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  We were 50 light years from Old Earth when the ship’s computer network alerted us. Every screen flashed three times, and Saul Gilpin’s voice sounded a warning.

  “Listen carefully. The Universe is alive with beings whose minds can and do reach through the space you are now in. It is not concepts that they project, but raw emotion. No matter what comes to your minds, you must not echo, you must not be afraid.”

  We sat there in silence. I felt chilled. I thought of mind-tendrils, reaching out to me, out from the burning suns, the icy darknesses…

  REGINALD BRETNOR

  ACE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Book I of this novel, now called Owl’s Flight,

  appeared in the February 1983 issue of

  Fantasy & Science Fiction, under the book’s present title.

  GILPIN’S SPACE

  An Ace Science Fiction Book/published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace Science Fiction edition/June 1986

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1986 by Reginald Bretnor.

  Cover art by Alan Gutierrez.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  ISBN: 0-441-28837-5

  Ace Science Fiction Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Contents: -

  BOOK I ~ Owl’s Flight

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  BOOK II ~ Laure’s World

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  BOOK III ~ And Back Again

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  BOOK I

  Owl’s Flight

  1

  It was strange that until he disappeared I never realized that, even though we were friends and he at least nominally worked under me, I really knew next to nothing about Saul Gilpin. He was a fey little man, with a big nose, bigger ears, and a dun-colored squirrel-tail moustache, and I knew—or at least I had assumed—that he was a chemist. (Who but a chemist, for God’s sake, would name his only daughter Polly Esther?) I’d simply taken him for granted, mostly because of that discreet PH (no chemical pun intended) next to his name on the roster, meaning that he’d been personally hired either by Admiral Endicott, when he was still alive, or by Laure, his widow, neither of whom ever made a mistake about a man. In the Navy, I had been the admiral’s aide, and now I was her general manager. It never occurred to me to ask questions about Saul.

  But there is no better way to get questions started than for a man to vanish while there’s still daylight, and not by himself alone but with his entire lab, especially when that lab is an eighty-foot still-experimental submarine safely moored between her two recently completed sister ships at the yard where they’d been built, with all three just about ready for their sea trials. Because it was past closing time and we’d shut down, only two people saw it happening: Rhoda Durfee, Laure Endicott’s confidential secretary, and Dan Kellett, our chief of security. They were more or less engaged, and he’d been walking her to the parking lot. The ship didn’t disappear abruptly. There was no implosion or anything like that. The blue-gray skin of Cupid’s Arrow—the cute name Gilpin had given it— began, almost imperceptibly, to pale. Then its texture seemed actually to thin. Then it and everything inside it was seen to turn momentarily transparent. Then it was gone. Like that. Instantly, the bay surged in to fill the hole, splashed back and forth a bit, then stilled. Nothing remained—nothing but the pier, and surgically severed hawsers, and her two sisters, Owl and Pussycat, now with only that frightening emptiness between them.

  Dan and Rhoda had reported immediately to Laure Endicott, as usual still in her office, and her phone call had caught me before I got past the guardpost at the gate. I wasted no time getting back to her.

  She sat behind the huge, polished rosewood desk she had inherited from the admiral—just as she had inherited Underseas, Ltd., and his shipyard, his library, his gun collection, his hunting dogs. If she had not inherited his ability, it was because she had no need of it. He had died owning one shipyard. Five years later, she had three, an additional one in Ireland, and one in Brazil, all building cargo subs and tankers. She had been bom French-Canadian, educated in Paris and in England, and she was one of those rare, rare women who carry all their beauty with them as they age. Her face was a seventeenth-century face: a patrician nose, slightly arched brows over cool, piercing gray eyes; she wore her silver hair in one of those beautifully impossible arrangements that must take a personal maid at least half an hour to arrange. Though she was not really tall, I always felt she was towering over me. The first time Janet, my wife, met her at a party, she watched her for a while, then turned to me and said, “Geoff, tell me—your Mrs. Endicott is more than old enough to be my mother, much more, and yet every man in this room—and that includes you, my love—can’t keep his eyes off her.”

  When 1 told her that she herself was much more beautiful, and that it was just noblesse oblige, she kicked me in the shins.

  Now Laure Endicott smiled at me, a friendly smile, but with no humor in it. She gestured me to my accustomed chair at the comer of her desk. Kellett and Rhoda Durfee were already seated, facing her, Dan looking like a harried quarterback, Rhoda working her capable, shapely hands against each other in her lap.

  “I shall outline what has happened,” said Laure Endicott, “and then you can question Rhoda and Mr. Kellett, who both witnessed it.”

  Dispassionately, as though she were giving me a routine rundown on the weather, she told about the disappearance of Cupid’s Arrow. She turned to them. “Can you add anything to that?”

  “You’ve covered it,” said Dan, obviously impressed. “Every bit of it.”

  “Except for one thing, Mrs. Endicott,” Rhoda put in hesitantly. “There—there was no sound. It—well, it just melted, and there was nothing left.”

  There was a touch of hysteria in her voice, and Laure Endicott soothed her expertly. “Rhoda,” she said, “that’s why I’m sure it didn’t simply melt or anything like that. It couldn’t have, not without a trace. It was, if anything, transferred, sent somewhere else. We’ll have to try to find out where and how.”

  Almost in an instant, I had experienced utter shock, cold realization, and half-acceptance of the unbelievable.

  She leaned toward us. “In the meantime, we’ve other fish to fry. Before too long, one of Dan’s boys is going to realize that Cupid’s Arrow has disappeared, and once the word’s out, the whole yard will be swarming—local police, federal men, then the media, and God only knows who else following. Geoff, what do you think we ought to do?”

  I hesitated, juggling choices. “I think our best bet’s a cover-up—at least for now. That may give us a chance to find out what happened. Otherwise, government—” We exchanged glances, thinking of the people who had come to power in Washington. “Otherwise, they’ll really make a mess of things, and we’ll have nothing left to get our teeth into.”

  She sat back, smiling grimly now. “I was hoping you’d say that. Dan Kellett here tells me both the ship’s hawsers were cut off razor clean. Could we give their ends a quick laser bum to hide the fact?”

  “No reason why not, if no one sees
us.”

  “I can manage it if we can keep our own men off my back,” Dan told her. He stood up massively. “It’s lucky Saul wouldn’t stand for any automatic security devices when there was anyone aboard. If he had, the fat’d be in the fire. Right, Commander?”

  “Right, Dan.”

  He took his intercom out of his pocket and called two men I knew would be nearest.

  “Sousa! Myers! Kellett here at the office. From the window it looks like maybe there’s steam or smoke out near the end of the north slip. Probably nothing, but better chase on up and check it out.”

  We waited till they got back to him that they were on the way. Then, quickly and quietly, he left the room. I looked inquiringly at Laure Endicott.

  “You’re wondering why I’m so anxious to make things look as though the boat’s been stolen?” She smiled. “Partly, Geoff, it’s because of the people we’ll be dealing with. But there’s something else. Saul told me about a week ago that he’d accomplished something sensational—a major breakthrough. He halfway hinted at a preview—he called it a premiere. The only other people present were to be his daughter, and his Chinese girlfriend, that pretty Lillian Yee, and you, and Franz Andradi because, after all, he did a lot of work on it with Saul. I don’t want the powers that be even to suspect that there might be more involved than some minor improvement in the drive or power plant—and, Geoff, there was.”

  We sat there looking at each other silently, hoping Dan wouldn’t be too long with his “Mission accomplished!”

  He wasn’t. It took him eight minutes by the clock. Finally his voice came back to us. “Commander Cormac? Looks like it’s time for me to button up. I’ve a dinner date, but I’ll come back and make a quick check around midnight.”

  Our intercoms were scrambled but Dan was spooked. Well, so was I. “Good boy,” I told him, playing right along. “See you tomorrow.”

  We looked at each other, Laure Endicott and I. “Well,” I said, “now the shooting starts. We’U just have to face up to whatever weirdos our new government sends down to bug us.” Rhoda was crying very softly—beautiful, loyal, dedicated Rhoda. She had a worthless brother, Arley, estranged except when he came begging her for money; and a grandmother, an inoffensive, ineffectual semi-alcoholic living in a protected retirement complex, whom Rhoda visited sadly and dutifully. None of us realized how dreadfully vulnerable she was going to be because of them. Laure Endicott and Dan were the only real family Rhoda had. I went and patted her on the shoulder. “I’m glad the admiral didn’t see these so-called Individualists take power,” I said. “He really was an individualist—and these apes are against everything he stood for.”

  His widow nodded. “He recognized them immediately for what they were. ’Their individualism,’ he told me, ‘means only that everyone’s free to be like every other individual—and they’ll define that. When they talk about private enterprise, they simply mean you’re free to buy a share or two in one of the great conglomerates, but if you succeed by yourself you’re a public menace. Like me.”’

  She did not allow her bitterness to affect her voice. The admiral had been relentless in his opposition to the Individualist People’s Party, in his cutting denunciations of their heavily funded charismatic leader, Breck Dugan—Good Ol’ Breck— and their entire program. Both she and I felt that when his private plane slammed into the Cascades, killing him and his copilot, there’d been dirty work afoot. But there was no way to prove it, and anyway, by that time IPP influence had grown to the point where they could have hamstrung us. Since then, they had swept the country. Good 01’ Breck was now our President, and his movement was spreading into other countries, south of the border, through what remained of the British Commonwealth, even behind the Iron Curtain, where Marxist ideologues had found a spiritual kinship between their repressive collectivism and his own—it reminded me of the Hitler-Stalin pact at the start of World War II. The death rate among independent industries had soared, ana so far Underseas had survived only because Laure Endicott seemed to know even more than the Japanese about economically building first-class cargo submarines.

  Rhoda dried her eyes. “Hadn’t I better be going home, Mrs. Endicott?”

  Laure Endicott stood up. “Please don’t,” she answered. “I need you both. I’m going to take you out to dinner, somewhere where we can’t be found too easily. Geoffrey, why don’t you phone Janet and see if she can join us at—let’s see—how about Les Trois Mousquetaires? Rhoda can go and freshen up while you’re phoning.”

  Rhoda looked at her gratefully, and went out, and I reached for the phone, but Laure stopped me. “A moment, Geoffrey! Rhoda and Dan Kellett can go together. You can ride with me because I want to talk to you. I want to brief you on some things you don’t know—about Saul and Cupid’s Arrow. Janet can drive you home after dinner—and you’ll probably either find the phone ringing for you when you get there, or else one of our people waiting to rush you to the yard.”

  I called Janet at the hospital, and waited while they had her paged. We’d been planning to have dinner out together anyhow, and she was delighted to go to a restaurant that was so quietly famous. She’d meet us there.

  Laure was a good driver. We left the yard behind us, and she turned her swift, silent car onto the access road leading to the freeway and the city.

  “Geoffrey,” she said, “have you ever wondered exactly what we’ve been paying Saul Gilpin for? Of course, it was to develop better and cheaper ways of doing things, but that wasn’t all by any means. John never believed that very profitable myth that only corporate or university or government-owned think tanks can come up with anything original—that everything’s become too complex for the individual genius who just can’t or won’t fit into a think-tank slot. Years ago, he said, ‘Someday Saul’s going to come up with something really revolutionary, something the whole world’s been waiting for without knowing it. My money’s on him.’ Geoffrey, Saul was working on a new drive.”

  “I knew that,” I said, “but I just assumed he’d worked out a new way of converting the nukepak’s energy to electricity. Maybe he wasn’t a mad scientist, Laure, but he really played the part—living aboard Cupid’s Arrow, actually setting up housekeeping there the last few months, bragging to everybody that he was working on the world’s fastest sub. It was just lucky that sub-killers have made submarines so vulnerable that they’re militarily worthless—otherwise, the government would have plucked him out of here long ago.”

  “Lucky for him—and us. His new drive wasn’t as simple as he made it sound. It was based on concepts that, quite literally, nobody else could understand. Franz Andradi told me he couldn’t, even though he’s a nuclear engineer. Once I asked Saul to explain it to me, and he replied, ‘Chire ma tante, I would be delighted to, but no—there is no way. It echoes die poetry at the heart of process, that’s what it does! But I promise you—it will succeed! Indeed it will, and then you can throw the greatest party-of all time to celebrate, even if I’m no longer there.’ Then he bowed, and walked off chuckling to himself.”

  I was beginning to catch on; a new and even more disquieting.dimension was being added to the vanishing of Cupid’s Arrow.

  “Do you mean,” I asked, “that Saul’s new drive did more than just drive? That it shifted Cupid’s Arrow into—into— oh, hell!—into a different universe or something?”

  “Or something,” she replied. “Yes. And that’s why I’ll do anything—and I mean anything—to keep Good OF Breck and his people from finding out about it.”

  “What about Saul?”

  “He must’ve been aboard—he and his cute Lillian Yee, and probably Polly Esther, too. He’d never have let himself get left behind in that kind of an experiment. And he wouldn’t have gone off without them.”

  “Do you suppose that’s what he meant when he talked of celebrating even if he were no longer present?”

  “Probably. God only knows where they are now. They may no longer even exist. Anyhow, I intend to find ou
t what happened. Are you with me, Geoff?”

  “All the way,” I told her.

  “And Dan Kellett?”

  “He feels the way I do—about you and about the IPP. What about Franz? How much does he know?”

  Momentarily, she smiled. “Probably more than we do. By an odd coincidence, he went off backpacking in Montana—at least ten days, he said, up in the high country where no telephone can reach him.”

  The freeway crossed the river, and we looked down on the city turning on its lights, and I found myself wondering what was going to happen to it under Dugan’s rule.

  “Thank God,” I said, “that some of the creeps Good OF Breck’s appointed to high office aren’t too bright. Still, we’d better cover all bases.”

  “Do you remember how John used to put it? ’The first contingency plans you make are for when somebody sinks your unsinkable ship.’”

  “Well, let’s suppose we can keep them hoodwinked,” I asked. “Then how do we go about finding out what and how?”

  “I’ll know more after we talk with Franz,” she told me. “Right now I haven’t even a shred of an idea.”