The Gravity Business by James E. Gunn (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📕

a chair. "Your guess is as good as anybody's."

"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!" She glared venomously at Grampa.

"We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly.

"Fweepland?" Reba repeated.

"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium."

"A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here—involuntary colonists."

Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched.

"I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize."

"It's these '23 models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were any good."

The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.

Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it."

"That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D."

"Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested.

Grampa snorted. "Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to."

"Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?"

Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth—"

"Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?"

Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't."

He cleared his throat professorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses."

The faces were still blank and unillumined.

"Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted."

The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do."

"Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'"

"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped. "And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible."

Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it."

"But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted.

"Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it."

"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded ironically.

"Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know."

"We're stuck," Reba said softly. "We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—"

"Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries."

"And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want."

"You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly. "You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me."

Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it happened."

"I could think of worse things," Reba said.

"I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered.

"Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?"

"Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.

"Fweep?" it queried hopefully.

"Not now," said Four.

"Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?"

"I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate its center of gravity."

"Well?" Fred prompted.

"It shifts."

"That's impossible," said Junior.

"Not for Fweep," Four replied.

"What do you mean by that?" Joyce suspiciously asked.

"It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following me."

"Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly.

"Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly.

"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave."

The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out, Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—"

"Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.

The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.

"Rat poison?" Four asked.

Joyce started guiltily. "How did you know?"

"There's no use trying to poison Fweep," Four said calmly. "He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all."

"What level does he use?" Junior wanted to know.

"Point the scintillation counter at him."

Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.

Junior looked at the counter's dial. "He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?"

"He uses ordinary matter," Four said. "He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago."

"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?" Junior said unbelievingly.

Four nodded. "And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead."

Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. "Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass."

"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us." Four giggled at the thought.

Joyce glared at him furiously. "Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!"

"I don't figure it's a whim," Grampa said. "Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move."

"I don't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it."

"How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy."

"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?"

"We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet."

"Well?"

"Probably he's immortal."

"And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically.

"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures."

"But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now."

"Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now."

Reba looked at Fweep kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway."

"I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately!"

Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!"

Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.

Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you."

Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.

"Give her one for me!" Grampa called.

Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.

"Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly. "Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result."

"What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep us from being squashed—and then quit."

"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from," Four explained. "All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped."

"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?" Grampa said. "Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop."

"He's no more improbable than people," said Four.

"Less than some I've known," Grampa conceded.

"If he can eat anything," Reba said, "why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?"

"He wants to