Then the nerves, carefully dissected out and clamped to the won-derous organic silver leads that alone had made major replacement of parts possible. Nervous tissue does not readily regenerate in the higher vertebrates—not without help. Organic silver is the solder that holds the parts together; organic silver in the form of braided wire strands is the "connection" that permits the extension of a nerve, so that performance is not lost during surgery. As the cervical ganglia were cut, great sections of Ryeland's body would convulse quiveringly.
Then the bones. Sonic saws to slice into the third cervical vertebra. The spinal cord—opened, sealed, tied. The fluid dammed inside its chamber—
"That's enough," interrupted Ryeland, his face frozen into a mask. "I get the picture. I don't need any more." His eyes sought Donna's, and he tried to speak to her . . . but could not. "Go ahead," he said. "Operate!"
He stepped forward, swung himself onto the operating cradle and lay patiently while Donderevo and Quiveras strapped him in. Then Donderevo nodded and Donna moved forward, her face trembling on the verge of repressed tears, in her hand the soft flexible mask that sealed his lips and plugged his nostrils. He moved his head aside quickly.
"Good-by, my dearest," he whispered. "For a while." Then he allowed her to fit the mask.
Crashing, crashing, the crystal trees swam down on him. The little reeflet folded into a bud, with himself in the heart of it like the pure liquid gold in the cup of one of its strange flowers . . .
And he was unconscious.
19
He was unconscious. But his mind was racing on.
He was dreaming. He was remembering. The haunting fog came swirling up out of the past. It had followed him all the way from Earth. It was all around him now, cold and silent and clinging. It covered Donna and Ron Donderevo, and distorted them. Everything changed, twisted into hopeless contradiction.
He was no longer in the portable surgery. Now the straps that held him were those of the therapy couch in the recreation center. The people over him were Dr. Thrale and General Fleemer.
"Tell us, Ryeland," Thrale's soft insistent voice was wheezing. "We know about the knocking on the door, after the teletype girl left your office to bring sandwiches and coffee. We know you left the papers on your desk and went to open the door. Tell us who came in."
Suddenly, he knew.
Somehow, the anesthetic had cleared away that clinging fog. It wasn't Angela Zwick! It wasn't even the Plan Police—they really hadn't come until the following Monday. It was a thin man in a blood-spotted fatigue uniform, bent under the bulging weight of a soiled space bag.
"Horrocks-" "Shhh!"
Ryeland let him into the room and locked the door again. Horrocks dropped the space bag and stood leaning on the desk. He was panting heavily. Droplets of red foam sprayed out of his mouth and spattered over the sheafs of yellow teletape on the desk.
"You're hurt," Ryeland said. "Let me get a doctor."
"That can wait," Dan Horrocks gasped. "I've got a message for you— that's got more priority. From an old—friend of yours."
Ryeland helped him into a chair and listened to the message. It came in gasped words that were sometimes incoherent. The old friend was Ron Donderevo. Horrocks had met him at a tiny colony on an uncharted asteroid twenty billion miles outside the Plan, when Colonel Lescure's ship had stopped there to pick up reaction mass.
The message itself took a long time for the stricken man to deliver, and longer still for Ryeland to grasp. It began with the existence of the Reefs of Space and the fusorian life that had built them. The point of it was the way the spacelings flew.
"Donderevo wants you to know space isn't dead," Horrocks panted hoarsely. "A living frontier—alive and infinite. Rockets can't—can't reach it usefully. We've got to have—propulsion—with no reaction mass."
In the dream he tried to tell the wounded man that any sort of jetless drive was forbidden by the Third Law of Motion.
"Wrong—" the wounded man interrupted him. "Spacelings~fly! Donderevo said-4ell you that. All you need to know. Except the fact—your father taught him. The historic effect—effect of the free front—"
Horrocks coughed, spraying Ryeland with flecks of red.
"Sorry!" he gasped. "Mean frontier. Closed frontier—closed society. That's the Plan." He paused to cough again, turning painfully away from Ryeland. "Open frontier—that's the Reefs. Freedom. Forever!"
Ryeland needed time to understand that agonized summary of a fundamental fact, but later, when he began to grasp it, he thought he knew what had happened to his father. The Plan existed to regiment the closed society that had spread to the last frontier that rockets could reach. His father had seen the infinite promise of the new frontier of interstellar space—but even a dream of that open frontier was treason to the closed world of the Plan.
"Donderevo knows Planner—Creery," Horrocks finished faintly. "Thinks we can trust—trust him to understand—that man is more—important than the Plan. If we can show him a working drive. But he says —he says trust—nobody—nobody else."
Even after his message was delivered, Horrocks didn't want a doctor. He let Ryeland give him a eubiotic emergency shot from the survival kit that he had stolen from the Cristobal Colon, and hid in the rest room across the corridor before Angela Zwick came back with the sandwiches and coffee. By the time Ryeland had got rid of her, Horrocks was gone.
The message was unbelievable—but Horrocks had left the red-spattered space bag. Ryeland dumped it on his desk, and shivered with wonder. There was a great, glowing octahedral crystal of carbon coral. There were dazzling stereos of reefs and pyropods and spacelings. There was a notebook of Ron Donderevo's observations, proving that the spacelings really flew without reaction.
Forced to believe, Ryeland's mind reacted. As Donderevo had told Horrocks to tell him, all he needed to know was the fact that the spacelings flew. With that simple datum actually accepted, the rest was obvious.
As a mathematician, he knew that equations had to balance. As a physicist, however, he had learned that the balancing quantity might be physically elusive. The neutrino, required to balance the equations of a nuclear reaction, was one such example. In his own equations of mass-creation and space-expansion, which described the Hoyle effect, the new mass equalled x—an unknown quantity, more elusive than even the neutrino, which he had failed to identify in nature.
But now he saw it. Printed in the simple fact of the spaceling's flight, it was plain as the fact that two plus two is four. The unknown quantity which equalled the new mass in his equations was at last identified.
It was momentum! The momentum of the expanding universe, which ultimately pushed the receding galaxies beyond the velocity of light!
With a professional satisfaction, he noted that the Third Law of Motion had not been violated. It had simply been transformed. The kinetic energy of the flying spaceling was balanced by a precisely equivalent energy of new mass. The reaction was governed by the classical equation of energy and mass, E = mc2. The enormous last factor, the squared velocity of light, meant that a tiny mass was the equivalent of enormous kinetic energy. That was what had made his x so hard to identify. On its longest jetless flight, a spaceling would add only an imperceptible breath of new hydrogen to the cloud of atoms that its own motion had created.