“If you’re looking for the door to the control room, that’s it.”
“I wanted to see your father,” Tony explained.
“You can’t see him now. He’s plotting our course. In fifteen minutes—” She let the sentence dangle. “Erle Masters can help you in a few minutes. He’s edging the ship out of the way of a polyhedron.”
“Polyhedron?”
“Many-sided asteroid. That’s the way we designate them.” She was being patronizing now.
“Well, of course. But I stick to plain triangles and spheres and cubes. A polyhedron is a sphere to me. I didn’t know we were on the way. Since when? I didn’t feel the acceleration.”
“Since ten minutes ago. And naturally there wouldn’t be any acceleration with an H-H drive. Well, if you want anything, you can talk to Erle.” She edged past him, went swinging up the corridor. Tony caught up with her.
“You can help me,” he said, voice edged. “Will you answer a few questions?”
She stopped, her penciled brows drawn together. She shrugged. “Fire away, lieutenant.”
She leaned against the wall, tapping it patiently with one manicured fingernail.
Tony said, “All I know about the Hoderay-Hammond drive, Miss Overland, is that it reverses the Fitz-Gerald Contraction principle. It makes use of a new type of mechanical advantage. A moving object contrasts in the direction of motion. Therefore a stationary object, such as a ship, can be made to move if you contract it in the direction you want it to move. How that’s accomplished, though, I don’t know.”
“By gravitons—Where have you been all your life?”
“Learning,” said Tony, “good manners.”
She flushed. Her fingers stopped drumming. “If you realized you were interrupting important work, you’d know why I forget my manners. We were trying to finish this up so daddy could get back to his farewell dinner at the university. I guess the professors guessed right when they sent his—Well, why should I explain that to you?”
“I’m sure,” said Tony, “I don’t know.”
“Well, go on,” she said coldly.
Tony lighted a cigarette, offered her one with an apology. She shook her head impatiently.
Tony eyed her through the haze of smoke. “Back there on 1007 I saw a skeleton with a ring on its finger.”
She seemed nonplused. “Well. Was it a pretty ring?”
Tony said grimly, “The point is, Braker never got near that skeleton after I saw it, but that same ring is now on his finger.”
Startlement showed in her eyes. “That doesn’t sound very plausible, lieutenant!”
“No, of course it doesn’t. Because then the same ring is in two different places at the same time”
“And of course,” she nodded, “that would be impossible. Go on. I don’t know what you’re getting at, but it certainly is interesting.”
“Impossible?” said Tony. “Except that it happens to be the truth. I’m not explaining it away, Miss Overland, if that’s your idea. Here’s something else. The skeleton is a human skeleton, but it existed before the human race existed.”
She shoved herself away from her indolent position. “You must be crazy.”
Tony said nothing.
“How did you know?” she said sharply.
“I know. Now you explain the H-H drive, if you will.”
“I will!” She said: “Gravitons are the ultimate particle of matter. There are 1846 in a proton, one in an electron, which is the reason why a proton is 1846 times as heavy as an electron.
“Now you can give me a cigarette, lieutenant. I’m curious about this thing, and if I can’t get to the bottom of it, my father certainly will.”
After a while, she blew out smoke nervously.
She continued, speaking rapidly: “A Wittenberg disrupter tears atoms apart. The free electrons are shunted off into accumulators, where we get power for lighting, cooking, heating and so forth. The protons go into the proton analyzer, where the gravitons are ripped out of them and stored in a special type of spherical field. When we want to move the ship, the gravitons are released. They spread through the ship and everything in the ship.
“The natural place for a graviton is in a proton. The gravitons rush for the protons — which are already saturated with 1846 gravitons. Gravitons are unable to remain free in three-dimensional space. They escape along the time line, into the past. The reaction contracts the atoms of the ship and everything in the ship, and shoves it forward along the opposite space-time line — forward into the future and forward in space. In the apparent space of a second, therefore, the ship can travel thousands of miles, with no acceleration effects.
“Now, there you have it, lieutenant. Do what you can with it.”
Tony said, “What would happen if the gravitons were forced into the future rather than the past?”
“Lieutenant, I would have been surprised if you hadn’t said that! Theoretically, it’s an impossibility. Anybody who knows gravitons would say so. But if Braker is wearing a ring that a skeleton older than the human race is also wearing—Ugh!”
She put her hands to her temples in genuine distaste. “We’ll have to see my father,” she said wearily. “He’ll be the one to find out whether or not you make this up as you go along.”
Erle Masters looked from Tony to Laurette.
“You believe this bilge he’s been handing you?”
“I’m not interested in what you think, Erle. But I am in what you do, Daddy.”
Overland looked uneasy, his stubbled jaws barely moving over a wad of rough-cut.
“It does sound like… er… bilge,” he muttered. “If you weren’t an IPF man, I’d think you were slightly off-center. But — one thing, young man. How did you know the skeleton was older than the human race?”
“I said it existed before the human race.”
“Is there any difference?”
“I think there is — somehow.”
“Well,” said Overland patiently, “how do you know it?”
Tony hesitated. “I don’t really know. I was standing at the mouth of the cave, and something — or someone — told me.”
“Someone!” Masters blasted the word out incredulously.
“I don’t know!” said Tony. “All I know is what I’m telling you. It couldn’t have been supernatural — could it?”
Overland said quickly, “Don’t let it upset you, son. Of course it wasn’t supernatural. There’s a rational explanation somewhere, I guess. But it’s going to be hard to come by.”
He nodded his head abstractedly, and kept on nodding it like a marionette. Then he smiled peculiarly.
“I’m old now, son — you know? And I’ve seen a lot. I don’t disbelieve anything. There’s only one logical step for a scientist to take now, and that’s to go back and take a look at that skeleton.”
Masters’ breath sounded. “You can’t do that!”
“But we’re going to. And remember that I employ you, because Laurette asked me to. Now turn this ship back to 1007. This might be more important than patching up a torn-up world at that.” He chuckled.
Laurette shook her blond head. “You know,” she said musingly, “this might be the very thing we shouldn’t do, going back like this. On the other hand, if we went on our way, that might be the thing we shouldn’t do.”
Masters muttered, “You’re talking nonsense, Laurette.”
He ostentatiously grabbed her bare arm, and led her from the room after her father, throwing Tony a significant glance as he passed.
Tony expelled a long breath. Then, smiling twistedly, he went back to the lounge, to wait — for what? His stomach contracted again with revulsion — or was it a premonition?