Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Possibly that accounted for his genius. At his touch motors purred fierce delight, and complex circuits were quick to answer his unworded questions. When tonight the rocket roared and went skyward, the hand of some Important Person would have tripped the last switch; but it would be the immaterial hand of Marty—his body earthbound by its damaged back—that opened and closed the vital relays, metered fuel to the ravening engine, kept instruments and gauges true.

  Linden’s gaze rested again on the ship. And he thought: It does look anxious to be gone . . . out there where it belongs. Even a fool or a total stranger could see that it wasn’t made for any purpose on Earth . . . no wheels, no traces or fins or wings, only the sharp nose pointing straight up to nowhere.

  He retreated from the feeling, at once terrifying and fascinating, that he stood in the presence of something alien. Maybe it had been a mistake to come out here—or maybe it had been a mistake to come with Marty. He groped for the hard comfort of facts.

  “Everything’ll be fully automatic, from orbit to oxygen. There’ll be nothing for me to do, and not much for me to see—nothing that the cameras won’t see better.” He laughed shortly. “The whole thing sounds about as thrilling as an eight-hour subway ride.”

  Marty didn’t look at him. “She could go by herself. . . . I wonder if she’d rather.”

  Linden’s taut nerves frayed. “That’s a hell of a way to put it. You mean: we know machines can take conditions out there, because we’ve sent them and they’ve come back. But we’re not really sure what space may do to a man. So—that’s why I’m going, whether your girl-friend wants my company or not.”

  “You know what I think. We ought to try a few more unmanned shots, first.”

  “We’ve already found out all we can that way; the instruments haven’t been invented, and won’t be invented this year or this century, that would let us predict every way space might affect the human body. We could do that if we had no end of time and resources—and if we knew all about the human body. But we haven’t, and we don’t.”

  Marty was frozenly silent.

  “But the animals survived. And Davidson went up, into hard space, and came back all right.”

  “For five minutes,” said Marty. “You stick your toe in the water to see if it’s cold, and stick your finger in and taste it to see if it’s poison . . . and then you jump in to see if it’ll drown you.”

  They had turned face to face, and their eyes locked. The argument was a flimsy excuse. The tension that had-been building was deeper-rooted, and for a moment now it flashed almost into hatred.

  Then Marty looked back toward the rocket. One corner of his mouth twitched grievously.

  Linden turned toward the gate where the curious sentries were watching.

  “. . . Thought you wanted to check up personally?”

  “No point to it. You’ve checked everything, haven’t you?”

  “Yes . . . Yes, she’ll make the trip.”

  Linden walked along the shadeless street. The breeze was getting hot and the new buildings smelled of raw pine lumber brought down from the mountains that rose blue and brown and green along the skyline, over the rooftops. There was little activity this morning; everything was finished and ready and waiting, like the rocket standing out there in the desert with its perfect magnesium skin dazzling in the sunshine. The street was as empty as the morning that stretched before him; in the afternoon, at least, there would be a few perfunctory final tests, though all the important ones, with the compression chambers and the centrifuges and the test shots, were already behind him.

  He opened the door and stopped short. His heart bounded up crazily for a moment; then, as the glare he had just left ceased to blind him, skidded back to fairly near normal again, and he said quietly, “Hello, Ruth.”

  After the first glimpse, he could see plainly that she had not come to ask for quarter, but to offer it. So there would be no peace, and she shouldn’t have come at all.

  “Listen, Jim. I talked to the General yesterday—”

  “I know you did. So did I.”

  But she ignored the wry interruption, rushing on: “—and he admitted that there are several other men who would be qualified to go as well as you. Several others—and you told me—”

  “Yes, I know,” he broke in again. “That was half a lie—because it seemed so much simpler that way. But since you saw the General, I had to tell a full-sized lie. I had to tell him you and I were through, that I didn’t give a damn about you any more.”

  She stared, arrested, her mouth shaping a voiceless “Why?”

  “Because some fool psychologist might decide that an emotional entanglement was reason enough to wash me out of this trip.”

  “And you don’t think it is.”

  He couldn’t keep on being brutal. He avoided her eyes and was silent.

  “We were going to have a house and a garden, in the country, with a view from a hill, and a place for picnics, and room for children . . . Her voice shook, but she went on, “Remember, Jim? We were going to be like other people, the lucky other people. And look at the moon only through the tree branches, and let somebody else worry about going miles higher and miles faster. . . .”

  “It can still be like that.”

  She didn’t listen. “Now I’ve found out,” she said wonderingly, “what I should have known before. You aren’t doing this because of duty, or science, or any of the fine excuses. There are lots of others that could do it. You want it for yourself. You want to go up into the dark in a blaze of glory . . . and when you come back down, if you come back, I won’t be waiting for you. You know that.”

  He took one step and caught her arms in a tense grip—only for a moment; she did not either resist or respond, and he let his hands fall as if the touch of her had burned him. He said thickly, “You’re doing all this by yourself. It’s only your imagination . . . senseless, unreasonable!”

  Ruth shook her head. “I’m not imagining.”

  “The test animals came back all right, didn’t they?”

  “Yes . . . and in the next generation, there were the little mice with no eyes, and the rabbits that couldn’t hop because their bones were wrong, and—”

  “Only a very few. I’ve told you over and over: the chance is negligible.”

  “The cosmic rays did that, up there where you mean to go. I won’t risk having children like that, not even yours. Can’t you understand that in some things any chance is too much to take?” Her voice had risen till it ended in a sob.

  “You’re not being logical,” he said helplessly. “There are always chances. . . .” He took a deep breath. “Ruth, if you’ll listen, I’ll try to explain . . . just why it’s got to be me. Then you’ll probably say that I don’t make sense.”

  She sat obediently on the edge of a chair, watching him as he paced.

  “I never told you, did I, about the time I fell out of the hayloft?” He turned abruptly to face her. “I didn’t fall. I jumped. . . . It was on my uncle’s farm, the summer when I was twelve. They had a huge red barn, like you see all through the Midwest, and at hay harvest they drove the loaded wagons up and pitched the hay through the door high up in the gable-end. Some of us kids had a great time, playing in the springy soft hay and looking out of the loft, over the fields and far away.

  “But that evening after supper, when the work was done and the men had left, I climbed up in the barn by myself, and looked out the loft door, down into the empty yard. It must have been about fifteen feet down, but to a twelve-year-old kid all alone it looked like a mile. . . . So I jumped.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I broke an ankle,” said Linden drily. “But I didn’t regret it, then or ever. For a moment, there—or rather, for about a second, which is how long it takes to fall fifteen feet—I found something I’d been looking for without knowing, and that I’ve been looking for, finding again and losing, ever since . . . The Jumping Off Place,” he finished, and could have bitten his tongue,
for he hadn’t meant to use that phrase; it was foolish-sounding, and a secret thing of his own.

  “Jim, that’s crazy.” Her eyes upon him were wide and troubled, but he met them squarely now.

  “All my life I’ve been looking for that Place. That’s why, when the war came, I joined the paratroopers, and why I haven’t been able to keep away from aircraft and rocket research.

  “For eight hours, while the rocket travels in its orbit twice around the planet, it will be in free fall. Free—of gravity, that holds us in prison ordinarily from one end of our lives to the other. A body in free fall is weightless, and that’s the only way it can be; even theoretically there’s no other way to beat gravity. The man in the rocket will experience eight hours of a state that nobody has ever known before for more than a few seconds—during a parachute drop, in a diving plane sometimes. And then in dreams. Almost everybody has those dreams, you know, of flying, not as a bird or an airplane flies, but floating, unchained from the pull of the Earth. It’s a normal human longing, I think; I just happen to be more conscious of it than most people.

  “I had to be the one. When I heard they’d perfected the nuclear jet and were really going to try it—I let you think they insisted I come here; well, it was the other way around; I moved heaven and earth to get in.”

  She said shakily, “Didn’t you ever think . . . that there must have been other boys who jumped out of haylofts, too?”

  He looked past her, not seeing her, seeing instead the rocket agleam in the desert and ready. “No doubt,” he said. “But I’ve found the Jumping Off Place, Ruth, and it’s mine.”

  She rose and stood straight. “I’ve waited. I’ve cried when I saw the headlines saying they were going to make something to go higher and faster. I’ve prayed you’d be hurt, crippled even, so you couldn’t go on. . . . But now we’ve come to the Jumping Off Place, and I won’t be waiting any more.”

  Linden turned his face away. He called himself coward, fool, and traitor, and he said aloud: “All right. If it’s got to be that way.”

  The rocket’s voice in the beginning was like the unsealed thunders of Revelations. As the ship climbed, the sound rose steeply in pitch, till it was like a million banshees keening for the extinction of the human race. And as the velocity still increased it went up still further to an almost supersonic note that shivered on the threshold of hearing and vibrated agonizingly in nerves and bones and blood.

  He lay pinioned and helpless, cradled in fluid as he had been in his mother’s womb. Arms, legs,. head, spine strained cruelly beneath the burden of their own intolerable weight. Each breath was a mighty effort and each breath went out of him as breath goes out of a man hit over the heart.

  And the rocket screamed and climbed—up where the air was too thin for wings; up where there was no air but only hurtling ions, particles traveling at enormous velocities and charged with enormous voltages; up into the domain of the primary cosmics, of radiation that it would be pointless to call merely “hard,” radiation compared to which the gamma-blast from an atomic explosion is like the soft pattering of summer rain in comparison to machine-gun fire.

  The automatic controls, the feedback circuits, the computing instruments did their work, seeking the orbit-to-be far out in space. The meter-bank above Linden was blurred and dim; the muscles of his eyes were not strong enough to focus them against the pressure of acceleration. His body weighed a thousand pounds. He was paying now for the weightlessness he would experience when the rocket began to orbit.

  His consciousness was a fading spark when the projectile’s vibration changed and the awful pressure diminished. Thirty seconds later the same thing happened again, and now breathing was easier and cramped muscles could relax a little from their torture. The rocket was approaching its burnout, swinging into the four-hour orbit, and the prepared relays were cutting its acceleration one gravity at a time, so that the change would not be too brutally abrupt.

  The next-to last stage was reached and for 30 seconds his weight seemed normal as the nuclear engine idled at one-gravity thrust. Linden moved aching limbs, working himself free of the plastic-fluid cocoon that had protected him. His still-blurred vision slid over the instrument bank, sought the tinted mirrors that would give him an outside view without exposing his eyes to the blaze of the unveiled heavens. . . .

  Then the engine cut out altogether, and there was deadly silence inside the rocket as it began to fall.

  Linden’s movements sent him floating free, across the little cabin—slowly, lazily in relation to the things around, while his every reflex shrieked that he and the ship around him were falling, falling from the great height, and aroused glands poured fear-secretions through his blood, and instinctively reacting nerves made his muscles tense and the sweat start out all over his body. His unconscious mind cowered and waited for the obliterating, inevitable smash—the smash that would never come, for the rocket was falling forever, plunging endlessly along the curvature of space in a trajectory of no return.

  In the mirrors were the naked stars, mercilessly brilliant and unwinking.

  The ship was a little metal bubble risen from the air-ocean into the great vacuum, with a trapped organism inside it, around it illimitable space—airless, lifeless, and yet not empty.

  The ship swam in the fierce bath of radiation. To the primary cosmic rays that blaze through space, its metal walls and the human body within them were as transparent and unsubstantial as some frail jellyfish aswim in the equally refracting medium of the sea.

  His hands clawed for support and found none. The myriad mirrored stars seemed to flare into novas and whirl around him. A voice screamed hoarsely, that must be his own, for there was no other human being in all space. He was falling down, down, and down into dizzy and searing darkness. . . .

  His memory of the time that followed was disjointed and fragmentary—whether of hours, days, an eternity, he could not tell. He preserved a clear image of himself, flapping and floundering in air like some grotesque wingless bird and laughing hysterically as the metal strut in his hand—it must have been wrested from the acceleration-couch bracings—swung, smashed, pounded . . . Glass sprayed in slow-motion and did not fall, the staring meters went blind and blank as he wrecked beyond repair the delicate instruments without which the ship could not return to Earth. A cable ripped loose from the automatic control system floated like a coiling snake and spat blue fire, and he laughed. . . .

  And another image stood stark and clear. He was stifling. The oxygen tanks must have failed—or had he smashed them, too?—and his sense of smothering grew momentarily more desperate, though he drew in great gasping breaths heedless of the glass splinters that floated and glittered, and though at the same time a strange fire speed to race through his veins and invest him with demoniac strength. . . . Finish it! shrieked a voice deep within him, and he made his way to the airseal door and attacked it savagely. The door had never been made to be unsealed in space, but neither had it been constructed to withstand such an assault from within. It gave way, and the blast of escaping air whipped it out and away.

  As it went, Linden glimpsed the vast cloudy globe of Earth, floating out there, cool and unreachable. Braced against the brief outrush of the ship’s tiny atmosphere, he took one last choking breath, and thought: Goodbye Earth . . . Ruth . . . goodbye . . .

  Instinct-driven, the axolotl moves, with the sureness of direction that in a higher life form would be called purpose, toward the shallow water, the light, and the air it cannot breathe. Painfully it creeps ashore. In the unfamiliar element, its fringed gills shrivel, and it writhes. . . .

  And the larval husk, the pallid shin of the ooze-dweller, bursts and is shed. From it emerges a new creature, lizard-slender, beady-eyed, splendidly striped in gold and black: the true adult of the species, the tiger salamander.

  A push sent Linden floating easily forward of the ship, twisting in midair to avoid collision with bare frame members that remained where he had torn out the bulkhead separ
ating the pressure cabin from the instrument and engine compartments sternward. The partition had been useless, of course, since he had let the air out of the vessel, and he had needed the materials it contained.

  He checked his leisurely flight and hovered beside the radio sender-receiver. Its working parts, exposed by the removal of a section of control panel, had been rearranged and altered in ways that would have made an Earthly technician raise eyebrows in scorn—and justly so, since the apparatus as it was now would have been of no possible use . . . on Earth.

  Methodically Linden finished placing and adjusting the bits of wire and glass he had taken from one of the dismantled measuring devices aft.

  He gazed thoughtfully at his own hands. They had become very brown in the last fortnight, and the nails—feeble vestiges that they were of the great claws of the ancestral brute—had sloughed off. At the same time, the exposed tips of his fingers had become mobile, so that he could make fine adjustments without employing the grosser muscles that moved the entire finger.

  Converting the radio to new purposes had proved much easier than the changes he had made in the ship’s driving mechanism—perhaps because the task was less difficult, or perhaps because, as he sensed to be true, the changes in his own mind and body were still progressing. Far more important than the visible, superficial changes were the unseen ones—in metabolism and vital processes, in the countless neural connections of the brain. His senses had sharpened and multiplied. Forces, radiations, the electromagnetic spectrum—creations of patchwork inference from the standpoint of Earthly science—had become for him matters of direct and intimate knowledge.

  Only in the last few days had he begun to hear the voices of Earth.