Space Lash

him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he leaned back, more relaxed.

“Program A is running.” A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner.

“D'you think we'll get full time out of it?” he ventured at last. “Those pilots are good, but I still wish it had been possible to use robotships for the key stations. A man can't hold still forever.”

“So do I.” Toner answered without obvious irritation, and his eyes remained fixed on his console, to the younger man's relief. “I also wish,” the director went on, “that it were possible to use the medium communicator system directly for automatic control of such things as distance, so as to get away from light-lag. But until some genius in your generation works out a way to measure the frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity of medium waves — or at least, furnishes some evidence that a wave phenomenon is involved — we'll have to stick with electromagnetic radiation and, at times, with human beings. You may not like it, but by the time you reach my age you'll have learned to put up with it.”

“I hope not,” Ledermann couldn't help replying.

“Eh? Why not?” Toner's eyes almost flicked away from his instruments for a moment, but didn't quite.

“I mean that if I learn to put up with inconveniences, it'll be because I haven't been able to figure out anything else to do about them. Who wants to admit that?”

Toner grinned. “Nobody wants to, I suppose, but the honest people do anyway. Hold up; here comes the end of the first minute; any irregularities on your board?”

“Not so far. I don't know what that proves, though; all we are measuring is what's going into the generators. We can't touch what's coming out without changing it…'

“Of course.” The older man made a gesture of impatience. It's some relief, though, to know that things are going in right. I don't know about you, Dick, but Program A is going to be the second longest couple of hours in my life.”

“I know,” replied Ledermann. It was the first time Toner had ever been so frank about his feelings — even though they were usually quite obvious from other evidence — and certainly the first time the assistant had felt much real sympathy for the director. Since the younger man was not a fast thinker, the remark left him once more unsure of what to say.

As a matter of fact, there was probably nothing to say which would have been just right. Toner, like most middle-aged men, had developed a pretty firm personal philosophy and a rather rigid set of fundamental beliefs. The present experiment involved very heavily one of those beliefs — one which Ledermann did not share.

Although, the assistant thought as he glanced through one of the Holiad's great view ports, this was a place where it was hard to feel sure and right about anything fundamental.

Space was not dark, though the nebular material which abounds in the Orion spur of the Milky Way system is never very bright even when no planetary atmosphere dims it. Getting closer to an extended light source, of course, doesn't make each square degree look any brighter; it merely increases the number of square degrees. From the Holiad's position, most of the sky is nebula-bright; and to a spaceman, anything resembling a cloud looks wrong in space. In some directions the stars blaze steadily, as they do from Earth's moon; other directions are blacked out by light-years of dust. Some of the dust itself is bright, for 41 Orionis, named “Cinder” by some humorist who had explored the region earlier, is only half a parsec away. Not only does its fierce ultraviolet radiation keep the nebular gases fluorescing, but its visible is quite enough to light up the dust for immense distances. Not counting its emission envelope, Cinder is only about five times the diameter of Sol, which means that it looks like a point from half a parsec away; but that point illuminated the Holiad almost as effectively as the full moon illuminates the earth. Several other O and B stars flame in the neighborhood; some look brighter than Venus as seen from Earth, some reveal themselves only by illuminating the surrounding dust clouds, some are invisible in the nebulosity. The Orion Spur is one of the cradles of the galaxy.

Unfortunately, the occupants of the cradle are foundlings. The general circumstances surrounding a star's birth are now fairly clear; ships prowling the cloudier regions of the spiral arms have found them in all stages of gestation, from gas and dust clouds half a light-year across and little denser than the interstellar background, through T Tauri variables hot enough to radiate visibly, to the vast population of main-sequence suns whose hydrogen fires are safely alight. Like foundlings, while an entire birth has never been observed in any one case, we know enough to picture the circumstances with some confidence.

Also like foundlings, however, the precise details of a star's conception are somewhat obscure. It has been widely supposed for several decades that random variations in the density of the interstellar medium are the key factor — that the law of chance is the father. Dick Ledermann, young and conservative, had no trouble accepting this view. To him, it was obvious that the random “winds” of space must at times produce a gas concentration so dense that its gravity would override the disruptive tidal force of the rest of the galaxy — override it enough to produce a local potential well able to trap at least the lower energy particles of the cloud.

Elvin Toner, nearly twenty years older, had strong reservations about the potency of unaided statistics. Like anyone with even a modest grounding in physical science, he realized the basically statistical nature of many of the universe's laws; he admitted that a star could come into existence by the concatenations of chance which most people took for granted; but he doubted seriously that the random motions of interstellar gas could set up the appropriate conditions often enough to account for the number of observed stars, even allowing for the fairly impressive lifetime of a star. He felt sure — it was as much an article of faith as the normal scientific belief that there is a natural reason for everything — that some specific, widespread, underlying process was operating to improve the chance of protostar formation.

He was able to prove that some such process was needed to account for the observed star density. Ledermann was able to prove that it was not. Both “proofs” were statistical, using the same “laws” of chance. They differed, of course, in the basic conditions which were assumed. Both sets of conditions were reasonable; the two hypotheses continued to survive because neither could be checked adequately. Elvin Toner had spent thirty years acquiring a professional reputation impressive enough to interest a sufficiently wealthy foundation in doing the checking. And now he had the chance.

It had taken wealth — or its equivalent — and a vast amount of human effort.

The basic check required detailed measurements of the positions, velocities and accelerations of all the particles, as exactly as Heisenberg allowed and as nearly simultaneously as possible, along a range of more than five astronomical units. Since electromagnetic energy had to be used, this meant that the best part of two hours would be needed merely to set up the web of standing waves which was to serve as the “framework” of the battery of measuring instruments, which were themselves force fields.

The basic design, of the experiment was standard — even unimaginative. After setting up the wave pattern, a period would be spent measuring the initial vector quantities of the particles along the range. Fundamentally, the measuring process would be practically instantaneous, but scanning and recording would use up an hour as the chain of reading impulses travelled from the Ymyrgar along the wave web to the Anfforddus, from which the readings would be transferred by medium crystal to the mother ship.

This was “Program A” which was now in progress. Electromagnetic waves of almost five hundred different frequencies, ranging from the blue part of the visible spectrum to the output of a huge electromagnet fed by an alternating current source with a three-hundred-second period, were propagating away from the Ymyrgar, groping their way through the not-quite-empty billion kilometers or so which separated the little tender from her sister. Some of the frequencies had been selected for their ability to interact with the atoms and ions known to occupy the space, some for the fact that they would not. Some would be absorbed and analyzed by the apparatus aboard the Anfforddus, some would be reflected back toward their source to create the standing-wave patterns needed for Program B. All would represent a waste of energy if the two tiny ships changed their relative positions by one part in ten billion billion.

Lights on the control consoles aboard the Holiad recorded the behavior, microsecond by microsecond, of each separate frequency generator; but the one which Toner never let out of his