Methuselah's Children

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Even then they were not outside the Solar System, but between them and the stars lay nothing but the winter homes of Sol's comets and hiding places of hypothetical trans-Plutonian planets-space in which the Sun holds options but can hardly be said to own in fee simple. But even the nearest stars were still light-years away. New Frontiers was headed for them at a pace which crowded the heels of light-weather cold, track fast.

  Out, out, and still farther out . . . out to the lonely depths where world lines are almost straight, undistorted by gravitation. Each day, each month . . . each year . . . their headlong flight took them farther from all humanity.

  PART TWO

  1

  The ship lunged on, alone in the desert of night, each light-year as empty as the last. The Families built up a way of life in her.

  The New Frontiers was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or "lower" compartments were living quarters while the innermost or "upper" compartments were storerooms and so forth. 'Tween compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive.

  The design will be recognized as similar to that of the larger free-flight interplanetary ships in use today, but it is necessary to bear in mind her enormous size. She was a city, with ample room for a colony of twenty thousand, which would have allowed the planned complement of ten thousand to double their numbers during the long voyage to Proxima Centauri.

  Thus, big as she was, the hundred thousand and more of the Families found themselves overcrowded fivefold.

  They put up with it only long enough to rig for cold-sleep. By converting some recreation space on the lower levels to storage, room was squeezed out for the purpose. Somnolents require about one per cent the living room needed by active, functioning humans; in time the ship was roomy enough for those still awake. Volunteers for cold-sleep were not numerous at first-these people were more than commonly aware of death because of their unique heritage; cold-sleep seemed too much like the Last Sleep. But the great discomfort of extreme overcrowding combined with the equally extreme monotony of the endless voyage changed their minds rapidly enough to provide a steady supply for the little death as fast as they could be accommodated.

  Those who remained awake were kept humping simply to get the work done-the ship's housekeeping, tending the hydroponic farms and the ship's auxiliary machinery and, most especially, caring for the somnolents themselves. Bio-mechanicians have worked out complex empirical formulas describing body deterioration and the measures which must be taken to offset it under various conditions of impressed acceleration, ambient temperature, the drugs used, and other factors such as metabolic age, body mass, sex, and so forth. By using the upper, low-weight compartments, deterioration caused by acceleration (that is to say, the simple weight of body tissues on themselves, the wear that leads to flat feet or bed sores) could be held to a minimum. But all the care of the somnolents had to be done by hand-turning them, massaging them, checking on blood sugar, testing the slow-motion heart actions, all the tests and services necessary to make sure that extremely reduced metabolism does not slide over into death. Aside from a dozen stalls in the ships infirmary she had not been designed for cold-sleep passengers; no automatic machinery had been provided. All this tedious care of tens of thousands of somnolents had to be done by hand.

  Eleanor Johnson ran across her friend, Nancy Weatheral in Refectory 9-D-called "The Club" by its habitués, less flattering things by those who avoided it. Most of its frequenters were young and noisy. Lazarus was the only elder who ate there often. He did not mind noise, he enjoyed it.

  Eleanor swooped down on her friend and kissed the back of her neck. "Nancy! So you are awake again! My, I'm glad to see you!"

  Nancy disentangled herself. "H'lo, babe. Don't spill my coffee."

  "Well! Aren't you glad to see me?"

  "Of course I am. But you forget that while it's been a year to you, it's only yesterday to me. And I'm still sleepy."

  "How long have you been awake, Nancy?"

  "A couple of hours. How's that kid of yours?"

  "Oh, he's fine!" Eleanor Johnson's face brightened. "You wouldn't know him-he's shot up fast this past year. Almost up to my shoulder and looking more like his father every day."

  Nancy changed the subject. Eleanor's friends made a point of keeping Eleanor's deceased husband out of the conversation. "What have you been doing while I was snoozing? Still teaching primary?"

  "Yes. Or rather 'No.' I stay with the age group my Hubert is in. He's in junior secondary now."

  "Why don't you catch a few months' sleep and skip some of that drudgery, Eleanor? You'll make an old woman out of yourself if you keep it up."

  "No," Eleanor refused, "not until Hubert is old enough not to need me."

  "Don't be sentimental. Half the female volunteers are women with young children. I don't blame 'em a bit Look at me-from my point of view the trip so far has lasted only seven months. I could do the rest of it standing on my head."

  Eleanor looked stubborn. "No, thank you. That may be all right for you, but I am doing very nicely as I am."

  Lazarus, had been sitting at the same counter doing drastic damage to a sirloin steak surrogate. "She's afraid she'll miss something," he explained. "I don't blame her. So am I."

  Nancy changed her tack. "Then have another child, Eleanor. That'll get you relieved from routine duties."

  "It takes two to arrange that," Eleanor pointed out.

  "That's no hazard. Here's Lazarus, for example. He'd make a plus father."

  Eleanor dimpled. Lazarus blushed under his permanent tan. "As a matter of fact," Eleanor stated evenly, "I proposed to him and was turned down."

  Nancy sputtered into her coffee and looked quickly from Lazarus to Eleanor. "Sorry. I didn't know."

  "No harm," answered Eleanor. "It's simply because I am one of his granddaughters, four times removed."

  "But . . ." Nancy fought a losing fight with the custom of privacy. "Well, goodness me, that's well within the limits of permissible consanguinity. What's the hitch? Or should I shut up?"

  "You should," Eleanor agreed.

  Lazarus shifted uncomfortably. "I know I'm old-fashioned," he admitted, "but I soaked up some of my ideas a long time ago. Genetics or no genetics, I just wouldn't feel right marrying one of my own grandchildren."

  Nancy looked amazed. "I'll say you're old-fashioned!" She added, "Or maybe you're just shy. I'm tempted to propose to you myself and find out."

  Lazarus glared at her. "Go ahead and see what a surprise you get!"

  Nancy looked him over coolly. "Mmm . . ." she meditated.

  Lazarus tried to outstare her, finally dropped his eyes. "I'll have to ask you ladies to excuse me," he said nervously. "Work to do."

  Eleanor laid a gentle hand on his arm. "Don't go, Lazarus. Nancy is a cat and can't help it. Tell her about the plans for landing."

  "What's that? Are we going to land? When? Where?"

  Lazarus, willing to be mollified, told her. The type G2, or Sol-type star, toward which they had bent their course years earlier was now less than a light-year away-a little over seven light-months-and it was now possible to infer by para-interferometric methods that the star (ZD9817, or simply "our" star) had planets of some sort.

  In another month, when the star would be a half light-year away, deceleration would commence. Spin would be taken off the ship and for one year she would boost backwards at one gravity, ending near the star at interplanetary rather than interstellar speed, and a search would be made for a planet fit to support human life. The search would be quick and easy as the only planets they were interested in would shine out brilliantly then, like Venus from Earth; they were not interested in elusive cold planets, like Neptune or Pluto, lurking in distant shadows, nor in scorched cinders like Mercury, hiding in the flaming skirts of the mother star.
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br />   If no Earthlike planet was to be had, then they must continue on down really close to the strange sun and again be kicked away by light pressure, to resume hunting for a home elsewhere-with the difference that this time, not harassed by police, they could select a new course with care.

  Lazarus explained that the New Frontiers would not actually land in either case; she was too big to land, her weight would wreck her. Instead, if they found a planet, she would be thrown into a parking orbit around her and exploring parties would be sent down in ship's boats.

  As soon as face permitted Lazarus left the two young women and went to the laboratory where the Families continued their researches in metabolism and gerontology. He expected to find Mary Sperling there; the brush with Nancy Weatheral had made him feel a need for her company. If he ever did marry again, he thought to himself, Mary was more his style. Not that he seriously considered it; he felt that a liaison between Mary and himself would have a ridiculous flavor of lavender and old lace.

  Mary Sperling, finding herself cooped up in the ship and not wishing to accept the symbolic death of cold-sleep, had turned her fear of death into constructive channels by volunteering to be a laboratory assistant in the continuing research into longevity. She was not a trained biologist but she had deft fingers and an agile mind; the patient years of the trip had shaped her into a valuable assistant to Dr. Gordon Hardy, chief of the research.

  Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques-and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.

  Gordon Hardy had insisted on taking the tissue and the apparatus which cherished it with him to the reservation when he was arrested; he had been equally stubborn about taking the living tissue along during the escape in the Chili. Now Mrs. 'Awkins still lived and grew in the New Frontiers, fifty or sixty pounds of her-blind, deaf, and brainless, but still alive.

  Mary Sperling was reducing her size. "Hello, Lazarus," she greeted him. "Stand back. I've got the tank open."

  He watched her slice off excess tissue. "Mary," he mused, "what keeps that silly thing alive?"

  "You've got the question inverted," she answered, not looking up; "the proper form is: why should it die? Why shouldn't it go on forever?"

  "I wish to the Devil it would die!" came the voice of Dr. Hardy from behind them. "Then we could observe and find out why."

  "You'll never find out why from Mrs. 'Awkins, boss," Mary answered, hands and eyes still busy. "The key to the matter is in the gonads-she hasn't any."

  "Hummph! What do you know about it?"

  "A woman's intuition. What do you know about it?"

  "Nothing, absolutely nothing!-which puts me ahead of you and your intuition."

  "Maybe. At least," Mary added slyly, "I knew you before you were housebroken."

  "A typical female argument. Mary, that lump of muscle cackled and laid eggs before either one of us was born, yet it doesn't know anything." He scowled at it "Lazarus, I'd gladly trade it for one pair of carp, male and female."

  "Why carp?" asked Lazarus.

  "Because carp don't seem to die. They get killed, or eaten, or starve to death, or succumb to infection, but so far as we know they don't die."

  "Why not?"

  "That's what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing."

  Mary said something inaudibly. Hardy said, "What are you muttering about? Another intuition?"

  "I said, 'Amoebas don't die.' You said yourself that every amoeba now alive has been alive for, oh, fifty million years or so. Yet they don't grow indefinitely larger and they certainly can't have intestinal flora."

  "No guts," said Lazarus and blinked.

  "What a terrible pun, Lazarus. But what I said is true. They don't die. They just twin and keep on living."

  "Guts or no guts," Hardy said impatiently, "there may be a structural parallel. But I'm frustrated for lack of experimental subjects. Which reminds me: Lazarus, I'm glad you dropped in. I want you to do me a favor."

  "Speak up. I might be feeling mellow."

  "You're an interesting case yourself, you know. You didn't follow our genetic pattern; you anticipated it. I don't want your body to go into the converter; I want to examine it."

  Lazarus snorted. " 'Sa'l right with me, bud. But you'd better tell your successor what to look for-you may not live that long. And I'll bet you anything that you like that nobody'll find it by poking around in my cadaver!"

  The planet they had hoped for was there when they looked for it, green, lush, and young, and looking as much like Earth as another planet could. Not only was it Earthlike but the rest of the system duplicated roughly the pattern of the Solar System-small terrestrial planets near this sun, large Jovian planets farther out. Cosmologists had never been able to account for the Solar System; they had alternated between theories of origin which had failed to stand up and "sound" mathematico-physical "proofs" that such a system could never have originated in the first place. Yet here was another enough like it to suggest that its paradoxes were not unique, might even be common.

  But more startling and even more stimulating and certainly more disturbing was another fact brought out by telescopic observation as they got close to the planet The planet held life . . . intelligent life . . . civilized life.

  Their cities could be seen. Their engineering works, strange in form and purpose, were huge enough to be seen from space just as ours can be seen.

  Nevertheless, though it might mean that they must again pursue their weary hegira, the dominant race did not appear to have crowded the available living space. There might be room for their little colony on those broad continents. If a colony was welcome-

  "To tell the truth," Captain King fretted, "I hadn't expected anything like this. Primitive aborigines perhaps, and we certainly could expect dangerous animals, but I suppose I unconsciously assumed that man was the only really civilized race. We're going to have to be very cautious."

  King made up a scouting party headed by Lazarus; he had come to have confidence in Lazarus' practical sense and will to survive. King wanted to head the party himself, but his concept of his duty as a ship's captain forced him to forego it. But Slayton Ford could go; Lazarus chose him and Ralph Schultz as his lieutenants. The rest of the party were specialists-biochemist, geologist, ecologist, stereographer, several sorts of psychologists and sociologists to study the natives including one authority in McKelvy's structural theory of communication whose task would be to find some way to talk with the natives.

  No weapons-

  King flatly refused to arm them. "Your scouting party is expendable," he told Lazarus bluntly; "for we cannot risk offending them by any sort of fighting for any reason, even in self-defense. You are ambassadors, not soldiers. Don't forget it."

  Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.

  As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families' congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain's attention.

  Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. "What's the meaning of this interruption?"

  "Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children."

  "Nurse, you are decide
dly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon."

  She put her hands on her hips. "You'll see me now. This is the landing party, isn't it? I've got something you have to hear before they leave."

  King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, "Make it brief."

  She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself-and an acute sensitivity to telepathy.

  He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it . . . and they were expecting him.

  The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his "friends."

  "Oh, just people," he said, shrugging at their stupidity. "Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You'll like them."

  But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting him; therefore he must go along.

  Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.

  When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. "It's amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it's also different enough to give you the willies-like looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling."

  "But how about the natives?"

  "Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven't seen through the 'scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn't have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans' hunches."