a bunch of dumbbells with screwdrivers.' He laughed.
'Shut up!' she shrieked.
'Jesus,' Card said. 'Did I really think Sissy was dead? Did I?'
She was trembling.
He nodded toward the photon gun. 'So if I don't drink the beer and take the pills, you pack me off to Altair-4, right? I get to babysit David Brown until we both drop dead of asphyxiation or starvation or cosmic-ray poisoning.'
She was viciously cold now, and it hurt - more than he ever would have believed -but at least she wasn't trying to read him. In her anger, she had forgotten.
The way they had forgotten how simple it was to plug a battery-driven tape recorder into a wall socket with a DC converter between the instrument and the power source.
'There really isn't an Altair-4, just as there aren't really any Tommyknockers. There aren't any nouns for some things - they just are. Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. lt's never a very good name, but it doesn't matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking about Tommyknockers, so here that's what we are. We've been called other things in other places. Altair-4 has, too. It's just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places.'
'Is that where you're from? Your people?'
Bobbi - or whatever this was that looked a bit like her - laughed almost gently. 'We're not a "People," Gard. Not a "race." Not a "species" Klaatu is not going to appear and say "Take us to your leader." No, we're not from Altair-4.'
She looked at him, still smiling faintly. She had recovered most of her equanimity and seemed to have forgotten the pills for the time being.
'If you know about Altair-4, I wonder if you've found the existence of the ship a little strange. '
Gardener only looked at her.
'I don't suppose you've had time enough to wonder why a race with access to teleportation technology' - Bobbi wiggled the plastic gun slightly -'would even bother zipping around in a physical ship.'
Gardener raised his eyebrows. No, he hadn't considered that, but now that Bobbi brought it up, he remembered a college acquaintance once wondering aloud why Kirk, Spock, and company bothered with the Starship Enterprise when it would have been so much simpler to just beam around the universe.
'More dumb-pills,' he said.
'Not at all. It's like radio. There are wavelengths. But beyond that, we don't understand it very well. Which is true of us about most things, Gard. We re builders, not understanders.
'Anyway, we've isolated something like ninety thousand clear - wave lengths - that is, pro-linear settings which do two things: avoid the binomial paradox that prevents the reintegration of living tissue and unfixed matter, and actually seem to go somewhere. But in almost all cases, it isn't anywhere anyone would want to go.'
'Like winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Utica, huh?'
'Much worse. There's a place which seems to be very much like the surface of Jupiter. If you open a door on that place, the difference in pressure is so extreme it starts a tornado in the doorway which quickly assumes an extremely high electrical charge which blows the door open wider and wider like tearing a wound open. The gravity is so much higher that it starts sucking out the earth of the incursive world the way a corkscrew pulls a cork. If left on that particular "station" for long, it would cause a gravonic fault in the planet's orbit, assuming the mass was similar to earth's. Or, depending on the planet's composition, it might just rip it to pieces.'
'Did anything like that come close to happening here?' Gard's lips were numb. Such a possibility made Chernobyl seem as important as a fart in a phone-booth. And you went along with it, Gard! his mind screamed at him. You helped dig it up!
'No, although some people had to be dissuaded from doing too much tinkering along transmitter/transmatter lines.' She smiled. 'It happened somewhere else we visited, though.'
'What happened?'
'They got the door shut before Shatterday, but a lot of people cooked when the orbit changed.' She sounded bored with the subject.
'All of them?' Gardener whispered.
'Nope. There are still nine or ten thousand of them alive at one of the poles,' Bobbi said. 'I think.'
'Jesus. Oh my Jesus, Bobbi.'
'There are other channels which open on rock. Just rock. The inside of some place. Most open in deep space. We've never been able to chart a single one of