CHAPTER V

Minus Math

Lancelot Biggs said feverishly, "Don't think, Hank--act! Anything you say is all right by me. You're in command here! Give your orders!"

Hank said hesitantly, "Well, if you say so--" and moved to the audio. With his unerring sense of assurance, he selected the right button, contacted the engine room. Chief Engineer Garrity's grizzled face appeared in the plate.

"Yes, sorr?"

"Chief, turn off them there reverse engines right away," said Hank hesitantly. "An' disconnect them anti--er--anti-grav doogummies."

Garrity's jaw fell open. He said, "I--I beg your pardon, sorr!" and looked around the room for verification of the orders. Cap Hanson, too, had heard the command, and was turning a violent mauve. But Lancelot Biggs nodded.

"Do as Mr. Cleaver says, Chief."

"--an' when you git done doin' them things," Hank persisted gravely, "I want you should git up steam. An' push for'rd as hard an' as fast as you can. With--" He swallowed hard. "With the auxil'ry use o' that new speed gadget Lootenant Biggs invented."

Garrity almost strangled, but he got the words out.

"Yes ... sorr!" Then he faded from the plate. Biggs stared at Hank.

"You--you're sure you know what you're doing, Cleaver?"

"I think I do," said Horse-sense Hank. "It's the only thing makes sense. I figgered an' figgered, and it looks to me like there's only one logical way to act. We'll know in a minute if I'm right."

He dug his toe into the carpet, sort of grunted, coughed, glanced at Biggs.

"Got a mite excited about me not bein' married, son. I been thinkin' that over. You mean to say--"

Biggs, looking confused, said,

"But you see, Hank--"

"Yeah. Reckon I do. An' you--an' you--"

"Yes, sir," said Lancelot Biggs.

I stared at Donovan.

I said, "What makes with the brain trust? Double talk?"

He said, "Don't ask me, Buster. I just work here. Or used to. It's even money whether I continue working or learn to play a harp. What with that screwy command your friend Hank gave--"

Then he, and I and everyone in the room stopped speaking. For again there had come, remotely, a different tone-value from the engine room. Hank's orders were being obeyed! And all eyes centered painfully on the visiplate in which, almost blotting the entire frame now, was mirrored the on-rushing planet....

* * * * *

Can I explain my feelings to you? I doubt it. All I can think of is to say that I felt like a very tiny fly on a wall, watching helplessly, wingless, unable to escape, as a gigantic flyswatter smashed down at frightful speed upon me. The _Saturn_ was a huge craft, yes, but it was a speck of dry dust compared to the colossal sphere toward which it plunged.

At this velocity there could be but one result to a collision. Death, swift, crushing, horrible, for all of us. A moment, I thought, of incredible pain. A torrent of madness beating at the eardrums, the fires of hell flaming before the eyes--then oblivion.

Nearer came the planet. I could see now that it was as mad and wild as the unspawned negative universe in which it floated. No life. No thin film of atmosphere to blue the sharp definition of its raw terrain. A weird, dead world in a universe that could not be.

I was aware of Donovan at my side, breathing hard. I glanced across the room at Lancelot Biggs. His eyes were strained, the muscles of his jaw white. His lips were half parted. Perhaps it was imagination, but I thought I caught the whisper of a name.

"Diane!"

And then a stranger thing happened. There came a sudden, tender little cry from Helen MacDowell. A flurry of movement. And then she was across the room, was in the arms of Hank Cleaver! And she didn't seem to care that her words carried to all of us.

"You've failed, Hank! But I don't care. I don't care. It's too late to pretend now that I hate you. For I don't. I love you, Hank...."

Then everything happened at once. My eyes leaped back from the Helen-Hank tableau to the visiplate, as abruptly there came a crashing explosion from the bowels of the ship. I saw the planet before us now within--it seemed--but inches! There was a high, tortured screaming in my ears. The grind of motors, the pounding of massive drums, a scream ripping from the throat of Hallowell, a muffled curse from Cap Hanson--

Then a horrible, wrenching shock. I felt my body lifting, floating, hurtling across the floor! Something fell sprawling upon me, glass splintered, a dozen voices cried out at once.

And everything was black, and there was a dead and sickly pressure across my body--

--from the center of which came a muffled voice. The voice of Bert Donovan.

"Well, I'll be triple and everlastingly damned to a fare-you-well!"

I kicked, and he wriggled. I kicked again and he moved.

I said, "If you'll get off my head, you damned fool, maybe I can see what's going on!"

He got up. And so did I. All about the control room, men were picking themselves up, lifting their voices in astonishment, staring at a visiplate from which had disappeared that gigantic, threatening orb.

* * * * *

A visiplate in which was now depicted sweet, jet depths of darkness, pin-pricked with glowing points of light!

Cap Hanson's voice was a paean of joy.

"We're home again! Home in our own universe! By God--in our own solar system! For there's Io, the pretty little devil!"

Helen was crying, "Then you didn't fail, Hank! It worked! We're saved!"

And Biggs, only sane man in a roomful of delight-maddened lunatics, was ambling to the audio, face wreathed in a seraphic grin.

"Garrity?" he called down to the chief engineer. "Take a look out the viewpanes if you want to holler with joy. And then--set course for home! And, oh, yes, Garrity--set men to work immediately on the repairing of the temporal deflector."

So that was that. We took time off to recuperate. Some hours later we were standing in the _Saturn_ before a large, cylindrical, glass-walled machine, Lancelot Biggs' "time-travel" gadget which had absorbed us up here into the future. That is most of us were still standing here in the _Saturn_.

Professor Hallowell had already been projected back to our time. So had Travis Tomkins, Midland's observatory expert, his arms loaded with books from the ship's library describing the great inventions of, as on the _Saturn_, the last two centuries--or, to us of 1940, the inventions of the _next_ two hundred years.

"Which books," commented Lancelot Biggs wryly, "will do Tomkins a lot of good--I don't think! They won't arrive with him, you know--because in his time they weren't even written! I hope both those fellows will return to their original places on Earth. Rather amazing, wouldn't it be," he chuckled, "if something went wrong with the machine and Hallowell appeared suddenly on the campus of Midland University with some gadget from the future--_his_ future--which fell into his pocket in his transit through space and time!"

"Campus?" exclaimed H. Logan MacDowell. "Don't tell me that time-travel thing of yours will actually set us down again in our own time!"

"If it doesn't," grinned Lancelot Biggs, "a lot of faces are going to be very red indeed."

He motioned to the second mate, Lt. Dick Todd. Todd set himself at the controls. Then he nodded to the detective.

With unseemly haste the gumshoe scrambled into the time machine.

"Contact!" Biggs ordered.

The second mate pressed the button that sent the snooper back to Midland campus. That lug! I don't think he ever did figure out what it was all about! In fact a week later, when I met him skulking along a corridor, I asked him how he liked his round trip through space.

"I'm trying not to think about it," he groaned. "Confidentially, in another ten days I'll be able to believe it never happened _a_-tall, no sir!"

"Brother," I said to myself, "if imagination was a baby chick, you couldn't scratch yourself out of an egg-shell."

But I'm getting ahead of the story. After we got rid of the gumshoe, there was Prexy H. Logan MacDowell to be considered.

"You are next, sir," Lancelot Biggs said courteously. "And a pleasant journey."

"Harrumph!" growled his academic nibs. "This is a damnable outrage!"

* * * * *

Biggs bowed him into the time-traveling contraption.

"I think you've got something there," he grinned--and signalled to Dick Todd. One second later H. Logan was flitting through space back home.

And now it was time for last farewells. But Biggs asked, in gripping Hank's hand, the question I'd been dying to ask myself, but hadn't dared.

"You should tell me, Hank, how you struck on the solution. We may get in a jam like that again, some day. And if we do--"

"Send for me," grinned Hank. "I like this period o' your'n okay, Bud. But you won't get in no more messes like that. Not if you tone down the speed o' that gadget o' your'n, like I told you to.

"My figgerin'? Why, it was just plain, dumb hosslogic, that's all. The tip-off come when we started whiskin' faster an' faster by the moment toward that there planet in our path.

"Y'see, we was in a negative universe. We decided that. But whut we overlooked was the simple, logical fact that in a negative universe all natcheral physical laws ought to operate in reverse!

"Way I see it, we just happened across that planet by accident. An' had we been content to let well enough alone, we'd never have come anywhere near it! It would have shunted us off on its own account!"

I said, "What? How do you figure--"

Biggs exclaimed, "_I_ see! In our positive universe, it is axiomatic that all objects attract each other in direct ratio to their masses. But in a _negative_ universe--"

"They'd repel each other," nodded Hank. "Right. I guess we was dumb, though. We done the _one_ thing we shouldn't have ever done. Put out anti-gravs and repellor-beams against the upstart planet! Which was the one thing calc'lated to drag us to it! In this backward universe, mathematics an' physics worked in reverse. Anti-gravitational beams attracted, and propellors repelled!"

Biggs sighed. "And I've always considered myself a logical man! What you did was turn on every available, ounce of energy and thrust the _Saturn_ at full speed _toward_ the planet, realizing that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and that the planet's terrific repelling force would throw us completely back out of negative space--is that it?"

Hank gazed at him admiringly.

"I reckon," he said softly, "that's about it. But you sure explain it purty...."

* * * * *

So why go on? We got into the machine, then. Hank and Helen and I. And again things began flickering. And at the last minute, I remembered there was something I wanted to ask Biggs, but it was too late then, for there came another moment of giddy spinning, fireworks in my eyes and butterflies in my tummy, and then--

We were back in my apartment. And it was broad daylight, but my radio was still on, as I had left it, and already it was blatting a news item about how Prof. Hallowell had inexplicably returned. There'd be other flashes later, I knew. And a lot of explaining to be done to an unbelieving public....

* * * * *

Then I said, "Damn!"

"Yeah?" said Hank. "Why for, Jim?"

"Something I meant to ask Biggs and forgot. But you can tell me, I guess. One thing I never did understand, was why Biggs got so excited when he found out you and Helen were not married. What difference did _that_ make? Why did that cause him to show such great confidence that we were going to pull out of our jam?"

Hank flushed. "Well, you see--" he hesitated.

"I don't. But I'm listening."

"Well, it was this way. Soon as Lanse learned me an' Helen wasn't hitched, he couldn't help knowin' everything was gonna be all right. On account of it warn't logical her an' me should git kilt _before_ we was married an'--an' had a youngster...."

His face was flaming. But I was inexorable.

"I still don't get it. Why not? Why wasn't it logical?"

"Aw, durn, Jim--don't you see? Because Biggs knew that much o' my 'history.' That is, my future, to me, is my _past_ to him. He knew who I'd married, and that me an' my wife had a youngster, an' consequently if them things hadn't happened yet, we was bound to live an' make 'em happen!"

So it finally sank in.

I said, "Golly! You're right--as usual! But wasn't it a lucky break that Lancelot Biggs happened to know something about your history, Hank? Your name must be pretty well known to the men of the future--"

Hank writhed in embarrassment.

"Well, now, I wouldn't 'zackly say that, Jim. Lanse knew about me, yes. But then, he'd be likely to. Him an' me bein' related, so to speak--"

"Related!"

"Yeah. Spoke to him 'bout it later. Y'see, Lanse is a sort of grandson o' mine, with a lot o' great-greats on the front of it--" He gulped and looked at Helen miserably. "I--I'm afeared they ain't nothin' we can do 'bout it, Helen. Lanse says you was his great-great-grandmammy!"

And then Helen MacDowell--smiled! And it was the kind of smile I hope to see some time on the lips of a woman looking at me. And she said, very softly,

"There's no sense in fighting fate, is there, Hank? What must be, must be. And there _is_ something we can do--to make the future happier...."

Aw, hell! I promised Helen she could have him alone in a dark room, didn't I? So I said good-by.

I don't think either of them heard me. In fact, I'm sure of it!