Ever since science fiction writers started trying to get around Einstein’s theory and write stories about spaceships traveling faster than the speed of light, there have been stories about ships traveling through what is often called “hyperspace.” It’s as good a term as any and has worked for dozens of writers for many decades.
“The Mapmakers,” first published in 1955, is about navigating hyperspace—and what happens when the normal navigation tools are no longer available. There are several notable aspects of this story, aside from the kicker, which I have been sworn not to reveal. First, the crew isn’t all men—there are women on the
Terra II
, and the women are full members of the crew, not just pretty nurses or secretaries. Secondly, the story is launched by an accident, the sort of thing that could happen anytime, anywhere in space, but that is seldom noted in stories.
These aspects, plus the too realistic atmosphere of life in a ship with a sizeable crew confined for more than a little time, give “The Mapmakers” a lively, engaging quality that sets it apart from other spaceship tales. The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.
It was one of those crazy, chance-in-a-million accidents. A particle of meteoric matter slammed into
Starship Terra II
in hyperspace. It was only a small particle, but it penetrated three bulkheads, injuring Lieutenant Groden and destroying the Celestial Atlas. It couldn’t happen in a hundred years—but it had happened.
That was the end of the road for
Starship Terra II.
The damage-control parties patched the bulkheads easily enough. But the Atlas—the only record on board of the incomprehensible Riemannian configurations of hyperspace—was a total loss.
The captain gave orders for Spohn, the Celestial Atlas, to be buried in space and called an emergency officers’ meeting in the wardroom.
Terra II
was in normal space and free fall. A trace of smoky kerosene odor still hung in the wardroom, but there was none of the queasy unrecognizable slipping motion of the hyperspace “jump,” and the captain had ordered the ship spun to give them a touch of simulated gravity. The officers were managing to look alert and responsive as they faced their skipper.
The captain was a hard-muscled, hard-eyed career naval officer, and by definition an ambitious man—else he would hardly have asked for the command of a charting flight. He walked briskly in from his own quarters, neither hurrying nor slow. He would walk at that same pace to receive his admiral’s stars when that day came, or to his execution, if it ever came to that.
He assumed his place at the head of the table and took the precise ten seconds his martinet mind allotted him for looking around the wardroom. Then he said, “We’re in trouble.”
The men in the wardroom hitched their hips a quarter-inch closer to the ward table.
The captain nodded and said it again, “We’re in the soup, and we’re a long way from home, and nobody is going to come to get us out of it. We’ll have to do it ourselves, if we can. Ciccarelli’s trying to get us a fix, but I can tell you right now, we’re not close to Sol. There isn’t a constellation in the sky that you or I or anybody else ever saw before. We might be a hundred light-years from home, we might be ten thousand.”
The exec cleared his throat. “Sir, what about our records?”
“What records? They went with the Atlas, Hal. We can’t retrace our way to Earth.”
“No, sir, that’s not what I mean. I understand that. But our charting records from Earth to here, we still have those. They won’t do us any good, because we can’t follow them backward—hyperspace doesn’t work that way. But Earth needs them.”
“Sure. What can we do about it? If we could get them back, we could get back ourselves. The whole trouble—Yes? What is it, Lorch?”
Ensign Lorch saluted from the door of the wardroom. “Spohn’s body, sir,” he rapped out. “It’s ready for burial now. Would the captain like to conduct the services?”
“The captain will. What about Groden?”
Lorch said. “He isn’t good, sir. He’s unconscious and his head is bandaged up. The surgeon thinks it’s bad. But we won’t know for sure for at least a couple of hours.”
The captain nodded, and Lorch quickly took his seat. He was the youngest officer in
Terra II
in years, six months out of the academy and still unable to vote. He listened to the discussion of ways and means with deference masking a keen feeling of excitement. The adventure of the unknown star lanes! That was why Lorch had signed up in the charting service, and he was getting it.
Perhaps more, even, than he had bargained for.
The trouble with
Terra II
was that she was playing a cosmic game of blindman’s buff. Jumping into hyperspace was like leaping through a shadow, blindfolded; there was no way of knowing in advance what lay on the other side.
The first hyperspace rocket had taught a few lessons, expensively learned. On its first jump into hyperspace,
Terra I
had been “out” for just under one second—just enough, that is, for the jump generators to swing the ship into and out of the Riemannian n-dimensional composite that they called hyperspace for lack of a better term.
And it had taken
Terra I
nearly a year to limp back home, in normal space all the way, its generators a smoldering ruin. Back still again to the drawing boards!
But it was no one’s fault. Who could have foreseen that any electric current, however faint, would so warp the field as to blow up the generators? The lesson was plain:
No electrical equipment in use during a jump
.
So
Terra I,
rebuilt, reequipped and with a new crew, tried again. And this time there were no power failures. The only failure, this time, was the human element.
Because in hyperspace, the Universe was a crazy quilt of screaming patterns and shimmering lights, no more like the ordered normal-space pattern of stars than the view through a kaleidoscope is like the colored shreds of paper at its focus.
So the Celestial Atlas was added to the complement of a hyperspace rocket’s crew.
And
Terra I
was rebuilt, and
Terra II
and
Terra III
and
Terra IV
came off the ways. And Earth cast its bait into the turgid depths of hyperspace again and again … .
The crews of the charting service were all volunteers, all rigidly screened. The ten officers who made up the wardroom of
Terra II
were as brilliant and able a group as ever assembled, but the emergency officers’ meeting was a failure, all the same.
There just wasn’t any way back.
“We’re the trailblazers,” rumbled the captain. “If we had a duplicate Celestial Atlas—but we don’t. Well, that’s something for the next ship to bear in mind, if we ever get back to tell them about it.”
Ensign Lorch said tentatively, “Sir,
don’t
we have one?”
The captain rasped, “Of course not, man! I just finished saying we didn’t. You should know that.”
“Yes, sir. But that’s not exactly what I meant. We have a library and, as I understand it, the library is basically the same as the atlas—a trained total-recall observer. Doesn’t any of the information in the library duplicate the atlas?”
“Now that,” said the captain after a pause, “is worth thinking about. What about it, Hal?”
The exec said, “Worth a try, captain.”
“Right. Yoel, get her up here.” Lieutenant Yoel saluted and spoke into the communications tube. The captain went on reflectively. “Probably won’t work, of course, but we’ll try anything. Anybody else got a suggestion?”
“Dead reckoning, sir?” Yoel suggested. “I know we’ve got the record of our fixes so far; can we try just backtracking?”
“Won’t work,” the captain said positively. “If we could be absolutely exact, maybe. But without an atlas we can’t be. And a centimeter’s divergence at the beginning of a run might put us a thousand kilometers off at the end. A thousand kilometers in hyperspace—heaven knows what that might come to in normal space. Anything from a million light-years down.
“I couldn’t do it, Yoel. Even Groden couldn’t do it
with
his eyes, and he’s the best shiphandler on board. And I don’t think he’s going to have his eyes, anyway, at least not for a long time. Maybe forever, if we don’t get back to the eye banks on Earth. Without the atlas, we’re as blind as Groden.”
The speaking tube interrupted and rescued Yoel. It whistled thinly: “Recorder Mate Eklund reporting to the wardroom.”
“Send her in,” said the exec, and the library, Nancy Eklund, RM2c, marched smartly into the meeting.
It wasn’t going to work; the captain knew it in the first few words. They spent an hour sweating the library of all of her relevant data, but it was wasted effort.
The captain thought wistfully of Recorder Mate Spohn, the lost Celestial Atlas. With him on the bridge, hyperspace navigation had been—well, not easy, but
possible
. For Spohn was trained in the techniques of total recall. The shifting, multicolored values of Riemannian space formed totals in his mind, so that he could actually navigate by means of a process of mental analysis and synthesis so rapid and complex that it became a sort of
gestalt.
Of course, a twelve-stage electronic computer could have done the same thing, just as
quickly. But
Terra II
had. its limitations, and one of the limitations was that no electronic equipment could be operated in a jump—just when the computer would most be needed. So the designers came up with what was, after all, a fairly well tested method of filing information—the human brain. By the techniques of hypnotic conditioning
all
of the brain opened up to subconscious storing.
Recorder Mate Spohn, trancelike on the bridge, had no conscious knowledge of what was going on as, machinelike, he scanned the Riemannian configurations and rapped out courses and speeds; but his subconscious never erred. With its countless cells and infinite linkages, the brain was a tank that all the world’s knowledge could hardly fill—just about big enough, in fact, to cope with the task of recognizing the meaning of hyperspace configurations.
And the process worked so well that the delighted designers added another recorder mate to the personnel tables—the library—which enabled them to dispense with the dead weight of books as well.
The entire wardroom, in order of rank, shot questions at their library, and her disciplined mind dutifully plucked out answers.
But most of them she never knew. For
Terra II
was a charting ship, and though the Atlas had, as a matter of routine, transcribed his calibrations into the ship’s log—and thence into the library—all that Nancy Eklund knew was how
Terra II
had reached its checkpoints in space. Hyperspace was a tricky business; backtracking was dangerous.
When
Terra II
got back—if
Terra II
got back—those who came after them would have complete calibrations for a round trip. But they did not. Their task was as difficult and dangerous, in its way, as Columbus’s caravels. Except that Columbus had only one great fear; falling off the edge of the Earth.
Lucky Columbus. The technology that had produced
Terra II
had brought plenty of new fears.
Three shells “up”—toward the ship’s center—a surgeon’s mate named Conboy was pulling the fourth needle out of the arm of Lieutenant Groden. The big navigator should have been out cold, but he was tossing and mumbling, his head thrashing from side to side in its thick wrappings of bandage.
Tough guy, thought Conboy critically, counting up the ampoules of opiate the blinded officer had taken. They were all tough guys, anyway, from the skipper on down. But the little pipettes brought them down to size and Conboy, though only an inch over five feet tall and the frailest on board, was the man who drove in the pipettes.
“He’s under, Mr. Broderick,” he reported to the ship’s surgeon, who nodded.
“Keep it so,” the officer ordered. “If anything comes up, I’ll be in the wardroom.” The captain would be wanting to hear about Groden’s condition, and Broderick wanted very much to hear what the emergency meeting had to say about the condition of
Terra II
in general.
This was fine with Conboy, who had a similar concern of his own. As soon as Commander Broderick was out of sight, Conboy took a last look at Groden and, reassured that the navigator would be out of trouble for at least half an hour, hurried to the next cabin to pry what information he could out of the chart room.
A spaceman–first named Coriell was methodically taking optical measurement on all the stars of second magnitude or brighter. Conboy looked uncomprehendingly at the entries on the charts. “Got anything?” he asked.
Coriell spat disgustedly. “Got trouble. See that little fellow down there, between the two real bright ones? That
might
be Canopus. The rough lines check; Mr. Ciccarelli’s going to have to run a spectrum on it, when he gets through with the meeting.”