Ryerson looked in some awe at the chit which the other man thumbprinted. He could not suppress it: "Do you always travel first-cla.s.s to the Moon?"

Maclaren put a fresh cigarette between his lips and touched his lighter-ring to the end. His smile c.o.c.ked it at a wry angle.

"I suppose," he answered, "I have always traveled first-cla.s.s through life."

THE ferry made turnover without spilling a drink or a pa.s.senger and backed down onto Tycho Port. Maclaren adjusted without a thought to Lunar gravity, Ryerson turned a little green and swallowed a pill. But even in his momentary distress, Ryerson was bewildered at merely walking through a tube to a monorail station. Third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers must sub-mit to interminable official bullying: safety regulations, queues, a.s.signment to hostel. Now, within minutes, he was again on soft cushions, staring through crystalline panes at the saw-toothed magnificence of mountains.

When the train got under way, he gripped his hands to-gether, irrationally afraid. It took him a while to hunt down the reason: the ghost of his father's G.o.d, ranting at pride and sloth from the tomb which the son had erected.

"Let's eat," said Maclaren. "I chose this train with malice aforethought. It's slow enough so we can enjoy our meal en route, and the chef puts his heart into the oysters won-ton."

"I'm not . . . not hungry," stammered Ryerson.

Maclaren's dark, hooked face flashed a grin. "That's what c.o.c.ktails and hors d'oeuvres are for, lad. Stuff yourself. If it's true what I've heard of deep-s.p.a.ce rations, we're in for a dreary month or two."

"You mean you've never been on an interstellar ship?"

"Of course not. Never been beyond the Moon in my life. Why should I do any such ridiculous thing?"

Maclaren's cloak swirled like fire as he led the way toward the diner. Beneath an iridescent white tunic, his legs showed muscular and hairless, down to the tooled-leather buskins; the slant of the beret on his head was pure insolence. Ryerson, trailing drably behind in s.p.a.ceman's gray coveralls, felt bitter-ness.

What have I been dragged away from Tamara for? Does this peac.o.c.k know a ma.s.s from a hole in the ground? He's hired himself a toy, is all, because for a while he's bored with wine and women . .

.and Tamara is locked away on a rock with a self-righteous old beast who hates the sound of her name!

As they sat down at their table, Maclaren went on, "But this is too good a chance to pa.s.s up. I found me a tame mathemati-cian last year and sicced him onto the Schrodinger equation-Sugimoto's relativistic version, I mean; Yuen postulates too b.l.o.o.d.y much for my taste-anyhow, he worked it out for the quant.i.ties involved in a dark star, ma.s.s and gravitational intensities and cetera. His results make us both wonder if such a body doesn't go over to an entirely new stage of degen-eracy at the core. One gigantic neutron? Well, maybe that's too fantastic. But consider-"

And while the monorail ran on toward Farside, Maclaren left the Interhuman language quite behind him.

Ryerson could follow tensors, even when scribbled on a menu, but Maclaren had some new function, symbolized by a pneumatic female outline, thatreduced to a generalized tensor under certain conditions.

Ryerson stepped out on Farside, two hours later, with his brain rotating.

He had heard of the cyclopean installations which fill the whole of Yukawa Crater and spread out onto the plains be-yond. Who has not? But all he saw on his first visit was a gigantic concourse, a long slideway tunnel, and a good many uniformed technicians. He made some timid mention of his disappointment to Maclaren. The New Zealander nodded: "Ex-actly. There's more romance, more sense of distance covered, and a devil of a lot better scenery, in an afternoon on the bay, than in a fifty light-year leap. I say s.p.a.ce travel is overrated. And it's a fact, I've heard, that s.p.a.cemen themselves prefer the interplanetary runs. They take the dull interstellar watches as a matter of duty, by turns."

Here and there the tunnel branched off, signs indicating the way to Alpha Centauri Jump, Tau Ceti Jump, Epsilon Eridani Jump, all the long-colonized systems. Those were for pa.s.sen-gers; freight went by other beams. There was no great bustle along any of the tubes. Comparatively few Earthlings had occasion to visit outsystem on business; still fewer could afford it for pleasure, and of course no colonial came here without a grudging O.K. The Protector had trouble enough; he was not going to expose the mother planet and its restless billions to new ideas born under new skies, nor let any more colonials than he could help see first-hand what an inferior position they held. That was the real reason for the ban, every edu-cated Terrestrial knew as much. The ma.s.ses, being illiterate, swallowed a vague official excuse about trade policy.

The branches leading to Sirius Jump, Procyon Jump, and the other attained but uncolonizable systems, were almost deserted. Little came from such places-perhaps an occasional gem or exotic chemical. But relay stations had been estab-lished there, for 'casting to more useful planets.

Ryerson's heart leaped when he pa.s.sed a newly activated sign: an arrow and WASHINGTON 5584 JUMP burning above.That tunnel would be filled, come next week!

He should have been in the line. And Tamara. Well, there would be later waves. His pa.s.sage was already paid for, he had had no difficulty about transferring to another section.

To make conversation, he said through a tightness: "Where are the bulkheads?"

"Which ones?" asked Maclaren absently.

"Safety bulkheads. A receiver does fail once in a great while, you know. That's why the installations here are spread out so much, why every star has a separate 'caster. There's a vast amount of energy involved in each transmission-one reason why a 'casting is more expensive than transportation by s.p.a.ce-ship.

Even a small increment, undissipated, can melt a whole chamber."

"Oh, yes. That." Maclaren had let Ryerson get pompous about the obvious because it was plain he needed something to bolster himself. What itched the kid, anyhow? One should think that when the Authority offered a fledgling a post on an expedition as fundamental as this-Of course, it had upset Ryerson's plans of emigration. Rut not importantly. There was no danger he would find all the choice sites on Rama occupied if he came several weeks late: too few people had the fare as it was.

Maclaren said, "I see what you mean. Yes, the bulkheads are there, but recessed into the walls and camouflaged. You don't want to emphasize possible danger to the cash customers, eh? Some technic might get annoyed and make trouble."

"Some day," said Ryerson, "they'll reduce the energy margin needed; and they'll figure how to reproduce a Frank tube, rather than manufacture it. Record the pattern and recreate from a matter bank. Then anyone can afford to ride the beams. Interplanetary ships, even air and surface craft, will become obsolete."

Maclaren made no answer. He had sometimes thought, more or less idly, about the unrealized potentialities of matter-casting. Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not.

Not for the ma.s.ses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren-or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the--No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.

As for matter transmission, the difficulty and hence the expense lay in the complexity of the signal.

Consider an adult human. There are some 1014 cells in him, each an elaborate structure involving many proteins with molecular weights in the millions. You had to scan every one of those molecules-identify it structurally, ticket its momentary energy levels, and place it in proper spatio-temporal relationship to every other molecule-as nearly simultaneously as the laws of phys-ics permitted. You couldn't take a man apart, or rea.s.semble him, in more than a few microseconds; he wouldn't survive it. You couldn't even transmit a recognizable beefsteak in much less of a hurry.

So the scanning beam went through and through, like a blade of energy. It touched every atom in its path, was modi-fied thereby, and flashed that modification onto the transmit-ter matrix. But such fury destroyed. The scanned object was reduced to gas so quickly that only an oscilloscope could watch the process. The gas was sucked into the destructor chamber and atomically condensed in the matter bank; in time it would become an incoming pa.s.senger, or incoming freight. In a sense, the man had died.

If you could record the signal which entered the transmitter matrix-you could keep such a record indefinitely, recreate the man and his instantaneous memories, thoughts, habits, prejudices, hopes and loves and hates and horrors, a thousand years afterward. You could create a billion identical men. Or, more practically, a single handmade prototype could become a billion indistinguishable copies; nothing would be worth more than any handful of dirt. Or . . . superimpose the neurone trace-patterns, memories, of a lifetime, onto a recorded twenty-year-old body, be born again and live forever!

The signal was too complex, though. An unpromising re-search program went on. Perhaps in a few centuries they would find some trick which would enable them to record a man, or even a Frank tube.

Meanwhile, transmission had to be simultaneous with scanning. The signal went out. Probably it would be relayed a few times. Eventually the desired receiving chamber got it. The receiver matrix, powered by dying atomic nuclei, flung gases together, formed higher elements, formed molecules and cells and dreams according to the signal, in microseconds. It was designed as an energy-consuming pro-cess, for obvious reasons: packing fraction energy was dissi-pated in gravitic and magnetic fields, to help shape the man.

(Or the beefsteak, or the s.p.a.ceship, or the colonial planet's produce.) He left the receiving chamber and went about his business.

A mono-isotopic element is a simple enough signal to record,Maclaren reminded himself,though even that requires a houseful of transistor elements. So this civilization can afford to be extravagant with metals-can use pure mercury as the raw material of a s.p.a.ceship's blast, for instance. But we still eat our bread in the sweat of some commoner's brow.

Not for the first time, but with no great indignation-life was too short for anything but amus.e.m.e.nt at the human race-Maclaren wondered if the recording problem really was as difficult as the physicists claimed. No government likes revo-lutions, and molecular duplication would revolutionize society beyond imagining. Just think how they had to guard the sta-tions as it was, and stick them out here on the Moon ...otherwise, even today, some fanatic could steal a tube of ra-dium from a hospital and duplicate enough to sterilize a planet!

"Oh, well," he said, half aloud.

THEY reached the special exploration section and entered an office. There was red tape to unsnarl.

Ryerson let Maclaren handle it, and spent the time trying to understand that soon the pattern which was himself would be embodied in newly-shaped atoms, a hundred light-years from Tamara. It wouldn't penetrate. It was only words.

Finally the papers were stamped. The transceivers to/from an interstellar s.p.a.ceship could handle several hundred kilos at a time; Maclaren and Ryerson went together. They had a moment's wait because of locked safety switches on theSouth-ern Cross: someone else was arriving or departing ahead of them.

"Watch that first step," said Maclaren. "It's a honey."

"What?" Ryerson blinked at him, uncomprehending.

The circuit closed. There was no sensation, the process went too fast.

The scanner put its signal into the matrix. The matrix mod-ulated the carrier wave. But such terminology is mere slang, borrowed from electronics. You cannot have a "wave" when you have no velocity, and gravitational forces do not. (This is a more accurate rendition of the common statement that "gravi-tation propagates at an infinite speed.") Inconceivable ener-gies surged within a thermonuclear fire chamber; nothing con-trolled them, nothing could control them, but the force fields they themselves generated.

Matter pulsed in and out of exis-tencequa matter, from particle to gamma ray quantum and back. Since quanta have no rest ma.s.s, the pulsations dis-turbed the geometry of s.p.a.ce according to the laws of Ein-steinian mechanics. Not much: gravitation is feebler than magnetism or electricity. Were it not for the resonance effect, the signal would have been smothered in "noise" a few kilome-ters away. Even as it was, there were many relayings across the pa.r.s.ecs until the matrix on theCross reacted. And yet in one sense no time at all had pa.s.sed; and no self-respecting mathematician would have called the "beam" by such a name. It was, however, a signal, the only signal which relativity physics allowed to go faster than light-and, after all, it did not reallygo, it simplywas.

Despite the pill inside him, Ryerson felt as if the bottom had dropped out of the world. He grabbed for a handhold. The after-image of the transmitter chamber yielded to the coils and banks of the receiver room on a s.p.a.ceship. He hung weight-less, a thousand billion billion kilometers from Earth.

FORWARD of the 'casting chambers, "above" them during acceleration, were fuel deck, gyros, and air renewal plant. Then you pa.s.sed through the observation deck, where instruments and laboratory equipment crowded together. A flimsy wall around the shaftway marked off the living quar-ters: folding bunks, galley, bath, table, benches, shelves, and lockers, all crammed into a six-meter circle.

Seiichi Nakamura wrapped one leg casually around a stan-chion, to keep himself from drifting in air currents, and made a ceremony out of leafing through the log-book in his hands. It gave the others a chance to calm down, and the yellow-haired boy, David Ryerson, seemed to need it. The astrophysicist, Maclaren, achieved the unusual feat of lounging in free fall; he puffed an expensive Earth-side cigarette and wrinkled his pa-trician nose at the pervading smell of an old ship, two hundred years of cooking and sweat and machine oil. The big, ugly young engineer, Sverdlov, merely looked sullen. Nakamura had never met any of them before.

"Well, gentlemen," he said at last. "Pardon me, I had to check the data recorded by the last pilot. Now I know approxi-mately where we are at." He laughed with polite self-depreca-tion. "Of course you are all familiar with the articles. The pilot is captain. His duty is to guide the ship where the chief scien-tist-Dr.

Maclaren-san in this case-wishes, within the limits of safety as determined by his own judgment. In case of my death or disability, command devolves upon the engineer, ah, Sverdlov-san, and you are to return home as soon as practica-ble. Yes-s-s. But I am sure we will all have a most pleasant and instructive expedition together."

He felt the ba.n.a.lity of his words. It was the law, and a wise one, that authority be defined at once if there were non-Guild personnel aboard. Some pilots contented themselves with reading the regulations aloud, but it had always seemed an unnecessarily cold procedure to Nakamura. Only . . . he saw a sick bewilderment in Ryerson's eyes, supercilious humor in Maclaren's, angry impatience in Sverdlov's . . . his attempt at friendliness had gone flat.

"We do not operate so formally," he went on in a lame fash-ion. "We shall post a schedule of housekeeping duties and help each other, yes? Well. That is for later. Now as to the star, we have some approximate data and estimates taken by previous watches. It appears to have about four times the ma.s.s of Sol; its radius is hardly more than twice Earth's, possibly less; it emits detectably only in the lower radio frequencies, and even that is feeble. I have here a quick reading of the spectrum which may interest you, Dr. Maclaren."

THE big dark man reached out for it. His brows went up. "Now this," he said, "is the weirdest collection of wave lengths I ever saw." He flickered experienced eyes along the column of numbers. "Seems to be a lot of triplets, but the lines appear so broad, judging from the probable errors given, that I can't be sure without more careful . . . hm-m-m." Glancing back at Nakamura: "Just where are we with relation to the star?"

"Approximately two million kilometers from the center of its ma.s.s. We are being drawn toward it, of course, since an orbit has not yet been established, but have enough radial velocity of our own to-"

"Never mind." The sophistication dropped from Maclaren like a tunic. He said with a boy's eagerness, "I would like to get as near the star as possible. How close do you think you can put us?"

Nakamura smiled. He had a feeling Maclaren could prove likable. "Too close isn't prudent. There would be meteors."

"Not around this one!" exclaimed Maclaren. "If physical the-ory is anything but mescaline dreams, a dead star is the clinker of a supernova. Any matter orbiting in its neighbor-hood became incandescent gas long ago."

"Atmosphere?" asked Nakamura dubiously. "Since we have nothing to see by, except starlight, we could hit its air."

"Hm-m-m. Yes. I suppose it would have some. But not very deep: too compressed to be deep. In fact, the radio photo-sphere, from which the previous watches estimated the star's diameter, must be nearly identical with the fringes of atmo-sphere."

"It would also take a great deal of reaction ma.s.s to pull us back out of its attraction, if we got too close,"

said Nakamura. He unclipped the specialized slide rule at his belt and made a few quick computations.

"In fact, this vessel cannot escape from a distance much less than three-quarters million kilome-ters, if there is to be reasonable amount of ma.s.s left for ma-neuvering around afterward. And I am sure you wish to ex-plore regions farther from the star, yes-s-s? However, I am willing to go that close."

Maclaren smiled. "Good enough. How long to arrive?"

"I estimate three hours, including time to establish an or-bit." Nakamura looked around their faces. "If everyone is pre-pared to go on duty, it is best we get into the desired path at once."

"Not even a cup of tea first?" grumbled Sverdlov.

Nakamura nodded at Maclaren and Ryerson. "You gentle-men will please prepare tea and sandwiches, and take them to the engineer and myself in about ninety minutes."

"Now, wait!" protested Maclaren. "We've hardly arrived. I haven't even looked at my instruments. I have to set up-"

"In ninety minutes, if you will be so kind. Very well, let us a.s.sume our posts."

Nakamura turned from Maclaren's suddenly mutinous look and Sverdlov's broad grin. He entered the shaftway and pulled himself along it by the rungs. Through the transparent plastic he saw the observation deck fall behind. The boat deck was next, heavy storage levels followed, and then he was forward, into the main turret.

IT was a clear plastic bubble, unshuttered now when the sole outside illumination was a wintry blaze of stars.

Floating toward the controls, Nakamura grew aware of the silence. So quiet. So uncountably many stars.

The constella-tions were noticeably distorted, some altogether foreign. He searched a crystal darkness for Capella, but the bulge of the ship hid it from him. No use looking for Sol without a tele-scope, here on the lonely edge of the known.

Fear of raw emptiness lay tightly coiled within him. He smothered it by routine: strapped himself before the console, checked the instruments one by one, spoke with Sverdlov down the length of the ship. His fingers chattered out a compu-tation on a set of keys, he fed the tape to the robot, he felt a faint tug as the gyros woke up, swiveling the vessel into posi-tion for blast. Even now, at the end of acceleration to half light-speed and deceleration to a few hundred kilometers per sec-ond, theCross bore several tons of reaction-ma.s.s mercury. The total ma.s.s, including hull, equipment, and payload, was a bit over one kiloton. Accordingly, her ma.s.sive gyroscopes needed half an hour to turn her completely around.

Waiting, he studied the viewscreens. Since he must back down on his goal, what they showed him was more important than what his eyes saw through the turret in the nose. He could not make out the black sun.Well, what do you expect? he asked himself angrily.It must be occulating a few stars, but there are too many. "Dr. Maclaren," he said into the intercom, "can you give me a radio directional on the target, as a check?"

"Aye, aye." A surly answer. Maclaren resented having to put his toys to work. He would rather have been taking spectra, reading ionoscopes, gulping gas and dust samples from out-side into his a.n.a.lyzers, every centimeter of the way. Well, he would just have to get those data when they receded from the star again.

Nakamura's eyes strayed down the ship herself, as shown in the viewscreens.Old, he thought.The very nation which built her has ceased to exist. But good work. A man's work outlives his hands.

Though what remains of the little ivory figures my father carved to ornament our house? What chance did my brother have to create, before he shriveled in my arms? No! He shut off the thought, like a surgeon clamping a vein, and re-freshed his memory of theCygnus cla.s.s.

This hull was a sphere of reinforced self-sealing plastic, fifty meters across, its outside smoothness broken by hatches, ports, air locks, and the like. The various decks sliced it in parallel planes. Aft, diametrically opposite this turret, the hull opened on the fire chamber. And thence ran two thin metal skeletons, thirty meters apart, a hundred meters long, like radio masts or ancient oil derricks. They comprised two series of rings, a couple of centimeters in diameter, with auxiliary wiring and a spidery framework holding it all together-the ion accelerators, built into and supported by the gravitic trans-ceiver web.

"A ten-second test blast, if you please, Engineer Sverdlov," said Nakamura.

The instruments showed him a certain unbalance in the distribution of ma.s.s within the hull. Yussuf bin Suleiman, who had just finished watch aboard the ship and gone back to Earth, was sloppy about . . . no, it was unjust to think so say that he had his own style of piloting. Nakamura set the pumps to work.

Mercury ran from the fuel deck to the trim tanks.

By then the ship was pointed correctly and it was time to start decelerating again. "Stand by for blast ...

Report ... I shall want one-point-five-seven standard gees for-" Nakamura reeled it off almost automatically.

It rumbled in the ship. Weight came, like a sudden fist in the belly. Nakamura held his body relaxed in harness, only his eyes moved, now and then a finger touched a control. The secret of judo, of life, was to hold every part of the organism at ease except those precise tissues needed for the moment's task- Why was it so d.a.m.nably difficult to put into practice?

MERCURY fed through pipes and pumps, past Sverdlov's control board, past the radiation wall, into the expan-sion chamber and through the ionizer and so as a spray past the sunlike heart of a thermonuclear plasma. Briefly, each atom endured a rage of mesons. It broke down, gave up its ma.s.s as pure energy, which at once became proton-antiproton pairs. Magnetic fields separated them as they were born: posi-tive and negative particles fled down the linear accelerators. The plasma, converting the death of matter directly to electric-ity, charged each ring at a successively higher potential. When the particles emerged from the last ring, they were traveling at three-fourths the speed of light.

At such an exhaust velocity, no great ma.s.s had to be dis-charged. Nor was the twin stream visible; it was too efficient. Sensitive instruments might have detected a pale gamma-colored splotch, very far behind the ship, as a few opposite charges finally converged on each other, but that effect was of no importance.

The process was energy-eating. It had to be. Otherwise sur-plus heat would have vaporized the ship.

The plasma fur-nished energy to spare. The process was a good deal more complex than a few words can describe, and yet less so than an engineer accustomed to more primitive branches of his art might imagine.

Nakamura gave himself up to the instruments. Their read-ings checked out with his running computation.