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anyway. I'll settle for a chimp. Why should I be any better than that young
fellow-what's his name?"
"You mean Duane Ferguson."
"Sure. Why should I be any better than he is?"
"Oh, cut it out, Norman. You're too old. Your phospholipids-"
"I'm not too old to die, am I? And that's the worst that could happen."
"It wouldn't be stable! Not at your age; you just don't understand the
chemistry. I couldn't promise you more than a few weeks."
Marchand said joyously, "Really! I didn't expect that much. That's more than
you can promise me now."
The doctor argued, but Marchand had held up his end of many a hard-
fought battle in ninety-six years, and besides, he had an advantage over
Czerny. The doctor knew even better than Marchand himself that getting into a
passion would kill him. At the moment when Czerny gauged the risk of a smith
translation less than the risk of going on arguing about it, he frowned, shook
his head grudgingly, and left.
Slowly Marchand wheeled after him.
He did not have to hurry to what might be the last act of his life.
There was plenty of time. In the Institute they kept a supply of breeding
chimpanzees, but it would take several hours to prepare one.
One mind had to be sacrificed in the smith imposition. The man would
ultimately be able to return to his own body, his risk less than one chance in
50 of failure. But the chimp would never be the same. Marchand submitted to
the beginnings of the irradiation, the delicate titration of his body fluids,
the endless strapping and patching and clamping. He had seen it done, and
there were no surprises in the procedure. . . . He had not known, however,
that it would hurt so much.
III
Trying not to walk on his knuckles (but it was~ hard; the ape body was meant
to crouch, the arms were too long to hang comfortably along his sides),
Marchand waddled out into the pad area and bent his rigid chimp's spine back
in order to look up at the hated thing. Dan Fleury came toward him. "Norm?" he
asked tentatively. Marchand attempted to nod; it was not a success, but Fleury
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understood. "Norman," he said, "this is Sigmund Eisele. He invented the FTL
drive."
Marchand raised one long arm and extended a hand that resisted being opened:
it was used to being clawed into a fist. "Congradulazhuns," he said, as
clearly as he could. Virtuously he did not squeeze the hand of the young
dark-eyed man who was being introduced to him. He had been warned that
chimpanzee strength maimed human beings. He was not likely to forget, but it
was tempting to allow himself to consider it for a moment.
He dropped the hand and winced as pain flooded through him.
Czerny had warned him to expect it. "Unstable, dangerous, won't last,"
had rumbled through his conversation, "and don't forget, Norman, the sensory
equipment is set high for you; you're not used to so much input: it will
hurt."
But Marchand had assured the doctor he would not mind that, and indeed he
didn't. He looked at the ship again. "Zo thads id," he grumbled, and again
bent the backbone, the whole barrel chest of the brute he occupied, to stare
at the ship on the pad. It was perhaps a hundred feet tall. "Nod mudge," he
said scornfully. "De Zirian, dad was our firzd, zdood nine hoonderd feed dali
and garried a dousand beople to Alpha Zendauri."
"And it brought a hundred and fifty back alive," said Eisele. He didn't
emphasize the words in any way, but he said it quite clearly. "I want to tell
you I've always admired you, Dr. Marchand. I hope you won't mind my company. I
understand you want to go along with me out to the Tycho Brahe."
"Why zhould I mind?" He did, of course. With the best will in the world, this
young fellow had thrown seventy years of dedication, plus a handsome
fortune-eight million dollars of his own, countless hundreds of millions that
Marchand had begged from millionaires, from government handouts, from the
pennies of schoolchildren-tossed them all into the chamber pot and flushed
them into history. They would say: "A nonce figure of the early twenty-first
century, Norman
Marchand, or Marquand, attempted stellar colonization with primitive rocket-
propelled craft. He was, of course, unsuccessful, and the toll of life and
wealth in his ill-conceived venture enormous. However, after Eisele's faster-
than-light became practicable . . ." They would say that he was a failure. And
he was.
When Tycho Brahe blasted off to the stars, massed bands of five hundred pieces
played it to its countdown, and television audiences all over the world
watched it through their orbiting satellites. A President, a Governor, and
half the Senate were on hand.
When Eisele's little ship took off to catch it and tell its people their
efforts had been all in vain, it was like the departure of the 7:17 ferry for
Jersey City. To that extent, thought Marchand, had Eisele degraded the majesty
of starifight. Yet he would not have missed it for anything. Not though it
meant forcing himself as super-cargo on Eisele, who had destroyed his life,
and on the other smithed chimpanzee, Duane Ferguson, who was for some reason
deemed to have special privileges in regard to the Brahe.
They shipped an extra FTL unit-Marchand heard one of the men call it a
polyflecter, but he would not do it the honor of asking anyone what that
meant-for some reason. Because it was likely to break down, so spares were
needed? Marchand dismissed the question, realizing that it had not been a fear
but a hope. Whatever the reason, he didn't care; he didn't want even to be
here; he only regarded it as his inescapable duty.
And he entered Eisele's ship.
The interior of Eisele's damned ship was built to human scale, nine-foot
ceilings and broad acceleration couches, but they had brought hammocks scaled
to a chimpanzee torso for himself and Duane Ferguson. Doubtless they had
looted the hammocks from the new ship. The one that would never fly-or at
least not on streams of ionized gas. And doubtless this was almost the last
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time that a man's mind would have to leave Earth in an ape's body.
What Eisele's damned ship rode to the stars on in place of ionized gas
Marchand did not understand. The whatcha-flecter, whatever the damned thing
was named, was so tiny. The whole ship was a pigmy.
There was no room for reaction mass, or at least only for enough to get it
off-Earth. Then the little black box-it was not really little, since it was
the size of a grand piano, and it was not black, but gray, but it was a box,
all right-would work its magic. They called that magic "polynomiation." What
polynomiation was Marchand did not try to understand, beyond listening, or
seeming to listen, to Eisele's
brief, crude attempt to translate mathematics into English. He heard just
enough to recognize a few words. Space was N-dimensional. All right, that
answered the whole question, as far as he was concerned, and he did not hear
Eisele's tortuous effofts to explain how one jacked oneself up, so to speak,
into a polynomial dimension-or no, not that, but translated the existing
polynomial extensions of a standard four-space mass into higher orders-he
didn't hear. He didn't hear any of it. What he was listening to was the deep
liquid thump of the great ape's heart that now was sustaining his brain.
Duane Ferguson appeared, in the ape's body that he would never leave now. That
was one more count of Marchand's self-indictment; he had heard them say that
the odds had worked against Ferguson, and his body had died in the imposition.
As soon as he had heard what Eisele was up to, Marchand had seized on it as a
chance for expiation. The project was very simple. A good test for
Eisele's drive, and a mission of mercy, too. They intended to fleet after the
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