Common Time
".  .  .  the  days went slowly round and round,  endless
and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces!
How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-
like it swung to the ship's dull roll, and ticked the hours
and ages."
Herman Melville, in Mardi
Don't move.
It was the first thought that came into Garrard's mind
when he awoke, and perhaps it saved his life. He lay where
he was, strapped against the padding, listening to the round
hum of the engines. That in itself was wrong; he should be
unable to hear the overdrive at all.
He thought to himself: Has it begun already?
Otherwise everything seemed normal. The DPC-3 had
crossed over into interstellar velocity, and he was still alive,
and the ship was still functioning. The ship should at this
moment be traveling at 22.4 times the speed of lighta neat
4,157,000 miles per second.
Somehow Garrard did not doubt that it was. On both
previous tries, the ships had whiffed away toward Alpha Cen-
tauri at the proper moment when the overdrive should have
cut in; and the split second of residual image after they had
vanished, subjected to spectroscopy, showed a Doppler shift
which tallied with the acceleration predicted for that moment
by Haertel.
The trouble was not that Brown and Cellini hadn't gotten
away in good order. It was simply that neither of them had
ever been heard from again.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes. His eyelids felt terrifically
heavy. As far as he could judge from the pressure of the
couch against his skin, the gravity was normal; nevertheless,
moving his eyelids seemed almost an impossible job.
After long concentration, he got them fully open. The
instrument chassis was directly before him, extended over his
diaphragm on its elbow joint. Still without moving anything
but his eyesand those only with the utmost patiencehe
checked each of the meters. Velocity: 22.4 c. Operating tem-
perature: normal. Ship temperature:  37 C. Air pressure:
778 mm. Fuel: No. I tank full. No. 2 tank full. No. 3 tank
full. No. 4 tank nine tenths full.  Gravity:  I  g.  Calendar:
stopped.
He looked at it closely, though his eyes seemed to focus
very slowly, too. It was, of course, something more than a
calendarit was an all-purpose clock, designed to show him
the passage of seconds, as well as of the ten months his trip
was supposed to take to the double star. But there was no
doubt about it: the second hand was motionless.
That was the second abnormality. Garrard felt an impulse
to get up and see if he could start the clock again. Perhaps
the trouble had been temporary and safely in the past. Im-
mediately there sounded in his head the injunction he had
drilled into himself for a full month before the trip had
begun
Don't move!
Don't move until you know the situation as far as it can
be known without moving. Whatever it was that had snatched
Brown and Cellini irretrievably beyond human ken was
potent, and totally beyond anticipation. They had both been
excellent men, intelligent, resourceful, trained to the point
of diminishing returns and not a micron beyond that point
the best men in the Project. Preparations for every knowable
kind of trouble had been built into their ships, as they had
been built into the DFC-3. Therefore, if there was something
wrong nevertheless, it would be something that might strike
from some commonplace quarterand strike only once.
He listened to the humming. It was even and placid, and
not very loud, but it disturbed him deeply. The overdrive
was supposed to be inaudible, and the tapes from the first
unmanned test vehicles had recorded no such hum. The
noise did not appear to interfere with the overdrive's opera-
tion, or to indicate any failure in it. It was just an irrelevancy
for which he could find no reason.
But the reason existed. Garrard did not intend to do so
much as draw another breath until he found out what it was.
Incredibly, he realized for the first time that he had not
in fact drawn one single breath since he had first come to.
Though he felt not the slightest discomfort, the discovery
called up so overwhelming a flash of panic that he very
nearly sat bolt upright on the couch. Luckilyor so it
seemed, after the panic had begun to ebbthe curious leth-
argy which had affected his eyelids appeared to involve his
whole body, for the impulse was gone before he could sum-
mon the energy to answer it. And the panic, poignant though
it  had  been  for  an  instant,  turned  out  to  be  wholly  intel-
lectual. In a moment, he was observing that his failure to
breathe in no way discommoded him as far as he could tell
it was just there, waiting to be explained . . .
Or to kill him. But it hadn't, yet.
Engines humming; eyelids heavy; breathing absent; calen-
dar stopped. The four facts added up to nothing. The temp-
tation to move somethingeven if it were only a big toe
was strong, but Garrard fought it back. He had been awake
only a short whilehalf an hour at mostand already had
noticed four abnormalities. There were bound to be more,
anomalies more subtle than these four; but available to close
examination before he had to move. Nor was there anything
in particular that he had to do, aside from caring for his own
wants; the Project, on the chance that Brown's and Cellini's
failure to return had resulted from some tampering with the
overdrive, had made everything in the DFC-3 subject only
to the computer. In a very real sense, Garrard was just along
for the ride. Only when the overdrive was off could he
adjust
Pock.
It was a soft, low-pitched noise, rather like a cork coming
out of a wine bottle. It seemed to have come just from the
right of the control chassis. He halted a sudden jerk of his
head on the cushions toward it with a flat fiat of will. Slowly,
he moved his eyes in that direction.
He could see nothing that might have caused the sound.
The ship's temperature dial showed no change, which ruled
out a heat noise from differential contraction or expansion
the only possible explanation he could bring to mind.
He closed his eyesa process which turned out to be just
as difficult as opening them had beenand tried to visualize
what the calendar had looked like when he had first come out
of anesthesia. After he got a clear andhe was almost sure
accurate picture, Garrard opened his eyes again.
The sound had been the calendar, advancing one second.
It was now motionless again, apparently stopped.
He did not know how long it took the second hand to
make that jump, normally; the question had never come up.
Certainly the jump, when it came at the end of each second,
had been too fast for the eye to follow.
Belatedly, he realized what all this cogitation was costing
him in terms of essential information. The calendar had
moved. Above all and before anything else, he must know
exactly how long it took it to move again . . .
He began to count, allowing an arbitrary five seconds lost.
One-and-a-six, one-and-a-seven, one-and-an-eight
Garrard had gotten only that far when he found himself
plunged into hell.
First, and utterly without reason, a sickening fear flooded
swiftly through his veins, becoming more and more intense.
His bowels began to knot, with infinite slowness. His whole
body became a field of small, slow pulsesnot so much shak-
ing him as putting his limbs into contrary joggling motions,
and making his skin ripple gently under his clothing. Against
the hum another sound became audible, a nearly subsonic
thunder which seemed to be inside his head. Still the fear
mounted, and with it came the pain, and the tenesmusa
boardlike stiffening of his muscles, particularly across his
abdomen and his shoulders, but affecting his forearms almost
as grievously. He felt himself beginning, very gradually, to
double at the middle, a motion about which he could do
precisely nothinga terrifying kind of dynamic paralysis. . . .
It lasted for hours. At the height of it, Garrard's mind,
even his very personality, was washed out utterly; he was only
a vessel of horror. When some few trickles of reason began
to return over that burning desert of reasonless emotion, he
found that he was sitting up on the cushions, and that with
one arm he had thrust the control chassis back on its elbow
so that it no longer jutted over his body. His clothing was
wet with perspiration, which stubbornly refused to evaporate
or to cool him. And his lungs ached a little, although he could
still detect no breathing.
What under God had happened? Was it this that had killed
Brown and Cellini? For it would kill Garrard, tooof that
he was sure, if it happened often. It would kill him even if it
happened only twice more, if the next two such things fol-
lowed the first one closely. At the very best it would make a
slobbering idiot of him; and though the computer might bring
Garrard and the ship back to Earth, it would not be able to
tell the Project about this tornado of senseless fear.
The calendar said that the eternity in hell had taken three
seconds. As he looked at it in academic indignation, it said
pock and condescended to make the total seizure four sec-
onds long. With grim determination, Garrard began to count
again.
He took care to establish the counting as an absolutely
even, automatic process which would not stop at the back of
his mind no matter what other problem he tackled along
with it, or what emotional typhoons should interrupt him.
Really compulsive counting cannot be stopped by anything
not the transports of love nor the agonies of empires. Garrard
knew the dangers in deliberately setting up such a mechanism
in his mind, but he also knew how desperately he needed to
time that clock tick. He was beginning to understand what
had happened to himbut he needed exact measurement
before he could put that understanding to use.
Of course there had been plenty of speculation on the
possible effect of the overdrive on the subjective time of the
pilot, but none of it had come to much. At any speed below
the velocity of light,  subjective  and objective time were
exactly the same as far as the pilot was concerned. For an
observer on Earth, time aboard the ship would appear to be
vastly slowed at near-light speeds; but for the pilot himself
there would be no apparent change.
Since flight beyond the speed of light was impossible
although for slightly differing reasonsby both the current
theories of relativity, neither theory had offered any clue as
to what would happen on board a translight ship. They would
not allow that any such ship could even exist. The Haertel
transformation, on which, in effect, the DFC-3 flew, was
nonrelativistic: it showed that the apparent elapsed time of a
translight journey should be identical in ship-time, and in the
time of observers at both ends of the trip.
But since ship and pilot were part of the same system,
both covered by the same expression in Haertel's equation,
it had never occurred to  anyone that the pilot and the ship
might keep different times. The notion was ridiculous.
One-and-a-sevenhundredone, one-and-a-sevenhundredtwo,
one - and - a - sevenhundredthree, one - and - a - sevenhundred
four . . .
The ship was keeping ship-time, which was identical with
observer-time. It would arrive at the Alpha Centauri system
in ten months. But the pilot was keeping Garrard-time, and
it was beginning to look as though he wasn't going to arrive
at all.
It  was  impossible,  but  there  it  was.  Somethingalmost
certainly an unsuspected physiological side effect of the over-
drive field on human metabolism, an effect which naturally
could not have been detected in the preliminary, robot-
piloted tests of the overdrivehad speeded up Garrard's
subjective apprehension of time, and had done a thorough
job of it.
The second hand began a slow, preliminary quivering as
the calendar's innards began to apply power to it. Seventy-
hundred-forty-one,  seventy-hundred-forty-two,  seventy-hun-
dred-forty-three ...
At the count of 7,058 the second hand began the jump to
the next graduation. It took it several apparent minutes to get
across the tiny distance, and several more to come com-
pletely to rest. Later still, the sound came to him:
pock.
In a fever of thought, but without any real physical agita-
tion, his mind began to manipulate the figures. Since it took
him longer to count an individual number as the number be-
came larger, the interval between the two calendar ticks
probably was closer to 7,200 seconds than to 7,058. Figur-
ing backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he
wanted:
One second in ship-time was two hours in Garrard-time.
Had he really been counting for what was, for him, two
whole hours? There seemed to be no doubt about it. It looked
like a long trip ahead.
Just how long it was gong to be struck him with stunning
force. Time had been slowed for him by a factor of 7200. He
would get to Alpha Centauri in just 72,000 months.
Which was
Six thousand years!

Garrard sat motionless for a long time after that, the
Nessus-shirt of warm sweat swathing him persistently, re-
fusing even to cool. There was, after all, no hurry.
Six thousand years. There would be food and water and
air for all that time, or for sixty or six hundred thousand
years; the ship would synthesize his needs, as a matter of
course, for as long as the fuel lasted, and the fuel bred itself.
Even if Garrard ate a meal every three seconds of objective,
or ship, time (which, he realized suddenly, he wouldn't be
able to do, for it took the ship several seconds of objective
time to prepare and serve up a meal once it was ordered; he'd
be lucky if he ate once a day, Garrard-time), there would be
no reason to fear any shortage of supplies. That had been one
of the earliest of the possibilities for disaster that the Project
engineers had ruled out in the design of the DFC-3.
But nobody had thought to provide a mechanism which
would indefinitely refurbish Garrard. After six thousand
years, there would be nothing left of him but a faint film
of dust on the DFC-3's dully gloaming horizontal surfaces.
His corpse might outlast him a while, since the ship itself
was sterilebut eventually he would be consumed by the
bacteria which he carried in his own digestive tract. He
needed those bacteria to synthesize part of his B-vitamin needs
while he lived, but they would consume him without compunc-
tion once he had ceased to be as complicated and delicately
balanced a thing as a pilotor as any other kind of life.
Garrard was, in short, to die before the DFC-3 had gotten
fairly  away  from  Sol;  and when,  after  12,000  apparent
years, the DFC-3 returned to Earth, not even his mummy
would be still aboard.
The chill that went through him at that seemed almost
unrelated to the way he thought he felt about the discovery;
it lasted an enormously long time, and insofar as he could
characterize it at all, it seemed to be a chill of urgency and
excitementnot at all the kind of chill he should be feeling
at a virtual death sentence. Luckily it was not as intolerably
violent as the last such emotional convulsion; and when it
was over, two clock ticks later, it left behind a residuum of
doubt.
Suppose that this effect of time-stretching was only men-
tal? The rest of his bodily processes might still be keeping
ship-time; Garrard had no immediate reason to believe other-
wise.  If so, he  would be  able to  move  about only on
ship-time, too;  it would take  many  apparent months to
complete the simplest task.
But he would live, if that were the case. His mind would
arrive  at Alpha Centauri six thousand years older,  and
perhaps madder, than his body, but he would live.
If, on the  other hand, his bodily movements were going
to be as fast as his mental processes, he would have to be
enormously careful. He would have to move slowly and
exert as little force as possible. The normal human hand
movement, in such a task as lifting a pencil, took the pencil
from a state of rest to another state of rest by imparting to
it an acceleration of about two feet per second per second
and, of course, decelerated it by the same amount. If Garrard
were to attempt to impart to a two-pound weight, which was
keeping ship-time, an acceleration of 14,440 ft/sec' in his
time, he'd have to exert a force of 900 pounds on it.
The point was not that it couldn't be donebut that it
would take as much effort as pushing a stalled jeep. He'd
never be able to lift that pencil with his forearm muscles
alone; he'd have to put his back into the task.
And the human body wasn't engineered to maintain
stresses of that magnitude indefinitely. Not even the most
powerful professional weight-lifter is forced to show his
prowess throughout every minute of every day.
Pock.
That was the calendar again; another second had gone by.
Or another two hours. It had certainly seemed longer than a
second, but less than two hours, too. Evidently subjective
time was an intensively recomplicated measure. Even in this
world of micro-timein which Garrard's mind, at least,
seemed to be operatinghe could make the lapses between
calendar ticks seem a little shorter by becoming actively in-
terested in some problem or other. That would help, during
the waking hours, but it would help only if the rest of hia
body were not keeping the same time as his mind. If it were
not, then he would lead an incredibly active, but perhaps not
intolerable, mental life during the many centuries of his
awake-time, and would be mercifully asleep for nearly as
long.
Both problemsthat of how much force he could exert
with his body, and how long he could hope to be asleep in
his mindemerged simultaneously into the forefront of his
consciousness while he still sat inertly on the hammock, their
terms still much muddled together. After the single tick of
the calendar, the shipor the part of it that Garrard could
see from heresettled back into complete rigidity. The sound
of the engines, too, did not seem to vary in frequency or am-
plitude, at least as far as his ears could tell. He was still not
breathing. Nothing moved, nothing changed.
It was the fact that he could still detect no motion of his
diaphragm or his rib cage that decided him at last. His body
had to be keeping ship-time, otherwise he would have blacked
out from oxygen starvation long before now. That assump-
tion explained, too, those two incredibly prolonged, seemingly
sourceless saturnalias of emotion through which he had suf-
fered: they had been nothing more nor less than the response
of his endocrine glands to the purely intellectual reactions he
had experienced earlier. He had discovered that he was not
breathing, had felt a flash of panic and had tried to sit up.
Long after his mind had forgotten those two impulses, they
had inched their way from his brain down his nerves to the
glands and muscles involved, and actual, physical panic had
supervened. When that was over, he actually was sitting up,
though the flood of adrenalin had prevented his noticing the
motion as he had made it. The later chillless violent, and
apparently associated with the discovery that he might die
long before the trip was completedactually had been his
body's response to a much earlier mental commandthe ab-
stract fever of interest he had felt while computing the time
differential had been responsible for it.
Obviously, he was going to have to be very careful with
apparently cold and intellectual impulses of any kindor he
would pay for them Intel with a prolonged and agonizing
glandular reaction. Nevertheless, the discovery gave him
considerable satisfaction, and Garrard allowed it free play;
it certainly could not hurt him to feel pleased for a few hours,
and the glandular pleasure might even prove helpful if it
caught him at a moment of mental depression. Six thousand
years, after all, provided a considerable number of oppor-
tunities for feeling down in the mouth; so it would be best to
encourage all pleasure moments, and let the after-reaction
last as long as it might. It would be the instants of panic, of
fear, of gloom, which he would have to regulate sternly the
moment they came into his mind; it would be those which
would otherwise plunge him into four, five, six, perhaps even
ten, Oarrard-hours of emotional inferno.
Pock.
There now, that was very good: there had been two Gar-
rard-hours which he had passed with virtually no difficulty of
any kind, and without being especially conscious of their pas-
sage. If he could really settle down and become used to this
kind of scheduling, the trip might not be as bad as he had at
first feared. Sleep would take immense bites out of it; and
during the waking periods he could put in one hell of a lot of
creative thinking. During a single day of ship time, Garrard
could get in more thinking than any philosopher of Earth
could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could,
if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a
century to running down the consequences of a single
thought, down to the last detail, and still have millennia left
to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason
could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had
gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up
with the solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast
and dinner of a single ship's day, and in a ship's month might
put his finger on the First Causel
Pock.
Not that Carrard was sanguine enough to expect that he
would remain logical or even sane throughout the trip. The
vista was still grim, in much of its detail. But the oppor-
tunities, too, were there. He felt a momentary regret that it
hadn't been Haertel, rather than himself, who had been given
such an opportunity
Pock.
for the old man could certainly have made better use of
it  than  Garrard  could.  The  situation  demanded  someone
trained in the- highest rigors of mathematics to be put to the
best conceivable use. Still and all Garrard began to feel
Pock.
that he would give a good account of himself, and it
tickled him to realize that (as long as be held onto his
essential sanity) he would return
Pock.
to Earth after ten Earth months with knowledge cen-
turies advanced beyond anything
Pock.
that Haertel knew, or that anyone could know
Pock.
who had to work within a normal lifetime. Pck. The
whole prospect tickled him. Pck. Even the clock tick seemed
more cheerful. Pck. He felt fairly safe now Pck in disregard-
ing his drilled-in command Pck against moving Pck, since in
any Pck event he Pck had already Pck moved Pck without
Pck being Pck harmed Pck Pck Pck Pck Pck pckpckpckpck-
pckpckpck.. . .
He yawned, stretched, and got up. It wouldn't do to be
too pleased, after all. There were certainly many problems
that still needed coping with, such as how to keep the impulse
toward getting a ship-time task performed going, while his
higher centers were following the ramifications of some
purely philosophical point. And besides . . .
And besides, he had just moved.
More than that; he had just performed a complicated
maneuver with his body in normal time!
Before Garrard looked at the calendar itself, the message
it had been ticking away at him had penetrated. While he
had been enjoying the protracted, glandular backwash of his
earlier feeling of satisfaction, he had failed to notice, at
least consciously, that the calendar was accelerating.
Good-bye, vast ethical systems which would dwarf the
Greeks. Good-bye, calculuses aeons advanced beyond the
spinor calculus of Dirac. Good-bye, cosmologies by Garrard
which would allot the Almighty a job as third-assistant-
waterboy in an n-dimensional backfield.
Good-bye, also, to a project he had once tried to undertake
in collegeto describe and count the positions of love, of
which, according to under-the-counter myth, there were sup-
posed to be at least forty eight. Garrard had never been able
to carry his tally beyond twenty, and he had just lost what
was probably his last opportunity to try again.
The micro-time in which he had been living had worn off,
only a few objective minutes after the ship had gone into
overdrive and he had come out of the anesthetic. The long
intellectual agony, with its glandular counterpoint, had come
to nothing. Garrard was now keeping ship-time.
Garrard sat back down on the hammock, uncertain whether
to be bitter or relieved. Neither emotion satisfied him in the
end; he simply felt unsatisfied. Micro-time had been bad
enough while it lasted; but now it was gone, and everything
seemed normal. How could so transient a thing have killed
Brown and Cellini? They were stable men, more stable, by
his own private estimation, than Garrard himself. Yet he had
come through it. Was there more to it than this?
And if there waswhat, conceivably, could it be?
There was no answer. At his elbow, on the control chassis
which he had thrust aside during that first moment of
infinitely protracted panic, the calendar continued to tick.
The engine noise was gone. His breath came and went in
natural rhythm. He felt light and strong. The ship was quiet,
calm, unchanging.
The calendar ticked, faster and faster. It reached and
passed the first hour, ship-time, of flight in overdrive.
Pock.
Garrard looked up in surprise. The familiar noise, this
time, had been the hour-hand jumping one unit. The minute-
hand was already sweeping past the past half-hour. The
second-hand was whirling like a propellerand while he
watched it, it speeded up to complete invisibility
Pock.
Another hour. The half-hour already passed. Pock. An-
other hour. Pock. Another. Pock. Pock. Pock, Pock, Pock,
Pock, pck-pck-pck-pck-pckpckpckpck. . . .
The hands of the calendar swirled toward invisibility as
time ran away with Garrard. Yet the ship did not change.
It stayed there, rigid, inviolate, invulnerable. When the date
tumblers reached a speed at which Garrard could no longer
read them, he discovered that once more he could not move
and that, although his whole body seemed to be aflutter
like that of a hummingbird, nothing coherent was coming
to him through his senses. The room was dimming, becoming
redder; or no, it was . . .
But he never saw the end of the process, never was
allowed to ' look from the pinnacle of macro-time toward
which the Haertel overdrive was taking him.
Pseudo-death took him first.
3
That Garrard did not die completely, and within a com-
paratively short time after the DFC-3 had gone into overdrive,
was due to the purest of accidents; but Garrard did not know
that. In fact, he knew nothing at all for an indefinite period,
sitting rigid and staring, his metabolism slowed down to next
to nothing, his mind almost utterly inactive. From time to
time, a single wave of low-level metabolic activity passed
through himwhat an electrician might have termed a
"maintenance turnover"in response to the urgings of some
occult survival urge; but these were of so basic a nature as
to reach his consciousness not at all. This was the pseudo-
death.
When the observer actually arrived, however, Garrard
woke. He could make very little sense out of what he saw
or felt even now; but one fact was clear: the overdrive
was offand with it the crazy alterations in time ratesand
there was strong light coming through one of the ports. The
first leg of the trip was over. It had been these two changes
in his environment which had restored him to life.
The thing (or things) which had restored him to con-
sciousness, however, wasit was what? It made no sense.
It was a construction, a rather fragile one, which completely
surrounded his hammock. No, it wasn't a construction, but
evidently something alivea living being, organized hori-
zontally, that had arranged itself in a circle about him. No,
it was a number of beings. Or a combination of all of these
things.
How it had gotten into the ship was a mystery, but there
it was. Or there they were.
"How do you hear?" the creature said abruptly. Its voice,
or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in
the circle, but not fiqm any particular point in it. Garrard
could think of no reason why that should be unusual.
"I" he said. "Or wewe hear with our ears. Here."
His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open
vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was
speaking such an odd language.
"We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise," the creature
said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3's ample library
fell to the deck beside the hammock. "We wooed there and
there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-
they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love."
"With all of love," Garrard echoed. The beademung's
use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but
again Garrard could  find no logical reason why the beade-
mung's usage should be considered wrong.
"Areare you-they from Alpha Centauri?" he said hesi-
tantly.
"Yes, we hear the twin radioceles, that show there beyond
the gift-orifices. We-they pitched that the being-Garrard with
most adoration these twins and had mind to them, soft and
loud alike. How do you hear?"
This time the being-Garrard understood the question. "I
hear Earth," he said. "But that is very soft, and does not
show."
"Yes," said the beademung. "It is a harmony, not a first,
as ours. The All-Devouring listens to lovers there, not on the
radioceles. Let me-mine pitch you-yours so to have mind of
the rodalent beademung and other brothers and lovers, along
the channel which is fragrant to the being-Garrard."
Garrard found that he understood the speech without
difficulty. The thought occurred to him that to understand a
language on its own termswithout having to put it back
into English in one's own mindis an ability that is won
only with difficulty and long practice. Yet, instantly his mind
said, "But it is English," which of course it was. The offer
the clinesterton beademung had just made was enormously
hearted, and he in turn was much minded and of love, to
his own delighting as well as to the beademungen; that
almost went without saying.
There were many matings of ships after that, and the
being-Garrard pitched the harmonies of the beademungen,
leaving his ship with the many gift orifices in harmonic for
the All-Devouring to love, while the beademungen made show
of they-theirs.
He tried, also, to tell how he was out of love with the
overdrive, which wooed only spaces and times, and made
featurelings. The rodalent beademung wooed the overdrive,
but it did not pitch he-them.
Then the being-Garrard knew that all the time was de-
voured, and he must hear Earth again.
"I pitch you-them to fullest love," he told the beade-
mungen, "I shall adore the radioceles of Alpha and Proxima
Centauri, 'on Earth as it is in Heaven.' Now the overdrive
my-other must woo and win me, and make me adore a
featureling much like silence."
"But you will be pitched again," the clinesterton beade-
mung said. "After you have adored Earth. You are much
loved by Time, the All-Devouring. We-they shall wait for
this othering."
Privately Garrard did not faith as much, but he said,
"Yes, we-they will make a new wooing of the beadernun-
gen at some other radiant. With all of love."
On this the beademungen made and pitched adorations,
and in the midst the overdrive cut in. The ship with the
many gift orifices and the being-Garrard him-other saw the
twin radioceles sundered away.
Then, once more, came the pseudo-death.
4
When the small candle lit in the endless cavern of
Garrard's pseudo-dead mind, the DFC-3 was well inside
the orbit of Uranus. Since the sun was still very small and
distant, it made no spectacular display through the nearby
port, and nothing called him from the post-death sleep for
nearly two days.
The computers waited patiently for him. They were no
longer immune to his control; he could now tool the ship
back to Earth himself if he so desired. But the computers
were also designed to take into account the fact that he
might be truly dead by the time the DFC-3 got back. After
giving him a solid week, during which time he did nothing
but sleep, they took over again. Radio signals began to go
out, tuned to a special channel.
An hour later, a very weak signal came back. It was only
a directional signal, and it made no sound inside the DFC-3
but it was sufficient to put the big ship in motion again.
It was that which woke Garrard. His conscious mind was
still  glazed  over  with  the  icy  spume  of  the  pseudo-death;
and as far as he could see the interior of the cabin had not
changed one whit, except for the book on the deck
The book. The clinesterton beademung had dropped it
there. But what under God was a clinesterton beademung?
And what was he, Garrard, crying about? It didn't make
sense. He remembered dimly some kind of experience out
there by the Centauri twins
the twin radioceles
There was another one of those words. It seemed to have
Greek roots, but he knew no Greekand besides, why
would Centaurians speak Greek?
He leaned forward and actuated the switch which would
roll the shutter off the front port, actually a telescope with
a translucent viewing screen. It showed a few stars, and a
faint nimbus off on one edge which might be the Sun. At
about one o'clock on the screen, was a planet about the size
of a pea which bad tiny projections, like teacup handles,
on each side. The DFC-3 hadn't passed Saturn on its way
out; at that time it had been on the other side of the Sun
from the route the starship had had to follow. But the
planet was certainly difficult to mistake.
Garrard was on his way homeand he was still alive.
and sane. Or was he still sane? These fantasies about Cen-
taurianswhich still seemed to have such a profound emo-
tional effect upon himdid not argue very well for the stabil-
ity of his mind.
But they were fading rapidly. When he discovered, clutch-
ing at the handiest fragments of the "memories," that the
plural of beademung was beademungen, he stopped taking
the problem seriously. Obviously a race of Centaurians who
spoke Greek wouldn't also be forming weak German plurals.
The whole business had obviously been thrown up by his
unconscious.
But what had he found by the Centaurus stars?
There was no answer to that question but that in-
comprehensible garble about love, the All-Devouring, and
beademungen. Possibly, he had never seen the Centaurus stars
at all, but had been lying here, cold as a mackerel, for the
entire twenty months.
Or had it been 12,000 years? After the tricks the over-
drive had played with time, there was no way to tell what
the objective date actually was. Frantically Garrard put the
telescope into action. Where was the Earth? After 12,000
years
The Earth was there. Which, he realized swiftly, proved
nothing. The Earth had lasted for many millions of years;
12,000 years was nothing to a planet. The Moon was there,
too; both were plainly visible, on the far side of the Sun
but not too far to pick them out clearly, with the telescope
at highest power. Garrard could even see a clear sun-highlight
on the Atlantic Ocean, not far east of Greenland; evidently
the computers were bringing the DFC-3 in on the Earth
from about 23 north of the plane of the ecliptic.
The Moon, too, had not changed. He could even see on
its face the huge splash of white, mimicking the sun-high-
light on Earth's ocean, which was the magnesium hydroxide
landing beacon, which had been dusted over the Mare Va-
porum in the earliest days of space flight, with a dark spot
on its southern edge which could only be the crater Monilius.
But that again proved nothing. The Moon never changed.
A film of dust laid down by modern man on its face would
last for millenniawhat, after all, existed on the Moon to
blow it away? The Mare Vaporum beacon covered more
than 4,000 square miles; age would not dim it, nor could
man himself undo iteither accidentally, or on purposein
anything under a century. When you dust an area that large
on a world without atmosphere, it stays dusted.
He checked the stars against his charts. They hadn't
moved; why should they have, in only 12,000 years? The
pointer stars in the Dipper still pointed to Polaris. Draco,
like a fantastic bit of tape, wound between the two Bears,
and Cepheus and Cassiopeia, as it always had done. These
constellations told him only that it was spring in the northern
hemisphere of Earth.
But spring of what year?
Then, suddenly, it occurred to Garrard that he had a
method of finding the answer. The Moon causes tides in the
Earth, and action and reaction are always equal and op-
posite.  The Moon cannot move things on Earth without
itself being affectedand that effect shows up in the moon's
angular momentum. The Moon's distance from the Earth
increases steadily by 0.6 inches every year. At the end of
12,000 years, it should be 600 feet farther away from the
Earth, and action and reaction are always equal and op-
Was it possible to measure? Garrard doubted it, but he
got out his ephemeris and his dividers anyhow, and took
pictures. While he worked, the Earth grew nearer. By the
time he had finished his first calculationwhich was indeci-
sive, because it allowed a margin for error greater than the
distances he was trying to checkEarth and Moon were
close enough in the telescope to permit much more accurate
measurements.
Which were, he realized wryly, quite unnecessary. The
computer had brought the DFC-3 back, not to an observed
sun or planet, but simply to a calculated point. That Earth
and Moon would not be near that point when the DFC-3 re-
turned was not an assumption that the computer could make.
That the Earth was visible from here was already good and
sufficient proof that no more time had elapsed than had been
calculated for from the beginning.
This was hardly new to Garrard; it had simply been
retired to the back of his mind. Actually he had been doing
all this figuring for one reason, and one reason only: because
deep in his brain, set to work by himself, there was a
mechanism that demanded counting. Long ago, while he
was still trying to time the ship's calendar, he had initiated
compulsive countingand it appeared that he had been
counting ever since. That had been one of the known
dangers of deliberately starting such a mental mechanism;
and now it was bearing fruit in these perfectly useless as-
tronomical exercises.
The insight was healing. He finished the figures roughly,
and that unheard moron deep inside his brain stopped count-
ing at last. It had been pawing its abacus for twenty months
now, and Garrard imagined that it was as glad to be retired
as he was to feel it go.
His radio squawked, and said anxiously, "DFC-3, DFC-3.
Garrard, do you hear me? Are you still alive? Everybody's
going wild down here. Garrard, if you hear me, call us!"
It  was  Haertel's  voice.  Garrard  closed  the  dividers  so
convulsively that one of the points nipped into the heel of
his hand. "Haertel, I'm here. DF,C-3 to the Project. This is
Garrard." And then, without knowing quite why, he added:
"With all of love."
Haertel, after all the hoopla was over, was more than
interested in the time effects. "It certainly enlarges the mani-
fold in which I was working," he said. "But I think we can
account for it in the transformation. Perhaps even factor
it out, which would eliminate it as  far as the pilot is  con-
cerned. We'll see, anyhow."
Garrard swirled his highball reflectively. In Haertel's
cramped old office, in the Project's administration shack, he
felt both strange and as old, as compressed, constricted. He
said, "I don't think I'd do that, Adolph. I think it saved
my life."
"How?"
"I told you that I seemed to die after a while. Since I got
home, I've been reading; and I've discovered that the psychol-
ogists take far less stock in the individuality of the human
psyche than you and I do. You and I are physical scientists,
so we think about the world as being all outside our skins
something which is to be observed, but which doesn't alter the
essential /. But evidently, that old solipsistic position isn't
quite true. Our very personalities, really, depend in large
part upon alt the things in our environment, large and small,
that exist outside our skins. If by some means you could
cut a human being off from every sense impression that
comes to him from outside, he would cease to exist as a
personality within two or three minutes. Probably he would
die."
"Unquote: Harry Stack Sullivan," Haertel said, dryly.
"So?"
"So," Garrard said, "think of what a monotonous environ-
ment the inside of a spaceship is. It's perfectly rigid, still,
unchanging, lifeless. In ordinary interplanetary flight, in such
an environment, even the most hardened spaceman may go
off his rocker now and then. You know the typical spaceman's
psychosis as well as I do, I suppose. The man's personality
goes rigid, just like his surroundings. Usually he recovers
as soon as he makes port, and makes contact with a more-
or-less normal world again.
"But in the DPC-3, I was cut off from the world around
me much more severely. I couldn't look outside the ports
I was in overdrive, and there was nothing to see. I couldn't
communicate with home, because I was going faster than
light.  And  then  I  found  I  couldn't  move  either,  for  an
enormous long while; and that even the instruments that are
in constant change for the usual spaceman wouldn't be in
motion for me. Even those were fixed.
"After the time rate began to pick up, I found myself in
an even more impossible box. The instruments moved, all
right, but then they moved too fast for me to read them.
The whole situation was now utterly rigidand, in effect,
I died. I froze as solid as the ship around me, and stayed
that way as long as the overdrive was on."
"By that showing," Haertel said dryly, "the time effects
were hardly your friends."
"But they were, Adolph. Look. Your engines act on sub-
jective time; they keep it varying along continuous curves
from far-too-slow to far-too-fastand, I suppose, back down
again. Now, this is a situation of continuous change. It wasn't
marked enough, in the long run, to keep me out of pseudo-
death; but it was sufficient to protect me from being obliter-
ated altogether, which I think is what happened to Brown
and Cellini. Those men knew that they could shut down the
overdrive if they could just get to it, and they killed them-
selves trying. But I knew that I just had to sit and take it
and, by my great good luck, your sine-curve time variation
made it possible for me to survive."
"Ah, ah," Haertel said. "A point worth considering
though I doubt that it will make interstellar travel very
popular!"
He dropped back into silence, his thin mouth pursed.
Garrard took a grateful pull at his drink.
At last Haertel said: "Why are you in trouble over these
Centaurians? It seems to me that you have done a good job.
It  was  nothing  that  you  were  a  heroany  fool  can  be
bravebut I see also that you thought, where Brown and
Cellini evidently only reacted. Is there some secret about
what you found when you reached those two stars?"
Garrard said, "Yes, there is. But I've already told you
what it is. When I came out of the pseudo-death, I was just
a sort of plastic palimpsest upon which anybody could have
made a mark. My own environment, my ordinary Earth
environment, was a hell of a long way off. My present
surroundings were nearly as rigid as they had ever been.
When I met the Centauriansif I did, and I'm not at all
sure of thatthey became the most important thing in my
world, and my personality changed to accommodate and
understand them. That was a change about which I couldn't
do a thing.
"Possibly I did understand them. But the man who under-
stood them wasn't the same man you're talking to now,
Adolph. Now that I'm back on Earth, I don't understand
that man. He even spoke English in a way that's gibberish
to me. If I can't understand myself during that periodand
I can't; I don't even believe that that man was the Garrard
I knowwhat hope have I of telling you or the Project
about the Centurians? They found me in a controlled environ-
ment, and they altered me by entering it. Now that they're
gone, nothing comes through; I don't even understand why
I think they spoke English!"
"Did they have a name for themselves?"
"Sure," Garrard said. "They were the beademungen."
"What did they look like?"
"I never saw them."
Haertel leaned forward. "Then . . ."
"I heard them. I think." Garrard shrugged, and tasted his
Scotch again. He was home, and on the whole he was
pleased.
But in his malleable mind he heard someone say, On
Earth, as it is in Heaven; and then, in another voice, which
might also have been his own (why had he thought "him-
other"?), It is later than you think.
"Adolph," he said, "is this all there is to it? Or are we
going to go on with it from here? How long will it take to
make a better starship, a DFC-4?"
"Many years," Haertel said, smiling kindly. "Don't be
anxious, Garrard. You've come back, which is more than
the others managed to do, and nobody will ask you to go out
again. I really think that it's hardly likely that we'll get
another ship built during your lifetime; and even if we do,
we'll be slow to launch it. We really have very little infor-
mation about what kind of playground you found out there."
"I'll go,"  Garrard said.  "I'm not afraid to go backI'd
like to go. Now that I know how the DFC-3 behaves, I
could take it out again, bring you back proper maps, tapes,
photos."
"Do you really think," Haertel said, his face suddenly
serious, "that we could let the DFC-3 go out again? Garrard,
we're going to take that ship apart practically molecule by
molecule; that's preliminary to the building of any DFC-4.
And no more can we let you go. I don't mean to be cruel,
but has it occurred to you that this desire to go back may
be the result of some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion? If
so, the more badly you want to go back, the more dangerous
to us all you may be. We are going to have to examine you
just as thoroughly as we do the ship. If these beademungen
wanted you to come back, they must have had a reason
and we have to know that reason."
Garrard nodded, but he knew that Haertel could see the
slight movement of his eyebrows and the wrinkles forming
in his forehead, the contractions of the small muscles which
stop the flow of tears only to make grief patent on the rest
of the face.
"In short," he said, "don't move."
Haertel looked politely puzzled. Garrard, however, could
say nothing more. He had returned to humanity's common
time, and would never leave it again.
Not even, for all his dimly remembered promise, with all
there was left in him of love.