Poul Anderson: Poul Anderson - Sci-Fi Boxed Set

"Look," said Ray, "we've got to do something. The Jovians will be combing this damned moon for us, and it's not so big that we have much chance of their not finding us before we can clean out those tubes. We've got to prepare an escape."

"How?" Urushkidan fixed him with a bespectacled stare.

"Well—uh—well—maybe get ready to flee into the hills."

"How long would we last out tere?" The Martian turned back to his work and blew a cloud of smoke. "No, I will debote myself to te beauties of pure matematics."

"But if they catch us, they'll kill us!"

"Tey won't kill me," said Urushkidan smugly. "I am too baluable."

"Come on, Ray," said Dyann. "Let's go monster-huntin."

"Waaah!" The Earthman blew up, jumping with rage. In the low gravity, his leap cracked his head against the ceiling.

"Oh, my poor Ray!" Dyann folded him in a bear's embrace.

"Let me go! Damn it, I want to live if you don't!"

"Be serene," advised Urushkidan. "Look at it from te aspect of eternity. You are one of te lower animals and your life is of no importance."

"You octopus! You conceited windbag! If I needed any proof that Martians are inferior, you'd be it."

"Temper, temper!" Urushkidan wagged a flexible finger at Ray. "Be objective, my friend, and if your philosophy is so deficient tat it will not prove a priori tat Martians are always right—by definition—ten consider te facts. Martians are beautiful. Martians habe an old and peaceful cibilisation. Eben physically, we are superior—we can libe under Earth conditions but I dare you to go out on Mars witout a spacesuit. I double-dog dare you."

"Martians," gritted Ray, "didn't come to Earth. Earthmen came to Mars."

"Certainly. We had no reason to bisit Earth, but you, of course, came to Mars to admire our beauty and wisdom. Now please fetch me tat table of integrals."

"There is nothin ve can do to help ourselves," said Dyann, "so ve might as well go huntin. Afterward ve can make love."

"Oh, no!" Ray grunted. "If I had that damn interstellar drive I'd get out of this hole so fast that—that—that—"

"Yes?" asked Dyann.

* * * * *

"Gods of Pluto!" whispered the man. "That's it. That's it! "

"Get me tat table!" screamed Urushkidan.

"The drive—the faster-than-light drive—" Ray did a jig, bouncing from floor to wall to ceiling. "We've got a shipful of equipment, we've got the System's only authority on the subject, we'll build ourselves a faster-than-light engine!"

Urushkidan grumbled his way back into the lab. "I'll get it myself, ten," he muttered. "See if I care."

"The engine—the engine—Dyann, we can escape!" Ray grabbed her by the arms and tried to shake her. "We can go home!"

Her eyes filled with tears. "You vant to leave me," she accused. "You vant to get rid of me."

"No, no, no, I want to save all our lives. Come on, give me a hand, we've got some heavy stuff to move around."

Dyann shook her head, pouting. "No," she said. "You don't love me. I won't help you."

"Oh, Lord! Look, Dyann, I love you, I adore you, I worship at your feet. But give me a hand."

Dyann brightened considerably, but said only, "Prove it."

Ray kissed her. She kissed back and he yelled as his ribs began to give way.

"Yowp! Some other time, honey. I want only to save your life, don't you see?"

"Some other time," said Dyann firmly, "is not now. Come here, you."

"Stop tat noise!" yelled Urushkidan, and slammed the laboratory door.

"Ve will honeymoon on Varann," sighed Dyann happily. "You shall ride to battle at my side."

Much later the aroma of coffee drew Urushkidan back into the forward cabin. A disheveled and weary-looking Ray Ballantyne was puttering around the hotplate while Dyann sat polishing her sword and humming to herself.

"Now," said Ray, turning with what seemed like relief to the Martian, "just how does this new drive of yours work?"

"It is not a dribe and it does not work—it is a structure of pure matematics," said Urushkidan. "Anyway, te teory is beyond te comprehension of anybody but myself. Gibe me some coffee."

"But you must have an idea how it would work in practice."

"Oh, no doubt if I wanted to take te time I could debise someting. But I am engaged in debeloping a new teory of cosmic origins." Urushkidan slurped coffee into himself.

"We've got to build it and escape."

"I told you you are of neiter beauty nor importance. Why should I take time wit you?"

"But look, if the Jovians capture you they'll force you to build it for them. They have ways. And then they'll overrun Mars along with all the other planets. The only thing that's held them back so far is the difficulty of interplanetary logistics. But when you have ships that can cross the orbit of Pluto in a matter of hours or minutes that isn't a problem any longer."

"Tat would be unfortunate, yes. But I am in te midst of a bery new and important train of tought. It would be more unfortunate if tat were lost tan if a few ephemeral Jobians conquered te System. Tey wouldn't last a tousand years, but a genius like me is born once in a million."

Dyann hefted her sword. "Do as Ray says," she advised.

"You dare not hurt me," said Urushkidan with a smug expression, "or you will neber get away."

He went over to the desk and began investigating the drawers again. "Where do tey keep teir tobacco? I cannot work witout my pipe."

"Jovians," said Ray glumly, "don't smoke. They consider it a degenerate habit."

"What?" The Martian's howl rattled the coffeepot on the hotplate. "No tobacco?"

"Only your own supply, back in Ganymede City, and I daresay the Jovians have confiscated and destroyed it by now. That puts the nearest cigar store somewhere in the Asteroid Belt."

"Oh, no! Te new cosmology ruined by tobacco shortage." Urushkidan stood thinking a moment, then came to a sudden decision. "Tere is no help for it. If te nearest tobacco is millions of miles away we must build te faster-tan-light engine at once."

* * * * *

Ray made no attempt to follow the Martian's long-winded equations in detail. What he was interested in was making use of them, and he proceeded with slashing approximations that brought screams of almost physical agony from Urushkidan.

Essentially, though, he recognized that the scientist's achievement lay in making what seemed to be a final correlation of relativity and wave mechanics, something which even the Goldfarb-Olson formulas had not fully reached.

Relativity deals with solid bodies moving at definite velocities which cannot exceed that of light, but in wave mechanics the particle becomes a weird and shadowy psi function and is only probably where it is. In the latter theory, point-to-point transitions are not velocities but shifts in the node of a complex wave. It turned out that the electronic wave velocity—which, unlike the group velocity, is not limited by the speed of light—could be imparted to matter under the right conditions, so that the most probable position of the electron went from point to point at a bewildering rate. The trick was to create the right conditions.

"A field of nuclear space-strain is set up by the circuit, and the ship, reacting against the entire mass of the universe, moves without need of rockets—right?" asked the Earthman.

"Wrong," said Urushkidan.

"Well, we'll build it anyway," said Ray. "Here, Dyann, bring that generator over this way, will you?"

"I vant to go monster-huntin," she sulked.

"Bring—it—over, you lummox!"

Dyann glared, but stooped over the massive machine and, between Ganymedean gravity and Varannian muscles, staggered across the floor with it. Ray was checking circuits on the oscilloscope. Urushkidan sat grumbling about heat and humidity and fanning himself with his ears. The lab was a mess of tubes, condensers, rheostats, and tangled wire.