Part 24 (1/2)
”Very well. As soon as the mate takes over, you and Mister Keku get up here. I want to know what the devil has been going on aboard my s.h.i.+p.”
”You are b.l.o.o.d.y well not the only one,” said Mike the Angel.
15
Midnight, s.h.i.+p time.
And, as far as the laws of simultaneity would allow, it was midnight in Greenwich, England. At least, when a s.h.i.+p returned from an interstellar trip, the s.h.i.+p's chronometer was within a second or two, plus or minus, of Greenwich time. Theoretically, the molecular vibration clocks shouldn't vary at all. The fact that they did hadn't yet been satisfactorily accounted for.
Mike the Angel tried to make himself think of clocks or the variations in s.p.a.ce time or anything else equally dull, in the hope that it would put him to sleep.
He began to try to work out the derivation of the Beale equations, the equations which had solved the principle of the no-s.p.a.ce drive. The s.h.i.+p didn't move through s.p.a.ce; s.p.a.ce moved through the s.h.i.+p, which, of course, might account for the variation in time, because--
--the time is out of joint.
_The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!_
_Hamlet_, thought Mike. _Act One, the end of scene five._
But why had he been born to set it right? Besides, exactly what was wrong? There was something wrong, all right.
And why from the end of the act? Another act to come? Something more to happen? The clock will go round till another time comes. Watch the clock, the absolutely cuckoo clock, which ticked as things happened that made almost no sense and yet had sense hidden in their works.
The good old Keku clock. Somewhere is ic.u.men in, lewdly sing Keku. The Mellon is ripe and climbing Jakob's ladder. And both of them playing Follow the Leda.
And where were they heading? Toward some destination in the general direction of the constellation Cygnus. The transformation equations work fine on an interstellar s.h.i.+p. Would they work on a man? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to transform yourself into a swan? Cygnus the Swan.
And we'll _all_ play Follow the Leda....
Somewhere in there, Mike the Angel managed to doze off.
He awoke suddenly, and his dream of being a huge black swan vanished, shattered into nothingness.
This time it had not been a sound that had awakened him. It had been something else, something more like a cessation of sound. A dying sigh.
He reached out and touched the switch plaque.
Nothing happened.
The room remained dark.
The room was strangely silent. The almost soundless vibration of the engines was still there, but....
The air conditioners!
The air in the stateroom was unmoving, static. There was none of the faint breeze of moving air. Something had gone wrong with the low-power circuits!