He fell still again. A relay clicked, a ventilator mumbled, the barren moon swelled in the viewscreen.

  “Wait!” Urban half rose. He had gone quite pale. “You mean…the FTL field changes the laws of nature?”

  “Yes. You told me it does.” Eide began to wake up a little. He fumbled in a pocket for his torchie, and was awkward about getting his pipe lit. When at length he had the fire going, he smoked very hard, trying to warm the bowl. It would comfort his cold hands.

  “With changed natural constants,” he said, “with different laws of chemical interaction, the DNA code has to be different. It’s affected far more than energy considerations alone would suggest. New enzymes are produced, to catalyze new reactions that the body isn’t meant for; syntheses that it desperately needs don’t take place. A unicellular organism dies almost at once. A multicellular one, having some reserves, can live for a while. Not long.”

  “But cold sleep should prevent that!” Urban protested wildly.

  “No,” Eide replied. Full consciousness was returning to him, with a sense of ultimate weariness. “You are still thinking just about the chemistry. But don’t you see, the chemical changes, the strange compounds Job found, they are an epiphenomenon. What was really changed is the whole meaning of the genetic code. Imagine. A set of amino acids is about to be assembled. The FTL field comes on. Now that set no longer can be made; but a different one, useless or poisonous, can be. Even under cold sleep, even at absolute zero, there is intramolecular activity, which sets the stage for the same thing to happen as soon as chemistry starts up again. The time in warped space required for this to be lethal turns out to be less than sixty seconds. Probably much less. You can’t disrupt a process meant to be continuous, and then expect it to go ahead in the usual way as if nothing had happened.”

  He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, and faced them head on. “No matter what you do,” he said, “men will never ride one of your starships.”

  The stillness waxed until Eide’s pipe began to burble. He blew into the mouthpiece, hoping to stop the cricket noise. His body felt heavy, as if already he had returned to Earth.

  “That—” Villiers wet his lips. “I say, that’s rather jumping to conclusions, isn’t it?”

  Job’s voice said from the verandah speaker: “The hypothesis fits all my data thus far, and does not contradict any now being gathered. I assign it a high probability of being correct.”

  “But…never to go out there—” Urban whispered.

  Villiers knotted his fists. “We can send mobile robots, at least,” he said. “The tandem brain system. That would work.”

  “It would,” said Job with a sound of triumph.

  ELEMENTARY MISTAKE

  Hello, Bellegarde! Hello, Earth. Hello, Universe. And to hell with you.

  Lind speaking. Squeaking. Reeking. Billy Lind. No, ’s not dignified enough. Kin’ly call me th’ late William J. Lind, sometime of West Newton, Chassamusetts, U.S.A., World Federation, planet Earth, star Sol, Milky Way galaxy…Does every schoolboy write that kin’a ’dress on his books? Not that I’m a schoolboy now. Wish I was…were?…yes, subjunctive, were. Ay-llow me t’ in’erduce m’self. William J. Lind, officer and putative gentleman of the Space Service, Pioneer Division, electronician aboard Widsith, seated at our primary transmitter on the planet they named, in the best romantic tradition, Guinevere—you should hear what we call it—with a lot of big ugly mountains staring over my shoulder and making rude remarks.

  Nope, wrong verb form again. I was sitting here. A thing we might’s well call a bird was flopping above the mast, in a purplish sky. It had long sweptback wings, sort o’ like our aircraft, and they glinted reddish green. Sun did that, big orange disk, and it tinted the clouds gold, and the snows on the peaks around this here now valley where we’re parked. (See, if I watch my tongue, I can still pronounce words good, but believe me, ’s not easy to watch your own tongue without a mirror.) The shadows were bluish red, too. But the smoke from yonder volcano, black, black…Where was I? Oh, yes. The proper grammar. Past tense. You won’t hear me for nigh on five years. By then I’ll be, all ten of us’ll be one with the beers of yesteryear.

  So fly up, little maser beam. Compute, little computer. Keep me locked onto that relay satellite. It’ll buck my words on to Bellegarde. Won’t it? Sure it will. It passed on the information that got us into this mess in the first place, didn’t it? Mean to say, look here, you smug idiots on Bellegarde, on Durindal, on Frodo, on every planet the human race has reached so far—whoa, there, Lind. Save words. The satellite’ll be under the horizon pretty soon. Minimize redundancy. Neologize. So: look here, you smidiots, I’m gonna ’splain’a you jus’ wha’ y’ done t’ us. An’ you’ll hafta sit’n listen. How y’ gonna discipline me, then? Ha?

  I…Shall…Speak…Carefully.

  Widsith. Spaceship. Null-null drive. Affect everything simultaneous. Push you up fast, just under speed of light, no acceleration pressure to worry about, good old-time dilation makes a five light-year hop go by in a couple of months. And meanwhile that lovely, lovely pay accumulating back at home. Good, no? No. Remember the power consumption. Think, just compute out, how many megawatts per ton you need. Stray radiation means heavy shielding, too, in a power factor of the power. And then, coasting across space? Uh-uh! Space is just full of hydrogen. One atom per cubic centimeter. At a speed of c, figure out the resistance. Figure out, also, what power you have to spend to keep those atoms at arm’s length. A long, hairy, tattooed arm. Else the radiation from them will fry your aspidistra. Ergo, you need lots of ergs to go. All engine, no comfort. Most certainly no extra isotopes for fueling a return trip, nor any gear for making ’em at the other end. Not when you’re carrying a mattercaster.

  Nice mattercaster. Good, friendly, obliging mattercaster. Set one up. Tune it. Step through the gate. Step out the other end, whatever other end has a receiver you’re tuned for, Bellegarde, Earth, Hell. No transition time. Not whatsoever. One hyperphase step across the galaxy. The universe is ours. ’Course, you do have to erect your gadget first. No transmitter, no reception, right? And the gadget does have to have a strong gravitational field to work. Got to be on a planet.

  So. From an advance base, as it might be Bellegarde, you send your roboprobes to the next likely-looking stars. They find the least horrible planet in the system. Take orbit. Maser back data. Mass, magnetic field, temperature, spectra, everything except what we really needed to know. Load up Widsith. Minimum ’caster. Minimum everything. All we have to do is get there; land; make a foundation and frame out of local materials; assemble our unit; walk back to Bellegarde and report. Then the parts for a big, industrial-type caster can get sent through—direct from Earth, if you want. So can men. So can any equipment they need, including women. No sweat. ’Nother planet conquered. Hurray.

  Hurray for us, ’spesh’lly. ’Stronomers on Bellegarde analyzed this here now sun we’re under, they did. Variant composition. Cosmic abundances just a statistical concept. Actual composition can vary like crazy. Look at the R Peculiar stars, f’r example. Or look at this one. High concentration Group Eight metals, platinum, palladium. Catalysts. (A catalyst is the gait of a drunken feline.) Looks like plenty silver, too.

  Like mother, like daughter. Planets oughta be loaded with these here now metals. Send roboprobe. Yep, planets, all right, all right. One of ’em even habitable. Earth size, Earth temperature, water oceans, oxynitro air, life, no sign of natives but reflection spectra show protein-based life. Given a li’l chemical apparatus, we could eat it. Not a full diet, but a dietary supplement, anyhow. Good. Ideal. Send Widsith off. Captain Ahmad Akbik, mattercaster engineer Miguel Ocampo, electronician William J. Lind…

  Has my recital insulted you enough? Hope so. You killed me, you know. I am, I was sitting here in a valley grown over with spongy brownish-green plants. There’re trees, of a sort, growing up the mountainsides. Above timberline, the rocks have funny colors, mostly bluish; they’re not like any rocks I ever saw before. On the volcano cone, below the snowcap, I do rec’nize black lava and yellow sulfur. The air stinks. It’s cool and damp and smells like old cigar butts. Or something. I’m breathing the air. And I’m drunk. Nearest liquor five light-years away, and I’m drunk. Funny? Merciful? Well, I can tell you what kind of gesture the hand of Providence is making at me. In fact, I will tell you—

  No, here comes somebody, airsuited to the ears. He looks mad. Guess they heard me, over yonder in the ship. We got a hookup. I was out here to test the air. Chemical and biological tests said O.K., said the stink’s just from the plants and harmless, but you never know. We gotta just breathe the air or we’re done for. You see—Hell, with it. We’re done for. How do you do, Captain Ahmad Akbik, sir? Shall we dance?

  Until the holds were unloaded, the bunkroom was the sole place aboard where all ten men could be simultaneously, and then only if they planned each move in advance. Sleeping, of course, was done in relays. They crowded knee to knee on the four bunks, hunched beneath the low overhead, and stared into each other’s face.

  The captain would have liked to offer a prayer, when God seemed to be their last remaining friend, but Mecca was probably in a ridiculous direction. “How are you now, Fulgosi?” he asked.

  “Quite well,” the mineralogist said. “No after-effects. To be sure, I didn’t become intoxicated like Lind—”

  “Hey!” The electronician blushed.

  “Don’t be so sensitive about that,” said the biochemist, Riese. “Not your fault. You merely showed a certain reaction, idiosyncratic but not unheard-of, to anesthesia.”

  “Anesthesia?” Lind frowned.

  “Sure, what else?” Fulgosi said. “When I tried breathing that stuff, I got too drowsy and thick-headed to think. Would’ve passed out before long if you hadn’t brought me back inside the ship. So what’s the cause, Riese?”

  “I don’t know,” said the biochemist slowly.

  “What?” Akbik exclaimed. “But you must! You’ve run a complete atmospheric analysis, haven’t you?” In the week since Widsith landed, each man had had so much preliminary work to do in his particular specialty that this was their first real chance to compare notes.

  “Yes, sir. I found nothing significant that the roboprobe hadn’t already reported. The air has a rather high proportion of noble gases, but otherwise it’s quite Earthlike.”

  Lind gagged. “Earthlike, you call those stenches?”

  “Yes, what about them?” Ocampo asked. “By-products of a different biochemistry from ours. Couldn’t something, in trace amounts, have an anesthetic effect on the human nervous system?”

  “I don’t know,” Riese admitted. “For heaven’s sake, my brain doesn’t have infinite storage capacity. And the reference works we could take with us, even in microspool form, are so limited. Surgical anesthesia has been entirely electronic for the past two centuries or more. Who could have foreseen any need for information about the chemical kind?”

  “Could some kind of germ be responsible?” Akbik wondered.

  “No, sir, that’s one possibility I swear we can rule out. No native life form can eat us for much the same reason that we can’t eat it. The selenium and fluorine concentrations in the body of this planet are so high that they have become integral to the metabolism of everything.”

  “How can you sit here,” the cyberneticist Pereira objected, “having barely seen a little of one valley, and talk about the entire planet?”

  Riese shrugged. “If my computer doesn’t lie,” he said, “it’s traced out the fundamental cellular energy cycle. And that will not vary. Not unless the well-founded idea is totally wrong, that all life on a given world derives from the materials available there in the beginning. Our kind of organism uses—oh, hydrogen bonding, and phosphorus in ATP. Life here uses fluorine and selenium in its equivalents. I don’t need a large sample to prove that. So—every Guineverean plant or animal is violently poisonous to us because of those elements. But by the same token, the phosphorus and iron in our bodies makes us just as poisonous to them.”

  “And this cuts our time even shorter,” the geologist Deschamps said unnecessarily.

  “I wonder how you’d taste, sautéed in lubricant,” Lind murmured.

  “Stop that!” Akbik said.

  “Why, is man forbidden food?”

  “Not explicitly,” grinned the chemosynthesist Nussbaum. “However, since man does not divide the hoof or chew the cud—”

  “You’re hopeless,” Akbik said.

  “I’m afraid that’s correct,” Lind said. Observing that the captain was in no mood to continue playing straight man, he hastily grew serious. “Sir, do we have to breathe that stink anyway? I mean, we can keep on wearing airsuits outdoors, and recharge their bottles from the ship’s oxy renewal plant.”

  “Unless we have to dismantle her,” Akbik said.

  They stared at each other, ten men alone in unknownness. The silence and the metal shell around them seemed to press inward.

  Widsith was a shining tower, tall in the valley. Lind looked up her hull, and up, and up, and reflected what a fraud the damned object was. Enormous fuel tanks: empty. Engines, therefore, useless, aside from the auxiliary generator. Holds: big, yes, but barely able to contain the equipment necessary to establish a minimal space gate. As a result: living quarters, life support systems, rations, personal gear, cut to the bone.

  And now, it turned out, Guinevere wasn’t going to furnish any supplements. No food, no air—”

  “And the ship’s not any cornucopia, either,” Lind said.

  “Beg pardon?” Tao-Chi Huang, the chief mechanic, glanced from the robotractor he was assembling.

  “Oh. I was thinking out loud,” Lind said. “The hull’s nothing but light metals, aluminum, magnesium, beryllium alloys. And those we can get right out of this planet. What we’ve got to have, that the planet doesn’t seem to have, is iron.”

  “What for? Structural members?”

  “Well, that was the original idea. Maybe we can use something else there. But we cannot replace iron—quite a bit of very pure iron—in things like the transformers and magnetic cores of the mattercaster circuits. Not without redesigning the entire system, which would take a special R&D team several years. We are not an R&D team, and we do not have several years.”

  “I know Gilruth hasn’t found any native iron yet,” Tao-Chi said. “But there must be some in the planet!”

  “So we assumed, before we arrived here. And, actually, I imagine there is some. Down in the core, if nowhere else. Bloated lot of good that does us. What we need is a workable deposit not too far underground. And we haven’t the time or the resources to scour an entire world searching for ore.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Tao-Chi started to rub his chin thoughtfully, but his faceplate got in the way. “Maybe our trouble is due to a lack of ferric-reducing bacteria.”

  “Maybe. Though wouldn’t you still get oxide in the soil? I think likelier the iron shortage is just another aspect of the weird element-abundance situation here.” Lind shrugged in his airsuit. “If we don’t find any, damn soon, we’ll have to cannibalize for it—like maybe your construction equipment.”

  “That will be needed up to the last minute,” Tao-Chi protested, “and in any event, it’s mostly light alloys, too. Besides, if you did take what steel parts there are, I doubt if you could purify the iron out of modern aligned-crystal materials with anything less than a gaseous diffusion plant.”

  “Which is too much for us to build. Well, so we’ll have to steal from the ship. Take out its transformers and such. We can do that, of course. But, the ship is an integrated system. If we remove a vital unit from, say, the engine, then the oxy renewal plant will also stop working.”

  “I know. So Joe Riese had jolly well better find a way to make the local air breathable. Right?”

  “Right. He’s working on it. Me, I got business in the shack.”

  Burdened and uncomfortable in survival gear, Lind’s slender form walked on down the valley. Passing the maser mast where he had disgraced himself, he winced. Damn Guinevere! Damn the astronomers, and their bland assumption that every kind of atom would be available here even if the percentages varied. Damn his own foolishness in signing on for the expedition. At best, he’d come back to a list of female vidiphone numbers five years obsolete. At worst…what good was money to a skeleton? Even if the skeleton’s owner had died drunk.

  A stream burbled along the path. It supplied water and waste removal to the gate construction site, and thus had lost its pristine freshness. Serve it right, Lind, thought viciously. He proceeded to a wide plot which had been cleared of topsoil and was now being leveled. Dust smoked in the orange sunlight, up from a bulldozer which snorted back and forth. That was an automaton, as was nearly every machine. Under no circumstances could ten men’s muscles do the brute labor of establishing a base on an uncharted planet: Nor could ten men’s brains do the innumerable necessary analyses of data and material samples. Humans were here to look at the instruments, program the robots, read the computer printouts, make the decisions, and perform the finer tasks of installation and adjustment as the mattercaster assembly grew.

  Nice theory. Trouble was, Guinevere didn’t provide the stuff needed to make the theory work.

  Lind entered a prefab which squatted ugly at the field’s edge. Sunlight through begrimed windows glittered red-gold off a clutter of apparatus. Ocampo and Fulgosi were turning away from a bulk that Lind identified as a furnace with attached spectroscope, pyrometer, and assorted things to which he could not put a name. Technology, he thought, had made technologists too blooming specialized.

  “No.” Fulgosi’s helmet speaker needed some adjustment, Lind heard. What the mineralogist must have intended as a sigh emerged as a whistle. “This sample has essentially the same composition as the last. Nothing is different except the hydration and a few impurities.”

  “But we must have calcium minerals!” Ocampo exclaimed.