Chapter VII

Lalande 25372 is a Spectral Class M star, a faint red dwarf not visible to the naked eye from Earth, Sol. Lalande 25372 lies fifteen point nine light years from Sol, about fifteen degrees north of the celestial equator and not quite opposite the vernal equinox. It has planets, but this does not make Lalande 25372 unique. Like most of the planets found in space, neither mad dogs nor Englishmen would have anything to do with them--willingly. They are suitable only for the hapless wight whose erring foot has unhappily landed on the tender official toe.

The planet Flatbush, Lalande 25372, received its name from an obscure medieval reference to a form of punishment known as "Walking a beat in Flatbush," if we are to believe MacClelland's authoritative volume _The Origin of Place Names_.

Observed through the multipane window of the Station, Flatbush, Lalande 25372, was a pleasant enough planet, provided one could ignore the fact that there was not a sign nor trace of vegetation from the Installation Building to the horizon. A couple of hundred yards from the building there was a pleasant looking lake. The lake was indeed water, but it contained dissolved substances that would have poisoned a boojum snark. The warm wind of Flatbush rippled the surface of the lake, but no square yard of sail would be hoisted until someone first built a gas mask that would filter out the colorless gases that turned silver black. Fluffy clouds floated across the sky, but they rained down a mess that etched stainless steel.

Out There, near the perimeter of Man's five-parsec range of operations, subelectromagnetic detector beams scoured the sky. Taking the most pessimistic standpoint--the least possible combinations of Nature's infinite variety of environment--Nature's own profligacy with life-forms still demanded that somewhere, Out There, another race was plying the spaceways.

Someday this hypothetical race was certain to touch wings with mankind.

When that took place it was the duty of the Bureau of Operations to detect them, to intercept them, and to warn the men of Earth, Sol, that Mankind was no longer alone. The fact that the subelectromagnetic detecting beams had been sweeping space for a couple of hundred years without detecting anything had no bearing on the future. The beams must be maintained so long as a human man remained alive in space.

In addition to the detector beams, the outlying planets carried astrogation beacons. They were subelectromagnetic lighthouses, so to speak, that rang across space with known direction and ranging telemetered signals. Someday, Man hoped to fill the space lanes with spacecraft and the planets with interstellar commerce.

Someday there might be another _Marie Celeste_ plying its course with its crew inexplicably missing. But if this ever happened, it was not going to happen without the Space Service knowing precisely how many and which spacecraft were operating through that volume of space before, during, and after D-for-Disaster Day and M-for-Mysterious Minute.

The equipment, of course, was automated to modern perfection, with multi-lateral channels that would take over in case of component failure. Its factor of reliability was well above six or seven nines of perfection. But to admit that this perfection was adequate would have deprived the Space Service of a convenient minor penal detail to take care of brash junior officers. Manning such a station provided the junior officer with a wealth of time to contemplate his sins, and to mend his evil ways.

In the case of Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, this process consisted of locating the flaw that prevented Hansen's Folly from being Hansen's Analysis.

* * * * *

Now, from the time of Alexander Selkirk, romantic history has been dotted with accounts of men who have been cast away with nothing more than their hands and their brains. And with these, they have succeeded in raising their caveman environment up to the level of modern technical conveniences.

Like them--having been unable to locate the flaw in Hansen's Folly by the theoretical approach during his tour of duty on Earth, Sol, and having similarly failed to locate the error in experimental hardware during his tour of duty on Eden, Tau Ceti--Junior Spaceman Howard Reed began to experiment on the spacecraft that stood parked on its launching pad two hundred feet from the Installation. There was plenty of equipment to work with. The Space Service did not stock its perimeter stations in a slipshod manner.

Furthermore, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had plenty of time.

The account of his life and adventures is hardly worth telling. He had no distractions. He worked. The months passed one after the other.

Flatbush, Lalande 25372 was so far out that there was no provision made for a regular tour of inspection. Nobody bothered to drop in on Junior Spaceman Howard Reed. Gabbling on the official communication channels was strictly forbidden, so the young junior officer was denied even contact by voice. No one had come up with an economically sound means of producing entertainment programs from Earth, Sol, on the subelectromagnetic beams and so he--like his fellows in the other perimeter stations--received neither news nor music from home.

He could terminate this tour of duty only by solving the riddle of Hansen's Folly, and then notifying his superiors on the official communications channels--or by tucking a note in the once-each-year supply drone that came laden with enough of Earth's environment to keep the young expatriate alive for another year.

The set-up was wholly conducive to work. There was time and there was equipment; his orders were to remain there until he had studied his way through the problem.

With nothing else to do, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed was deep in his investigation ... when the drone spacecraft came down along the subelectromagnetic beacon and made its landing a dozen yards away.

The drone was standard spacecraft size, an unmanned hull laden with the necessities of life that would support him for a year.

It was the first one that he had ever seen. This was the first time that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had had to face the problem of Supply. Packed in that droneship was enough earth environment to last a man a year. The perishables and expendables, as well as replacement for the lost fractions of the recyclables, were all there. They were dehydrated and deep frozen after all waste had been removed, then compressed into cubes of identical size for the most favorable packing fraction. Even so, it was a prodigious amount of stuff. Supply would have been impossible on a once-per-year basis, if the foul water of Flatbush, Lalande 25372, hadn't been distillable with ease.

* * * * *

The junior spaceman eyed the droneship with a sudden burst of pride in his fellow man's accomplishment. Given a pre-programmed flight along telemetered beacons originating at either terminus, the running equipment within the drone would bulk much less than the same mass and size as a human and his needs. Until flight-decisions were necessary, the hardware pilot was as good as the human pilot--and far less subject to headache, tantrum, disappointment at not getting the Saturday night pass and resentment over being passed by at promotion time.

Then his pride gave way to sudden, prolonged thought.

The range of a spacecraft is computed from point of takeoff to point of no return. There was no way of restoring the powerbanks of a spacecraft except on Earth, Sol.

Now, of course, it is entirely possible to take off and just keep going until the powerbanks are depleted.

That will cover twice the stated range to the point of no return. Ships have gone out and off and away and have never been heard of again. It is possible that one or more of these have succeeded in locating an Earth-like planet beyond the point of no return, but the Earthmen at home will never know about it until the range is extended. The possibility of such a planet favoring human life and ultimately harboring a culture of technical competence enough to create and maintain the power restoring equipment is extremely remote.

For spacecraft that carry women are few and far between.

And it takes more than one man's lifetime to make use of the know-how.

Junior Spaceman Howard Reed knew that away back in the Twentieth Century, the average engineer could make a guess, count on his fingers, and come up with a pretty shrewd estimate of the horsepower per cubic inch that could be stored by the various ways and means available to the age.

Removing the human pilot and his needs did give the droneship quite a bit more space for cargo and power. But, as he looked at the droneship standing there, it became plain to Junior Spaceman Howard Reed that there was not room in that size of hull for both the necessary powerbanks and the full year's store of supplies for one man.

Whereupon Junior Spaceman Howard Reed dropped his tools. He donned his space suit and crossed the intervening space to the droneship.

He began to examine the ship's running gear with a critical and suspicious eye.

He was examining hardware that was familiar to him. It took him no more than two hours to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that the droneship's drive was built along the theories and mathematical analysis that he had been told simply did not work!

Someone had reduced Hansen's Folly to practice!

* * * * *

He paused again. Hansen's Folly had been called a failure about two hundred years ago, but what did that really mean? He considered his history.

In 1724, Stephen Gray and Granville Wheeler made the proud announcement that they had succeeded in transmitting an electrical phenomenon along a wire for a distance of 682 feet. Two hundred years later the entire Earth was girdled with telegraph, telephone and cable wires and linked with the invisible bonds of radio waves.

In about 1904 the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane flight. Forty years later men were flying in airplanes that carried a wingspread greater than the distance of the Wright's first flight.

Einstein's Barrier was accepted scientific dogma for a hundred years; but he, Howard Reed, was now standing in a spacecraft that had crossed the gulf between the stars at a speed that not only exceeded the velocity of propagated light--but exceeded this speed by a few hundred orders of magnitude.

So? So maybe they were right. Maybe Hansen's Folly was a failure.

But the running gear in this droneship was designed to the analysis produced by Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, and it worked. Furthermore, he had only the scornful word of Commander Briggs of the Bureau of Research that his arguments had been parallel to those of the hapless Hansen.

It would hardly be the first time in the history of the human race that some bureaucrat got fat on the work of his underlings who not only received no credit for their work, but were often hushed, hidden, or otherwise prevented from proving their right to the fame and fortune.

Angrily, Howard Reed stood up and cursed. They were not going to smother him in a peg-whittling job on a single-man post sixteen light years from home base, denied of all but official communications.

He was going to find out about this very strange business!

Junior Spaceman Howard Reed did not even bother going back to the Station. Its Outside detectors had been sweeping deep space for a couple of hundred years without detecting anything; its astrobeacons were employed once each year when the droneship arrived. Furthermore, both equipments were automatic, on the trips, set up to bypass the one-man crew of the Station by transmitting the information on the regular Channels. So, there in the droneship, the junior spaceman merely disconnected the pre-programmed autopilot, clamped his hands around the manual gear, and took off for far-off Earth, Sol.