Party Line

Clifford D. Simak PARTY LINE

I

Einstein did not come in. That was unusual. Very seldom was Einstein late or absent. Usually he was waiting, ready to take up again the patient teaching that had been going on for months. Jay Martin tried again.

— Einstein. Einstein. Are you there? Einstein was not there.

The console in front of Martin hummed and the sensor lights were flickering. The cubicle was quiet, an engineered quietness, insulated against all distraction. Martin reached up and adjusted the helmet more firmly on his head.

— Einstein. Einstein. Where are you?

A faint sense of beginning panic flicked across Martin's mind. Had Einstein finally given it all up as a bad job? Had he (or she, or it, or them?) simply slipped away, dropping him, finally despairing of making so ignorant a student understand what he had to say?

Something out there stirred, a thin whistle of distant emptiness. Strange, thought Martin, how it always came that way-the haunting sense of distant emptiness. When there was, in fact, no distance nor no emptiness involved. The carrier waves were immune to any of the limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instantaneous, no lag, as if distance, matter, time did not exist.

— Einstein? he asked, convinced that it wasn't Einstein. It didn't feel like Einstein, although he would have been hard pressed if he had been called upon to tell how Einstein felt.

The thin whistle came again.

— Yes, said Martin, I'm here. Who are you?

And the voice (the thought? the pulse? the intelligence?) spoke.

— The turning point, it said.

— Unclear, said Martin. What turning point?

— The universe. The universe has reached its turning point. Universal death has started. The universe has reached its farthest point. It now is running down. Entropy has been accomplished.

— That, said Martin, is a strange way to say it.

— The universe always strove toward entropy.

— Not here, said Martin. No entropy here. The stars still burn.

— At the edge. The outer fringe. The universe at the edge has reached the point of entropy. Heat death. No more energy. And now is falling back. It is retreating. The distance whistled. The emptiness keened.

— You are at the edge?

— Near the rim. That is how we know. Our measurement…

The distance howled, drowning out the words.

— How long? asked Martin. How long till the end?

— Equal to the time since the beginning. Our calculations -

— Fifteen billion years, said Martin.

— We do not grasp your measurement.

— Never mind, said Martin. It makes no difference. I should not have said it.

— The pity of it! The irony!

— What pity? What irony?

— We have tried so long. Everyone has tried so long. To understand the universe and now we have no time.

— We have lots of time. Another fifteen billion years.

— You may have. We haven't. We're too close to the rim. We are in the dying zone.

A cry for help, thought Martin. The moaning of self pity. And was shaken. For there'd never been a cry for help before.

The other caught his thought.

— No cry for help, it said. There is no help. This is warning only.

The pulse, the thought cut off. Distance and emptiness whistled for a moment and then it, too, cut off.

Martin sat huddled in his cubicle, the weight of all that distance, all that emptiness crashing down upon him.

II

The day began badly for Paul Thomas.

The desk communicator chirped at him.

'Yes,' he said.

His secretary's voice said, 'Mr. Russell is here to see you.'

Thomas grimaced. 'Show him in,' he said.

Russell was prissy and precise. He came into the office and sat down in a chair across the desk from Thomas.

'What can I do for R&D this morning?' Thomas asked, ignoring all conversational preliminaries.

Russell was a man who was impatient with social amenities.

'A lot more than you're doing,' Russell said. 'Goddammit, Paul, I know that you are hip-deep in data.

It's piling up on you. We haven't had a thing from you in the last six months. I know the rules, of course, but aren't you giving them too strict an interpretation?'

'What are you interested in?'

'The faster-than-light business for one thing. I happen to know that Martin…'

'Martin still is working on it.'

'He must have something. Besides being a good telepath, he also happens to be a top-notch astrophysicist.'

'That's true,' said Thomas. 'We don't often get a man like him. Mostly, it's a raw farm boy or some girl who is clerking in the five-and-dime. We're running recruiting programs all the time, but…'

'You're trying to throw me off the track, Paul. I've got men aching to get started on this FTL thing.

We know you're getting something.'

The funny thing about it is that we aren't.'

'Martin's been on it for months.'

'Yeah, for months. And not understanding anything he's getting. Both he and I are beginning to believe we may have the wrong man on it.'

'The wrong man on it? An astrophysicist?'

'Ben, it may not be physics at all.'

'But he has equations.'

'Equations, yes. But they make no sense. Equations aren't the magic thing all by themselves that people think they are. They have to make some sense and these make no sense. Jay is beginning to think they're something entirely outside the field of physics.'

'Outside the field of physics? What else could they be?'

'That's the question, Ben. You and I have been over this, again and again. You don't seem to understand. Or refuse to understand. Or are too pig-headed to allow yourself to understand. We aren't dealing with humans out there. I understand that and my people understand it. But you refuse to accept it.

You think of those other people out there among the stars as simply funny-looking humans. I don't know, no one knows, what they really are. But we know they aren't humans, not even funny-looking humans.

We wear ourselves out at times trying to work out what they are. Not because of any great curiosity on our part, but because we could work with them better if we knew. And we have no idea. You hear me?

No idea whatsoever. Hal Rawlins is talking to someone he is convinced is a robot-a funny-looking robot, of course-but he can't even be sure of that. No one can be sure of anything at all. The point is that we don't really have to be. They accept us, we accept them. They are patient with us and we with them. They may be more patient than we are, for they know we are newcomers, new subscribers on this party line we share. None of them think like us, none of us think like them. We try to adapt ourselves to their way of thinking, they try to adapt themselves to our way of thinking. All we know for sure is that they are intelligences, all they know is that we are some outrageous kind of intelligent life form. We are, all of us, a brotherhood of intelligences, getting along the best we can, talking, gossiping, teaching, learning, trading information, laying out ideas.'

This is the kind of crap you're always talking,' said Russell, wrathfully. 'I don't give a damn about all your philosophizing. What I want is something to work on. The deal is that when you have something that is promising, you pass it on to us.'

'But the judgment is mine,' said Thomas, 'and rightly so. In some of the stuff we get here, there could be certain implications…'

'Implications, hell!'

'What are you doing with what we have given you? We gave you the data on artificial molecules.

What have you done on that?'

'We're working on it.'

'Work harder, then. Quit your bellyaching and show some results on that one. You and I both know what it would mean. With it, we could built to order any material, put together any kind of structure we might wish. Could build the kind of world we want, to order. The materials we want to our own specifications-food, metal, fabrics, you name it.'