THIS CANNOT BE DONE, it replied.
He wrote, with morbid curiosity:
IF YOU DO NOT FIND THE ANSWER UNAIDED YOU WILL BE DESTROYED ALONG WITH
ME AT 13:53. DON'T YOU GIVE A DAMN?
It answered: GIVE A DAMN IS A SEMANTIC EXPRESSION I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
CLARIFY QUESTION.
He got out of the computer seat and walked about the room restlessly.
He passed by the transdimensional viewscreen and communicator and
pressed the communicator's signal button. A dial flickered in return,
showing his signal was going out, but there was no sound in response.
If only he could make contact with the brains in Observation--
He was umpty billion miles east of the sun and umpty billion miles west
of the sun. He was racing faster than light in two different directions
at once and he was sitting motionless under the blasters of two Slug
cruisers.
Another thought came to him: even if he could move the ship while in
the warp, where could he go?
He would have to go far beyond the outer limits of the solar system to
escape detection by the Slug cruisers. And at that distance the sun
would be only a yellow star, incapable of energizing the little solar
power units. He would not live long after the last of the power was
drained from the batteries and the air regeneration equipment ceased
functioning. He would not even dare sleep, toward the last. There were
no convection currents in the air of a ship without gravity, and it was
imperative that the air be circulated constantly. The air circulation
blowers would cease functioning while the ship still contained pure air
but he would have to move about continually to breathe that air. Should
he lie down to sleep he would smother to death in a carbon dioxide
bubble of his own making.
If he managed to emerge into normal space at some point just outside
Earth's atmosphere, beyond range of the cruisers, his driveless ship
would descend as a blazing meteor. If, by some miracle, he could
emerge into normal space just a few inches above the space-field it
would be to materialize into space already occupied by air. Such
a materialization would be simultaneously fatal to him and to the
electronic components of the shuttle and computer.
And if he did not move the ship, the Slug cruisers would disintegrate
him. He had four hypothetical choices of his way to die, all equally
unpleasant.
He smiled wanly at his reflection in the bright metal bordering the
viewscreen and said, "Brother--you've had it!"
* * * * *
He went to the control room, there to brush his fingers across the
useless control buttons and look into the viewscreen that revealed only
black and limitless Nothing.
What was the warp? Surely it must have definite physical laws of some
kind. It was difficult to imagine any kind of existence--even the black
nothing of the warp--as being utterly without rule or reason. If he
knew the laws of the warp he might find some means of survival hitherto
hidden from him.
There was only one way he could learn about the warp. He would have to
question the computer and continue questioning it until he learned or
until his time was up.
He returned to the computer and considered his next question. The
computer had calculated their positions from observations of the sun
and other stars in front of the ship--what would similar calculations
based on observations of the stars behind the ship reveal? He typed:
USE FIRST THE TRIANGULATION METHOD AND THEN THE SPECTRUM-SHIFT METHOD
TO DETERMINE OUR POSITION FROM OBSERVATIONS MADE OF THE STARS OF
OPHIUCHUS.
The answers appeared. They showed the ship to be simultaneously
speeding away from Ophiuchus and toward it.
He asked: DO THESE TWO POSITIONS COINCIDE WITH THOSE RESULTING FROM THE
OBSERVATIONS OF ORION?
YES, it answered.
Was the paradox limited to the line of flight?
He asked the computer: WHAT IS OUR POSITION, COURSE AND SPEED AS
INDICATED BY THE STARS AT RIGHT-ANGLES TO OUR FORWARD-BACKWARD COURSE;
BY THE STARS OF URSA MINOR AND CRUX?
The answer appeared on the panel: the ship was racing sideward through
the warp in two diametrically opposed directions, but at only one-third
the speed with which it was racing forward and backward.
So now the ship had four impossible positions and two different speeds.
He frowned at the computer, trying to find some clue in the new data.
He noticed, absently, that the hand of one of the dials was near zero
in the red section of the dial. He had not noticed any of the dials
registering in the danger zone before....
He jerked out of his preoccupation with apprehension and typed: TELL ME
IN NON-TECHNICAL LANGUAGE THE MEANING OF THE HAND NEAR ZERO ON THE DIAL
LABELED _MAX. ET. REF_.
It answered: ONE OF MY CIRCUITS WAS DAMAGED BY THE SUDDEN RELEASE OF
AIR PRESSURE. I WILL CEASE FUNCTIONING AT THE END OF FOUR MORE MINUTES
OF OPERATION.
He slammed the master switch to OFF. The lights on the board went out,
the various needles swung to zero, leaving the computer a mindless
structure more than ever resembling an overgrown refrigerator.
Four minutes more of operation ... and he had so many questions to
ask before he could hope to learn enough about the warp to know what
he should do. He had wasted almost an hour of the computer's limited
life, leaving it turned on when he was not using it. If only it had
told him ... but it was not the nature of a machine to voluntarily give
information. Besides, the receding hand of the dial was there for him
to see. The computer neither knew nor cared that no one had thought it
worthwhile to teach him the rudiments of its operation and maintenance.
It was 12:52. One hour and one minute left.
He put the thought aside and concentrated on the problem of finding the
key to the paradox.
What conceivable set of circumstances would cause receding stars to
have a spectrum shift that showed them to be approaching the ship? Or,
to rephrase the question, what conceivable set of circumstances would
cause approaching stars to appear to dwindle in size?
The answer came with startling suddenness and clarity:
There was no paradox--the ship was expanding.
He considered the solution, examining it for flaws of logic, and found
none. If he and the ship were expanding the wave length of light would
diminish in proportion to the increasing size of the retinas of his
eyes and the scanner plates of the transdimensional viewscreens: would
become shorter and go into the ultraviolet. At the same time, the
increasing size of himself and the ship would make the Earth and sun
relatively smaller and therefore apparently receding.
The same theory explained the two different speeds of the ship: its
length was three times its diameter so its longitudinal expansion would
proceed at three times the speed of its cross-sectional expansion.
Everything checked.
How large was the ship now?
He made a rough calculation and stared almost unbelievingly at the
results. He was a giant, more than a third of a light-year tall, in a
ship that was six light-years long and two light-years in diameter.
Far Centauri, which had required thirty years to reach in the fastest
interplanetary ship, floated seventy-one feet away in the blackness
outside the hull.
And the sun and Earth were in the room with him, going into the
shuttle's silvery focal ball.
He would have to ask the computer to make certain his theory was valid.
His time was too critically short for him to waste any of it with
speculation based on an erroneous theory.
He switched on the computer and it lighted up again. He typed rapidly:
ASSUME THIS SHIP TO BE MOTIONLESS AND EXPANDING WOULD THAT THEORY
SATISFACTORILY EXPLAIN ALL THE HITHERTO CONTRADICTORY PHENOMENA?
There was a brief pause as the computer evaluated its data, then it
answered with one word: