"Mr. President, naturally, I wish to help in any way I can. But we have been over this subject before. I will do anything you like, but I don't know how to make the bombs work again. You saw what happened, Mr. President. They no longer exist."
"I didn't say anything about bombs, did I? Look, Kneffie, I'm a reasonable man. You say you can't make bombs; all right, but there are other things. How about this. You promise to use your best efforts in any way you can."
Knefhausen hesitated. "What other things, Mr. President?"
"Don't press, Knefhausen. Services to your country." The President locked his hands over his belly and smiled benignly. "You give me that promise and you're out of here today. Or would you rather I just turned off the pump?"
Knefhausen's head-shake was not so much negation as despair. "You do not understand the difficulties! What can a scientist do for you today? If there were anything, do you think I would have spent these last years writing memoirs?"
"That's why I took you out of that, Knefhausen."
"Yes, you took me from Johns Hopkins University, where I was fulfilling some function until your band of looters came along."
"Watch your mouth," the President said in righteous indignation. "That was an IRS field team."
"Naturlich, Mr. President, tax collectors, not looters—a distinction not always easily made. Nevertheless! The preconditions for what you want no longer exist. Ten years ago, five maybe, yes, something perhaps could have been done. Now, no. When all the nuclear plants went out— When the factories that depended on them ran out of power— When the fertilizer plants couldn't fix nitrogen and the insecticide plants couldn't deliver— When the people began to die of hunger and the pestilences started—"
"Yes or no, Knefhausen," the President cut in.
The scientist paused, looking thoughtfully at his adversary. A gleam of the old shrewdness appeared in his eyes.
"Mr. President, you know something. Something has happened."
"Rightl You're smart. Now tell me, what is it I know?"
Knefhausen shook his head. After seven decades of life, and another decade of slowly dying, it was hard to allow himself to hope again. This terrible upstart, this lump— he was not without animal cunning, and he seemed very sure. "Please, Mr. President, tell me."
The President put a finger to his lips, and then an ear to the door. When he was convinced no one could be listening, he came closer to Knefhausen and said softly:
"We're not such hicks here as you think. I have contacts all over the continent. Would you like to know what one of them just brought me?"
Knefhausen did not answer, but his watery old eyes were imploring.
"A message," the President whispered.
"From the Constitution?" cried Knefhausen. "But, no, it is not possible! Farside is gone, Goldstone is destroyed, the communications satellites are running down—"
"It wasn't a radio message," said the President. "And it didn't come from Goldstone. It came from some people from the West Coast, and they got it from some other place. From some observatory in Hawaii, they said, although maybe they just said that to get the price up. They say there's some telescope out there that didn't get smashed, and I guess there's some old fogies that still look through it sometimes, and they got a message. In laser light. Plain Morse code. From what they said was Alpha Centauri. From your little friends, Knefhausen."
He took a folded slip of paper from his pocket and held it up.
Knefhausen was racked by a fit of coughing, but he managed to reach for it. "Give it to me!"
The President lifted it out of his reach. "Do we have a deal?"
"Yes, of course. YesI Anything you say, but give me the message!"
"Why, certainly," smiled the President, and passed over the much-creased sheet of paper.
It said:
PLEASE BE ADVISED. WE HAVE CREATED THE WORLD ALPHA-ALEPH. IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND GRAND. WE WILL SEND A FERRY TO BRING SUITABLE STOCK AND TO COMPLETE CERTAIN OTHER BUSINESS. OUR SPECIAL REGARDS TO DR. DIETER VON KNEFHAUSEN, WHOM WE WANT TO TALK TO VERY MUCH. EXPECT US IN 250 DAYS FROM THIS MESSAGE.
Knefhausen read it over twice, lifted his head to stare at the President, and read it again. Then he stared into space, the paper dangling from his fingers.
The President snatched it back, folded it, and put it in his pocket, as though the message itself was the key to power. "Do we have a deal?"
"Zwei hundert funfzig— Mr. President, when was this message received?"
"About seven months ago, near as I can tell. That's right. They'll be here very soon, and you can imagine what they'll have Guns, tools, everything—and all you have to do is persuade them to join us in restoring the U. S. of— Knefhausen!"
The President jumped forward, but he was too late. The scientist had fallen limply to the duckboards. The guard, when ordered, ran for the White House doctor, who limped as rapidly to the scene as his bad legs would let him, but he was too late too. Everything was too late for Knefhausen, whose old heart had failed him . . . just in time.
23
EIGHT WENT OUT TO ALPHA CENTAURI AND EIGHT CAME back, but they were by no means the same eight. The pilot's name was Quittyyx, which signified, among other odd things, that he was of the tenth cohort, and therefore only six years old when they left Alpha-Aleph. That wasn't so bad. His deputy, Jeromolo Bill, was not quite two.
Of course, tiny Bill would not be trusted with the guidance of the interstellar vessel Shef had designed for them until he was at least four, but there was not really a whole hell of a lot to do in the first half of the trip. Turnover was the time that counted. All the universe concentrated into a single terrifying starburst of light, watching the very act of Creation, and no other signposts were in the skies. By then Jeromolo Bill was able to take his turn with his elder. They both had what none of the others had, what none of the Original Eight had had, a genetic, built-in capacity to handle relativistic computations in their heads. They were not smarter than anyone else, simply hard-wired to match and measure the asymptotic slopes of mass and velocity and time and convert them into direction.
The long voyage home took all of four years, but at that less than half as long as it had taken Constitution on the way out. The reason was that they were in a better vessel than Constitution. They were in Sheffield Jackman's masterpiece, built like a basketball and filled with Flo's genetics, Jim's optics, Ski's communications, and, in lieu of any contribution from their researches. Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost themselves in the flesh—or, in Will Becklund's case, whatever it was he was in rather than flesh. It was a darling souped-up speedster of a ship, all right, and apart from the fact that they had power to burn there was a valuable purpose in burning it. Acceleration was good for them. It was even necessary. Every one of the voyagers needed to accommodate his body to the crushing weight they had to look forward to on Earth.
So the ship started off slowly—relatively slowly, no more than a quarter G. Even so, most of them crept around in walkers. When they fell, not infrequently, there was a rich harvest of fractures and sprains. But the bodies toughened. The muscles swelled. The porous bones grew denser and stronger. Every one of them (Uncle Ghost always excepted) drank from Flo's nauseating sap of harvested calcium-salts solution every morning and every night; and they were at half a G, three-quarters, as much as a gravity and a half of acceleration toward the end, and the ship fairly flew, and Jeron was its captain. He said so himself. Even so, it was a long, long trip.