Patron of the Arts

I paid top money for top men, but money was not the only consideration. I made it a challenge, and of course, it was. It took eight months, but slowly the pieces began to come together. I found that my

“insights” were not so wrong after all.

There is no time outside the universe. We found that out when we were able to move aside all the energy, all the particles, all the light, to make a hole in space. The sensors probed through that hole, into the outside of curved space, to find another way back in. What we couldn’t be certain of was where and when the re-entry would be. This was when Cilento’s sensatron provided critical information. Carefully, we opened it up. Coleman traced the aiming circuits. Gottlieb did the math, and Intertech built the transporter machinery. It took more time to make it self-sufficient, with a portable fusion generator, but I needed it that way.

We sent through several objects, but nothing came back. A laboratory rat went through and returned dead, and very old. A second rat came back dead, but approximately the same age. One half of a matched set of atomic clocks went and were returned. There was a difference of 45.76.3 seconds when they were compared. We were getting there.

Experiment after experiment was tried. Most failed in some way or another. Sensing and recording devices were sent but the magnetism was ruined, film fogged, and other methods were too faulty for any good use. We had to send a human, the multi-purpose recording and analysis generalist. A machine can only respond to what it is built to respond to, and nothing else. A man can accept variables, sense the unknown, and analyze, somewhat, on the basis of very little information. I insisted that man be me, but they were not yet ready. The drift factors were the problem: we start out here and go there and return at once . . . but here is several seconds removed. The planet turns, it orbits the sun, the sun moves in relation to other stars, the whole universe is exploding still. There was no relative point to which we could anchor, no benchmark from which we could measure.

“What we need is a kind of step process,” Coleman told me.

“We move an approximate distance toward point X in an approximate direction. Then we stop and adjust. Two dings left, one ding high. Then we go to point B and look at point A, where we started, and back at point X, and make another guess at it. And so on. Inching closer with each adjustment.”

“Guess?” I said.

“Sure,” he smiled. “A guess. Fifty, a hundred years from now, when this whole thing is computerized to the nth degree you’ll be able to condense and speed the whole process up. But for now it’s an approximation. Cut and fit. With each cutting and fitting we gain knowledge and expertise.”

“That’s why pioneers got full of arrows,” I sighed.

“But if it works,” he said happily, “we can go anywhere. The first explorations will be cut and fit. Then we’ll get transmitter stations on Centauri, for instance. We can beam in on it, simplifying the whole process. Then on a planet in another direction—with triangularization we can go somewhere else, faster and more accurately.”

I thought a moment. “What if we had a beam signal here on Earth, and the other from Mars?”

“We thought of that. It would broaden the base and give us a more accurate aiming method. The time lag between here and there can be worked out easily enough.”

“How did Cilento do it?”

“Dumb luck, probably. It held together long enough for him to go through, as long as the recording cycle went, and then the hole closed. He could never come back that way.”

“I’ve been having the Young Observatory on Luna analyze the spectrum of the recorded sun and run a comparison test. So far they’ve come up with nine suns within ten light years that are close approximations.”

Coleman rubbed his lip with his thumbnail. “Ah, yes, the target. Wouldn’t you rather just go to Centauri? It would be easier.”

“Easier, but not what I want.”

He shrugged. “I’d be satisfied to get to any other sun.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But I want that certain planet.”

“They may be dead . . . or . . . something.”

“Yes, I know.” A sudden thought came to me. The mural in the Star Palace. During that hallucination that I had it seemed to . . . open . .