Chapter VIII: It was finished

Commodore Theodore Wilson eyed the stereo grid with distaste. The filmy white haze, marking off the volumes already combed, filled the grid completely and overlapped the enclosing lines.

The pattern search had been most thorough. The random search teams had cut curlicues and looping curves back and forth through the grid. Their coverage had not been perfect, by far, but it was good enough for a random search. The volume covered by the infrawave detector spacer was spotty, but adequate.

The equipment was still breaking down every five or ten minutes, still delivering a horde of spurious responses. Scoutships still were being sent scurrying back and forth to investigate.

He faced the grid unhappily. He was gaunt from lack of sleep, from hastily snatched meals, or meals missed completely, from chain smoking, from watching what had started as a chance to make a good mark turn into drab failure. Worse, a failure that in no man's mind could be blamed upon Ted Wilson. For he had found one lifeship, and the fluke would be forgotten.

So would his failure. By every man but Wilson.

Somewhere back in that vast black volume of nothing, outlined by imperfect mathematical concepts in a larger field of nothing, was a lifeship, lost. A tiny cold mote of iron twenty-odd feet tall and nine feet in diameter across its widest point.

Wilson tried to draw his mind from it, but could not. Hysteria crept in but was quickly subdued.

In his mind he saw her as he had last seen her, pert and happy, with her light spacebag on the floor of the waiting room beside her slender ankles. He saw her before him, taut with thrill and excitement, vibrant and alive. He remembered her parting kiss, and the warmth of her body pressed against him.

Alice had been filled with anticipation, wanting to share her excitement with him, but unable to share what was a brand-new experience to her of going to space with a man who had been a-spacing for years. A man who knew all too well how space could be boring, lonely, and incredibly monotonous.

Not like travel across land, where there is scenery to watch, and although a tree is a tree, no two trees are ever alike, just as no one mountain ever looks the same at two o'clock in the morning as it had four hours earlier at ten in the evening.

Not even like travel on water, across the broad ocean where the scenery is water, whipped into waves of some similarity. For no two waves are ever the same exactly, and there is always the chance of a whitecap or a surfacing fish. The motion of the waves is incessant, at some times as soothing to the nerves as a lullaby.

But space was always the same. Across the galactic reaches covered by Man so far, there is little change in the aspect of the sky. A nearby star here or there is misplaced, but by and large the sky looks the same from Terra as it does from any planet or any star within fifty light years.

Move a man from Sol to Sirius, and Canis Major loses a bright star and changes shape to a degree not noticed by any but a trained uranographer. Ophiuchus gains another unimportant star that no one would care much about.

But then, Alice had been thrilled from the center of her heart to the flush on her skin with the idea of taking to space at last, so that she could at least begin to grasp the immensity and the mystery that he had failed to bring to her through talk.

Well, Alice Hemingway was getting her young tummy full of space!

He was still swearing under his breath when the men came in to ask him what they should do next.

He eyed them sourly. Manning, Edwards and Wainwright of his own ship. Hatch, Weston, Allison; then others Wilson knew only by reputation and name--Morganstern, Cunningham, Wilkes, Thordarson, Moore, Silkowski, Themes, and Calcaterra.

* * * * *

They watched him quietly, knowing what he must be feeling. They wanted orders, either to continue this fruitless search or to abandon it. But not one of them wanted to be the first to speak.

Finally Wilson singled out Toby Manning, the computer.

"Well?" he snapped.

Manning shrugged. "Tell me what to do next and I'll do it," he said defensively.

Wilson exploded, "You know your job! Suppose you tell us all how three hundred ships could comb space and miss anything bigger than a hard-boiled egg."

Toby Manning started to open his mouth to say something. He was not at all sure what he should say, not at all sure what was wise to say, but he knew he was expected to say something. It was as well for Manning that he felt indecision, for if he had uttered a syllable it would have been blasted back down his throat.

"Space search!" roared Wilson angrily. "Integrated maneuvers! We might as well be a bunch of crying children, lost, and scrambling all over a department store trying to get ourselves located. Sure I know there are indeterminates. I know there's always trouble with space coordinates. Sure, it ain't like plowing a farm where you can follow the edge of where you've been last. But you, Manning, are supposed to be a computer, capable of plowing with the Law of Probabilities which, my math prof once told me, should include the probability that human beings will make errors and be generally sloppy. You set up the search grid and proposed the search pattern with what you called a factor of overlap-safety."

Wilson turned on Hugh Weston. "And you are supposed to have a bunch of the finest astrogators in the Universe! You and your collection of schoolboys, confidently walking behind the stereo and drawing pinpoints and hairlines to show where we've been! Nuts. You should have used a ten-inch kalsomine brush."

He paused for breath as he scorned them with his eyes, then picked Allison.

"That fancy doodad of yours, Allison--the famous infrawave detector and ranger! Did you ever get more than ten minutes of constant operation out of it?"

"Once," Allison snapped angrily, his face red and his hands opening and closing.

"Fine," sneered Wilson. "Oh, fine. Oh, hell!"

He looked at them all again. He saw them, this time.

"All right," he said contritely. "I've been off base. I'm wrong. Manning, what are the probabilities for error in the grid itself?"

"Commodore, nothing can be perfect. We had to approximate their position, we had to guess their speed. But we did put our search area out beyond the region where their chances ended. If they do lie outside of the volume of space searched, their position lies under a nine-nines figure against the computation. I may sound like I'm talking gibberish, but that's it. No man can make a perfect sampling cross section unless he samples every item. I would stake my uniform on the probability that the lifeship lies within the volume outlined on our grid."

"Yes." Wilson nodded. "Weston, can you add anything? I chewed you out, too, and now I want to back down and ask your honest opinion."

Hugh Weston shrugged. "We're far from perfect ourselves," he said quietly. "I'll put it this way. I gave strict orders to the men in the marker ships that if there was any remote chance they might drift, they were to overcompensate. In other words, running a channel through space back and forth leaves a man lost himself, as to his exact position. I had men marking the courses. Each run through the grid covered a cylindrical volume. If there were a chance for any cylindrical coverage to miss its neighbor, leaving a hole in the grid, my men were to move in and see to it that these errata were closed. But I repeat, we're not perfect."

* * * * *

Wilson said contritely, "Allison, I owe you the most. You snapped me out of it. Maybe I owe you the least for bringing that damned gizmo out here and tying up Hatch's entire fleet of scout craft. But Hatch would have been sitting quiet anyway, as it turned out. Anything to add?"

"Nope," said Allison, with a shake of his head. "We know the infrawave detector is no polished instrument. We're fumbling in the dark. But there was that possible chance that the detector might have worked in deep space where it hadn't worked in the interference field of a planetary system. We hardly know what makes the infrawaves radiate, let alone how they propagate. But we tried. Just as you tried. We failed."

"Just as I failed," said Wilson bitterly.

"Not completely," said Commander Hatch. "We did catch one of them."

"Batting fifty per cent. One hit and one miss."

"Stop beating yourself, Wilson."

"Beating myself? I--" He stopped, then spoke to Manning. "What are their chances of being in the same general region as that other lifeship?"

Manning said to Weston, "You answer that."

Weston shook his head. "We have no way of knowing whether the rescued ship left the foundered spacecraft before or after the lost one. Nor at what celestial angle. Nor at what speed. Okay?"

Manning nodded, then added to Wilson, "The answer to that, Commodore, is that the position of the rescued lifeship has no bearing on the lost one. Just as the turn of heads in a toss has any effect upon the turn of the next toss."

Wilson nodded unhappily. "And so we sit here and talk it to death."

"What more can we do?"

"We can start over again."

"Is that an order?" asked Hatch.

Manning shook his head almost imperceptibly. Wilson caught the faint objection and said, "Wait a moment. Toby, what have you got in mind?"

"If we start over again," Manning said soberly, "I'll have to reconstruct the grid. Because by the time we've covered the grid, they'll have had time to pass outside of the present realm."

Wilson thought this over. "Why," he asked generally, "don't we start on the outside and close in?"

Manning answered, "Because in starting on the inside we have the best mathematical chance of finding them. By starting on the outside, we must cover a vast cylinder, element by element, working in the direction opposite to theirs. No, that's not the right way to do it, Commodore."

"All right. Reconstruct your new grid, Toby. Hugh, get your gang together and compute the center line of the pattern within a half-inch. Morganstern, you've got a good crew of advanced techs. Turn 'em all over to Allison. Allison, pack enough men aboard that cranky crate of yours so that any part that blows can be replaced within ten seconds. I want uninterrupted operation, even though the thing only hands us spurious responses.

"Hatch, put half of your gang in with the random search team. No use using all of you to run down gas clouds and meteorites and places where there should be something the size of a planet but isn't. Yes, we'll start all over. And this time, Hugh, give us fifty per cent overlap, and get busy with Toby to compute the new grid on that basis. Can we do it?"

They looked at him. Some wearily, who saw him more weary than they. Some angrily, but Wilson was beyond honest anger himself. Some anxiously, who knew that Ted Wilson had lost more out in that black nothingness than a reputation, or a mark on his record. Some looked at him willingly. They were all with him, tired, angry, expectant, but all willing.

Weston growled, "We'll find 'em, damn it."

* * * * *

The room rumbled with growls. They were not schoolboys, thrilled with the adventure or given to demonstration, nor youths driven to the job of combing the unknown for their commodore's lost love. But they felt it inside and stifled it in low-voiced growls because they were not much given to bragging, either.

And Ted Wilson knew that if the lost lifeship was to be found, his command would find it.

Wilson's communications officer came in quietly. He caught his commodore's eye and motioned Wilson aside.

"Commodore," he said, "something I'm not quite sure about."

"Yes?"

"The hourly infrawave distress call?"

"Yes, of course. It's time for it." Wilson looked at the man's face and knew that something was wrong. "It came in, didn't it?" When the communications officer didn't speak, Wilson cried hoarsely, "It came in?"

The com-tech nodded slowly. "It started, but it was sputtering badly. Then it conked out cold, Commodore. Nothing like I've ever heard before."

"Like what?"

"Well, you know the code wheel runs in standard communications code, giving the spacecraft license, the lifeship number, and the general distress call, repeated over and over for three minutes. Well, sir, the license identification came through all right, but after that the code got awful garbled and spotty, and then the whole damned transmission just crapped out, sir. After about a half-minute."

"Fade?" asked Wilson in a strained voice.

"Went out like a blown fuse. Big blast, then silence. Nothing."

Wilson thought for a moment, then looked around. "Anybody have an idea?"

Allison scratched his head. "You say the code was all right, but then got spotty?"

"Yes, sir."

Allison looked at Manning. Both were involved in science to a high degree, Allison as an infrawave researcher; Manning as a computer. Both had studied the mathematics of communication. Manning nodded soberly.

"You don't suppose they foolishly tried to key the automatic transmitter?" he asked. "Superimposing a code upon another code would result in a spotty transmission, since the intermingled transmission bits would obtain only where both codings delivered a positive configuration. It might--"

The communications tech broke in scornfully, "The pilot of the Seventy-nine was aboard. He'd know. Nobody but a complete imbecile would try to key an automatic distress transmitter."

Allison nodded positively. "Can't be it."

Commander Hatch looked down at his feet. "I was in a space can once," he said. "They don't last forever. I--" He let his voice trail away.

Wilson looked into their faces. The cold, bleak fact was so clear in their faces that he could not ignore it. He was forced to recognize the fact that a lifeship is no spacecraft. A lifeship is a flimsy tin can, as spaceworthy as an open raft on the broad ocean, as spaceworthy as an umbrella in a windstorm. A lifeship was not intended for comfort, or for travel, or for use. It was aimed at a hope and a prayer that if the mother spacecraft came a cropper that human lives could be protected for a time, long enough to give hope of rescue.

In the faces of the men had been determination. Now the determination had faded. Left was only sorrow and resignation.

Wilson had lost.

Doggedly he said, "We'll loaf it out for the next hour. We'll go on as though this hadn't happened. We'll prepare for a recoverage of the grid."

They all nodded and left, but the step of each had lost its spring, and voices had lowered to funeral rumbles. Some even whispered.

* * * * *

Commodore Wilson swore at the closed door.

The hour passed with the slow interminable drag of eternity itself. It was the complete uncertainty of the result, the angering fact that not a single thing could be done until that hour had passed, and even then there was a high possibility that nothing could be done at all. So long as the hourly signal came in, there had been solid knowledge of the survival of the lost party.

This had been a sort of haphazard thing. There had been times before when a lifeship party had missed sending the signal because of fatigue, and had finally sent their signal late. Suggestions were always cropping up that the signal be entirely automatic, clock-timed. These ideas were claimed to be impractical since a timed, automatic signal only meant that the lifeship itself was still lost in space, and not that any aboard it were alive.

A full, two-way infrawave system would have been the answer; if a full two-way system could have been installed in a lifeship, still leaving room in the little space can for things essential to the sustenance of human life.

Ocean lifecraft are equipped with hooks and lines for catching fish, with gizmos for making water from the salt ocean drinkable. Air is free. Waste products are cast overboard.

In space there are no fish to catch, no salt ocean to purify, no air but that within the tiny can and its high-pressure air flasks. There is a supply of water and a small refining plant to distill waste products, not at all efficient, but adequate for a few days. But the bulk of the food and water and all of the air necessary to maintain life filled up a large percentage of the small volume of a lifeship.

Slowly, that nerve-grinding hour passed, and then it became an hour and a half. Then it was two hours, then two and a half. Then three hours.

No signal....

Andrews looked askance at Norton. "Nothing we can do?" he asked quietly.

Norton shook his head: "Nothing I can do," he said helplessly.

"But there must be something."

"There probably is," Norton said simply. "If I were a trained com-tech, I could probably fake something together and make some fudged-up repair that would at least radiate. But I'm a pilot, so I don't know all the angles of infrawave equipment. Not even basic theory. I know enough--with the aid of this repair manual--to replace any part that might have failed. But beyond that--"

Andrews shook his head and scratched his nose. "I can't see it," he said.

"See what?"

"I can't see how a man can claim the ability to make a repair on a complicated thing like this without knowing more than you say you know."

Norton smiled thinly. "I can replace the plumbing under a sink, too," he said flatly, "without knowing enough to make me a licensed plumber. This manual gives full directions, but no reasons. If the voltage at this terminal is less than thirty-six hundred, then check the voltages on terminals so-and-so, measure the resistance between terminals this-and-that with the equipment off, connect terminal A to terminal B, and check the alternating voltage across Component Two-nineteen. Depending upon what we find that does not follow the book, we locate the busted doodad and replace it. But the damned book doesn't bother to tell you why the voltage across such-and-such terminals should be thirty-six hundred, or what happens when it isn't. The book was not written for infrawave engineers. It was written for guys like me who care more to get a signal on the infrawave bands than we care for the theory of operation."

"All right, then. So we blew something. Can't we run it down?"

"Trouble is that we blew too many things at the same time."

"Don't understand."

"Naturally," snapped the pilot. "You know less about this stuff than I do. This is supposed to be more than thirty-six hundred, providing that is functioning. But the voltage will go above seven thousand if the other has come unglued. If you blow both items, together, the voltage downed by one and upped by the other comes out to about four thousand. The reading may be all right, but when everything in the damned set reads wrong, I have to give up."

"So what do we do now?"

Norton shrugged. "We hope they don't give up. We keep on working on this thing. We--Hell, we might as well turn on the receiver and listen."

"Can we spare the power?"

Norton looked at the financier. "Might as well," he said. "We might as well. If they abandon this search because we aren't transmitting, we might as well waste the power anyway...."

* * * * *

Viggon Sarri faced his lieutenants. "From Brein's report," he announced, "they finished their grid search some three hours ago, and have been milling around in stacked pattern ever since. Linus predicts that they have been waiting for a recurrence of the regularly transmitted signal that should have kept coming but which blew out from some sort of overload. Within the half-hour, they have reformed their search pattern and seem inclined to continue, even though it should appear obvious to them that their friends have lost their ability to transmit."

Regin Naylo looked puzzled. "Could it be that they've discovered how to tell when an infrawave receiver is being used?"

Faren Twill shook his head, "If they knew that they'd have developed a more efficient infrawave detector."

Linus Brein agreed vigorously.

Viggon Sarri seated himself self-confidently. "Gentlemen, you have before you a race with dogged determination, the grit and will to go on, even though they have tasted failure."

"Right," said Faren Twill.

"So now I know," said Viggon. "And now we go in!"

Regin Naylo looked hopeful. "To let 'em have it?" His face fell. "Or to make friends of them?"

Faren Twill started to speak, but Viggon silenced him with a wave of his multiflexed hand as he went on. "We go in prepared for anything. Naylo, you will, as usual, set up our forces for battle. That means an all-man alert at all stations. Complete alert, Naylo."

Naylo nodded.

"With one exception. No attempt to clear the space charge in the projectors with a preliminary blast."

"But look, sir--"

"You'll issue instructions to your beam officers to set their beams for the trial blast, but not to clear them."

"Mightn't that be dangerous?"

"It might. But the clearing blast can come before we strike--if we have to strike. I doubt that the wait will be disastrous, Regin. After all, they seem to have no armaments worthy of the name. And firing a few thousand megnoid beams, even at test power, cuts up some awful didoes in space."

"So?" sneered Naylo.

"Aside from scaring the armor off of them, it also kills a certain element I demand. At any rate, those are your orders. You, Faren Twill, will take charge of the maneuvers, setting up the fleet in battle formation and instructing each ship captain to be prepared for any maneuver, however unorthodox. Both of you are to maintain constant personal contact with me, for my orders may change by the minute. Linus, you had better clear your logic computer of all problems, but retain the information we have stored regarding this race. Be prepared to accept any information that may come from our next act. Understand?"

They all nodded.

"All right. Then as soon as each of you is ready for further orders, report. At that time we are going in!"