One Step From Earth

"You know what I mean. You've been everywhere else. I've been to college and to the job and holidays in the Bahamas. I'm a city boy, a real urban dweller."

"You did fine when I blacked out."

"Without you there to back me up I suppose I had to. Your tank was empty and I was sure it was anoxia.

I knew the shelter had oxygen in it so I just dragged you in here as quick as I could. I pulled off your mask and you seemed to be breathing okay, but it was cold so I went after the heater, then the food. That was all. I just did what had to he done." His words trickled off into silence and he looked owl-like and frightened again behind his heavy-rimmed glasses.

"But that is all that had to be done. All that can be done." Ben leaned forward, hammering the words home. "No one could have done more. It is about time you stopped thinking of yourself as one more city boy and faced the fact that you are one of the only two Martian explorers in the whole solar system."

Otto thought about it and almost straightened up his shoulders. "That is true, isn't it?"

"Don't you forget it. The worst is over. We are safely through that box of tricks, which is always what troubled me, and we are at home on Mars. We have food, water, everything we need for months. All we have to do is take normal precautions and we do our job and go back as heroes. Rich ones."

"We have to set up the transmitter first, but that shouldn't he difficult."

"I'll take your word for it, thanks." Ben took the soup and sipped at it noisily because it was hot. "I have no idea why we even have to build another MT when we have one here. In fact I don't even know how the thing works and no one ever bothered to tell me."

"It's simple enough." Otto relaxed, on familiar ground, eager to explain, forgetting their situation for the moment. Which is just why Ben, who knew a good deal about MT theory, had asked him the question.

"The discovery of Bhattacharya space is what made matter transmission possible. Bhattacharya space — or B-space — is analogous to our three-dimensional continuum but nevertheless lies outside of it. But we can penetrate it. The interesting thing is that wherever we penetrate it, from whatever location in our own universe, we appear to come through in the same place there. So by careful alignment it is possible to have two screens sharing the same portion of B-space. The B-space in effect is allowed to penetrate into our space before each screen so that as far as we are concerned the screens no longer exist in our space-time continuum. Whatever enters one comes out of the other. That is it, simply, of course."

"Simple enough — as long as you leave out the details about how the gadget is built. But it doesn't explain why we can't leave Mars in the same manner that we came."

"There are a number of factors involved, but the more important ones are alignment power and physical distance."

"You told me distance doesn't affect the screens."

"It doesn't, directly, but it makes alignment much more difficult. The screen out there that was rocketed here to Mars has a two-foot working diameter, about the very largest we could send. Almost all of its power goes to holding its existence. The transmitter on Earth reaches out and — it is difficult to describe — latches onto it, holds it in shape, stabilizes it to receive transmission. But the same process won't happen in reverse."

"What would happen if something were sent back in the other direction?"

"There is no 'other direction.' Anything put into this transmitter would be converted to Y radiation and simply sprayed into Bhattacharya space."

"Doesn't sound healthy at all. What do you say we recharge our oxygen tanks and move the rest of the stuff in here that we are going to need? Then get some sleep."

"I'm with you."

They gathered only the immediate essentials — food, air-scrubbing equipment, and the like — then crawled into their sleeping bags. The next day they were both feeling much better and finished setting up the camp. On the third day the first pieces of the big matter transmitter were sent through.

It was a component engineer's nightmare. All the units, whatever their function, had to have been designed to fit through a two-foot hole. A number of compromises had been made. After a good many sleepless nights over the drawing boards it had been finally decided that a diesel-electric generator could not be modified enough to get it through Some nameless subengineer bestowed credit on his superiors by suggesting that enough high-charge batteries could he sent through to activate the big six-foot screen long enough to push the generator through in one piece.