Suddenly a blue screen in the wall turned on. A jingling bell attracted attention to it. It said:
Due to the possible orbital miscalculations of the Royal officer who plotted the travel course, arrival at the destination base would have been just before daylight local time.
Therefore, the actual commander of this vessel has been forced to apply prudence based on years of valuable experience which some Royal officers do not have and adjust the landing time to early evening at the destination base.
This means that we must dawdle in warp drive the last few million miles in order to arrive in early evening, after dark, instead.
This advances our arrival time 12.02 hours sidereal.
Stabb
The Actual Captain
I blew up! (Bleep) Heller anyway. Making a silly mistake like that.
Keeping me not just twenty-two but another thirty-four hours in this (bleeped) box.
I was furious!
I was going back and give him a piece of my mind. The worst piece of it I could locate!
I got up. An electric arc from the table corner zapped my bare hand. I put my feet on the floor. An arc leaped off a studding and hit me in the toe. I grabbed for a steadying handrail and the blue snap of electricity almost burned my fingers. This (bleeped) tug was alive with electricity!
Somebody had laid out some insulator gloves and boots. I got them on.
I jabbed at a communicator button to the aft area. “I’m coming back to see you!” I yelled.
Heller’s voice answered, “Come ahead. The doors are not locked.”
It was time I put him in his place!
Here we were, tearing through space like madmen, only to have to wait and only because he had made a stupid mistake. Forcing the ship to go this fast could blow it up. And all for nothing!
Chapter 4
Maybe it was because I was still confused as part of the after effects of the speed or because all the wild sparks flying around got me rattled, but I had a bad time of it trying to find my way through the “circle of boxes.” I got my hands zapped, even through the insulator gloves, on two different silver rails, and to add pain to injury, I got my face too close to a doorframe and my nose got zapped.
Heller was in the top lounge with all the huge black windows.
The moment I entered, I yelled at him, “You didn’t have to go this fast!”
He didn’t turn around. He was half-lying in an easy chair. He had on a blue insulator suit and hood and he was wearing blue gloves.
He was idly playing a game called “Battle.” He had it set up on an independent viewing screen and his opponent was a computer.
“Battle,” in my opinion, is a silly game. The “board” is a three-dimensional screen; the positions are coordinates in space; each player has fourteen pieces, each one of which has special moves. It presupposes that two galaxies are at war and the object is to take the other player’s galaxy. This itself is silly: technology is not up to two galaxies fighting.
Spacers play it against each other, by choice. When they play it against a computer, they almost always lose.
I looked at his back. He was a lot too calm. If he only knew what I had in store for him, he wouldn’t be so relaxed! So far as games went now, they were all stacked against him. He would be a couple dozen light-years from his nearest friend. He was one and we were many. I had him bugged. And he even thought this was an honest, actual mission. The idiot.
Suddenly, with a flash, the image of the board blew out. It gave me a lot of satisfaction as he seemed to have been winning.
In a disgusted tone, he said, “That’s the third time that board has wiped in the last hour.” He shoved the button plate away from him. “Why bother to set it up again?”
He turned to me, “Your accusation about going too fast doesn’t make sense, Soltan. Without a tow, this tug just goes faster and faster. It’s what distance the voyage is, not what speed you set.”
I sat down on a sofa so I could level a finger at him. “You know I don’t know anything about these engines. You’re taking advantage of me! It won’t do!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess they don’t go into this very deeply at the Academy.”
They did, but I had flunked.
“You have to understand time,” he said. “Primitive cultures think energy movement determines time. Actually, it is the other way around. Time determines energy movement. You got that?”
I said I had but he must have seen I hadn’t.
“Athletes and fighters are accustomed to controlling time,” he said. “In some sports and in hand-to-hand combat, a real expert slows time down. Everything seems to go into slow motion. He can pick and choose every particle position and he is in no rush at all. There’s nothing mystic about it. He is simply stretching time.”
I wasn’t following him, so he picked up his button plate and hit a few.
“First,” he said, “there is LIFE.” And that word appeared at the top of the screen. “Some primitive cultures think life is the product of the universe, which is silly. It’s the other way around. The universe and things in it are the product of life. Some primitives develop a hatred for their fellows and put out that living beings are just the accidental product of matter, but neither do such cultures get very far.”
He was flying into the teeth of my own heroes: psychiatrists and psychologists. They can tell you with great authority that men and living things are just rotten chunks of matter and ought to be killed off, which proves it! Just try and tell them there is such a thing as independent life and they’d order you executed as a heretic! Which shows they are right. But I let him go on. Not too long from now, he’d get what was coming to him.
“Next,” said Heller, “there is TIME.” And he put that on the screen. “And then there is SPACE.” And he put that on the screen. “And then there is ENERGY. And then there is MATTER. And you now have the seniorities from top to bottom.”
The board now said:
“As WE are life,” he continued, “we can control this scale. Most living creatures are so much the effect of their environment that they think it controls them. But as long as you think this way, you won’t get anyplace much.
“The reason we are an advanced technology is because we can control that scale there to some degree. A technology advances to the extent it can control force. That is the formula of technical success: the ability to control the factors you see there on that screen. If you get the idea they control you, you wind up a failure.”
Oh, he was really into heresy now! Any psychologist can tell you that man is totally the effect of everything, that he can change nothing!
“So,” said Heller, “we have to understand time a bit in order to at least try to control it. Actually, the idea of controlling time is inconceivable to savages. And in defense of them, it does seem the most immutable entity there is. Nothing seems to change it ever. It is the most adamant and powerful factor in the universe. It just inexorably crushes on and on.
“The Voltarian discoveries about time made them a space power.
“Time is the thing which molds the universe, unless interfered with by life.