"Miss Bright?"
"Yes. You know:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
In just such a way
And arrived the previous night.
"But you see"-she pointed again-"I've eliminated it. Or rather I depend upon it: upon the fact that the universe will not permit such a paradox to occur.
"I have always thought that, doing what the tnuctipun did, time could be made to precess at different rates over a much larger scale," she went on. "You need an engine to generate your second field, of course, which is a problem. Caught between those fields you would be squeezed away from them, like a wet orange seed squeezed between two fingers. I calculate one of the results would be negative mass."
Stanley the waiter brought us two coffees. The Lindenbaum had deluxe human service in this section and put its prices up accordingly. Gazing at Dimity, he tripped over a neighboring table as he backed away. She went on:
"Within a gravitational singularity, that would be the end of you. You might become something like your own wormhole, millions of miles long, the length depending on how much mass you originally had, and less than the width of a subatomic particle. But beyond the singularity, and if you had a certain velocity, you'd move. Without an increase in mass. If what happens then can be described in terms of physical structure it might be called creating your own big wormhole. A sort of shunt rather than a drive… " She saw she was not getting through and made another attempt. "A matter of getting away from a greater impossibility by being pushed into a lesser one if you like."
"I don't understand." But I believed her.
She gestured at the symbols again, as if it was all obvious. She had, as I had thought that sad day when I realized our brains couldn't match, given that phrase "not exactly a rocket scientist" a whole new dimension of meaning.
"If you were moving at sufficient speed already… I think you'd be projected out of the Einsteinian universe… Greenberg was able to tell us a bit of what happened with the ancient drive, the preconditions, but of course he didn't know how it worked, except that the speed had to be sufficient to affect the average mass of the universe. I think the two major achievements of the ancient technologies were connected. The stasis field was a byproduct of their drive technology, or their drive was a byproduct of the stasis-field technology… "
"Does that mean…?" I couldn't say it, somehow.
She paused, and then there was something new that was hard and defiant in her voice, a challenge: "We know the tnuctipun could do it! There would be a bending effect of space and… "
"How fast?"
"How fast do you want?"
"Where do you get the energy?"
"From the Big Bang. Space is still full of it… Look at the rest of the universe as the norm, and the singularities as the exception. In terms of getting from one singularity to another, I calculate-it's on the computer at home-a light-year in about… " She paused. I think she felt herself shy of what she was about to say "…about three days… It doesn't break the light barrier, it shatters it, because once you move into that… dimension or aspect of space you can keep accelerating!"
There had been theories before. The first major modifications to the Special Theory of Relativity were more than four hundred years old. Things happened, or were thought to happen, at the edges of black holes. Nothing practical so far… but it has been done before, once before, by a race within an empire which, it was thought, had controlled most of the Spiral Arm at least and which had vanished before life emerged from the seas of Earth.
"And… that's what you've got here?" My own voice sounded somehow very small. The thing I had sought her out for suddenly seemed almost unimportant-until I put two sets of implications together and then it suddenly seemed more important than ever. I heard another tinkling sound besides that of the music box and found my hands were shaking as I held my coffee cup.
"Not yet. Not for years, I think. Maybe never. We know that with the tnuctipun drive they had to be moving close to lightspeed anyway. Greenberg told us it was the average mass of the universe that was the critical factor. But I'm getting somewhere. So far, the computers support my theorizing. Of course, I had to instruct the computers, but if there's a fault in my instructions I can only believe it's a very subtle one.
"This is the wrong place to do it. A double star means the combined singularity is huge. And the engineering is huge enough anyway. The tools are beyond our technology."
"Could you build such an engine… eventually?"
"Eventually is a long time. I think I could… recognize one. That's not very helpful, is it?" I wrenched my mind away from the vision that opened up. I felt I needed her brain's connective powers for something else at the moment. "Could you come with me for a couple of hours?" I asked her. "I want to show you something."
The markings in and around the grove hadn't changed. "There it is," I said. "What do you make of it?" I had told her on my abortive expedition of the previous day, though not of the meeting that followed it. She put away the calculations she had been scribbling at. "An aircraft landed there and took off again," she said. "That's the most probable thing. A fairly small one, but a good deal bigger than this. Not an ordinary private car. It landed and took off vertically but without chemical rockets-there's no sign of burning-and without jets or sufficient downdraft to damage the vegetation. But it hasn't left a groundeffect trail. That is very strange. In fact impossible."
"Yes. I thought you might say that. I wanted someone else to confirm it."
"Maybe it took your specimen."
"Yes. What I'm worried about is the possibility that my specimen was flying it."
Anyone else would have been brought up short by that. She took it in instantly.
"In that case it would hardly have made just one landing. Have you looked for other sites?"
Not yet. There's too big an area to search."
"Perhaps we can narrow it down. Why did it land here? What's special about this place."
The monastery."
"Yes. Let's say your specimen landed near the monastery because it was curious. Maybe it's landed near other human dwellings. What about the marshmen's shacks? And perhaps the marshmen have seen something."
I would have asked the marshmen the previous day, except that they tended to be highly unapproachable. On Wunderland, with plenty of good farmland for those who wanted it and good communications, hermits were hermits from choice. We were proud that here, unlike Earth, we respected individuals' privacy. But things had been different the previous day.
I pulled the car's nose up and we headed across the swamp. There was a bit more wildlife to be seen below us today, but it still seemed unusually shy and skittish.
There was old Harry's cabin on Hook Island. Or rather, there had been. There were a few pieces of walls and roof now, scattered about. There was a disturbed area about the same size as that in the grove. The island had no trees, no cover anything could be hiding in, I thought. I did a couple of cautious passes and we landed.
The monastery garden had been silent but for the insects. This was a silence that was not perfect but of an utterly different quality.
There were the prints, obvious in soft ground. Very big, clawed prints, made by something very heavy. Water oozed into some, and one already had red froggolinas swimming in it. There was a kermitoid with markings I had not seen before… Most of the small creatures around seemed ordinary enough, even if I couldn't name them all. Grossgeister teamed with life in a huge variety of kinds and sizes, including creatures on the larger islands who occupied the ecological niches held on Earth by bear, swamp deer, or cougar. At any other time my professional interest in them would have been more intense. I must get on with my great project of classifying all this, one part of my mind remarked. My work in the caves was a preparation for the greater biological treasures of Grossgeister… I jerked my mind back to what was in front of me.