"I'm afraid I made it a little strong."
General Pittmann poured himself a cupful from the electric percolator and
sipped the hot coffee appraisingly. "Yes, just a bit." It was a choice
between making do with this, and waiting for another pot. He made do.
"I've been thinking . . ." Hansard said.
"We try to discourage thinking in the Army," Pittmann said placidly, as he
pried apart two slices of frozen bread and put them into the toaster.
". . . about what you said the day I arrived here. I think you were right."
"I wouldn't be surprised." He grimaced over a second mouthful of the coffee.
"But you'll have to refresh my memory, Nathan. I say so many right things."
"That it's genocidal to use the bombs."
"Did I say that? Surely only in the most hypothetical way -- if I did.
For my own part, I have little but contempt for people who warm their
consciences over such words, and over that word especially. You can't
win a war, you know, without making omelettes." Pleased with his timing,
Pittmann cracked two eggs neatly into the electric skillet. "So I hope
you're not taking such talk too seriously. At your age it isn't becoming
to be that deadly earnest."
"But if the word has any meaning at all -- "
"Exactly, Nathan. It has none. It's a red flag to wave at Liberals."
"There is the classic example."
"Yes?" General Pittmann looked up, inviting -- or daring -- Hansard to
continue. An impish grin played at the corner of his lips. "The example
of Germany, you mean? Why do you bring up a subject if you then refuse
to talk about it? Auschwitz was ill-advised, certainly. A terrible waste
of manpower, not to mention the prejudice involved; that is what I find
most offensive. But nowadays prejudice doesn't enter into it. The bomb
is the most democratic weapon man has ever devised. It draws absolutely
no distinctions . . . . You make lousy coffee, Nathan."
"You make filthy jokes, General."
"That borders on impertinence, you know. But I'll overlook it for the
sake of having you making conversation again."
"Your coffee will taste better if you put milk and sugar in it."
"A barbaric custom," Pittmann complained, but he followed Hansard's advice.
"Since when have you let considerations like that stand in your way?"
Pittmann laughed in good earnest. "Better, much better. You see, it's all
in having a delicate touch. Would you like a piece of toast? Isn't life
. . ." he scarcely seemed to pay attention to the knife that slipped out
of his fingers and clattered on the floor, ". . . a terrible waste of
manpower?" He laughed weakly.
"Oh, put that gun away, Nathan! What do you think I'm going to do --
attack you with a butter knife? I'm too weak to . . . " he closed his
eyes ". . . to finish sentences. It won't do you any good, Nathan, this
noble gesture of yours. If you'd waited till the last minute, perhaps
you might have prevented me. But then, this is only
one
post. What of
the other? What of Russia? Foolish Nathan. . . .
"Why did you poison me?"
Hansard stared at the general coldly. Pittmann had very delicately
balanced himself in the spindly tubular chair so that he could not fall
out of it when he was unconscious.
"I always wondered, you know . . . I always wondered what it would be like
to die. I like it." He fell asleep, smiling.
Hansard chuckled. He knew Pittmann would be mortified when he woke up
next day. There had been nothing but Army-issue barbiturates in the
coffee, which were guaranteed nonlethal in any quantity. Hansard left
the officers' mess, locking the door behind him.
He returned to his cabin to work on what Panofsky had promised would be
"a trifle of rewiring." The adjustments that had to be made in the standard
transmitter elements that Hansard had rifled from storage taxed his manual
abilities to the limit, but he had had the advantage of having performed
the same task only hours before under Panofsky's supervision. It was
exasperating just now, at the moment of highest crisis, to have to work
electronic jigsaw puzzles. But it was possible. He needn't even feel
rushed. Indeed, with so much at stake, he did not dare to.
When all the assemblies were put together and had been checked and rechecked,
Hansard fitted them into two overnight bags -- all but the essential "fix."
This he hid in the observatory ventilation shaft.
As fate would have it, it was Worsaw whom he found on duty before the
entrance to the manmitter.
"Private Worsaw, the General asked me to tell you to report to him on
the double in the observatory."
"Sir?" Worsaw looked doubtful. It was not likely Pittmann would be
interested in seeing
him
.
"I shall stand duty for you here, of course. Better not keep him waiting.
I suspect his request has something to do with those chevrons missing
from your sleeves." Hansard winked, a friendly conspirator's wink.
Worsaw saluted briskly and took his leave. Poor fool, Hansard thought.
He too walks out of my life smiling. He was happy that he had not been
required once again, and this time definitively, to kill Worsaw. He never
wanted to kill anyone again.
Hansard entered the manmitter with the key he had taken from Pittmann.
After taking out the first of the devices he would need, he depressed
the button that operated the manmitter. The letters stencilled on the
steel wall flickered from MARS to EARTH. He was home again, but there
was no time to kiss the terran ground. His arrival would not have been
unannounced; neither would it be welcome.
He looked at his watch. Two-eighteen p.m. He had, he estimated, another
three minutes. He had found that he could hold his breath no longer than
that. He made the last connections in the receiverless transmitter just
as the door of the receiver sprang open and the guards burst in.
They opened fire on the man who was no longer there.
"Receiverless transmitters?" Hansard had objected, when first Panofsky
had outlined his plan. "But you've said yourself that such a thing isn't
possible. And it doesn't make
sense
."
"Sense!" Panofsky jeered. "What is sense? Does gravity make sense?
Do wavicles? Does the Blessed Trinity? God glories in paradoxes more than
in syllogisms. But I was quite sincere in what I told you. Strictly
speaking, a receiverless transmitter isn't possible. But who says the
receiver has to be where you want your bundles transmitted? Why not send
it along
with
them?"
"Yes, and why don't I lift myself up by my boot straps?" Hansard replied
sourly.
"The heart of the matter," Panofsky continued imperturbably, "lies in
that word 'instantaneous.' If matter transmission is truly instantaneous
and not just very very fast, like light, then, at the exact instant of
transmission, where is the object we're transmitting? It is
here
,
or is it there? And the answer, of course, is that it is both
here
and
there
. And thus -- the receiverless transmitter, socalled. We just
attach a set of three transmitters and three receivers to the object,
posit the transmitters as being
here
and the receivers as being
there
,
press the button, and
poof
! You see?"
Hansard shook his head glumly.
"But you've already seen it work! You traveled all over the house in it."
"Oh, I know it happened. But the state I'm in now, you could as easily
convince me that it's magic that makes it work, as the laws of nature.
That's what it is -- even down to the magic number three."
"Numbers
are
magic, of course, and none more so than three. But there
is also a reason for that number. Three points establish a plane. It is
the hypothetical plane that those three receivers define by which we
can place the transmitted object at exactly that point in space where
we wish it to be."
"Even I can call your bluff on that one, Doctor. It takes four points
to define an object's position in space. Three will determine a plane,
but for a solid body you need four. That's simple Eudidean geometry."
"And you'll get a good grade in that subject. In fact, there does have to
be a fourth transmitter-receiver for the whole thing to work at all. And
the fourth one doesn't travel along with the others. It stays behind and
serves as the point of reference. The 'here' posit of the transmitter
and the 'there' posit of the receiver can be considered to form two
immense pyramids sharing a common apex at the 'fix' point."
"And where will my fix be?"
"On Mars, of course. Where else could it be?"
Naturally enough, the first point for which Panofsky had been able to obtain
exact information concerning longitude, latitude, and altitude had been
his own residence; and it was there, in the library, that Hansard came
first after leaving Camp Jackson/Virginia. Panofsky and Bridgetta being
away in Moscow, Hansard was conveniently alone. He placed the first
transmitter-receiver at the agreed-upon location behind the uniform
edition of Bulwer-Lytton. Then, taking up the two bags with the rest of
the equipment he set off once again, a comfortable thirty seconds ahead
of schedule.
It had been more difficult to find sufficiently detailed information
concerning two other locations. The data on the Great Pyramid of Egypt
Panofsky had discovered in a back number of
The Journal of Theosophical
Science
.
Hansard arrived at the apex of the Great Pyramid at night. He had never
seen a desert from such a height under moonlight before and, despite the
urgency of his task, he had to pause to gaze down at the scene with awe.
Someone, perhaps a tourist, glimpsed Hansard's silhouette against the
moon and began shouting at him. The night wind carried his words off and
Hansard caught only scattered wisps of sound, not enough even to tell
what language the man was speaking -- much less his meaning. Hansard
left the second of the transmitter-receivers atop the crumbling stone,
and moved on to the third and last point of the triangulation.
He found himself in the midst of a vast concrete expanse from which there
projected, at wide intervals, the small knobs of the headstones. This was
the eighty acres of the Viet Nam War-Dead Memorial erected outside Canberra
by the new Liberal Government that had taken Australia out of the war.
With a magnanimity unparalleled in history, the government had here
commemorated the enemy's dead in equal number with its own.
Hansard set the last receiver-transmitter upon one of the headstones.
Only one minute twenty-three seconds had passed since he'd made the first
jump from Camp Jackson/Virginia. There was time, some few seconds,
for reverence.
"It was wrong," Hansard said with great definiteness.
And, though he did not go on to say so, the wrong was irretrievable.
The boy was dead forever. This very headstone might mark his grave.
That was all the time he could allow for reverence. He pressed down the
button of the third transmitter-receiver. A delayed-action mechanism
provided him with fifteen seconds' grace. He unzipped the second of
the two bags and took out the neutralizer. It had an effective range of
six feet.
"You'd better go now," he said to himself. It was Hansard[2] who said
this, but there was no reply from Hansard[1].
Only then did Hansard[2] realize that he had been deceived all this while;
that in an inviolable part of his mind, Hansard[1] had formed his intention
and kept it secret from his other self. It was too late to argue with him,
for suddenly the ground under Hansard[2]'s feet became solid, and he knew
that the earth had just been turned upside down on its axis and transmitted
to the other side of the solar system.
"Impossible!" Hansard had said. "And if it could be done, it would be
a madness worse than the bombs."
"Fudge, Nathan! Haven't you learned yet that I'm always right?"
"What will become of all the people in the Real World? You should think
of their welfare before you consider ours."
"The chief immediate consequence for them will be that people in the
northern hemisphere will suddenly see the constellations usual to
southern skies. In consequence, there will probably be more than a'
few shipwrecks on the night-side of earth. A small enough price to pay,
considering the alternative."
"But how will this prevent the bombs? They'll be coming from Mars to their
receiver-satellites, in any case."
"But the receiver satellites will lie outside the earth's field of
transmission. Earth-Sub-One will cross the solar system and leave the
satellites behind."
"So they can drop their bombs on Earth-Sub-Two?"
"You forget that for anything constituted of primary matter, secondary
matter seems not to exist. From the point of view of those bombs, earth
will seem to have disappeared. Moreover, they will cease to be satellites,
since the echo of earth remaining behind has no gravitational grip on
them. They'll fly off tangent to their orbits and eventually be dragged
down into the sun." Panofsky grinned. "Imagine, though, what your people
on Mars will think when the earth suddenly disappears from the sky!
Will they blame it on the Russians?"
Hansard was not ready to make jokes on the subject. "But . . . the magnitude
of it!
The whole damn earth!
"
"Is that meant to be an objection? Great magnitudes often simplify an
operation. Clock towers were built before wrist watches, and the solar
system has often been called a celestial timepiece. Consider that, in
transmitting the earth, I waste none of its momentum. Placed properly
and pointed in the right direction, it should proceed in its immemorial
orbit about the sun without a hairbreath of wobble. I can't guarantee
quite
that
exactitude, but my calculations show that nothing too terrible
should result."
"And turning it upside down?"
"To conserve the order of the seasons which, as you certainly should know,
are caused by the earth's position along its orbit about the sun. In effect,
I am advancing the earth six months through time. Turning it topsy-turvy
will compensate for that exactly."
There was no air for him to breathe.
You fool! Hansard[2] thought angrily. Why did you stay inside the field
of neutralization? Why?