Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things: that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few miles… or a few feet… distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.
Caroline was taking off her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.
"I understand a little better now," she said. "They are friends of ours."
"Friends of ours?" asked Gary.
"Friends of everyone within the universe," said Caroline. "Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some outside danger — from some outside force."
She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.
"They want us to come out to the edge of the universe," she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.
Herb's chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. "They want us…" he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.
Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley's nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.
"How do they expect us to get out there?" Kingsley asked.
"My ship is fast," Tommy Evans said, "faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!"
"A space-time warp," said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. "They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps…."
Caroline smiled at him. "That's the answer," she said.
"A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time."
Kingsley's great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.
"How will we do it?" asked Herb. "There isn't a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we're the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you'd have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you'd have to make it stay that way."
"Maybe the Engineers," said Evans.
"That's it," nodded Caroline. "The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions."
"But," protested Kingsley, "could we understand? It would involve mathematics that are way beyond us."
Caroline's voice cut sharply through his protest. "I can understand them," she replied, bitterly. "Maybe it will take a little while, but I can work them out, I've had… practice, you know."
Kingsley was dumfounded. "You can work it out?"
"I worked out new mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship," she said. "They're only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point."
She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.
"I had a thousand years to do it," she reminded him. "I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don't you see? Something to keep from going crazy."
Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto. That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.
How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that was wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and in relaxation, leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think, to figure out things. And then one died and all one's thoughts were lost. Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Lost and left for someone else to discover if he could… and probably lost forever.
But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. No time out for eating or for sleeping. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years, on one problem, had she wished.
He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew, what keys she had found out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And — she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.
She was talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion that she could be.
"You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector… but with a vast difference in one respect."
"You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?" asked Kingsley.
She nodded. "Except that they wouldn't have used it for driving ships… not then. For Jupiter was winning and everyone was desperate. They didn't care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon."
"The geosector is no weapon," Kingsley declared flatly. "You couldn't use it near a planetary body."
"But consider this," said the girl. "If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn't it?"
Herb whistled. "I'd say it'd be a weapon," he said, "and how!"
"They wanted to train it on Jupiter," Caroline explained. "It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well."
"But think of what it would have done to the solar system," ejaculated Kingsley. "Even if the space warp hadn't distorted space throughout the entire system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the other planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth."
The girl nodded.
"That's why I wouldn't turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space."
"Why," said Gary, "you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn't built until a hundred years ago."
Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn't laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.
He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.
"Young lady," rumbled Kingsley, "it seems to me that you don't need any help from these Cosmic Engineers."
She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. "But I do," she said.
The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.