Collected Short Fiction, page 279
FALK’S voice died away suddenly. Warshow fought an impulse to get violently sick. His face felt cold and clammy, and he turned to look at the pale, nervous faces of Sigstrom and Cullinan. Behind them sat Thetona, expressionless.
Cullinan broke the long silence. “Leon, you heard the earlier session. Did you recognize what he was just telling us?”
“The birth trauma,” Warshow said tonelessly.
“Obviously,” Sigstrom said. The medic ran unshaking fingers through his heavy shock of white hair. “The chemotherapy . . . it was a womb for him. We put him back in the womb.”
“And then we pulled him out,” said Warshow. “We delivered him. And he went looking for a mother.”
Cullinan nodded at Thetona. “He found one too.”
Warshow licked his lips. “Well, now we have the answer. What do we do about it?”
“We play the whole thing to him on tapes. His conscious intellectual mind sees his relationship with Thetona for what it is—the neurotic grasping of a grown man forced into an artificial womb and searching for a mother. Once we’ve gotten that out of his basement and into the attic, so to speak, I think he’ll be all right.”
“But the ship was his mother,” Warshow said. “That was where the incubation tank—the womb—was.”
“The ship cast him out. You were an uncle-image, not a mother-substitute. He said so himself. He went looking elsewhere, and found Thetona. Let’s give him the tapes.”
MUCH LATER, Matt Falk faced the four of them in the cabin. He had heard his own voice rambling back over his lifetime. He knew, now.
There was a long silence when the last tape had played out, when Falk’s voice had said, “All, all over. And I’m terribly alone.”
The words seemed to hang in the room. Finally Falk said, “Thanks,” in a cold, hard, tight, dead voice.
“Thanks?” Warshow repeated dully.
“Yes. Thanks for opening my eyes, for thoughtfully giving me a peek at what was behind my lid. Sure—thanks.” The boy’s face was sullen, bitter.
“You understand why it was necessary, of course,” Cullinan said. “Why we—”
“Yeah, I know why,” Falk said. “And now I can go back to Earth with you, and your consciences are cleared.” He glanced at Thetona, who was watching him with perturbed curiosity evident on her broad face. Falk shuddered lightly as his eyes met the alien girl’s. Warshow caught the reaction and nodded. The therapy had been a success.
“I was happy,” Falk said quietly. “Until you decided you had to take me back to Earth with you. So you ran me through a wringer and combed all the psychoses out of me, and—and—”
Thetona took two heavy steps towards him and put her arms on his shoulders. “No,” he murmured, and wriggled away. “Can’t you see it’s over?”
“Matt—” Warshow said.
“Don’t Matt me, cap’n! I’m out of my womb now, and back in your crew.” He turned sad eyes on Warshow. “Thetona and I had something good and warm and beautiful, and you busted it up. It can’t get put together again, either. Okay. I’m ready to go back to Earth, now.”
He stalked out of the room without another word. Grey-faced, Warshow stared at Cullinan and at Thetona, and lowered his eyes.
He had fought to keep Matt Falk, and he had won—or had he? In fact, yes. But in spirit? Falk would never forgive him for this.
Warshow shrugged, remembering the book that said, “The relation of commander to crewman is that of parent to child.”
Warshow would not allow Falk’s sullen eyes to upset him any longer; it was only to be expected that the boy would be bitter.
No child ever really forgives the parent who casts him from the womb.
“Come on, Thetona,” he said to the big, enigmatically frowning alien girl. “Come with me. I’ll take you back down to the city.”
Why?
For eleven years, Brock and I had gone from world to world on our exploration tour. Then Brock had to ask the devastating question
AND WE LEFT Capella XXII, after a six-month stay, and hopskipped across the galaxy to Dschubba, in the forehead of the Scorpion. And after the eight worlds of Dschubba had been seen and digested and recorded and classified, and after we had programmed all our material for transmission back to Earth, we moved on again, Brock and I.
We zeroed into warp and doublesqueaked into the star Pavo, which from Earth is seen to be the brightest star of the Peacock. And Pavo proved to be planetless, save for one ball of mud and methane a billion miles out; we chalked the mission off as unpromising, and moved on once again.
Brock was the coordinator; I, the fine-tooth man. He saw in patterns; I, in particulars. We had been teamed for eleven years. We had visited seventy-eight stars and one hundred sixty-three planets. The end was not quite in sight.
We hung in the greyness of warp, suspended neither in space nor in not-space, hovering in an interstice. Brock said, “I vote for Markab.”
“Alpha Pegasi? No. I vote for Etamin.”
But Gamma Draconis held little magic for him. He rubbed his angular hands through his tight-cropped hair and said, “The Wheel, then.”
I nodded. “The Wheel.”
THE WHEEL was our guide: not really a wheel so much as a map of the heavens in three dimensions, a lens of the galaxy, sprinkled brightly with stars. I pulled a switch; a beam of light lanced down from the ship’s wall, needle-thin, playing against the Wheel. Brock seized the handle and imparted axial spin to the Wheel. Over and over for three, four, five rotations; then, stop. The light-beam stung Alphecca.
“Alphecca it will be,” Brock said.
“Yes. Alphecca.” I noted it in the log, and began setting up the coordinates on the drive. Brock was frowning uneasily.
“This failure to agree,” he said. “This inability to decide on a matter so simple as our next destination—”
“Yes. Elucidate. Expound. Exegetize. What pattern do you see in that?”
Scowling he said, “Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is unhealthy. Conflict is valuable, but not for its own sake. It worries me.”
“Perhaps we’ve been in space too long. Perhaps we should resign our commissions, leave the Exploratory Corps, return to Earth and settle there.”
His face drained of blood. “No,” he said. “No. No.”
WE EMERGED from warp within humming-distance of Alphecca, a bright star orbited by four worlds. Brock was playing calculus at the time; driblets of sweat glossed his face at each integration. I peered through the thick quartz of the observation panel and counted planets.
“Four worlds,” I said. “One, two, three, and four.”
I looked at him. His unfleshy face was tight with pain. After nearly a minute he said, “Pick one.”
“Me?”
“Pick one!”
“Alphecca II.”
“All right. We’ll land there. I won’t contest the point, Hammond. I want to land on Alphecca II.” He grinned at me—a bright-eyed wild grin that I found unpleasant. But I saw what he was doing. He was easing a stress-pattern between us, eliminating a source of conflict before the chafing friction exploded. When two men live in a spaceship eleven years, such things are necessary.
Calmly and untensely I took a reading on Alphecca II. I sighted us in and actuated the computer. This was the way a landing was effected; this was the way Brock and I had effected one hundred sixty-three landings. The ion-drive exploded into life.
We dropped “downward”. Alphecca II rose to meet us as our slim pale-green needle of a ship dived tail-first towards the world below.
THE LANDING was routine. I sketched out a big 164 on my chart, and we donned spacesuits to make our preliminary explorations. Brock paused a moment at the airlock, smoothing the purple cloth of his suit, adjusting his air-intake, tightening his belt cincture. The corners of his mouth twitched nervously. Within the head-globe he looked frightened, and very tired.
I said, “You’re not well. Maybe we should postpone our first look-see.”
“Maybe we should go back to Earth, Hammond. And live in a beehive and breathe filthy grey soup.” His voice was edged with bitter reproach. “Let’s go outside,” he said. He turned away, face shadowed morosely, and touched the stud that peeled back the airlock hatch.
I followed him into the lock and down the elevator. He was silent, stiff, reserved. I wished I had his talent for glimpsing patterns: this mood of his had probably been a long time building.
But I saw no cause for it. After eleven years, I thought, I should know him almost as well as I do myself. Or better. But no easy answers came, and I followed him out onto the exit stage and dropped gently down.
Landing One Six Four was entering the exploratory stage.
THE GROUND spread out far to the horizon, a dull orange in color, rough in texture, pebbly, thick of consistency. We saw a few trees, bare-trunked, bluish. Green vines swarmed over the ground, twisted and gnarled.
Otherwise, nothing.
“Another uninhabited planet,” I said. “That makes one hundred eight out of the hundred sixty-four.”
“Don’t be premature. You can’t judge a world by a few acres. Land at a pole; extrapolate utter barrenness. It’s not a valid pattern. Not enough evidence.”
I cut him short. “Here’s one time when I perceive a pattern. I perceive that this world’s uninhabited. It’s too damned quiet.”
Chuckling, Brock said, “I incline to agree. But remember Adhara XI.”
I remembered Adhara XI: the small, sandy world far from its primary, which seemed nothing but endless yellow sand dunes, rolling westward round and round the planet. We had joked about the desert-world, dry and parched, inhabited only by the restless dunes. But after the report was written, after our data were codified and flung through subspace towards Earth, we found the oasis on the eastern continent, the tiny garden of green things and sweet air that so sharply was unlike the rest of Adhara XI. I remembered sleek scaly creatures slithering through the crystal lake, and an indolent old worm sleeping beneath a heavy-fruited tree.
“Adhara XI is probably swarming with Earth tourists,” I said. “Now that our amended report is public knowledge. I often think we should have concealed the oasis from Earth, and. returned there ourselves when we grew tired of exploring the galaxy.”
BROCK’S HEAD snapped up sharply. He ripped a sprouting tip from a leathery vine and said, “When we grow tired? Hammond, aren’t you tired already? Eleven years, a hundred sixty-four worlds?”
Now I saw the pattern taking fairly clear shape. I shook my head, throttling the conversation. “Let’s get down the data, Brock. We can talk later.”
We proceeded with the measurements of our particular sector of Alphecca II. We nailed down the dry vital statistics, bracketing them off so Earth could enter the neat figures in its giant catalogue of explored worlds.
GRAVITY—1.02 E.
ATMOSPHERIC CONSTITUTION—ammonia/carbon dioxide
Type ab7, unbreathable
ESTIMATED PLANETARY DIAMETER—.87 E.
INTELLIGENT LIFE—none
We filled out the standard tests, took the standard soil samples. Exploration had become a smooth mechanical routine.
Our first tour lasted three hours. We wandered over the slowly rising hills, with the spaceship always at our backs, and Alphecca high behind us. The dry soil crunched unpleasantly beneath our heavy boots.
CONVERSATION was at a minimum. Brock and I rarely spoke when it was not absolutely necessary—and when we did speak, it was to let a tight, tense remark escape confinement, not to communicate anything. We shared too many silent memories. Eleven years and one hundred sixty-four planets. All Brock had to do was say “Fomalhaut”, or I “Theta Eridani”, and a train of associations and memories was set off in whose depths we could browse silently for hours and hours.
Alphecca II did not promise to be as memorable as those worlds. There would be nothing here to match the fantastic moonrise of Fomalhaut VI, the five hundred mirror-bright moons in stately procession through the sky, each glinting in a different hue. That moonrise had overwhelmed us four years ago, and remained yet bright. Alphecca II, dead world that it was, or rather world not yet alive, would leave no marks on our memories.
But bitterness was rising in Brock. I saw the pattern forming; I saw the question bubbling up through the layers of his mind, ready to be asked.
And on the fourth day, he let it be asked. After four days on Alphecca II, four days of staring at the grotesque twisted green shapes of the angular sprawling vines, four days of watching the lethargic fission of the pond protozoa who seemed to be the world’s only animal life, Brock suddenly looked up at me.
He asked the shattering question that should never be asked.
“Why?” he said.
ELEVEN years and a hundred sixty-four worlds earlier, the seeds of that unanswered question had been sown. I was fresh out of the Academy, twenty-three, a tall, sharp-nosed boy with what some said was an irritatingly precise way of looking at things.
I should say that I bitterly resented being told I was coldly precise. People accused me of Teutonic heaviness. A girl I once had known said that to me, after a notably unsuccessful romance had come trailing to a halt. I recall turning to her, glaring at the light dusting of freckles across her nose, and telling her, “I have no Teutonic blood whatsoever. If you’ll take the trouble to think of the probable Scandinavian derivation of my name—”
She slapped me.
Shortly after that, I met Brock—Brock, who at twenty-four was already the Brock I would know at thirty-five, harsh of face and voice, dark of complexion, with an expression of nervous wariness registering in his blue-black eyes always and ever. Brock never accused me of Teutonicism; he laughed when I cited some minor detail from memory, but the laugh was one of respect.
We were both Academy graduates; we both were restless. It showed in Brock’s face, and I don’t doubt it showed in mine. Earth was small and dirty and crowded, and each night the stars, those bright enough to glint through the haze and brightness of the cities, seemed to mock at us.
BROCK AND I gravitated naturally together. We shared a room in Appalachia North, we shared a library planchet, we shared reading tapes and music-discs and occasionally lovers. And eight weeks after my twenty-third birthday, seven weeks before Brock’s twenty-fourth, we hailed a cab and invested our last four coins in a trip downtown to the Administration of External Exploration.
There, we spoke to a bland-faced, smiling man with one leg prosthetic—he boasted of it—and his left hand a waxy synthetic one. “I got that way on Sirius VI,” he told us. “But I’m an exception. Most of the exploration teams keep going for years and years, and nothing ever happens to them. McKees and Haugmuth have been out twenty-three years now. That’s the record. We hear from them, every few months or so. They keep on going, farther and farther out.”
Brock nodded. “Good. Give us the forms.”
He signed first. I added my name below, finishing with a flourish. I stacked the triplicate forms neatly together and shoved them back at the half-synthetic recruiter.
“Excellent. Excellent. Welcome to the Corps.”
He shook our hands, giving the hairy-knuckled right hand to Brock, the waxy left to me. I gripped it tightly, wondering if he could feel my grip.
Three days later we were in space, bound outward. In all the time since the original idea had sprung up unvoiced between us, neither Brock nor myself had paused to ask the damnable question.
Why?
We had joined the Corps. We had renounced Earth. Motive, unstated. Or unknown. We let the matter lie dormant between us for eleven years, through a procession of strange and then less strange worlds.
Until Brock’s agony broke forth to the surface. He destroyed eleven years of numb peace with one half-whispered syllable, there in the ship’s lab our fourth morning on Alphecca II.
I LOOKED at him for perhaps thirty seconds. Moistening my lips, I said, “What do you mean, Brock?”
“You know what I mean.” The flat declarative tone was one of simple truth. “The one thing we haven’t been asking ourselves all these years, because we knew we didn’t have an answer for it and we like to have answers for things. Why are we here, on Alphecca II—with a hundred sixty-three visited worlds behind us?”
I shrugged. “You didn’t have to start this, Brock.” Outside the sun was climbing towards noon height, but I felt cold and dry, as if the ammonia atmosphere were seeping into the ship. It wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to start this. I could have let it fester for another eleven years. But it came popping out, and I want to settle it. We left Earth because we didn’t like it there. Agreed?”
I nodded.
“BUT THAT’S not why enough,” he persisted. “Why do we explore? Why do we keep running from planet to planet, from one crazy airless ball to the next, out here where there are no people and no cities? Green crabs on Rigel V, sand-fish on Caph. Dammit, Hammond, what are we looking for?”
Very calmly I said, “Ourselves, maybe?”
His face crinkled scornfully. “Foggy-eyed and imprecise, and you know it. We’re not looking for ourselves out here. We’re trying to lose ourselves. Eh?”
“No!”
“Admit it!”
I stared through the quartz window at the stiff, almost wooden vines that covered the pebbly ground. They seemed to be moving faintly, to be stretching their rigid bodies in a contraction of some sort. In a dull, tired voice, Brock said, “We left Earth because we couldn’t cope with it. It was too crowded and too dirty for sensitive shrinking souls like us. We had the choice of withdrawing into shells and huddling there for eighty or ninety years, or else pulling up and leaving for space. We left. There’s no society out here, just each other.”
“We’ve adjusted to each other,” I pointed out.
“So? Does that mean we could fit into Earth society? Would you want to go back? Remember the team—McKees and Haugmuth, is it?—who spent thirty-three years in space and came back. They were catatonic eight minutes after landing, the report said.”
