BY THE BOOK

Frank Herbert

You will take your work seriously. Infinite numbers of yet-unborn humankind depend upon you who keep open the communications lines through negative space. Let the angle-transmission networks fail and Man will fail.

“You and the Haigh Company” (Employees Handbook)

He was too old for this kind of work even if his name was Ivar Norris Gump, admittedly the best troubleshooter in the company’s nine-hundred-year history. If it’d been anyone but his old friend Poss Washington calling for help, there’d have been a polite refusal signed “Ing.” Semi-retirement gave a troubleshooter the right to turn down dangerous assignments.

Now, after three hours on duty in a full vac suit within a Skoarnoff tube’s blank darkness, Ing ached with tiredness. It impaired his mental clarity and his ability to survive and he knew it.

You will take your work seriously at all times, he thought. Axiom: A troubleshooter shall not get into trouble.

Ing shook his head at the handbook’s educated ignorance, took a deep breath and tried to relax. Right now he should be back home on Mars, his only concerns the routine maintenance of the Phobos Relay and an occasional lecture to new ‘shooters.

Damn that Poss, he thought.

The big trouble was in here, though—in the tube, and six good men had died trying to find it. They were six men he had helped train—and that was another reason he had come. They were all caught up in the same dream.

Around Ing stretched an airless tubular cave twelve kilometers long, two kilometers diameter. It was a lightless hole carved through lava rock beneath the moon’s Mare Nectaris. Here was the home of the “Beam”—the beautiful, deadly, vitally serious beam, a tamed violence which suddenly had become balky.

Ing thought of all the history which had gone into this tube. Some nine hundred years ago the Seedling Compact had been signed. In addition to its Solar System Communications duties, the Haigh Company had taken over then the sending out of small containers, their size severely limited by the mass an angtrans pulse could push. Each container held twenty female rabbits. In the rabbit uteri, dormant, their metabolism almost at a standstill, lay two hundred human embryos nestled with embryos of cattle, all the domestic stock needed to start a new human economy. With the rabbits went plant seeds, insect eggs and design tapes for tools.

The containers were rigged to fold out on a planet’s surface to provide a shielded living area. There the embryos would be machine-transferred into inflatable gestation vats, brought to full term, cared for and educated by mechanicals until the human seed could fend for itself.

Each container had been pushed to trans-light speed by angtrans pulses—“Like pumping a common garden swing,” said the popular literature. The life mechanism was controlled by signals transmitted through the “Beam” whose tiny impulses went “around the corner” to bridge in milliseconds distances which took matter centuries to traverse.

Ing glanced up at the miniature beam sealed behind its quartz window in his suit. There was the hope and the frustration. If they could only put a little beam such as that in each container, the big beam could home on it. But under that harsh bombardment, beam anodes lasted no longer than a month. They made-do with reflection plates on the containers, then, with beam-bounce and programmed approximations. And somewhere the programmed approximations were breaking down.

Now, with the first Seedling Compact vessel about to land on Theta Apus IV, with mankind’s interest raised to fever pitch—beam contact had turned unreliable. The farther out the container, the worse the contact.

Ing could feel himself being drawn toward that frail cargo out there. His instincts were in communion with those containers which would drift into limbo unless the beam was brought under control. The embryos would surely die eventually and the dream would die with them.

Much of humanity feared the containers had fallen into the hands of alien life, that the human embryos were being taken over by something out there. Panic ruled in some quarters and there were shouts that the SC containers betrayed enough human secrets to make the entire race vulnerable.

To Ing and the six before him, the locus of the problem seemed obvious. It lay in here and in the anomaly math newly derived }o explain how the beam might be deflected from the containers. What to do about that appeared equally obvious. But six men had died following that obvious course. They had died here in this utter blackness.

Sometimes it helped to quote the book.

Often you didn’t know what you hunted here—a bit of stray radiation perhaps, a few cosmic rays that had penetrated a weak spot in the force-baffle shielding, a dust leak caused by a moonquake, or a touch of heat, a hot spot coming up from the depths. The big beam wouldn’t tolerate much interference. Put a pinhead flake of dust in its path at the wrong moment, let a tiny flicker of light intersect it, and it went whiplash wild. It writhed like a giant snake, tore whole sections off the tube walls. Beam auroras danced in the sky above the moon then and the human attendants scurried.

A troubleshooter at the wrong spot in the tube died.

Ing pulled his hands into his suit’s barrel top, adjusted his own tiny beam scope, the unit that linked him through a short reach of angspace to beam control. He checked his instruments, read his position from the modulated contact ripple through the soles of his shielded suit.

He wondered what his daughter, Lisa, was doing about now. Probably getting the boys, his grandsons, ready for the slotride to school. It made Ing feel suddenly old to think that one of his grandsons already was in Mars Polytechnic aiming for a Haigh Company career in the footsteps of his famous grandfather.

The vac suit was hot and smelly around Ing after a three-hour tour. He noted from a dial that his canned-cold temperature balance system still had an hour and ten minutes before red-line.

It’s the cleaners, Ing told himself. It has to be the vacuum cleaners. It’s the old familiar cussedness of inanimate objects.

What did the handbook say? “Frequently it pays to look first for the characteristics of devices in use which may be such that an essential pragmatic approach offers the best chance for success. It often is possible to solve an accident or malfunction problem with straightforward and uncomplicated approaches, deliberately ignoring their more subtle aspects.

He slipped his hands back into his suit’s arms, shielded his particle counter with an armored hand, cracked open the cover, peered in at the luminous dial. Immediately, an angry voice crackled in the speakers:

“Douse that light! We’re beaming!”

Ing snapped the lid closed by reflex, said: “I’m in the backboard shadow. Can’t see the beam.” Then: “Why wasn’t I told you’re beaming?”

Another voice rumbled from the speakers: “It’s Poss here, Ing. I’m monitoring your position by sono, told them to go ahead without disturbing you.”

“What’s the supetrans doing monitoring a troubleshooter?” Ing asked.

. “All right, Ing.”

Ing chuckled, then: “What’re you doing, testing?”

“Yes. We’ve an inner-space transport to beam down on Titan, thought we’d run it from here.”

“Did I foul the beam?”

“We’re still tracking clean.”

Inner-space transmission open and reliable, Ing thought, but the long reach out to the stars was muddied. Maybe the scare mongers were right. Maybe it was outside interference, an alien intelligence.

“We’ve lost two cleaners on this transmission,” Washington said. “Any sign of them?”

“Negative.”

They’d lost two cleaners on the transmission, Ing thought. That was getting to be routine. The flitting vacuum cleaners—supported by the beam’s field, patrolling its length for the slightest trace of interference, had to be replaced at the rate of about a hundred a year normally, but the rate had been going up. As the beam grew bigger, unleashed more power for the long reach, the cleaners proved less and less effective at dodging the angtrans throw, the controlled whiplash. No part of a cleaner survived contact with the beam. They were energy-charged in phase with the beam, keyed for instant dissolution to add their energy to the transmission.

“It’s the damned cleaners,” Ing said.

“That’s what you all keep saying,” Washington said.

Ing began prowling to his right. Somewhere off there the glassite floor curved gradually upward and became a wall—and then a ceiling. But the opposite side was always two kilometers away, and the moon’s gravity, light as that was, imposed limits on how far he could walk up the wall. It wasn’t like the little Phobos beam where they could use a low-power magnafield outside and walk right around the tube.

He wondered then if he was going to insist on riding one of the cleaners… the way the six others had done.

Ing’s shuffling, cautious footsteps brought him out of the anode backboard’s shadow. He turned, saw a pencil line of glowing purple stretching away from him to the cathode twelve kilometers distant. He knew there actually was no purple glow, that what he saw was a visual simulation created on the one-way surface of his faceplate, a reaction to the beam’s presence displayed there for his benefit alone.

Washington’s voice in his speaker said: “Sono has you in Zone Yellow. Take it easy, Ing.”

Ing altered course to the right, studied the beam.

Intermittent breaks in the purple line betrayed the presence between himself and that lambent energy of the robot vacuum cleaners policing the perimeter, hanging on the sine lines of the beam field like porpoises gamboling on a bow wave.

“Transport’s down,” Washington said. “We’re phasing into a long-throw test. Ten-minute program.”

Ing nodded to himself, imagined Washington sitting there in the armored bubble of the control room, a giant, with a brooding face, eyes alert and glittering. ,Old Poss didn’t want to believe it was the cleaners, that was sure. If it was the cleaners, someone was going to have to ride the wild goose. There’d be more deaths… more rides… until they tested out the new theory. It certainly was a helluva time for someone to come up with an anomaly hole in the angtrans math. But that’s what someone back at one of the trans-time computers on Earth had done… and if he was right—then the problem had to be the cleaners.

Ing studied the shadow breaks in the beam—robotic torpedoes, sensor-trained to collect the tiniest debris. One of the shadows suddenly reached away from him in both directions until the entire beam was hidden. A cleaner was approaching him. Ing waited for it to identify the Authorized Intruder markings which it could see the same way he saw the beam.

The beam reappeared.

“Cleaner just looked you over,” Washington said. “You’re getting in pretty close.”

Ing heard the worry in his friend’s voice, said: “I’m all right long’s I stay up here close to the board.”

He tried to picture in his mind then the cleaner lifting over him and returning to its station along the beam.

“I’m plotting you against the beam,” Washington said. “Your shadow width says you’re approaching Zone Red. Don’t crowd it, Ing. I’d rather not have to clean a fried troubleshooter out of there.”

“Hate to put you to all that extra work,” Ing said.

“Give yourself plenty of ‘lash room.”

“I’m miking the beam thickness against my helmet cross-hairs, Poss. Relax.”

Ing advanced another two steps, sent his gaze traversing the beam’s length, seeking the beginnings of the controlled whiplash which would throw the test message into angspace. The chained energy of the purple rope began to bend near its center far down the tube. It was an action visible only as a gentle flickering outward against the cross-hairs of his faceplate.

He backed off four steps. The throw was a chancy thing when you were this close—and if interfering radiation ever touched that beam…

Ing crouched, sighted along the beam, waited for the throw. An experienced troubleshooter could tell more from the way the beam whipped than banks of instruments could reveal. Did it push out a double bow? Look for faulty field focus. Did it waver up and down? Possible misalignment of vertical hold. Did it split or spread into two loops? Synchronization problem.

But you had to be in here close and alert to that fractional margin between good seeing and goodnight! forever.

Cleaners began paying more attention to him in this close, but he planted himself with his Al markings visible to them, allowing them to fix his position and go on about their business.

To Ing’s trained eye, the cleaner action appeared more intense, faster than normal. That agreed with all the previous reports—unless a perimeter gap had admitted stray foreign particles, or perhaps tiny shades dislodged from the tube’s walls by the pulse of the moon’s own life.

Ing wondered then if there could be an overlooked hole in the fanatic quadruple-lock controls giving access to the tube. But they’d been sniffing along that line since the first sign of trouble. Not likely a hole would’ve escaped the inspectors. No—it was in here. And cleaner action was increased, a definite lift in tempo.

“Program condition?” Ing asked.

“Transmission’s still Whorf positive, but we haven’t found an angspace opening yet.”

“Time?”

“Eight minutes to program termination.”

“Cleaner action’s way up,” Ing said. “What’s the dirt count?”

A pause, then: “Normal.”

Ing shook his head. The monitor that kept constant count of the quantity of debris picked up by the cleaners shouldn’t show normal in the face of this much activity.

“What’s the word from Mare Nubium transmitter?” Ing asked.

“Still shut down and full of inspection equipment. Nothing to show for it at last report.”

“Imbrium?”

“Inspection teams are out and they expect to be back into test phase by 0900. You’re not thinking of ordering us to shut down for a complete clean-out?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ve got a budget to consider, too, Ing. Remember that.”

Huh! Ing thought. Not like Poss to worry about budget in this kind of an emergency. He trying to tell me something?

What did the handbook say? “The good troubleshooter is cost conscious, aware that down time and equipment replacement are factors of serious concern to the Haigh Company.”

Ing wondered then if he should order the tube opened for thorough inspection. But the Imbrium and Nubium tubes had revealed nothing and the decontamination time was costly. They were the older tubes, though—Nubium the first to be built. They were smaller than Nectaris, simpler locks. But their beams weren’t getting through any better than the Nectaris tube with its behemoth size, greater safeguards.

“Stand by,” Washington said. “We’re beginning to get whipcount on the program.”

In the abrupt silence, Ing saw the beam curl. The whiplash came down the twelve kilometers of tube curling like a purple wave, traveling the entire length in about two thousandths of a second. It was a thing so fast that the visual effect was of seeing it after it had happened.

Ing stood up, began analyzing what he had seen. The beam had appeared clean, pure—a perfect thro-w… except for one little flare near the far end and another about midway. Little flares. The afterimage was needle shaped, rigid… pointed.

“How’d it look?” Washington asked.

“Clean,” Ing said. “Did we get through?”

“We’re checking,” Washington said, then: “Limited contact. Very muddy. About thirty per cent…just about enough to tell us the container’s still there and its contents seem to be alive.”

“Is it in orbit?”

”Seems to be. Can’t be sure.”

“Give me the cleaner count,” Ing said.

A pause, then: “Damnation! We’re down another two.”

“Exactly two?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Dunno yet. Do your instruments show beam deflections from hitting two cleaners? What’s the energy sum?”

“Everyone thinks the cleaners are causing this,” Washington muttered. “I tell you they couldn’t. They’re fully phased with the beam, just add energy to it if they hit. They’re not debris!”

“But does the beam really eat them?” Ing asked. “You saw the anomaly report.”

“Oh, Ing, let’s not go into that again.” Washington’s voice sounded tired, irritated.

The stubborness of Washington’s response confused Ing. This wasn’t like the man at all. “Sure,” Ing said, “but what if they’re going somewhere we can’t see?”

“Come off that, Ing! You’re as bad as all the others. If there’s one place we know they’re not going, that’s into angspace. There isn’t enough energy in the universe to put cleaner mass around the corner.”

“Unless that hole in our theories really exists,” Ing said. And he thought: Poss is trying to tell me something. What? Why can’t he come right out and say it? He waited, wondering at an idea that nibbled at the edge of his mind—a concept… What was it? Some half-forgotten association…

“Here’s the beam report,” Washington said. “Deflection shows only one being taken, but the energy sum’s doubled all right. One balanced out the other. That happens.”

Ing studied the purple line, nodding to himself. The beam was almost the color of a scarf his wife had worn on their honeymoon. She’d been a good wife, Jennie— raising Lisa in Marsxamps and blister pods, sticking with her man until the canned air and hard life had taken her.

The beam lay quiescent now with only the faintest auroral bleed off. Cleaner tempo was down. The test program still had a few minutes to go, but Ing doubted it’d produce another throw into angspace. You acquired an instinct for the transmission pulse after a while. You could sense when the beam was going to open its tiny signal window across the light-years.

“I saw both of those cleaners go,” Ing said. “They didn’t seem to be torn apart or anything—just flared out.”

“Energy consumed,” Washington said.

“Maybe.”

Ing thought for a moment. A hunch was beginning to grow in him. He knew a way to test it. The question was: Would Poss go along with it? Hard to tell in his present mood. Ing wondered about his friend. Darkness, the isolation of this position within the tube gave voices from outside a disembodied quality.

“Poss, do me a favor,” Ing said. “Give me a straight ‘lash-gram. No fancy stuff, just a demonstration throw. I want a clean ripple the length of the beam. Don’t try for angspace, just ‘lash it.”

“Have you popped your skull? Any ‘lash can hit angspace. And you get one fleck of dust in that beam path…”

“We’d rip the sides off the tube; I know. But this is a clean beam, Poss. lean see it. I just want a little ripple.”

“Why?”

Can I tell him? Ing wondered.

Ing decided to tell only part of the truth, said: “I want to check the cleaner tempo during the program. Give me a debris monitor and a crossing count for each observation post. Have them focus on the cleaners, not on the beam.”

“Why?”

“You can see for yourself cleaner activity doesn’t agree with the beam condition,” Ing said. “Something’s wrong there—accumulated programming error or… I dunno. But I want some actual facts to go on—a physical count during a ‘lash.”

“You’re not going to get new data running a test that could be repeated in the laboratory.”

“This isn’t a laboratory.”

Washington absorbed this, then: “Where would you be during the ‘lash?”

He’s going to do it, Ing thought. He said: “I’ll be close to the anode end here. ‘Lash can’t swing too wide here.”

“And if we damage the tube?”

Ing hesitated remembering that it was a friend out there, a friend with responsibilities. No telling who might be monitoring the conversation, though… and this test was vital to the idea nibbling at Ing’s awareness.

“Humor me, Poss,” Ing said.

“Humor him,” Washington muttered. “All right, but this’d better not be humorous.”

“Wait till I’m in position,” Ing said. “A straight ‘lash.”

He began working up the tube slope out of Zone Yellow into the Gray and then the White. Here, he turned, studied the beam. It was a thin purple ribbon stretching off left and right—shorter on the left toward the anode. The long reach of it going off toward the cathode some twelve kilometers to his right was a thin wisp of color broken by the flickering passage of cleaners.

“Any time,” Ing said.

He adjusted the suit rests against the tube’s curve, pulled his arms into the barrel top, started the viewplate counter recording movement of the cleaners. Now came the hard part—waiting and watching. He had a sudden feeling of isolation then, wondering if he’d done the right thing. There was an element of burning bridges in this action.

What did the handbook say? “There is no point in planning sophisticated research on a specific factor’s role unless that factor is known to be present.”

If it isn’t there, you can’t study it, Ing thought.

“You will take your work seriously,” he muttered. Ing smiled then, thinking of the tragicomic faces, the jowly board chairmen he visualized behind the handbook’s pronouncements. Nothing was left to chance—no task, no item of personal tidiness, no physical exercise. Ing considered himself an expert on handbooks. He owned one of the finest collections of them dating from ancient times down to the present. In moments of boredom he amused himself with choice quotes.

“Program going in,” Washington said. “I wish I knew what you hope to find by this.”

“I quote,” Ing said. “The objective worker makes as large a collection of data as possible and analyzes these in their entirety in relation to selected factors whose relationship to a questioned phenomenon is to be investigated.”

“What the devil’s that supposed to mean?” Washington demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Ing said, “but it’s right out of the Haigh Handbook.” He cleared his throat. “What’s the cleaner tempo from your stations?”

“Up a bit.”

“Give me a countdown on the ‘lash.”

“No sign yet. There’s… wait a minute! Here’s some action—twenty-five… twenty seconds.”

Ing began counting under his breath.

Zero.

A progression of tiny flares began far off to his right, flickered past him with increasing brightness. They were a blur that left a glimmering afterimage. Sensors in his suit soles began reporting the fall of debris.

“Holy O’Golden!” Washington muttered.

“How many’d we lose?” Ing asked. He knew it was going to be bad—worse than he’d expected.

There was a long wait, then Washington’s shocked voice: “A hundred and eighteen cleaners down. It isn’t possible!”

“Yeah,” Ing said. “They’re all over the floor. Shut off the beam before that dust drifts up into it.”

The beam disappeared from Ing’s faceplate responders.

“Is that what you thought would happen, Ing?”

“Kind of.”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“You wouldn’t have given me that ‘lash.”

“Well how the devil’re we going to explain a hundred and eighteen cleaners? Accounting’ll be down on my neck like a…”

“Forget Accounting,” Ing said. “You’re a beam engineer; open your eyes. Those cleaners weren’t absorbed by the beam. They were cut down and scattered over the floor.”

“But the…”

“Cleaners are designed to respond to the beam’s needs,” Ing said. “As the beam moves they move. As the debris count goes up, the cleaners work harder. It one works a little too hard and doesn’t get out of the way fast enough, it’s supposed to be absorbed—its energy converted by the beam. Now, a false ‘lash catches a hundred and eighteen of them off balance. Those cleaners weren’t eaten; they were scattered over the floor.”

There was silence while Washington absorbed this,

“Did that ‘lash touch angspace?” Ing asked.

“I’m checking,” Washington said. Then: “No…wait a minute: there’s a whole ripple of angspace… contacts, very low energy—a series lasting about an eighty-millionth of a second. I had the responders set to the last decimal or we’d have never caught it.”

“To all intents and purposes we didn’t touch,” Ing said.

“Practically not.” Then: “Could somebody in cleaner programming have flubbed the dub?”

“On a hundred and eighteen units?”

“Yeah. I see what you mean. Well, what’re we going to say when they come around for an explanation?”

“We quote the book. ‘Each problem should be approached in two stages: (1) locate those areas which contribute most to the malfunction, and (2) take remedial action designed to reduce hazards which have _ been positively identified.’ We tell ‘em, Poss, that we were positively identifying hazards.”

Ing stepped over the lock sill into the executive salon, saw that Washington already was seated at the corner table which convention reserved for the senior beam engineer on duty, the Supervisor of Transmission.

It was too late for day lunch and too early for the second shift coffee break. The salon was almost empty.

Three junior executives at a table across the room to the right were sharing a private joke, but keeping it low in Washington’s presence. A security officer sat nursing a teabulb beside the passage to the kitchen tram on the left. His shoulders bore a touch of dampness from a perspiration reclaimer to show that he had recently come down from the surface. Security had a lot of officers on the station, Ing noted… and there always seemed to be one around Washington.

The vidwall at the back was tuned to an Earthside news broadcast: There were hints of political upsets because of the beam failure, demands for explanations of the money spent. Washington was quoted as saying a solution would be forthcoming.

Ing began making his way toward the corner, moving around the empty tables.

Washington had a coffeebulb in front of him, steam drifting upward. Ing studied the man—Possible Washington (Impossible, according to his junior engineers) was a six-foot eight-inch powerhouse of a man with wide shoulders, sensitive hands, a sharply Moorish-Semitic face of cafe au lait skin and startingly blue eyes under a dark crewcut. (The company’s senior medic referred to him as “a most amazing throw of the genetic dice.”) Washington’s size said a great deal about his abilities. It took a considerable expenditure to lift his extra kilos moonside. He had to be worth just that much more.

Ing sat down across from Washington, gestured to the waiter-eye on the table surface, ordered Mars-lichen tea.

“You just come from Assembly?” Washington asked.

“They said you were up here,” Ing said. “You look tired, Earthside give you any trouble about your report?”

“Until I used your trick and quoted the book: ‘Every test under field conditions shall approximate as closely as possible the conditions set down by laboratory precedent.’”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Ing said. “Why didn’t you tell them you were following a hunch—you had a hunch I had a hunch.”

Washington smiled.

Ing took a deep breath. It felt good to sit down. He realized he’d worked straight through two shifts without a break.

“You look tired yourself,” Washington said.

Ing nodded. Yes, he was tired. He was too old to push this hard. Ing had few illusions about himself. He’d always been a runt, a little on the weak side— skinny and with an almost weaselish face that was saved from ugliness by widely set green eyes and a thick crewcut mop of golden hair. The hair was turning gray now, but the brain behind the wide brow still functioned smoothly.

The teabulb came up through the table slot. Ing pulled the bulb to him, cupped his hands around its warmth. He had counted on Washington to keep the worst of the official pressure off him, but now that it had been done, Ing felt guilty.

“No matter how much I quote the book,” Washington said, “they don’t like that explanation.”

“Heads will roll and all that?”

“To put it mildly.”

“Well we have a position chart on where every cleaner went down,” Ing said. “Every piece of wreckage has been reassembled as well as possible. The undamaged cleaners have been gone over with the proverbial comb of fine teeth.”

“How long until we have a clean tube?” Washington asked.

“About eight hours.”

Ing moved his shoulders against the chair. His thigh muscles still ached from the long session in the Skoarnoff tube and there was a pain across his shoulders.

“Then it’s time for some turkey talk,” Washington said.

Ing had been dreading this moment. He knew the stand Washington was going to take.

The Security officer across the room looked up, met Ing’s eyes, looked away. Is he listening to us? Ing wondered.

“You’re thinking what the others thought,” Washington said. “That those cleaners were kicked around the corner into angspace.”

“One way to find out,” Ing said.

There was a definite lift to the Security officer’s chin at that remark. He was listening.

“You’re not taking that suicide ride,” Washington said.

“Are the other beams getting through to the Seed Ships?” Ing asked.

“You know they aren’t!”

Across the room, the junior executives stopped their own conversation, peered toward the corner table. The Security officer hitched his chair around to watch both the executives and the corner table.

Ing took a sip of his tea, said: “Damn’ tea here’s always too bitter. They don’t know how to serve it anywhere except on Mars.” He pushed the bulb away from him. “Join the Haigh Company and save the Universe for Man.”

“All right, Ing,” Washington said. “We’ve known each other a long time and can speak straight out. What’re you hiding from me?”

Ing sighed.

“I guess I owe it to you,” he said. “Well, I guess it begins with the fact that every transmitter’s a unique individual, which you know as well as I do. We map what it does and operate by prediction statistics. We play it by ear, as they say. Now, let’s consider something out of the book. A tube is, after all, just a big cave in the rock, a controlled environment for the beam to do its work. The book says: ‘By anglespace transmission, any place in the universe is just around the corner from any other place.’ This is a damned loose way to describe something we don’t really understand. It makes it sound as though we know what we’re talking about.”

“And you say we’re putting matter around that corner,” Washington said, “but you haven’t told me what you’re—”

“I know,” Ing said. “We place a modulation of energy where it can be seen by the Seed Ship’s instruments. But that’s a transfer of energy, Poss. And energy’s interchangeable with matter.”

“You’re twisting definitions. We put a highly unstable, highly transitory reflection phenomenon in such a position that time/ space limitations are” changed. That’s by the book, too. But you’re still not telling me…”

“Poss, I have a crew rigging a cleaner for me to ride. We’ve analyzed the destruction pattern—which is what I wanted from that test ‘lash—and I think we can kick me into angspace aboard one of these wild geese.”

“You fool! I’m still Supetrans here and I say you’re not going in there on…”

“Now, take it easy, Poss. You haven’t even…”

“Granting you get kicked around that stupid corner, how do you expect to get back? And what’s the purpose, anyway? What can you do if you…”

“I can go there and look, Poss. And the cleaner we’re rigging will be more in the nature of a lifeboat. I can get down on TA-IV, maybe take the container with me, give our seeds a better chance. And if we learn how to kick me around there, we can do it again with…”

“This is stupidity!”

“Look,” Ing said. “What’re we risking? One old man long past his prime.”

Ing faced the angry glare in Washington’s eyes and realized an odd thing about himself. He wanted to get through there, wanted to give that container of embryos its chance. He was drunk with the same dream that had spawned the Seeding Compact. And he saw now that the other troubleshooters, the six who’d gone before him, must have been caught in the same web. They’d all seen where the trouble had to be. One of them would get through. There were tools in the container; another beam could be rigged on the other side. There was a chance of getting back,.. afterward…

“I let them talk me into sending for you,” Washington growled. “The understanding was you’d examine the set up, confirm or deny what the others . saw—but I didn’t have to send you into that…”

“I want to go, Poss,” Ing said. He saw what was eating on his friend now. The man had sent six troubleshooters in there to die—or disappear into an untraeeable void, which was worse. Guilt had him.

And I’m refusing permission, Washington said.

The Security officer arose from his table, crossed to stand over Washington. “Mr. Washington,” he said, “I’ve been listening and it seems to me if Mr. Gump wants to go you can’t…”

Washington got to his feet, all six feet eight inches of him, caught the Security man by the jacket. “So they told you to interfere if I tried to stop him!” He shook the man with an odd gentleness. “If you are on my station after the next shuttle leaves, I will see to it personally that you have an unexplained accident.” He released his grip.

The Security agent paled, but stood his ground. “One call from me and this no longer will be your station.”

“Poss,” Ing said, “you can’t fight city hall. And if you try they’ll take you out of here. Then I’ll have to make do with second best at this end. I need you as beam jockey here when I ride that wild goose.”

Washington glared at him. “Ing, it won’t work!”

Ing studied his friend, seeing the pressures which had been brought to bear, understanding how Earthside had maneuvered to get that request sent from a friend to Ivar Norris Gump. It all said something about Earthside’s desperation. The patterns of secrecy, the Security watch, the hints in the newscasts—Ing felt something of the same urgency himself which these things betrayed. And he knew if Washington could overcome this guilt block the man would share mankind’s need to help those drifting containers.

“No matter how many people get hurt—or killed,” Ing said, “we have to give the embryos in those containers their chance. You know, I’m right—this is the main chance. And we need you, Poss. I want everything going for me I can get. And no matter what happens, we’ll know you did your best for me…”

Washington took two short breaths. His shoulders slumped. “And nothing I say…”

“Nothing you say.”

“You’re going?”

“I’m going where the wild goose goes.”

“And who faces the family afterward?”

“A friend, Poss. A friend faces the family and makes the blow as soft as possible.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the Security officer said.

They ignored him as the man returned to his table.

Washington allowed himself a deep, sighing breath. Some of the fire returned to his eyes. “All right,” he growled. “But I’m going to be on this end every step of the way. And I’m telling you now you get no Go signal until everything’s rigged to my satisfaction.”

“Of course, Poss. That’s why I can’t afford to have you get into a fracas and be booted out of here.” *

Ing’s left ankle itched.

It was maddening. His hand could reach only to the calf inside the webbing of his shieldsuit. The ankle and its itch could not be lifted from the area of the sole contact controls.

The suit itself lay suspended in an oil bath within a shocktank. Around the shocktank was something that resembled a standard cleaner in shape but not in size. It was at least twice the length of a cleaner and it was fatter. The fatness allowed for phased shells— Washington’s idea. It had grown out of analysis of the debris left by the test ‘lash.

The faint hissing of his oxygen regenerators came to Ing through his suit sensors. His viewplate had been replaced by a set of screens linked to exterior pickups. The largest screen, at top center, reported the view from a scanner on the belly. It showed a rope of fluorescing purple surrounded by blackness.

The beam.

It was a full five centimeters across, larger than Ing had ever before seen it. The nearness of that potential violence filled him with a conditioned dread. He’d milked too many beams in too many tubes, wary of the slightest growth in size to keep him at a safe distance.

This was a monster beam. All his training and experience cried out against its size.

Ing reminded himself of the analysis which had produced the false cleaner around him now.

Eighty-nine of the cleaners recovered from the tube floor had taken their primary damage at the pickup orifice. They’d been oriented to the beam itself, disregarding the local particle count But the most important discovery was that the cleaners had fallen through the beam without being sliced in two. They had passed completely through the blade of that purple knife without being severed. There’d been no break in the beam. The explanation had to rest in that topological anomaly—angspace. Part of the beam and/or the cleaners had gone into angspace.

He was gambling his life now that the angspace bounce coincided with the energy phasing which kept the cleaners from deflecting the beam. The outside carrier, Ing’s false cleaner, was phased with the beam. It would be demolished. The next inner shell was one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. The next shell was back in phase. And so on for ten shells.

In the center lay Ing his hands and feet on the controls of a suit that was in effect a miniature lifeboat.

As the moment of final commitment approached, Ing began to feel a prickly sensation in his stomach. And the ankle continued to itch. But there was no way he could turn back and still live with himself. He was a troubleshooter, the best in the Haigh Company. There was no doubt that the company—and those lonely drifting human embryos had never needed him more desperately.

“Report your condition, Ing.”

The voice coming from the speaker beside Ing’s face-mask was Washington’s with an unmistakable edge of fear in it.

“All systems clear,” Ing said.

“Program entering its second section,” Washington said. “Can you see any of the other cleaners?”

“Forty contacts so far,” Ing said. “All normal.” He gasped as his cleaner dodged a transient ‘lash.

“You all right?”

“All right,” Ing said.

The ride continued to be a rough one, though. Each time the beam ‘lashed, his cleaner dodged. There was no way to anticipate the direction. Ing could only trust his suit webbing and the oil-bath shocktank to keep him from being smashed against a side of the compartment.

“We’re getting an abnormal number of transients,” Washington said.

That called for no comment and Ing remained silent. He looked up at his receiver above the speaker. A quartz window gave him a view of the tiny beam which kept him in contact with Washington. The tiny beam, less than a centimeter long, glowed sharply purple through its inspection window. It, too, was crackling and jumping. The little beam could stand more interference than a big one, but it clearly was disturbed.

Ing turned his attention to the big beam in the viewscreen, glanced back at the little beam. The difference was a matter of degree. It often seemed to Ing that the beams should illuminate the area around them, and he had to remind himself that the parallel quanta couldn’t deviate that much.

“Getting ‘lash count,” Washington said. “Ing! Condition critical! Stand by.”

Ing concentrated on the big beam now. His stomach was a hard knot. He wondered how the other troubleshooters had felt in this moment. The same, no doubt. But they’d been flying without the protection Ing had. They’d paved the way, died to give information.

The view of the beam was so close and restricted that Ing knew he’d get no warning of the whip—just a sudden shift in size or position.

His heart leaped as the beam flared in the screen. The cleaner rolled sideways as it dodged, letting the beam pass to one side, but there was an ominous bump. Momentarily, the screen went blank, but the purple rope flickered back into view as his cleaner’s sensors lined up and brought him back into position.

Ing checked his instruments. That bump—what had that been?

“Ing!” Washington’s voice came sharply urgent from the speaker.

“What’s the word?”

“We have one of the other cleaners on grav-track,” Washington said. “It’s in your shadow. Hold on.”

There came a murmur of voices, hushed words, indistinguishable, then: “The beam touched you, Ing. You’ve got a phase arc between two of your shells on the side opposite the beam. One of the other cleaners has locked onto that arc with one of its sensors. Its other sensors are still on the beam and it’s riding parallel with you, in your shadow. We’re getting you out of there.”

Ing tried to swallow in a dry throat. He knew the danger without having it explained. There was an arc, light in the tube. His cleaner was between the arc and the beam, but the other cleaner was up there behind him, too. If they had to dodge a ‘lash, the other cleaner would be confused because its sensor contacts were now split. It’d be momentarily delayed. The two cleaners would collide and release light in the tube. The big beam would go wild. The protective shells would be struck from all sides.

Washington was working to get him out, but that would take time. You couldn’t just yank a primary program out. That created its own ‘lash conditions. And if you damped the beam, the other cleaners would home on the arc. There’d be carnage in the tube.

“Starting phase out,” Washington said. “Estimating three minutes to control the second phase. We’ll just…”

‘“Lash!”

The word rang in Ing’s ears even as he felt his cleaner lift at the beginning of a dodge maneuver. He had time to think that the warning must’ve come from one of the engineers on the monitor board, then a giant gong rang out.

A startled: “What the hell!” blasted from his speaker to be replaced by a strident hissing, the ravening of a billion snakes.

Ing felt his cleaner still lifting, pressing him down against the webbing, his face hard against the protective mask. There was no view of the big beam in his screen and the small beam revealed a wavering, crackling worm of red-little window which should’ve showed the line of his own beam revealed a wavering, crackling worm of red-purple.

Abruptly, Ing’s world twisted inside out.

It was like being squeezed flat into a one-molecule puddle and stretched out to infinity. He saw around the outside of an inner-viewed universe with light extended to hard rods of brilliance that poked through from one end to the other. He realized he wasn’t seeing with his eyes, but was absorbing a sensation compounded from every sense organ he possessed. Beyond this inner view everything was chaos, undefined madness.

The beam got me, he thought. I’m dying.

One of the light rods resolved itself into a finite row of spinning objects—over, under, around… over, under, around The movement was hypnotic. With a feeling of wonder, Ing recognized that the object was his own suit and a few shattered pieces of the protective shells. The tiny beam of his own transmitter had been opened and was spitting shards of purple.

With the recognition came a sensation of being compressed. Ing felt himself being pushed down into the blackness that jerked at him, twisting, pounding. It was like going over a series of rapids. He felt the web harness bite into his skin.

Abruptly, the faceplate viewscreens showed jewel brilliance against velvet black—spots of light: sharp blue, red, green, gold. A glaring white light spun into view surrounded by whipping purple ribbons. The ribbons looked like beam auroras.

Ing’s body ached. His mind felt as though immersed in fog, every thought laboring against deadly slowness.

Jewel brilliance—spots of light.

Again, glaring white.

Purple ribbons.

The speaker above him crackled with static. Through its window, he saw his tiny beam spattering and jumping. It seemed important to do something about that. Ing slipped a hand into one of his suit arms, encountered a shattered piece of protective shell drifting close.

The idea of drifting seemed vital, but he couldn’t decide why.

Gently, he nudged the piece of shell up until it formed a rough shield over his receiver beam.

Immediately, a tinny little voice came from his speaker: “Ing! Come in, Ing! Can you hear me, Ing?” Then, more distant: “You there! To hell with the locks! Suit up and get in there. He must be down…”

“Poss?” Ing said.

“Ing! Is that you, Ing?”

“Yeah, Poss. I’m…I seem to be all in one piece.”

“Are you down on the floor some place? We’re coming in after you. Hold on.”

“I dunno where I am. I can see beam auroras.”

“Don’t try to move. The tube’s all smashed to hell. I’m patched through the Imbrium tube to talk to you. Just stay put. We’ll be right with you.”

“Poss, I don’t think I’m in the tube.”

From some place that Ing felt existed on a very tenuous basis, he felt his thoughts stirring, recognition patterns forming.

Some of the jewel brilliance he saw was stars. He saw that now. Some of it was… debris, bits and pieces of cleaners, odd chunks of matter. There was light somewhere toward his feet, but the sensors there appeared to’ve been destroyed or something was covering them.

Debris.

Beam auroras.

The glaring white spun once more into view. Ing adjusted his spin with a short burst from a finger jet. He saw the thing clearly now, recognized it: the ball and sensor tubes of a Seeding Compact container.

He grew conscious that the makeshift shield for his little beam had slipped. Static filled his speakers. Ing replaced the bit of shell.

“… Do you mean you’re not in the tube?” Washington’s voice asked. “Ing, come in. What’s wrong?”

“There’s an SC container about a hundred meters or so directly in front of me,” Ing said. “It’s surrounded by cleaner debris. And there’re auroras, angspace ribbons, all over the sky here. I… think I’ve come through.”

“You couldn’t have. I’m receiving you too strong. What’s this about auroras?”

“That’s why you’re receiving me,,” Ing said. “You’re stitching a few pieces of beam through here. Light all over the place; there’s a sun down beneath my feet somewhere. You’re getting through to me, but the container’s almost surrounded by junk. The reflection and beam spatter in there must be enormous. I’m going in now and clean a path for the beam contact.”

“Are you sure you’re…” Hiss, crackle.

The little piece of shell had slipped again.

Ing cased it back into position as he maneuvered with his belt jets.

“I’m all right, Poss.”

The turn brought the primary into view—a great golden ball that went dim immediately as his scanner filters adjusted. To his right beyond the sun lay a great ball of blue with chunks of cottony clouds drifting over it. Ing stared, transfixed by the beauty of it.

A virgin planet.

A check of the lifeboat instruments installed in his suit showed what the SC container had revealed before contact had gone intermittent—Theta Apus IV, almost Earth normal except for larger oceans, smaller land masses.

Ing took a deep breath, smelled the canned air of his suit.

To work, he thought.

His suit jets brought him in close to the debris and he began nudging it aside, moving in closer and closer to the container. He lost his beam shield, ignored it, cut down receiver volume to reduce the static.

Presently, he drifted beside the container.

With an armored hand, he shielded his beam.

“Poss? Come in, Poss.”

“Are you really there, Ing?”

“Try a beam contact with the container, Poss.”

“We’ll have to break contact with you.”

“Do it.”

Ing waited.

Auroral activity increased—great looping ribbons over the sky all around him.

So that’s what it looks like at the receiving end, Ing thought. He looked up at the window revealing his own beam—clean and sharp under the shadow of his upraised hand. The armored fingers were black outlines against the blue world beyond. He began calculating then how long his own beam would last without replacement of anode and cathode. Hard bombardment, sharp tiny beam—its useful life would only be a fraction of what a big beam could expect.

Have to find a way to rig a beam once we get down, he thought.

“Ing? Come in, Ing?”

Ing heard the excitement in Washington’s voice.

“You got through, eh, Poss, old boss?”

“Loud and clear. Now, look—if you can weld yourself fast to the tail curve of that container we can get you down with it. It’s over-engineered to handle twice your mass on landing sequence.”

Ing nodded to himself. Riding the soft, safe balloon, which the container would presently become, offered a much more attractive prospect than maneuvering his suit down, burning it out above a watery world where a landing on solid ground would take some doing.

“We’re maneuvering to give re-entry for contact with a major land mass,” Washington said. “Tell us when you’re fast to the container.”

Ing maneuvered in close, put an armored hand on the container’s surface, feeling an odd sensation of communion with the metal and life that had spent nine hundred years in the void.

Old papa Ing’s going to look after you, he thought.

As he worked, welding himself solidly to the tail

curve of the container, Ing recalled the chaos he had

glimpsed in his spewing, jerking ride through angspace.

He shuddered. j

“Ing, when you feel up to it, we want a detailed report,” Washington said. “We’re planning now to put people through for every one of the containers that’s giving trouble.”

“You figured out how to get us back?” Ing asked.

“Earthside says it has the answer if you can assemble enough mass at your end to anchor a full-sized beam.”

Again, Ing thought of that ride through chaos. He wasn’t sure he wanted another such trip. Time to solve that problem when it arose, though. There’d be something in the book about it.

Ing smiled at himself then, sensing an instinctive reason for all the handbooks of history. Against chaos, man had to raise a precise and orderly alignment of actions, a system within which he could sense his own existence.

A watery world down there, he thought. Have to find some way to make paper for these kids before they come out of their vats. Plenty of things to teach them.

Watery world.

He recalled then a sentence of swimming instructions from the “Blue Jackets Manual,” one of the ancient handbooks in his collection: “Breathing may be accomplished by swimming with the head out of water.”

Have to remember that one, he thought. The kids’ll need a secure and orderly world.

The End

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