Staring back through the cover of the cocoon, Pertin relented. “Sorry,” he said, snapping the communicator back on. “What were you trying to tell me?”
“I’ve lost the Scorpian,” wailed the chimp.
“Well? Are you supposed to be his keeper?”
“Be easy on me, Ben James,” begged the chimpanzee. “I hurt all over. The robot was supposed to be getting ready for some new instruments that were coming in. He isn’t there. The stuff’s piling up in the transmission chamber and nobody to do anything about it. I’m afraid it’ll get damaged.”
“What about what’s-her-name, Aphrodite? Can’t she store it?”
“She is trying to, but the Scorpian is a specialist in this stuff and she isn’t. None of the other high-G creatures is, as far as I can tell, and, oh, Ben James, I’ve travelled so far trying to find someone who can help!”
He was a pitiable sight, his fur unpreened, his gay clothes smudged and wrinkled. Pertin said, “You’ve done your best, Doc. There’s nothing I can do until the thrust stops - half an hour or so. Why don’t you rest up for a while?”
“Thanks, Ben James!” cried the chimp gratefully. “I’ll just take a few minutes. Wake me, will you? I – I —”
But he was already clambering into the cocoon, his spiderlike arms shaking with strain. Pertin lay back and closed his own eyes, allowing the cocoon to do its best, which amounted to increasing its rate of stroking his back muscles, trying mindlessly to calm him down.
It had seemed very easy, back on Sun One, to volunteer for a task even though the end of it was his certain death. He had not counted on the fact that death did not come like the turning of a switch but slowly and with increasing pain, or that he would be watching friends die before him.
Pertin didn’t wake the chimp when he could finally move; he thrust his own way to the tachyon transmission chamber, hurling himself down the corridors carelessly and almost diving into what turned out to be the silver pseudogirl. He didn’t recognize the creature at first, for she had unfurled enormous silver-film wings and looked like a tinsel Christmas-tree angel as she drove past him.
In the tachyon chamber he found Nummie supervising an octopoidal creature from one of the Core stars in transporting crated equipment to an empty chamber. “What’s happened? Where did Aphrodite go? What’s this stuff?” he demanded, all at once.
Nummie paused and hung in the air before him, balancing himself against stray currents of air with casual movements of his wings. He whistled a methodical answer, and the Pmal translator converted it to this stately and precise form of speech in English: “Of those events which have occurred, that which appears most significant is the arrival of eight hundred mass units of observing equipment. A currently occurring event is that this equipment is in process of being installed. A complicating event is that the Scorpian artificial intelligence being has elected to engage his attention in other areas. There are other events but of lesser significance. The being you name Aphrodite has gone to bring the Beta Boötis collective beings to assist in the aforesaid installation. The reason for this is that they are catalogued as possessing qualification on this instrumentation similar to that of the artificial intelligence Scorpian.
The precise nature of the stuff is tachyar-observing equipment. I offer an additional observation: the purpose of it is to map and survey Object Lambda. I offer another additional observation: it will add to the radiation load by a factor of not less than three nor more than eight.”
The T’Worlie hung silently in front of him, waiting for him to respond.
It had a long wait. Pertin was trying to assimilate the information he had just received. A factor of not less than three.
But that meant that his life expectancy was not a matter of months or weeks. It might only be days!
Tachyar was simple enough in concept. It was like the ancient electromagnetic radar sets of Earth; the difference was that it used the faster-than-light tachyons to scan a distant object and return an echo of its shape and size. It was expensive – all tachyon transmission was expensive. Its only justification was that it was indispensable.
If you wanted to get a man, or an instrument, from one point in the universe to some other point across interstellar distances, you had only two choices. One was to build a rocket - preferably fusion-powered, like the Aurora. You then had to launch it, set it on its way and wait anywhere from a decade to a geologic era for it to reach a nearby star. If you wanted to go farther than that, you would wait forever. A voyage from a spiral arm to the core, or from any point in the Galaxy to the deeps of intergalactic space where they now were, was simply out of the time consciousness of any race but the T’Worlies.
The other method was faster. It dispensed with attempting to transport matter at all. Instead of sending an object, you sent a blueprint of the object, and had it built from plan at the destination.
It was not a simple procedure. It required enormous expenditures of energy to generate the tachyon stream that carried the blueprint. It required complex scanning devices to measure every atom and molecule in the object to be transmitted, and to encode positions and relationships for transmission. Above all, it required a tachyon receiver at the point to which you wanted to go.
But granted all those things, you could “travel” at the speed of the tachyons, those particles whose lower speed limit was the velocity of light, and whose upper limit had never been measured.
Of course, the original object remained behind. It was scanned and its blueprints were encoded, and then it was returned unharmed. The man who volunteered for a tachyon trip also stayed at home. What flashed across space was a description of himself, and what emerged from the receiving chamber at destination was a new-built identical copy. There was no detectable difference between original and copy. It would have been a foolproof method of counterfeiting or of duplicating rare art objects - if it had not been so expensive in terms of power consumption that there was little worth the cost of duplicating.
Tachyar was only one use of tachyons. Like ancient radar and sonar, it generated a beam and measured reflections. The problem in using tachyar was the magnitude of the beam. Vast energies were used, and the fraction which was wasted because of the natural inefficiency of the process produced ionizing radiation in large amplitudes.
Sun One must be taking the question of Object Lambda’s satellites seriously if it was sending tachyar equipment to study them. The cost was high. It would be paid in the lives of those aboard.
The single planet of the golden-yellow star Beta Boötis was like a cooler, older Venus. Because it was farther from its sun, it was spared the huge flow of heat that cooked Venus sterile; but it possessed the same enormously deep, enormously dense atmosphere. It was spared the loss of its liquid water, and so its surface was covered an average of thirty miles deep in an Oceanic soup. That was where the Boaty-Bits had evolved.
Aquatic in origin, they could survive on Sun One or the probe ship only in edited forms adapted for air-breathing; they could not live on high-gravity planets at all, since they had only the feeblest mechanisms for propelling themselves about their native seas. An individual Boaty-Bit was about as useful as an infant jellyfish, and not much more intelligent. That didn’t matter; the Boaty-Bits never operated as individuals. Their swarming instinct was overpowering, and once linked together they had a collective intelligence that was a direct function of their number. A quarter of a million Boaty-Bits equalled a man. On their home planet they sometimes linked up in collectives of four or five million or more, but those groupings could be maintained only briefly even in their oceans and were never attained in their air-breathing edited forms.