"Listen closely, please," he said. "Your machine – that is, your time-traveller – operates on the principle of similar circles, does it not?"
"I seem to remember that it does. So what?"
"So this, Miss Evans. You postulate that firstly the circumference of all circles equals infinity times zero. Am I right?"
That was approximately what Stephen had said, so I supposed that he was. "Right as rarebits," I said.
"Now, your further hypothesis is probably that all circles are equal. And that equal distances traversed at equal speeds are traversed in equal times. Am I still right?"
"That seemed to be the idea."
"Very well." A smug smile broke over his fishy face. He continued. "Your theory works beautifully – but your machine – no."
I looked down at myself to see if I were there. I was. "Explain that, please," I said. "Why doesn't the machine work?"
"For this reason. Infinity times zero does not equal a nurnber. It equals any number. A definite number is represented by x; any number, n. See the difference? And so unequal circles are still unequal, and cannot be circumnavigated as of the same distance at the same speed in the same time. And your theory – is a fallacy."
He looked at me gloatingly before continuing. Then, slowly, "Your theory is fallacious. Ergo, your machine doesn't work. If your machine doesn't work, you couldn't have used it to get here. There is no other way for you to have gotten here. Therefore ... you are not here! and so the projected colonization will proceed on schedule!"
And the light flashed in my head. Of course! that was what I had been trying to think of back in the house. The weakness in Trainer's logic!
Then I went pouf again, my eyes closed, and I thought to myself, "Since the machine didn't work and couldn't have worked, I didn't travel in time. So I must be back with Trainer."
I opened my eyes. I was.
"You moron," I snapped at him as he stood goggle-eyed, his hand on the wall-socket. "Your machine doesn't work!" He stared at me blankly. "You were gone. Where were you?"
"It seemed to be 2700 A.D.,"I answered.
"How was it?" he inquired, reaching for a fresh flask of ethyl.
"Very, very silly. I'm glad the machine didn't work." He offered me .a beaker and I drained it. "I'd hate to think that I'd really been there." I took off the belt and stretched my aching muscles.
"Do you know, Mabel," he said, looking at me hard, "I think I'm going to like this town."
THE ENGINEER
IT WAS VERY SIMPLE. Some combination of low temperature and high pressure had forced something from the seepage at the ocean bottom into combination with something in the water around them.
And the impregnable armor around Subatlantic Oil’s drilling chamber had discovered a weakness.
On the television screen it looked more serious than it was-so Muhlenhoff told himself, staring at it grimly. You get down more than a mile, and you’re bound to have little technical problems. That’s why deep-sea oil wells were still there.
Still, it did look kind of serious. The water driving in the pitted faults had the pressure of eighteen hundred meters behind it, and where it struck it did not splash-it battered and destroyed. As Muhlenhoff watched, a bulkhead collapsed in an explosion of spray; the remote camera caught a tiny driblet of the scattering brine, and the picture in the screen fluttered and shrank, and came back with a wavering sidewise pulse.
Muhlenhoff flicked off the screen and marched into the room where the Engineering Board was waiting in attitudes of flabby panic.
As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order, a dispatch was handed to him-a preliminary report from a quickly-dispatched company trouble-shooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.
A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled:
“Some vibration thing-and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!” He sneered. “Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research and Development hands out? Armor’s armor. Sure it pops -when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn’t be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again. Big deal!”
Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. “Breck,” he said, “thank God you’ve got guts. Perhaps we were in a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we’ll all take heart from Mr. Breck’s level-headed-what did you say, Breck?”
Breck didn’t look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. “Nine-inch plate,” he read aloud, white-faced. “And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago.
If this goes on in a straight line-“ he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule -“we have, uh-“ he swallowed-“less time than the probable error,” he finished.
“Breck!” Muhlenhoff yelled. “Where are you going?”
The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: “To find a submarine.”
The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the trouble-shooting team’s’dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.
“Stop it,” he said evenly. “The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized.”
He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: “I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with countermeasures.”
He paused. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we must not lose our nerves. We must not panic. Possibly the most serious technical crisis in Atlantic’s history lies before us. Your most important job is to maintain-at all times-a cheerful, courageous attitude. We cannot, repeat cannot, afford to have the sub-technical staff of the project panicked for lack of a good example from us.” He drilled each of them in turn with a long glare. “And,” he finished, “if I hear of anyone suddenly discovering emergency business ashore, the man who does it better get fitted for a sludgemonkey’s suit, because that’s what he’ll be tomorrow. Clear?”
Each of the executives assumed some version of a cheerful, courageous attitude. They looked ghastly, even to themselves.
Muhlenhoff stalked into his private office, the nerve-center of the whole bulkheaded works.
In MuhlenhofFs private office, you would never know you were 1,800 meters below the surface of the sea. It looked like any oilman’s brass-hat office anywhere, complete to the beautiful blonde outside the door (but white-faced and trembling), the potted palm (though the ends of its fronds vibrated gently), and the typical section chief bursting in in the typical flap. “Sir,” he whined, frenzied, “Section Six has pinholed! The corrosion-“
“Handle it!” barked Muhlenhoff, and slammed the door. Section Six be damned! What did it matter if a few of the old bulkheads pinholed and rilled? The central chambers were safe, until they could lick whatever it was that was corroding. The point was, you had to stay with it and get out the oil; because if you didn’t prove your lease, PetroMex would. Mexican oil wanted those reserves mighty badly.