thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.
How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that was wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and in relaxation, leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think, to figure out things. And then one died and all one's thoughts were lost.
Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Lost and left for someone else to discover if he could… and probably lost forever.
But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. No time out for eating or for sleeping. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years, on one problem, had she wished.
He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew, what keys she had found out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And — she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.
She was talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion that she could be.
'You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector… but with a vast difference in one respect.”
'You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?' asked Kingsley.
She nodded. 'Except that they wouldn't have used it for driving ships…
not then. For Jupiter was winning and everyone was desperate. They didn't care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon.”
'The geosector is no weapon,' Kingsley declared flatly. 'You couldn't use it near a planetary body.”
'But consider this,' said the girl. 'If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn't it?”
Herb whistled. 'I'd say it'd be a weapon,' he said, 'and how!”
'They wanted to train it on Jupiter,' Caroline explained. 'It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well.”
'But think of what it would have done to the solar system,' ejaculated Kingsley. 'Even if the space warp hadn't distorted space throughout the entire system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the other planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth.”
The girl nodded.
'That's why I wouldn't turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space.”
'Why,' said Gary, 'you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn't built until a hundred years ago.”
Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn't laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.
He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.
'Young lady,' rumbled Kingsley, 'it seems to me that you don't need any help from these Cosmic Engineers.”
She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. 'But I do,' she said.
The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.
'The instructions,' Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.
The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and the flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.
Gary's head swam at the thought of it… that slim wisp of a girl talking across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe, Talking and understanding but not perfectly understanding, perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about the equations she had written on the pad. The tip of her pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.
The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.
The pencil made corrections, added notes and jotted down new equations.
Never once hesitating. Then the light blinked off and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.
Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.
He looked questioningly at the girl.
'Do you understand this?' he rasped.
She nodded blithely.
He flung down the pad. 'There's only one other person in the system who could,' he said. 'Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowing what it's all about. That's Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he's in a mental institution back on Earth.”
'Sure,' yelled Herb, 'he's the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a picture of him once.”
They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.
'I understand it well enough to start,' she said. 'I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened in my mind. But we can always do that when the time comes.”
'Those equations,' said Kingsley, 'represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom.”
'Probably,' Caroline suggested, 'the Engineers live on a large and massive world, so large that space would be distorted, where stresses such as are shown in the equations would be the normal circumstance. Beings living on such a world would soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably couldn't be developed because there'd be no such a thing as a plane surface.”
'What do they want us to do?' asked Evans.
'They want us to build a machine,' said Caroline, 'a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them.”
She glanced at Kingsley. 'We'll need strong materials,' she said. 'Stronger than anything we know of in the system. Something that will stand up under the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space.”
Kingsley wrinkled his brow.
'I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl,' she said. 'Have you experimented with it here?”
Kingsley nodded. 'We've stilled the electron-whirl,' he said. 'Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won't do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be maintained at close to absolute zero. The least heat and they overcome inertia and start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.
'If we could crystallize the atomic orbit after we had stopped it,' he said, 'we'd have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down.”
'We can do it,' Caroline said. 'We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their places.”
Kingsley snorted. 'Is there anything,' he asked, 'that you can't do with space?”
Caroline laughed. 'A lot of things I can't do, doctor,' she told him. 'A few things I can do. I was interested in
