Rachmael nodded mutely.
Quietly, Miss Holm asked, "How long did it take a passenger liner of your father's corporation to reach Whale's Mouth with a load of, say, five hundred colonists, plus their personal effects?"
After a tormented pause he said, "We — never even tried. Years. Even at hyper-see." The girl, across from him, still waited, wanted to hear him say it. "With our flagship transport," he said, "eighteen years."
"And with Dr. von Einem's teleportation instrument — "
"Fifteen minutes," he said harshly. And Whale's Mouth, the number IX planet of the Fomalhaut system, was to date the sole planet discovered either by manned or unmanned observers which was truly habitable — truly a second Terra. Eighteen years... and even deep-sleep would not help, for such a prolonged period; aging, although slowed down, although consciousness was dimmed, still occurred. Alpha and Prox; that had been all right; that had been short enough. But Fomalhaut, at twenty-four light-years —
"We just couldn't compete," he said. "We simply could not carry colonists that far."
"Would you have tried, without von Einem's Telpor breakthrough?"
Rachmael said, "My father — "
"Was thinking about it." She nodded. "But then he died and it was too late and now you've had to sell virtually all your ships to meet note-payment due-dates. Now, from us, Rachmael. You wanted... ?"
"I still own," he said, "our fastest, newest, biggest ship, the Omphalos; she's never been sold, no matter how great the pressure THL has put on me, within and outside the UN courts." He hesitated, then said it. "I want to go to Whale's Mouth. By ship. Not by Dr. von Einem's Telpor. And by my own ship, by what we meant to be our — " He broke off. "I want to take her all the way to Fomalhaut, on an eighteen-year voyage — alone. And when I arrive at Whale's Mouth I'll prove — "
"Yes?" Freya said. "Prove what, Rachmael?"
"That we could have done it. Had von Einem not come along with that thing, that — " He gestured, with impotent fury.
Freya said, "Telpor is one of the most vital discoveries in human history, Rachmael. Teleportation, from one star system to another, twenty-four light-years in fifteen minutes. When you reach Whale's Mouth by the Omphalos, I for instance will be — " She calculated. "Forty-three years old."
He was silent.
"What," Freya asked in a soft voice, "would you accomplish by your trip?"
He said, honestly, "I — don't know."
Presently Freya said, reading from her folio, "You have, for six months now, been thoroughly checking out the Omphalos at a concealed — even from us — launch field and maintenance dock on Luna. She is now considered ready for the inter-system flight. Trails of Hoffman has tried, through the courts, to attach her to claim her as their legal property; this you have managed to fight. So far. But now — "
"My lawyers tell me," Rachmael said, "that three days stand between me and THL seizing the Omphalos."
"You can't blast off within three days?"
"The deep-sleep equipment. It's a week from being readied." He let out his breath raggedly. "A subsidiary of THL manufactures vital components. They've been — held up."
Freya nodded. "And your coming here is to request us," she said, "to pick up the Omphalos, with one of our veteran pilots, disappear with her for a week, until she's ready for the flight to Fomalhaut. Correct?"
"That's it," he said, and sat waiting. "I'm not good enough to lose her. They'd find me. But yours — one of your best." He did not look directly at her; it meant too much.
"You can pay our fee of — "
"Nothing. I have absolutely no funds. Later, as I continue to liquidate the assets of the corporation, possibly I — "
Freya said, "There's a note here, Xeroxed, from my employer, Mr. Glazer-Holliday. He observes that you're poscredless. His instructions to us — " She read the note, silently. "However, we're to cooperate with you, despite your financial helplessness." Glancing up at him she said, "We'll dispatch an experienced pilot who will take the Omphalos off where THL, where even the UN agents acting for the Secretary General, Herr Horst Bert old, won't find her. This our man can do — while you manage, if you can, to obtain the final components of the deep-sleep equipment." She smiled slightly. "But I doubt if you'll obtain those components, Rachmael; there's an additional memo here to that effect, too. You're right: Theodoric Ferry sits on its board of directors, too, and this is all legal, this monopoly which the firm possesses." Her smile was bitter. "UN sanctioned."
He was silent. Obviously it was hopeless; no matter how long the Lies Incorporated professional and ultra-veteran space-pilot kept the huge liner the Omphalos lost between planets, the components would be "held up unavoidably," as the invoices, marked back-order, would read.
"I think," Freya said presently, "that your problem is not the mere obtaining of deep-sleep components. That can be handled; there are ways... we, for instance, can — although this will cost you a good deal of money eventually — pick them up on the blackmarket. Your problem, Rachmael — "
"I know," he said. His problem was not how to get to the Fomalhaut system, to its ninth planet, Whale's Mouth, which was Terra's sole thriving colony-world. In fact his problem was not the eighteen-year voyage at all.
His problem was —
Why go at all, when Dr. von Einem's Telpor construct, available at a nominal cost at any of Trails of Hoffman's many retail outlets on Terra, made the trip a mere fifteen-minute minor journey, and within financial reach of even the most modest, income-wise speaking, Terran family?
Aloud he said, "Freya, the trip by Telpor to Whale's Mouth — it sounds fine." And forty million Terran citizens had taken advantage of it. And the aud and vid reports returning — via the Telpor construct — all told glowingly of a world not overcrowded, of tall grass, of odd but benign animals, of new and lovely cities built by robot-assists taken across at UN-expense to Whale's Mouth. "But — "
"But," Freya said, "the peculiar fact is that it's a one-way trip."
Instantly he nodded. "Yes, that's it. No one can come back."
"That's easily explained. The Sol system is located at the axis of the universe; the recession of the extra-galactic nebulae demonstrates von Einem's Theorem One that — "
"There must," he said, "out of those forty million people, be a few who want to return. But the TV and 'pape reports say they're all ecstatically happy. You've seen the endless TV shows, life at Newcolonizedland. It's — "
"Too perfect, Rachmael?"
"Statistically, malcontents must exist. Why do we never hear of them? And we can't go and take a look." Because, if you went by Telpor to Whale's Mouth and saw, you were there, as they were, to stay. So if you did find malcontents — what could you do for them? Because you could not take them back; you could only join them. And he had the intuition that somehow this just wouldn't be of much use. Even the UN left Newcolonizedland alone, the countless UN welfare agencies, the personnel and bureaus newly set up by the present Secretary General Horst Bertold, from New Whole Germany: the largest political entity in Europe — even they stopped at the Telpor gates. Neues Einige Deutschland... N.E.D. Far more powerful than the mangy, dwindling French Empire or the U.K. — they were pale remnants of the past.