* * * * *
Redmond paused and beat one fist down on the doctor's desk for
emphasis. "So it seems to our blind, deaf, stupid senses who plod along
the universe limited to the speed of light or sound. Man--the fleet
bullet snaps past your ear at a speed faster than sound. Can your
limited senses tell me whence it came?"
"Yes."
Redmond shook his head. "Not from the sound of the _Snap_!" he
snapped. "You tell from the sound of the gun--which comes later! With
a silencer, you would be unable to line the flight up. So," said
Redmond, staring at the wall again, "something fired a bolt of energy
that propagated faster than light, creating its own negative space as
it passed. What it was we shall never know. But--" and he bored at
Hanson with sharp eyes,--"get me Maculay and we shall follow it into
interstellar space!"
"And if Maculay were to die tomorrow?"
"Then we would follow it sooner or later anyway. A bit more fumbling,
a bit more walking an unfamiliar way in the dark, but we would get
there." Redmond looked at the doctor solemnly for a moment. "A year?"
"A year."
"Hell," snapped Redmond, "in a year we can do it ourselves! A year!
Hanson, Cliff Maculay has always kept a volume of data from me. I am
going to open his desk and get that volume, and go to work on this
thing myself. Were he here he would forbid me, but he is not here. I--"
"Why are you telling me this?" asked Hanson.
"Someone must be told, and I--" Redmond trailed off uncertainly. Then
he nodded and left the office as abruptly as he had come in.
Ava blinked. "What do you make of him?" she asked uncertainly.
"Very simple. His is the case of not-quite-genius working at the
feet of true genius. His pattern is poorly aped after Maculay's
forcefulness, but obviously lacks Maculay's weight. He wants to give
the impression that he is cut of the same cloth as Maculay. He is
uncertain of himself, or he would not bluster and threaten; nor would
he be so completely at sea without Maculay. He has a frustration;
Maculay's secret data has been withheld from him. He is jealous of
Maculay and also fears Maculay or he would not make a confession to me
that he was about to break orders. Furthermore, he is convinced that he
can solve this thing without Maculay's help, but wants other people to
believe it also."
"But could he get into trouble?"
Hanson laughed tolerantly. "Any man who has lived beyond the age of
eighteen months can get into trouble," he said. "And it's good for
a man to get into a bit of trouble occasionally. Security is a fine
goal, but it is danger that sharpens the wits and eventually sets the
character into such self-confidence that his security comes from within
rather than without."
He leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. He was not quite
correct in telling Redmond that he understood nothing of Maculay's
work. During the hours Hanson had hypnotic rapport with Cliff, he had
absorbed quite a bit of Maculay's theories. Not that Hanson could stand
in Maculay's shoes--or even his baby slippers for that matter--but he
had a fair idea of what Maculay was driving at. He took this on faith
rather than a real understanding--as any man might nod his head and
accept the formulation of the three degrees of infinity because some
bright man told him that such existed, one still might not understand
why the number of spots on a line and the number of spots on a
plane--when a plane has an infinite number of lines and each line an
infinite number of spots--were both of the same degree of infinity.
Something niggled at Hanson's mind--something important in just plain
horse-logic that had come to him fouled up in a barrage of words and
formulations that were so much triple-talk to the man untutored in
abstract theory on variable-matrix wave mechanics. In the maze of
completely confusing theories, it was like the sighting of a shaped
stone arrowhead in the rubble of a landslide, or finding an empty
tomato can lying on the absolutely barren and completely useless fifth
satellite of Saturn.
Someone had shouted "Two plus two equals four" amid the babble of an
insane asylum, and it made sense.
Hanson ordered his whirling thoughts, marshalled them as only a man who
has pursued the mysteries of the human mind for fifty years could do,
and made his recollections come out consecutively.
And then he hit the desk with his hand. "Negative space depends upon
the generation of a negative-gravitic field," he muttered. "Which
produces the unreal root, and positive and negative space are mutually
inimical."
"What was all that?" asked Ava.