Clifford D. Simak

PARTY LINE

I

Einstein did not come in. That was unusual. Very seldom was Einstein late or absent. Usually he was waiting, ready to take up again the patient teaching that had been going on for months. Jay Martin tried again.

— Einstein. Einstein. Are you there? Einstein was not there.

The console in front of Martin hummed and the sensor lights were flickering. The cubicle was quiet, an engineered quietness, insulated against all distraction. Martin reached up and adjusted the helmet more firmly on his head.

— Einstein. Einstein. Where are you?

A faint sense of beginning panic flicked across Martin's mind. Had Einstein finally given it all up as a bad job? Had he (or she, or it, or them?) simply slipped away, dropping him, finally despairing of making so ignorant a student understand what he had to say?

Something out there stirred, a thin whistle of distant emptiness. Strange, thought Martin, how it always came that way-the haunting sense of distant emptiness. When there was, in fact, no distance nor no emptiness involved. The carrier waves were immune to any of the limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instantaneous, no lag, as if distance, matter, time did not exist.

— Einstein? he asked, convinced that it wasn't Einstein. It didn't feel like Einstein, although he would have been hard pressed if he had been called upon to tell how Einstein felt.

The thin whistle came again.

— Yes, said Martin, I'm here. Who are you?

And the voice (the thought? the pulse? the intelligence?) spoke.

— The turning point, it said.

— Unclear, said Martin. What turning point?

— The universe. The universe has reached its turning point. Universal death has started. The universe has reached its farthest point. It now is running down. Entropy has been accomplished.

— That, said Martin, is a strange way to say it.

— The universe always strove toward entropy.

— Not here, said Martin. No entropy here. The stars still burn.

— At the edge. The outer fringe. The universe at the edge has reached the point of entropy. Heat death. No more energy. And now is falling back. It is retreating. The distance whistled. The emptiness keened.

— You are at the edge?

— Near the rim. That is how we know. Our measurement…

The distance howled, drowning out the words.

— How long? asked Martin. How long till the end?

— Equal to the time since the beginning. Our calculations -

— Fifteen billion years, said Martin.

— We do not grasp your measurement.

— Never mind, said Martin. It makes no difference. I should not have said it.

— The pity of it! The irony!

— What pity? What irony?

— We have tried so long. Everyone has tried so long. To understand the universe and now we have no time.

— We have lots of time. Another fifteen billion years.

— You may have. We haven't. We're too close to the rim. We are in the dying zone.

A cry for help, thought Martin. The moaning of self pity. And was shaken. For there'd never been a cry for help before.

The other caught his thought.

— No cry for help, it said. There is no help. This is warning only.

The pulse, the thought cut off. Distance and emptiness whistled for a moment and then it, too, cut off.

Martin sat huddled in his cubicle, the weight of all that distance, all that emptiness crashing down upon him.

II

The day began badly for Paul Thomas.

The desk communicator chirped at him.

'Yes,' he said.

His secretary's voice said, 'Mr. Russell is here to see you.'

Thomas grimaced. 'Show him in,' he said.

Russell was prissy and precise. He came into the office and sat down in a chair across the desk from Thomas.

'What can I do for R&D this morning?' Thomas asked, ignoring all conversational preliminaries.

Russell was a man who was impatient with social amenities.

'A lot more than you're doing,' Russell said. 'Goddammit, Paul, I know that you are hip-deep in data.

It's piling up on you. We haven't had a thing from you in the last six months. I know the rules, of course, but aren't you giving them too strict an interpretation?'

'What are you interested in?'

'The faster-than-light business for one thing. I happen to know that Martin…'

'Martin still is working on it.'

'He must have something. Besides being a good telepath, he also happens to be a top-notch astrophysicist.'

'That's true,' said Thomas. 'We don't often get a man like him. Mostly, it's a raw farm boy or some girl who is clerking in the five-and-dime. We're running recruiting programs all the time, but…'

'You're trying to throw me off the track, Paul. I've got men aching to get started on this FTL thing.

We know you're getting something.'

The funny thing about it is that we aren't.'

'Martin's been on it for months.'

'Yeah, for months. And not understanding anything he's getting. Both he and I are beginning to believe we may have the wrong man on it.'

'The wrong man on it? An astrophysicist?'

'Ben, it may not be physics at all.'

'But he has equations.'

'Equations, yes. But they make no sense. Equations aren't the magic thing all by themselves that people think they are. They have to make some sense and these make no sense. Jay is beginning to think they're something entirely outside the field of physics.'

'Outside the field of physics? What else could they be?'

'That's the question, Ben. You and I have been over this, again and again. You don't seem to understand. Or refuse to understand. Or are too pig-headed to allow yourself to understand. We aren't dealing with humans out there. I understand that and my people understand it. But you refuse to accept it.

You think of those other people out there among the stars as simply funny-looking humans. I don't know, no one knows, what they really are. But we know they aren't humans, not even funny-looking humans.

We wear ourselves out at times trying to work out what they are. Not because of any great curiosity on our part, but because we could work with them better if we knew. And we have no idea. You hear me?

No idea whatsoever. Hal Rawlins is talking to someone he is convinced is a robot-a funny-looking robot, of course-but he can't even be sure of that. No one can be sure of anything at all. The point is that we don't really have to be. They accept us, we accept them. They are patient with us and we with them. They may be more patient than we are, for they know we are newcomers, new subscribers on this party line we share. None of them think like us, none of us think like them. We try to adapt ourselves to their way of thinking, they try to adapt themselves to our way of thinking. All we know for sure is that they are intelligences, all they know is that we are some outrageous kind of intelligent life form. We are, all of us, a brotherhood of intelligences, getting along the best we can, talking, gossiping, teaching, learning, trading information, laying out ideas.'

This is the kind of crap you're always talking,' said Russell, wrathfully. 'I don't give a damn about all your philosophizing. What I want is something to work on. The deal is that when you have something that is promising, you pass it on to us.'

'But the judgment is mine,' said Thomas, 'and rightly so. In some of the stuff we get here, there could be certain implications…'

'Implications, hell!'

'What are you doing with what we have given you? We gave you the data on artificial molecules.

What have you done on that?'

'We're working on it.'

'Work harder, then. Quit your bellyaching and show some results on that one. You and I both know what it would mean. With it, we could built to order any material, put together any kind of structure we might wish. Could build the kind of world we want, to order. The materials we want to our own specifications-food, metal, fabrics, you name it.'

'Development,' Russell said, defensively, 'takes time. Keep your shirt on.'

'We gave you the data on cell replacement. That would defeat disease and old age. Carried to its ultimate degree, an immortal world-if we wanted an immortal world, and could control it and afford it.

What are you doing with that?'

'We're working on that one, too. All these things take time.'

'Mary Kay thinks she has found what may be an ideal religion. She thinks that she may even have found God. At times, she says, she feels she's face to face with God. How about that one? We'll hand it over to you anytime you say.'

'You keep that one. What we want is FTL.'

'You can't have FTL. Not until we know more. As you say, we have mountains of data on it…'

'Give me that data. Let my boys get to work on it.'

'Not yet. Not until we have a better feel of it. To tell you the truth, Ben, there's something scary about it.'

'What do you mean, scary?'

'Something wrong. Something not quite right. You have to trust our judgment.'

'Look, Paul, we've gone out to Centauri. Crawled out there. Took years to get there, years to get back. And nothing there. Not a goddamn thing. Just those three suns. We might just as well not have gone. That killed star travel. The public wouldn't stand still for another one like that. We have to have FTL, or we'll never go to the stars. Now we know it can be done. You guys have it at your fingertips and you won't let us in on it.'

'As soon as we have something even remotely possible, we'll hand it over to you.'

'Couldn't we just have a look at it? If it's as bad, as screwed up as you say it is, we'll hand it back.'

Thomas shook his head. 'Not a chance,' he said.

III

There were no words, although there was the sense of unspoken words. No music, but the sense of music. No landscape,but a feel of tall slender trees, graceful in the wind; of park-like lawns surrounding stately houses; of a running brook glistening in an unseen sun, babbling over stones; of a lake with whitecaps racing in to shore. No actuality, but a compounded belief that a shattering actuality lurked just around the corner, waiting to burst out.

Mary Kay sank into it and let all of it enfold her. This time, she had thought, this time, please God, there will be something that I can understand. But once she had sunk into it, she no longer prayed there would be something to take back. This, in itself, was quite enough. This was all that anyone might want, or need. What was here filled the soul and wiped out the mind.

A stray, human thought intruded, but only momentarily:

Someday I'll have it; someday there will be data. Someday there'll be an inkling.

And then the thought snapped off. For there was no need to know. Being here was all.

She was no longer human. She was not anything at all. She simply existed. She was stripped of everything but the inner core of consciousness. She had no body and no mind. The intellectuality took in only the wonder and the breath-catching happiness, the innocent sensuality, the mindless well-being and the Tightness of it all-the Tightness of being here. Wherever here might be. She did not even wonder at the here. She simply did not care.

Duty and purpose struggled feebly with the carelessness.

— But? she cried, why show me only? Why not tell me, too? I'm an intelligence. I want to know. I have the right to know.

— Sh-h-h-h-h

A shushing, a lullaby. A compassion. A tenderness.

Then the holiness.

She surrendered herself wholly to the holiness.

IV

They looked to him, thought Thomas. That was the hell of it; they all looked to him for guidance, direction and comfort and he had none of these to give. They were out there on the firing line and he was sitting safely back and it would seem there should be something he could offer. But try as he might, he knew that he had nothing. Each of them a sensitive, for if they were not sensitives, they'd not be telepaths.

It took raw courage, he thought, a special kind of courage, to reach out into the cosmos, out into that place where time and space pressed close even if time and space were cancelled out. Even knowing this, knowing that space-time had been brushed aside, the consciousness of it must be always there, the fear of it always there, the fear of being snared and left and lost within the deepest gulf of it. A special courage to face up to another mind that might be only a few light-years distant or millions of light-years distant, and the alienness that the light-years conjured up and magnified. And, worst of all, the never-forgotten realization that one was a newcomer in this community of intelligence, a novice, a hick, the bottom of the totem pole. A tendency to be retiring and apologetic, even when there was no reason to be apologetic. A kindergartener in a school where high school seniors and college students reared to godlike heights.

Thomas rose from his desk and walked across the room to stand before a window. The desert lay outside, aloof and noncaring, a humped plain of sand and rock, sterile and hostile. Better judgment would have been to place this installation, he thought, in a kinder land where there would be friendly trees and purling streams and forest paths to walk in. But the desert, in the administrative mind, served a better purpose. Its long distances, its discomforts and its loneliness discouraged the curious who otherwise might come flocking in to stare. No secret project, in the usual sense, but one about which not too much was said, about which as little as possible was said in the unspoken but devout hope that in time it might disappear from the public mind.

A spooky thing-too spooky to be thrown open. A shuddery business, this reaching out to other minds across the universe. Not something which the public comfortably could sleep with. And what was the matter with the public? Thomas asked himself. Did they not realize that the project was mankind's greatest hope? For thousands of years, mankind had staggered along on its own, coddling its prejudices, making its mistakes, then multiplying rather than correcting them, slipping into a too-human groove that had brought, in its turn, untold misery and injustice. New blood was needed, a new mentality, and the one place to get it was from those cultures far among the stars. A cross-pollination process that could improve the texture and might revise the purpose of mankind's stumbling destiny.

The box on his desk chirped at him. He strode from the window and snapped down the toggle.

'What is it, Evelyn?'

'Senator Brown is on the phone.'

'Thank you,' said Thomas.

There was no one he wanted to talk with less than the senator.

He leaned back in his chair and pressed the button to activate the visor. The visor lighted to reveal the hatchet-face of the senator-ascetic, thin, wrinkled, but with a tightness to the wrinkles.

'Senator,' he said, 'how kind of you to call.'

'I thought to pass the time of day,' said the senator. 'It has been a long time since we have had a chat.'

'Yes, it has.'

'As you may know,' said the senator, 'the budget for your project is coming up before committee in the next few weeks. I can get nothing out of these jackasses who are your superiors in Washington. They talk about knowledge being the most precious commodity. They say no market value can be placed upon it. I wonder if you would concur.'

'I think I would,' said Thomas, 'although, if that is all they say, it's a fairly general statement. There is so much spinoff. I suppose they told you that.'

They did,' said the senator. 'They dwelt most lovingly upon it.'

'Then what is it you want of me?'

'Realism. Some old-fashioned realism. A hard-headed assessment.'

'I'm fairly close to the operation. It's hard for me to step back those few necessary paces to take a good objective look at it.'

'Well, do the best you can. This is off-the-record. Just between the two of us. If necessary, we'll have you in to testify. To start with, maybe, how good are the chances for FTL?'

'We are working on it, senator. I have a feeling we still have a long way to go. We're beginning to have a feeling that it may not be a simple matter of physical laws.'

'What could it be, then?'

'Emphasizing the fact that we do not really know, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that it might be something we have never heard of. A procedure, or a technique, maybe even a state of mind, that is outside all human experience.'

'Now you're going mystic on me. I don't like this mystic stuff.'

*'In no way mystic, senator. Just a willingness to admit mankind's limitations. It stands to reason that one race on one planet is not going to come up with everything there is.'

'Have you anything to back that up?'

'Senator, I think I have. For the last several months, one of our operators has been trying to explain to his opposite number some of the fundamentals of our economic system. It has been and still is a trying task. Even the simplest fundamentals-things like buying and selling, supply and demand-have been hard to put across. Those folks out there, whoever they are, have never even thought of our brand of economics, if, in fact, any kind of economics. What makes it even harder is that they appear to stand in absolute horror of some of the things we tell them. As if the very ideas were obscene.'

'Why bother with them, then?'

'Because they still maintain an interest. Perhaps the ideas are so horrible that they have a morbid fascination for them. As long as they maintain that interest, we'll keep on working with them.'

'Our idea in starting this project was to help ourselves, not a lot of other folks.'

'It's a two-way street,' said Thomas. They help us, we help them. They teach us, we teach them. It's a free interchange of information. And we're not being as altruistic as you think. It is our hope that as we go along with this economic business, we'll pick up some hints.'

'What do you mean, some hints?'

'Perhaps some indications of how we may be able to revise or modify our economic system.'

'Thomas, we have spent five or six thousand years or more in working out that economic system.'

'Which doesn't mean, senator, that it is letter perfect. We made mistakes along the way.'

The senator grunted. This, I take it, will be another long-term project?'

'All of our work, or the most of it, is long-term. Most of what we get is not readily or easily adapted to our use.'

'I don't like the sound of it,' growled the senator. 'I don't much like anything I hear. I asked you for specifics.'

'I've given you specifics. I could spend the rest of the day giving you specifics.'

'You've been at this business for twenty-five years?'

'On a job like this, twenty-five years is a short time.'

'You tell me you're getting nowhere on FTL. You're piddling away your time teaching an economics course to some stupid jerks who are having a hard time knowing what you are talking about.'

'We do what we can,' said Thomas.

'It's not enough,' said the senator. The people are getting tired of seeing their taxes go into the project. They were never very much for it to start with. They were afraid of it. You could slip, you know, and give away our location.'

'No one has ever asked for our location.'

They might have ways of getting it, anyhow.'

'Senator, that's an old bugaboo that should long ago have been laid to rest. No one is going to attack us. No one is going to invade us. By and large, these are intelligent, and I would suspect, honorable gentlemen with whom we're dealing. Even if they're not, what we have here would not be worth their time and effort. What we are dealing in is information. They want it from us, we want it from them. It's worth more than any other commodity that any of us may have.'

'Now we're back to that again.'

'But, dammit, senator, that's what it's all about.'

'I hope you're not letting us be taken in by some sort of slicker out there.'

That's a chance we have to take, but I doubt it very much. As director of this branch of the project, I've had the opportunity…'

The senator cut him off. I'll talk with you some other time.'

'Any time,' said Thomas, as affably as he was able. I'll look forward to it.'

V

They had gathered in the lounge, as was their daily custom, for a round of drinks before dinner.

Jay Martin was telling about what had happened earlier in the day.

'It shook me,' he said. 'Here was this voice, from far away…'

'How did you know it was far away?' asked Thomas. 'Before they told you, that is.'

'I can tell,' said Martin. 'You get so you can tell. There is a certain smell to distance.'

He bent over quickly, reaching for a handkerchief, barely getting it up in time to muffle the explosive sneeze. Straightening, he mopped his face, wiped his streaming eyes.

'Your allergy again.' said Mary Kay.

Tm sorry,' he said. 'How in hell can a man pick up pollen out here in this desert? Nothing but sage and cactus.'

'Maybe it's not pollen,' said Mary Kay. 'It could be mold. Or dandruff. Has anyone here got dandruff?'

'You can't be allergic to human dandruff. It has to be cat dandruff,' said Jennie Sherman.

'We haven't any cats here,' said Mary Kay, 'so it couldn't be cat dandruff. Are you sure about human dandruff, Jennie?'

Tm sure,' said Jennie. 'I read it somewhere.'

'Ever see a physician about it?' asked Thomas.

Martin shook his head, still mopping at his eyes.

'You should,' said Thomas. 'You could be given allergy tests. A battery of tests until they find what you're allergic to.'

'Go ahead and tell us more,' said Richard Garner, 'about this guy who said the world was about to end.'

'Not the world,' said Martin. 'The universe. He was just spreading the word. In a hurry to spread the word. As if they'd just found out. Like Chicken Little, yelling that the sky was falling. Talking for just a minute, then dropping out. I suppose going on to someone else. Trying to catch everyone he could.

Sounded a little frantic. As if there was little time.'

'Maybe it was a joke,' suggested Jennie.

'I don't think so. It didn't sound like a joke. I don't think any of the people out there joke. If so, I've never heard of it. Maybe we're the only ones who have a sense of humor. Anyone here ever hear anything that sounded like a joke?'

They shook their heads.

The rest of you are halfway laughing at it,' said Mary Kay. 'I don't think it's funny at all. Here are these people out on the rim, trying all these years, for no one knows how many centuries, to understand the universe, then up pops someone and tells them the universe has run down and they, out at the edge of it, will be the first to go. Maybe they were very close to understanding. Maybe they needed only a few more years and now they haven't got the years.'

'Would that be the way it would happen?' asked Hal Rawlins. 'Jay, you're the physicist. You'd be the one to know.'

'I can't be certain, Hal. We don't know enough about the structure of the universe. There might be certain conditions that we are not aware of. Entropy presupposes a spreading out, so that the total energy of a thermodynamic system is so evenly distributed that there is no energy available for work.

That's not the case here, of course. Out at the rim of the universe, maybe. The energy and matter out there would be old, have had more time. Or would it? God, I don't know. I'm talking about something no one knows about.'

'But you finally contacted Einstein,' said Thomas.

'Yes, he came in a little later.'

'Anything?'

'No, the same as ever. We both got tired after a time, I guess. And talked about something else.'

'Is that the way it often goes?'

'Every now and then. Today we talked about houses. Or I think it was houses. Near as I can make out, they live in some sort of bubble. Got the impression of huge webs with bubbles scattered through them. Do you suppose Einstein could be some sort of spider?'

'Could be,' said Thomas.

'What beats the hell out of me,' said Martin, 'is why Einstein sticks with me. He beats his brains out trying to tell me about FTL and I beat my brains out trying to understand what he's telling me and never getting it. I swear I'm not a great deal closer than I was to start with, but he doesn't give up on me. He just keeps boring in. What I can't figure is what he's getting out of it.'

'Every once in a while I get the funny feeling,' said Garner, 'that maybe these aren't different people who are talking to us. Not a lot of different cultures, but a lot of different individuals, maybe different specialists, from the same society.'

'I doubt that's true,' said Jennie Sherman. 'Mine has a personality. A real personality. And different, very different, from the personalities the rest of you talk about. This one of mine is obsessed with death. .'

'What a doleful subject,' said Rawlins. 'But I guess you've told us about him before. Talking about death all this time…'

'It was depressing to start with,' said Jennie, 'but it's not any more. He's made a philosophy out of it.

At times, he makes death sound almost beautiful.'

'A decadent race,' said Garner.

'It's not that at all. I thought so at first. But he's so joyful about it, so happy.'

'Death, Jennie, is not a joyful or happy subject,' said Thomas. 'We've talked about this, you and I.

Maybe you should put an end to it. Pick up someone else.'

'I will if you say so, Paul. But I have a feeling that something will come out of it. Some new kind of understanding, a new philosophy, a new principle. You haven't looked at the data, have you?'

Thomas shook his head.

'I can't tell why I feel this way,' she said. 'But deep down, at the bottom of me, I do.'

'For the moment,' said Thomas, 'that's good enough for me.'

Rawlins said, 'Jay spoke of something that bugs me, too. What are they getting out of it? What are any of them getting out of it? We're giving them nothing.'

'That's your guilt talking,' said Thomas. 'Perhaps it's something all of us are feeling. We must get rid of it. Wipe it from our minds. We feel intensely that we are beginners, that we're the new kid in the neighborhood. We are takers, not givers, although that's not entirely true. Dick has spent weeks trying to explain economics to his people.'

Garner made a wry face. 'Trying is all I do. I try to reduce the basics to the lowest common denominator. Thoughts of one syllable. Each syllable said slowly. Printed in big type. And they don't seem to get it. As if the very idea of economics was completely alien to them. As if hearing it were somehow distasteful. How in the world could a civilization develop and have any continuity without an economic system? I can't envision it. With us, economics is our life blood. We'd be nothing without an economic system. We'd be in chaos.'

'Maybe that's what they're in,' said Rawlins. 'Maybe chaos is a way of life for them. No rules, no regulations, nothing. Although even as I say it, that doesn't sound quite right. Such a situation would be beyond our understanding, as repugnant to us as our economics seem to be to them.'

'We all have our blind spots,' said Thomas. 'We're beginning to find that out.'

'It would help though, it would help a lot,' said Martin, 'if we could feel we'd done something for one or two of them. It would give us a feeling of status, of having paid our dues.'

'We're new at it,' said Thomas. The time will come. How are you getting along with your robot, Hal?'

'Damned if I know,' said Rawlins. 'I can't pin him down to anything. I can't get in a word. This robot, if it is a robot, if it's some sort of computer system-and for the life of me, I can't tell you why I think it is. But, anyhow, it is a non-stop talker. Information, most of it trivial, I suspect, just flows out of it. Never sticks to one thing. Talks about one thing, then goes chattering off to something entirely unrelated. As if it had a memory bank filled to the brim with data and trying, as rapidly as possible, to spew out all that information. When I pick up something that seems to have some promise to it, something that could be of more than usual interest, I try to break in to talk at greater length about it, to ask some questions. Most often I can't break in, occasionally there are times I can. But when I do this, he is impatient with me. He cuts off the discussion and goes back to his chatter. There are times when I get the impression that he's not talking to me alone, but to a lot of other people. I have the idea that when I am able to break in, he uses one circuit to talk with me directly while he goes on talking to all those others through other circuits.'

Thomas put his empty glass on the table beside him, rose to his feet. 'The others are starting in for dinner,' he said. 'Shall we join them.'

VI

Robert Allen, the project psychiatrist, rotated the brandy snifter between his palms.

'You sent word you wanted to see me, Paul. Has something come up?'

'I don't think so,' Thomas said. 'Not anything I can put a finger on. Maybe just a bad day, that's all.

Ben Russell was in to raise hell with me. Said we were holding back on him.'

'He's always saying that.'

'I know. He's probably catching heat himself. When he catches heat, he turns it back on me. A feedback mechanism. A defensive gesture. He was upset that we'd not passed FTL data on to him.'

'Have we got anything to pass?-'

'Just a lot of nothing. Some meaningless equations. I don't see how Jay stands up under it. He picked up that allergy of his again.'

'Tension,' said Allen. 'Frustration. That could bring it on.'

'Later in the day,' said Thomas, 'Brown phoned.'

The senator?'

'The senator. It was FTL again. He was all over me. The budget's coming up again.'

'Faster-than-light is something that the administrative mind can understand,' said Allen. 'Hardware.'

'Bob, I'm not too sure it's hardware. It could be something else. Jay's an astrophysicist. If it was plain physics, he would have it pegged.'

'Maybe there are many kinds of physics.'

'I don't think so. Physics should be basic. The same throughout the universe.'

'You can be sure of that?'

'No, I can't be sure of that. But my logic rejects…'

'Paul, you're over-reacting. If I were you, I'd disregard this sudden flurry over FTL. It's something that comes periodically and then dies down again.'

'I can't disregard it,' said Thomas. 'Not this time. Brown's out to get us. His power base is slipping and he needs a new issue. We would make a good issue. Here we are, here we've been for a quarter century, gobbling up tax money that could be used for something else. That's the kind of issue the people would accept. They definitely are not with us; they have a feeling that we were crammed down their throats. They were never with us. Not only do we cost a lot, but we pose threats. What if we gave away our location, so that some barbaric, bloodthirsty alien horde could come crashing in on us? What if we find out something that would upset the apple-cart, wrecking a lot of our time-honored, comfortable concepts?'

'You mean he'd destroy us just to get elected?'

'Bob, you don't know politics. I am sure he would. Even if he believed in us, he might. I have a feeling that he doesn't believe in us. If he destroyed us, he'd be a public hero. We have to do something, come up with something in the next few months or he'll have a go at us.'

'We have support,' said Allen. There are people in authority, in positions of power, who are committed to the project. Good people, reasonable people.'

'Good and reasonable people don't have too much chance when they come up against a demagogue.

The only way to beat Brown, if he decides to make us an issue, is to pile up some points we can make with the public.'

'How can I help you, Paul?'

'Honestly, I don't know. A psychiatrist as a political adviser? No, I guess not. I suppose I only wanted to unload on you.'

'Paul, you didn't ask me in to talk about FTL. That's an administrative matter. You can handle it. Nor about the politics of the project. You know I'm a child in politics. There is something else.'

Thomas frowned. 'It's hard to tell you. Hard to put into words. I'm beginning to sense something that disturbs me. Nothing concrete. Fuzzy, in fact. Tonight Jennie-you know Jennie?'

'Yes, the little car-hop we picked up a few years ago. Nice girl. Smart.'

Tonight Jennie was talking about her people. They talk about death, she said. I knew it, of course.

She'd been in a couple of times to talk with me about it. Depressed. Perhaps even frightened. After all, death can be a grisly subject. She had wanted to drop these people, try to pick up someone else. I urged her to hang in there a little longer. Never can tell what will happen, I told her. Tonight, when I suggested that she should drop it, she opposed me. Let me stay a while longer, she said, some worthwhile philosophy might develop out of it. I think there was something she wasn't telling me, something she is holding back.'

'Maybe the discussion has advanced beyond death,' said Allen. 'Maybe it's getting into what happens after death-if anything happens after death.'

Thomas looked in amazement at the psychiatrist. 'My thought, exactly. With one qualification. If nothing happens after death, she'd be more depressed than ever. Her interest must mean that these folks do believe something happens. They may even have proof of it. Not faith, not a religious conviction.

Jennie's a hard-headed little piece. She'd not buy simple faith. It would have to be more than that.'

'You could pull the data. Have a look at it.'

'No, I can't. Not yet. She'd know. I'd be snooping on her private project. My operators are fiercely jealous of what they are putting into their data banks. I have to give her time. She'll let me know when it's time to have a look.'

'We must always keep in mind,' said Allen, 'that more than words, more than thoughts and ideas, come through from the aliens. Other things are transmitted. Things the operators hear but that can't be put into the banks. Fears, hopes, perceptions, residual memories, philosophical positions, moral evaluations, hungers, sorrow…'

I know,' said Thomas, 'and none of it gets into the banks. It would be easier in one way if it did, perhaps more confusing in another.'

'Paul, I know how easy it must be for someone in your position to become overly concerned, overwhelmed with worry, perhaps, even at times doubtful of the wisdom of the project. But you must remember, we've been at it only a little more than twenty years. We've done well in that short space of time…'

The project,' said Thomas, 'really started about a hundred years ago. With that old gentleman who was convinced he was talking with the stars. What was his name? Do you recall it?'

'George White. The last years of his life must have been a nightmare. The government took him over, ran him through all sorts of tests. They never let him be. I suspect he might have been happier if everyone had continued not believing him. They pampered him of course. That might have, in some measure, made it up to him. We still pamper our telepaths. Giving them a luxurious residential compound, with country club overtones, and…'

They have it coming to them,' snapped Thomas. 'They are all we have. They're our one great hope.

Sure, we've made strides. Progress if you want to call it that. The world existing in a sort of loose confederation; wars a thing of the past. Colonies and industries in space. A start made on terraforming Mars and Venus. One largely abortive voyage to the nearest stars. But we have our problems. Despite expansion into space, our economy still is kicked all out of shape. We continually ride on the edge of economic disaster. Our disadvantaged are still stockpiled against that day, that probably will never come, when we will be able to do something for them. The development of synthetic molecules would give us a boost if R&D would get cracking on it instead of moaning about not having FTL. I have some hopes that Garner may get some feedback from the aliens he is trying to teach economics to, but nothing yet, maybe nothing ever. It's the only economics show we have going. I had hoped others might come up, but they haven't. The hell of it is that so much of what we have going is producing so little. Much of it is seemingly off on the wrong track. Yet you can't junk all this stuff and start grabbing out frantically for something else. Mary Kay, for example. She has found something that might be big, but she's so hooked on it that she can't look for answers. When she tries, there are no answers. No idea communications at all, apparently. Just this feeling of euphoria. Worthless as it stands, but we can't pass it by. We have to keep on trying. There may be something there that is worth waiting for.'

'I think the greatest problem lies in the kind of people who turn out to be the right kind of telepaths,'

said Allen. 'Jay is the only man trained in science that we have. The others are not equipped to handle some of the material they are getting. I still think we could try to give some of them training in certain fields.'

'We tried it,' said Thomas, 'and it didn't work. These are a special breed of people. Sensitives. They have to be handled with kid gloves or you destroy them. And under special kinds of strain. The strange thing about it, fragile as some of their personalities may be, they stand up to these special strains. Many ordinary people would crack if they knew they were in contact with an alien mind. A few of ours have, but not many. They have stood up under it. But they occasionally need support. It's my job to try to give it to them. They come to me with their fears, their doubts, their glory and elation. They cry on my shoulder, they scream at me…'

'The one thing that astounds me,' said Allen, 'is that they still maintain their relationships with non-telepaths. They are, as you have said, a very special breed. To them, it might seem, the rest of us would be little better than cloddish animals. Yet that does not seem to be the case. They've retained their humanity. It has been my observation, as well, that they don't get chummy with the aliens they are working with. Books. I guess that's it. They treat the aliens as books they'd take down off the shelf to read for information.'

'All of them except Jay. He has worked up a fairly easy relationship with this last one. Calls him Einstein. None of the others have names for their aliens.'

'Jay is a good man. Wasn't he the one who came up with the synthetic molecules?'

'That's right. He was one of the first successful operators. The first, if I remember rightly, who tolerated the brain implant. Others got the implant, but they had trouble with it. Some of them a lot of trouble. Of course, by the time Jay got his, there had been some improvement.'

'Paul, is the implant absolutely necessary?'

'The boys upstairs think it is. I don't know enough about it, technically that is, to be sure. First, you have to find the right kind of telepath-not just a high quality telepath, but the right kind. Then the implant is made, not to increase the range, as some people will tell you, but to re-enforce the natural ability. It also has something to do, quite a bit to do, with the storage of the information. Range, as such, probably is not really important. On the face of it, it shouldn't be, for the waves or pulses or whatever they are that enable telepaths to talk to one another are instantaneous. The time and distance factors are cancelled out entirely and the pulses are immune to the restrictions of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are a phenomenon entirely outside the spectrum.'

'Key, of course, to the entire project,' said Allen, 'lay in the development of the capability to record and store the information that is exchanged in the telepathic communication. A development of the earlier brain-waves studies.'

'You're right,' said Thomas. 'It would have been impossible to rely on the memories of the telepaths.

Many of them, most of them, in fact, have only a marginal understanding of what they are told; they are handling information that is beyond their comprehension. They have a general idea, probably, but they miss a lot of it. Jay is an exception, of course. And that makes it easier with him. But with the others, the ones who do not fully understand, we have a record of the communications in the memory bank.'

'We need more operators,' said Allen. 'We're barely touching all the sources out there. And we can't go skipping around a lot because if we did, we might be passing up some fairly solid material. We do our recruiting and we uncover a lot of incipient telepaths, of course, but very few of the kind we are looking for.'

'At no time,' said Thomas, 'are there ever too many of them to find.'

'We got off what we were talking about,' said Allen. 'Mary Kay and Jennie, wasn't it?'

'I guess it was. They're the question marks. Jay either will pin down the matter of FTL or he'll not be able to. Dick will keep on with the economics and will either get some worth-while feedback or he won't.

Those are the kinds of odds we have to play. Hal will go on talking with his alien computer and we eventually may get something out of it. One of these days, we'll jerk the memory banks on that one and see what we have. I'd guess there might be some nebulous ideas we could play around with. But Mary Kay and Jennie-Christ, they're into something that is beyond anything we ever bargained for. Mary Kay a simulation-or maybe even the actuality-of a heavenly existence, a sort of Paradise, and Jennie with overtones of an existence beyond the grave. These are the kinds of things that people have been yearning for since the world began. This is what made billions of people, over the ages, tolerate religions. It poses a problem-both of them pose problems.'

'If something came of either of them,' said Allen, 'what would we do with it?'

That's right. Yet, you can't go chicken on it. You can't just turn it off because you're afraid of it.'

'You're afraid of it, Paul?'

I guess I am. Not personally. Personally, like everyone else, I would like to know. But can you imagine what would happen if we dumped it on the world?'

'I think I can. A sweep of unrealistic euphoria. New cults rising and we have more cults than we can handle now. A disruptive, perhaps a destructive impact on society.'

'So what do we do? It's something we may have to face.'

'We play it by ear,' said Allen. 'We make a decision when we have to. As project manager, you can control what comes out of here. Which may make Ben Russell unhappy, but something like this business of Mary Kay and Jennie is precisely why the director was given that kind of authority.'

'Sit on it?' asked Thomas.

'That's right. Sit on it. Watch it. Keep close tabs on it. But don't fret about it. Not now at least.

Fretting time may be some distance down the road.'

'I don't know why I bothered you,' said Thomas. 'That's exactly what I intended all along.'

'You bothered me,' said Allen, 'because you wanted someone in to help you finish up that bottle.'

Thomas reached for the bottle. 'Let's be about it, then.'

VII

'If you had to invent a universe,' asked Mary Kay, 'if you really had to, I mean; if it was your job and you had to do it, what kind of universe would you invent?'

'A universe that went on and on,' said Martin. 'A universe with no beginning and no end. Hoyle's kind of universe.

Where there'd be the time and space for everything that possibly could happen, to happen.'

That entropy thing really got to you, didn't it. A voice out of the void saying it was all coming to an end.'

Martin crinkled his forehead. 'More now than it did to start with. Now that I've had time to think it over. Christ, think of it. We've been sitting here, us and all the people before us, thinking that there was no end, ever. Telling ourselves we had all the time there is. Not considering our own mortality, that is.

Thinking racially, not of ourselves alone. Not ourselves, but all the people who come after us. An expanding universe, we told ourselves. And maybe now it isn't. Maybe, right this minute, it is a contracting universe. Rushing back, all the old dead matter, all the played-out energy.'

'It has no real bearing on us,' said Mary Kay. 'No physical effect. We won't be caught in the crunch, not right away at least. Our agony is intellectual. It does violence to our concept of the universe. That's what hurts. That a thing so big, so beautiful-the only thing we really know-is coming to an end.'

'They could have been wrong,' he said. They might have miscalculated. Their observations might have been faulty. And it might not really be the end. There might still be another universe. Once everything retreated back as far as it could go, there might be another cosmic explosion and another universe.'

'But it wouldn't be the same,' she said. 'It would be a different universe. Not our universe. It would give rise to different kinds of life, new kinds of intellect. Or maybe no life or intellect at all. Just the matter and the energy. Stars burning for themselves. No one to see them and to wonder. That, Jay, is what has made our universe so wonderful. Little blobs of life that held the capacity to wonder.'

'Not only the wonder,' Jay told her, 'but the audacity to probe beyond the wonder. The grief in that warning was not that the universe was coming to an end, but that it was doing so before someone could find out what it was.'

'Jay, I've been wondering…'

'You're always wondering. What is it this time?'

'It's silly. All my wondering is silly. But, do you suppose that we can experience things in time, reach things in time as well as in space?'

I don't know. I've never thought of it.'

'You know this place I've found. So quiet. So wonderful. So happy and so holy. Have you any idea of what it might be?'

'Let's not get into that right now,' said Jay. 'You'll just upset yourself. Everyone else has left. Maybe we should be leaving, too.'

He looked around the empty lounge, made a motion to get up. She reached for his arm and held him there.

'I've been thinking about it,' she said. 'I've been wondering if this place of mine is what is left after everything is gone. When the universe is gone. The few good things left over, the worthwhile things left over. The things we have never valued enough. We or any of the others out there. The peace, the love, the holiness. These are the things, I think, that will survive.'

I don't know, Mary. God, how could I know.'

'I hope it is,' she said. I so hope it is. I have a feeling that it is. I go so much on feeling. In the place I found, you have to depend on what you feel. There is nothing else. Just the feeling. Do you ever depend on feeling, Jay?'

'No, I don't,' he told her. He got to his feet, put out a hand to help her up. 'Do you know,' he said,

'that you are beautiful and crazy.'

Suddenly he bent double getting the handkerchief to his face barely in time to catch the sneeze.

'Poor Jay,' she said. 'You still have your allergy.'

VIII

Martin settled himself before the console, shoved the helmet more comfortably into place. The helmet was a nuisance, but he had to wear it, for it was the mechanism that fed the information into the data banks.

— Einstein, are you there? he asked.

— I am here, said Einstein, ready to begin. You have your allergy again. Are you ingesting chemicals?

— Yes. And they don't help a lot.

— We sorrow for you greatly.

— I thank you very much, said Martin.

— When last we quit, we were discussing…

— A moment, Einstein. I have a question. -Ask.

— It has nothing to do with what we were discussing. It's a question I long have wanted to ask and never had the courage.

— Ask.

— For a long time, we have been talking about faster-than-light and I am not understanding. You've been patient with me. You overlook my stupidity. Still willing to keep on, when at times it must seem hopeless to you. I want to ask you why. Why are you willing to keep on?

— Simple, Einstein said. You help us. We help you.

— But I haven't helped you.

— Yes, you have. You recall occasion first we took notice of your allergy?

— That was a long time ago.

— We asked you can you do anything to help it. And you say a term at the time we do not know.

— Medicine?

— That was it. We asked you, medicine? And you explain. Chemicals you say. Chemicals we know.

— Yes, I guess I did say that.

— Medicine-chemicals entirely new to us. Never heard of them. Never thought of them.

— You mean you had no idea of medicine?

— Correct. Affirmative. Had no idea, ever.

— But, you never asked me about it. I would have been willing to tell you.

— We did ask. Now and then we asked. Very briefly, very carefully. So you would not know.

— Why? Why briefly? Why carefully?

— So great a thing. Too big to share with others. Now I see we misjudge you. I am very sorry.

— You should be, Martin said. I thought you were my friend.

— Friend, of course, but even among friends…

— You were willing to tell of faster-than-light.

— No great thing. Many others have it. Very simple, once you catch it.

— I'm glad to hear you say so. How are you doing on medicine?

— Slowly, but some progress. Things we need to know.

— So go ahead and ask. said Martin.

IX

Thomas looked questioningly across the desk at Martin.

'You mean to tell me, Jay, that Einstein's people had never thought of medicine. That they know chemistry and had never thought of medicine?'

'Well, it's not quite that simple,' said Martin. They have a hang-up. Their bodies are sacred. Temples of their souls. Einstein didn't actually say that; it is my interpretation of what he said. But, anyhow, their bodies are sacred and they don't tamper with them.'

'In that case, they'll have a hell of a time selling medicine to their public.'

'I suppose so. But with Einstein and some of his fellows, that's different. An elite clique, I gather, standing above the general public, perhaps a bit contemptuous of the public, not sharing all the superstitions the general public holds. Willing, even anxious, to pick up what might be considered iconoclastic ideas. Willing, at least, to have a try at them. With the forces of the old beliefs and prejudices bearing on them, however, it's not to be wondered at that they never thought of medicine.'

They're willing to let you tell them about it?'

'Anxious. Strangely excited about it-a sort of nervous excitement. As if they know they're doing wrong, but are going to do it anyhow. All I can give them, of course, is the basic thinking on medicine.

They'll have to work out the details themselves, adapting them to their situation. I gave them what I could today. I'll have to bone up on the theory of medicine to give them much more. There should be material in the library.'

'I'm sure there is,' said Thomas.

'I thought for a while I'd lost Einstein. I told him that to develop medicine they'd have to know about their bodies…'

'And since their bodies are sacred…'

Martin nodded. That's the idea, exactly. Einstein asked how they'd get to know about their bodies and I said dissection. I told him what dissection was and that was when I thought I'd blown it. He was getting more than he asked for, more than he really wanted, and a lot of it he didn't like. But he was a man about it; he gulped and gagged somewhat and finally came to terms with it. It appears he is a devoted soul. Once he gets his teeth into something, he hangs onto it.'

'You think he and the rest of his clique will go ahead with it?'

'I'm not sure, Paul. I think so. He tended to wax a bit philosophical about it. Trying to talk himself more firmly into the idea of going ahead with it. And while he was doing this, I was wondering how many similar hang-ups we may have that makes it hard or impossible to use some of the ideas we may get.

Here is this advanced culture, a forward-looking society, and yet an old obsession that probably dates back to primordial times has made it impossible for them to come up with the concept of medicine.'

'Our own history of medicine,' said Thomas, 'is not too dissimilar. We had to sweep away a lot of superstition and wrong thinking before we could get even a decent start in the healing art.'

'I suppose so,' said Martin. 'But, dammit, the whole thing makes me feel good. If Einstein goes ahead with it, and I think he will, it means we've been of some use. Like I said last night, we may be beginning to pay our dues. We aren't just Cub Scouts any longer. I had no idea, you see, of what was going on.

The sneaky son-of-a-bitch was trying to steal the idea of medicine from me, bit by tiny bit.'

'I'd suspect we may be doing much the same thing on our part,' said Thomas. 'We're handling some of those jokers out there far too gently, more than likely, than there is any need to. Going easy on them, afraid of doing something wrong and scaring them off. I would suspect this is because of our inferiority complex, brought about by the kind of company we're keeping. Get a few more deals like your medicine show under our belts and we'll no longer have it. We'll be right up there with the rest of them.'

'I hesitated to ask him,' said Martin, 'about why he was sticking with me. Like you say, I probably was afraid of scaring him off. But it bugged me, it had bugged me for a long time. So I thought, why not? why not be honest with him? And once I was honest with him, he decided to be honest with me. It does beat hell how things sometimes turn out.'

'I don't suppose you had much time to talk about FTL today. That's all right. Maybe a few days off may help. And now you'll feel less guilty at the time Einstein spends on it. You can bear down a little harder on him.'

'No time on FTL today at all,' said Martin. 'But you may be right. I've been doing some thinking about it. I talked with Mary Kay last night and she asked me if I stuck to hard fact all the time or if I paid some attention to my feelings, how I felt about it. I suppose she was trying to say hunches and not quite making it. I told her my feelings played no part in it. I've never let them play a part. I've tried to stick to the pure science of it-if, in fact, there is any science in it. This afternoon I got to thinking about it and maybe I was wrong…'

'And?'

'You know, Paul, I may finally have a handle on this FTL business. Not for certain, but maybe. A new way to go. For the last several weeks, I've been telling myself time could be the key factor and that I should be paying more attention to it. Has this project ever held any talk with some of our aliens about time?'

'I think so. Ten or fifteen years ago. We still have the record. It was fairly inconclusive, but we have stacks of data.'

'Except in a superficial way,' said Martin, 'time can't play too much of a part in any equation, although in many problems it can be a fairly critical factor. If we knew more about time. I told myself, not as a physical, but as a mental factor in FTL, we might turn the trick. Tying a mental concept of time into the equation…'

'You think it might work?'

'Not now. Not any more. I have a hunch that time may be a variable, that it runs differently in different sectors of the universe, or differently in the minds of different intelligences. But there is something that would be a constant. Eternity would be a constant factor. It wouldn't vary; it would be the same everywhere.'

'My God, Jay, you aren't talking about…'

'Not about arriving at an understanding of it, but I think we might work out a way it could be used as a constant. I'm going to take a shot at it. With it in mind, some of the other factors may come clear.'

'But eternity, Jay. This business about the universe coming to an end.'

'Mary Kay told me something else last night. Her hunch of what might be left when the universe is gone.'

'I know. She was in just a while ago. She spilled it all on me.'

'And what did you say?'

'Christ, Jay, what could I say? I patted her on the shoulder and told her to stay in there pitching.'

'But if she's right, there'd be something beyond the end of the universe. There'd still be eternity.

Maybe still infinity. Two constants. And room for something else to happen.'

'You're getting me in beyond my depth, Jay.'

'Maybe I'm beyond my depth, too. But it's a new approach.

Maybe it can be handled. Tell Russell and Brown, when they start hassling you again, that we're going at it from a fresh angle.'

Thomas sat a long time at the desk after Martin had left.

Last night, he thought, Allen had been no help when he'd talked with him. All the same old platitudes: don't worry, sit on it, hang in there tight, make a decision only when you have to. And this afternoon he, himself, had been no help when Jay and Mary Kay had sat across the desk from him. Stay in there pitching, he'd told Mary Kay.

These are special people, he had told Allen. He had been right, of course. They were special, but how special? How far beyond the ordinary run of mankind? Dime store clerks and car hops and raw farm boys. But what happened to them when they ventured out among the stars and made contacts with the intelligences who dwelt on planets orbiting distant suns? Allen had said, or had it been he? that all that came through from the star-flung party line was not recorded in the memory banks-the pain, the sorrow, the doubt, the hope, the fear, the prejudices, the biases, and what else? Something beyond all human experience? Something that was soaked up, that was absorbed into the fiber and the fabric of the human telepaths who listened, who chatted and gossiped with their neighbors strung across the galaxies. A factor, or factors, that made them slightly more than human or, perhaps, a great deal more than human.

Mary Kay, with her talk of a place that would still persist after the universe was gone, quite naturally was crazy. Jay, with his talk of using eternity as a constant factor, was insane as well. But crazy and insane, of course, only by human standards. And these people, these telepaths of his (perhaps, almost certainly, undeniably) had gone far beyond humanity.

A special people, a new breed, their humanity cross pollinated by the subtle intricacies of alien contact, the hope of humankind? Ambassadors to the universe? Industrial spies? Snoopers into places where man had little right to go? Explorers of the infinite?

Dammit, he thought, it made a man proud to be a member of the human race. Even if this special breed should finally become a race apart, they still stemmed from the same origins as all the other humans.

Might it be, he wondered, that in time some of the specialness would rub off on others such as he?

And, suddenly, without any thinking on it, without due consideration, without mulling it over, without using the slow, intricate, involved process of human thought, he arrived at faith. And was convinced, as well, that his faith was justified.

Time to go for broke, he told himself.

He reached over and punched the button for Evelyn.

'Get me Senator Brown,' he told her. 'No, I don't know where he is. Track him down, wherever he may be. I want to tell the old bastard that we're finally on the track for FTL.'

Content

Clifford D. Simak
PARTY LINE