Even as he seized her hand, he knew it was too late. The lens slipped through the mastoid bone of the sleeper into moist darkness...
All space-time shifted in a grinding, shuddering wrench, that seemed to tear all atomic structure, shift it instantaneously into a new pattern. Gahn felt the scream tear his throat, felt the brink of shuddering nothingness, and screamed again.
The tears dimmed her eyes so that the steam pipe above her head was a weaving blur. Once again she tried, and then she heard the pound of feet behind her, heard John’s hoarse cry, and then he had pulled her off the chair down into his arms.
He rocked her back and forth and said thickly, “Oh my darling! My poor, silly darling! I nearly lost you.”
And suddenly she knew that only the fates had kept her from being a fool — knew that she could never leave him. Never. Tears were salt on her lips as she tried to tell him.
Goland spat into the yellow dust, showed his broken teeth in a wide grin, and began to shake his begging bowl again. Surely the Martian sun was too hot, even for a space tramp. It had given him strange visions. Even now they were fading from his mind. How absurd to think he was someone named Gahn, the younger, messing around with a screwy time-machine. Waking dreams in the hot Martian sun are weird. And all that guff about tenth-level minds. Nice babe in that dream though. Eighth-level, whatever that meant. A nice lush blonde creature named Luria. Reminded him of that waitress about ten-fifteen years ago in the NewMex terminal. He looked with disgust at the few bits of metal in the begging bowl and began to shake it vigorously, yowling in his cracked voice, “He’p an ole man git back to Earth! He’p an ole man git back to Earth!”
Delusion Drive
Originally published in Super Science Stories, April 1949; as Peter Reed.
The space rat was green, had never been in a vessel that used the dread Rip... He had to learn the hard way that once you’re entered the Rip, you’re dead — or only a grey thought in the mind of a machine!
I shipped out on the Leandor, one of the middle-sized freighters of the Troy Line, as a cook’s helper. We were packed to the ports with hydroponic tanks for the colony on Negus IX, and the scuttlebutt was that we were bringing back a full load, of the high vitamin concentrate that they were growing there. I’d read about it in the Space Times.
I signed on at the Troy offices and the man gave me my sign-on bonus and told me what day to climb aboard. I got there early and swaggered into the port, hoping that any crew member I saw would notice that even though I was eighteen, I was a hardened space rat. My kit was battered, but I had no plans of telling anybody that it got that way on a beat-up excursion liner in the VEM run. I wanted them to think I’d been outside the system and knew all about Space Rip, which was the way the Leandor traveled.
A sleepy guy showed me where to go to pick a bunk and when I got there, a fellow about my age was unpacking his duffel. He nodded absently and after I’d picked a bunk and stowed my stuff in the locker, I went to find the cook. He hadn’t come aboard.
At noon sharp, when the last man came aboard, the ports were dogged down and the PA told everybody not on duty to hit the sack.
I felt a lot better when we blasted off, because it was the same sort of thing I was used to — at least it felt that way.
As soon as the initial load was over, I forgot myself and called over to the young man, whose name was Jameson, saying, “What’s so funny about this Space Rip?”
He gave me a sour grin and said, “Greeny, hey? We aren’t in it yet. We take physical drive to our reference point and then rip off.”
I shut up, wanting to bite my tongue off.
After a little while he said, “You’ll know when it starts, Greeny.”
He had a nasty, superior way about him and I didn’t answer. But I saw that he kept licking his lips and that he was afraid.
It made me afraid to watch him and so I just watched the underside of the bunk overhead.
My remark had been stupid. I’d read enough about Space Rip to know that nobody has been able to explain the feeling.
The big gyros made a distant throbbing hum and I knew that they’d made a course correction. Somebody at the PA mike said, “Hold your hats, rats.”
I grabbed the bunk stanchion to brace myself, but it wasn’t that kind of a jar, the sort that you can brace yourself against. It felt as if I had been swatted by a huge club, and yet instead of a club it was made of sharp knives set close together. The knives were ‘so sharp that my body offered no resistance and so the big club passed right through me, leaving me... sort of misty and vague. Apart at the seams.
I noticed the greyness then. All colors gone. Everything was a shade of grey and everything had a slight, almost noticeable flicker about it, like the old movies in the museum.
All feeling of movement was gone.
While I was trying to get used to it, the PA, with blurred tone, somehow far away, said, “Cook’s helper. Report to the galley.”
Walking was a misty sort of dream and when I staggered against the corridor wall there was a funny unsubstantialness about the wall and about the hand that touched it.
The cook, a big sweating vision in black and grey, waved a cleaver in my face. “I tell you again,” he said, his voice coming from far off like voices in a dream, “the underlying philosophical concept is unsound.”
“I’m Bill Torrance,” I said.
“Sure, sure. Hello. I’m Doc. As I was saying, boy, they haven’t agreed on the concept. This is my thirty-fifth rip and I wish they’d make up their minds. Start dicing those onions.
“Dakin’s formula gives the speed. Very simple, boy. The square root of the distance in light years equals the cube of the trip time in weeks. This trip is three weeks, so simple mathematics gives you a distance to Negus IX of seven hundred twenty-nine light years. Not accurate, you understand. Just rule of thumb. What do you know about the Rip, boy?”
I was weeping over the onions. They had authority. I sniffed and said, “From what I heard, the Rip changes the ship into something that isn’t physical and then it reassembles it on the other end.”
He snorted. “If it isn’t physical, what is it? They say it’s a concept. You and I are concepts, just ideas in the head of some damn machine. You know how fast we’re going this minute?”
“No,” I said humbly.
“You aren’t moving. You’re gone. Just as though you never existed. That’s what they say. You have ceased to live, boy. But just when you stopped living a damn mechanical brain got a concept of you and it’s shoving that concept through space at a slow lope of eight trillion, seven hundred and seventy billion, six hundred and forty-four million miles an hour.”
I put the knife down and stared at him. “Asteroids,” I said weakly.
“Ha!” he said. “Nothing to fear, boy. Can an asteroid make a hole in a concept? A man’s thought is quicker. He looks at a star fifty light years away. By looking at it, boy, he has pushed his mental concept right to that star in nothing flat. But he can’t think so good. Not so clear. This mechanical mind has a slow brain but an accurate one. When it changes us back to physical matter at the end of the Rip, we’re just like we were when it got the concept.”
“Is... is that why everything looks misty and funny?”
“Right, boy. The machine can’t think except in terms of shades of grey. You follow me so far?”
“I... I think so.”