But wait a minute! What’s this? This number four’s a little bit of a new one, about as small as they ever come. Margie ought to be taking it, if she’s ever going to take anything … but she isn’t! She’s running damn near three hundred mils behind!
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Why? Oh—amplitudes—frequencies extreme instability … Lag isn’t proportional only to activity, then, but jointly to activity and to instability.
That gives us a chance—but what in all nine of Palain’s purple hells is that machine doing with that data?
He started to climb out of his bucket seat to go around to talk to Joan right then, but changed his mind at his first move. Even if Margie could handle mis little one it wouldn’t be a real test, and it’d be a crying shame to give Joan a success here and then kick her in the teeth with a flat failure next time. No, the next one, the only one left and Vegia’s worst, would be the one. If Margie could handle that, she could snuff anything the galaxy had to offer.
Hence Cloud extinguished this one, too, himself. The Vortex Blaster II darted to its last Vegian objective and lined itself up for business. Joan put Margie to work as usual; but Storm, for the first time, did not take his own place. Instead, he came around and stood behind Joan’s chair.
‘How’re we doing, little chum?’ he asked.
‘Rotten!’ Joan’s block was still up; her voice was choked with tears. ‘She’s come so close half a dozen times today—why —why can’t I get that last fraction of a second?’
‘Maybe you can.’ As though it were the most natural thing in the world—which in fact it was—Cloud put his left arm around her shoulders and exerted a gentle pressure. ‘Bars down, chum—we can think a lot clearer than we can talk.’
‘That’s better,’ as her guard went down. ‘Your differential ‘scope looks like it’s set about one centimeter to the second. Can you give it enough vertical gain to make it about five?’
‘Yes. Ten if you like, but the trace would keep jumping the screen on the down-swings.’
‘I wouldn’t care about that—closest approach is all I want. Give it full gain.”
‘QX, but why?’ Joan demanded, as she made the requested adjustment. ‘Did you find out something I can’t dig deep enough in your mind to pry loose?’
‘Don’t know yet whether I did or not—I can tell you in a couple of minutes,’ and Cloud concentrated his full attention upon the chart and its adjacent oscilloscope screen.
One pen of the chart was drawing a thin, wildly-wavering red line. A few seconds behind it a second pen was tracing the
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red line in black; tracing it so exactly that not the tiniest touch of red was to be seen anywhere along the black. And on the screen of the differential oscilloscope the fine green saw-tooth wave-form of the electronic trace, which gave continuously the instantaneous value of the brain’s shortage in time, flickered insanely and apparently reasonlessly up and down; occasionally falling clear off the bottom of the screen. If that needle-pointed trace should touch the zero line, however briefly, Margie the Brain would act; but it was not coming within one full centimeter of touching.
‘The feeling that these failures have been partly, or even mostly, my fault is growing on me,’ Cloud thought, tightening his arm a little: and Joan, if anything, yielded to the pressure instead of fighting away from it. ‘Maybe I haven’t been waiting long enough to give your brains the leeway they need. To check: I’ve been assuming all along that they work in pretty much the same way I do; that they handle all the data, out to the limit of validity of the equations, but aren’t fast enough to work out a three-point-six-second prediction.
‘But if I’m reading those curves right Margie simply isn’t working that way. She doesn’t seem to be extrapolating anything more than three and a half seconds ahead—’way short of the reliability limit—and sometimes a lot less than that. She isn’t accepting data far enough ahead. She acts as though she can gulp down just so much information without choking on it —so much and no more.’
‘Exactly. An over-simplification, of course, since it isn’t the kind of choking that giving her a bigger throat would cure, but very well put.’ Joan’s right hand crept across her body, rested on Cloud’s wrist, and helped his squeeze, while her face turned more directly toward the face so close to hers. ‘That’s inherent in the design of all really fast machines … and we simply don’t know any way of getting away from it … Why? What has that to do with the case?’
‘A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to half an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so that the equations would hold valid and give a longer valid prediction.’
‘Stabilize? How? I’ve never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or does “stabilize” have a special meaning for you vortex experts?’
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‘Could be. It’s what happens when a sigma becomes a little more regular than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid prediction.’
‘I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible to me might mean a lot to you.’
‘Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may hold for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the smaller the volume of actual data …’
‘Oh!’ Joan’s thought soared high. ‘So Margie may work yet, if we wait a while?’
‘Check. Browning can’t take the ship away from you, can he?’
‘No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that red “stop” button there. D’you suppose she can do it, Storm? How long can we wait?’
‘Half an hour, I’d say. No, to settle the point definitely, let’s wait until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie’s doing about the situation then.’
‘Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be looking at the chart, don’t you think?’ she asked, pointedly. His eyes, at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of approximately twelve inches.
‘I’ll look at it later, but right now I’m …’
The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable triphammer blow of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of the two scientists most concerned, the sigma curve had, momentarily, become a trifle less irregular. The point of the sawtooth had touched the zero line. Margie had acted. The visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare of the vortex had blazed so long, went suddenly black.
‘She did it, Storm!’ Joan’s thought was a mental shriek of joy. ‘She really worked!’
Whether, when the ship went free, Joan pulled Storm down to her merely to anchor him, or for some other reason; whether Cloud grabbed her merely in lieu of a safety-line or not; which of the two was first to put arms around the other; these are moot points impossible of decision at this date. The fact is, however, that the two scientists held a remarkably unscientific pose for a good two minutes before Joan thought that she ought to object a little, just on general principles. Even then,
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she did not object with her mind; instead she put up her block and used her voice.
‘But, after all, Storm,’ she began, only to be silenced as beloved women have been silenced throughout the ages. She cut her screen then, and her mind, tender and unafraid, reached out to his.
‘This might be the perfect time, dear, to merge our minds? I’ve been scared to death of it all along, but no more … let’s?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ he demurred. ‘I’m still afraid of it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and doing some drilling, and the more I play with it the more scared I get. It’s dangerous. It’s like playing with duodec. I’ve just about decided that we’d better let it drop.’
‘Afraid? For yourself, or for me? Don’t try to lie with your mind, Storm; you can’t do it. You’re afraid only for me, and you needn’t be. I’ve been thinking, too, and digging deep, and I know I’m ready.’ She looked up at him then, her quick, bright, impish grin very much in evidence. ‘Let’s go.’
‘QX, Joanie, and thanks. I’ve been wanting this more than I ever wanted anything before in my life. But not holding hands, this time. Heart to heart and cheek to cheek.’ ‘Check—the closer the better.’
They embraced, and again mind flowed into mind; this time with no thought of withholding or reserve on either side. Smoothly, effortlessly, the two essential beings merged, each fitting its tiniest, remotest members into the deepest, ordinarily most inaccessible recesses of the other; fusing as quickly and as delicately and as thoroughly as two drops of water coalescing into one.