Stories Complete, page 12
So ended phase one. His theory had been right—proven. Gone now was the mental anguish and brain-racking uncertainty. It was time for phase two. And that was the long, gruelling session. How many years of it? Seven—eight? Better make it ten—that would allow for trouble. Ten years of solitude that bordered on banishment—of isolation that touched on madness. And the strangest part of it was, he hardly knew why he was making the trip. Fifteen years before he had left Terra. Ten more to make it back. Twenty-five years! For what?
Perhaps it was a mistake going back. Probably wasn’t worth it. Desire had offered a moderate degree of satisfaction. It offered food, shelter, and a chance to live again among civilized human beings. The only thing it lacked was the feasibility to satisfy his compulsion for space. That was why he’d left. He wished now that he had had a chance to see more of the planet. He was curious to know how the inhabitants had made use of an Aladdin’s Lamp that was only partly effective. He wondered about the social problems encountered in a civilization where everyone could have as much as every one else. And most of all he thought about a girl on a far-off planet who had been duplicated complete with every brain cell, except for personality—which was much more interesting than the original! The inhibitions were the thing that never jelled right. That’s what Hortense Applerith had told him. That’s what Lois Burbank had been afraid to tell him. He wondered how long it would be before Earthmen would improve their crude matter transformers into anything approaching the duplicator. . . .
Then he thought of the machine back in the ship’s storeroom. The idea was an impossible one. In the first place, it wouldn’t work. The duplicator was—after all—only a machine. Nothing more, nothing less. To put it in operation, even at pre-light speeds would not only be impractical, but probably downright dangerous. In the second place, he had only a vague idea how to operate it. And in the third place, there was something about the whole idea that almost sickened him.
He stared out the porthole, watching the ragged edge of the galaxy and trying to push the thought out of his mind. And like the sharp edge of a surgeon’s scapel, it came back again—prodding at him, nagging at him. It wasn’t that he would—or even could—do anything about the macabre idea. It was just something to think about. A small straw floating in a sea of loneliness, which he could mull over, but never quite grasp at.
Impulsively he got up and walked down the ship’s corridor. He went down past the galley, past the sleeping quarters, and finally back to the storeroom bulkhead, stopping when the door hissed open at his approach.
Then he saw it. . . . The machine stood at the far corner of the big room, but it had undergone some drastic changes. The entire front end of the giant green base had been dismantled. Like so much scrap metal, it lay strewn haphazardly about the floor of the cabin. The two silver globes had undergone the same treatment. No longer did they gleam in the light of the overhead lamps. Instead, they resembled jagged-edged hemispheres, protruding from the base like a pair of shattered Christmas tree ornaments!
“I broke it, Vince!”
At first the voice seemed to come from the machine itself. Then, from a niche between the pile guards, a girl stepped out. She had long shoulder-length hair that gleamed like burnished copper and hung loosely across a pair of round white shoulders.
Vince drew a quick breath.
“You don’t seem very glad to see me, Vince,” she said.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Stupidly he stared at the red lips and the grey-green eyes that matched the off-the-shoulder dress.
She walked toward him then, smiling around a set of very white teeth. “You’re not angry with me, are you, Vince?” she asked.
Vince rubbed his forehead. It was damp with cold sweat. “You’re dead!” he said woodenly. “You have to be dead. I buried you myself!”
The girl stopped, searching his face. “You didn’t bury me, Vince. I did that myself—buried what was left of Hortense Applerith right after you gave me that lecture about inhibitions.”
Vince gulped. “You’re not Lois Burbank?”
The red lips titled in a nostalgic smile. “Who was Lois Burbank,” she said softly, “except the girl I always wanted to be. As far as I know, there never was any real Lois Burbank. She was nothing but a character in a book I once read.” She paused, then added. “That was a long time ago, Vince. She must have made quite an impression.”
“Yeah,” Vince said. “She sure did.”
“You did ask me to come along, Vince,” the girl said quickly. “So I did. I came aboard while you were making flight plans.”
“Just like that?”
He watched the round white shoulders tilt. “Just like that, Vince.” She glanced over at the machine. “I’m sorry about the duplicator, Vince. It was just that I wanted to make a clean break. I want to be Lois Burbank now, not have you think of her as something that came out of—out of that.”
Vince’s mind was beginning to swim, in front of him, the girl, the cabin, and the dismantled machine were becoming blurred and indistinct. Over the girl’s shoulder he stared out the porthole. Yeandro, like a bright white marble, blazed into the big glass. And beyond it was Mercedes. He’d had an experience there once, on a planet named Gallion. Yet somehow it seemed remote and far, far away. These were strange times—times when almost anything could happen. Maybe in an age of force-fields and duplicators anything was possible. Maybe it was even possible for a girl to completely reverse her personality by merely saying it was so. He didn’t know about that. But one thing was sure: the trip wouldn’t be a lonely one now.
He was aware of a throaty voice at his elbow. “I had to do it, Vince. You do see that, don’t you?”
He met the girl’s eyes, matched her smile. “Sure, Lois, he said. “Glad to have you aboard.”
Spaceborn
They weren’t very different even if they were—
FIFTEEN MILLION MILES from touchdown, Skipper Manus pulled the pins out of the pile. There was a faint lessening of vibration—nothing more. Most of the ship’s ninety-four occupants were unaware that they were already on deceleration.
At the communications table, Axtel Shear had a beamfix on the green planet. He was a big raw-boned man with high cheekbones and a thick, rasping voice that droned on with machine-like monotony:
“Star Quest to Terra . . . Star Quest to Terra . . . Come in Terra!”
prom the bucket seat at the control panel, Skipper Manus watched anxiously. Any moment now someone at the Pana Spaceport would acknowledge and wires all over the Earth would begin buzzing.
Five minutes went by . . . Ten.
Axtel Shear slammed the speaker against the backboard.
“They don’t answer,” he said.
The skipper walked over to where he sat. “They have to answer. Keep trying!”
The communications man raised his eyes. “Shall I go out and shout at them?” he inquired coldly.
The skipper’s watery-blue eyes remained impassive. He was a wry-looking man, with a shock of unmanageable hair that had been white before the voyage started.
“Keep trying,” he repeated quietly.
In another section of the ship a youth sat reading a book. He was a sensitivelooking boy in his late teens. From time to time he’d look up from the book and stare into the star-studded blackness outside the porthole. Finally, he put the book down and pressed his face against the glass.
The view had changed. Alpha Centauri, once close-by and white hot, no longer boiled into the starboard ports. It was only a star now—remote and infinitesimal. And cradled in the depths of Sagittarius like a marble-sized emerald in a sea of lampblack was the Earth.
And the youth gazed fixedly at the green planet and wondered what it held in store for him.
“Jus?”
The boy turned at the sound of his name. The girl at his elbow wore no make-up, yet her face had a fresh glow of natural colour. She just missed being on the plump side. It was the way she missed it that drew lingering glances from every male on the ship, despite the fact she’d just turned seventeen.
“Any news, Jus?” the girl asked.
The boy shook his head. “No, Alda, no news. They’ll announce it on the speakers when we make contact.”
The girl sat down beside him. For a full minute she stared at the silent squawkbox bracketed against the metal hull. Then she leaned back, her long dark hair trailing behind the foam cushion seat-back.
“What’s it like, Jus?” she said, without taking her eyes from the ceiling. “What’s it really like?”
Jus turned. For several heartbeats he allowed his eyes to caress the warm curves of the girl’s profile. “It’s crowded, Alda,” he said finally. “Every book and tape I’ve ever read says there’s not nearly enough land to support everyone.”
The girl folded her hands in her lap. “Five-billion people,” she said softly. “Just thinking about all those people scares me.”
“It shouldn’t, Alda. They’re just people—just the same as you and I.”
“But I don’t know them, Jus! These people on the ship I know. But not them!”
Jus dropped his eyes. An impulse to comfort the girl churned up inside him, yet her very closeness filled him with a strange uneasiness.
“It won’t be so bad, Alda,” he said thickly. “The Elders say we’ll be heros when we arrive. They say there’ll be video broadcasts and newspaper interviews. They say people from all over the world will be interested in who we are and where we’ve been.”
He could feel Alda’s eyes on him. He didn’t look up.
“But why? Why, Jus?” he heard her say. “We didn’t even land on the planets of Centauri. They were just as dead as those in our own system. All we’ve seen is space. You and I were born in space!”
“The Elders say that doesn’t matter, Alda. They say the important thing is that we tried—that we were the first human beings to reach a star.”
“They told you that?”
The boy shook his head. “They didn’t tell me exactly, but I heard some of them talking about it. They said the people on Earth would be especially interested in us.”
“In us?”
“Yes, Alda. That’s what they said. They said people on Earth would be interested in us because we were spaceborn.”
“Does that make us different?”
Jus stared at the palms of his hands. “There was an article in the ship’s bulletin,” he said. “It wasn’t just about us. It was about all the space-born—all thirty-two of us. But I got the idea that it was mostly about the older ones—the ones like you and me.”
“What about you and me, Jus?”
“Well, according to this article, we’re supposed to have some sort of complex—a space complex they called it. It seems that normal children mature to an extent by imitating the actions of children in an older age group. Only with us there isn’t any other age group. There’s just us and the Elders, so we’ve been forced to duplicate their personality. Furthermore, because of our restricted environment, we’ve been regimentated into the same way of living as theirs . . . They say that isn’t good for children. They say children should be given an opportunity to make decisions of their own.”
“Was that all it said, Jus?”
“No. It said that because of these factors we were fifty years old in our actions but only eight years old in our ability to reason things out for ourselves. It said we’d find everyday living almost unbearable when we got back to Earth.”
The girl sighed heavily.
“So we are different then—we really are different.”
Jus looked out the port again. “The Elders say we are,” he said. “And I guess they ought to know.”
Skipper Manus’ sandals clicked a monotonous cadence against the floor while the toneless chant of Axtel Shear continued to ring in his ears.
“Star Quest to Terra . . . Star Quest to Terra . . . Come in Terra!”
When the skipper stopped pacing, Shear dropped the speaker unit from his lips. “What now?” he asked.
Skipper Manus ran a hand through his white hair. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “Why don’t they answer?”
“Shall I keep trying?”
Manus shook his head. “No. Try them again later. Could be they’ve changed the wavelength. Maybe that’s why we can’t contact them.”
Shear grinned around a set of yellow teeth. “Maybe they don’t want to answer,” he said. “Maybe they don’t give a damn whether we come back or not.”
“Why should they feel that way?” Manus demanded.
The communications man turned up the palms of his hands. “A lot can happen in twenty-one years,” he said blandly. “Maybe they’ve outlawed space travel. There was some talk of that right after we learned that none of our own planets could support life.”
Skipper Manus clenched his fists. “Impossible!” he said flatly.
“Is it?” Shear asked.
“Certainly it is! You’re forgetting that the men and women aboard this ship represent the best brains in the world. We were chosen for the mission because we’re scientists. The trip schedule worked out to twenty-one years—give or take a few months . . . Now the twenty-one years are up. They’re expecting us back!”
“So why don’t they answer, then?”
The skipper’s voice became calm. “I can’t answer that,” he said evenly. “Not right now I can’t. But there’s a reason for it—a good reason. I’d bet on that.”
The thin rasp of a buzzer rippled across the control room.
The skipper glanced at his watch and nodded at the communications man. “Take over,” he said, and disappeared into the corridor that led to the ship’s dining room.
Jus stiffened at the sound of the skipper’s footsteps. Then he glanced sharply at the girl and got up.
Skipper Manus nodded at him in passing. He did not speak.
“Is there—is there any news, sir?” Jus called after him.
The skipper’s stride slackened, then quickly returned to normal as he made for the dining room bulkhead.
Jus ran after him. The old man’s frosty hair barely reached his shoulder as he fell in step beside him.
“We’ve been waiting for the announcement, sir,” the boy said breathlessly. “We’ve been wondering if you made contact yet.”
Skipper Manus stopped, measuring the boy with detached amusement. “Is that all that’s worrying you, lad?” he asked mildly.
Jus avoided the watery-blue eyes. “Yes, sir.”
The skipper patted his arm. “Don’t let it worry you, Jus. Everything’s going according to plan. Don’t forget, boy, the best brains in the world are right aboard this ship and as soon as we hear anything we’ll announce it over the speakers.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy turned and started to leave.
“Jus?”
The boy stopped.
The skipper’s Ups were set in a quiet smile. For a long while he regarded Jus fixedly—as if seeing him for the first time.
“How old are you now, lad?” he asked suddenly.
“Nineteen, sir.”
The old man shook his head. “Incredible,” he said. “It seems like just yesterday that you were born. Did you know, lad, that you were the first baby ever to be born in space?”
“Yes, sir. I know.”
Skipper Manus sighed wearily. “It’s so hard to realise you’ve grown up, lad. Already you’re a full grown man. And before long you’ll have to assume a man’s responsibilities.”
“Yes. I know, sir.”
“Too bad I didn’t realise you’d grown up sooner,” the skipper said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I could have assigned you to some minor job—something you’d be qualified for.”
“I’d have liked that, sir.”
“You would?”
“Yes, sir. Ever since my father died I’ve been wanting to do something—something to replace him, sort of.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Skipper Manus said: “The trouble is, lad, placing you would present sort of a problem. You see the men and women here are all specialists. We’re a combination, so to speak—a combination of the best brains in the world.”
Jus nodded. “I know,” he said.
He watched the skipper till he disappeared into the dining room. Then he went back to where Alda was waiting for him. “There’s nothing to worry about, Alda,” he told her. “The skipper says everything’s going according to plan.”
The girl nodded, her bluegrey eyes regarding him solemnly. The room was empty now. The noisy youngsters who were playing farmer in the centre of the floor had left, and they were alone.
Absently, Jus picked up the book he’d been reading, tried to concentrate, but the letters kept jumping out of focus and blurring into a jumble of meaningless phrases.
He put the book down.
“Alda,” He tried to make his voice casual. “What will you do—after we get back, I mean?”
The girl moved her shoulders. “I don’t know, Jus. I’ll go to school, I guess. Now that we’re twenty-one years behind the world, the Elders say we’ll all have to spend some time on education . . . even them.”
“Is that what you want to do, Alda? Is that what you really want?”
He watched the girl bite her Up.
“It’s a terrible thing to say, Jus,” she said suddenly. “I know it’s terrible to even think about it, but sometimes I find myself wishing that while we were gone something happened to the Earth—something that destroyed all the people but left the planet fresh and new so all we’d have to do was to land and start all over again . . . Do you ever feel that way?”
A lump that started in the boy’s chest rose to his throat. Around it, he said: “I’ve been thinking, Alda. I thought maybe I could get a piece of land somewhere. I’d like to work the land—make things grow . . . I thought maybe you . . .”
