Activity in the sound studio had diminished. Against a white wall men had placed a small table and two chairs, and a battery of teevee cameras and lights were aiming their muzzles into the scene.
Jerryberry touched Whyte's arm. "Let's go sit down over there." Whyte might freeze up if confronted by the cameras too suddenly. Give him a chance to get used to it.
Whyte didn't move. His head was cocked to one side, and his lips moved silently.
"What's the matter?"
Whyte made a shushing motion.
Jerryberry waited.
Presently Whyte looked up. "You'll have to scrap this. How much time have we got?"
"But- An hour. Less. What do you mean, scrap it?"
Whyte smiled. "I just thought of something. Get me to a telephone, will you? Has Gem still got the schematics of the Corliss accelerator?"
An hour to broadcast time, and Jerryberry began to shake.
"Robin, are we going to have a broadcast or not?"
Whyte patted him on the arm. "Count on it."
Gen Jones's big white-on-blue schematic had been thumbtacked to the white wall over the table and chairs. Below it, Jerryberry Jansen leaned back, seemingly relaxed, watching Whyte move about with a piece of chalk.
A thumbtacked blueprint and a piece of chalk. It was slipshod by professional standards. Robin Whyte had not appeared on teevee in a couple of decades. He made professional mistakes: he turned his back on the audience, he covered what he was drawing with the chalk. But he didn't look nervous. He grinned into the cameras as if he could see old friends out there.
"The heart of it is the Corliss accelerator," he said, and with the chalk he drew an arc underneath the tower's launch cradle, through the rock itself. "We excavate here, carve out a space to get the room. Then-" He drew it in.
A JumpShift drop ship receiver cage.
"The rescue ship is self-transmitting, of course. As it leaves the accelerator it transmits back to the launch end. What we have then is an electromagnetic cannon of infinite length. We spin it on its axis so it doesn't get out of alignment. We give the ship an acceleration of one gee for a bit less than two months to boost it to the velocity of Lazarus, then we flick it out to the drop ship.
"This turns out to be a relatively cheap operation," Whyte said. "We could put some extra couches in Phoenix and use that. We could even use the accelerator to boost the drop ship up to speed, but that would take four months, and we'd have to do it now. It would mean building another Corliss accelerator, but-", Whyte grinned into the cameras, "we should have done that anyway, years ago. There's enough traffic to justify it.
"Return voyage is just as simple. After they pick up the crew of Lazarus, they flick to the Pluto drop ship, which is big enough to catch them, then to the Mercury drop ship to lose their potential energy, then back to the Corliss accelerator drop cage. We use the accelerator for another two months to slow it down. The cost of an interstellar drop ship is half a billion new dollars. A new Corliss accelerator would cost us about the same, and we can use it commercially. Total price is half of what Lazarus cost." Whyte put down the chalk and sat.
Jerryberry said, "When can you go ahead with this, Doctor?"
"JumpShift will submit a time-and-costs schedule to the UN Space Authority. I expect it'll go to the world vote."
"Thank you, Doctor Whyte, for..." It was a formula. When the cameras were off Jerryberry sagged in his chair. "Now I can say it. Boy, are you out of practice."
"What do you mean? Didn't I get it across?"
"I think you did. I hope so. You smiled a lot too much. On camera that makes you look self-satisfied."
"I know, you told me before," said Whyte. "I couldn't help it. I just felt so good."
There Is a Tide
THEN, THE PLANET had no name. It circles a star which in 2830 lay beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years from Sol. The star is a G3, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller. The planet, swinging eighty million miles from its primary in a reasonably circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes.
In the year 2830 one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will. Take the coincidence of his meeting-
But we'll get to that.
Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of boosterspice, he didn't show his years. If he didn't get bored first, or broke, he might reach a thousand.
"But," he sometimes told himself, "not if I have to put up with any more cocktail parties, or Bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten. Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth that blows its zap just as it's my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with people, day and night, all those endless centuries."
When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably, it would keep happening. In such a state of anomie, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone, especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return until he was desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.
On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was desperate for the sight of a Kzinti face.
That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice ... because of these things, he added, "I think this time I'll wait till I'm desperate to see a Kdatlyno. Female, of course."
Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And them. He spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with Sol at its center.
He approached a certain G3 star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He was looking for Slaver stasis boxes.
If the pulse returned no echo, we would accelerate until he could shift to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him and he could use it to coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved fuel.
He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from looking.
As he passed through the system, the deep-radar showed him planets like pale ghosts, light gray circles on the white screen. The G3 sun was a wide gray disk, darkening almost to black at the center. The near-black was degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits collapse entirely.
He was well past the sun, and still accelerating when the screen showed a tiny black fleck.
"No system is perfect, of course," he muttered as he turned off the drive. He talked to himself a good deal out here where nobody could interrupt him.
"It usually saves fuel," he told himself a week later. By then he was out of the singularity, in clear space. He took the ship into hyperdrive, circled halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he'd built up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where he'd found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop.