Death Quotient and Other Stories

Delusion Drive

Originally published in Super Science Stories, April 1949; as Peter Reed.

The space rat was green, had never been in a vessel that used the dread Rip... He had to learn the hard way that once you’re entered the Rip, you’re dead — or only a grey thought in the mind of a machine!

I shipped out on the Leandor, one of the middle-sized freighters of the Troy Line, as a cook’s helper. We were packed to the ports with hydroponic tanks for the colony on Negus IX, and the scuttlebutt was that we were bringing back a full load, of the high vitamin concentrate that they were growing there. I’d read about it in the Space Times.

I signed on at the Troy offices and the man gave me my sign-on bonus and told me what day to climb aboard. I got there early and swaggered into the port, hoping that any crew member I saw would notice that even though I was eighteen, I was a hardened space rat. My kit was battered, but I had no plans of telling anybody that it got that way on a beat-up excursion liner in the VEM run. I wanted them to think I’d been outside the system and knew all about Space Rip, which was the way the Leandor traveled.

A sleepy guy showed me where to go to pick a bunk and when I got there, a fellow about my age was unpacking his duffel. He nodded absently and after I’d picked a bunk and stowed my stuff in the locker, I went to find the cook. He hadn’t come aboard.

At noon sharp, when the last man came aboard, the ports were dogged down and the PA told everybody not on duty to hit the sack.

I felt a lot better when we blasted off, because it was the same sort of thing I was used to — at least it felt that way.

As soon as the initial load was over, I forgot myself and called over to the young man, whose name was Jameson, saying, “What’s so funny about this Space Rip?”

He gave me a sour grin and said, “Greeny, hey? We aren’t in it yet. We take physical drive to our reference point and then rip off.”

I shut up, wanting to bite my tongue off.

After a little while he said, “You’ll know when it starts, Greeny.”

He had a nasty, superior way about him and I didn’t answer. But I saw that he kept licking his lips and that he was afraid.

It made me afraid to watch him and so I just watched the underside of the bunk overhead.

My remark had been stupid. I’d read enough about Space Rip to know that nobody has been able to explain the feeling.

The big gyros made a distant throbbing hum and I knew that they’d made a course correction. Somebody at the PA mike said, “Hold your hats, rats.”

I grabbed the bunk stanchion to brace myself, but it wasn’t that kind of a jar, the sort that you can brace yourself against. It felt as if I had been swatted by a huge club, and yet instead of a club it was made of sharp knives set close together. The knives were ‘so sharp that my body offered no resistance and so the big club passed right through me, leaving me... sort of misty and vague. Apart at the seams.

I noticed the greyness then. All colors gone. Everything was a shade of grey and everything had a slight, almost noticeable flicker about it, like the old movies in the museum.

All feeling of movement was gone.

While I was trying to get used to it, the PA, with blurred tone, somehow far away, said, “Cook’s helper. Report to the galley.”

Walking was a misty sort of dream and when I staggered against the corridor wall there was a funny unsubstantialness about the wall and about the hand that touched it.

The cook, a big sweating vision in black and grey, waved a cleaver in my face. “I tell you again,” he said, his voice coming from far off like voices in a dream, “the underlying philosophical concept is unsound.”

“I’m Bill Torrance,” I said.

“Sure, sure. Hello. I’m Doc. As I was saying, boy, they haven’t agreed on the concept. This is my thirty-fifth rip and I wish they’d make up their minds. Start dicing those onions.

“Dakin’s formula gives the speed. Very simple, boy. The square root of the distance in light years equals the cube of the trip time in weeks. This trip is three weeks, so simple mathematics gives you a distance to Negus IX of seven hundred twenty-nine light years. Not accurate, you understand. Just rule of thumb. What do you know about the Rip, boy?”

I was weeping over the onions. They had authority. I sniffed and said, “From what I heard, the Rip changes the ship into something that isn’t physical and then it reassembles it on the other end.”

He snorted. “If it isn’t physical, what is it? They say it’s a concept. You and I are concepts, just ideas in the head of some damn machine. You know how fast we’re going this minute?”

“No,” I said humbly.

“You aren’t moving. You’re gone. Just as though you never existed. That’s what they say. You have ceased to live, boy. But just when you stopped living a damn mechanical brain got a concept of you and it’s shoving that concept through space at a slow lope of eight trillion, seven hundred and seventy billion, six hundred and forty-four million miles an hour.”

I put the knife down and stared at him. “Asteroids,” I said weakly.

“Ha!” he said. “Nothing to fear, boy. Can an asteroid make a hole in a concept? A man’s thought is quicker. He looks at a star fifty light years away. By looking at it, boy, he has pushed his mental concept right to that star in nothing flat. But he can’t think so good. Not so clear. This mechanical mind has a slow brain but an accurate one. When it changes us back to physical matter at the end of the Rip, we’re just like we were when it got the concept.”

“Is... is that why everything looks misty and funny?”

“Right, boy. The machine can’t think except in terms of shades of grey. You follow me so far?”

“I... I think so.”

“Now here’s where I fall off at the first curve. The machine, boy, dematerializes itself and turns itself into a concept and comes right along with us because it’s part of the ship. That’s where I find the philosophical flaw. If we exist only in the mechanical brain of a machine as a concept, how in Gehenna can that mechanical brain be a part of the concept. It’s like the snake eating his own tail!”

It made me sick.

He reached over my shoulder and picked up an onion. “You think this is an onion? Well, it isn’t, boy. It’s a mechanical thought of an onion being whisked across space at just the same speed that you are. You know what? You can open a port and throw that onion out!”

I was getting dizzy. “But the air... space...”

“No, boy. The concept is of a ship with the air in it. And of ports with hinges. So you can open the port of the concept but you can’t let the air out of the concept. What’s the matter, boy,” he said, peering into my face. “You look sickish.”

“Look, Doc,” I asked, “so the onion is a concept. And so am I. So why do I want to eat the onion? Why do I have to?”

“Because the thought picture of you is so accurate that you’re built with every urge and hunger intact. You’d be damn uncomfortable if you stopped eating!”

Inside of three days I got a little used to the dreamy look of everything, the faraway sounds, the soft feeling of the steel plates. But I knew that I could never be matter-of-fact about it. In my sleep I dreamed about what would happen if the machine didn’t materialise us at the end of the trip. I had nightmares about going on and on forever, a thought that had missed its target.

Looking around, I could see that it got on the nerves of the others too. Nobody seemed to have enough to do. There were interminable bull sessions, many of them turning into bitter quarrels over our exact status — whether or not we existed, and if so, where we were.

I took a lot of riding from the others because of it being my first Rip. They kept asking me how I liked it until the question got as boring as that hot weather question about whether it’s warm enough for you.

One stocky, goodnatured engineer told fine stories about the adventures of Silas McCurdy, the first space pilot, and what happened when McCurdy, trying to achieve the speed of light with a physical drive, ran afoul of Fitzgerald’s Contraction and, for a time, disappeared entirely. Another one that was good was about how McCurdy helped the scientists find the right frame of space.

Jameson was morose and gloomy, ignoring everybody. He kept looking at me in a funny way that made me uncomfortable.

Four of us were in the same cabin. I had as little to say to Jameson as he had to me. The days turned into weeks and soon there was that air of expectancy aboard that always signals a port ahead.

We were due to come out of the Rip at noon the next day when the stocky engineer caught me just outside my cabin and said, “Kid, I don’t want to upset you or anything, but that Jameson is a bad actor. He’s got a reputation that isn’t so hot. You must have been snotty to him the first day out because he’s had it in for you ever since. I figure the least I can do is warn you. I think the guy is going off his wagon.”

He meant what he said. “But what can I—”

He forced a small automatic into my hand. “Here, Kid. You borrow Betsy. She’s loaded and ready. If Jameson goes off his rocker completely, he’ll surer than hell come after you with that sheath knife of his. Just keep an eye on him.”

He went off down the corridor. I put the automatic inside my blouse and went into the cabin. Jameson was on his bunk, staring at me. His deep-set eyes seemed to glow and his mouth was a tight, brutal line.

I knew then that the engineer was right.

If I reported Jameson to the captain, I might be laughed off the ship. I asked Doc for his advice. He told me to keep my mouth shut and keep the gun handy.

All that evening Jameson stared at me and his eyes seemed to glow brighter every hour. I went to sleep at last, after several hours of tossing and turning.

In the morning it was even worse. When I went to the mess hall, Jameson was right behind me. I could almost feel the point of that knife in my back.

At eleven-thirty Doc sent me back to my bunk. Jameson was there. The other men in the cabin were watching him as though they were afraid of him.

The silence and tension mounted.

Jameson sat on the edge of his bunk, took out the knife and began to clean his fingernails. After each nail he glanced over at me.

The PA startled me when it said, “Five minutes’ warning.”

By instinct I looked up at the speaker mesh. When I looked back Jameson was nearly on me, the knife upraised. The other men yelled. There was no chance of avoiding the thrust. With his face twisted, he sunk the knife deep into my belly with all his strength. He moved back and his lips writhed like grey worms. My hand closed on the butt of the gun. I pulled it out and emptied it into his chest. The slugs drove him back and he fell and lay still, a trickle of grey blood coming from the corner of his sagging mouth.

I knew that I could not live through it. I stared down at the knife handle in horror. The life was draining out of me.

“Hold your hat, guys,” the PA said abruptly.

Coming out of the Rip was unimportant compared with death.

There was a spinning madness and the vast club which had smashed through me at the beginning of the Rip smashed up in the other direction, filling in the vagueness, solidifying that which had been misty for so long.

I blinked in the brighter light, my mind reeling under the sudden impact of color.

Then there was loud laughter and Jameson, a wide smile on his face, was coming toward me with his hand out. My first thought was that the gun had been loaded with blanks. He wanted me to shake hands with him, and me with a knife that he had driven into me! But the knife was in its sheath at his belt and there wasn’t any hole in me.

Doc came in yelling, “How’d he take it? How’d the Kid take it? Any guts?” He turned to me and said, “Boy, they take it easier these days. Why, on my first Rip they told me that the ship was lost and then they opened a port and every damn man jack jumped out into space and left me alone. Thought I’d go nuts. Of course, since this is only a concept when you’re in Rip, everything goes back to exactly the way it was when we started the Rip.”

Jameson found my hand. His grip was solid and good.

“Come on, space rat,” he said. “I know where there’s a good bar!”