“Wrong? Any damn fool can look out across the sea, or a prairie, and see it’s flat. And you just watch: the sun travels across the sky every day, and it rises over the horizon in the east just when it has to if it keeps traveling back under the earth all night. You’re denying the obvious!”
“I see your point, sir. But we have the instruments that don’t have any subjective bias; they show what’s really happening.”
“Jack up the drive wheels on a ground-car, and race the engine,” I suggested. “The speedo will say you’re doing eighty or ninety.”
“Really,” he corrected, “it just says the wheel the sensor is attached to is spinning. But that’s a real phenomenon. The meter isn’t imagining it.”
“Which shows us how much human interpretation, based on preconceptions, goes into our understanding of even the most basic observation, Andy.”
“Well,” the young fellow started, “it doesn’t really matter…”
“That’s right. What we have to do is decide on a course of action, and do it. Actually, I have to make the decision. I can’t fob the responsibility off on a junior officer.”
He was nodding in agreement. “I didn’t mean, sir…” He trailed off.
I told him I knew, and maneuvered away from the coach. It was finished in shiny black lacquer and looked brand new. There were solid rubber tires on its high, spoked wheels.
“It’s a fake,” I told Helm. “It was apparently intended to give us the idea we were looking for an A-line with a backward transportation technology. But that’s synthetic lacquer and rubber. Let’s find out what they were trying to conceal.” I maneuvered back to match openings again, tighter, this time. The pink aureole sprang up. I stepped back inside, ducking my head under the low brocaded ceiling.
“Sir,” Helm spoke up. “This could date from the nineties, when those two Italian fellows built the first, ah, shuttle. Maybe they wanted to disguise the machine―”
“Sure,” I agreed. “Maybe. If so, this is a museum piece we have to take back home. In the meantime, I’m going to check it out.” I got back out and climbed up to the elevated driver’s seat. With no horses, the thing had to have a drive mechanism. It did. I called Helm up and showed him the controls concealed under the curved dashboard, which really was a functional barrier to the dirt thrown up by horses’ hooves. I traced the connections and found a compact energy cell and a power lead to the left hind wheel. I touched the “go” lever and the high vehicle rolled smoothly forward a few inches.
“I was thinking, sir,” Helm contributed as soon as he had climbed up beside me, still holding the sleeping infant. “Maybe whoever owns this buggy was running a few minutes behind schedule. They intended to phase in before we found the pup, and missed their coordinates just enough to let us get here before them.”
“That’s a possibility,” I acknowledged. “But why would they leave the baby here, then decoy us here to find it, then come dashing to the rescue before we had time to react to the setup?” I wasn’t expecting an answer, but went on silently pondering the question. Somebody, the Ylokk security boys, or another player not yet on the board, had gone to a great deal of trouble to waylay us. There was a reason for it, no doubt.
I told Helm to sit tight and be ready to drive, and went back down and got back in the shuttle.
I kind of hated to abandon the gleaming black coach in null-time; any museum in the Imperium would swap its collection of Jurassic dinosaurs for it. But I recorded the locus and told Helm to come down and strap in. Smovia had slept through finding the baby. I let him sleep. Poor fellow; he’d been on his feet ever since I’d brought Swft to him, at least twenty-four hours subjective, and I was planning to double-cross him.
“Andy,” I addressed the lad gently, “I can try something, but I don’t know what the result will be. This is a desperate expedient that’s never been used in the field. It will either start us moving normally again, or eject us violently onto another entropic level. How do you vote?”
“ ‘Vote,’ sir?” He sounded shocked. “It is my duty, sir, to follow the colonel’s orders, sir…”
“All right,” I agreed. I didn’t want to upset him. “We’ll do it. Try to relax and get some sleep.”
I went forward to the console and pulled out the component trays, disconnecting the safety locks to do so. The theory was straightforward enough: even in an entropic vacuole, energies are flowing. Not the normal entropic and temporal energies of the problyon flux, but more esoteric if equally potent forces little noticed in a normal continuum. The insidious ninth force, for example, which causes the laws of “chance” to operate; and the tenth, which is responsible for the conservation of angular momentum, and which causes dust-grain-sized comets a light-year from the sun to execute a smart elliptical U-turn and head back Solward from out where Sol is simply the brightest star in sight. If I cross-controlled, applying control pressure tending to shift the shuttle from its present A-line, and at the same time cranked in entropic pressure tending to reverse our A-entropic motion, the two forces would be placed in direction opposition: the irresistible force would meet the irresistible force, and the shuttle would be squeezed like a watermelon seed until it popped out―or blew up.
I felt a little shaky. In the Net labs, we’d once tried a small-scale experiment involving only a single neutron, and it had blown the entire wing off into the realms of unrealized potential. But I didn’t have any other ideas. It was only a moment’s work to reverse the wave-guides and connectors to set it up: then I had to throw the drive―full gain lever to see what would happen. The simple gray plastic knob looked pinkish―an entropic aureole indicating the leakage from the leashed energies of the universe. I threw the lever. The world blew up.
Chapter 11
“―or at least that’s what I thought,” I was explaining to Andy, who was bending over me again.
“It seems like I’m always coming to with you giving me a worried look,” I said.
He grinned and nodded. “There was quite a . . . well, a wrenching, sir,” he told me, as if that meant something. He looked around the cramped compartment as if he expected it―whatever “it” was―to happen again. “I felt . . . twisted, sir,” he explained earnestly. “It lasted for maybe a second, but it seemed like a long time.” He put a hand against his upper abdomen. “It felt awful, sir, but it passed, and everything was just like before, except that you were unconscious, sir. I just started to try to bring you around, and you started talking. Said it blew up, but it didn’t, Colonel!” For once he didn’t apologize for contradicting me. “How’s the view outside?” I wondered, and got up easily enough and took the two steps necessary to look out the view-panel. I saw at once that the mudscape was gone. In its place was a bleak New Englandish day with leafless trees and wet leaves on the ground. A brisk wind seemed to be blowing, judging from the movement of the bare branches and the flying bits of vegetable matter. A spatter of rain was blowing with them. There was a cottage in sight, a hundred yards along a well-worn trail. It was half sod hut, half dugout. Light glowed from a window made of leaded bottle-bottoms. Smoke was rising from a crooked chimney that emerged from the sodden ground beside the biggest tree in sight. It gave an impression of an extensive underground installation, but it looked a lot cozier than the rest of the scene. While we watched, a tall Ylokk dressed in a red body-stocking came running on all fours from behind the house, if house it was, and along the trail, right up to the shuttle. The alien halted a few feet away, put nose to the ground, and went sniffing around our vehicle.