First man to reach the speed of light, I was. But you'll find the good Albert only hinted at the effects, in a delta-theta 2.3 pi-squared way. E=mc2, he said. And for fifty years before they built my rocket, the Lighttrick, slim, tapering, sleek and gy-perpowered, everyone concentrated on turning matter into energy at a light-squared power. Big, bright bangs, and congratulations. It's a pity no one asked what happens to energy divided by the speed of light. I happen to be the answer to the equation, and by interfering with the motor of this electric typescripter I can give you my thoughts on the matter.
The Lighttrick hit full velocity out there between Van Allen and the asteroids. I'd guess the whole beautiful ship, including me, converted into energy and, slowing down, reconverted on the wrong side, so to speak. And there I was, floating without a ship and surrounded by little round beings, shimmering in a blue haze.
"Good afternoon," I said.
But no sound came out of my mouth. I had a mouth, in a way, but not for talking; and not at all the sort of mouth I used to have. In fact, the shimmering blue haze was me. I could find no other parts of me. And when the little round things touched me on the periphery, there was an intelligent vibration.
"Frequency and tone?" said the vibration. "Please identify."
"You must take me as you find me," I thought.
"Unidentified frequencies and discordant tones requested not to wander in spaceways," vibrated the little round things.
"I'm a man," I vibrated back. "We don't have frequencies. We use frequencies in radio, television, radar and so on."
"Not intelligible."
"Where's my ship?"
"Ship?"
I tried to picture the Lighttrick and the long thin gleam on her hull, the fury of her rockets and the calm ordered keyboard of the control panels.
"Most interesting," vibrated the round things. "Poetic. Very creative. Speculative philosopher, yes?"
They seemed to be grasping the general idea, so I concentrated on an image of myself, square and bearded, staring sternly into space through the ports, in a pioneer manner, observing hitherto unknown planets.
"Most ingenious," my audience vibrated back. "But unlikely."
Then they started vibrating among themselves.
"Senior e minus says...."
"Mush is mush, that's what I say."
"Now, theoretically...."
"I don't vibrate why not. There are more things in positive and negative, Horatio, than...."
"Excuse me," I vibrated.
There was a brief pause.
"Perhaps we should illuminate."
"Please do," I vibrated politely.
They gathered round the edges of my haze and explained. It seemed a very senior e had suggested once that there might, just might, theoretically be side-effects of mush. The little round things were e beings. And "mush" was the accepted term for the static and orbital tracks of electrons in fixed patterns, such as one found here and there in space. But the very senior e, apparently, had speculated that in a certain narrow band of light frequencies mush might possibly give an appearance of "matter"—to coin a word—a kind of condensed or crystalline energy.
"But no one," they vibrated, "ever suggested there might be forms of life based on such 'material' structures. We admire your imagination. Hail bright e! All hail."
A rapid circuit of my haze failed to show anyone else that they might be vibrating to.
"Do you mean me?" I inquired.
"Naturally. Hail, bright e!"
"I'm an e?"
"What else?"
"Very well," I thought. "Perhaps you'll tell me what an e is."
"An e? We are all e beings."
"So you mentioned earlier. But what is an e being?"
"Ah, you are too deep for us. Highly original philosopher, yes. But please get off the spaceway. There is a food flood due."
And they edged me firmly down, and down, to a vast doughnut with a hole in the center.
I ate a piece out of habit. It was insipid and tasteless. But then, a doughnut several thousand miles across must have some drawbacks.
"The pasture is better inside," they vibrated.
So I sank down into the enormous piece of pastry and came out of a couple of inner layers to see a big ball of mush. There was no mistaking it. A vast, tangled, interconnecting mass of tiny points of light. Mush was a good name for it. But here and there on its surface were great rivers of liquor and mounds of food in delectable variety.
I stuffed myself for days, browsing here and there across the surface of the globe of mush.
In fact, I was chewing quietly on an apparently endless streaming ribbon of—well—trout, steak, caviar, you-name-your-favorite food; that's what it was to me. And I happened to bite too deeply. There was a core of this mush stuff inside and, when I bit it, the whole food supply stopped. The stream of entrancing food just disappeared.
And there I was, hovering on a plain of bare mush.
I was brooding on this and belching contentedly with a sort of cracking noise, when the skeleton came driving over the surface of the mush ball. It was in a framework of mush shaped like a jeep but squirting delicious little fountains of liquor in the front, where the engine of a real jeep would have been. I moved over and tasted them. And the whole framework stopped.
"Triple purple hell," said a voice. "The damned thing's broken down again. Wait till I get my hands on that idiot mechanic!"
"Hey," I vibrated. "Where are you?"
"Now I'll have to walk all the way back, I suppose," the voice added.
The skeleton got out of the mush jeep, walked through me and lifted the hood.
"Battery flat," the voice said disgustedly. "Not a drop of juice in it."
I began to feel guilty.
There was a slight blue haze round the skeleton's head. When I examined it more closely, it looked less like a skeleton of bare bones and more like a physician's chart of the human nervous system, traced out in thin lines of mush ... little close-packed lines of energy, fixed in relation to each other but flexible as a whole.
It occurred to me I was looking at a human being, in terms of energy.
And I had just drunk his jeep's ignition!
So thought was a form of energy, after all. For some of the things he was thinking about the mechanic responsible for maintaining the jeep were strictly subliminal and Freudian. If he spoke, I doubted if I would hear him. His voice would just be a very faint wave of mush traveling indistinctly out.
"And the next time that spark-spark foreman sends me out on an emergency power-line repair," continued the skeleton, "he can spark-spark well give me a vehicle that works!"
The skeleton's name was Joe, I think. And I watched Joe sway over to the ribbon of mush I had bitten through.
"Fused," Joe muttered in his head. "Now, what on Earth did that?"
And it struck me for the first time where I was. Back on Earth! As an e being! A being based, it seemed, on energy and not on matter. Converted accidentally by the marvels of modern science and the supreme technological achievement of traveling at the speed of light.
I spat disgustedly at the thought.
"Summer lightning?" Joe bent his mush head back and looked up. He exposed a rather interesting tidbit in the region of his throat plexus and his cardiac nerves were, I regret to say, for an instant very appetizing. But I controlled myself.
After all, in a technological society as free with energy as ours ... as yours ... there were bound to be ample food and drink flowing about.
I swear I had come to that ethical conclusion. It wasn't my fault that I was unfamiliar with my own reactions as an e being. I didn't know I was so fast. I ate Joe by mistake. I just drained off the energy of his system before I knew it. Truly.
Well, naturally I was sorry about it. In fact, I was just standing there, looking at the huddled pile of mush, when the other repair crew arrived. From their scrambled thoughts of death and radio and Main Office, I gathered they were sending for a doctor. Sure enough, he arrived in an autojet with delicious after-burners.
So then they had to send for a team of towing tractors. I just couldn't help thinking about the ignition systems of their vehicles; and to think is to eat, with an e. Or rather, if you have the speed of light—as an e being has—it takes some time before you learn to control your reactions quickly enough.
"Well, I don't know what's going on around here," said a voice which I located as the doctor thinking to himself. "But I remember Professor Bigglesby's advice. When you don't know, nod thoughtfully."
I could see his mush head and its blue haze wobbling solemnly at the other mush-men. I beg your pardon—at the other humans.
"Nervous collapse," the doctor continued in his head. "Something to do with electricity, I suppose. Powerline failure. Broken cable. Dead repair man. Don't know much about electricity. Who does? Hello, hello, what's this?"
I saw him bend his nervous skeleton over Joe's body and straighten up with a string of little silver beads sticking to his hand.
"Makes a noise. Quite musical. Adheres to skin. Light. What is it?"
"There's some more of that stuff in the jeep engine," one of the repair crew noticed.
"And on the doc's jets...."
"And in our truck...."
I watched and gathered I was leaving some form of conversion product around the place. I didn't like that thought. If an e being eats energy as food and drink, what does an e being's conversion product make? The answer might be important ... considering I had just eaten someone.
I decided to follow along. The doctor was wiping the silver beads off his hands into something shaped like a glass jar and screwing on a lid. I thought I had better be around when it was examined.
So I rolled after the towing tractors and carefully refrained from even thinking of their refreshing little spark-plugs and tasty exhaust.
I followed the doctor until we reached a place where the mush grew up in blocks on either side, square and close-meshed, with streams, rivers and trickling lines of energy tumbling through their structures. I gathered we had reached a city of some sort.
The doctor-skeleton got out of the tractor and went into one of the tall blocks of ............