Subspace Survivors, E. E. Smith [ready to read books txt] 📗

Barbara's hand-to-hand engagement took about one second longer. Moose Mordan was big and strong; and, for such a big man, was fairly fast physically. If he had had time to get his muscles ready, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Warner Deston was almost as fast physically as she was mentally. Thus she reached him before he even began to realize that this pint-sized girl actually intended[Pg 128] to hit him; and thus it was that his belly-muscles were still completely relaxed when her small but extremely hard left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.

With an agonized "WHOOSH!" he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. Her right hand, fingers tightly bunched, was already boring savagely into a selected spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.

That ended it. The big man could very well have been dying on his feet. To make sure, however—or to keep the girl from knowing that she had killed a man?—Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the rug.

Both girls flung themselves, sobbing, into their husband's arms.

The whole battle had lasted only a few seconds. Adams, although he had seen almost everything, had been concentrating so deeply that it took those few seconds for him actually to realize what was going on. He got up, felt of Newman's head, then looked casually at the three other bodies.

"Oh, I killed him, Carl!" Barbara sobbed, convulsively. "And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in my whole life!"

"You didn't kill him, Barbara," Adams said.

"Huh?" She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between her streaming eyes and the relief dawning over her whole face was almost funny. "Why, I did the foulest things possible, and as hard as I possibly could. I'm sure I killed him."

"By no means, my dear. Judo techniques, however skillfully and powerfully applied, do not and can not kill instantly. Bullets through the brain do. I will photograph the cadavers, of course, and perform the customary post-mortem examinations for the record; but I know already what the findings will be. These four men died instantly of gunshot wounds."

With the four gangsters gone, life aboardship settled down quickly into a routine. That routine, however, was in no sense dull. The officers had plenty to do; operating the whole ship and rebuilding the mechanisms that were operating on jury rigging or on straight "bread-board" hookups. And in their "spare" time they enjoyed themselves tremendously in becoming better and better acquainted with their wives. For Bernice and Jones, like Barbara and Deston, had for each other an infinite number of endless vistas of personality; the exploration of which was sheerest delight.

The girls—each of whom became joyously pregnant as soon as she could—kept house and helped their husbands whenever need or opportunity arose. Their biggest chore,[Pg 129] however, was to see to it that Adams got sleep, food, and exercise. For, if left to his own devices, he would never have exercised at all, would have grabbed a bite now and then, and would have slept only when he could no longer stay awake.

"Uncle Andy, why don't you use that Big Brain of yours?" Barbara snapped at him one day. "For a man that's actually as smart as you are, I swear you've got the least sense of anybody I know!"

"But it's necessary, my dear child," Adams explained, unmoved. "This material is new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved, and I have less than a year to work on them. Less than one year; and it is a task for a team of specialists and all the resources of a research center."

To the officers, however, Adams went into more detail. "Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the safety devices employed; it is improbable that we are the first survivors of a subspace catastrophe to set course for a planet."

After some argument, the officers agreed.

"While I cannot as yet detect it, classify it, or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum[Pg 130] either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass; and I'm virtually certain that it is. The discharge may be anything from an imperceptible flow up to one of such violence as to volatilize the craft carrying it. From the facts: One, that in the absence of that field the subspace radio will function normally; and Two, that no subspace-radio messages have ever been received from survivors; the conclusion seems inescapable that the discharge of this unknown field is in fact of extreme violence."

"Good God!" Deston exclaimed. "Oh ... that was what you meant by 'fantastic precautions,' back there?"

"Precisely."

"But what can we do about it?"

"I don't know. I ... simply ... do ... not ... know." Adams lost himself in thought for over a minute. "This is all so new ... I know so little ... and am working with such pitifully inadequate instrumentation—However, we have months of time yet, and if I am unable to arrive at a conclusion before arrival—I don't mean a rigorous analysis, of course, but merely a stop-gap, empirical, pragmatic solution—we will simply remain in orbit around that sun until I do."

The Procyon bored on through space, at one unchanging gravity of acceleration. It may not seem, at first glance, that one gravity would result in any very high velocity; but when it is maintained steadily for days and weeks and months, it builds up to a very respectable speed. Nor was there any question of power, for the Procyon's atomics did not drive the ship, but merely energized the "Chaytors"—the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the energy of the expanding universe itself.

Thus, in less than six months, the Procyon had attained a velocity almost half that of light. At the estimated mid-point of the flight the spaceship, still at one gravity of drive, was turned end-for-end; so that for the ensuing five-and-a-fraction months she would be slowing down.

A few weeks after the turnover, Adams seemed to have more time. At least, he devoted more time to the expectant mothers, even to the point of supervising Deston and Jones in the construction of a weirdly-wired device by means of which he studied and photographed the unborn child each woman bore. He said nothing, however, until Barbara made him talk.

"Listen, you egregious clam," she said, firmly, "I know darn well I've been pregnant for at least seven months, and I ought to be twice this big. Our clock isn't that far off; Carl said that by wave lengths or something it's only about three per cent fast. And you've been pussyfooting and hem-hawing around all this time. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the truth. Are we in for a lot of trouble?"[Pg 131]

"Trouble? Of course not. Certainly not. No trouble at all, my dear. Why, you've seen the pictures—here, look at them again ... see? Absolutely normal fetus—yours, too, Bernice. Perfect! No malformations of any kind."

"Yes, but for what age?" Bernice asked, pointedly. "Four months, say? I see, I was exposed to a course in embryology myself, once."

"But that's the interesting part of it!" Adams enthused. "Fascinating! And, indubitably, supremely important. In fact, it may point out the key datum underlying the solution of our entire problem. If this zeta field is causing this seemingly peculiar biological effect, that gives us a tremendously powerful new tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus, certain determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by ... but you aren't listening!"

"I'm listening, pops, but nothing is coming through. But thanks much, anyway. I feel a lot better, knowing I'm not going to give birth to a monster. Or are you sure, really?"

"Of course I'm sure!" Adams snapped, testily, and Barbara led Deston aside.

"Have you got the slightest idea of what he was talking about?" she asked.

"Just the slightest, if any. Either that time is relative—no, that's so elementary he wouldn't mention it. Maybe he's figured out a variable time of some kind or other. Anyway, you girls' slowness in producing has given the old boy a big lift, and I'm mighty glad of it."

"But aren't you worried, sweetheart? Not even the least little bit?"

"Of course not," and Deston very evidently meant just that.

"I am. I can't help but be. Why aren't you?"

"Because Doc isn't, and he knows his stuff, believe me. He can't lie any better than a three-year-old, and he's sure that all four of you are just as safe as though you were in God's lefthand hip pocket."

"Oh—that's right. I never thought of it that way. So I don't have anything to worry about, do I?" She lifted her lips to be kissed; and the kiss was long and sweet.

Time flew past until, one day a couple of weeks short of arrival, Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. "I have it!" he shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher—very much higher—mathematics.

"Hold it, Doc!" Deston held up an expostulatory hand. "I read you zero and ten. Can't you delouse your signal? Whittle the stuff down to our size?"

"W-e-l-l-," the scientist looked hurt, but did consent to forego the high math. "The discharge is catastrophic; in energy equivalent something of the order of magnitude of ten thousand discharges of lightning. And, unfortunately, I do not know what it is. It is virtually certain,