Mission: Earth "Black Genesis" Read Online Free PDF

"Come ahead. The doors are not locked."
    It was time I put him in his place!
    Here we were, tearing through space like madmen, only to have to wait and only because he had made a stupid mistake. Forcing the ship to go this fast could blow it up. And all for nothing!
Chapter 4
    Maybe it was because I was still confused as part of the after effects of the speed or because all the wild sparks flying around got me rattled, but I had a bad time of it trying to find my way through the "circle of boxes." I got my hands zapped, even through the insulator gloves, on two different silver rails, and to add pain to injury, I got my face too close to a doorframe and my nose got zapped.
    Heller was in the top lounge with all the huge black windows.
    The moment I entered, I yelled at him, "You didn't have to go this fast!"
    He didn't turn around. He was half-lying in an easy chair. He had on a blue insulator suit and hood and he was wearing blue gloves.
    He was idly playing a game called "Battle." He had
    it set up on an independent viewing screen and his opponent was a computer.
    "Battle," in my opinion, is a silly game. The "board" is a three-dimensional screen; the positions are coordinates in space; each player has fourteen pieces, each one of which has special moves. It presupposes that two galaxies are at war and the object is to take the other player's galaxy. This itself is silly: technology is not up to two galaxies fighting.
    Spacers play it against each other, by choice. When they play it against a computer, they almost always lose.
    I looked at his back. He was a lot too calm. If he only knew what I had in store for him, he wouldn't be so relaxed! So far as games went now, they were all stacked against him. He would be a couple dozen light-years from his nearest friend. He was one and we were many. I had him bugged. And he even thought this was an honest, actual mission. The idiot.
    Suddenly, with a flash, the image of the board blew out. It gave me a lot of satisfaction as he seemed to have been winning.
    In a disgusted tone, he said, "That's the third time that board has wiped in the last hour." He shoved the button plate away from him. "Why bother to set it up again?"
    He turned to me, "Your accusation about going too fast doesn't make sense, Soltan. Without a tow, this tug just goes faster and faster. It's what distance the voyage is, not what speed you set."
    I sat down on a sofa so I could level a finger at him. "You know I don't know anything about these engines. You're taking advantage of me! It won't do!"
    "Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I guess they don't go into this very deeply at the Academy."
    They did, but I had flunked.
    "You have to understand time," he said. "Primitive cultures think energy movement determines time. Actually, it is the other way around. Time determines energy movement. You got that?"
    I said I had but he must have seen I hadn't.
    "Athletes and fighters are accustomed to controlling time," he said. "In some sports and in hand-to-hand combat, a real expert slows time down. Everything seems to go into slow motion. He can pick and choose every particle position and he is in no rush at all. There's nothing mystic about it. He is simply stretching time."
    I wasn't following him, so he picked up his button plate and hit a few.
    "First," he said, "there is LIFE." And that word appeared at the top of the screen. "Some primitive cultures think life is the product of the universe, which is silly. It's the other way around. The universe and things in it are the product of life. Some primitives develop a hatred for their fellows and put out that living beings are just the accidental product of matter, but neither do such cultures get very far."
    He was flying into the teeth of my own heroes: psychiatrists and psychologists. They can tell you with great authority that men and living things are just rotten chunks of matter and ought to be killed off, which proves it! Just try and tell them there is such a thing as