know how many, but it was a long, long time ago.”
Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.
'At first,' Caroline whispered, 'they referred to us by some term that had affection in it… actual kinfolk affection, as if there were blood ties between them and the things they were trying to talk to here. The things that must have disappeared centuries ago.”
'Longer ago than that,' Kingsley told her. 'That the thought bombardment is directed at this spot would indicate the things they are trying to reach had established some sort of a center, perhaps a city, on this site. There are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone was ever here, every sign of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, nothing to erode, nothing to blow away. A billion years would be too short a time — ”
'But who are they?' asked Gary. 'These ones you were talking to. Did they tell you that?”
She shook her head. 'I couldn't exactly understand. As near as I could come, they called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. 'That's a very poor translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it.”
She paused as if to marshal a definition. 'As if they were self-appointed guardians of the entire universe,' she explained. 'Champions of all things that live within its space-time frame. And something is threatening the universe. Some mighty force out beyond the universe out where there's neither space nor time.”
'They want our help,' she said.
'But how can we help them?' asked Herb.
'I don't know. They tried to tell me, but the thoughts they used were too abstract. I couldn't understand entirely. A few clues here and there.
They'll have to reduce it to simpler terms.”
'We couldn't even get there to help them,' said Gary. 'There is no way in which we can reach the rim of the universe. We haven't yet gone to the nearest star.”
'Maybe,' suggested Tommy Evans, 'we don't need to get there. Maybe we can do something here to help them.”
The red light was blinking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge of power.
Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. 'The edge of space. But that's impossible!”
Gary laughed at him silently.
The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.
Gary felt the cold wind from space again, flicking at his face, felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.
Kingsley was jittery. And he was jittery. Who wouldn't be at a time like this? A message from the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area where time and space still surged outward into that no-man's-land of nothingness… into that place where there was no time or space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever, where there was no place and no circumstance and no possibility of event that could allow anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer was nothing. But what was nothing?
Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe, of these two things he constructed the sum total of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn't space?
Caroline was closing the dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.
He watched the girl closely, saw her body tense and then relax. She bent forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.
Kingsley's face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his side.
Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things: that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few miles… or a few feet… distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.
Caroline was taking off her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.
'I understand a little better now,' she said. 'They are friends of ours.”
'Friends of ours?' asked Gary.
'Friends of everyone within the universe,' said Caroline. 'Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some outside danger — from some outside force.”
She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.
'They want us to come out to the edge of the universe,' she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.
Herb's chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. 'They want us…' he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.
Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley's nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.
'How do they expect us to get out there?' Kingsley asked.
'My ship is fast,' Tommy Evans said, 'faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!”
'A space-time warp,' said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. 'They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps….”
Caroline smiled at him. 'That's the answer,' she said.
'A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time.”
Kingsley's great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.
'How will we do it?' asked Herb. 'There isn't a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we're the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you'd have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you'd have to make it stay that way.”
'Maybe the Engineers,' said Evans.
'That's it,' nodded Caroline. 'The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions.”
'But,' protested Kingsley, 'could we understand? It would involve mathematics that are way beyond us.”
Caroline's voice cut sharply through his protest. 'I can understand them,”
she replied, bitterly. 'Maybe it will take a little while, but I can work them out, I've had… practice, you know.”
Kingsley was dumfounded. 'You can work it out?”
'I worked out new mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship,' she said. 'They're only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point.”
She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.
'I had a thousand years to do it,' she reminded him. 'I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don't you see?
Something to keep from going crazy.”
Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto.
That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even
