Other Worlds – October 1951
(1951)*
Randall Garrett
(as by David Gordon)
Ever been on a train when you pass a crossing? Funny how that warning bell suddenly drops in pitch as you zip by.
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FOUR minutes after the Luna XXI settled gently to rest on the spacefield at Theophilus, a blond young man was presenting his papers to the Government Police guard at the tubeway station.
The guard slid them under the scanner. Somewhere far below them, an electronic brain compared them with their duplicates and decided that the gentleman in question really was James L. Simons, of General Alloys, Inc., especially since his prints matched beautifully.
"All right, Mr. Simons." The guard shoved back the papers.
"Thanks. Say, which tube do I take to Peak City?"
"Either three or four. Three's the express."
"Thanks again."
The blond young man turned and walked toward Tubeway Three, breathing a little better.
"That," he thought, "is probably the first time that brain has ever made a wrong identification.
Six minutes after that, he was on the train; the magnetic field coils slammed it along at better than sixty miles an hour. In three more minutes, he was in Peak City, located beneath the crust of the "high" end of the central peak of the lunar crater Theophilus.
The girl was waiting for him in the station. She didn't see him immediately, and he paused for a moment to look. Light brown hair, smooth warmly-tanned skin and eyes that were—green? No, blue. She was looking straight at him, smiling.
He smiled back, and they walked toward each other.
"Jim! Jim, darling!" She threw her arms around him and held him for a moment, then put her face up to be kissed.
It was not what he would have called an enjoyable kiss; mobile, realistic, and pliable though they are, a plexiskin mask simply does not have any sensory nerves.
Afterward, he realized that she hadn't gotten anything out of the kiss either. He thought: "I wonder what she really looks like under that mask?"
Her voice hissed whisperingly in his ear as he held her tight to him: "Alas, alack, and aday—"
"—we'll all be dead someday," he finished in the same tone. It was a poor couplet, and, he thought, a rather morbid one; but it served its purpose.
The girl led him out of the station, and into a cab, chattering in a wifely manner all the time. They talked pleasantly all the way to the apartment district—about nothing of importance.
"Apartment 3312, Corridor 62," was the address she had given the cab. Peak City was not exactly a city in the Earthly sense of the word; it was a series of corridors and compartments hacked and blasted out of the Lunar bedrock.
They stepped out of the cab and went through a doorway into the narrower pedestrian corridor. The girl unlocked a door numbered 3312; a door exactly similar to hundreds of other doors stretching up and down both ways along the well-lit corridors. She flung it open with a grandiose gesture and said: "Well, darling, this is home!"
He walked on in and looked around, as he supposed he was expected to do. He heard the door click shut, and turned back to the girl.
She was pointing a large and very nasty-looking gun straight at his midsection.
"BEFORE you say anything, let me tell you that I will not hesitate to shoot if the answers to the questions I am about to ask are either slow in coming or in any way incorrect."
Her voice was still calm, with no trace of hardness in it.
"I understand." For some reason, his voice didn't sound quite as calm.
"First: your real name."
"Rupert Lee Corby. I—"
"Don't volunteer any information; just answer. How were you contacted? Details, please."
All right, he thought, if you want details, you'll get them.
"I was arrested four weeks and three days ago by the Government Police—three agents, named Atkins, Baker, and Colvin—who picked me up at approximately six-thirty in the evening just as I was leaving my laboratory. They took me to Police Headquarters on Two Hundred and Sixty-Ninth Street, where I was given an exhaustive robotic lie detector test. The questions were—"
"Never mind what the questions were, get on with it."
"After they were completely satisfied as to my loyalty and honesty, they gave me my instructions."
"And these were?"
"To report here, on this date and do as I have done. I was shown three photographs of your appearance in your present disguise so that I would be able to recognize you, and I was given the rhyme couplet."
The gun still hadn't moved one iota. "Do you know why you are here?"
"No. I was told that it was highly secret and confidential work. Nothing more."
"All right. Now, take off the mask."
He did so, peeling it up from his throat and off his forehead.
And still the gun did not move.
Corby frowned. "Aren't you satisfied?"
"Not quite. All of this information could have been removed from the real Dr. Corby's mind and hypnotically implanted in yours. One more question."
In quick succession, she fired a string of mathematical symbols at him. Unhesitatingly, Corby fired another set back at her.
"Dr. Corby," she said, dropping the gun to her side, "there is only one man in the Solar System who could have answered that question. I am very glad to meet you."
Corby smiled. "And there is only one woman who could have asked it. I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Janice Luise Forbes."
She frowned slightly. "You accept that in spite of—"
"In spite of the fact that Dr. Forbes is supposed to have died twelve years ago? Yes. If another woman had, in that time achieved your mathematical brilliance, I would have known about it. Q.E.D.: You are Janice Forbes."
"I see. Well, I'm afraid I'll have to admit it."
She was removing her own face mask now, and Corby watched, interestedly.
It wasn't actually much different from her own face. A little extra thickness here and there, and her own jaw line was more pronounced, firmer. And yet Corby knew he would never have recognized her from the pictures the Police had shown him.
She was still young and—well, not beautiful, but very attractive. As well as he could recall, she was about eight years younger than he—that would make her sixty-one or two.
"What next?" Corby asked after she had removed the now-shapeless mass of plastic. "Can you tell me what this is all about?"
"Better than that, I'll show you." Janice stepped over to the phone and flipped the switch. The screen didn't light, nor could he hear the faint hum that showed the speaker was operating. Nevertheless, she leaned over and said softly: "Ad astra per aspirin." Then, she released the switch.
Corby looked at her solemnly. "Aren't you sort of misquoting your Latin?"
"You'd be surprised how true it is," she answered. "Now let's go."
For the barest fraction of a second, Corby felt startled. A section of the wall had slipped aside to reveal what appeared to be a darkened closet. Then he realized it was an elevator.
THEY went in, and the elevator began to drop at what Corby considered a sickening rate of speed. It stopped at what appeared to be a tubeway station except that there wasn't a soul in sight. A single empty car waited for them.
Corby followed Janice through the door, and they braced themselves against the backs of the seats. The car began to move, slowly at first, then more rapidly. The lights in the car went out, and they were left in absolute blackness.
"You see," Janice explained through the darkness, "no one knows exactly where on the Moon Project Aspirin is—except for a few top government officials. This car, and a few others like it are the only ways to get there. In a few minutes, we'll be past the field of the gravity generators under Theophilus Peak, so watch your stomach."
Even though he was prepared for it, the shock came so suddenly that Corby was almost sick. In a spasm of quick, jerking nausea, Corby's weight dropped to thirty pounds.
"No wonder," he said, after swallowing, "they use these fields. Imagine growing up under this gravity."
"Right. There are a million people living in Peak City, a couple of hundred thousand of them children. Imagine that many monstrosities!"
They were silent for a moment, then Corby said: "Well, come on, what is it? What is all this hush-hush about?"
Janice Forbes seemed to be choosing her words carefully.
"We are building one of the greatest spaceships ever dreamed of by man—an interstellar vessel. At top speed, it will reach a velocity nearly ten thousand times that of light."
Corby felt, mentally, the same shock that the gravity release had given him physically; as before he forced it down, made his voice calm.
"I see. And what is my part in all this?"
"Until we get there, this is the last answer I'll give you: You are here to investigate a hunch."
Corby kept his mouth shut. He knew only too well that this woman would no more answer another question than the nearest wall. But, by God, he could speculate!
An interstellar ship! It hardly sounded possible. For better than seven centuries, now, man had owned the Solar System, lock, stock, and barrel. He had found no resistance, nothing to fight his control. Life had, in a few instances, existed in lower forms—algae, bacteria, and a few others—but only Earth had spawned animal life; only Earth had bred an intelligent species.
And now the stars. Maybe somewhere, somehow, out there, they would find other intelligences. For here, somewhere beneath the gray, hard rock of Earth's moon, man was at last building a ship that could reach across those awful distances to other suns, other planets.
How long had they been building it? Who had evolved the drive that so violently violated known physics? And all this security, this secrecy; all the imprisonment and suffering and headaches its builders must have suffered!
Suddenly Corby laughed aloud.
"What's so funny?" Janice Forbes asked.
"Headaches! Ad astra per aspirin! 'To the stars through aspirin!' I think I'm going to like this crowd!"
Her laughter joined his as the car hissed on through the blackness.
EIGHT guards met them at the end of the long tubeway, guns levelled. Evidently no one trusted anyone around here.
More identification procedure and more questions before they were finally released to go to the construction site.
"Why all the secrecy?" Corby asked as they walked down another of the seemingly endless corridors. "What in the devil could it possibly hurt to release this stuff?"
She looked at him oddly. "Ever hear of Solar Atomics?"
"Sure. So?"
"So they own, sub rosa, every atomic corporation in the System. The Government can't prove it, of course, but they know ...
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