BY JOHN E. MULLER The botanist claims that human life depends indirectly on the chlorophyll in the green leaf. The leaf depends on sunlight. But both depend upon the atom. No atoms, no physical matter, no physical universe! Microscope experts peer closely into the mysteries of the human body, into the mysteries of the green lead, into the mysteries of the chemical elements. It is hardly feasible to subject an atom to microscopic examination. But what if it was possible? What if a new technique of observation was discovered? A strange, revolutionary "seeing" without recourse to the photon. The microscope might reveal scientific impossibilities which would shake the universe to its foundations. Smallness hold more terrors than greatness.
Release date:
December 30, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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JEFF CHORSE, skipper of the ‘Tabard-bell’, was a quiet, soft-spoken, easy-going, rather nondescript little character. And yet behind that somewhat dull and drab exterior, behind those eyes which seemed to be turned perpetually groundwards, lurked a keen and penetrating mind. At that particular moment Jeff was thinking about his space-liner, the ‘Tabard-bell’. He liked the name; he had a vague idea that it had something to do with very early history, but he was no historian and its significance had escaped him. He knew that the ship had been born in the great beryllium processing yards of Southwark and Canterbury; he knew that she was one of the finest, most space-worthy vessels of her day; that she was the last word in comfort, in luxury, in elegance. Way back in the 20th century there had been two great ocean ‘Queens’, the ‘Mary’ and the ‘Elizabeth’; they had been, somehow, a symbol of luxury, a symbol of prestige. Now—many centuries later—the ‘Tabard-bell’ was the same kind of symbol of ease, elegance and luxury, in the field of space-craft, and the great silver-grey icicle of a ship drifting through the frigid vacuum of intergalactic space was equipped with the latest type of asquith-drive, which enabled her to leap in and out of the Warp, to dance from true space to hyper space, as lightly as a Highland chief skipping nimbly across the blades of his crossed swords, at the Braemar Games.
Jeff’s thoughts turned from his ship to his passengers; a mixed bunch, he decided, a very mixed bunch. So far they were just names, but they had a long voyage scheduled, and the names would associate themselves sooner or later, in his mind, with personalities. Characters would build up; so far only one or two of them had really attracted his attention. There was Lady Lentyne, strange how in some colonies, in some fringes of the galaxy, titles were as popular as ever! In others they were regarded as a sign of decadence. Jeff himself had no particular axe to grind one way or the other. If Lady Lentyne liked to retain her title and derived some kind of satisfaction from it, that was up to her.
His rounds had taken him a little longer than usual, and supper was well under way. The ‘Tabard-bell’ had the very latest pseudo-grav field inducers, so that there was none of the awkward embarrassment which comes to the spaceman on war-flight, whose ship is stripped down for action and who has to eat and drink from flexible plasto-containers. The pseudo-grav meant that liquids did what was expected of them and flowed downwards in the normal way. There were comical upsets occasionally when something went wrong with the pseudo-grav equipment, and the mouthful of soup that you were trying to swallow suddenly decided that it wanted to get back into circulation … but on a ship like the ‘Tabard-bell’ these episodes were rare indeed.
Lady Lentyne, he reflected, was a very graceful, dainty eater. There was something about her which savoured of the courtesan, and yet she was tremendously genteel and discreet. After the fashion of those on her colony she wore a kind of folded cloth hood, which she had pinned most becomingly, perhaps rather more so than some of her puritanical fellow colonists would have approved.
She looked like a living book on etiquette, he thought, as he studied her, and his attention returned to her face. Her nose was well-proportioned, and her eyes—like grey glass—gentle and yet … and yet? No, he told himself, there was no depth of meaning there; it was simply a physical peculiarity, those grey-glass coloured eyes. Her soft red mouth was rather small, and without prolonging his glance into a stare he let his eyes travel up to her forehead—very wide and high. She was well-dressed in a cloak of fine quality material, and over her arm she wore, after the fashion of her own people, a small coral strand, a string of beads, they were overlaid with some kind of bright green syntho-plastic, but there was nothing synthetic about the gold brooch that hung from them; it was large and bright and obviously one of her most cherished possessions.
Possibly it stood for something significant back on her own world. It bore a huge capital letter ‘A’, and below this, interwoven throughout its lower half were the Latin words ‘amor vincit omnia’. Chorse stretched his imagination for the meaning of the Latin, and finally realised that as near as he could literalise it into English it became ‘Love conquers all’. Just the ghost of an enigmatic smile crossed his face as he sat down at the table beside Lady Lentyne. Something stirred—several somethings stirred, as he took his place.
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” He realised that he had accidentally trodden on one of her ladyship’s dogs.
“It’s quite all right, Captain. He should have moved himself!” Those grey, glass eyes boring into his, yet boring gently. It was rather like being worked over by a pleasant dentist. Yet she was anxious about the dog.
“How is your collection going, Lady Lentyne?” Jeff changed the subject as rapidly as possible. The minute dog had stopped whimpering and was now licking his foot. Cute little critters, he decided, but a man had to be careful where he put his boots!
“Oh, my collection’s going splendidly,” said Lady Lentyne.
They ate in silence for a few moments, and then the rather gentle, grey-eyed colonist said,
“How soon will we be putting into this new port, Captain Chorse?”
“You haven’t been before?” His answer was part statement, part question. She shook her head daintily.
“That’s why I’m looking forward so much to picking up samples of the flora and fauna which must be indigenous to Xyrax!”
“I think you will get several interesting specimens that you haven’t seen before, although a lot of the life forms there have been imported, introduced artificially.”
“One does find so much of that,” said Lady Lentyne, rather sadly; then she brightened visibly, “but, of course, even allowing for artificial introduction, strains take on particular forms and tendencies when they are put into a new environment. …”
“Yes—I can understand that,” agreed the Captain.
“It’s a fascinating hobby,” said Lady Lentyne, as she dissected a small bean, speared it on the end of a fork, and popped it daintily into her neat little red mouth.
“I’m more interested in electronics, myself,” said Jeff Chorse, “but still, everyone to their own taste, your ladyship! I trust that all the arrangements aboard are entirely to your satisfaction?”
“Oh entirely!” she responded, with a kind of warm earnestness, which he felt was almost entirely genuine. In his own, undemonstrative way, Jeff Chorse felt a small thrill of satisfaction. In a less worthy character it might almost have been a small sensation of smugness, but whatever his other faults, Jeff Chorse was not a man to be smug.
“I’m very glad,” he said. “Let me know if there is anything else we can do at any time. Anything that will facilitate the collecting. …” He walked back, nodding to one or two of the other passengers who were dining, and returned to the Cabin, his own Cabin, his Private Den, his Sanctuary.
Funny, he was thinking as he walked up, how these colonies can throw up these Lady Lentynes with their own little staff of servants. He wasn’t exactly sure what she did—a female administrator of some kind—and a high one at that! But whether the organization that she ran could be classed as a religious order, an educational establishment, or something mid-way between the two, it was difficult to tell. Customs varied from world to world throughout the earth empire to such an extent that it was almost impossible to know just exactly where to draw the lines between one type of organization and another. Societies and communities intermingled and overlapped in their functions to such an extent that the complexities were beyond even the most experienced sociologist to untangle.
Chorse was a space-man, a thinking space-man, yes, but a sociologist, or a psychologist, no! Beyond being a keen amateur in both fields, definitely no!
The voyage continued in its routine way, and they eventually touched do. . .
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