Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

Ray kissed her. She kissed back and he yelled as his ribs began to give way.

“Yowp! Some other time, honey. I want only to save your life, don’t you see?”

“Some other time,” said Dyann firmly, “is not now. Come here, you.”

“Stop tat noise!” yelled Urushkidan, and slammed the laboratory door.

“Ve will honeymoon on Varann,” sighed Dyann happily. “You shall ride to battle at my side.”

Much later the aroma of coffee drew Urushkidan back into the forward cabin. A disheveled and weary-looking Ray Ballantyne was puttering around the hotplate while Dyann sat polishing her sword and humming to herself.

“Now,” said Ray, turning with what seemed like relief to the Martian, “just how does this new drive of yours work?”

“It is not a dribe and it does not work⁠—it is a structure of pure matematics,” said Urushkidan. “Anyway, te teory is beyond te comprehension of anybody but myself. Gibe me some coffee.”

“But you must have an idea how it would work in practice.”

“Oh, no doubt if I wanted to take te time I could debise someting. But I am engaged in debeloping a new teory of cosmic origins.” Urushkidan slurped coffee into himself.

“We’ve got to build it and escape.”

“I told you you are of neiter beauty nor importance. Why should I take time wit you?”

“But look, if the Jovians capture you they’ll force you to build it for them. They have ways. And then they’ll overrun Mars along with all the other planets. The only thing that’s held them back so far is the difficulty of interplanetary logistics. But when you have ships that can cross the orbit of Pluto in a matter of hours or minutes that isn’t a problem any longer.”

“Tat would be unfortunate, yes. But I am in te midst of a bery new and important train of tought. It would be more unfortunate if tat were lost tan if a few ephemeral Jobians conquered te System. Tey wouldn’t last a tousand years, but a genius like me is born once in a million.”

Dyann hefted her sword. “Do as Ray says,” she advised.

“You dare not hurt me,” said Urushkidan with a smug expression, “or you will neber get away.”

He went over to the desk and began investigating the drawers again. “Where do tey keep teir tobacco? I cannot work witout my pipe.”

“Jovians,” said Ray glumly, “don’t smoke. They consider it a degenerate habit.”

“What?” The Martian’s howl rattled the coffeepot on the hotplate. “No tobacco?”

“Only your own supply, back in Ganymede City, and I daresay the Jovians have confiscated and destroyed it by now. That puts the nearest cigar store somewhere in the Asteroid Belt.”

“Oh, no! Te new cosmology ruined by tobacco shortage.” Urushkidan stood thinking a moment, then came to a sudden decision. “Tere is no help for it. If te nearest tobacco is millions of miles away we must build te faster-tan-light engine at once.”

Ray made no attempt to follow the Martian’s long-winded equations in detail. What he was interested in was making use of them, and he proceeded with slashing approximations that brought screams of almost physical agony from Urushkidan.

Essentially, though, he recognized that the scientist’s achievement lay in making what seemed to be a final correlation of relativity and wave mechanics, something which even the Goldfarb-Olson formulas had not fully reached.

Relativity deals with solid bodies moving at definite velocities which cannot exceed that of light, but in wave mechanics the particle becomes a weird and shadowy psi function and is only probably where it is. In the latter theory, point-to-point transitions are not velocities but shifts in the node of a complex wave. It turned out that the electronic wave velocity⁠—which, unlike the group velocity, is not limited by the speed of light⁠—could be imparted to matter under the right conditions, so that the most probable position of the electron went from point to point at a bewildering rate. The trick was to create the right conditions.

“A field of nuclear space-strain is set up by the circuit, and the ship, reacting against the entire mass of the universe, moves without need of rockets⁠—right?” asked the Earthman.

“Wrong,” said Urushkidan.

“Well, we’ll build it anyway,” said Ray. “Here, Dyann, bring that generator over this way, will you?”

“I vant to go monster-huntin,” she sulked.

“Bring⁠—it⁠—over, you lummox!”

Dyann glared, but stooped over the massive machine and, between Ganymedean gravity and Varannian muscles, staggered across the floor with it. Ray was checking circuits on the oscilloscope. Urushkidan sat grumbling about heat and humidity and fanning himself with his ears. The lab was a mess of tubes, condensers, rheostats, and tangled wire.

“I’m stuck,” wailed Ray. “I need a resistor having so-and-so many ohms along with such-and-such a capacitance. Find me one, quick.”

“If you would specify your units more precisely⁠—” began Urushkidan huffily.

Ray pawed through the litter on the floor, putting one object after another into his testing circuit, glancing at the meters, and throwing it across the room. “It’s vital,” he said.

“Vill this do, maybe?” asked Dyann innocently, holding out the ship’s one and only frying pan.

“Get out!” screamed Ray.

“I go monster-huntin,” she pouted.

Absentmindedly, Ray tested the frying pan. It was nearly right. By Luna, if he sawed off the handle⁠—

“Hey!” yelped Urushkidan.

“I don’t like the thought of eating cold beans, cold canned meat, and raw eggs any better than you,” said Ray. “But damn it, we’ve got to get out of here.” He soldered the emasculated pan into his circuit. “Starward the course of human empire,” he muttered viciously.

“Martian empire,” corrected Urushkidan.

“It’ll be Jovian empire if we don’t clear out of here. Okay, big brain, what comes next?”

“How should I know? How can you expect me to tink in tis foul tick air, and witout tobacco?” Urushkidan turned his back. Dyann clumped in, spacesuited, sword in one hand and rifle in the other. “I saw monsters out there,” she said. “I’m goin out to kill them.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” muttered Ray without looking up from his slide rule. “Urushkidan, you’ve got to calculate the resonant psi function for me.”

“Won’t,” said the Martian.

“By