Robert Heinlein - The Number of the Beast

"Jacob, what is the 'real world'?"

"Ouch! Hilda, I don't know. But I'm afraid to get too many quanta away from our world-world-zero, where we were born. I think the extrapolation you propose would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle to- What world, Deety?"

"World-six-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-eight on Teh- minus axis, Pop. Unless it's skewed."

"Thanks, Deety. Captain, if we arrived there, we could return to Earth-zero by one setting. if-' Instead of a superhyper great circle we might follow a helix or some other curve through dimensions we know not of."

Pop, you took what I said and fancied it up.

"R.H.I.P., my dear. You will appear as junior author on the monograph you'll write and I'll sign."

"Pop, you're so good to me. Wouldn't Smart Girl return us simply by G, A, Y, H, 0, M, E?"

"Those programs instruct a machine that has built into it only six dimensions. Perhaps she would... but to our native universe so far from Earth-zero that we would be hopelessly lost. If Zeb and I were bachelors, I would say,

'Let's go!' But we are family men."

"Deety, set the next one. Teh -five-plus?"

"Right, Zebadiah. But, Captain Auntie, I'm game! The long trip!"

"Me, too," agreed Captain Sharpie.

I said in a tired voice, "Those babies are ours as much as they are yours- Jake and I are taking no unnecessary risks. Captain Sharpie, if that doesn't suit you, you can find another astrogator and another chief pilot."

"Mutiny. Deety, shall we pull a 'Lysistrata'?"

"Uh....an't we find some reasonable middle ground?"

"Looks like a place to stop for lunch. Sharpie, want to sniff for 'Black Hats'?"

"Take me down, please. About two thousand klicks above ground."

"Will you settle for five?"

"Sissy pants. Yes, if you'll first have Jacob zip us around night side to check for city lights."

"Give her what she wants, Jake, by transiting; an orbit takes too long. 'Give me operations... way out on some lonely atoll! For I... am too young to diiiie! I just want to grow old!"

"You're off key, Zebbie."

"Deety likes my singing. Anybody spot city lights?"

We found no cities. So Jake put us down for lunch on a lonely atoll, Hilda first making certain that it had nothing on it but palm trees. Deety stripped, started exercises.

Hilda joined her; Jake and I set out lunch, having first dressed in stylish tropical skin. The only less-than-idyllic note came from my objecting to Deety's swimming in the lagoon. Hilda backed me up. "Deety, that's not a swimming pool. Anything in it has defenses or couldn't have survived. The first law of biology is eat or be eaten. A shark could have washed over the reef years back, eaten all the fish-and now be delighted to have you for lunch."

"Ugh!"

"Deety, you'd be very tasty," I soothed.

"-under his vine and under his fig tree;

and none shall make them afraid-"

Jacob:

Teh positive took longer to search than Teh -negative for the very reason that its analogs were so much like our native planet.

An uninhabited planet could be dismissed in ten minutes; one heavily populated took no longer. A planet at too low a level of culture took hardly longer- a culture with animal-drawn carts and sailing ships as major transport we assumed not to have advanced medicine. But most took longer to reject.

At the end of a week we had rejected ninety-seven... which left us only 40.000 + to inspect!

That evening, at "Picnic Island," our private atoll, my daughter said, "Cap'n Auntie, we're doing this wrong."

'How, Deetjkins?"

"Ninety-seven in a week, over forty thousand to go. At that rate we finish in eight years."

Her husband said, "Deety, we're getting faster."

My beloved said, "Astrogator, do you know more about calculating than does the Copilot?" Zeb shut up. We had learned that when Hilda addressed usby titles, she was speaking as captain. I flatter myself that I learned it quicke5~ whereas Zeb was a bit slow. "Go ahead, Deety."

"If we go on checking this way, it won't get better; it will get worse. Here's the first weeks' score"-she passed around her summary; it read:

Earth analogs checked 97

Average time per planet 34 mins 381/2 sec

Maximum time 2 days 3 hrs 52 mins

Minimum time 13 seconds

Median time 12 mins 07 sec

I studied it. "Deety, we can reduce that average time. Over two days was much too long to check analog twenty-six."

"No, Pop, we should have taken longer on twenty-six. It's that thirteen seconds that is bankrupting us."

"Daughter, that's preposter-"

"Chief Pilot."

"Yes, dear?"

"Please let the Copilot finish... without interruption." I retired from the field, annoyed, to wait until my advice was indispensable-soon, I felt sure.

"Aunt Hilda, if we gave each analog thirteen seconds, it would take us eighteen and a half days....nd we would learn nothing. I want to cut the minimum time way, way down-make it routine-and learn something. I wish Gay could talk, I do."

"But, dear, she can. We can be in Oz in two minutes. The dirty dishes can wait."

My daughter looked startled. "Pass me the Stupid Hat."

"But we won't go to Oz before tomorrow. We need to figure out what the problem is, first-and I need a night of cuddle with Jacob for the good of my soul." Hilda reached out and took my hand.

Hilda went on, "Deety, remember how fast we mapped Mars-Tau -ten-positive once we let Gay do it her way? Isn't there some way to define a locus- then turn her loose?"

We discussed it until bedtime. I set the locus myself by vetoing going past Earth-analog-Teh -positive-five-thousand until we were certain that no satisfactory analog existed in those first five thousand. "Family," I told them, "call me chicken, to use Zeb's favorite excuse. I know so little about this gadget I invented that lam always afraid of getting lost. All rotations have been exactly~ ninety degrees. In theory I can define a quantum of angle and each such quantum should render accessible another sheaf of universes. In practice I can't do machining of that quality. Even if I could, I would be afraid to risk ~ our necks on a gadget required to count angular quanta.

"But I have another objection-a gut feeling that worlds too far out Teh axis will be too strange. Language, culture, even dominant race-I confess to prejudice for human beings, with human odo~ and dandruff and faults. Supermen or angels would trouble me more than vermin. I know what to do with

a 'Black Hat'-kill it! But a superman would make me feel so inferior that I would not want to go on living."

Deety clapped. "That's my Pop! Don't worry, Pop; the superman who can give you an inferiority complex hasn't been hatched." I think she meant that as a compliment.

We worked the parameters down to three: climate warm enough to encourage nudity; population comfortably low; technology high. The first parameter was a defense against B.H. vermin: they require antinudity taboo to bolster their disguises. The last parameter would tend to indicate advanced obstetrics. As for population, every major shortcoming of our native planet could be traced to one cause: too many people, not enough planet.

Hilda decided to standardize: one locale, one H-above-G. The locale was (in Earth-zero terminology) Long Beach, California, over its beach one klick Habove-G-dangerously low were it not that Gay would never be in any universe longer than one second. Any speed-of-light weapon can destroy in less than a second, but can its human-cum-machine operators identify a target, bear on it, and fire in one second? We thought not. We hoped not.

At analogs of Long Beach, it should be midsummer, hot, dry, and cloudless. If that beach was comfortably filled but not crowded, if the people were nude, if area adjacent to the beach showed high technology by appearance, then that analog should be checked further.