Time For The Stars

VIII RELATIVITY

I had been in the Elsie a week when it was decided to operate on Pat. Pat told me they were going to do it, but he did not talk about it much. His attitude was the old iron-man, as if he meant to eat peanuts and read comics while they were chopping on him. I think he was scared stiff... I would have been.

Not that I would have understood if I had known the details; I'm no neural surgeon, nor any sort; removing a splinter is about my speed.

But it meant we would be off the watch list for a while, so I told Commander Frick. He already knew from messages passed between the ship and LRF; he told me to drop off the watch list the day before my brother was operated and to consider myself available for extra duty during his convalescence. It did not make any difference to him; not only were there other telepairs but we were still radio-linked to Earth.

Two weeks after we started spacing and the day before Pat was to be cut on I was sitting in my room, wondering whether to go to the communications office and offer my valuable services in cleaning waste baskets and microfilming files or just sit tight until somebody sent for me.

I had decided on the" latter, remembering Uncle Steve's advice never to volunteer, and was letting down my bunk, when the squawker boomed: "T. P. Bartlett, special communicator, report to the Relativist!"

I hocked my bunk up while wandering if there was an Eye-Spy concealed in my recto-taking down my bunk during working hours seemed always to result in my being paged. Dr. Babcock was not in the control room and they chased me out, but not before I took a quick look around—the control room was off limits to anyone who did not work there. I found him down in the computation room across from the communications office, where I would have looked in the first place if I hadn't wanted to see the control room.

I said, "T. P. Bartlett, communicator tenth grade, reporting to the Relativist as ordered."

Dr. Babcock swung around in his chair and looked at me. He was a big raw-boned man, all hands and feet, and looked more like a lumberjack than a mathematical physicist. I think he played it up-you know, elbows on the table and bad grammar on purpose. Uncle Steve said Babcock had more honorary degrees than most people had socks.

He stared at me and laughed. "Where did you get that fake military manner, son? Siddown. You're Bartlett?"

I sat. "Yes, sir."

"What's this about you and your twin going off the duty list?"

"Well, my brother is in a hospital, sir. They're going to do something to his spine tomorrow."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I didn't answer because it was so unreasonable; I wasn't even in his department. "Frick never tells me anything, the Captain never tells me anything, now you never tell me anything. I have to bang around the galley and pick up gossip to find out what's going on. I was planning on working you over tomorrow. You know that don't you?"

"Uh, no, sir."

"Of course you don't, became I never tell anybody anything either. What a way to run a ship! I should have stayed in Vienna. There's a nice town. Ever have coffee and pastries in the Ring?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Nevertheless I was going to work you and your twin over tomorrow-so now we'll have to do it today. Tell him to stand by."

"Uh; what do you want him to do, Doctor? He's already been moved to a hospital."

"Just tell him to stand by. I'm going, to calibrate you two, that's what. Figure out your index error."

"Sir?"

"Just tell him-"

So I called Pat. I hadn't spoken to him since breakfast; I wondered how he was going to take it

But he already knew. "Yes, yes," he said in a tired voice.

"They're setting up apparatus in my hospital room right now.

Mother made such a fuss I had to send her out."

("Look, Pat, if you don't want to do this, whatever it is, I'll tell them nothing doing. It's an imposition.")

"What difference does it make?" he said irritably. "I've got to sweat out the next sixteen hours somehow. Anyhow, this may be the last time we work together."

It was the first time he had shown that it was affecting his nerve. I said hastily, ("Don't talk that way, Pat. You're going to get well. You're going to walk again. Shucks, you'll even be able to ski if you want to.")

"Don't give me that Cheerful Charlie stuff. I'm getting more of it from the folks than I can use. It makes me want to throw up."

("Now see here, Pat—")

"Stow it, stow it! Let's get on with what they want us to do."

("Well, all right.") I spoke aloud: "He's ready, Doctor."

"Half a minute. Start your camera, O'Toole." Dr. Babcock touched something on his desk. "Commander Frick?"

"Yes, Doctor," Frick's voice answered.

"We're ready. You coming in?"

"All set here," I heard my boss answer. "We'll come in."

A moment later he entered, with Anna Horoshen. In the meantime I took a look around. One whole wall of the computation room was a computer, smaller than the one at Los Alamos but not much. The blinking lights must have meant something to somebody. Sitting at right angles to it at a console was Mr. O'Toole and above the console was a big display scope; at about one-second intervals a flash of light would peak in the center of it.

Anna nodded without speaking; I knew she must be linked. Pat said, "Tom, you've got a girl named Anna Horoshen aboard: Is she around?"

("Yes. Why?")

"Say hello to her for me—1 knew her in Zurich. Her sister Becky is here." He chuckled and I felt better. "Good looking babes, aren't they? Maudie is jealous."

Babcock said to Frick, "Tell them to stand by. First synchronizing run, starting from their end."

"Tell them, Anna,"

She nodded. I wondered why they bothered with a second telepair when they could talk through myself and Pat. I soon found out: Pat and I were too busy.

Pat was sounding out ticks like a clock; I was told to repeat them... and every time I did another peak of light flashed on the display scope. Babcock watched it, then turned me around so that I couldn't see and taped a microphone to my voice box. "Again."

Pat said, "Stand by—" and started ticking again. I did my best to tick right with him but it was the silliest performance possible. I heard Babcock say quietly, "That cut out the feedback and the speed-of-sound lag. I wish there were some way to measure the synaptic rate arose closely."

Frick said, "Have you talked to Dev about it?"

I went on ticking.

"A reverse run now, young lady," Babcock said, and slipped headphones on me. I immediately heard a ticking like the ticks Pat had been sending. "That's a spectral metronome you're listening to, young fellow, timed by monochrome light. It was synchronized with the one your brother is using before we left Earth. Now start ticking at him,"

So I did. It had a hypnotic quality; it was easier to get into step and tick with it than it was to get out of step. It was impossible to ignore it. I began to get sleepy but I kept on ticking; I couldn't stop.

"End of run," Babcock announced. The ticking stopped and I rubbed my ears.

"Dr. Babcock?"

" "Huh?"

"How can you tell one tick from another?"

"Eh? You can't. But O'Toole can, he's got it all down on film. Same at the other end. Don't worry about it; just try to stay in time."

This silliness continued for more than an hour, sometimes with Pat sending, sometimes myself. At last O'Toole looked up and said, "Fatigue factor is cooking our goose, Dec. The second differences are running all over the lot."

"Okay, that's all," Babcock announced. He turned to me.

"You can thank your brother for me and sign off."

Commander Frick and Anna left. I hung around. Presently Dr. Babcock looked up from his desk and said, "You can go, bub. Thanks."

"Uh, Dr. Babcock?"

"Huh? Speak up."

"Would you mind telling me what this is all about?"

He looked surprised, then said, "Sorry. I'm not used to using people instead of instruments; I forget. Okay, sit down. This is why you m-r people were brought along: for research into the nature of time."

I stared. "Sir? I thought we were along to report back on the planets we expect to find."

"Oh, that—Well, I suppose so, but this is much more important. There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time—just shoot every other one."

A Mr. O'Toole said, without looking up, "The thing I like about you, Chief, is your big warm heart."

"Quiet in the gallery, please. Now today, son, we have been trying to find out what time it is."

I must have looked as puzzled as I felt for he went on, "Oh, we know what time it is... but too many different ways. See that?" He pointed at the display scope, still tirelessly making a peak every second. "That's the Greenwich time tick, pulled in by radio and corrected for relative speed and change of speed. Then there is the time you were hearing over the earphones; that is the time the ship runs by. Then there is the time you were getting from your brother and passing to us. We're trying to compare them all, but the trouble is that we have to have people in the circuit and, while a tenth of a second is a short time for the human nervous system, a microsecond is a measurably long time in physics. Any radar system splits up a microsecond as easily as you slice a pound of butter. So we use a lot of runs to try to even out our ignorance."

"Yes, but what do you expect to find out?"

"If I 'expected," I wouldn't be doing it. But you might say that we are trying to find out what the word "simultaneous" means."

Mr. O'Toole looked up from the console. "If it means anything," he amended.

Dr. Babcock glanced at him. "You still here? "If it means anything." Son, ever since the great Doctor Einstein, 'simultaneous' and 'simultaneity' have been dirty words to physicists. We chucked the very concept, denied that it had meaning, and built up a glorious structure of theoretical physics without it. Then you mind readers came along and kicked it over. Oh, don't look guilty; every house needs a housecleaning now and then. If you folks had done your carnival stunt at just the speed of light, we would have assigned you a place in the files and forgotten you. But you rudely insisted on doing it at something enormously greater than the speed of light, which made you as welcome as a pig at a wedding, you've split us physicists into two schools, those who want to class you as a purely psychological phenomenon and no business of physics—these are the 'close your eyes and it will go away' boys—and a second school which realizes that since measurements can be made of whatever this is you do, it is therefore the business of physics to measure and include it... since physics is, above all, the trade of measuring things and assigning definite numerical values to them."

O'Toole said, "Don't wax philosophical, Chief."

"You get back to your numbers, O'Toole; you have no soul These laddies want to measure how fast you do it. They don't care how fast—they've already recovered from the blow that you do it faster than light—but they want to know exactly how fast. They can't accept the idea that you do it 'instantaneously,' for that would require them to go to a different church entirely. They want to assign a definite speed of propagation, such-and-such number of times faster than the speed of light. Then they can modify their old equations and go right on happily doing business at the old stand."

"They will," agreed O'Toole.

"Then there is a third school of thought, the right one....y own."

O'Toole, without looking up, made a rude noise.

"Is that your asthma coming back?" Babcock said anxiously. "By the way, you got any results?"

"They're still doing it in nothing flat. Measured time negative as often as positive and never greater than inherent observational error."

"You see, son? That's the correct school. Measure what happens and let the chips fly where they may."

"Hear hear!"

"Quiet, you renegade Irishman. Besides that, you m-r's give us our first real chance to check another matter. Are you familiar with the relativity transformations?"

"You mean the Einstein equations?

"Surely. You know the one for time?"

I thought hard Pat and I had taken first-year physics our freshman year; it had been quite a while. I picked up a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought it was:

"That's it," agreed Dr. Babcock. "At a relative velocity of 'v' time interval at first frame of reference equals time interval at second frame of reference multiplied by the square root of one minus the square of the relative velocity divided by the square of the speed of light. That's just the special case, of course, for constant speeds; it is more complicated for acceleration. But there has been much disagreement as to what the time equations meant, or if they meant anything."

I blurted out, "Huh? But I thought the Einstein theory had been proved?" It suddenly occurred to me that, if the relativity equations were wrong, we were going to be away a mighty long time—Tau Ceti, our first stop, was eleven light-years from the Sun... and that was just our first one; the others were a lot farther.

But everybody said that once we got up near the speed of light the months would breeze past like days. The equations said so.

"Attend me. How do you prove that there are eggs in a bird's nest? Don't strain your gray matter: go climb the tree and find out There is no other way. Now we are climbing the tree."

"Fine!" said O'Toole. "Go climb a tree."

"Noisy in here. One school of thought maintained that the equations simply meant that a clock would read differently if you could read it from a passing star... which you can't... but that there was no real stretching or shrinking of time-whatever 'real' means. Another school pointed to the companion equations for length and mass, maintaining that the famous Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the length transformation was 'real' and pointing out that the increase of mass was regularly computed and used for particle-accelerator ballistics and elsewhere in nuclear physics—for example, in the torch that pushes this ship. So, they reasoned, the change in time rates must be real, because the corollary equations worked in practice. But nobody knew. You have to climb the tree and look."

"When will we know?" I was still worrying. Staying several years, Einstein time, in the ship I had counted on. Getting killed in the course of it, the way Uncle Steve said we probably would, I refused to worry about. But dying of old age in the Elsie was not what I had counted on. It was a grim thought, a life sentence shut up inside these steel walls.

"When? Why, we know right now."

"You do? What's the answer?"

"Don't hurry me, son. We've been gone a couple of weeks, at a boost of 124% of one gee; we're up to about 9,000 miles per second now. We still haven't come far—call it seven and a half light-hours or about 5,450,000,000 miles. It will be the better part of a year before we are crowding the speed of light. Nevertheless we have reached a sizable percentage of that speed, about five per cent; that's enough to show. Easy to measure, with the aid of you mind readers."

"Well, sir? Is it a real time difference? Or is it just relative?"

"You're using the wrong words. But it's 'real,' so far as the word means anything. The ratio right now is about 99.9%."

"To put it exactly," added Mr. O'Toole, "Bartlett's slippage—that's a technical term I just invented-his 'slippage' in time rate from that of his twin has now reached twelve parts in ten thousand."

"So you would make me a liar for one fiftieth of one per cent?" Babcock complained. "O'Toole, why did I let you come along?"

"So you would have some one to work your arithmetic," his assistant answered smugly.

Pat told me he did not want me around when they operated, but I came anyway. I locked myself in my room so nobody could disturb me and stuck with him. He didn't really object; whenever I spoke he answered and the it got to the deadline the more he talked… a cheerful babble about nothing and everything. It did not fool me.

When they wheeled him into surgery, he said, "Tom, you should see my anesthetist. Pretty as a sunny day and just lap size."

("Isn't her face covered with a mask?")

"Well, not completely. I can see her pretty blue eyes. 1 think I'll ask her what she's doing tonight."

("Maudie won't like that.")

"You keep Maudie out of this; a sick man is entitled to privileges. Wait a sec, I'll ask her."

("What did she say?")

"She said, "Nothing much," and that I would be doing the same for a few days. But I'll get her phone number."

("Two gets you five she won't give it to you.")

"Well, I can try... uh uh! Too late, they're starting in... Tom, you wouldn't believe this needle; it's the size of an air hose. She says she wants me to count. Okay, anything for a laugh… one... two… three..."

Pat got up to seven and I counted with him. All the way through I kept winding up tighter and tighter to unbearable tension and fear. I knew now what he apparently had been sure of all along, that he was not coming out of it. At the count of seven he lost track but his mind did not go silent. Maybe those around the operating table thought they had him unconscious but I knew better; he was trapped inside and screaming to get out.

I called to him and he called back but we couldn't find each other. Then I was as trapped and lost and confused as he was and we groped around in the dark and the cold and the aloneness of the place where you die.

Then I felt the knife whittling at my back and I screamed.

The next thing I remember is a couple of faces floating over me. Somebody said, "I think he's coming around, Doctor." The voice did not belong to anyone; it was a long way off.

Then there was just one face and it said, "Feeling better?"

"I guess so. What happened?"

"Drink this. Here, I'll hold up your head."

When I woke up again I felt fairly wide awake and could see that I was in the ship's infirmary. Dr. Devereaux was there, looking at me. "You decided to come out of it, young fellow?"

"Out of what, Doctor? What happened?"

"I don't know precisely, but you gave a perfect clinical picture of a patient terminating in surgical shock. By the time we broke the lock on your door, you were far gone-you gave us a bad time. Can you tell me about it?"

I tried to think, then I remembered. Pat! I called him in my mind. ("Pat! Where are you, boy?")

He didn't answer. I tried again and he still didn't answer, so I knew. I sat up and managed to choke out, "My brother ... he died!"

Dr. Devereaux said, "Wups! Take it easy. Lie down. He's not dead... unless he died in the last ten minutes, which I doubt."

"But I can't reach him! How do you know? I can't reach him, I tell you!"

"Come down off the ceiling. Because I've been checking on him all morning via the m-r's on watch. He's resting easily under an eighth grain of hypnal, which is why you can't raise him. I may be stupid, son—I was stupid, not to warn you to stay out of it—but I've been tinkering with the human mind long enough to figure out approximately what happened to you, given the circumstances. My only excuse is that I have never encountered such circumstances before."

I quieted a little. It made sense that I couldn't wake Pat if they had him under drugs. Under Dr. Devereaux's questions I managed to tell him more or less what had happened—not perfectly, because you can't really tell someone else what goes on inside your head. "Uh, was the operation successful, Doctor?"

"The patient came through in good shape. We'll talk about it later. Now turn over."

"Huh?"

"Turn over. I want to take a look at your back."

He looked at it, then called two of his staff to see it. Presently he touched me. "Does that hurt?"

"Ouch! Uh, yes, it's pretty tender. What's wrong with my back, Doctor?"

"Nothing, really. But you've got two perfect stigmata, just matching the incisions for Macdougal's operation... which is the technique they used on your brother."

"Uh, what does that mean?"

"It means that the human mind is complicated and we don't know much about it. Now roll over and go to sleep. I'm going to keep you in bed a couple of days."

I didn't intend to go to sleep but I did. I was awakened by Pat calling me. "Hey, Tom! Where are you? Snap out of it."

("I'm right here. What's the matter?")

"Tom... I've got my legs back!"

I answered, ("Yeah, I know,") and went back to sleep.