CHAPTER 2

Dr. Eignbergen

The RAH slowed to a stop relative to the Nugget using delicate blasts from the steering thrusters. When the maneuver was successfully completed, Hunt told Freddy to release the snake, a long tube that would connect the ship to the asteroid. The clamps made a series of satisfying clanks when they contacted the asteroid’s airlock and were secured.

Hunt and Jan met at the Heinlein’s main airlock, cycled through, and swam along the center of the snake, adjusting their idea of up and down as they left the influence of the ship’s artificial gravity field and fell into the growing intensity of the field generated by a machine on the asteroid.

The outer hatch of the asteroid’s airlock was open when they arrived at the far end of the snake. They went in, the outer door closed, and since the pressure was already about equal, the inner door opened immediately.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said a tall slim robot. Its voice was pleasantly modulated and had a slight upper-class inflection. It was made of metal that had the shine and smoothness of mercury. The robot had no hair, but the outlines of clothing were etched directly onto its skin. It bent easily in all the usual places—seemingly as limber as an eel. “You may call me Number Six.”

Jan introduced himself and Hunt. Number Six gave them a mild professional smile. “Follow me, gentlemen,” was all it said as it lead them from tunnel to tunnel, all of which were too smooth and straight to be natural. Hunt and Jan occasionally encountered more robots, most constructed to appear vaguely humanoid. A few were no more than mobile boxes with manipulating arms and flashing lights.

Hunt was thoroughly lost by the time they marched through a wide arch, a doorway into what was obviously Dr. Eignbergen’s laboratory. Dressed in what might have been the same white coat he’d been wearing in the reference article Hunt had viewed, the doctor was sitting on a stool staring at a cloud of colorful numbers floating before him in a three-dimensional array. He was surrounded by a lot of equipment, much of which Hunt could not identify. He supposed it had something to do with the doctor’s work. Hunt wondered how much of it the doctor would want to take with him.

“Doctor—” Hunt started, but stopped when Eignbergen raised one finger in his direction, and with his other hand slid a red five three spaces to the left. Immediately a fanfare blared from somewhere, and the array was replaced by a magnificent display of fireworks. Eignbergen watched the display with delight. “I’ve been working on that game for almost a month,” he said.

“Congratulations, Doctor,” Number Six said.

“Thank you. Are we done packing?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You and a few of the others take my impedimenta to the airlock. I’m sure these gentlemen have ideas where it should be stowed aboard their ship.”

Number Six didn’t bow to Dr. Eignbergen, but that was its attitude as it backed out of his presence and left the room.

Hunt glanced around. “Will you be wanting to bring all of this?”

Eignbergen contemplated Hunt with placid curiosity. “What if I did?” he asked gently.

“I’d remind you that we have a limited amount of discretionary space aboard our ship.”

Eignbergen laughed. “And you would be right, Cadet Hunt.” He shook his head. “No. I am leaving this behind. You’ll see that I am taking very little.”

“Is Number Six coming with us?” Jan asked.

“I hadn’t even considered it,” Eignbergen said with astonishment. “It is just a robot, like all the others on this asteroid. It kept me company and helped me in my work, but unlike some people,” he smiled briefly at Jan, “I do not become attached to machines.”

“Me neither,” Jan said, and shrugged.

“Shall we go, Doctor?” Hunt suggested.

Dr. Eignbergen nodded, took off his white coat, and wrapped himself in a more formal grass-green jacket that closed up in front without a wrinkle; the green jacket looked a little ragged, as if he’d been wearing it long past its use-by date. Freddy would have to spray him a new one. All part of the service.

When the doctor led them back through the tunnels, he and the robots ignored each other, as if this were just another day and he wasn’t going anywhere special. Apparently it was true that he did not become attached to machines, not even machines that had been his only company for ten years.

Number Six and a small crowd of other robots waited at the airlock with a few flat cases and one more that was big enough to hold the torso of one of his robots. Hunt was surprised and relieved that Dr. Eignbergen had told the truth when he assured them that he wasn’t bringing much with him. Hunt had no idea what any of the cases contained, but a security field glowed dully around the big one.

Hunt and Jan led the way back through the snake. Dr. Eignbergen swam after them, showing unexpected skill at moving from one gravity field to the other. Number Six and its assistant robots came after with the luggage. Jan went down to the power deck to prepare for departure while Hunt showed Number Six to the storage bay where the big case could be stowed. Dr. Eignbergen kept the flat cases with him in the small cabin where he would be sleeping for the next three weeks. A few minutes later Number Six and the other robots headed back to the Nugget, leaving the Heinlein’s crew and her passenger alone. Eignbergen barely glanced at them as they left.

“Freddy, say hello to Dr. Eignbergen,” Hunt said.

“Welcome, Dr. Eignbergen,” Freddy said. “Please let me know if there is anything at all I can do for you.”

The doctor accepted Freddy’s covert existence easily. Not a surprise considering that he’d been dealing with robots and other artificial life forms for ten years. “Thank you, Freddy.”

“We’ll be leaving soon,” Hunt said. “Would you like to see how we do it?”

“I would indeed.”

Hunt took the doctor up to the control deck and strapped him onto an acceleration couch facing the astrogation sphere. “Prepare for departure, Freddy,” Hunt ordered.

“Aye, sir,” Freddy said.

The clamps on the far end of the snake opened with their familiar metallic bumps and grinds, and the astrogation sphere showed Hunt the course back to Earth that Freddy had plotted. Jan reported in ready.

“Ready here, Raymond,” Freddy said.

“Let’s go,” Hunt said.

A green dot appeared near the center of the sphere, and the main thrusters flung the Heinlein on its way.

* * * *

Hunt wanted to study, but he had a distinguished passenger now, so he also had an obligation to be entertaining. Hunt’s life was made easier because the doctor had spent so much of his time alone that it did not bother him. He read a lot and watched some of the new holos they’d brought with them. But the doctor didn’t spend all his time by himself. Hunt learned that the doctor was a demon checkers player—he enjoyed it as a blood sport.

Hunt, Eignbergen, and Jan were sitting in the tiny galley eating sparkzel, one of Jan’s Venusian specialties; it was a lumpy mix of vegetables that grew all over Venus since the terraforming, and seasoned with swamp mist—when Jan brought up the question that Hunt was too polite to ask. “So, Doctor, what exactly have you been working on for ten years?”

“Now, Jan,” Hunt said, “It’s possible that Doctor E would rather not say.”

For a long moment Eignbergen contemplated the intent and serious expression on Jan’s face while taking another forkful of sparkzel, a dish that he seemed to like. “I don’t want to bore you,” he said.

“That’s nice of you,” Jan said. “But hanging out with Hunt here, I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.”

Both Hunt and Eignbergen laughed at that. The expression on Jan’s face didn’t change.

“All right, then. If you insist.” The doctor carefully set down his fork and asked Hunt to guide them to the storage bay. When they arrived, they approached the big box in the middle of the deck. Jan watched Eignbergen expectantly.

Eignbergen shook his head. “Poor Covington,” he said sadly, as if he were talking to himself.

“Who’s Covington?” Hunt couldn’t help asking.

Eignbergen looked at Hunt suddenly, as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. The doctor sighed. “Albert Covington. He volunteered to be the first to try the machine. He never came back.”

“What sort of machine is it?” Jan asked.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? It’s a time machine.”

“You gotta be—” Jan began.

“You mean this fellow Covington is lost somewhere in time?” Hunt asked, heading Jan off before he said something they would all regret.

Eignbergen nodded.

“Past or future?” Jan asked.

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Eignbergen said. “Past, I think. Here, I’ll show you.” He walked to the big case and undid the clasps. The box unfolded to reveal a complex collection of long thin silver rods seemingly stuck at random into a glowing sphere in the center of a cubical frame; it was very much like the astrogation sphere in the control room of the RAH but much smaller. Hunt had trouble following some of the rods with his eyes—they went off in some indefinable direction and didn’t seem quite real.

“What are those rods made of?” Hunt asked.

“A little something of my own,” Dr. Eignbergen said. “I call it temporine. The rods manipulate the tachyons.”

“Temporal, as in time,” Jan guessed.

“Exactly. And tachyon is a term coined by Gerald Feinberg back in 1967, but he had no idea what to do with the word because he hadn’t actually found the particle it described—neither had anybody else, until I had a thought. Ten years ago all I wanted to do was find a new method of preserving food. You’d put food into the box I wanted to invent, and when you took it out years later it would still be fresh because only seconds had passed inside.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Hunt said.

“It was. It still is. I hoped to finish the invention before the grant money ran out and I had to go back to Earth. And I might have succeeded, I suppose. Only the longer I worked, the further I got from food preservation and the more involved I became with time travel. After a while I dropped the food preservation idea altogether. This is the result.” He nodded at the thing that had been inside the case.

“Does it work? Jan asked.

Eignbergen made a “harrumphing” noise. “Ask Albert Covington,” he said.

They all considered that for a moment.

“Would you like to see it in action?” Eignbergen asked.

“I believe we would, yes,” Hunt said.

Eignbergen twisted rods at the corners of the array, causing indicators to appear floating over the top of the box, and lights began to move inside the sphere. The doctor sucked on his lower lip as he made further adjustments with the rods while watching the numbers registering on his gauges. “There we are,” he said. “A Space League episode broadcast live in 1955 to television sets all over what was then the United States.”

And sure enough, the lights inside the sphere settled down into a black and white image. Two men in fancy uniforms—each a cross between a holo adventure cowboy outfit and something an actor playing Robin Hood might wear—stood near a wooden desk studying a box with a flashing bulb on top and a lot of knobs on the sides. “Looks kind of old-fashioned,” Jan said scornfully.

“That shouldn’t surprise you,” Dr. Eignbergen explained. “In addition to their tiny budget, Space League was produced a few hundred years in our past.”

“I’m impressed,” Hunt said. “Considering. Can you turn up the gain on the sound?”

Dr. Eignbergen twisted one of the rods.

“Is that how the Amethyst Queen has been making her ship invisible, Commodore Edwards?” asked the younger of the two men in the sphere.

“I believe so, Cadet Jolly.”

The two looked surprised when a beautiful woman marched into the room. She wore a long silvery cloak, a complicated headdress, and a lot of eye makeup, making her appear as if she were looking out through a mask made from the wings of a Terran butterfly.

“The Amethyst Queen!” Jolly exclaimed. “How did you get in here?”

“It is not difficult when you can make yourself invisible,” she said and smiled sweetly.

“What do you want?” the older man demanded.

“You know the answer to that,” the Amethyst Queen said. “I want the destruction of the Space League Academy.”

The two uniformed men shared a horrified look.

The picture faded, and for a moment Hunt thought that something had gone wrong with the doctor’s machine. But the scene they’d been watching was immediately replaced by a different man in a different place in a similar uniform. Before him on a table was a tall rectangular box and a large bowl.

“Hey, kids,” the man said enthusiastically, “you still have time to get your Space League decoder badge from Sugar Slammers, the spaceman’s breakfast.” He went on and on about all the wonderful things the badge could do, and how great Sugar Slammers were for breakfast. “Good and good for ya!”

“This is what they thought you System Guard cadets would be like,” the doctor said, and chuckled.

“Ridiculous,” Jan said.

“Not a bad guess from hundreds of years in the past,” Hunt said. “Good-looking uniforms.”

Jan sniffed at that.

“And after all,” the doctor said, “the show was entertainment, not a documentary.”

An alert chirped three times, and Freddy came on the air. “Raymond, we are receiving a message from a small ship five thousand klicks off our starboard bow,” he reported calmly.

“Let’s hear it,” Hunt said.

“Mayday, Mayday, this is Forty-Niner calling anyone.”

“It sounds like a woman,” Jan noted.

She repeated her message.

“This is the System Guard scout ship Robert A. Heinlein,” Hunt said. “What is your situation?”

“Thank Frooth,” the woman said. “I’ve been struck by a meteor, and the puncture is too big for my emergency system to handle. Not much air left.” And indeed, she did sound a little out of breath.

“Freddy, make course for Forty-Niner,” Hunt ordered.