Dickson, Gordon - Space Winners

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It was a little, Jim Rawlins thought at last on Sunday night, like being the fastest gun west

of Tombstone.

He had no liking for the reputation he had picked up, especially these last two years, for

being stubborn. He tried to duck it. But somebody was always coming around to challenge

him.

Sunday night, sitting out in the Rawlins carport, wrestling a rebuilt bearing into the

gyrostabilizer of his motorbike, it had happened again. This time about odds. And with

Ward Stuyler, who had been with him al! through the last five years of junior and senior

high school.

"You say it and then you take it back in the next breath!" Ward finally exploded. He was

perched on a five-gallon oil can, watching Jim tap the bearing into place in the torn down

gyro system.

"No, I don't," said Jim.

"But you admit nearly a million to one is long odds!" Ward yelled. "Then you turn around

and say there'd be nothing impossible about being one of the three winners the Aliens'11

pick from the continental U.S. testing area. Three out of nearly three million graduating

high-school seniors!"

"I say it, because there wouldn't," said Jim, doggedly. "Practically impossible has to mean I

can figure safely that for practical purposes something's not going to happen. But this is

going to happen—for three people. For those three, like the seventeen other winners the

Aliens are supposed to pick in the other testing areas around the world, it never was

practically impossible."

"But—" Ward tried hard to break in, but Jim plowed ahead.

"—In fact," said Jim, "it was a cinch. Those three just happened to be the ones with the

exact chance combination of talent and character that the Alien Federation's looking for.

For the three we're talking about, then, it was certain from the start—they just didn't know

it. And 'them' might include you, or me."

"There!" said Ward. "You said it yourself— 'Chance.' Chance is luck, isn't it?"

"No," said Jim, scowling. "Anyway, not for me. It'dbebadluck."

"Sure, sure I know!" said Ward. "You've got your future all planned. So you wouldn't want

to go-"

"That's right," said Jim, stiffly.

"You must be the only one out of the entire three million who thinks that way; that's all I've

got to say," said Ward. "Catch me turning it down if I was one of the ones picked! You know

our area got its tests finished first—that means our three will probably be the first humans

into interstellar space. Catch me turning down something like that! I'd come back to Earth

full of Alien information no one else here on Earth knew, and be fixed for life. Anyway, you

just admitted believing in luck."

"I didn't," Jim banged hard on the bearing ring, to seat it on the gyro shaft. "I don't believe

in luck."

"Carry me home! I give up!" Ward tossed his arms wide and almost went over backward off

the oil can. For a moment he teetered, then he got his feet back on the concrete beneath

him. "What is it when you flip a coin and it can come up either heads or tails? Is that luck,

or isn't it?"

"It isn't." Jim scowled again. "The side that's up when the coin lands depends on the lift

and spin you gave it in flipping. If you could calculate those forces exactly, you could tell

before it landed if it was going to be heads, or tails. Same way with lightning striking. If you

could calculate all the factors, you could tell where it would hit. There's no such thing as

luck, when you get right to it."

"What is there, then?" demanded Ward. "The laws of cause and effect!" growled Jim. They

ended up settling nothing.

"Oh, there you are," said Taub Widerman, as Jim came into Building B at Research Three

the next morning and made his way through the maze of equipment and heavy power

cables involved in Building B's part of the research. Weary-looking, probably from working

to midnight the night before, Jim guessed, the young physicist ran a hand over his already

balding forehead. "I was just going to start without you."

"The new bearing in my gyrostabilizer jammed on the way here," said Jim, apologetically.

His summer job at Research Three was taking care of the animals and fish used by Taub as

experimental subjects. He had stopped on arriving at Building B only long enough to put on

the swimming trunks that were his ordinary working uniform, but he saw now that Taub had

been held up without him.

It was next to impossible for the physicist to direct the time-gap transmitter—his working

tool—upon the experimental subjects, while at the same time handling the subjects

themselves. But Taub, Jim saw, had been warming up the transmitter when Jim appeared.

So it was high time Jim was here. Handling the subjects was Jim's job—one he hoped to

keep on a part-time basis after he started at the university this coming fall.

Something special, Taub?" he asked now. "You don't usually need me until I've finished

cleaning the tanks and cages."

"Visitors today," replied Taub briefly. Jim felt his own spirits take a downward elevator ride.

Research Three was not a Federal research project with security regulations to keep

stockholders and other visitors at a distance. It was a private corporation, set up like many

others after the Aliens had shocked Earth by landing squarely in the center of Antarctica

and speaking to the world over some form of transmission which pre-empted every radio or

television circuit operating at the time.

Jim had been only seven then, but he remembered the newspaper headlines. The Aliens

had broken the news to Earth that there was a Federation of intelligent races out among the

stars. Earth, they said, would not be allowed to send its people any further into space until

the human race qualified for membership in that Federation. To qualify, humans had to

develop a means of driving spaceships faster than the speed of light.

This was no small order. According to the physics developed by Albert Einstein, the speed

of light represented the greatest velocity possible in the universe, roughly one hundred

eighty-six thousand miles per second. But even at that speed, interstellar distances were

so great that it would take three or four years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest

worthwhile star to Earth. To reach the center of the galaxy would take twenty-

five to thirty thousand years. But the Aliens, apparently, could make that trip in a few days

at most. Earth must learn how to do likewise. A towering scientific problem—but how could

the difficulties involved be explained to visitors at Research Three who thought Antarctica

was a long way off?

"I'll get busy right away," said Jim, guiltily. "First—what?"

"One of the tiger sharks, I think—Old Susy," answered Taub. "Shunt her into the main pool

here." He waved a hand at the fifty by twenty feet of four-foot-deep tank alongside him, with

the massive, camera-eyed shape of the time-gap transmitter straddling it on arching steel

legs. "Maybe we can get through the sharks and down to the turtles, or something else

harmless by the time the visitors show up. If I'm asked one more time why we don't have

muzzles on the sharks, or whether the octopi eat people, I'll quit and take a teaching job."

He looked at the time-gap transmitter, hanging over the center of the pool.

"Well, off to the salt mines," he said, beginning to climb up the ladder mounted to one of

the legs of the transmitter. "Maybe we can get through in time. Get her moving, Jim."

Jim went to the tanks that held the fish and water animals. He cornered Old Susy with one

of the shark tank's movable partitions, and shunted her into the water corridor leading to

the experimental tank. After that it was a matter of merely herding her down the

SPACE WINNERS

corridor and into the tank itself by sliding a partition along behind her. Used to this process

as she was, Susy hardly waited to be urged. She was called Old Susy not because she was

old—though at a length of twelve feet she was respectably grown up as tiger sharks went—

but because she had been around longer than any other of the sharks they were using as

experimental subjects.

Susy swam out into the main tank and began to cruise around after the fashion of sharks

who—lacking the swim bladder of ordinary fishes—have to keep moving to keep from

sinking. Taub rolled the transmitter back and forth over its tracks on either side of the pool,

occasionally transmitting an impulse of time-lessness of constantly varying duration into

Susy's tiny "Y"-shaped brain.

Jim left the poolside to go about his main work of cleaning the tanks and cages, feeding

and checking over the experimental animals—which ranged from sharks to spider

monkeys. But it was a day of troubles. He was just beginning to drain and hose down the

glass walls of the turtle cage, when he heard Taub calling him.

"Jim!—Jim! Hey! Get over here! I need you!"

Hastily, Jim shut off the hose, dropped it, and sprinted back to the pool. Taub was hanging

so far out of his saddle behind the transmitter that it looked as if he was about to dive into

the pool himself. Down below him, Susy was lying still and dead-

Gordon R. Dickson

looking, on her side on the bottom of the pool with her gills motionless.

"Slammed her with one!" shouted Taub to Jim, "Since we were late, I started her out at the

top of the scale."

Reaching the poolside, Jim nodded and dove in. A couple of strokes brought him alongside

the sunken shark. He got to his feet, reached down and put his arms around the sandpaper-

rough body just back of the high first dorsal fin, sticking up like a sail from the spine of the

shark. He lifted the tiger-striped body, righting it in the water, and began to slowly slosh

with it along the length of the tank.

Susy's undershot mouth, with its murderous multiple rows of teeth, hung open and her gills

stirred, opening, as the pressure of the water flowing in through the mouth and out through

the gill openings pushed them. For a moment they fluttered slightly, as if Susy herself was

trying to use them, then they relaxed again. Jim kept pushing the shark forward, until he

came to the end of the tank, when he turned about and headed back in the opposite

direction.

"How is she?" It was Taub, down from the transmitter and squatting beside the pool to

hand Jim a belt with weights on it. Jim paused to hook the belt around his waist, so the

weights would hold him down and give his feet traction against the bottom of the pool.

"Her gills fluttered," Jim said. "She ought to come out all right."

SPACE WINNERS

"Good," said Taub. "Keep walking her. That setting on the transmitter must be something

special. When she comes to, I want to try her again. I've never seen one of the sharks

knocked out like that before." He went back to the transmitter.

Jim kept at the necessary work of pushing Susy through the water. Without the movement-

forced flow of oxygen-bearing water over and past her gills, the unconscious shark would

literally drown. Coming up to one end of the pool, Jim caught sight of the milky reflection of

his own image, cast back by the shadowed tile above the water at that end.

His square shoulders were hunched forward like a fullback's. Under the dark cap of his

black hair and equally dark eyebrows, reflected in the tank wall, his square face was set,

jaw thrust forward, almost scowling with the effort of walking the big shark's body through

the water. That, he thought, as he made the turn and left the reflection behind him, was

probably the way he looked to people most of the time. But he couldn't help it. Some people

could do things easily, without looking as if they were working at it. He couldn't, and there

was no use wishing he could. So, he told himself, heading back up toward the other end of

the pool, forget it.

He did. He was good at shutting things out when he wanted to concentrate. Susy was slow

coming out of her state of shock. It had always been a strange thing to Jim that a shark

should give up so easily under certain conditions. The same shark that would

Gordon R. Dickson

bite the leg off a fisherman after lying apparently dead in the bottom of a boat, out of the

water for half an hour, was just as likely, after being carefully netted, tanked, and carried

ashore unmarked by human captors, to turn belly up and try to give up the ghost without a

struggle.

But it was this tendency to go into a sort of fatal shock that made the shark so valuable in

Taub's end of the research, thought Jim. The sharks were far the most sensitive to no-time,

followed by the other selachians, then amphibians, and then the land reptiles. For some

reason the warm-blooded land animals were practically immune. That should mean that

humans would also be immune to any no-time reaction—but no one was going to risk

human lives on that supposition alone. Once it was understood why contact with an

infinitesimal moment of time less ness should send sharks into profound shock, then work

on the no-time drive could go forward . . .

Susy stirred suddenly, rasping Jim's side with the dermal denticles, which, like small teeth

rather than scales, studded her skin.

"Coming out of it at last, are you?" grunted Jim. None of the sharks had ever taken this

long before to recover. Perhaps . . .

''Young man!" screamed a strange woman's voice somewhere above Jim. "Young man,

what are you doing down there? Answer me!"

Jim's heart sank. The visitors had evidently arrived. Well, he thought, keeping his head

down and

SPACE WINNERS

plowing on, Taub would have to handle whoever it was.

"Young man!" cried the voice. "Jason! Jason, where'are you? Jason—"

Jason Wells was the head of the crew on the project. It was his unhappy duty to guide the

visitors around—when he could not find someone else to take his place. Jason should be

with this visitor, whoever she was. And if not Jason, where was Taub, wondered Jim,

making a turn at the end of the tank? But just then he heard Taub's voice—painfully polite

and plainly unhappy.

"Jason had to go back to the office to take a telephone call. Can I help you?"

"What's that young man doing in that water with mat shark? Doesn't he know that's

dangerous? Get him out, immediately! Get him out, I say!"

"It's not dangerous—" Taub began soothingly.

"Not dangerous! Playing with a shark big enough to eat him alive! Don't tell me it's not

dangerous!"

"Not," said Taub, a trifle grimly, "in this case, ma'am. That shark you see there is stunned.

Jim is just walking her until she comes out of it. It's standard procedure."

"That's no excuse. He shouldn't have stunned her in the first place."

"He didn't," said Taub's voice, grimly. "I did."

"You did. Why? Do you call this working on a faster-than-light drive, young man, whoever

you are—I don't know your name."

Gordon R. Dickson

"Taub Widerman," said Taub. "Yes, I do."

"No wonder the operating expenses of this laboratory are scandalous. Well, don't just

stand there, explain yourself. What if that shark comes to and bites him?"

"When the shark comes to," said Taub's voice patiently, "she won't feel like biting anyone

for some time. Just like a human being who's been knocked out, she'll be groggy for a

matter of minutes and just want to be left alone. Jim, down there, will have all the time he

needs to let go of her and climb out of the pool . . ."

His voice went on, explaining. Jim looked at Susy. She seemed slower than usual in

coming back to consciousness. He found himself wondering what the setting had been on

the transmitter, to have knocked her out so thoroughly. By watching and listening this last

month that he had been working here, he had learned more than a little about how the

transmitter operated. And of course the basic principle behind it had been in his high-

school physics textbook . . .

He became aware that Taub, just above him, had finally got the verbal upper hand and was

launched into that principle as part of the regular explanation he gave to visitors.

*'. . . It's all based," he was saying, "on the Uncertainty Principle stated by Werner

Heisenberg in 1927. This is a fundamental statement in quantum mechanics—"

"I suppose you think I don't understand a word

SPACE WINNERS

you're telling me!" interrupted the visitor's voice. "Well, you're wrong! I had college physics

thirty years ago, before these modern teaching devices were around and we really had to

study. I know the Heisenberg Principle. It says you can tell how fast something's moving, or

where it is—but the more correct you are at telling one thing, the less correct you are about

the other!"

"Er . . . yes," said Taub. "But strictly speaking, the Principle states that it's impossible to

specify or determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of a particle as

accurately as is wished; because the greater the precision is in one, the greater the

inevitable lack of defmiteness is in the other. Based on this Principle, we've evolved what

we call the Theory of No-Time, which says, essentially, that if we have temporal space, or

moment, so small that time does not enter the position-velocity relationship of

Heisenberg's Principle, then in that moment a particle in it becomes ubiquitous—

mathematically, it exists everywhere in the universe at once ..."

Scowling at Susy's slowness to recover, Jim doggedly shoved the shark's body along.

". . . but by so-called 'gap* transmission of electronic pulses," Taub was continuing—

apparently the young physicist was too involved with his visitor to notice what was

happening with Susy, "at extremely high velocity, we find we can produce the impulses. It's

as if you crowded together a series of waves coming in on a beach, with the result that a

wave

Gordon R. Dickson

hollow was produced that went right down to the sand—so that behind the crowd of waves,

there was a little strip of no water at all, moving ashore."

Should he interrupt Taub and call his attention to the way Susy was failing to react?

wondered Jim. Better wait a minute or two and see if she didn't revive naturally, after all.

"This gap we can produce seems to act the way a small segment of our theoretical no-time

should act. During it, the position of a given subatomic particle becomes ubiquitous; and,

theoretically at least, we can control its position when it comes out of no-time so that we

can move it instantaneously from one position to another."

Suddenly Susy twitched and shivered in Jim's arms. He looked at her hopefully.

"So our present problem," wound up Taub, "is to do the same thing with a mass of

particles, to move a sealed vessel and its contents, like a spaceship—or a human being—"

"Then why don't you try a spaceship, instead of wasting your time playing with these

sharks? I should think, young man—"

"Jim!" called another man's voice. "Jim—Taub, where's—oh, there you are, Jim!"

Jim looked up to see Jason Wells approaching the side of the tank. A tall, slim man, he

came up to the edge of the tank past Taub and an enormously fat woman in a green dress—

the visitor, obviously—and squatted down at the edge of the tank.

SPACE WINNERS

"Come here a minute, Jim," he said.

Susy was moving her gills now, even if the rhythm of their movement was somewhat

ragged. Jim let her go and the shark, listing slightly to the right, swam slowly off toward the

far end of the tank. Jim turned and started to slosh over to the side where Jason waited.

There was an unusual touch of color in Jason's normally pale, calm face.

"Jason!" said the visitor. "Where have you been? This young man, Taub, or whatever his

name is—"

"Just a minute, Mrs. Pohock," interrupted Jason without turning his head. "I've got a rather

urgent message for Jim, here. Jim, your father just called."

Jim had just laid his hands on the edge of the tank, ready to hoist himself over. But at these

words, he stopped in surprise.

"My dad called?" he said. "Why?"

"He wants you to come home right away," answered Jason. The unusual color over Jason's

cheekbones seemed to darken and spread. Jim felt a sudden, unreasonable twinge of

alarm.

"What is it?" demanded Jim, quickly hoisting himself out of the tank. He stood up, dripping,

to face the tall laboratory head. "Why does he want me home right away?"

"There's a man from the federal government, from Washington, there to see you," said

Jason. "And . . ." he hesitated, glancing at Taub and the visitor . . . "somebody else."

Gordon R. Dickson

"Somebody else?" Jim stared. "Didn't he say who?"

"Yes." The color was still on Jason's cheekbones, but his voice was calm. "As a matter of

fact, he did. The other . . . person ... is the real reason both of them are there to see you.

The other's an Alien."

He stood looking at Jim without moving, and Jim felt the eyes of Taub and the visitor also

staring at him. Suddenly it seemed to him as if their eyes were the eyes of all the world,

fastened upon him.

"An Alien!" echoed Jim.

Behind Jason, he could see Taub and the woman visitor gazing fixedly at him. In a world

that never stopped thinking about the Aliens—but a world, also, in which few human beings

had ever seen one—the words Jason had just spoken were like a summons to a royal

audience, back in the days of tyrants and kings. There was something different now, Jim

saw, in the faces of the three looking at him. They were watching him as strangely as if he

had suddenly become an Alien himself.

"Well . . ." said Jim, awkwardly, "I guess I better get changed and start home."

"Yes," replied Jason, "you'd better not waste any time." The touches of color were fading

from his

26 Gordon R. Dickson

cheeks, and he was observing Jim now with the coolly speculative look with which he

usually studied the results of test work done by Taub and the others

at the lab.

"I'll give you a call, Taub," said Jim, looking past Jason to the younger physicist, "as soon

as I

know what's up."

"No hurry—when you get the chance," answered Taub hastily; but Jim felt Taub and the

others still watching after him as he turned and hurried off.

Twenty minutes later, dressed, he wheeled from the side road onto the cycleway and

worked his way over to the far left, into the hundred-miles-per-hour-plus lane. Luckily, at

this time of the day the cycleway was not crowded. With the development of electronic

road-safety controls along with the gyrostabilizer, out of the gyrocontrol system that had

been the ruin of Jim's own father, anyone from nine to ninety could safely ride a

motorcycle. This situation, added to the development of the cycleways, with their air-

curtain weather shields, could fill the lanes during the mom-ing and evening rush hours.

Now, however, at nearly midday, the lanes were almost clear. By using the hundred-plus

lane, Jim could be home in fifteen minutes. Wheeling along it, he remembered again how

Jason, Taub, and the visitor had stared at him, and the back of his neck crawled with

embarrassment. Of course they, like everyone else, knew about the tests to pick the Space

Winners—as the news services in the continental

SPACE WINNERS

United States had come to call the three to be chosen from that area. Naturally they had

jumped to the conclusion that this call from Jim's father meant that Jim was one of the

chosen, which was ridiculous, of course.

But Jim felt an unexpected hollowness inside him. What other reason, actually, could there

be for a real, live Alien to be at the Rawlins' home now, waiting for him? For the first time

the fact that he might actually have been chosen became real for Jim.

It couldn't be true that he, of all people—but what if it was?

The hollowness grew worse inside him. Now cut it out, he told himself. Weren't you the one

who kept telling Ward Stuyler there was nothing impossible about being picked?

Sure, answered the hollow feeling inside him. But I didn't really believe it could happen to

me. I never actually thought I'd have to face up to whether I'd go, or not.

But I thought you had all that settled, he argued with himself. Didn't you make up your mind

long ago? You're no Uncle Kevin, to go haring off on some wild deal and mess everybody

up. Haven't you had your plans made for two years, now? Start at the University in the fall

and hang on to your job part-time at Research Three. Six years from now you'll have your

degree, and you can start working for Research Three or some outfit like it. Any good

company will give you time off to get your advanced

28 Gordon R. Dickson

degrees; and ten years from now you ought to be able to get any research job you want,

doing the kind of work you want to do.

AH right, that's still the sensible thing to do, isn't it? He challenged himself, swooping

around one of the breathtaking curves of the cycleway as absent-mindedly as if he were

riding in a bus down a city street. Nothing about the plan's changed, just because some

Alien's seen fit to come calling at the house. Haven't you always told yourself you had to

make up for not being clever like Enid and Terry and the folks by being clear-headed and

sensible? Do you want to be another Kevin and wreck things for people? Well, do you?

No, said the hollow feeling inside him. No. But I never expected to have to make a choice

like this.

Jim wheeled on around the curves of the cycleway, arguing it out with himself in the

brilliant June sunlight. It was crazy to think of going off to some Alien world. His mother

and father would be against it. If he considered going, they would be correct in thinking he

was his Uncle Kevin all over again. But what

was right?

He had told himself until now that people the age of his father and mother had simply been

too old to adjust to the landing of the Aliens. The right way to deal with the Aliens, Jim and

his friends all agreed, was to treat them as a fact of life. To take for granted the fact that

they were there and knew more about some things than humans did—and would not tell us

SPACE WINNERS

until we had a faster-than-light drive. Accept the facts and go ahead and make your own

life.

It was a way that had seemed to work for Jim until an hour ago.

Why did I take the test anyway? Jim thought bleakly. None of us had to, they told us that at

school.

But almost everyone in his high-school graduating class had taken it. The exceptions had

been only the nuts and the oddballs. Kids who claimed to be Neo-Taylorites, wore yellow

robes out of school hours and refused to think about anything unpleasant. And another,

smaller bunch, who wore ancient costumes in their spare time and called themselves

Archaists. These last were a crew who wanted to return to living in the Middle Ages, just as

soon as they had attacked and conquered the whole Alien Federation. Most of the members

of these two cults, that had sprung up since the Alien landing, were adults. But a fair

number were no more than Jim's age.

They were the ones who could not learn to live with the fact of the Aliens' existence in the

way Jim and his friends believed they had learned. Oh, the cultists had lots of seemingly

sound arguments. Even today, crops failed for lack of weather or soil control mat Alien

devices could probably have provided. People died of diseases that Alien medicines almost

undoubtedly could have cured—and that could be hard, to see someone in your family die,

and think that the Aliens could have saved him or her, if they had wanted to do so.

30 Gordon R. Dickson

But the main problem for the Neo-Taylorites and the Archaists was the crushing blow to

their notions of human superiority, which the Aliens had dealt merely by revealing their

existence.

What was the point of trying, asked many people, particularly those the age of Jim's father,

if you knew the best you could do had already been far outdone and that what you might

wear yourself out to invent had already been discovered and put to work elsewhere?

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Itwasalittle,JimRawlinsthoughtatlastonSundaynight,likebeingthefastestgunwestofTombstone.Hehadnolikingforthereputationhehadpickedup,especiallytheselasttwoyears,forbeingstubborn.Hetriedtoduckit.Butsomebodywasalwayscomingaroundtochallengehim.Sundaynight,sittingoutintheRawlinscarport,wrestlingarebuiltbe...

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