World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now roll over."

"Tyrant," hissed Charley, which isn't easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power they'd been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest of space.

Which would be a shame.

That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy's size and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.

The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, "It's fun to meet someone who likes to argue about the same things you do." They compared Los Angeles' outward growth to West Berlin's reaching skyscrapers.

"The urge to reach the stars," said Jansky.

"You're surrounded by East Germany," Larry maintained.

"There's nowhere you can go but up."

They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog- where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Janaky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they'd never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn't until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

"You were not the first man to read a dolphin's mind, Mr. Greenberg." Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor's blackboard pointer. "Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?"

Larry nodded vigorously. "Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody's gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren't any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch." He sighed. "But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards."

Judy reached across and took his hand. "We'll get there yet," she promised.

"Sure we will," said Larry.

"You may not need to," said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet-" He paused expectantly.

"You don't mean you've got a bandersnatch here?" Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

"Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?"

"No." Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

"Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years."

"But you got it."

"Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one second of time inside the field. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh, quantum jumps. The twenty-one-thousand-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we do not know where the next quantum is."

Judy spoke unexpectedly.

"Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other."

The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. "Excuse me," he said when he had finished, "but it is very funny that you should make that suggestion so quickly. Of course, it was one of the first things we tried." Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand warningly. Jansky didn't notice. "The fact is that one time-retarding field cannot exist inside another. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this."

"Too bad," said Larry.

"Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?"

Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered. "I have! Lifetimes did a pictorial on it. It's the one they found off the Brazilian continental shell."

"That's right," Larry remembered aloud. "The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they'd found Atlantis." He remembered pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. "It looked like an early rendition of a goblin."

"Yes, it certainly does. I have it here."

"Here?"

"Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us after we explained what it was for." He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. "As you know, no sociologist has been able to link the statue to any known culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the mystery. I believe.

"Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field. You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field, to cancel out our, er, visitor's own field, and let you read its mind."

They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black-checked flyer dropped to the corner.

Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. "What's wrong?" he asked, turning half around.

"I'm frightened," she said. She looked it. "Are you sure it's all right? You don't know anything about him at all!"

"Who, Jansky? Look-"

"The statue."

"Oh." He considered. "Look, I'm just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?" She nodded. "One. The contact gadget isn't dangerous.