Clifford D. Simak
Cosmic Engineers
"… apart from your assignments, you must always be receptive to, be prepared for, and act upon all news potential from strange sources though it may lead you to the end of the solar system — perhaps even to the very edge of the universe…"
Chapter One
Herb Harper snapped on the radio and a voice snarled, billions of miles away: "Police ship 968. Keep watch for freighter Vulcan on the Earth-Venus run. Search ship for drugs. Believed to be…”
Herb spun the dial. A lazy voice floated through the ship: "Pleasure yacht Helen, three hours out of Sandebar. Have you any messages for us?”
He spun the dial again. The voice of Tim Donovan, radio's ace newscaster, rasped "Tommy Evans will have to wait a few more days before attempting his flight to Alpha Centauri. The Solar Commerce commission claims to have found some faults in the construction of his new generators, but Tommy still insists that those generators will shoot him along at a speed well over that of light. Nevertheless, he has been ordered to bring his ship back to Mars so that technicians may check it before he finally takes off.
Tommy is out on Pluto now, all poised for launching off into space beyond the solar system. At last reports he had made no move to obey the order of the commission. Tommy's backers, angered by the order, call it high-handed, charge there are politics back of it…”
Herb shut off the radio and walked to the door separating the living quarters of the Space Pup from the control room.
"Hear that, Gary?" he asked. "Maybe we'll get to see this guy, Evans, after all.”
Gary Nelson, puffing at his foul, black pipe, scowled savagely at Herb.
"Who wants to see that glory grabber?" he asked.
"What's biting you now?" asked Herb.
"Nothing," said Gary, "except Tommy Evans. Ever since we left Saturn we haven't heard a thing out of Donovan except this Tommy Evans.”
Herb stared at his lanky partner.
"You sure got a bad case of space fever," he said. "You been like a dog with a sore head the last few days.”
"Who wouldn't get space fever?" snapped Gary. He gestured out through the vision plate. "Nothing but space," he said. "Blackness with little stars.
Stars that have forgotten how to twinkle. Going hundreds of miles a second and you wonder if you're moving. No change in scenery. A few square feet of space to live in. Black space pressing all about you, taunting you, trying to get in…”
He stopped and sat down limply in the pilot's chair.
"How about a game of chess?" asked Herb.
Gary twisted about and snapped at him:
"Don't mention chess to me again, you sawed-off shrimp. I'll space-walk you if you do. So help me Hannah if I won't.”
"Thought maybe it would quiet you down," said Herb.
Gary levelled his pipe stem at Herb.
"If I had the guy who invented three-way chess," he said, "I'd wring his blasted neck. The old kind was bad enough, but three-dimensional, twenty-seven man…”
He shook his head dismally.
"He must have been half nuts," he said.
"He did go off his rockers," Herb told him, "but not from inventing three-way chess. Guy by the name of Konrad Fairbanks. In an asylum back on Earth now. I took a picture of him once, when he was coming out of the courtroom. Just after the judge said he was only half there. The cops chased hell out of me but I got away. The Old Man paid me ten bucks bonus for the shot.”
"I remember that," said Gary. "Best mathematical mind in the whole system.
Worked out equations no one could understand. Went screwy when he proved that there actually were times when one and one didn't quite make two.
Proved it, you understand. Not just theory or mathematical mumbo-jumbo.”
Herb walked across the control room and stood beside Gary, looking out through the vision plate.
"Everything been going all right?" he asked.
Gary growled deep in his throat.
"What could go wrong out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit and watch. And there really isn't any need of that. The robot navigator handles everything." The soft purr of the geosectors filled the ship. There was no other sound. The ship seemed standing still in space. Saturn swung far down to the right, a golden disk of light with thin, bright rings.
Pluto was a tiny speck of light almost dead ahead, a little to the left.
The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their sight.
The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a second. The geosectors, warping the curvature of space itself, hurled the tiny ship through the void at a speed unthought of less than a hundred years before.
And now Tommy Evans, out on Pluto, was ready, if only the Solar Commerce commission would stop its interference, to bullet his experimental craft away from the solar system, out toward the nearest star, 4.29 light-years distant. Providing his improved electro-gravatic geodesic deflectors lived up to the boast of their inventors, he would exceed the speed of light, would vanish into that limbo of impossibility that learned savants only a few centuries before had declared was unattainable.
"It kind of makes a fellow dizzy," Herb declared.
"What does?”
"Why," said Herb, "this Tommy Evans stunt. The boy is making history. And maybe we'll be there to see him do it. He's the first to make a try at the stars — and if he wins, there will be lots of others. Man will go out and out and still farther out, maybe clear out to where space is still exploding.”
Gary grunted. "They sure will have to hurry some," he said, "because space is exploding fast.”
"Now look here," said Herb. "You can't just sit there and pretend the human race has made no progress. Take this ship, just for example. We don't rely on rockets any more except in taking off and landing. Once out in space and we set the geosectors to going and we warp space and build up speed that no rocket could ever hope to give you. We got an atmosphere generator that manufactures air. No more stocking up on oxygen and depending on air purifiers. Same thing with food. The machine just picks up matter and energy out of space and transmutes them into steaks and potatoes — or at least their equivalent in food value. And we send news stories and pictures across billions of miles of space. You just sit down in front of that spacewriter and whang away at the keys and in a few hours another machine back in New York writes what you have written.”
Gary yawned. "How you run on," he said, "We haven't even started yet — the human race hasn't. What we have done isn't anything to what we are going to do. That is, if the race doesn't get so downright ornery that it kills itself off first.”
The spacewriter in the corner of the room stuttered and gibbered, warming up under the impulse of the warning signals, flung out hours before and three billion miles away.
The two men hurried across the room and hung over it.
Slowly, laboriously, the keys began to tap.
NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. HAVE INFO EVANS MAY TAKE OFF FOR CENTAURI WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION OF SCC. MAKE ALL POSSIBLE SPEED TO PLUTO.
HANDLE SOONEST. MOST IMPORTANT. RUSH. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.
The machine burped to a stop. Herb looked at Gary.
"Maybe that guy Evans has got some guts after all," said Gary. "Maybe he'll tell the SCC where to stick it. They been asking for it for a long time now.”
Herb grunted. "They won't chase after him, that's sure." Gary sat down before the sending board and threw the switch. The hum of the electric generators drowned out the moan of the geosectors as they built up the power necessary to hurl a beam of energy across the void to Earth.
"Only one thing wrong with this setup," said Gary. "It takes too long and it takes too much power. I wish someone would hurry up and figure out a way to use the cosmics for carriers.”