Party Line

Clifford D. Simak Party Line

I

Einstein did not come in. That was unusual. Very seldom was Einstein late or absent. Usually he was waiting, ready to take up again the patient teaching that had been going on for months. Jay Martin tried again.

— Einstein. Einstein. Are you there? Einstein was not there.

The console in front of Martin hummed and the sensor lights were flickering. The cubicle was quiet, an engineered quietness, insulated against all distraction. Martin reached up and adjusted the helmet more firmly on his head.

— Einstein. Einstein. Where are you?

A faint sense of beginning panic flicked across Martin's mind. Had Einstein finally given it all up as a bad job? Had he (or she, or it, or them?) simply slipped away, dropping him, finally despairing of making so ignorant a student understand what he had to say?

Something out there stirred, a thin whistle of distant emptiness. Strange, thought Martin, how it always came that way — the haunting sense of distant emptiness. When there was, in fact, no distance nor no emptiness involved. The carrier waves were immune to any of the limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instantaneous, no lag, as if distance, matter, time did not exist.

— Einstein? he asked, convinced that it wasn't Einstein. It didn't feel like Einstein, although he would have been hard pressed if he had been called upon to tell how Einstein felt.

The thin whistle came again.

— Yes, said Martin, I'm here. Who are you?

And the voice (the thought? the pulse? the intelligence?) spoke.

— The turning point, it said.

— Unclear, said Martin. What turning point?

— The universe. The universe has reached its turning point. Universal death has started. The universe has reached its farthest point. It now is running down. Entropy has been accomplished.

— That, said Martin, is a strange way to say it.

— The universe always strove toward entropy.

— Not here, said Martin. No entropy here. The stars still burn.

— At the edge. The outer fringe. The universe at the edge has reached the point of entropy. Heat death. No more energy. And now is falling back. It is retreating.

The distance whistled. The emptiness keened.

— You are at the edge?

— Near the rim. That is how we know. Our measurement…

The distance howled, drowning out the words.

— How long? asked Martin. How long till the end?

— Equal to the time since the beginning. Our calculations -

— Fifteen billion years, said Martin.

— We do not grasp your measurement.

— Never mind, said Martin. It makes no difference. I should not have said it.

— The pity of it! The irony!

— What pity? What irony?

— We have tried so long. Everyone has tried so long. To understand the universe and now we have no time.

— We have lots of time. Another fifteen billion years.

— You may have. We haven't. We're too close to the rim. We are in the dying zone.

A cry for help, thought Martin. The moaning of self pity. And was shaken. For there'd never been a cry for help before.

The other caught his thought.

— No cry for help, it said. There is no help. This is warning only.

The pulse, the thought cut off. Distance and emptiness whistled for a moment and then it, too, cut off.

Martin sat huddled in his cubicle, the weight of all that distance, all that emptiness crashing down upon him.

II

The day began badly for Paul Thomas.

The desk communicator chirped at him.

'Yes,' he said.

His secretary's voice said, 'Mr. Russell is here to see you.'

Thomas grimaced. 'Show him in,' he said.

Russell was prissy and precise. He came into the office and sat down in a chair across the desk from Thomas.

'What can I do for R&D this morning?' Thomas asked, ignoring all conversational preliminaries. Russell was a man who was impatient with social amenities.

'A lot more than you're doing,' Russell said. 'Goddammit, Paul, I know that you are hip-deep in data. It's piling up on you. We haven't had a thing from you in the last six months. I know the rules, of course, but aren't you giving them too strict an interpretation?'

'What are you interested in?'

'The faster-than-light business for one thing. I happen to know that Martin…'

'Martin still is working on it.'

'He must have something. Besides being a good telepath, he also happens to be a top-notch astrophysicist.'

'That's true,' said Thomas. 'We don't often get a man like him. Mostly, it's a raw farm boy or some girl who is clerking in the five-and-dime. We're running recruiting programs all the time, but…'

'You're trying to throw me off the track, Paul. I've got men aching to get started on this FTL thing. We know you're getting something.'

The funny thing about it is that we aren't.'

'Martin's been on it for months.'

'Yeah, for months. And not understanding anything he's getting. Both he and I are beginning to believe we may have the wrong man on it.'

'The wrong man on it? An astrophysicist?'

'Ben, it may not be physics at all.'

'But he has equations.'