to bug him to tell you about it, over and over. It still bothers you, doesn't it?» «Yes. Very much.» «Can't stand prosperity, huh? We have a galaxy. We're making do nicely with it, thank you. If we continue to breed at the present expansion rate
and double our population every few years, there's still enough for the race for a million years. Why the barrier? Are we ready?» «Because it's there, I suppose,» Plank said. «And the hell of it is,» Matt said, «100 credits to ten you'll break the thing, if that's your goal.» «Just a preliminary study.» «Promise me one thing?» «Perhaps.» «Promise me you won't go through, even if you can, until you talk with me. Until we can make plans. John, I don't think we are ready. There's something pretty hairy on the other side of that force field or whatever it is. Before we go out there to, as they told our grandparents, invade their privacy, we'd better be damned sure we're ready.» «If we can break the barrier we're ready.» Matt frowned. «Why not give the race a bit more time to develop? I know you have your mentalists. But from remembering grandfather's tales, your mind people are amateurs compared to those people out there. They wouldn't even be able to hold their own with the Eater, and he was retarded.» «Grandfather used to say that they were not infallible.» «He used to say a lot of things. He talked a lot about tigers.» John smiled. «When a tiger is eating members of the community, a man picks up his spear and goes tiger hunting.» «Right now the tiger is sleeping,» Matt said. «I'd feel a lot better if we sort of tippytoed around him and let him sleep.» «Do you remember one of the things that impressed grandfather most about that being he spoke with? She was explaining why she could not rebuild Matt Webb, for whom you were named by the way, and she said it was because the Eater didn't have enough willpower to give up the tastiest morsel of a human body, the brain. The description of the delight of the
Eater when he was enjoying a brain was so vivid, she said, that it raised an atavistic appetite in her.» «No,» Matt said, «I won't buy that rationale. You're not going out there to protect us from some future threat. Those people are not going to bust into the galaxy and start eating humans. No. You're going out there for
the same reason that old John spent the second half of his life establishing a university and engaging in pure research. All of your work to date points to that. Grandfather spent a lifetime and vast amounts of money to better the race, to make it more powerful in its technology. He even became interested in parapsychology and was the first to apply psychic power to
the search for man's ancestry. He was afraid, just as you're afraid, that the beautiful woman and the Eater were right, that we are evolved from the artificially created food creatures. You think that by proving that man is, at least, the equal of those people out there that you can disprove the theory of our artificial origin once and for all.» «I'd be lying if I said you're 100 percent wrong,» John said. «But you're not 100 percent right, either.» «Think it over carefully, John. I won't try to stop you, although I have the power to stop you if I wanted to. But I respect you too much to try to impose my will on you.» «You're becoming truly civilized.» «Just don't come home with the tiger chasing you, nipping at your tail.» «I am rather attached to my tail,» John laughed. When the stars thinned, they advanced carefully. The Pride functioned smoothly. Susan Lite, prior to each jump, blended her mind with a new detection system and searched the space ahead. Not many ships had been
all the way to the barrier. In the early days of blink travel, the existence of the barrier had been confirmed, and after that, there was no reason to venture out beyond the galaxy into the deepness of true emptiness. Among spacers the barrier was rarely mentioned. Plank's grandfather had seen a ship crunch to ruin against the barrier, so the general area was approached very cautiously. No one was sure that even the mental abilities of Susan and Martha would be able to detect it. To ram it would be disaster. To blink into it would produce an unknown
result, but to be effective, the barrier had to be able to halt a blinking ship, because the Eater had possessed blink technology and the barrier was, after all, first installed to imprison the Eater within the galaxy. Within a few million miles, plus or minus, of the barrier, the Pride ceased blinking and began to move carefully forward at sublight speeds. Plank was reasonably sure that electronics alone would be useless in detecting the barrier. Electronics in combination with the mental tricks of Susan and Martha might, just might, detect it, but he did not leave it to chance. On the front of the Pride a small cannon fired a non-explosive projectile containing a tracking device; fired it at a speed that sent it ahead of the Pride at regular intervals. Light and radiation and radio waves passed the barrier at will. A solid object would be stopped. In a blink, parsecs disappeared instantly. At sublight speeds a man could appreciate the vastness of space. The ship crawled. Time passed. A comfortable relationship was being established aboard ship, all members compatible. Automatic systems made round-the-clock watches unnecessary, so there was time for socializing, for bridge, for long bull sessions, for lovely nights in his cabin with his wife. Plank came to know why, up to the very end, his grandfather and grandmother loved space, why, at the drop of a suggestion, they would board one version or the other of a Pride and be off. There was a grandeur about it that made a person stand taller. There was an indescribable
feeling of comfort and safety inside a good ship, with all that was hostile to life outside, cold, airless, empty. As weeks became months, however, Plank grew restless. The barrier was farther out than he had calculated. He was tempted to do some jumping, but he didn't dare. Sooner or later it would be encountered. After almost a year of cruising at sublight, firing projectiles into the space ahead, the barrier was found. And it was not found by mental detection, but by the rebounding of a projectile from an unseen screen. Plank halted the Pride at 10,000 kilometers and began to run a series of tests. Physical instruments showed only the emptiness of space. The light of distant galaxies came to them as if there was nothing between the ship and the far pinpoints of light. Neither Martha nor Susan could detect the force of the barrier. It was going to be tougher than he thought. But he had come a long way. Once again he moved the ship and, easing her forward on steering jets at less than two kilometers an hour, felt the solid impact. The Pride bumped to a halt. The barrier was just outside, centimeters away from the forward viewers. Plank suited up and went outside to feel the barrier for himself. Using the advanced propulsion unit of an lsg, he skimmed along the barrier for a kilometer or so and then returned to the ship. Martha and Susan had been using the mind amplifier. They could detect nothing. For years Plank had been theorizing about the barrier. To sustain the barrier would require energy. In intergalactic space the only source of energy would be the radiation from the galaxies. There were scattered particles of matter of course, since nothing is truly empty, but they were so few that he doubted the possibility of using them in any way to create enough power to build a field around something as vast as a galaxy. When the initial investigations produced nothing, Plank set out on a task that would take, even at blink speeds, two years. First, it was necessary to determine the contour of the barrier. This was a laborious process, accomplished by short blinks. After several months he had what he thought was a pattern. Holding his breath, he made a long blink; the ship stayed outside the first scattering of stars and came out within projectile distance of the barrier. The remaining months of the two-year mapping period were easier. The barrier could be figured to be at a uniform distance from the nearest star of the galaxy, and it bulged out to take in the satellite clouds of stars. After two years Plank had built a model of the galaxy and the clouds; and around that model a film to indicate the barrier. It was all encompassing. The work of two years—it did not require the attentions of all of the crew to complete the mapping—produced no clue as to the nature of the barrier. Having returned to a point near their initial encounter with the barrier, they settled down to some hard work. Plank was convinced that the barrier was formed from something physical. He could not swallow the concept of pure mental force. The others disputed him. He pointed out that although mental force is in existence, as witness both Ellen and Martha's abilities to move physical objects with the power of the mind, that mental force is undetectable. To be evinced, it must act on something physical. While the mentalists concentrated on using the mental amplifier at different frequencies—this was not an accurate term, but rather than take time to invent a new word they used it—Plank reviewed his work in elemental particles. He could not escape the idea that the barrier was something physical. He remembered the Eater's ability to flow particles at the atomic level and below. He was in an area where man had not, as yet, equaled the ability of the Eater, but there were solid advances. In the end, the solution was surprisingly simple. It was merely a matter of knowing how to look and where to look, and in the looking Plank recorded entire new families of subatomic particles. It was possible, then, to tune the mental amplifier. «Yes,» Martha Peters said. «I can see it now.» Susan Lite, the receiver, felt the power that held the field together. She tried to put it into words. «The particles are mesmerized,» she said. «They make contact with other particles coming into contact with them and, in effect, pass on the mesmerization. The effect is an order—thou shalt not pass.» And, two days later, after sleepless, frantic hours of study, Susan said. «All right.» She sank back limply in her seat. «You can now counter the force?» Plank asked. «I think so,» Susan said. «Selectively?» «Yes.» «A small test, then,» Plank said. «Do I hear any objections?» «Will it alert them?» Ellen asked. «I don't know.» «I don't think passing an object a few millimeters in diameter will cause much of a disturbance,» Susan said. «They would have to be watching very closely.» «I feel that we can count on the very element that helped my grandfather, arrogance. The Eater was so sure of himself that he left grandfather and the others to their own devices. From what John Plank said and wrote, I'm sure that the parent race feels the same sort of smug arrogance toward us. They told him that it was quite unlikely that we'd