, but I think it feeds Tanayama’s hatred to believe that there is danger here. And from that, you move logically to the notion that superluminal flight is what we must have in order to locate an Earth-like world elsewhere. Then we can transfer as much of Earth’s population as possible to that other world—if the worse comes to worst. You’ll have to admit that’s sensible.”

“It is, but you don’t have to imagine destruction, Crile. It is a natural feeling that humanity ought to spread outward even if Earth remains perfectly safe. We’ve moved out to the Settlements and reaching for the stars is a logical next step, and for that next step, we must have superluminal travel.”

“Yes, but Tanayama would find that a cold view. The colonization of the Galaxy is something I’m sure he is willing to leave to generations to come. What he wants for himself is to find Rotor and punish it for having abandoned the Solar System without regard for the rest of the human community. He wants to live to see
that
and that’s why he keeps pushing you, Tessa.”

“He can push all he wants, and it won’t help him. He’s a dying man.”

“I wonder. Modern medical procedures can perform marvels and I’m sure the doctors will go all out for Tanayama.”

“Even modern medicine can only go so far. I asked the doctors.”

“And they answered? I would have supposed that the question of Tanayama’s health was a state secret.”

“Not to me, under the circumstances, Crile. I went to the medical team that attended the Old Man here and told them that I was anxious to build an actual ship capable of carrying human beings to the stars, and that I wanted to do so before Tanayama died. I asked them how much time I had.”

“And what did they say?”

“I had a year. That’s what they said. At the most. They urged me to hurry.”

“Can you do it in one year?”

“In one year? Of course not, Crile, and I’m glad of it. I find pleasure in the fact that that poisonous person won’t live to see it. What are you making faces about, Crile? Does it bother you that I make so cruel a remark?”