The Galaxy Primes | Page 3

familiar Earth. The plates showed no familiar stars nor patterns of
heavenly bodies. The brightly-shining sun was very evidently not their
familiar Sol.
"Well--we went somewhere ... but not to Alpha Centauri, not much to
our surprise." James gulped twice; then went on, speaking almost
jauntily now that the attempt had been made and had failed. "So now
it's up to you, Clee, as Director of Project Gunther and captain of the
good ship Pleiades, to boss the more-or-less simple--more, I hope--job
of getting us back to Tellus."
Science, both physical and paraphysical, had done its best. Gunther's
Theorems, which define the electromagnetic and electrogravitic
parameters pertaining to the annihilation of distance, had been studied,
tested, and applied to the full. So had the Psionic Corollaries; which,
while not having the status of paraphysical laws, do allow computation
of the qualities and magnitudes of the stresses required for any given
application of the Gunther Effect.
The planning of the starship Pleiades had been difficult in the extreme;
its construction almost impossible. While it was practically a foregone
conclusion that any man of the requisite caliber would already be a

member of the Galaxian Society, the three planets and eight satellites
were screened, psionicist by psionicist, to select the two strongest and
most versatile of their breed.
These two, Garlock and James, were heads of departments of, and
under iron-clad contract to, vast Solar System Enterprises, Inc., the
only concern able and willing to attempt the building of the first
starship.
Alonzo P. Ferber, Chancellor of SSE, however, would not risk a
tenth-piece of the company's money on such a bird-brained scheme.
Himself a Gunther First, he believed implicitly that Firsts were in fact
tops in Gunther ability; that these few self-styled "Operators" and
"Prime Operators" were either charlatans or self-deluded crackpots.
Since he could not feel that so-called "Operator Field," no such thing
did or could exist. No Gunther starship could ever, possibly, work.
He did loan Garlock and James to the Galaxians, but that was as far as
he would go. For salaries and for labor, for research and material, for
trials and for errors; the Society paid and paid and paid.
Thus the starship Pleiades had cost the Galaxian Society almost a
thousand million credits.
Garlock and James had worked on the ship since its inception. They
were to be of the crew; for over a year it had been taken for granted that
would be its only crew.
As the Pleiades neared completion, however, it became clearer and
clearer that the displacement-control presented an unsolved, and quite
possibly an insoluble, problem. It was mathematically certain that,
when the Gunther field went on, the ship would be displaced
instantaneously to some location in space having precisely the Gunther
coordinates required by that particular field. One impeccably rigorous
analysis showed that the ship would shift into the nearest solar system
possessing an Earth-type planet; which was believed to be Alpha
Centauri and which was close enough to Sol so that orientation would
be automatic and the return to Earth a simple matter.

Since the Gunther Effect did in fact annihilate distance, however,
another group of mathematicians, led by Garlock and James, proved
with equal rigor that the point of destination was no more likely to be
any one given Gunther point than any other one of the myriads of
billions of equiguntherial points undoubtedly existent throughout the
length, breadth, and thickness of our entire normal space-time
continuum.
The two men would go anyway, of course. Carefully-calculated
pressures would make them go. It was neither necessary nor desirable,
however, for them to go alone.
Wherefore the planets and satellites were combed again; this time to
select two women--the two most highly-gifted psionicists in the
eighteen-to-twenty-five age group. Thus, if the Pleiades returned
successfully to Earth, well and good. If she did not, the four selectees
would found, upon some far-off world, a race much abler than the
humanity of Earth; since eighty-three percent of Earth's dwellers had
psionic grades lower than Four.
This search, with its attendant fanfare and studiedly blatant publicity,
was so planned and engineered that two selected women did not arrive
at the spaceport until a bare fifteen minutes before the scheduled time
of take-off. Thus it made no difference whether the women liked the
men or not, or vice versa; or whether or not any of them really wanted
to make the trip. Pressures were such that each of them had to go,
whether he or she wanted to or not.
"Cut the rope, Jim, and let the old bucket drop," Garlock said. "Not too
close. Before we make any kind of contact we'll have to do some
organizing. These instruments," he waved at his console, "show that
ours is the only Operator Field in this whole region