Ask a Silly Question Read online

  Ask A Silly Question

  Andew J. Offutt

  Originally published in Galaxy magazine, July 1970

  The ship trembled. The reactor Shocklium radiation cooler which in turn fed back through the heat exchanger to the reactor at the very tip of the ship’s nose. Coupled to the turbine, the generator sent the other twenty-five percent of its energy in megawatts—sizzling down two channels of its energy back into the heated cesium and sent it, hot and deadly, through the neutron shield into the heat exchanger, from there it flowed through the gamma-ray shield to drive the monster turbine. Ignoring economy and efficiency, the turbine sent something like seventy-five percent to jet out into space from the electron waste tube and the ion exhaust jets.

  Primitive, inefficient, uneconomical. But magnetism, gravity, resisted conquest with the tenacity of a blob of chewing gum on a theater seat.

  The ship trembled. It plunged through space at a speed of 3 x 108 feet per second. Difficult? Try 2.1 X 108 mph. Still difficult? Make it over 56,800 miles per second, then couple that to a 2.1759G acceleration and reach for your slipstick. A waste of time, that—one of the ship’s four passengers is jealous of his responsibility and his computer tells him acceleration is steady at seventy feet per second toward a goal of 186,300 mps. Or thereabouts.

  “I’ll bet on energy,” the comptech said. He patted his computer. It winked at him, humming. “That’s what ole Cal means. I’m sure, and I go along with whatever Cal says. Energy.”

  “That is not what Cal says, Tom,” the captain told him. He spun idly back and forth in his chair, facing the other three men. He was a captain of men, not machinery—the computer decided what to do and when to do it and told the ship and the ship obeyed. The captain was about as necessary to the ship’s operation as the quintillions of watts of energy the engines wasted as a matter of course because Man could not wait for a better way. “Cal says he does not know. ‘Insufficient data: Warning’ does not mean Cal computes we’ll be converted to energy.” He grinned at the reporter. “You agree?”

  “With you? Or that we’ll be converted to energy?”

  The captain nodded, grinning. “Yep.”

  The reporter shuddered. “How about some alternatives?”

  “Oh man! There’s an infinity of ’em,” the captain said and chuckled at his joke. He swung in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, one hand flat on the steel panel running along the steel bulkhead behind him. “Doc?”

  The government physicist looked up. He was calculating, using genuine paper—lined—and a genuine pen, ballpoint. “Hm? What?”

  “Tom’s computer would be delighted to do whatever you’re doing, Doc—and Tom would be double-delighted to feed it in.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that,” the physicist said. His manner was embarrassed. He waved the pen. “Habit. I use computers, too, of course.”

  “What do those artifacts of yours tell you?” Tom asked.

  The physicist chuckled, looking down at the paper. “They tell me I can’t work worth a damn at two-plus gees. Also—insufficient data. I’m just like Cal. I don’t know.”

  “Cal,” Tom said, his chin assuming a Mussolini tilt, “does know. All we lack is being smart enough to know how to ask the questions. Cal can answer them.”

  The captain sighed. “Okay. Tom says we’ll wind up as energy, Doc, because he thinks that’s the ‘Insufficient data’ his machine complains about, and that’s why it says ‘Warning.’ We have lots of time. Suppose we try to live with the data we have and play guessing games. What’s your theory?”

  Doc leaned back and frowned. His chin sagged badly under two gravities acceleration. “Einstein said that no energy can be transmitted at a velocity greater than the speed of light—c. If we hit c, we’ll still be in the process of transmission even if we, uh become energy. Thus—”

  “If we bust one rule,” Tom said, “we can bust another. I say we become energy at the instant we hit c.” He twisted a little to pat the gleaming hide of his computer. “And Cal knows it. He thinks—”

  “Cal,” the physicist said, “does not think.”

  The comptech raised a finger to his lips and rolled his eyes. “Sh, Cal’s sensitive!”

  Three men laughed. The reporter was frowning. “Uh—look. Suppose you just pretend I’m a three-year-old in the first grade, okay?”

  The captain looked eager. “Start from how far back?”

  The computer technician and the physicist appeared just as delighted at the opportunity to show off.

  Which was what the reporter wanted, of course—he knew the theory backward and forward or he would not have been on board.

  “Try starting,” he said, looking sheepish, “with E = mc2”

  “Wow!” Tom rolled his eyes in the general direction of his hairline, which appeared to have retreated from previous threats. “You came along without knowing an ionized thing? Man, you’re either dedicated or crazy! You realize we’ll probably wind up looking like a supernova, with everyone on Earth trying to decide which of us to name it after.”

  “I know there’s danger,” the reporter said. “I’ve had that kind of assignment before. I also know this is the biggest story since the Cudahy Equations.”

  The captain was shaking his head, wearing his lady-killer smile again—worthless on this ship. He reached up to push his fingers through his blond burr-cut. “E = mc2 means a given mass—that’s m, and that’s us—is transformed into E for energy at the speed of light, in centimeters squared. Too plain. Doc?”

  The physicist moved his shoulders in a shrug. “It’ll do.”

  “Everything’s relative to everything else. And interdependent—space, time, matter. Space and time, interdependent, depend also on us, as observers. They aren’t absolute, I mean. Einstein’s law—which we’ve gone back to calling ‘theory’—says we can’t exceed c. Because as we accelerate we gain mass. At almost-light, our mass doubles. At c, our mass becomes infinite.”

  “That’s a meaningless phrase,” the reporter prompted. “Totally meaningless, like ten billion dollars. It’s inconceivable. Anyhow—so what would happen?”

  “That’s what our feller ’murricans are shelling out an inconceivable amount of money for us to find out,” the captain told him. “One theory says the universe would collapse, whatever that means. Implode, sort of. Point is, since Cudahy we think Einstein postulated his theory, not the Universe’s Law. Maybe. No big deal there: Newton was right for a long time but no one tried to apotheosize him. Einstein was nearly made a god. People in science have a bad habit of accepting what’s in their books, without asking why and what if. I think that’s why a lot of ’em are in science; it’s a nice, safe haven, like a convent. Every now and then some boat-rocker with a bump of curiosity and a little imagination pops up and becomes Galileo or Newton or Maxwell or Planck or Einstein—or Cudahy.”

  “Or something else,” the physicist said. “But I happen to agree with Doctor Cudahy—which doesn’t stop me from admitting he might be crazy as a bedbug. And my presence here indicates I am. Ever hear of Stefan Christesco?”

  He showed surprise when all three of the others shook their heads. He smiled. “I’ll tell you why. Christesco published a book in nineteen-twenty-five in defense of Euclidean geometry. He tore into Einstein and Lorentz and Minkovski and wound up saying their postulates belonged to ‘the domain of the imaginary and the absurd.’ Cudahy’s been attacked, too. So have I, for the matter of that. So, when the decision was made to send out a manned ship to find out, I volunteered and then fought to come. A lot of my detractors didn’t express any desire to prove themselves right the hard way—wouldn’t have looked through Galileo’s telescope, either.”

  “Crazy as a bedbug,” the
comptech said. “But I haven’t heard your theory. Doctor Bowers.”

  The physicist leaned back and poked at his chin with his pen. “You may be right. But bear in mind that you are interpreting that computer’s answer. It hasn’t given an answer, for the matter of that; it’s given a definite lack of one. And remember this—the word ‘intuit’ wasn’t invented for computers. I think we can marry Einstein and Cudahy. Suppose it’s true we can’t exceed the speed of light. What does that mean? It means relative to us, to what we know. Or think we know. In this universe, this plane, this dimension—this coil, if you want to go Shakespearean. So—at the speed of light I wonder if we won’t just, uh, slip sideways into another dimension. I doubt time. I expect something altogether else, a fifth one, if you need a word. Where the railroad tracks come together. Where time is—abbreviated. Where we can exceed c, in that plane.”

  “Sort of the universe next door?” the reporter asked. The physicist smiled and nodded. The reporter looked at the captain. “And you? What do you think. Captain?”

  “I think we’re going to be stuck with each other for a long, long time and you’d better call me Bob. Meanwhile, I don’t theorize much. I’m just curious. What’s ‘infinity?’ What does infinite mean? What’s it like in no-Time no-Space?” He shrugged. “I volunteered and got picked. I asked just one question.” He waited, and they waited. “Going to stare me down without asking, huh? Okay. I asked, ‘Does light have mass and energy?’”

  Doctor Bowers nodded, smiling. “That’s an old one. Then how come it travels at lightspeed, eh?”

  The reporter sighed. “The A-bomb proved Einstein, right? And you think you’re going to become one?”

  “A real whopper,” Tom said.

  “Assuming we get back—sorry, Tom,” the reporter said, “am I going to be allowed to quote this theorizing-before-the-fact?”

  “Ask me again,” the physicist smiled, “post facto.”

  “One thing about it,” the captain sighed. “If you’re right. Doc, Tom and that Cal of his will just have to decide how they want their crow cooked. But if Tom’s right, you’ll never have to listen to his I-told-you-so.”

  “But, the point is we can’t do it,” the reporter said, stepping back into the discussion. “As Doc said, Cudahy’s equations are just that: figures on paper. They have yet to be field-tested.”

  “You’ve been stringing us along,” the captain said. “You know all about it, don’t you?”

  “Well—suppose I challenge you back. I’ll bet not one in a hundred or maybe more can give the meaning of E = mc2. But Einstein said no material body or anything bearing energy could exceed the speed of light because—because it would require infinite energy?”

  The comptech nodded. “With respect to the observer,” he said. “And don’t forget the business about achieving infinite mass. We’re gaining now. I say it’s impossible for our mass to reach infinity, whatever that is—but I’m no Chris Whoever-Doc-said. I say that at c we’ll be converted into pure energy. Relatively speaking, I mean.” He grinned. “Relative to us. And I believe in Cal. Cal doesn’t goof. If I’m wrong, I eat crow, not Cal. He says we haven’t told him enough for him to give us an answer—either that or he doesn’t have the, the vocabulary to answer us. I keep trying, every time I think of another way to ask.”

  The reporter’s mind was nearly as audible as the mechanical one behind Tom. “And that is the point,” he said. “That there isn’t any absolute motion. It’s all relative. Right?”

  “Relative,” Doctor Bowers said, “to something.” He stressed the final word and looked meaningfully at the reporter, then at Bob and Tom, his eyes large and round and ingenuous-looking as a kitten’s. “But we can go on and on with our speculating. Try this. No material body. Suppose at the instant we hit c we become immaterial. And at the instant we drop under lightspeed we—materialize again. Voila!"

  “That’s strictly an evasion,” Tom said. “But we’re about to find out.” He swung around to his pet. “Tell us when, Cal. Acceleration constant at seventy feet per second. Velocity...” He continued to speak quietly to the shiny metal cabinet with its ornamentation of dials and gauges and keys and its ‘mouth,’ a television screen. It chattered back.

  The ship surged on, trembling.

  The reporter watched the stars.

  Their positions were changing, he knew—relative to him, since he felt no movement—in the same manner as the minute hand on his watch. He knew it moved. He could see that it had moved, by looking away and counting and then looking back. But its actual motion was not quite visible. The stars moved the same way; they were there, immobile in appearance, but they weren’t where they’d been a few hours ago. Relative to their more distant companions. And to the observer.

  Tom gave the computer a velocity figure of 56,820 mps. That figure changed as the electronic brain figured its answer. He had keyed a tape answer in addition to the visual one—he read the tape, nodded, said “Mark,” and depressed a key. A black pointer swung across a dial, stopped at 112. The dial next to it indicated 24. The third registered 54. The last gauge mentioned a figure too small to bother with.

  “Round to minutes,” Tom told his machine and Cal dutifully zeroed the final dial and raised the one to its left to 55. Tom swung around in his padded chair. Doctor Bowers was looking at him, smiling, his head cocked.

  “One-hundred thirteen days, fifty-five minutes to lightspeed,” the computer technician said and the physicist nodded, looking down at the paper on his knees. His hand was damp; both pen and hand were heavy at just over two gravities constant acceleration.

  “Right,” he said and the reporter made a grinning note.

  “Doc’s kidding you, Tom,” the captain said. “Ask your friend if we can take the mass increase at steady acceleration.” Doctor Bowers jerked his head to stare quizzically at the captain as the comptech turned and posed the question to Cal.

  A broad glastic screen just above Tom’s head glowed as its fiveounce electron tube beamed Cal’s answer on it: “E = mc2.”

  The captain chuckled. “Can’t fool old Cal,” he said. “From that answer I’d swear he has a sense of humor. He’s reminding me that sure our mass will increase, just as your pen will shorten. Doc. But since it’s all relative we won’t be aware of a thing. No sweat.”

  “Plenty of sweat,” the reporter said. “We’ve got to sit around and wait four months and a day. That’s a long sweat.”

  “I’m not worrying about the four months and a day,” Tom said. “But you can bet I’ll sweat those last fifty-five minutes!”

  The stars crawled by. Dials moved. There were no days, no nights, no noons. Long ago Tom had set the computer to ring an alarm to remind them of lunchtime and dinner hour. Later he’d cut it off—it invariably interrupted a discussion or an argument or a game of chess or double-board Broadside. They ate when it was opportune, slept when they began to slur words and squint. On the one hundred and fifth day they were moving at one hundred seventy-six thousand miles per second. On the one-hundred eleventh day they watched the final three figures on the velocity gauge creep higher and higher. The first three read one-eight-five.

  They waited. Eyes strayed more and more frequently to the gauges.

  “Bingo,” the reporter said and Doctor Bowers jumped two inches.

  Heads snapped to the dials. Their velocity indicator ticked up to 186,000 miles per second.

  They made their bets, each taking a different figure, no one choosing the accepted lightspeed of 186,282. “Be damned if I’m not sweating,” the captain growled and the nervous laughter of his companions was their admission of the same fact.

  “We’ve got a few more hours. Bob,” the comptech said. “You’re one game up on me. Want to give me a chance to even the score?”

  The captain grinned. “No fair. I’m in no condition to play chess.”

  “Relative to someone on Earth,” you mean, Tom said, laughing. “Relative to me we’re even.”

  Again they
laughed. Nervously.

  And waited. And watched the hour-clock die as had the day-clock. Their eyes ached as they watched the last pointer creep backward from fifty-five while the velocimeter crept forward.

  Tom began counting at ten. “Four- three- two- one- bingo!” His announcement was gratuitous—he turned from the computer to find the others watching the viewplace and the gauges beneath it.

  Nothing happened. Their speed moved past 186,282 miles per second. Nothing happened.

  And then the stars vanished from the viewplate and all gauges swung back to zero.

  “My God!”

  “According to the old story,” the captain said drily—and quietly —“a voice is supposed to answer ‘Yes?’” He went on—no one had smiled. “Very well. Exec.” His voice was stiff now. Military discipline had been used to dam panic before. “We have exceeded the speed of light and we have not been converted to energy and my mass feels pretty finite. The railroad tracks have not converged. You better confess to being wrong, kick Cal in the slats and then tell us the score.”

  “Aye sir.” Tom turned his chair to face Cal. He felt fantastically, sickeningly light. The pressure of acceleration was gone. He glanced back over his shoulder at the dead gauges and the blank viewplate. Then he asked his question.

  “Cal—have we exceeded the speed of light?”

  YES

  The television screen spelled out the word. Cal volunteered no information. It was because of the computer’s laconic responses that Tom had named it after a former president famed for his terseness.

  “What has happened to us. Cal?”

  NOTHING.

  “Like hell. Qualify!”

  ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO YOU OR TO THIS SHIP.

  “All right then, dammit, what has happened, period?”

  REPEAT: NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO YOU OR SHIP OR CAL. SHIP HAS SUCCESSFULLY EXCEEDED LIGHT-SPEED. REST OF UNIVERSE HAS VANISHED.

  “Good god!” the reporter gasped.