Brant was a scientist, a space scientist. He had techniques and technologies at his fingertips that would have looked like magic to the old timers of the twentieth century. There were new sciences that hadn't been heard of a century before. Things like Teleportology and Psycholithography. The specialised departmental scientists were narrow field experts in spheres of work that a twentieth century man wouldn't even have begun to comprehend. Science had the answer to most things, but there was a new world out through the Hyperdrive Lanes, a world of mystery on the edge of the universe. It was inhabited by ebony skinned humanoids, with proud noble chieftains and weird La-akas or medicine men. Brant and his crew scoffed at first. "Primitive magic and superstition" laughed the scientists. Then the La-akas did things that science couldn't' explain. Things like controlling nature. Brant and his men began to investigate the age of the culture. It wasn't primitive, it was old.... thousands of years older than Earth.... And it throbbed with terrible danger.
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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SHE was a good ship, tall, proud and strong; gleaming beryllium and zirconium; perfect gem of a ship; a culmination of 25th century science. Sleek and proud and graceful. Proud, too, as if aware of her own grace and strength. As though aware of her own ability, to prod with that needle-sharp nose into the void, to find out the secrets of space. To go between space into the grey spaces, the hyperspace. To travel like a ghostly dart, to walk between the worlds. To travel in excess of the speed of light, to hold a galaxy in her rocket tubes, and in her hyperdrive. She was a fine ship, and she inspired the men on board her with courage and determination.
Men like Tony Brant, lean and tough as whipcord, with that sharp, ageless cast of feature that personified the men of the 25th century. Neither physically, mentally nor biologically, Brant hadn’t aged a day since he was twenty.
There were a few lines on his face, but they were lines of character, not lines of old age. His eyes looked mature, but they didn’t look old.
‘Five hundred years ago,’ he thought, ‘who would have believed that a man could live to this age. …’ Brant was a hundred and four.
His fellow crew members ranged from ninety to a hundred and twenty. The life expectancy was well up in the two hundreds. More if a man was careful.
The medicos had discovered the secret of allowing the body to reach its peak of efficiency and maturity, and then to hold it there. New drugs, new processes, new radiation medicine, had prevented arteries from hardening. Had prevented muscles from clogging the fat. Had prevented old age from destroying a man. It seemed almost as though death itself was on the verge of being conquered. Five hundred years was nothing in biological times. Come to that, man as recognisable man had only been on earth for a million years or so. From a cave man to a scientific super man, with a two hundred years’ life span, in a matter of a million years. That wasn’t bad going. That showed that Nature had been right when she had decreed that mind, and not size or force, was the greater power.
There were other things that the medicos had done, too, things that would have seemed miraculous a few centuries back. They hadn’t only increased the life span. They had made it more worth while. Men were stronger, tougher, fitter, far more athletic. More intelligent. A lot of it had been due to new scientific diet, new drugs, new genetic infiltration processes, all kinds of scientific medical miracles had taken place, and now the whole earth had benefitted from it. …
‘Yes,’ thought Tony Brant as he stood, a tall, proud man, in a tall, proud ship. ‘Life is good.’
It was almost as though some weird cosmic force had been listening. Listening and laughing. …
In 2520 supervidic ships didn’t have accidents. It was unheard of! Science knew the lot. Technology was a mushroom, the more it grew the faster it spread. Metals didn’t fatigue because they weren’t built to fatigue. Plastic didn’t break, electronic check units saw to it that no faulty mechanisms got through. You were as safe in a space ship in 2520 as you would have been riding a bicycle slowly along a quiet English road in the 20th century. Spaceships were foolproof. Nothing went wrong. There was nothing that could go wrong. Brant was standing by the computer. His flawless brain dictating a thought pattern to it. Powerful, lightly-bronzed fingers ran over the keys of his instrument. He raised one eyebrow quizzically. Surely his memory hadn’t gone queer? He felt O.K. Maybe he’d been thinking about something else, and touched the wrong key. But he’d never done that before. Surely, he thought, I haven’t started going senile, this young! He was a man in his prime, flying a perfect ship, a ship that didn’t have any aberrations. A ship that didn’t make mistakes. He was a man that didn’t make mistakes. The computer didn’t make mistakes.
The typing keys never hit a wrong figure. The tape didn’t jam up; it was designed not to jam up. What was the good of being a technological man with a technological brain, if your mechanism failed you at the last moment.
You couldn’t play around with hyperspace unless you could trust your ship. Something had gone wrong! Something had gone damnably wrong!
“Rogerson!”
Joe Rogerson was a pure maths specialist, he could do problems in his head almost as well as a Mark I computer could handle them. He had that kind of mind. Joe came over. He was roughly the same age as Brant, and as keen brained, and as strong limbed.
“What’s up, Skip?”
Tony indicated the computer tape. Joe looked at it.
“What the hell!” he said. “That shouldn’t be! That doesn’t make sense!” He looked at Tony inquisitively. “How long you been on duty, Skip? Overtired?”
“Not on your life!” said Tony.
He was as puzzled as his colleague,
“Look, you take the figures and feed ’em in, will you? On your own. I’ll go and have a look out of the visi-port.”
He walked to the other side of the ship and lit a cigarette; took a long, thoughtful pull at it.
Why should the computer have shown up that set of figures? Something was wrong. Strangely, oddly wrong. He glanced at the faultless, self-winding chronometer on his wrist. He gave Joe three minutes and walked back to the computer.
“Well?”
Joe was scratching at dark, curly hair, biting his lip.
“Have a cigarette,” said Tony.
“Thanks, I will. I need one! I also need a drink!”
Brant pressed the control button of the liquor cabinet, a plastic, space-drinking capsule glided out on the end of a mechanical rod. He snapped off the cap, and handed it to the maths man. Joe Rogerson squeezed the tube gently and handed it back.
“That’s better!” he said. “In small doses, there’s nothing like the old grandmother alcohol to cure the human mind.”
“Shades of Omar Khayam!” said Tony Brant with a grin. “O.K., mastermind. What’s wrong with the computer?”
Joe was grinning. “There’s nothing wrong with the computer, there’s something wrong with me. Computers don’t go wrong!” he said. “I worked that course out in my head, then I fed in the figures. It didn’t balance! I didn’t get the same answer as you. I got something, if possible, even further off. A bigger error percentage.”
“Then the computer must be wrong!” said Brant.
“It isn’t,” said Joe. “They don’t go wrong, you know that as well as I do. There’s an emergency computer in the spare locker, and here’s another on the life ship.”
“So what?”
“So we try ’em, and we see what the heck is up!”
“O.K.!” Joe shrugged broad, athletic shoulders.
“Look, there’s no need to spread a general alarm and despondency,” said Tony thoughtfully. “Got to think of morale! Tell you what, you go and try that course again on the spare computer. I’ll go and try it on that little computer in the life ship. If anybody wants to know where we are, you’re checking stock, and I’m doing a routine test, on the emergency equipment. O.K.?”
“Right!”
They went their separate ways. Ten minutes later they met again, in Brant’s cabin.
“Well?” he queried.
“Anything but well,” answered Rogerson. “I got five different results from the same set of figures, and none of them were anything like the original.”
“You mean the calculation you did in your head?”
“That’s it,” said Joe. “How about you?”
“Well, I can’t do it in my head the same way that you can,” said Brant, “and I’ll be the first to admit it. I’ve got a rough idea that it should fall within certain limits. The course co-ordinates ought to be somewhere between 1/4007/2 and 2/8137/6. That’s as close as I can pin it.”
“That’s fair enough,” answered Joe. “The exact readings, as I worked it out mentally, should be 1/7943/5.”
Brant got out a piece of paper, grinned apologetically.
“I know this is old-fashioned, but I’m going to sit and work this out the hard way. I said that on my co-ordinates to a broad reading it should fall somewhere between 1/4007/2 and 2/8137/6.”
Joe Rogerson closed his eyes and did a rapid calculation.
“Yes, as rough co-ordinates, they’ll do. You haven’t done the third process—the third stage. But working from your two figures, if you’ll just bother to jot it down, you’ll find that the third stage answer comes to 1/7943/5—which is what I got it to in the first place.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Brant. “Now look. Here’s the computer figure I got. The first one starts with zero reading, the next one gives a 4 reading, then a 7, then a 12. We know that it should be between the 1 and the 2 reading.”
“Exactly,” said Joe. “The readings I got are even more cock-eyed. They run from a minus up to a hundred and six! Which could be anywhere from inside the atom to outside the universe! Fascinating!”
“Let’s all s. . .
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