"Maybe," suggested Tommy Evans, "we don't need to get there. Maybe we can do something here to help them.”
The red light was blinking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge of power.
Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. "The edge of space. But that's impossible!”
Gary laughed at him silently.
The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.
Gary felt the cold wind from space again, flicking at his face, felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.
Kingsley was jittery. And he was jittery. Who wouldn't be at a time like this? A message from the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area where time and space still surged outward into that no-man's-land of nothingness… into that place where there was no time or space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever, where there was no place and no circumstance and no possibility of event that could allow anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer was nothing. But what was nothing?
Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe, of these two things he constructed the sum total of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn't space?
Caroline was closing the dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.
He watched the girl closely, saw her body tense and then relax. She bent forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.
Kingsley's face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his side.
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.”