"Are you one of them, Mr. Zwingli?"
"No, I am not going into the Cube. Shall I tell you why? I reason as follows: either the aliens exist or they do not. If they exist, either they have told the exact truth through you, Mr. Stone, or they have not. Already we have a twenty-five percent chance of a favorable outcome. If they have told the exact truth, then I will be revived on another planet; either I will like living there or I will not. Now we are down to a twelve and a half percent chance. Not good enough.
"Now if I remain, the chance of a favorable outcome is twenty-five percent, twice as much, because I already know that I like living here on this planet. If the aliens exist, and if they have told the exact truth, I lose. But if they do not exist, or if they have not told the truth about the Earth being destroyed, I win. So I am staying. And besides," he said, blowing a plume of smoke, "what is happening here is very interesting. I could not bear not to know what happens next."
"I feel the same way."
"Well, Mr. Stone, I must go to my office now. May I assume that your parole is still in force until you tell me it is ended?"
Stone looked at him steadily. "Not to damage the airship or anyone in it? Yeah, okay."
"Good. In that case, please feel free to go anywhere you like in the airship, except of course the control chamber and the scaffolding in the gas bag, which are too dangerous. If there is anything you need, use any console. Someone will always be on duty to answer your questions." He rose. "And I would be happy if you would join me for a cocktail before dinner."
It was early afternoon. At the writing table in the lounge, Stone was writing something on the margin of a newspaper. By using the zoom lens, Van Loon could read it quite easily: ED STONE ILLEGALLY HELD PRISONER ON AIRSHIP BAYERN . NOTIFY MRS. FLORENCE ROONEY, PARK AVENUE HOTEL NEW YORK. $100,000 REWARD .
Van Loon thumbed the intercom.
"Yes?"
"Mr. Zwingli, Mr. Stone has written a message on a newspaper."
"And?"
"Now he is tearing a piece of the newspaper. Now he puts a hundred-dollar bill in it. He is making a paper airplane. Do you want me to stop him? If so, I have to hurry."
"No, leave him alone. "
"He will fly the paper airplane out one of the windows."
"I know. Let him fly all the airplanes he wants, Van Loon. You did right to tell me, however. Well done!" The connection clicked off.
Van Loon sighed and continued to watch. As he had predicted, Stone finished his airplane, cleverly crimping the hundred-dollar bill into its nose so that it would not fall out, and took it to the nearest window, which he opened. When he released the airplane, it dived out of sight immediately. Stone leaned over to watch it, then pulled his head back in and closed the window.
"Why make an airplane?" Van Loon muttered. "Why not just drop the paper out the window? But then the engines might get it. So he is not so foolish after all."
Now he saw that Stone was folding another hundred dollar bill into an airplane, leaving out the newspaper altogether. He tossed it experimentally, but it nosedived a few feet away. "That's an old bill, of course you can't make a proper airplane from it," Van Loon muttered.
Stone smoothed out the bill and put it away. Now he had got out a fifty-pound note, which had better proportions, and he was trying again. The pound was a little more airworthy than the dollar, but not much. Stone put it away and sat motionless a few moments. Van Loon watched in keen anticipation.
Presently Stone got up and began opening the drawers in the end tables one by one, pawing through their contents. He found some playing cards, a box of tissues, paper clips, rubber bands, a roll of cellotape, a scratchpad, and several pencils. He spread out a sheet of tissue on the table, tore off four long strips of tape and attached them to the comers of the tissue. When he began attaching the other ends of the strips to a rolled-up bill, Van Loon thumbed the intercom again.
"Yes, Van Loon, what is it now?"
"Mr. Zwingli, now he is making a parachute!"
"A parachute?"
"Yes, I'm sure of it."
''All right, he can make parachutes, too. Thank you for your alertness, Van Loon. Tell me at once if he does anything to endanger the ship.''
"Certainly, Mr. Zwingli." But the connection had already been broken.
Stone pressed each strip of tape together and rolled it into a sort of cable. He bounced the finished object in his hand, then tossed it up, but evidently he was not satisfied with the way if fell. And no wonder, Van Loon thought; he himself had made such parachutes when he was a child, and had weighted them with pebbles or bolts, but a rolled-up dollar bill was not heavy enough, as any fool would know.
Ah! Now Stone had seen the problem correctly. He was rolling the bill around one of the pencils, attaching it again to a piece of tissue. This time when he tossed it, the parachute opened quite satisfactorily. "Hurrah!" said Van Loon before he could stop himself.
Now Stone was taking the whole thing apart, peeling off all the tape and throwing it in the wastebasket, unrolling the bill and spreading it out on the table. Now he was writing a message on the hundred-dollar bill. He could have saved himself some time if he had done that in the beginning, Van Loon thought. Now he rolled the bill up again, taped it around the pencil, attached it to the comers of a square of tissue. He swept all his failures into the wastebasket, took the redesigned parachute to the window and threw it out. Judging by his expression, the parachute was a success. He went back to the table and started another.
"This is Gregory Montaine in Shanghai, and I'm talking to Shu Gao-Den, the superintendent of the Cube Project. Mr. Shu, it must have taken a tremendous amount of organization just to get these people here, lined up and ready to go. How many are you loading every day?"
"About eight hundred thousand. It was twice that when we were running at full capacity. We hope to get it up to at least a million again."
"A million! How many is that in an hour?"
"Over forty-one thousand. It is eleven and a half every second.''
"Now, how is that possible? Or, let me ask, how long does it take to get each capsule up to its place on the Cube?"
"At this stage, it takes approximately two minutes to reach the far side of the working surface."
"And how fast are the capsules traveling when they get there?"
"They are traveling approximately one hundred miles an hour. "
"Amazing! But don't you have to slow them down?"
"No, because one capsule at the end of each file is set in place first and stabilized. Then the rest of the file is accelerated until each capsule is arrested by the one in front of it. Each capsule is stabilized in tum. Technically, each capsule except the first one in a file is moving at a high rate of speed, but they can't actually move because the first one is not moving."
"I'm not sure I understand that," said the reporter, grinning and scratching his head.
"Well, it's very simple, although it seems contrary to experience. In the stabilization field, every object retains its intrinsic relative motion, but each one is being rotated through multidimensional space at millions of times a second, and therefore if a capsule is set against a stabilized object, it can't move at all, and it can't even impart any of its momentum to the stabilized object, because that object is unable to move."