I paused on the pedestrian street level to look up at the General Anomaly building. I felt very remote from it and the pride I had once felt seemed foreign and distant. It was not my building; I had only paid for it. Steelworkers and cement handlers and welders were the ones who built it. Electricians and decorators and airlift operators were the ones who owned it. They had made it, not I.
Huo had put guards out on the street, too. They looked like casual gawkers, but their eyes were too restless, too alert. I walked past the outer perimeter, but they didn’t appear to notice me. Had I changed that much?
The guards at the door recognized me, but I looked at them and they seemed to freeze, uncertain and confused. I went to the executive elevator and there the single burly guard was more certain. But slow. The elevator door opened on the sealed floor according to the punch code, and there were four of them, ready but unwilling to act. Bowie saved them.
“Easy, boys,” he said from the right, his laser steady. “Hi, boss,”
he said with a grin, standing separate from the other outer guards.
“Thank you, Bowie,” I said and walked through the empty floor to my office.
It was as if I had done all this a thousand times before and this was one more dreary performance. Huo was so predictable, so ordinary, that it was almost startling. The surprised look, the frantic reach for the laser in the security drawer, the expression when he knew he would be too late.
I stood looking down at his body and thought my sad thoughts. How banal. How ordinary a crook. Who was it that spoke of the true horror of greed being its utter banality?
I went to see Sandler, who became very confused. He showed me tapes of conversations with “Brian Thorne” and I had to admit the double was excellent. Then Lowell gave me the bad news.
“You’re broke, Mr. Thorne. It will take you years to get the mess straightened out. His signature was perfect. Even the thumbprint slip-on was made by an expert forger. I’m sorry . . . but you saw him yourself. His mannerisms, his way of speaking, his voice, the nicknames, the special information and—”
I waved him silent. “I understand. It’s not really—important. Is there anything at all left? I must repay the Sunstrums for the passage money and I have some . . . research to do.”
“I was in the process of liquidating the Itacoatiara Dam stock with the Amazonia Corporation. There’s some of that left, and, uh, I haven’t sold off the Cortez stock on the deep-drilling wells on Mars, and
. . .”
“I’ll need about ten million Swiss francs. Do I have it or not?”
“I think so, sir. I can let you know in a day or so. Where will you be?” Lowell, ever cautious, ultraconservative.
“London. Control will know.”
“Uh, you don’t have Control, sir. It was sold, along with—”
“All right. I’ll call you. Bank of Luna is the Sunstrum bank. Pay them first, then I’ll want to know how much is left.”
But there would be enough.
I had Cilento’s original papers brought to me in his London studio, and with them the reports of the research teams I had set working two years before. I read everything through once, then again. At first I was confident that my new insights, or what I thought were my new insights, would help me solve the problem quickly.
But I was wrong. For days I stared at the sensatron, reading the notes, the reports, the Probability Analysis papers, the conjectures and wild guesses. Time and again I walked around Michael Cilento’s strange, final sensatron, looking at the red-violet sea, at the footsteps that went off through the grass to the distant rocks at seaside.
Then I had to admit my failure to comprehend. No mere strange metaphysical experience on the fourth planet had prepared me to be a scientist. But I knew that one way to unravel problems was to get people who liked to unravel problems and give them the technical assistance necessary.
I attacked the problem as if I were assembling an exhibit or putting on an art festival. I got Coleman from Harvard by buying one of England’s best wine cellars and opening it to him. Gilman Gottlieb came from his hobbit-hole in the Sierras when he was told Coleman was going to beat him to the solution. I poured resources into backup teams from Intertech and Physics International. I gave grants to M. I. T. and Caltech and established the Mark Rhandra Chair of Physics at the University of Mexico, just to free a certain scientist.
I paid top money for top men, but money was not the only consideration. I made it a challenge, and of course, it was. It took eight months, but slowly the pieces began to come together. I found that my
“insights” were not so wrong after all.
There is no time outside the universe. We found that out when we were able to move aside all the energy, all the particles, all the light, to make a hole in space. The sensors probed through that hole, into the outside of curved space, to find another way back in. What we couldn’t be certain of was where and when the re-entry would be. This was when Cilento’s sensatron provided critical information. Carefully, we opened it up. Coleman traced the aiming circuits. Gottlieb did the math, and Intertech built the transporter machinery. It took more time to make it self-sufficient, with a portable fusion generator, but I needed it that way.
We sent through several objects, but nothing came back. A laboratory rat went through and returned dead, and very old. A second rat came back dead, but approximately the same age. One half of a matched set of atomic clocks went and were returned. There was a difference of 45.76.3 seconds when they were compared. We were getting there.
Experiment after experiment was tried. Most failed in some way or another. Sensing and recording devices were sent but the magnetism was ruined, film fogged, and other methods were too faulty for any good use. We had to send a human, the multi-purpose recording and analysis generalist. A machine can only respond to what it is built to respond to, and nothing else. A man can accept variables, sense the unknown, and analyze, somewhat, on the basis of very little information. I insisted that man be me, but they were not yet ready. The drift factors were the problem: we start out here and go there and return at once . . . but here is several seconds removed. The planet turns, it orbits the sun, the sun moves in relation to other stars, the whole universe is exploding still. There was no relative point to which we could anchor, no benchmark from which we could measure.
“What we need is a kind of step process,” Coleman told me.
“We move an approximate distance toward point X in an approximate direction. Then we stop and adjust. Two dings left, one ding high. Then we go to point B and look at point A, where we started, and back at point X, and make another guess at it. And so on. Inching closer with each adjustment.”
“Guess?” I said.