The Instant of Now Part 3

"It can't be done, Paul." Dirrul held his Glo-Wave nervously to the end of a cigarette. "Besides, I want to think this through carefully before I make up my mind."

"A merchant s.h.i.+p made a crash landing at Barney's emergency field yesterday," said Paul. "The damage was slight, but the pilot--unfortunately the pilot is dead." Sorgel smiled enigmatically. "Barney's one of our best men. He's been on the lookout for a chance like this for weeks.

"You'll leave tonight. Avoid the regular s.p.a.ce lanes. I'm guessing you'll be on Vinin in a hundred days at the outside. On the fiftieth day after that--exactly one hundred and fifty days from now--our Vininese s.p.a.ce-fleet must make a landing on Agron."

"I'll be missed, Paul--they'll make inquiries."

"And get no satisfactory answers."

Pacing the floor, Dirrul asked tensely, "Does everyone in the Movement know about this?"

"The vote was made unanimously yesterday."

"One of the others must have a vacation leave coming up. Send him.

We're not at war with Vinin. He could take one of the regular s.p.a.ce excursions."

"I can't send a message in writing. It would be picked up by the customs police. And you're the only one who can carry it verbally, Eddie. You know the whole background because you worked with Glenna and Hurd. You've been in the Movement longer than any of the others."

"Why not go yourself, Paul?"

"I can do more for the liberation if I stay here."

"I wish I'd been at the meeting yesterday when the vote was taken. I'd have liked to discuss it with the others before--"

"Why so many questions, Eddie? Why so many doubts all of a sudden?"

Sorgel stood and faced Dirrul, holding his shoulders in a grip that hurt. "Are you trying to back out? Maybe it wasn't a good thing to let you play around with the science boys after all. Be honest with me, Eddie. If you're not sure where you stand, say so. There's no room in the Movement for traitors."

When Dirrul said nothing Sorgel added in a voice that rang with fervor, "You're the only man in the Movement who has had any training as a s.p.a.ce-pilot. It depends on you now--everything you've ever dreamed of, everything Glenna and Hurd wanted. Can you forget what the Agronian police did to Glenna? Is your courage any less than hers?"

Again Sorgel paused but still Dirrul said nothing. "The future of your world depends on you, Eddie--don't let it down."

"I'll go," Dirrul whispered.

As Eddie made up his mind his internal tension relaxed and he was filled with a sense of well-being. When he thought about it he couldn't understand why he had hesitated--unless perhaps what Sorgel suggested was true--that his contact with the Ad-Air faculty had blunted and nearly perverted his established sense of values.

An hour later Dirrul boarded the battered antiquated s.p.a.ce cargo carrier on the launching rack at Barney's emergency field. At the last minute Sorgel pressed a curious disk into his hand. Made of a very light metal and suspended from a short chain it was two inches in diameter and covered with a complex grid design.

"Put it around your neck before you land, Eddie. Don't remove under any circ.u.mstances until you report. Give it to the Chief then. He'll know I sent you because it's my own identification activator." Sorgel clasped Dirrul's hand warmly. "When you land on Vinin take the North Field below the capital. It's the HQ operational center. Use Wave-code three-seven-three and they'll know you're friendly."

IV

After the launching s.p.a.ce-flight was normally a monotonous routine.

The course was charted by automatic navigators and the vast pattern of interlocking machinery and safety devices was electronically controlled by robot relays from the pilot master-panel. The chief function of a trained s.p.a.ce-pilot, aside from his services as a diplomat, was to handle emergency situations for which automatic responses could not be built into the machinery.

Dirrul, however, could not depend a great deal upon the robot devices.

He had to avoid the well-traveled and well-charted commercial s.p.a.ce-lanes. He had to be constantly on the alert for the telltale white of a police cruiser. A cargo carrier was the slowest s.h.i.+p in the universe--Dirrul could outrun nothing, not even a playboy's sport jalopy, and inspection by the customs police would have been disastrous.

He followed a roundabout route, keeping as far from inhabited planets as he could, and he made good time. In ninety-five days he had reached the mythical border in s.p.a.ce, which divided the territory of the Planetary Union and the Vininese Confederacy.

He was almost at midpoint in the galaxy. On the glazed screen of his s.p.a.ce-map the mirrored pinp.r.i.c.ks of sun systems glittered like microscopic gems scattered over the curve of a gigantic black saucer.

Dirrul had never been so far from Agron. He felt a stifling sense of insignificance.

The meaning of time as he understood it was somehow overwhelmed by the immensity of s.p.a.ce. Now and yesterday, today and tomorrow, became a single unity. Dirrul had a new sense of the past in terms of the present. His mind groped for word symbols that he understood which could crystalize the shadowy new concept filling his mind.

New understanding seemed to arise from the s.p.a.ce-map. Somewhere among the glowing points of light was the Place of the Beginning, a single planet called Earth. In the far-distant past Earthmen had made themselves rational beings. But for centuries thereafter they had made no further progress, apparently appalled by the audacity of such presumptive evolution. They had fought through a long primitive period of violence, erecting system on system and philosophy upon philosophy to conceal, destroy and wipe out their own biological machinery.

Then out of a final orgy of death and terror the Earthmen had grasped the meaning and the responsibility of the Rational Potential. They had understood the reality of being.

Within a century after that they had conquered s.p.a.ce. They had found peoples like themselves occasionally--but more often races that had followed different biological adaptations to different environments.

Wherever there seemed to be a spark of primitive rationality the Earthmen had stayed and patiently taught the Rational Potential of being, which they had learned for themselves only after such bloodshed.

The galaxy was theirs, in a sense, for it thought in the patterns of Earthmen, although long ago their direct influence had waned. They were a legend and an ideal, lost in the vastness of s.p.a.ce, yet bound fast into the cultures of all peoples.

Yet somewhere the Earthmen must have failed, somewhere there must have been a flaw in their teaching. Fifty years earlier, as the Agronians measured time, the galaxy had been torn apart by war. The Agronians had led one group of planets, the Vininese another. Planet after planet was seared by deadly new weapons--world after world died in the orange flame of gaudy atomic disintegration. Slowly the power of Vinin crept across the sky until the Vininese ruled half the galaxy.

Their first defeat had come unexpectedly. Their great s.p.a.ce-armada swung in on Agron, while the people crowded in terror in their flimsy raid shelters. But the Vininese s.h.i.+ps had vanished high in the air.

Not even debris had fallen on the planet.

It was the first use of the Nuclear Beams. Dirrul had been a schoolboy when the Agronian scientists announced their discovery. He remembered the exciting thrill of pride, recalled how he and his schoolmates had dreamed of destroying the Vininese with the new weapon.

He remembered too the galling bitterness he had felt when the scientists announced that they had made peace instead.

They had had sound reasons, of course. They said the Beams had a limited value. They could be used only defensively to girdle a single planet in the stratospheric level of its atmosphere. Elsewhere they were harmless. To compound the spectacular timidity, the scientists had given away the secret to all comers, including the Vininese. They had an argument for that particular idiocy too--if each planet could protect itself so easily from all external attack its people could freely decide for themselves their galactic allegiance or maintain isolated independence.

The Planetary Union had been formed and members of the Vininese Confederacy invited to join it. Not a people anywhere in the Confederacy made even tentative exploration of the offer while five sun systems of the Union later joined the Vininese. That was the fact that had ultimately prodded Dirrul into joining the Movement.

Later, when he read the pamphlets brought from Vinin, he had clarified his purposes. On the one hand lay the waste, the confusion, the uncertainty of Agron. Scientists who talked forever of hypotheses and were afraid to stand firm for any absolute truths--moralists who qualified even the simplest standards of right and wrong--philosophers who glorified a condition of eternal chaos which they called an open mind.

On the other hand lay the clean efficiency of Vinin. Scientific certainty, and the progress that stemmed from it--the s.p.a.ce-dragon instead of the Safe-sweet candy, a clear social organization in which the individual was directed by established and inflexible principles.

The whole of it was history as Dirrul had learned it, the chronology of the past. As he looked on the star map of the galaxy, at midpoint between the two great unions of planets, the meaning of the past began to change. The chronology fell into a new perspective.

Against the vast expanse of s.p.a.ce time twisted into a new relations.h.i.+p. Time and s.p.a.ce began to equate with an exciting synonymity. History was not the past, dead and numbered--history was now. All things, all s.p.a.ce, all time, were forever fixed at the instant of now.

In Dirrul's mind a tumult of facts trembled on the verge of a startling new order--the atomic structure of all energy and the black saucer of the galaxy. The violent spasms the Earthmen had suffered before they found the Rational Potential and the devastation of the Galactic War.

But before he could a.s.sess such new values and verbalize the new generalization the antiquated warning system of his s.h.i.+p tw.a.n.ged tinnily. On the control panel screen he saw the trim outline of a white Agronian police s.h.i.+p. A moment later the voice came over the speaker, ordering him to state his permit registry and his destination.

Dragged so suddenly back to reality, Dirrul reacted in panic. It was a routine inquiry. He might have bluffed his way clear. Instead he put the cargo s.h.i.+p at top speed toward Vinin and watched helplessly while the patrol cruiser closed relentlessly in.

"Stand for search!" the voice commanded.

When he did nothing the police shot a warning rocket over his bow. A second shot struck the rear of the cargo s.h.i.+p and tore away a section of landing gear. Swearing, Dirrul tried to maneuver out of range, and to a certain extent he was successful. But piloting skill could not make up for the c.u.mbersome bulk of his unarmed s.h.i.+p. Two more blasts. .h.i.t him, collapsing the forward compartment and knocking out one power tube.

At the point of triumph, however, the police patrol turned away and left Dirrul limping alone in s.p.a.ce. For a moment he was puzzled. In another ten minutes they could have boarded the cargo carrier and made him prisoner. But he understood when he glanced again at the star map--the Agronian police had pursued him far into Vininese territory.

If Vininese patrols had found them there it might have created an unpleasant intergalactic incident.

Dirrul made a quick survey of the damage. He had only one power tube intact--beyond that, the cargo carrier was wrecked and he had on board nothing with which to make repairs. He could move ahead only at quarter-speed.