"My waistline is just line, thank you."
"Okay, Captain."
"Very well. Please thank him for me."
He was so indifferent about it that I added a touch of my own. "My partner is a girl, Captain, not a "him." Her mother has placed a two-hour curfew on it. Otherwise it must be arranged with LRF."
"So. Very well." He turned to Eastman. "Can't we manage to coordinate these communication watches?"
"I'm trying, Captain. But it is new to me. .. and we have only three watchstanders left."
"A watch in three should not be too difficult. Yet there always seems to be some reason why we can't transmit. Comment?"
"Well, sir, you saw the difficulty just now. It's a matter of coordinating with Earth. Uh, I believe the special communicators usually arranged that themselves. Or one of them did."
"Which one? Mr. McNeil?"
"I believe Bartlett usually handled it, sir."
"So. Bartlett?"
"I did, sir."
"Very well, you have the job again. Arrange a continuous watch." He started to get up.
How do you tell the Captain he can't have his bucket ofpaint? Aye aye, sir. But just a minute, Captain—"
"Yes?"
"Do I understand you are authorizing me to arrange a continuous watch with LRF? Signed with your release number?"
"Naturally."
"Well, what do I do if they won't agree to such long hours for the old lady? Ask for still longer hours for the other two? In the case of my partner, you'll run into parent trouble; she's a young girl."
"So. I can't see why the home office hired such people."
I didn't say anything. If he didn't know that you don't hire telepaths the way you hire butchers I wasn't going to explain.
But he persisted. "Comment?"
"I have no comment, sir. You can't get more than three or four hours a day out of any of them, except in extreme emergency. Is this one? If it is, I can arrange it without bothering the home office."
He did not answer directly. Instead he said, "Arrange the best watch list you can. Consult with Mr. Eastman." As he turned to leave I caught a look of unutterable weariness on his face and suddenly felt sorry for him. At least I didn't want to swap jobs with him.
Vicky took a trick in the middle of the night, over Kathleen's objections. Kathleen wanted to take it herself, but the truth was that she and I could no longer work easily without Vicky in the circuit, at least not anything as difficult as code groups.
The Captain did not come in to breakfast and I got there late. I looked around and found a place by Janet Meers. We no longer sat by departments—just one big horseshoe table, with the rest of the mess room arranged to look like a lounge, so that it would not seem so empty.
I was just digging into scrambled yeast on toast when Mr. Eastman stood up and tapped a glass for attention. He looked as if he had not slept for days. "Quiet, please. I have a message from the Captain." He pulled out a sheet and started to read:
" 'Notice to All Hands: By direction of the Long Range Foundation the mission of this ship has been modified. We will remain in the neighborhood of Beta Ceti pending rendezvous with Foundation Ship Serendipity. Rendezvous is expected in approximately one month. Immediately thereafter we will shape orbit for Earth.
" 'F. X. Urqhardt, commanding Lewis and Clark.'"
My jaw dropped. Why, the silent creeper! All the time I had been lambasting him in my mind he had been arguing the home office into canceling our orders ... no wonder he had used code; you don't say in clear language that your ship is a mess and your crew has gone to pot. Not if you can help it, you don't. I didn't even resent that he had not trusted us freaks to respect the security of communications; I wouldn't have trusted myself, under the circumstances.
Janet's eyes were shining... like a woman in love, or like a relativistic mathematician who has just found a new way to work a transformation. "So they've done it!" she said in a hushed voice.
"Done what?" I asked. She was certainly taking it in a big way; I hadn't realized she was that anxious to get home.
"Tommie, don't you see? They've done it, they've done it, they've applied irrelevance. Dr. Babcock was right."
"Huh?"
"Why, it's perfectly plain. What kind of a ship can get here in a month? An irrelevant ship, of course. One that is faster than light." She frowned. "But I don't see why it should take even a month. It shouldn't take any time at all.
It wouldn't use time."
I said, "Take it easy, Janet. I'm stupid this morning—I didn't have much sleep last night. Why do you say that ship
... uh, the Serendipity... is faster than light? That's impossible."
"Tommie, Tommie... look, dear, if it was an ordinary ship, in order to rendezvous with us here, it would have had to have left Earth over sixty-three years ago."
"Well, maybe it did."
"Tommie! It couldn't possibly—because that long ago non body knew that we would be here now. How could they?"
I figured back. Sixty-three Greenwich years ago... mama, that would have been sometime during our first peak. Janet seemed to be right; only an incredible optimist or a fortune teller would have sent a ship from Earth at that time to meet us here now. "I don't understand it."
"Don't you see, Tommie? I've explained it to you, I know I have. Irrelevance. Why, you telepaths were the reason the investigation started; you proved that "simultaneity' was an admissible concept ,...nd the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist."
I felt my head begin to ache. "They don't? Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?"
"Just a mathematical abstraction, dear. Nothing more." She smiled and looked motherly. "Poor 'Sentimental Tommie.' You worry too much."
I suppose Janet was right, for we made rendezvous with F. S. Serendipity twenty-nine Greenwich days later. We spent the time moseying out at a half gravity to a locus five billion miles Galactic-north of Beta Ceti, for it appeared that the Sarah did not want to come too close to the big star. Still, at sixty-three light-years, five billion miles is close shooting—a very near miss. We also spent the time working like mischief to arrange and prepare specimens and in collating data. Besides that, Captain Urqhardt suddenly discovered, now that .we were expecting visitors, that lots and lots of things had not been cleaned and polished lately. He even inspected staterooms, which I thought was snoopy.
The Sarah had a mind reader aboard, which helped when it came time to close rendezvous. She missed us by nearly two light-hours; then their m-r and myself exchanged coordinates (referred to Beta Ceti) by relay back Earthside and got each other pinpointed in a hurry. By radar and radio alone we could have fiddled around for a week—if we had ever made contact at all.
But once that was done, the Sarah turned out to be a fast ship, lively enough to bug your eyes out. She was in our lap, showing on our short-range radar, as I was reporting the coordinates she had just had to the Captain. An hour later she was made fast and sealed to our lock. And she was a little ship. The Elsie had seemed huge when I first joined her; then after a while she was just the right size, or a little cramped for some purposes. But the Sarah wouldn't have made a decent Earth-Moon shuttle.