Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.
The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.
They were sucked into clusters around the open ports of the New Frontiers like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes. Whew! he sighed to himself, watch that first step-it’s a honey!
Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo’s message.
King seemed undecided. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my passengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed.”
“I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir,” Libby answered unhumorously. “Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I’m glad you had the ship’s access ports open.”
“I didn’t,” said King tersely. “They were opened for me.”
They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. “This planet that Sarloo described to you,” said King, “does it belong to a G-type star?”
“Yes,” Libby confirmed, “an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could. identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away.’
“So . . .” King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story.
With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the New Frontiers was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.
“I can’t tell you much,” admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. “I was able to determine, before we passed the speed of light-or appeared to-that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his gods. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astrogational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going,”
“Loosen up, Andy,” suggested Lazarus. “Make a guess.”
“Well . . . if our world line is a smooth function-if it is, and I have no data-then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going.”
“Rummph!” Lazarus turned to King. “Have you tried slowing down?”
“Yes,” King said shortly. “The controls are dead.”
“Mmmm . . . Andy, when do we get there?”
Libby shrugged helplessly. “I have no frame of reference. What is time without a space reference?”
Time and space, inseparable and one- Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the space framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship’s time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physio-chemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.
But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.
What universe?
There was no universe. It was gone.
Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?
Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to what? thought Libby. Could it be that space held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded “ether” thatthe classic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that-had denied the very possibility of its existence? -had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually passed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as passengers, going nowhere at no time?