Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

Ted, bemused, watched him come.

Pel grabbed the lawyer by his lapels.

“Listen,” he said, “what would it take to convince you that this is real, and not a dream? Would a punch in the nose do it? I mean, if it hurt, just like real life?”

Ted considered this quite seriously. He looked around the room, at the oddly but splendidly dressed passengers, at the dimming orange stars beyond the window, at the crystal chandelier and the brass railings.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’d probably just mean I fell out of bed. It might wake me up, though.”

Pel nodded.

“Let’s see,” he said, as he swung.

The steward was almost in time to stop him, and his restraining arm, flung up in front of Pel’s, slowed the impact; Ted staggered, nose red and starting to bleed, but he didn’t fall, and nothing broke. He made no protest, no defense, and no counter-attack. After the blow had landed he simply stood, staring blankly at Pel.

“ Sir ,” the steward began, shocked.

“Oh, shut up,” Pel replied, as he stalked off toward his cabin.

By the time they were two days out from Psi Cassiopeia Two, Pel understood why the original complement aboard the Princess had wanted to land there in the first place.

Space travel was boring .

It was very nearly as boring as, though far more comfortable than, sitting out in the desert waiting for the aircar to come back.

Obviously, anything that broke the monotony would be welcome, even if it was just a stopover somewhere like Town-which Pel, angrily remembering Ted’s words, had to admit probably did resemble the Pittsburgh bus station more than it did anything else.

So much for the romance and adventure of being in another universe.

The fact that none of them had so much as a toothbrush in the way of supplies didn’t help any. Having to either wear the same clothes constantly or borrow ill-fitting substitutes from condescending strangers was a constant irritation for them all; Amy and Susan had wound up with spare stewardess uniforms, but there hadn’t been enough of those to go around even for the women, so the crew and the original passengers had made donations to the poor, pitiful refugees.

“Condescending” was the politest word Pel could apply to their attitude. He would have paid his entire fortune for a well-packed suitcase-preferably one with a couple of paperbacks in it. A nice trashy novel would have been just right for passing the time.

Pel had initially assumed that the ship would have some sort of library, or a theater of some sort-just a VCR hooked to a TV would have been wonderful. This assumption had not panned out; some of the paying passengers had brought their own books, but there was no library, and none of the people native to this universe seemed to understand what he was talking about when he mentioned “TV,” or “video,” or “VCR.”

Movies they understood, films, motion pictures-though Pel had the impression that they only knew silents, that the Empire hadn’t yet developed talkies. In any case, there weren’t any films on board.

And books were too bulky. Keeping a good selection would have been, a steward told him, completely impractical; far better to let the passengers bring their own and swap.

None of the passengers seemed interested in simply loaning books to the refugees, and of course, the refugees had nothing to offer in trade.

This was not to say that there was nothing at all on board for entertainment; on the contrary, the Princess was, the stewards assured him, fully equipped in that regard. They carried a plentiful supply of playing cards, poker chips, backgammon boards, dice, and other gaming devices.

Pel was not quite ready to resort to such mundane pastimes-for one thing, he had no money with him, which really made poker and other gambling games rather pointless. He had never much liked backgammon, never even learned craps.

There were other card games, and he knew he would probably resort to them shortly, but for now he was still hoping to find something more exotic. He didn’t want to be like those people who go to Europe and eat at McDonald’s; he wanted to sample the local culture.

Unfortunately, the local culture was not cooperating. The native passengers, after the incident in the aft salon, avoided him even more than they avoided the other refugees. The crew spoke to him, but kept relations strictly businesslike and formal.

Nancy and Rachel had found something to occupy their time-caring for the two little people, who were growing weaker and weaker with no visible cause for their illness. The two of them were in constant pain now, and unable to move, and Nancy had taken it upon herself to stay with them and tend them as best she could, feeding them thin soup and aspirin, sponging off the heavy perspiration that bathed them, and talking to them soothingly. Rachel was acting as her mother’s messenger, running whatever errands needed to be run.

That was all very well, and in fact Pel was proud to see it, but there wasn’t room or need for another person in the storage compartment the little people occupied. That left him unable to help out, and without the company of his wife and daughter.

The others all seemed to have found ways to stay busy, as well-except for Ted, and Pel was avoiding him.

There wasn’t even anything to see out the ports; to the stern the stars had red-shifted into invisibility, while ahead they had blue-shifted into areas of the spectrum hazardous enough that the ports were kept closed.

This left him sufficiently desperate for entertainment to stand around asking stupid questions of the crew.

“How does anti-gravity work, anyway?” he said casually.

The navigator looked up from the periscope, annoyed. “What?” he asked.

Pel repeated his question.

“How the hell should I know?” the navigator snarled.

“Well, I just thought…” Pel began. “I mean, I don’t know anything about it, not even schoolboy stuff, we don’t have it where I come from.”

The navigator returned to the eyepiece, but said, “It’s simple enough. Matter absorbs gravitons, so that particles are drawn toward each other by the streams of gravitons flowing into them-that’s gravity, right?”

Pel made a noise of agreement, but was in fact bewildered; that was not at all the explanation he remembered from high school physics.

But then, why should it be? This was another universe, with its own laws.

“Well, anti-gravity makes solid matter spit the gravitons back out again, that’s all,” the navigator explained patiently, never moving his eyes from the periscope. “So it counteracts gravity. And if we make it spit the gravitons out all in one direction, we can use it like a rocket, only of course it’s far more powerful.”

“Oh,” Pel said.

It would appear, he thought, that gravity did not work here in anything like the way it did back home. No wonder Ruthless had dropped like a rock.

“How do you get matter to emit gravitons?” he asked.

The navigator let out an exasperated sigh and looked up from the lens. “You compress it until the space it occupies collapses, of course,” he said. “You take a lump of uranium, or something else really massive, and run a vibratory current through it to destabilize it, and then you apply pressure.”

Pel started to ask another question, then saw the navigator’s expression and thought better of it. “Thanks,” he said.

He started to turn away, and then something else occurred to him. “If we’re traveling faster than light,” he asked, “how can you see to navigate?”

“I’m not seeing anything,” the navigator said. “I’m reading the gravity fields.”