Nothing!
No flicker. Nothing!
The Parsec never left normal space.
Major-general Kallner took off his officer's cap to mop his glistening forehead and in doing so exposed a bald head that would have aged him ten years in appearance if his drawn expression had not already done so. Nearly an hour had passed since the Parsec's failure and nothing had been done.
"How did it happen? How did it happen? I don't understand it." Dr. Mayer Schloss, who at forty was the "grand old man" of the young science of hyperfield matrices, said hopelessly, "There is nothing wrong with the basic theory. I'll swear my life away on that. There's a mechanical failure on the ship somewhere. Nothing more." He had said that a dozen times.
"I thought everything was tested." That had been said too. "It was, sir, it was. Just the same-" And that.
They sat staring at each other in Kallner's office, which was now out of bounds for all personnel. Neither quite dared to look at the third person present.
Susan Calvin's thin lips and pale cheeks bore no expression. She said coolly, "You may console yourself with what I have told you before. It is doubtful whether anything useful would have resulted."
"This is not the time for the old argument," groaned Schloss. "I am not arguing. U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation will supply robots made up to specification to any legal purchaser for any legal use. We did our part, however. We informed you that we could not guarantee being able to draw conclusions with regard to the human brain from anything that happened to the positronic brain. Our responsibility ends there. There is no argument."
"Great space," said General Kallner, in a tone that made the expletive feeble indeed. "Let's not discuss that."
"What else was there to do?" muttered Schloss, driven to the subject nevertheless. "Until we know exactly what's happening to the mind in hyperspace we can't progress. The robot's mind is at least capable of mathematical analysis. It's a start, a beginning. And until we try-" He looked up wildly, "But your robot isn't the point, Dr. Calvin. We're not worried about him or his positronic brain. Damn it, woman-" His voice rose nearly to a scream.
The robopsychologist cut him to silence with a voice that scarcely raised itself from its level monotone. "No hysteria, man. In my lifetime I have witnessed many crises and I have never seen one solved by hysteria. I want answers to some questions."
Schloss's full lips trembled and his deep-set eyes seemed to retreat into their sockets and leave pits of shadow in their places. He said harshly, "Are you trained in etheric engineering?"
"That is an irrelevant question. I am Chief Robopsychologist of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation. That is a positronic robot sitting at the controls of the Parsec. Like all such robots, it is leased and not sold. I have a right to demand information concerning any experiment in which such a robot is involved."
"Talk to her, Schloss," barked General Kallner. "She's-she's all right."
Dr. Calvin turned her pale eyes on the general, who had been present at the time of the affair of the lost robot and who therefore could be expected not to make the mistake of underestimating her. (Schloss had been out on sick leave at the time, and hearsay is not as effective as personal experience.) "Thank you, general," she said.
Schloss looked helplessly from one to the other and muttered, "What do you want to know?"
"Obviously my first question is, What is your problem if the robot is not?"
"But the problem is an obvious one. The ship hasn't moved. Can't you see that? Are you blind?"
"I see quite well. What I don't see is your obvious panic over some mechanical failure. Don't you people expect failure sometimes?"
The general muttered, "It's the expense. The ship was hellishly expensive. The World Congress-appropriations-" He bogged down.
"The ship's still there. A slight overhaul and correction would involve no great trouble."
Schloss had taken hold of himself. The expression on his face was one of a man who had caught his soul in both hands, shaken it hard and set it on its feet. His voice had even achieved a kind of patience. "Dr. Calvin, when I say a mechanical failure, I mean something like a relay jammed by a speck of dust, a connection inhibited by a spot of grease, a transistor balked by a momentary heat expansion. A dozen other things. A hundred other things. Any of them can be quite temporary. They can stop taking effect at any moment."
"Which means that at any moment the Parsec may flash through hyperspace and back after all."
"Exactly. Now do you understand?"
"Not at all. Wouldn't that be just what you want?" Schloss made a motion that looked like the start of an effort to seize a double handful of hair and yank. He said, "You are not an etherics engineer."
"Does that tongue-tie you, doctor?"
"We had the ship set," said Schloss despairingly, "to make a jump from a definite point in space relative to the center of gravity of the galaxy to another point. The return was to be to the original point corrected for the motion of the solar system. In the hour that has passed since the Parsec should have moved, the solar system has shifted position. The original parameters to which the hyperfield is adjusted no longer apply. The ordinary laws of motion do not apply to hyperspace and it would take us a week of computation to calculate a new set of parameters."
"You mean that if the ship moves now it will return to some unpredictable point thousands of miles away?"
"Unpredictable?" Schloss smiled hollowly. "Yes, I should call it that. The Parsec might end up in the Andromeda nebula or in the center of the sun. In any case the odds are against our ever seeing it again."