“I know,” said Bull in great weariness. “Perhaps antifouling paint can be developed. Or spaceships can be careened, God help us. Oh, yes. All I care about is how we personally get home. I can’t modify our own magnetic generators. I haven’t the parts or the tools, even if I knew precisely how. We’ll spin on and on, the radiation worse every hour, till—”

  “Be quiet!” snapped Langnes.

  “The Chinese turned around, and look what happened to them,” underlined Winge. “We must try something different, however hopeless it too may look.”

  Bull braced his heavy shoulders. “See here, Torvald,” he growled, “what makes you so sure the Chinese did head back under power?”

  “Because they were never seen again. If they had been on the predicted orbit, or even on a completed free-fall ellipse, one of the ships watching for them in the neighborhood of Earth would have—Oh.”

  “Yes,” said Bull through his teeth. “Would have seen them? How do you know they weren’t seen? I think they were. I think they plugged blindly on as they’d been ordered to, and the radiation suddenly started increasing on a steep curve—as you’d expect, when a critical point of fouling up was passed. I think they died, and came back like comets, sealed into spaceships so crusted they looked like ordinary meteorites!”

  The silence thundered.

  “So we may as well turn back,” said Bull at last. “If we don’t make it, our death’ll be a quicker and cleaner one than those poor devils had.”

  Again the quietude. Until Captain Langnes shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, gentlemen. But we go on.”

  “What?” screamed Helledahl.

  The captain floated in the air, a ludicrous parody of officerlike erectness. But there was an odd dignity to him all the same.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I have a family too, you know. I would turn about if it could be done with reasonable safety. But Professor Winge has shown that that is impossible. We would die anyhow—and our ship would be a ruin, a few bits of worn and crumpled metal, all our results gone. If we proceed, we can prepare specimens and keep records which will be of use to our successors. Us they will find, for we can improvise a conspicuous feature on the hull that the barnacles won’t obliterate.”

  He looked from one to another.

  “Shall we do less for our country’s honor than the Chinese did for theirs?” he finished.

  Well, if you put it that way, thought Bull, yes.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Maybe they all thought the same, including Langnes himself, but none was brave enough to admit it. The trouble with us moral cowards, thought Bull, is that we make heroes of ourselves.

  I suppose Marta will shed some pretty, nostalgic tears when she gets the news. Ech! It’s bad enough to croak out here; but if that bluestocking memorializes me with a newspaper poem about my Viking spirit—

  Maybe that’s what we should rig up on the hull, so they won’t ignore this poor barnacled derelict as just another flying boulder Make the Holy Ole into a real, old-fashioned, Gokstad type ship. Dragon figurehead, oars, sail…shields hung along the side…hey, yes! Imagine some smug Russian on an Earth satellite, bragging about how his people were the first into space—and then along comes this Viking ship—

  I think I’ll even paint the shields. A face on each one, with its tongue out and a thumb to its nose—

  Holy hopping Ole!

  “Shields!” roared Bull.

  “What?” said Langnes through the echoes.

  “We’re shielded! We can turn back! Right now!”

  * * *

  When the hubbub had died down and a few slide rule calculations had been made, Bull addressed the others.

  “It’s really quite simple,” he said. “All the elements of the answer were there all the time. I’m only surprised that the Chinese never realized it; but then, I imagine they used all their spare moments for socialist self-criticism.

  “Anyhow, we know our ship is a space barnacle’s paradise. Even our barnacles have barnacles. Why? Because it picks up so much sand and gravel. Now what worried us about heading straight home was not an occasional meteorite big enough to punch clear through the skin of the ship—we’ve patching to take care of that—no, we were afraid of a sandblast wearing the entire hull paper thin. But we’re protected against precisely that danger! The more such little particles that hit us, the more barnacles we’ll have. They can’t be eroded away, because they’re alive. They renew themselves from the very stuff that strikes them. Like a stone in a river, worn away by the current, while the soft moss is always there.

  “We’ll get back out of the Belt before the radiation level builds up to anything serious. Then, if we want to, we can chisel off the encrustation. But why bother, really? We’ll soon be home.”

  “No argument there,” smiled Langnes.

  ‘‘I’ll go check the engines prior to starting up,” said Bull. “Will you and Torvald compute us an Earthward course?”

  He started for the doorway, paused, and added slowly: ‘‘Uh, I kind of hate to say this, but those barnacles are what will really make the Asteroid Belt available to men.”

  “What?” said Helledahl.

  “Sure,” said Bull. “Simple. Naturally, we’ll have to devise protection for the radio, and redesign the radiation screen apparatus, as the skipper remarked. But under proper control, the barnacles make a self-repairing shield against sandblast. It shouldn’t be necessary to go through the Belt on these tedious elliptical orbits. The space miners can take hyperbolic paths, as fast as they choose, in any direction they please.

  “I,” he finished with emphasis, “will not be among them.”

  “Where will you be?” asked Winge.

  But Erik Bull was already headed aft to his work. A snatch of song, bawled from powerful lungs, came back to the others. They all knew English, but it took them a moment to get the drift.

  “ ‘…Who’s that knocking at my door?’ Said the fair young maiden.

  ‘Oh, it’s only me, from over the sea,’

  Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.

  ‘I’ve sailed the seas from shore to shore,

  I’ll never sail the seas no more.

  Now open up this blank-blank door!’

  Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

  To Jack Williamson

  Judge this: the gathering of dreams that grew

  Across the span of half a century,

  Called out of space and time by one who knew—

  Knew well, and knows—what miracles must be

  Where stars and stars hold back the outer night

  In radiance, begetting worlds and souls.

  Longed has his vision raised beyond our sight,

  Light-years, to find adventures, hopes and goals.

  Imagination likewise dares the deeps

  And danger of our future and our past,

  Man’s fate; and if man laughs or shouts or weeps,

  Still in these tales we see ourselves at last.

  On Earth, from which the questing ships depart,

  No bard among us bears a higher heart.

  Time Heals

  Hart followed the doctor down a long corridor where they were the only two in sight and their footsteps had a hollow echo. The fluorescent lights were almost pitilessly bright, and the hall was silent. Silent and empty as—death? No, as the Crypt at its end, as timelessness.

  Hart’s lips were dry, his throat felt tight, and his heart beat with a rapid violence that dinned faintly in his ears. He was frightened. Why not admit it? The feeling was utterly illogical, but he was scared silly.

  He asked inanely, as if he and all the rest of the world didn’t know, “There won’t be any sensation at all?”

  “None,” replied the doctor with a patience suggesting he had led many down this hallway. “You’ll stand on a plate between the field coils, I’ll throw the main switch and—as far as you’re concerned—you’ll be in the future. Time simply does not exist, as a ‘flow’ at any rate, in a level-entropy field.”

  Hart licked his lips. “It’s like dying,” he said.

  The doctor nodded. “In a way, it is death,” he replied. “You’ll be leaving everything behind you—family, friends, the whole world in which you have lived. You can’t go back. When you’re released from the field—ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years hence maybe—you’ll be irrevocably in the future.” He shrugged. “But, of course, you’ll live, whereas your only choice in this era is death.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Hart. ‘‘I’m nervous sure but I’m not scared. I have every confidence in your machine. It’s just that I never did understand the principles of it, and of course one is naturally skittish in the face of the unknown.”

  “It’s very simple,” said the doctor. “The newspapers have, as usual, made a horrible mess of trying to explain it to the public, and all the legal and moral argument it’s stirred up have further confused the issue. But the scientific basis is very simple indeed.” He adopted a lecturing tone: “Time, of course, is a fourth dimension in a more or less rigid continuum—that’s putting it very crudely, of course, but it shows that simple relativity gives no reason why time should flow, or if it flows, why it should do so in one direction only. That difficulty was resolved by suggesting that the increase of time was the general increase of entropy throughout the universe with respect to the ‘rigid’ time dimension. Again, that’s a clumsy way of putting it, but you get my general idea. I don’t pretend to understand the details of it myself.

  “Anyway, just a couple of years ago, in 1950 I believe, Seaton found an effect, a field, in which entropy was held level. An object in such a field could not experience any time flow—for it, time would not exist. The generation of such a field turned out to be fairly simple once the basic principles were discovered, so that before long we had the Crypt.”

  Hart nodded—although he didn’t understand it even now. Science had bored him; he regarded himself as a natural-born aesthete and observer of man, a pursuit which a medium-sized independent income made possible. He wrote a little, painted a little, played the piano a little, went to all the exhibitions and concerts, chose his friends and occasional mistresses primarily on a basis of conversational ability, and in general had a pretty good time.

  The fundamental idea of the Crypt was hardly new to him. He had read the old legends—the Seven Sleepers, the tales of Herla, Frederik Barbarossa, and Holger Danske—of men for whom time had stopped until the remote future date when they awoke. Only last night, his last night in this world, he had played the whole Tannhäuser in an orgy of sentimentality.

  There was always a catch. But he had very little to lose. A cancer which had metastasized to the lymph glands meant a short and unpleasant life, perhaps prolonged by operations hopelessly carving away more and more of his flesh—better to take some poison and go out like a gentleman.

  Or, better yet, go into the future when they would have worked out some sure and easy cure for his sickness. And perhaps, he thought, a cure for the political cancers which ate at his own society, a cure for war and poverty and misery. Utopia was not inherently unattainable, to a close approximation anyway…For a moment he was almost looking forward to the adventure, but the tightness and the heavy pulse wouldn’t leave him. He liked his present existence, and the future would have to be pretty good to make up for his present.

  Though I’m lucky, he thought. I have no really close ties, none who’ll really miss me or whom I can’t live without. And I have a high I.Q. and adaptability, I can get along with almost anybody. I won’t suffer.

  He asked, “Are there any people besides those with diseases at present incurable going into the Crypt?”

  “No,” answered the doctor, “except, of course, husbands and wives who wish to accompany their sick spouses, and a few other special cases like that. We just don’t have room for any more.

  “Naturally,” he went on, “we’re swamped with applications from people who want to escape the tribulations of the present for a presumably happier future. But those we ignore. There’s been talk of developing level-entropy units which can be used for everyday purposes like preserving food or other perishables, or even in the household. Imagine cooking a chicken dinner, putting it in the field, and taking it out piping hot whenever needed, maybe twenty years hence! But the manufacturers are very careful about releasing stasis generators, precisely because too many people would try to take a one-way ride into tomorrow. What would become of the present—and would the future want our neurotic escapists?

  “Several state legislatures have already tried to regulate the use of the Seaton effect, and Congress is arguing about a Federal law. Meanwhile, the Crypt staff uses it simply to save lives which are lost to the present anyway.”

  “If you can be sure they are saved—” murmured Hart. “Of course, we can give no hundred-percent guarantee,” said the doctor with elaborate patience, “but I think it’s a very safe bet. The Crypt is in an underground vault well away from any area which might be presumable atomic-bomb targets. Not that even an atom bomb could penetrate a stasis field. Once the fields are set up, they’re self-maintaining until neutralized from outside. Information about the Crypt is diffused throughout the world by now, even if something should happen to the permanent staff, which is unlikely. Whenever a cure for a specific disease is found, we will consult our records and release those suffering from it.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Hart. “But what kind of future—?”

  “Who knows?” The doctor shrugged. “But I don’t think it will be too hard to adjust. I rather imagine that a smart Roman or Elizabethan Englishman, say, could do very well for himself in the present. Besides, at the rate medical science is advancing, I don’t think anyone will be in here longer than fifty or a hundred years.”

  “And making a living—”

  “You invested all your money as safely as possible before coming here, didn’t you? You’ll still have it when you awake, then, or the equivalent of it if they change the fiscal system. The Crypt staff will see to that if it isn’t taken care of automatically. You’ll also have quite a bit of accumulated interest.”

  Hart nodded his sleek dark head. “It seems as sound a proposition as human ingenuity can make it,” he said. He added wryly, “Anyway, there’s no point in quibbling, not when the old man with the scythe is so close.”

  “Quite so,” said the doctor.

  They came to the end of the passage, where a great vault door sealed off the Crypt itself. The doctor worked the multiple combination lock, remarking idly, “Even if this whole place should be destroyed, the sleepers would be safe. Literally nothing from outside except a neutralizing field can penetrate the stasis. You could be buried under ten tons of earth without its making any difference—till they dug you out and opened your field.”

  “There are things worse than death,” muttered Hart, and then added quickly, “but hardly worse than death by cancer.”

  “Quite.” The doctor started the little motor which opened the huge door. “In a way,” he said, “I envy you. You’ll wake up rich, in a society which is better than ours—it must be, it couldn’t be much worse—and has all the great new adventures we’re just beginning to glimpse—the planets, the stars…” He shrugged. “I may see you again, of course. They’re working hard on the cancer problem right now. But I’ll be a pretty old man then.”

  Hart nodded. “Benjamin Franklin once said he wished that, after he was dead, somebody would wake him every hundred years and tell him what happened. I see his point.”

  They entered the Crypt. The room was a huge one, cold in steel and concrete and the white fluorescent lighting. There was little about to suggest the sensation it was arousing in the outer world. It looked much like a burial vault—a sinister thought, that, and one which Hart did his best to abolish—with its long row on row of steel caskets sliding into the walls. Each box, Hart noticed, had a complete case history engraved on its end.

  The doctor followed his eye. “Those supplement our other records, in case they get lost,” he said. “The future physicians can read directly what is the matter with each patient. And just in case something should happen to the Crypt itself, everyone takes another case history into stasis with him, like the one you’re carrying now. So if it should become necessary, if nothing else survived, you could always be ‘wakened’ for the sole purpose of reexamination. But all those precautions are more for the benefit of worriers than because we think they’ll ever be needed.”

  “The patients are actually in those—coffins?”

  “Yes. The Seaton generator throws an almost cubical field about the subject. You’ve seen pictures or movies of it—a totally reflecting region, six or seven feet on a side. This field is, as I said, inherently self-maintaining. I heard Seaton himself lecture once, and he said something like the field requiring finite time in which to break down—only there is no time in it. Anyway, we find it most convenient to store those, uh, blocks of frozen time in the vaults you see.”

  Hart licked his lips again. He had always had a touch of necrophobia, and his hands were damp and cold now. To be frozen in time like a fish in a chunk of ice; and stowed away in a steel box for no one knew how long…He had a morbid desire to see his own coffin, but did not indulge it. That would not have fitted the picture he had of himself, which was somewhere between Epicure and Stoic.

  They came into a smaller room at the end of the Crypt. It was crowded with apparatus which was meaningless to Hart. A couple of technicians stood by, smoking and talking and most infernally casual about it all.

  “Well,” said the doctor, a little awkwardly, “I guess this is it. Are you sure you don’t want to leave any farewell messages or—?”

  “No,” said Hart. “I hate good-byes. I’ve said mine, and don’t want that railway-platform waiting at the end. Let’s get it over with.”