“I don’t suppose you know what kind of chaos ensues when fifty men who’ve been working on fifty aspects of fifty things all get thrown together and told that they’re really all working on the same thing and they’d better get it together and build it. People’s work gets all upset. The people themselves get all upset. Everybody argues. Nobody likes the Project director. Nobody likes the desert. Nobody likes the army and the Security. Nobody likes the way their shower bath is designed. Months of this sort of pettiness just has to be endured. It takes a long time just to get the guys back on their marks. And once there, once set, they have to go like bombs because time’s wasted and money’s flowing away.
“But eventually there’s a spark, and you begin to get chain reactions here and there. Men who hated each other’s guts only weeks before become lifelong buddies instead, and they feed each other with the data and the perspective which keeps things going. There’s a sudden and terrific burst of enthusiasm, which infects everything, from the shower bath to the brass on the colonel’s cap. If you’re lucky, by the time that enthusiasm itself becomes routine, you have something that you’re working on: a synthesized, convergent, synergistic goal at which everybody’s effort is directed. Your sweat, your thinking, your life, becomes directed toward that goal.
“In those days, when I wasn’t quite at the top of the pyramid, I saw titan as the end. Do you know, I never once allowed myself to believe that it would actually work? I took this problem on as a substitute for a life. It was my going out present — my immortal soul. It looked to have twenty or thirty years in it — enough so that by the time it was ready I’d be just about fit to slide quietly into my grave, so that my soul could go out with the first ship. But things went too fast for that. It didn’t have twenty or thirty years in it at all. First there was urgency, then panic. Then madness. You were out when the first ones went up, weren’t you?”
“I was working with Jenny. It was the big news.”
“Titan one flew. It went up, and it did as it was told, and it came back. I was still alive. It hadn’t needed my immortal soul.
“It was great. The joke was on Einstein. No fuss, no bother. The drive worked. From a standing takeoff to a hundred times the speed of light. It worked, just as our mathematicians said it ought, just as our physicists said it could. But even they were a little bit surprised. They’d had those Einstein equations hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles ever since they’d ventured to make a new model of the way things work. They’d never more than half-believed, you see. Dogma was against them. They’d only dared to give half their hearts to a scientific heresy — even to their own. Even now, seven titans later, there are math and physics boys who believe that ftl is impossible and the fma can’t work. There are men who claim that wherever two went, it wasn’t Proxima, and that three couldn’t have looped Barnard’s Star. They won’t believe.
“But I believed, and so did every man on the base, every man on the Project. While Andy and I talked down titan one like it was our homecoming son, we were already in heaven. Whatever I was saying and doing and thinking all that day and for a week after, there was one image that was never out of my mind. Something was saying over and over, this is it. We’re out. That great big cage of darkness which surrounds us is unlocked; we’ve beaten the universe. I felt like we’d been on trial before the Laws of Physics, and been acquitted. We were free to go. Anywhere.
“From the moment that titan came back, nothing else signified. I forgot my soul and my life’s work and my going out gracefully. I forgot all the waste and the pollution and the destruction and the miserable people — they lost their meaning. Titan one, in a single, sudden, prayed-for, but still unexpected moment, had translated the whole arena of human existence from the surface of one Earth already too costly to repair to the whole of a limitless cosmos.
“One day did that to me, Harker. Just one day. One day from earthbound, creeping nonentity to citizen of the galaxy. I could reach out and touch a million stars. Until that day, my dreams were only pretending. I was thinking about my life, thinking about my work, planning my existence as if it was so much window dressing. Not a genuine dream at all. Then titan opened the door of the human cage.
“Maybe you got a bit of it yourself when you read the papers that day. Maybe you only felt extra bitter because you were still in your cage. I don’t know whether you looked out of the window into infinity, or just across the corridor into another cell, and I don’t want you to tell me. With me, the burst of adrenaline that carried me high carried me high for keeps. It was the real moment of my birth.
“Time was quick to dive in on top of the public reaction, of course. A machine — all titan one was was a robot — isn’t a man. They didn’t have the same affinity with one that I had. How could they? The price of a bus ride was the same, the cistern leaked, and the computer cards still had them cold. They were no machine lovers. Before they thought greater things about the human race they wanted a man home from the stars, loaded down with a good corny script. Well, that was all part of it. I wanted that, too.
“We failed to deliver.
“Years have passed, and no man has come home from the stars. We have the scripts all ready — had them for years — and my God we’ve been tempted to use them, tempted to lie. Maybe someday we’ll have to. But for now, we’re still in the ring fighting.
“Can you imagine what it has come to mean for me, for all of us on the Project? Can you imagine what it meant for the man who was sacrificed because a surfeit of confident publicity exploded in his face? We had the stars given into our care, and we lost them. You can’t, I know. You far less than anyone. How can I know what it’s like in your world of perpetual darkness? We’re at opposite ends of the spectrum of human ambitions, Harker. But we need someone from your end to gain us ours. You know, to the paper-reading, TV-devouring public, it was just news when Mason didn’t come back. They felt sad for a minute, shrugged it off, watched the commercials, and life went on in the funnies and the programs. We thought there’d be difficulties in fading titan out of the public eye, having shouted so loud. But the public didn’t notice. There were no crowds clamoring to know what happened to five or. The people live through their TV sets, Harker, and they take what they’re given. We have to give them some real news now, Harker. For safety’s sake, perhaps for all our sakes, it has to be true news. I think that’s vital. If that man decides to win the next election by lying, by telling the people we have the stars when we haven’t, then we never will have. The Project will be wound up — killed. The professional liars will take it over. It will become a gigantic advertising campaign. I couldn’t take that. Not even that man wants that, if we can really send a man and bring him back. It’ll still be a lie — we’ll lie about the man. It won’t be your face on the cover of Time magazine. But there’s a world of difference between the one sort of lie and the other, d’you see? One forfeits the stars, the other lets us have them, although at their price.
“You see what I see, now, don’t you. However dimly, you do see. . . .
“You know what titan nine means, now. We have to break out of the cage of darkness. I don’t care if it kills a hundred men — we have no choice. But we must have one live one to set alongside our hundred, our thousand dead. We must have one win to stay in the game. We need you now, Harker. You’re the only man who can give us any reason to hope. It’s killed strong men, good men, sane men. We need a half-man, a survivor, a man who lives with madness and doesn’t give in to it. It’s the only way we can continue to live.”
“It’s all right, Mike,” I told him. “It’s going to be all right.”
I wasn’t humoring him. I swear I wasn’t fooling.
I couldn’t feel his need, his emotional flames. I just couldn’t.
But what could I say?
“I’ll be back,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
Cage of Darkness
An Inno
cent Man
I want to tell you about Nathan Petrie. I don’t think he’s important to your understanding of the nature of and the events connected with my life as an inmate of Block C, but I want to tell you about him anyway. You may have noticed that the things I’m telling you about the people I knew there don’t really add anything to my assessment of the place. I’m telling you about them because I want to. Because, I suppose, I can’t separate them from my thinking of the place. The people I knew there were the environment just as much as the locks, the landings, and the antisuicide netting. Like all the rest, Nathan Petrie was a part of my experience of Canaan.
Petrie was a sap.
I want that clear. Not a cretin, not an imbecile, not a dope.
A sap. A sucker. One of those of which there is one born every minute. (Sorry, that’s out of date — these days it must be ten a minute if not a thousand.)
By which I mean, of course, that it is important to realize that Petrie definitely had intelligence, but was very remiss about using it. It’s one of those things that’s hilarious or tragic, depending upon what a guy looks like and which side of him you’re sitting on. Most guys were definitely anti-Petrie (his tragedy), but I think I was on his side (everybody’s tragedy). If he’d been fat and silly, everybody would have laughed at him, and maybe not liked him, but they’d have let him be and even defended him if need be. If he’d been medium-sized and handsome, people would have liked him, ribbed him a lot, and the girls would have flipped over him, married him, and made a misery of his failures. But Nathan was thin and small, everybody hated him, and it was all quite nasty.
Inside himself, Nathan Petrie was a knot. A knot tied a little tighter by everybody who ever knew him. Nobody was conscious of tormenting Nathan Petrie. Nobody hated him with a fury sufficient to twist a knife in his wounds. Nobody cared enough about him to hurt him with kindness or generosity or friendship or hope or any of the other weapons that become deadly when they’re measured. In Nathan’s case, they would have been measured to the last inch.
A pity, because if ever there was a man who really needed a mile, it was Nathan.
It was all incidental and accidental where he was concerned — and I mean all. In and out of him. Chance encounters, idle words, thoughtless actions. That was Nathan and the universe, together. Ships that pass in the night so that one of the poor bastards gets swamped by the other’s bow wave, and the other doesn’t even know.
Poor Nathan.
You couldn’t even begin to understand the kind of life he led, or the kind of life that led him. If you can see why Nathan was Nathan, you’re probably not so far off being Nathan yourself. Sometimes I wonder just how common he is. If this is really reaching you, if you’re really feeling for Nathan, then I shouldn’t bother to go on reading. Go have a bath and cut your wrists.
He never bothered anybody. And try as they might, the strong arm of the law and persuasive methods even stronger couldn’t quite get a grip on him for a very long time. Nathan was a simple man. He had his schemes and he had his habits. There wasn’t a great deal else to him.
He swore from the moment they picked him up to the moment they locked him in Canaan with the rest of us that he never did it, that he was nowhere near the place at the time and wouldn’t have done it even if he had been. (Incidentally, I’ll break a rule here and tell you what he was in for — there are special circumstances which make this necessary; you’ll understand in a minute.) Sure, he’d followed the girl home several times and been warned about it. Sure, he knew where she’d be at exactly that time. Sure, her boyfriend had beaten him up, and, sure, she’d called the cops on him more than once. But he was in bed asleep at the time. No, there weren’t any witnesses. Who else’d live in that place? How did the knife come to be in his trash can? He hadn’t the faintest idea — somebody had put it there to frame him. Would he be stupid enough to hide a murder weapon with blood on it in his own trash can?
Yes, decided the jurobot. He sure would.
As a matter of pure fact — and this is no conjecture, because the grapevine even reached Canaan — if anyone’s interested, Nathan Petrie didn’t do it, because he was at home that night. He was framed, and I know who did it. Half the prison knew. But nobody cared.
But the interesting thing is this. Nathan was not a bit different from anyone else in Block C. A lot of killers are nice people. Nathan was neither a killer nor a nice person. But in Canaan, inside the deep cage, there’s just no way to tell. No way at all.
Madman’s Dance
The Acquired Taste of Desolation
The storm-rain floods like tears from the black eyes in the sky. The brightness of childhood is covered by the undergrowth of the dark forest of age. The branches on the frightened trees are leafless and shattered, their greenery fallen long since to the ashen ground. The burden of life hangs heavy upon their brittle frames. The valleys and the grasslands have passed into their own antiquity, forlorn, without even the company of shadows. The wailing night descends upon their hollow reaches, howling frosty winds and screaming starlight. The deathful face of time, with its features half-molten, half-given into foam, has long ago claimed the streets of existence into the cackling of vultures and the hum of flies.
The wake of man is empty of mourners.
The rivers and the marshes are fathoms deep in ancient, discarded dreams which the reaching willows may no longer pluck from the surfaces of the rippled lakes. What is done is finished and the world is wholly, truly, totally human.
And as dead as cradled bones and grave-lined rust and dust.
The silver cities are let to the cats and rats and bats, and they, too, leave only the footprints of ghosts. The world waits only for the everlasting sunset and the dreaming shadow of eternity to reawaken. . . .
. . . The smoke-veiled ground which slopes away from me, while below me half a hundred men slip and struggle in ankle-deep mud trying to shift some huge piece of machinery against the slope. Its giant wheels spin uselessly, failing to gain any purchase at all in the fluid earth. Other machines — no two are alike — light the semidarkness with streaks of blue flame, and where the streaks become arcs the ground flares and leaves a lingering glow.
The machines are impressive, but I know full well that it is only the men who are important. They work unceasingly in their thousands and tens of thousands to move and operate their masters in the most appalling of conditions. Where the machines cannot go alone, the men are ready and eager to push and carry them. They feed the juggernauts with fuel which the machines spit out in anger at some hidden enemy below them, in the bowl-valley, and above them in the mountains. The oily pall of smoke hides the array of the opposing forces from my stinging eyes.
Half a mile away, a large vehicle with thick treads and a double cupola lurches to the top of a ridge. Two rods of polished metal protruding from the twin hoods oscillate madly, but whatever effect the activity might have is hidden from me. Men suddenly erupt from its sides, sprinting madly downhill and throwing themselves flat as the tank explodes in wreaths of rose-tinted flame. I cannot tell how many men might have been left inside the leviathan, or too close to its destruction. There seem to be thousands struggling to their feet, but that cannot be. Perhaps ten or twelve.
A target is pinpointed, there is a curtain of explosions along a ragged line drawn horizontally across the far slopes, until a blossom of angry red flowers in the gloom, and there is a brief pause, taken up almost immediately by sourceless sheets of lightning, flare, and scarlet splash, and men boil out of the ground with fire and fury, dangling their burnt and broken limbs in the current of the shock waves.
Strategy is quite incalculable. Position. Fire. Run. Keep moving all the time, and finally disappear in a whimpering flood of fire. Nothing gained, everything lost; one side or other winning, but I cannot tell which.
A man races past me, shouting unintelligibly, and a small, mobile machine bounces gail
y toward me. I run downhill a short distance, curiously unafraid, and drop into a trench. Seconds later, a huge bulk hurtles into the trench a little way to my right. I hear heavy breathing, a storm of racking coughs, and then it is gone again.
I am involved, but I can hardly imagine myself one of this limitless pygmy horde which labors so fruitlessly to serve its terrifying machines. I am alone and aloof. I climb out of the trench. Hot air surrounds me and clutches at my clothing, but I stand firm.
A silver thread flies from a pinnacle far to the right and unravels in a great arc all the way across the bowl. Puffs of angry red enclose it in smoke, and a stab of white gulps in the head of the streamer, but something lands at the far end of the rainbow, and there is a fragmentary rush of colored flame. The glow of an accompanying retinue of explosions illuminates a great shadowy hulk. Before the afterimage fades, it bubbles into fire, vomiting great gobs of rosy molten hail.
The black pinnacle from which the missile came becomes the focus of a thousand flickering fireworks, and the solid rock is whittled swiftly into dust and cloud.
A rain of silver rockets shoots into the far mountainsides. There is a tremble in the earth as the mountains reverberate to the impact. Several slopes slide downward with a dull roaring which drowns completely the fragile protests of a hundred thousand men whose bodies are mangled in the cascades.
Then the slopes around me erupt in their turn, sheets of flame and a vast tumult of sound which bursts and continues to expand, intolerable heat, and running men mingle all around me into a fluid mass of images whose fabric is torn by time and shattered into bloody chaos.
The survivors — seeming to be thousands, but only ten or twelve — are running uphill, their machines abandoned in their wake, still trumpeting their fury and disgust, still maintaining their own ceaseless blast.
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