She stubbed out her cigarette lazily. "That isn't what you told Gottling," she observed.
"How do you know what I told Gottling?"
"Oh, I know very many things. Why shouldn't I? The Machine goes everywhere, and my father is practically part of the Machine. And, oh, yes, I like the Machine, and everything I like—" She shrugged win-somely.
Ryeland stared. She was mocking him. She had to be. It was a joke in terribly bad taste, but surely that was all it was. He said stiffly: "Miss Creery, I don't appreciate that sort of remark about the Machine. I believe in the Plan of Man."
"That's terribly good of you," she said admiringly.
"Blast you," he yelled, pushed a step too far, "don't make fun of me! The Plan of Man needs the jetless drive, you silly little skirt! If the spaceling has to die so the Plan can discover its secret, what possible difference does that make?"
She swung her feet to the ground and got up, walking over close to him. Her face was relaxed and sympathetic. She looked at him for a second.
Then she said suddenly: "Do you still love that girl?"
It caught him off balance. "What—what girl?"
"Angela Zwick," she said patiently. "The daughter of Stefan Zwick.
The blonde, twenty years old, five feet four and a quarter, with green eyes, who became your teletype operator late one afternoon and made you kiss her that very night. The one who turned you in. Do you still love her?"
Ryeland's eyes popped. "I—I know you've got special sources of information," he managed, "but, really, I had no idea—"
"Answer the question," she said impatiently.
He took a deep breath and considered.
"Why, I don't know," he said at last. "Perhaps I do."
Donna Creery nodded. "I thought so," she said. "All right, Steve. I thought for a moment—But, no, it wouldn't work out, would it? But I admire your spirit."
Ryeland took a deep breath again. This girl, she had a talent for confusing him. It wasn't possible for him to keep up with her, he decided, it was only possible for him to cling to the basic facts of his existence. He said stiffly: "It doesn't take spirit to defend the Plan of Man. If the Plan needs to learn the secret of the jetless drive, that's my plain duty."
She nodded and sat again on his bed, the Peace Doves settling gently on her shoulders. "Tell me, Steve, do you know why the Plan of Man requires this information?"
"Why—no, not exactly. I suppose—"
"Don't suppose. It's to explore the reefs of space. Do you know what the Plan wants in the reefs?"
"No, I can't say that-"
"It wants Ron Donderevo, Steve."
"Ron?" He frowned.
"The man who got out of his iron collar, Steve," the girl said, nodding. "A man you might like to know again. That booby-trapped, tamper-proof collar, that nobody can possibly get off until the Machine authorizes it—the Machine wants to talk to Donderevo about it, very badly. Because he took his collar off, all by himself."
Ryeland stared at her.
She nodded. "And Donderevo is out in the reefs now," she said, "and the Machine wants to do something about it. It might simply destroy the reefs. I understand you are working on some such project. But if it can't do that, it wants to send someone out there to find him.
"Someone with a radar gun, Steve! To kill him! And that's why the Machine wants the secret of the jetless drive!"
7
Ryeland's new authority as leader of the Attack Team did nothing to efidear him to his colleagues.
He didn't care. He had work enough to keep him busy. Oddball Oporto made himself useful. The little man's talent for lightning computing saved Ryeland a good deal of time. Not that Oporto was faster than a computer. He wasn't; but Oporto.had a distinct advantage over the binary digital types in that problems didn't have to be encoded and taped, then decoded.
Still, in the final analysis there were not too many problems to compute. In fact, that was the big problem: Ryeland could find no handle by which to grasp the question of the jetless drive.
But Oporto made himself useful in other ways as well. He had a prying nose for news, for example, which kept Ryeland informed of what was going on in the Team Project. "Fleemer's got the sulks," he reported one day. "Holed up in his room, doesn't come out."
"All right," said Ryeland absently. "Say, where's my Physical Constants of Steady-State Equations?"
"It's indexed under 603.811," Oporto said patiently. "The word is that Fleemer is having an argument with the Machine. Messages are going back and forth, back and forth, all the time."
"What?" Ryeland looked up, momentarily diverted from the task of scribbling out a library requisition for the book he needed. "Nobody can argue with the Machine!"
Oporto shrugged. "I don't know what you'd call it, then."
"General Fleemer is filing reports," Ryeland said firmly. He beckoned to Faith, brooding in a corner. The Togetherness girl came eagerly forward, saw the slip, looked glum, shrugged and went off to get the book.
"Sure," said Oporto. "Say, have you heard anything from Donna Creery?"
Ryeland shook his head.
"I hear she's in Port Canaveral."
Ryeland snapped: "That's her problem. No doubt the Planner's daughter has plenty of occasions for off-Earth trips."
"No doubt," agreed Oporto, "but-"
"But you could mind your business," said Ryeland, closing the discussion.
Faith came back with the book. Ryeland verified a couple of figures and turned a sheet of calculations over to Oporto. "Here, solve these for me. It'll give you something to do," he said. He stood up, looking absently around the room. This was his A Section, devoted to the Hoyle Effect. He had a whole sub-Team of workers going here. Still, he thought, it was a waste of time.
"No sweat," said Oporto cheerfully, handing back the completed equations.
"Thanks." Ryeland glanced at them, then dumped them on the desk of one of the other workers. There wasn't much to be done but routine; he could leave it to the others now. That was why it was a waste of time. All the prior art was in hand and digested; it was only a matter of checking out the math now. Then he could answer the Machine's questions—but in fact, he knew, he could pretty well answer them now. Under what conditions could hydrogen growth occur? That was easy. Basic theory gave most of the answer; an analysis of the data from Les-cure's expedition in the Cristobal Colon gave a clue to the rest. And what was the possibility of halting or reversing the formation? That was easy too. Humans could have little control over the processes that could build stars. With finite equipment, in finite time, the probability was zero.
But it was a measure of the Machine's—desperation? Was that a word you could apply to the Machine—a measure of the Machine's, well, urgency that it could even ask such questions as these.
Ryeland said uncomfortably: "Come on, Oporto. Let's go take a look at the spaceling."
And that was B Section, and it was going badly indeed.
Jetless drive! It was impossible, that was all. If Ryeland hadn't had the maddening spectacle of the spaceling right there before him, he would have sworn that the laws were right.
For every action, Newton had stated centuries before, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That law of motion accounted for every movement of every creature on Earth. The cilia of the first swimming Paramecium propelled the creature forward by propelling an equal mass of water backward. It was the same with the thrust of a propeller, in water or in air. Rockets thrust forward by reaction, as the mass of the ejected jet's hot molecules went one way, the vessel the rockets drove went another. Action and reaction!