Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

“The rules are different in that universe.”

“You mean the laws of physics?” said Max.

“Yes.”

“I think we talked about that.”

“But we didn’t think it out. Why do you suppose the artificial gravity generator malfunctioned?”

“Ohhh,” said Jay. “I bet you’re right.”

Max, who wasn’t anxious to head back into a dangerous location, was losing patience. “One of you guys want to explain it to me?”

“The reason,” said Jay, “that the generator didn’t work was because the other universe doesn’t have gravity.”

“Wait, wait. That’s not possible, is it?”

“Not on this side of the gate.”

“Okay. So where does that take us?”

“Max,” said Emily, “speaking of the gate…”

They were getting close. They’d been moving slowly, but now Max reduced their velocity enough that someone on foot could have kept pace. “So what,” he asked, “does the lack of gravity have to do with anything?” Jay was about to respond when the pilot got it. “Oh, wait,” he said. “This has nothing to do with gravity directly. It’s physical laws. In this case,” he had to pause while he thought about it, “the speed of light is slower.”

“Correct,” said Emily. “Much slower. I’d bet it takes a while for a radio transmission to reach him.”

Max was looking out through the windows, juggling the numbers, when the prow started to disappear.

They arrived back on the other side. Max immediately halted their progress to avoid losing touch with the gate. “So we’re used to radio conversations that are pretty much instantaneous,” Emily said. “But if the transmissions travel at, say, fifty kilometers per second instead of three hundred thousand, even if he’s only a few thousand kilometers away, it would take almost six or seven minutes for a message to reach him, and just as long to get a reply.”

“Yes. And that’s probably what happened.”

“But why didn’t the scanner pick him up?”

“Same reason. Instead of a fraction of a second, it takes the scanning signal seven minutes or whatever to find him and just as long to bounce back. We didn’t wait long enough.”

The other side was still filled with the gray fog. But they were only seconds clear of the gate when Horace’s desperate voice erupted from the radio. “Where the hell did you guys go? Hello, Max. Where in God’s name are you?”

“We’re here, Horace. It’s okay.”

Again there was no response. Max’s natural reaction was to ask the question again. But he reminded himself to sit back and wait.

It took twenty-six minutes while their message traveled out to wherever Horace was adrift and his reply came back. It was twenty-six minutes full of nervousness, exasperation, and frustration.

“It’s a good thing,” Max told Emily, “ you were with us.”

Horace tracked their transmissions back in and followed the Breckinridge through the gate into the wormhole and finally back out under a starry sky. Minutes later, he was on board.

“I got pretty thoroughly screwed up,” he said. “I expected to be able to see the gate. But all I got was the cloud. I thought all I had to do was get clear of that and I’d be able to see the wormhole.”

“Which would allow you to find the gate.”

“Right. I’m glad you guys figured it out.”

“You can thank Emily for that.”

“Thank you, Emily,” he said. “I knew all along you were the brains on this mission.” He grinned at Jay. “But I told you not to come after me.”

Jay laughed. “You don’t sound as if you’re mad at us.”

“No. I guess I was pretty dumb.” They were seated in the passenger cabin while the Breckinridge recharged. “But we didn’t get much of a look at our next door neighbor.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Emily.

Horace rolled his eyes. “How can you say that? We’ve been to another universe and we’ve only seen one cloud.”

“You’re not thinking, Horace. It has no gravity. That’s all that place is: a giant hydrogen cloud. With probably some helium. Come back in a few million years and they might have picked up a few atoms.”

Jay shrugged. “Not that it matters. If there’s no gravity, they’ll never have anything.”

Alex Benedict first encountered the voice while playing a board game on a friend’s porch when he was about twelve. The friend was Augie McLeish. It was a guy reminiscing about what he’d gone through trying to summon the nerve to ask a girl to go out with him. “It’s a recording,” Augie said. “My folks listen to them a lot.”

The girl’s name was Peggy and she was the girl of his dreams. The narrator said he’d been in the sixth grade at the time. “My problem,” he continued, “was that whenever I got close to her, I froze, completely and absolutely. Then I saw an advertisement for a self-hypnosis package that guaranteed I could persuade myself that I was the ultimate prize. Good-looking, smart, funny.” He laughed at the sheer stupidity of the idea. His voice crackled with energy. “Any girl could be mine. That was what they guaranteed.” He laughed again and they cut in with some music. The show’s theme, growing louder, indicated they were coming to a close. “I’m still trying to get it to work,” he said.

The theme, Alex learned later, was Shefski’s “Liftoff.” It suggested a musical rocket, soaring into the stratosphere. It was a great voice, and Alex realized he’d been paying more attention to the recording than to the game.

“Who is that guy?” he asked the father.

“He’s Horace Brandon, Alex. A radio comedian from, I don’t know, fifty or sixty years ago.”

Alex had never heard of him. He did a search and discovered his program had been three hours long, broadcast on Sunday evenings to an impassioned audience across the North American continent. North America and Earth were a long way from where Alex lived, but he and Horace connected. He downloaded some of his stuff, learned that he was known as ‘Brandy’ rather than Horace, and became an overnight addict. Brandy was the funniest guy he’d ever heard, while simultaneously describing a life Alex knew quite well. He talked about his misadventures trying to “become one of the gang,” wearing a cape, and collecting superhero memorabilia. “My favorite,” he said “was Captain Chaos. Her special power was that wherever she went, she sowed utter confusion. Her abilities derived,” Brandy explained, “from the fact that she came from a long line of politicians.”

Alex listened to the recordings whenever he had time. Over a span of about two years, Brandy provided him with a sense of what it meant to be human, why he should be skeptical of people’s opinions, especially his own, and how easy it was to laugh at most of life’s misfortunes. He talked about things he wanted to do, to sit down with one of the Ashyurreans, and see what it felt like to get his mind read. To visit a star that was about to explode. “Most of all,” he said on several occasions, “I’d like to live long enough to share a few beers with whoever lives in Andromeda.”

Alex loved the guy. After encountering Brandy, he was never the same. He was sorry to learn that he was no longer alive.