Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

He looked as if she had spit in his face. “It seemed important to act, Ensign Hopper. There are…forces conspiring to keep us from getting home. So I set the controls for full reverse.”

“It was an honest mistake.” He was, she suspected, cracking under the stress — and how long before that happened to all of them? She had to help Heinlein keep his courage up. Blaming him at this juncture would not help. “But you were acting on the misconception that we were operating in a linear system — switch it one way, we go forward; switch it the other, we go back. Clearly, it’s not that simple.” Asimov stood at the rail, as if mesmerized by the setting sun. She turned away from Heinlein to give him time to collect himself. “Talk to me, Mr. Asimov.”

He blinked, as if waking from a dream. “Eh?”

“We need to approach this problem from a new angle. The snowflakes were trying to show me something, but…I’m not quite there. Just talk about it. Talk about what we know so far. Explain it to me.”

“What we know? We don’t really know anything, but we think that resonant frequencies have something to do with it.” He started slowly, then gathered speed as he warmed to his topic. “We think that we’re rotating through dimensions beyond the four that we normally sense. We’re rotating and we need to rotate back into alignment with the dimensions where we live.”

“Rotating…,” Grace muttered. “And we need to rotate back. If we were rotating in three dimensions, I’d approach this with spherical trigonometry. But we’re rotating through a multidimensional sphere. Perhaps that’s what the snowflakes were driving at. To calculate the length of a jump, we need to consider a projection of that multidimensional sphere into three dimensional space. What are our known variables?”

Heinlein frowned, struggling to answer. “We jumped in space — from four hours south of Philadelphia to Bermuda. Then to the Sargasso Sea. But who knows after that?”

“Distance,” she mused. “That’s a variable. But how far?”

Isaac, paying attention now, gave her the distances. She pulled a notepad from her skirt pocket and jotted them down. The man really was a fount of trivial information.

“What other variables have we got?”

“Time,” Heinlein said. “Time between jumps. If we are looking at the coordinates in multi-dimensional space-time….”

“How long did we have between jumps?”

“We were in Bermuda for about an hour,” Asimov said.

“And how long were we with the plesiosaurs?”

“About four hours,” Heinlein said.

“We were in the rainstorm for less than an hour, and among the snowflakes for about eight hours,” Grace said. “Let me see what I can do with this. Bob, why don’t you and Isaac devise a plan for shutting down the generators immediately upon our arrival home. I will assign as many crew members as you need to make it instantaneous.” She spoke with more confidence than she felt. “Meet me back here when you’re done.”

Was it an hour later? Or a day? She didn’t know. Someone shook her shoulder and there was Bob Heinlein, looking worried. She had fallen asleep sitting on the deck, doing calculations by the lurid light of the permanently setting sun.

This was a world that had never known life, and never would. She shivered. No matter where they ended up, she wouldn’t want to stay here.

By the light of an incandescent bulb, she double-checked her figures. The results of her calculations gave the coordinates from which they had to jump and the time at which they had to discharge the coils. “What time is it?” she said in a panic. “How long have we been here?”

“Four hours,” Asimov said.

“Good. Here’s what we need to do.”

They had four more hours to get to the proper location. Full speed ahead, through the lifeless sea. It was good to rouse the men to power the ship; good to be moving. They reached the jump-off point with twenty minutes to spare.

She was waiting, hand on the switch and eye on the clock, when there was a polite knock on the door. At her command, the last person on earth she expected to see entered, and saluted. “Seaman Kobinski, reporting for duty, ma’am.”

“Kobinski?! Where the hell have you been?”

“Invisible, ma’am. I kind of blacked out and when I came to, I couldn’t see myself, so I thought, well, maybe I should be in the sick bay.” He grinned shyly. “I’m better now.”

The second hand swung round to zero-second. “Hang on to your hat,” she said, and, praying her calculations were right, threw the switch.

Sprague was sitting in a dim corner of Pop-Pop’s Tavern waiting for Catherine when the invisible sailors poured in, looking for a fight.

The irony was that Pop-Pop’s was a respectable tappie. It wasn’t one of Heinlein’s dives, with b-girls hustling two-dollar ginger ale cocktails or a “Magic Window” over the bar where naked women enacted supposedly classical tableaux. Pop-Pop’s was the kind of place where the old neighborhood women had their own entrance and a back room where they could buy a quart of beer to drink with their girlfriends without suffering the unwanted presence of men.

But it was near the Yard and so there were sailors in the front room. And, being sailors, when challenged they fought back. That their opponents were invisible made surprisingly little difference to the dynamics of the fight. Somebody was jostled when the newcomers rushed to the bar. He threw a punch. It hit the wrong person. The bar erupted.

Sprague saw a sailor lifted struggling into the air by unseen hands. Somebody smashed a chair over his invisible opponent, and the sailor fell to the floor. With a roar of rage, a bottle swooped up from the bar and smashed over the chair-wielder’s head.

Sprague was a lieutenant, bucking for lieutenant commander. His first impulse was to break up the fight. He was pretty sure he could do it. Military discipline was all theater, really. A commanding voice and a dramatic presence could quell the rowdiest enlisted man. He had both of those.

But in the time it took to lay down a quarter to pay for his unfinished beer, stand, and tuck his cap under his arm, a better thought came to him.

So, quietly, Sprague slipped into the back room and, with a nod and a wink to its denizens, ducked out the Ladies’ Entrance. He didn’t want to get involved in an incident that would tie him up for hours with the Shore Patrol. Not now.

He arrived at the sidewalk out front just as one of the invisible seamen pushed through the door, dragging an unconscious sailor by the feet behind him.

This Sprague could not ignore.

In the bright sunlight, the seaman was not entirely invisible — more like a clear glass filled with water, which an observant man could see if he looked closely. Sprague stepped forward and tapped him on the shoulder. He felt solid enough.

The man dropped his burden, spun about, and aimed a haymaker at Sprague’s jaw.

Deftly, Sprague stepped aside from the blow. As the fist whistled past, he seized the man’s wrist, and twisted — a technique he had learned from a Kuomintang ensign — forcing the fellow to bend over. Then he drove his knee into the man’s stomach. Hard.

The transparent ruffian fell to the ground with a concrete thud.

I’ve seen action at last, Sprague thought. Now, nobody can say I spent all the war behind a desk. If only Catherine had been here to see it, though!

“Sprague, what on Earth is going on?” Catherine had come up behind him. “Are you all right?”

Thank you, God.

Catherine stared down at the unconscious sailor. He was slowly fading back into visibility.

“What’s going on here? What on Earth does it mean?” she asked wonderingly.