arm.
“I’ll bring it back to you,” he said.
“Well be waiting for you,” Kingsley rumbled.
“Hell,” moaned Herb, “I never get to have any fun. Here you and Caroline
are going out there to the Earth and I got to stay behind.”
“Listen,” said Gary savagely, “there’s no use in risking all our lives.
Caroline’s going because she may be the only one who could understand what
the old Earth people can tell us, and I’m going because I play a better
hand of poker. I beat you all, fair and square.”
“I was a sucker,” mourned Herb. “I should have known you’d have an ace in
the hole. You always got an ace in the hole.”
Tommy grinned.
“I got a lousy band,” he said. “We should have played more than just one
band.”
“It was one way of deciding it,” said Gary. “We all wanted to go, so we
played one hand of poker. We couldn’t waste time for more. I won. What more
do you want?”
“You always win,” Herb complained.
“Just how much chance have you got?” Tommy asked Caroline.
She shrugged.
“It works out on paper,” she declared. “When we came here the Engineers had
to distort time and space to get us here, but they distorted the two
equally. Same amount of distortion for each. But here you have to distort
time a whole lot more. Your factors are different. But we have a good
chance of getting where we’re going?’
“If it’s there when you get there…” Herb began, but Kingsley growled at
him and he stopped.
Caroline was talking swiftly to Kingsley.
“The Engineer understands the equation for the hyperspheres,” she was
saying. “Work with him. Try to set up several of them in our own space and
see if it isn’t possible to set up at least one outside the universe. Pinch
it off the time-space warp and shove it out into the inter-space. We may be
able to use it later on.”
A blast of sound smote them and the solid masonry beneath their feet
shivered to the impact of a bomb. For a single second the flashing blaze of
atomic fury made the brilliant sunlight seem pale and dim.
“That one was close,” said Tommy.
They were used to bombs now.
Gary craned his neck upward and saw the silvery flash of ships far
overhead.
“The Engineers can’t hold out much longer,” Kingsley rumbled. “If we are
going to do anything we have to do it pretty soon.”
“There is the old space warp again,” said Herb. He pointed upward and the
others sighted out into space beyond his pointing finger.
There it was… the steady wheel of light, the faint spin of space in
motion… they had seen back on Pluto.
The doorway to another world.
“I guess,” said Caroline, “that means we have to go.” Her voice caught on
something that sounded like a sob.
She turned to Kingsley. “If we don’t come back,” she said, “try the
hyperspheres anyhow. Try to absorb the energy in them. You won’t have to
control it long. Just long enough so the other universe explodes. Then
we’ll be safe.”
She stepped through the air lock and Gary followed her. He turned back and
looked at the three of them… great, rumbling Kingsley with his huge head
thrust forward, staring through his helmet, with his metal-shod fists
opening and closing; dapper, debonair Tommy Evans, the boy who had dreamed
of flying to Alpha Centauri and had come to the edge of the universe
instead; Herb, the dumpy little photographer who was eating out his heart
because he couldn’t go. Through eyes suddenly bleared with emotion, Gary
waved at them and they waved back. And then he hurried into the ship,
slammed down the lever that swung tight the air-lock valves.
In the control room he took off his helmet and dropped into the pilot’s
seat. He looked at Caroline. “Good to get the helmet off,” he said.
She nodded, lifting her own off her head.
His fingers tapped out a firing pattern. He hesitated for a moment, his
thumb poised over the firing lever.
“Listen, Caroline,” be asked, “how much chance have we got?”
“We’ll get there,” she said.
“No,” he snapped, “don’t tell me that. Tell me the truth. Have we any
chance at all?”
Her eyes met his and her mouth sobered into a thin, straight line.
“Yes, some,” she said. “Not quite fifty-fifty. There are so many factors of
error, so many factors of accident. Mathematics can’t foresee them, can’t
take care of them, and mathematics are the only signposts that we have.”
He laughed harshly.
“We’re shooting at a target, don’t you see?” she said. “A target millions
of light-years away, and millions of years away as well, and you have to
have a different set of co-ordinates for both the time and distance. The
same set won’t do for both. It’s difficult.”
He looked at her soberly. She said it was difficult. He could only faintly
imagine how difficult it might be. Only someone who was a master at the
mathematics of both time and space could even faintly understand – someone,
say, who had thought for forty lifetimes.
“And even if we do hit the place,” he said, “it may not be there.”
Savagely he plunged his thumb against the lever. The rockets thundered and
the ship was arcing up. Another pattern and another. They were plunging
upward now under the full thrust of rocket power and still the ruined city
was all around them, cragged, broken towers shattered by the blasting of
atomic energy.
The soft swirl of light that marked the opening of the time-space tunnel
lay between and beyond two blasted towers. Gary fired a short, corrective
pattern to line the nose of the ship between the towers and then depressed
a stud and fired a blast that drove them straight between the towers, up
and over the city, straight for the whirl of light.
The ship arrowed swiftly up. The directional crossbars lined squarely upon
the hub of spinning light.
“We’re almost there,” he said, his breath whistling between his teeth.
“We’ll know in just a minute.”
The cold wind out of space was blowing on his face again; the short hairs
on his neck were trying to rise into a ruff. The old challenge of the
unknown. The old glory of crusading.
He snapped a look at Caroline. She was staring out of the vision plate,
staring straight ahead, watching the rim of the wheel spin out until only
the blackness of the hub remained.
She turned to him. “Oh, Gary!” she cried, and then the ship plunged into
the hub and blackness as thick and heavy and as stifling as the ink of
utter space flooded into the ship and seemed to dim the very radium lamps
that burned within the room. He heard her voice coming out of the blackness
that engulfed them. “Gary, I’m afraid!”
Then the black was gone and the ship rode in space again – in a
star-sprinkled space that had, curiously, a warm and friendly look after
the blackness of the tunnel.
“There it is!” Caroline cried, and Gary expelled his breath in a sigh of
relief.
Below them swam a planet, a planet such as they had seen in the spinning
bowl back in the city of the Engineers. A planet that was spotted with
mighty mountains weathered down to meek and somber hills, a planet with
shallow seas and a thinning atmosphere.
“The Earth,” said Gary, looking at it.
Yes, the Earth. The birthplace of the human race, now an old and senile
planet tottering to its doom, a planet that had outlived its usefulness. A
planet that had mothered a great race of people – a race that always strove
to reach what was just beyond, always reaching out to the not-as-yet, that
met each challenge with a battle cry. A crusading people.
“It’s really there,” said Caroline. “It’s real.”
Gary glanced swiftly at the instruments. They were only a matter of five
hundred miles above the surface and as yet there was no indication of
atmosphere. Slowly the ship was dropping toward the planet, but still there
was no sign of anything but space.
He whistled softly. Even the slightest presence of gases would be
registered on the dials and so far the needles hadn’t even flickered.
Earth must be old! Her atmosphere was swiftly being stripped from her to
leave her bare bones naked to the cold of space. Space, cold and malignant,
was creeping in on mankind’s cradle.
He struck the first sign of atmosphere at slightly under two hundred miles.
The surface of the planet was lighted by a Sun which must have lost much of
its energy, for the light seemed feeble compared to the way Gary remembered
it. The Sun, behind them, was shielded from their vision.
Swiftly they dropped, closer and closer to the surface. Eagerly they