«What?» screamed Helledahl.
The captain floated in the air, a ludicrous parody of officerlike erectness. But there was an odd dignity to him all the same.
«I’m sorry,» he repeated. «I have a family too, you know. I would turn about if it could be done with reasonable safety. But Professor Winge has shown that that is impossible. We would die anyhow—and our ship would be a ruin, a few bits of worn and crumpled metal, all our results gone. If we proceed, we can prepare specimens and keep records which will be of use to our successors. Us they will find, for we can improvise a conspicuous feature on the hull that the barnacles won’t obliterate.»
He looked from one to another.
«Shall we do less for our country’s honor than the Chinese did for theirs?» he finished.
Well, if you put it that way, thought Bull, yes.
But he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Maybe they all thought the same, including Langnes himself, but none was brave enough to admit it. The trouble with us moral cowards, thought Bull, is that we make heroes of ourselves.
I suppose Marta will shed some pretty, nostalgic tears when she gets the news. Ech! It’s bad enough to croak out here; but if that bluestocking memorializes me with a newspaper poem about my Viking spirit—
Maybe that’s what we should rig up on the hull, so they won’t ignore this poor barnacled derelict as just another flying boulder. Make the Holy Ole into a real, old-fashioned, Gokstad type ship. Dragon figurehead, oars, sail… shields hung along the side… hey, yes! Imagine some smug Russian on an Earth satellite, bragging about how his people were the first into space—and then along comes this Viking ship—
I think I’ll even paint the shields. A face on each one, with its tongue out and a thumb to its nose—
Holy hopping Ole!
«Shields!» roared Bull.
«What?» said Langnes through the echoes.
«We’re shielded! We can turn back! Right now!»
When the hubbub had died down and a few slide rule calculations had been made, Bull addressed the others.
«It’s really quite simple,» he said. «All the elements of the answer were there all the time. I’m only surprised that the Chinese never realized it; but then, I imagine they used all their spare moments for socialist self-criticism.
«Anyhow, we know our ship is a space barnacle’s paradise. Even our barnacles have barnacles. Why? Because it picks up so much sand and gravel. Now what worried us about heading straight home was not an occasional meteorite big enough to punch clear through the skin of the ship—we’ve patching to take care of that—no, we were afraid of a sandblast wearing the entire hull paper thin. But we’re protected against precisely that danger! The more such little particles that hit us, the more barnacles we’ll have. They can’t be eroded away, because they’re alive. They renew themselves from the very stuff that strikes them. Like a stone in a river, worn away by the current, while the soft moss is always there.
«We’ll get back out of the Belt before the radiation level builds up to anything serious. Then, if we want to, we can chisel off the encrustation. But why bother, really? We’ll soon be home.»
«No argument there,» smiled Langnes.
«I’ll go check the engines prior to starting up,» said Bull. «Will you and Torvald compute us an Earthward course?»
He started for the doorway, paused, and added slowly: «Uh, I kind of hate to say this, but those barnacles are what will really make the Asteroid Belt available to men.»
«What?» said Helledahl.
«Sure,» said Bull. «Simple. Naturally, we’ll have to devise protection for the radio, and redesign the radiation screen apparatus, as the skipper remarked. But under proper control, the barnacles make a self-repairing shield against sandblast. It shouldn’t be necessary to go through the Belt on these tedious elliptical orbits. The space miners can take hyperbolic paths, as fast as they choose, in any direction they please.
«I,» he finished with emphasis, «will not be among them.»
«Where will you be?» asked Winge.
But Erik Bull was already headed aft to his work. A snatch of song, bawled from powerful lungs, came back to the others. They all knew English, but it took them a moment to get the drift.
«‘…Who’s that knocking at my door?’
Said the fair young maiden.
‘Oh, it’s only me, from over the sea,’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.
‘I’ve sailed the seas from shore to shore,
I’ll never sail the seas no more.
Now open up this blank-blank door!’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.»
TO JACK WILLIAMSON
TIME HEALS
Hart followed the doctor down a long corridor where they were the only two in sight and their footsteps had a hollow echo. The fluorescent lights were almost pitilessly bright, and the hall was silent. Silent and empty as—death? No, as the Crypt at its end, as timelessness.
Hart’s lips were dry, his throat felt tight, and his heart beat with a rapid violence that dinned faintly in his ears. He was frightened. Why not admit it? The feeling was utterly illogical, but he was scared silly.
He asked inanely, as if he and all the rest of the world didn’t know, «There won’t be any sensation at all?»
«None,» replied the doctor with a patience suggesting he had led many down this hallway. «You’ll stand on a plate between the field coils, I’ll throw the main switch and—as far as you’re concerned—you’ll be in the future. Time simply does not exist, as a ‘flow’ at any rate, in a level-entropy field.»
Hart licked his lips. «It’s like dying,» he said.
The doctor nodded. «In a way, it is death,» he replied. «You’ll be leaving everything behind you—family, friends, the whole world in which you have lived. You can’t go back. When you’re released from the field—ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years hence maybe—you’ll be irrevocably in the future.» He shrugged. «But, of course, you’ll live, whereas your only choice in this era is death.»
«Don’t get me wrong,» said Hart. «I’m nervous sure but I’m not scared. I have every confidence in your machine. It’s just that I never did understand the principles of it, and of course one is naturally skittish in the face of the unknown.»
«It’s very simple,» said the doctor. «The newspapers have, as usual, made a horrible mess of trying to explain it to the public, and all the legal and moral argument it’s stirred up have further confused the issue. But the scientific basis is very simple indeed.» He adopted a lecturing tone: «Time, of course, is a fourth dimension in a more or less rigid continuum—that’s putting it very crudely, of course, but it shows that simple relativity gives no reason why time should flow, or if it flows, why it should do so in one direction only. That difficulty was resolved by suggesting that the increase of time was the general increase of entropy throughout the universe with respect to the ‘rigid’ time dimension. Again, that’s a clumsy way of putting it, but you get my general idea. I don’t pretend to understand the details of it myself.