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 paneclass="underline" 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: YES.
He switched it off again, to squander none of its short period of usefulness until he had decided upon what his further questions should be. At last, he had some grounds for conjecture; had learned something about the warp the designers of the shuttle had not suspected. Their calculations had been correct when they showed a ship would travel in the warp at many times the normal space speed of light. But somewhere some little factor had been overlooked—or never found—and their precise mathematics had not indicated that the travel would be produced by expansion.
Nature abhors a vacuum. And the black, empty warp was a vacuum more perfect than any that existed in normal space. In the normal space universe there were millions of stars in the galaxy and millions of galaxies. In the warp there was utter Nothing. Did the physical laws of the warp demand that matter be scattered throughout it, in emulation of its rich neighbor in the adjoining dimension? Was the warp hungry for matter?
He rejected the thought as fantasy. There was some explanation that the physicists would eventually find. Perhaps there was a vast size-ratio difference between the two dimensions; perhaps the warp was far larger than the normal space universe and some co-universal law demanded that objects entering it become proportionally larger.
None of that aspect of his circumstances, however, was of importance. There was only one prime problem facing him: how to move the ship within less than an hour to some point in the warp where his emergence into normal space would result in neither instant nor days-away death and where he would have the time to try to carry out the responsibility, so suddenly placed in his hands, of delivering the space warp shuttle to the Thunderbolt.
The long-range task depended upon his immediate survival. He had to move the ship, and how did a man move a driveless ship? It might not require a very large propulsive force—perhaps even an oxygen tank would serve as a jet. Except that he had none.