Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  The region where we lived was called the spaceward lunar hemisphere. Earth never shone there, but life was good. There were other kids, and school, and the usual dreams about being a bold space wanderer, speeding out to find unimagined marvels.

  Dad was a technician in the research labs, just a few miles from our house by tube train. I could see the walls of the buildings in the bleak volcanic distance.

  Dad used to pretend he was wrestling with me. "Charlie," he'd say, "a kid better grow up tough and flexible these days. Not mean but rugged—ready for anything. Don't ever go soft on me, Charlie, with all the temptations of modern comforts. You know one thing the labs are looking for, already? Yeah, a way to reach the planets of the stars! Maybe a means—and an engine powerful enough—really will be invented to force a shortened, interdimensional path across the light-years if the structure of space itself doesn't burst under test! Keep your head down, kid! The work is much too dangerous to be conducted on the densely populated Earth. There could be an awful blow."

  Dad was a big, dark man. Talking like that, he looked thrilled and scared.

  Dad used to bring Dr. Shane Lanvin out to our house to enjoy Mother's cooking, which, even considering the aid of a fine automatic kitchen, was something special. Dr. Lanvin was a wispy little man with a ragged blond mustache. He was much older than Dad; though Mom used to say that even if he was a famous scientist, he was part child in his interests; that he liked even toys.

  "I always did enjoy things in miniature, Lillian," he'd admit.

  Dr. Lanvin was an instrument specialist, which meant designing and assembling parts that you could scarcely see, so small were they. Once he made me a toy. It was a ball that absorbed the energy of sunshine, and rolled after me wherever I went, in the plastic-sealed, tree-lined streets of the lab staff housing area. Following the sounds of my footsteps, it seemed half alive. Maybe it was a forerunner of all that was to come.

  Once Dr. Lanvin showed me a bit of quartz, like a grain of sand. It was mounted in a little round case, fitted permanently to a powerful pocket microscope. Through the scope you could see one flat face of the quartz grain, glinting. Carved on it, unmistakable, were horizontal rows of symbols.

  My spine tingled. "Did you engrave them, Dr. Lanvin?" I demanded. I was eight or nine, then.

  "I could have, Buggsie," he answered, using my nickname. "With a micro-manipulator and a diamond-chip. Only I didn't."

  "Then who did?" I pursued.

  "I wish I knew," he replied. "A friend of mine collected some two thousand of these tiny, non-ferrous—not iron-bearing, that is—meteors, floating free in the asteroid belt, and mailed them to me. My microscope revealed this unusual one. The symbols are about the same as those used by the beings of Planet X in their full-sized inscriptions, before some vast nuclear charge from Mars blew up their world. But no man can read such writing. That's about all I know—yet."

  This remained almost our only information on this particular subject, until years later.

  We might all have been blown to Kingdom Come there on the Moon, had any of the lab experiments gotten seriously out of control. There were minor blasts. But I lived out my time there safely. I even worked in those labs myself for several months, and by then even the stars seemed technologically nearer. Dr. Lanvin had left the Moon, accepting a professorship at the University of Chicago, and it was soon decided that I'd be sent there to complete my education.

  Mom said an odd thing as she and Dad saw me off at the Tycho spaceport: "I wish we were going there, too, Charlie. I wish we had a little country place, far off from everything, and a cow and some chickens."

  "That's a primitive mouthful for a modern woman, with no idea of modern farming, let alone such an antique setup," Dad chuckled. "Well, sometimes I yearn for simplicity, too. We're weak, slow-adjusting characters, left a little behind by the onrush of the times. So long, Charlie, watch yourself. It seems funny that I, an Earthian, have a son who'll actually have to get used to Earth."

  Yes, that turned around situation, characteristic of our era, seemed odd. I was nervous about my big, sophisticated, native planet, as if it was an alien world! As a youngster, men had kidded me that I couldn't even endure its huge gravity!

  The new university outside Chicago proper was beautiful. As arranged, I went to live at Dr. Lanvin's house. I adjusted to Terra, even though, within twenty-four hours of my arrival, there was a catastrophe that couldn't have happened in a previous age.

  A freighter coming from Mars to the Chicago spaceport, couldn't decelerate. Nobody knows completely what errors of human stupidity were committed aboard the doomed ship under the goad of panic; but the Venetian Prince came down like a colossal meteor, fortunately in almost open country miles from the port. Yet a town of fifteen thousand nearby was wiped out. At Dr. Lanvin's house we felt the shock wave and the hot wind. The western horizon glowed red. No doubt a crater will stand for ages at the site of the crash.

  As I watched from Doc's dooryard, all the loved romance of space and the future seemed to turn sour on me.

  "Disasters that afflict innovations always affect people about the same, Charlie," Doc breathed heavily, not calling me Buggsie, now. "Train wrecks, the sinking of an ocean liner, the crash of a great plane. Now a space ship destroying a town. The magnitude just gets bigger, more terrible. There'll be an investigation, terror, grief, complaints; laws will be changed. But wider and better interplanetary travel will go marching on, with everything else."

  I got in on the ground floor of Dr. Lanvin's work in advanced robotics. Robot devices had been used for various purposes for many years. But Doc had invented some much improved ones. I tried handling several. Then, like part of my obscure destiny, the chance came to really prove one of them.

  Fire broke out in an unrenovated warehouse near the edge of the city one night. Doc and I drove to the scene in his autocar. There was a lot of inflammable and possibly explosive material. Someone shouted that a watchman had been overcome by smoke inside the building.

  "Get him out, Charlie," Doc said. "Your body is more agile than mine; your control of an artificial one will be the same."

  Sitting in the car, I put the control helmet over my head. In it there was no old fashioned television screen, and no complicated guide levers. What the helmet did was detect and sidetrack the motor impulses from my brain, broadcasting their pulsations by short wave radio to the robot, which I thus guided as if it were my own form. Similarly, sensory impressions were radioed back to the helmet, there to be reconverted into impulses directly perceptible to the sensory centers of my brain, without the intervention of my eyes, ears, and other sense organs.

  So, in effect I was living in a shape not handsome in a human way, stronger than my own, and far less limited. Like a demon I stepped out of the rear seat of the autocar on asbestos-shod feet. Propelled by steel muscles energized by a motor drawing current from an atomic battery, I walked past less intricately robotized fire-fighting equipment. Through smoke that would have strangled an unprotected man, I climbed a ladder and went through a window from which a plume of flame belched. I felt no inconvenience whatsoever. There was a thrill in that—like being something super.

  After that I was a bit lost. But a voice growled instructions near me—in the car, that is; I had almost forgotten that I was really there, and not in the blazing warehouse. Muffled and harrassed, it reached my own ears through the control helmet:

  "Walk your robot inward, kid, for cripes sake! Follow a beam if there's no floor left! There'll be a little office room...."

  I knew that it must be some chief of the fire fighters who was giving me directions.

  With flames all around, I—or the machine—scrambled along a steel support, and through an opening in an inside wall. Flames had not penetrated there, and automatically I saw through the opaque smoke by radio waves sent out by, and bouncing back to eyes that belonged to the robot; parabolic antennas, they were. The images were visual and unblurred, and lacked only color.
>
  I found the office, and the man who had collapsed there. I pressed an oxygen mask from my insulated pack over his face, and wrapped him in an asbestos blanket that I carried.

  "Rush to the main door of the building, kid!" the voice growled again. "I think the wall of flame is less deep there!"

  Doing it was a cinch, though I went through a hundred feet of pure fire in two great leaps. I dropped the guy on a stretcher outside the door. Let the medics work on him. I had to remind myself that he had been rescued, not by me, but by a product of science.

  Back at the car I made the robot polish the soot off itself with a cloth, and then climb into the rear seat to assume an inert position for transport, again. After that, I removed the helmet.

  "Well, Charlie, another foretaste of the future, eh?" Doc said from behind the wheel. "Make way for tomorrow...."

  "Yeah," I grunted raggedly. "Like being more than human."

  The guy who had been giving me directions still stood beside the car. Somehow, I sensed that our innocent remarks were wrong things to say in his presence. I studied him from my six-feet-three height. Growing up in low lunar gravity, a fellow shoots up amazingly.

  His face, topping a massive body, was beefy and rough and kind; but now there was fury in it. He was like a tame bear after being baited and confused for too long. And he'd just been through some nerve wracking minutes of responsibility for a man's life.

  "Okay, kid," he rumbled. "You and science saved that man. Thanks. Otherwise, it's all the same. Tomorrow, and more gadgets! Nothing stays put so a guy can understand it! The world just rushes on, till maybe not even gravestones mean anything anymore—except when a spaceship rubs out a town, killing my brother, his wife, and their four kids, among the others! Pretty soon you think that the whole universe is going to fall apart, with all the junk in it, and that there aren't going to be any real folks anymore! When all you wanted was peace for your family. Then you get all mixed up, and want to kill and smash whoever and whatever makes this so. Damn! Dammit all!..."

  I held my hands poised to grab him if he tried to jump me. Only his grief kept me from calling him a fool. Yes, he might have attacked me, except that now he went all to pieces. Big sobs wracked him.

  Doc and I didn't have to do anything because two cops came and led him away.

  Doc shrugged sadly. "Neurasthenia. It's getting commoner, Charlie," he said. "A straw just broke another camel's back. Our friend has had a tough time. Besides, he's one of the slow ones. Slow to adjust and grow with his civilization. Oh, he'll probably straighten out. Or the cerebral specialists will fix his brain. He'll be an easy going, untroubled individual. Is it right and democratic to tamper with a man's mind? Well, would you let him be insane, poignantly miserable, for keeps?"

  Again I had a primitive qualm. The Earth was all around me, strange, teeming, overpopulated in spite of colonies across space. The crowd, jubilant over the robot's demonstration, was all around us. But I bet that every one of those people was at least a little bewildered by the times.

  "Let's drive home, Doc," I urged sharply.

  II

  As we whizzed along, Dr. Lanvin smirked at me like a sly elf. "To what our poor friend complained about, I owe much," he remarked. "Consider my birth-date, January 23rd, 1932. It's now 2033. Yes, I'm a hundred and one, though I look and feel fifty by old standards. It's common enough. Wizardry? No. Let's face facts, Charlie. Something like immortality has been sneaking up on the human race for well over a century. First, diseases were conquered one by one. Meanwhile, surgery, replacing worn out organs with new ones grown artificially, went far ahead. Hormone therapy was developed. The final degenerative disease, senility, is proving to be just as conquerable as cancer. Remove its causes—accumulation of minerals and certain fatty acids among other things, and tone up the machine—and it just isn't there anymore!"

  Doc paused for breath, then went on:

  "Yes, there's plenty that we don't yet know about the wonderful mechanism of the human body. But we don't need to know everything to keep it living on and on. Because, with a little help, it restores itself. The trouble with our viewpoint is that death has been the destiny of all life on Earth for so long that it seems like an inviolable tradition. A silly attitude, don't you think? Now, have I disoriented you some more, Charlie? Don't be embarrassed. I feel somewhat that way myself. Maybe your mood is right for me to go a step further into the murky Destiny of Man, eh?"

  My hide was tingling with something like dread. But I was eager. "I'm ready for anything, Doc."

  We got back to his old house under the trees of the campus. From a cabinet in his quiet living room he took a plastic box. In it was a small, oblong bar of pinkish substance that wriggled slightly, as if it were animated.

  "Touch it," Dr. Lanvin commanded.

  I obeyed. The stuff was warm, and in response to contact with my finger, it writhed violently. "Unh—what in hell!" I grunted.

  "It's something a big commercial laboratory managed to produce for abstract reasons," he answered. "It isn't any one substance, but its structure does include quite a few complex silicone compounds. Chemically it's not static. Processes and structural changes are going on inside it constantly. Its microscopic texture is cellular, like animal tissue. Pour, say, sugar dissolved in water on it, with the addition of certain salts, and it absorbs the solution slowly, along with oxygen from the air, to produce a kind of tissue-combustion, heat and movement. But it can convert sunlight, or simple heat from an outside source, or electricity, into motion, too. And it grows. Cut a piece of it off, and that will grow, too, as if reproduction had occurred. So—would you call it life of a sort? It's a lot more rugged than common life. Here, I'll show you, Charlie...."

  Doc picked up a small soldering tool. When its point glowed red hot he held it close to that pinkish oblong. It did not recoil from the heat. Instead, as if impelled by some inherent automatism or instinct, it curled itself around the tool, and, hissing softly, seemed to enjoy the warmth. When Doc switched off the current, it uncoiled itself as if in disappointment. It wasn't burned.

  "Cold it is equally resistant," Doc remarked. "Especially when its vital fluid, moistening it inside and out, is changed to something with a lower freezing temperature than water. Alcohol, for example, or liquefied air or ammonia gas. Then its chemistry, and the flow of energy continue on a different temperature plane, for it is supremely adaptable, Charlie."

  Dr. Lanvin's sly expression matched the chill along my back.

  "Okay," I growled. "Now tell me what you're really thinking."

  He shrugged. "Oh, nothing definite, Charlie. Someday reaching the stars in another figurative sense, maybe. As is, this stuff isn't of much use. Call it 'protoplast' as its creators do—a tougher, upstart brother of protoplasm—life. It isn't molded. But what if, in a vastly improved form, if could be someday?"

  I frowned. "An animal?" I questioned. "Artificially made? Or—a man? An android, that is? Pure fantasy, of course, yet. A robot, with a robot's ruggedness, but made completely in human form. Servants maybe?"

  Doc Lanvin's mild grin turned crooked. "Servants?" he challenged. "Is that all? What if we were living the last century of man's existence as original man? No, I don't necessarily mean the often dreamed-up possibility of a robot conquest of humanity by force! But what of the 'improved model' principle, applied by humans to themselves, with the transfer of mind and ego to a body that could live without harm in the cold vacuum between the planets, or in an inferno; a body unaging, and destructible only by absolute violence? No, Charlie, this development must normally be a long ways ahead. But what if?"

  A cold tingling had started around my heart, spreading inexorably to the tips of my fingers, toes, and tongue.

  "Doc, I don't know," I said slowly. "To the flexible of viewpoint—wonderful. But it might be the ultimate shock to those who want tomorrow to be understandably and reliably like today and last year. To them it might be a hell; the death of everything reasonable, and a catastroph
e to resist with all the weapons in the modern armory, and with the last fury of dying brain and muscle."

  "I thought you'd react something like that," Doc sighed.

  My laugh was unsteady. "Then why don't scientists stop digging? Nature can bite back."

  "We can't stop, Charlie. Like everything, man is part of nature. He was given wits and curiosity to know the whys and wherefores of everything. It's like a religion—trying to learn a little more about, and get a little closer to, Whatever It Is That Keeps The Cosmos Running. Or you can say that all of man's works are works of nature, with him as the tool. That is our oneness with the universe which we've got to grow with. The fears are often childish. I feel the scare, too, Charlie, but I think you're like me."

  "I hope I am," I stated.

  "Thanks. Go to bed, Charlie. We've gabbed enough for now."

  "Nix," I answered. "I think that maybe you have been leading up to some mention of your own work, Doc."

  Dr. Lanvin's fingers tightened on the arm of his chair. "All right, Charlie," he said. "Down at dust-grain size is my own segment of the universe—my miniature region to explore—as others mean to explore the planets of the stars. It's a weird zone where familiar physical laws are curiously altered in their effects by relativity. Humans can't go there in their own flesh, at least not yet. But I believe that there may be a simple if difficult way to build a tiny metal proxy, operated the same as you operated that fire robot. Then, perhaps some compelling mysteries will be solved."

  "For instance?" I prompted.

  Doc nodded toward a photograph on the wall beside the old fashioned picture of his former wife. The first photograph showed his tiny pink meteor. Its much magnified hieroglyphics seemed to wink at us enigmatically.

  "How that writing got there," Doc answered. "And now, more. Government authority has asked me to help, Charlie. From Ganymede, largest moon of Jupiter, comes a report of a cache of tools in a chest that itself is of almost microscopic dimensions. Finding it, several men were afflicted with dizziness and fainting. One died. Autopsy revealed many little seared, reddish lines crisscrossing inside the cortex of his brain. Also, in the asteroid belt, several space ships have gone out of control, the finest parts of their most delicate control mechanisms severed as if by intense heat."