The planning of the starship Pleiades had been difficult in the extreme, its construction almost impossible. While it was practically a foregone conclusion that any man of the requisite caliber would already be a member of the Galaxian Society, the three planets and eight satellites were screened, psiontist by psiontist, to select the two strongest and most versatile of their breed.
These two, Garlock and James, were heads of departments of, and under iron-clad contract to, vast Solar System Enterprises, Inc., the only concern able and willing to attempt the building of the first starship.
However, Alonzo P. Ferber, Chancellor of S.S.E., would not risk a tenth-piece of the company’s money on such a bird-brained scheme. Himself a Gunther First, he believed implicity that Firsts were in fact tops in Gunther ability; that these few self-styled ‘Operators’ and ‘Prime Operators’ were either charlatans or self-deluded crackpots. Since he could not feel that so-called ‘Operator Field’, no such thing did or could exist. No Gunther starship could ever, possibly, work.
He did loan Garlock and James to the Galaxians, but that was as far as he would go. For salaries and labor, for research and materials, for trials and for errors; the Society paid and paid and paid.
Thus the starship Pleiades had cost the Galaxian Society almost a thousand million credits.
Garlock and James had worked on the ship since its inception. They were to be of the crew; for over a year it had been taken for granted that they would be its only crew.
11
As the Pleiades neared completion, however, it became clearer and clearer that the displacement-control presented an unsolved, and quite possibly an insoluble, problem. It was mathematically certain that, when the Gunther field went on, the ship would be displaced instantaneously to some location in space having precisely the Gunther coordinates required by that particular field. One impeccably rigorous analysis showed that the ship would shift into the nearest solar system possessing an Earth-type planet – which was believed to be Alpha Centauri and which was close enough to Sol so that orientation would be automatic and the return to Earth a simple matter.
Since the Gunther Effect did in fact annihilate distance, however, another group of mathematicians, led by Garlock and James, proved with equal rigor that the point of destination was no more likely to be any one given Gunther point than any other one of the myriads of billions of equiguntherial points undoubtedly existing throughout our entire normal space-time continuum.
The two men would go anyway, of course. Carefully-calculated pressures would make them go. It was neither necesary nor desirable, however, for them to go alone.
Wherefore the planets and satellites were combed again this time to select two women – the two most highly-gifted psioni-cists in the eighteen-to-twenty-five age group. Thus, if the Pleiades returned successfully to Earth, well and good. If she did not, the four selectees would found, upon some far-off world, a race much abler than the humanity of Earth; since eighty-three percent of Earth’s dwellers had psionic grades lower than Four. This search, with its attendant fanfare and studiedly blatant publicity, was so planned and engineered that the selected women did not arrive at the spaceport until a bare fifteen minutes before the scheduled time of takeoff. Thus it made no difference whether the women liked the men or not, or vice versa; or whether or not any of them really wanted to make the trip. Pressures were such that each of them had to go, whether he or she wanted to or not.
‘Cut the rope, Jim, and let the old bucket drop,’ Garlock said. ‘Not too close. Before we make any kind of contact we’ll have to do some organizing. These instruments’ – he waved at 12
the console – ‘show that ours is the only Operator Field in this whole region of space. Hence, there are no Operators and no Primes. That means that from now until we get back to Tellus …’
‘// we get back to Tellus,’ Belle corrected, sweetly. ‘Until we get back to Tellus there will be no Gunthering aboard this ship …’
‘What?’ Belle broke in again. ‘Have you lost your mind?’ ‘There will be little if any lepping, and nothing else at all. At the table, if we want sugar, we will reach for it or have it passed. We will pick up things, such as cigarettes, with our fingers. We will carry lighters and use them. When we go from place to place, we will walk. Is that clear?’
‘You seem to be talking English,’ Belle said, ‘but the words don’t make sense.’
‘I didn’t think you were that stupid.’ Their eyes locked and held. Then Garlock grinned savagely. ‘Okay. You tell her, Lola, in words of as few syllables as possible.’
‘Why, to get used to it, of course,’ Lola explained, while Belle glared at Garlock. ‘So as not to reveal anything we don’t have to.”
‘Excellent, Miss Montandon – all monosyllables except two. That should make it clear, even to Miss Bellamy.’ He paused, glancing calmly at Belle’s glare, then said, ‘In emergencies, of course, anything goes. We will now proceed with business.’
‘One minute, please!’ Belle snapped. ‘Just why, Lord Director Captain Garlock, are you insisting on oral communication, when lepping is so much faster and better? It’s stupid -reactionary. Don’t you ever lep?’
“With Jim, on business, yes; with women, no more than I have to. What I think is nobody’s business but mine.’ What a way to run a ship! Or a project!’ ‘Running this project is my business, not yours; and if there’s any one thing in the entire universe it does not need, it’s a female exhibitionist. Besides your obvious qualifications to be one of the Eves in case of Ultimate Contingency…’ He broke off and stared at her, his contemptuous gaze traveling slowly, dissectingly, from her toes to the topmost wave of her hairdo. ‘Forty-two, twenty, forty?’ he asked.
‘You flatter me.’ Her voice was controlled fury. ‘Thirty-nine,
13
twenty-two, thirty-nine. Five-seven. One thirty-five. If any of it’s any of your business, which it isn’t. You should be discussing brains and ability, not vital statistics.’
‘Brains? Well, yes – as a Prime, you must have a brain. What do you think you’re good for on this project? What can you do?’
‘I can do anything any man ever born can do, and do it better!’
‘Okay. Compute a Gunther field that will put us two hundred thousand feet directly above the peak of that mountain.’
That isn’t fair and you know it – not that I expected fairness from you. That doesn’t take either brains or ability…’
‘Oh, no?’
“No. Merely highly specialized training that you know I haven’t had. Give me a five-tape course on it and I’ll come closer than either you or James; for a hundred credits a shot.’
‘I’ll do just that. Something you are supposed to know, then. How would you go about making first contact?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t do it the way you would – by knocking down the first native I saw, putting my foot on his face, and yelling, “Bow down, you stupid beasts, and worship me—” ‘
‘Hold it, both of you!’ James broke in ‘What the hell are you trying to prove? How about cutting out this cat-and-dog act and getting some work done?’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ Garlock admitted, holding his temper by a visible effort. ‘Sorry, Jim. Belle, what were you briefed for?’
‘To understudy you.’ She, too, fought her temper down, To learn everything about Project Gunther. I have a whole box of tapes in my room, including advanced Gunther math and first-contact techniques. I’m to study them during all my on-watch time unless you assign other duties.’
‘No matter what your duties may be, you’ll have to have time to study. If you don’t find what you want in your own tapes -and you probably won’t, since Ferber and his Miss Foster ran the selections – use our library. It’s good – designed to carry on our civilization. Miss Montandon? No, that’s ridiculous, the way we’re fixed. Lola?’
‘I’m to learn how to be Doctor James’…’
‘Jim please, Lola,’ James said. ‘And call him Clee.’ 14
‘I’d like that.’ She smiled winningly. ‘And my friends call me “Brownie”.’
‘I see why they would. It fits like a coat of lacquer.’ It did. Her hair was a dark, lustrous brown, as were her eyebrows. Her eyes were brown. Her skin, too – her dark red playsuit left little to the imagination – was a rich and even brown. Originally fairly dark, it had been tanned to a more-than-fashionable depth of color by naked sunbathing and by practically-naked outdoor sports. A couple of inches shorter than the green-haired girl, she too had a figure that would have delighted any sculptor.
‘I’m your friend, Brownie, and very glad to be such,’ James said. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’m to be your assistant. I have about a thousand tapes to study, too. It’ll be quite awhile, I’m afraid, before I can be of much use, but I’ll do the best I can.’