Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Doc shrugged mildly. "I'd almost say 'Blah, tiresome fool!'" he remarked. "But it wouldn't be fair. Cope stubbornly believes what he says, I'm sure. It's etched into his nature. To a lesser degree with most, it's the same with many others. So, this is it."

  The following evening, Doc made his suggestions over the air, speaking from his house:

  "I am addressing those, who, in the eyes of some, have ceased to be human. But perhaps the term, 'android' should be dropped entirely. We are men in form, mind, emotion, aim, and pleasure—let there be no instinctive, sullen, backward doubt of that! Our shape and our organs are human. We have sprung from man's aspirations, and his quest for more knowledge and better living. Though the knowhow of our living was borrowed from another people, it would have come to men on Earth in time, and by their own efforts. We are thus, simply, a far hardier variety of what humans have always been. To those who are weaker, troubled by fear, less understanding, we should be generous, until more time lets them realize these truths. Therefore, I suggest that we leave the Earth to them, going outward where our powers permit us to go freely."

  That is how it has been. Among the androids, as if the interstellar regions was their natural habitat, Dr. Lanvin's hint took hold at once. On Earth, tension eased gradually, until even Armand Cope's voice sounded puzzled, and then sank to silence.

  But let me tell about a side-event. Doc found a toy-sized craft in his workshop, a ship with tapered bow and stern, and retractable airfoils. It was less than an inch long. Need I say how we boarded it—Doc, Jan, and I? Or how later, we and one Kobolah, conversed under the scope of a micro-manipulator, while Scharber and Doc's Irma took turns watching us through the lenses?

  We thanked the tiny Xian for all his help. We saw his electronic visual filaments blink over his eyes when Jan suggested:

  "Kobolah, you could be cast in a larger form like the old Xians. You could go with Dr. Lanvin in the first ship to leave for the solar system of Sirius."

  "Maybe—someday," he buzzed in answer. "Not now. To Sirius? I'm going there, anyway with my own people soon. Time? There is plenty—for everything. May you make few errors."

  Then, with his jet rod he blasted off into the air. Within a minute, his ship, aboard which were hundreds of his kind that we had seen, spat blue fire, and darted out of the open window.

  Scharber chuckled almost wistfully. "Micro-androids," he said. "Strangest thing I ever saw. Why didn't he take me with him? Got to start seeing the outer-universe somewhere. Why not in miniature? Darn, androids can go anywhere."

  X

  The next day, Scharber's protoplastic form was found inert in his small bachelor's apartment. When we were notified, Doc and I had a look at the place. On Scharber's study table were many brief messages, written on paper with a heat-charred line. The words were English, and spelled correctly; but the script was strange. I knew the instrument of the writing. I had written with it myself.

  But Scharber had left a note of his own, written to us in ink:

  Dear Dr. Lanvin, Mrs. Lanvin, Charlie, Jan. Everybody—So I win.... The Little Guy must have guessed. Anyway, he brought his ship here. Then he wrote his questions—though he could hear me answer. Do I want to come along? Yeah—look at the other papers—see for yourselves. You must have made a good impression out there—you who were there. So he likes Earthlings. For pets, maybe? Who knows? Well—I didn't say no.... Wish me luck, and the same to you. Do me a favor? Whoever goes first out to Sirius, take this big carcass of mine along—being android, it ought to keep for a long time. Maybe I'll need it after a while. Right now I'm getting a smaller edition. So long for maybe a hundred years, more or less.

  Scharber.

  Smiling like an elf, Doc looked at me. "How do you feel?" he asked.

  "Same as you, I suppose," I answered. "Haunted...."

  During the year that followed, that first starship was completed, and ten others of the huge mile-long craft were begun. Jan and I saw them all in their cradles when we went out to the Moon to visit my mother and dad.

  It was really meant to be a farewell trip. Jan and I hadn't expected to get berthed on that first starcraft, the Euclid, but it happened. Not all of the voyagers were of the new flesh.

  "Farewell nothing," Dad told me slyly at the house. He looked more like a slightly older brother of mine, than somebody paternal.

  "We're going along, Charlie," Mom intimated. "We've always been ready for new adventure, haven't we?"

  In due course the Euclid came to the New Mexico Spaceport to pick, up its passengers, Jan and I and the folks had been on Earth for over a month by then. We and Doc and Irma arrived at the port on the same rocket plane, and as I looked up at the brooding hull of that colossus I felt a little as if a kid dream of mine had come true—that I was matching my lusty strength against the whole universe, and winning. To fight and to win against something, has been a need in human blood and bone for uncounted eons. But should I feel a bit puny and sheepish, too? Comparing myself to Doc, for instance?

  This was his special day. Back there behind us, as we approached the starship—back there beyond the guardropes—were the crowds of curious, thrilled, scared, envious humanity. Some cheered for what the Euclid meant to progress—or perhaps they cheered more for a greater triumph—the thirty-thousand demigods who would be among its passengers. But was some of the cheering given in relief at being rid of them?

  Bowhart was there, to shake hands with Doc and me and Irma and Jan, and to meet my folks.

  "Good luck to you all," he said. "No Great Change, yet, for you, Charlie? So I hear. Funny, hunh? Dr. Lanvin—I want to give you special best wishes. You look happy, so I guess if you're satisfied, nothing I can say will be an offense. But I still wouldn't want to be you for a million dollars."

  Bowhart must have known that much, saying what he did; because Doc wasn't at all offended—just airily nettled, like an ageless leprechaun pitied by an urchin.

  "Oh?" he asked lightly. "In the past many a millionaire would have given more than a million for another week of life and vigor, and it was no sale. The value is a lot bigger; but it doesn't cost that, now—it doesn't cost anything except a little more growing up. What do you want to do, Bow? Drink beer, eat ice cream, make love? I can do all that, too. Someday you'll get it through your fuddled head that I'm still human. I think you're catching on already. Yes, the androids are leaving Earth; but you know that the process that makes them is still here. Every day there are more labs. Because people get hurt terribly, or wear out beyond reasonable repair. And what would you expect them to want to do then, just die?"

  Doc wasn't just talking to slow minded Bowhart, but to all humanity that was like him. It was his final message. But there was another touch to it that wasn't in words. It was a cocky gentle air that maybe suggested the contrast of—say—eating a fine dinner, and then taking a long dive, unclothed, through the vacuum of space—both with equal relish.

  Bowhart looked puzzled, and a bit sullen. Maybe he was beginning to catch on at last.

  Well, we made that enormous jump across the light-years to the Sirian System. Seventy-nine years it took. I don't think that even an Xian ship could have done much better. There's no overdrive or time-travel in sight. Funny, isn't it—here, for once, nature resists us. But to avoid boredom there was the older idea of suspended animation—natural to the android, and capable of being induced in the older flesh by special anesthetics and chilling. My wife and our friends passed the first two years of the journey awake, to help operate the ship. The other seventy-seven years passed as a moment.

  We found us a world just slightly smaller than the Earth, and young and beautiful. There was no native intelligence yet, comparable with the human. The valley in which we live is rich and lush, and it slopes down to the ocean. Like my dad and mother, Jan and I have a sturdy house of stone; cleared fields, and livestock descended from the animals and poultry brought out from Earth.

  It's Mom's old rustic dream. It's even Cope's! It's an idyll
.

  A town is springing up fast nearby. It is one of the first colonial settlements of what may become a great Earthborn interstellar union.

  Doc is in the town with Irma, building it, planning, full of goodwill for everyone. Scharber's normal-sized android body still sleeps in a special vault under the town hall. But who knows at what moment he and Kobolah may come?

  Doc kids my folks and Jan; but especially he kids me:

  "You're silly, Charlie, why don't you switch over to the android level? What are you waiting for? Sure, I like to live in a house, too; but sometimes I sleep out in the rain or the snow just for the hell of it! Of course there's no real good in that kind of nonsense! But changed over, a man has an average of a twenty per cent increase in intelligence, simply on the basis of better energy and alertness! You may think that you feel good, but even if no trials come to demand superior stamina, you'll feel better; you'll do three times the work, and never tire at all! Why, even on Earth, according to reports that are relayed from starship to starship coming this way in a long string, humans as they were are almost gone. So what are you—a diehard, a stick-in-the-mud? Even—you?"

  "Maybe it's the seventy-seven years lost, Doc," I josh back at him. "I've got to catch up, perhaps. Of course I recognize all the advantages. I've been through the mill. Just as with you, in my head, lodged against my upper skull and doing me no harm, the medics say, is a micro-android which my ego has inhabited, and which I almost never use now. I remember what it is like to be super, Doc. I grant that it is all the truth. But there's time. Just let me think some more."

  Yeah, Jan and I think of all we've seen, that we never dreamed was there. Beauty, strangeness, vastness, smallness, wonder, knowledge. We've come a long awesome way.

  You feel that you know a little more about the universe, and that you're warmly and humbly a little nearer to its ultimate Mystery, and are at peace. You know that the Great Change in man is right, and was intended.

  We've been stubborn, and I'm not entirely sure why. I know that we and the others of the old flesh will yield to progress sooner or later. Maybe we've been clinging sentimentally to the past of man. But deep down, I believe I know the real reason. We're slow, we're human; just give us time. It's hard to accept the responsible role of demigod.

  We're just scared of so much newness.

  The End

  *******************************

  Trail Blazer,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Fantastic Story Magazine Fall 1951

  Short Story - 7218 words

  RUST-RED deserts cover the long-dead planet of Mars. Here civilization once might have ruled, but it has long since vanished. However, there are native sons of Terra who have not altogether lost contact with that life of wilderness and raw nature which first molded Mankind. Joe Whiteskunk, Indian, in his own way met the challenge of Mars—and won.

  My twin brother Frank and I were just back on the ranch from college. Dad was dead, leaving us free. Magazines were full of diagrams of space-ships and living quarters for other worlds. There was recruiting ballyhoo on the television. At night we could sometimes see the fire-trails of rockets, outward bound from nearby White Sands, New Mexico. It became like drums beating in our blood.

  “They need lots of young engineers like us, Dave,” Frank said to me. He was leaning against the corner of the house. It was evening. “On the moon now—then gosh knows where.”

  “Sure,” I answered, feeling both excited and sad. “The only question is, what do we do with Joe?”

  Just then Joe Whiteskunk was fixing a fence not a hundred yards off. With the deliberation of a rivulet washing away a mountain—as usual. Joe, who had come from Oklahoma with our Dad long ago. Joe, who might have made an oil-fortune if a slicker hadn’t cheated him of his claim. Joe, who resembled gnarled mahogany. Sixty-five years old, he was, if a day. He didn’t know exactly himself.

  Frank is no guy to beat around the bush. “Got to tell him what we mean to do,” he said.

  So we did. I began it with, “Look, Joe . . .”

  For awhile he didn’t seem to have heard. He just kept on working at that fence. But at last he said, “I go too.”

  I won’t say that I was exactly surprised. I figured I knew Joe. Maybe he thought the Moon was something like Texas or California.

  “You’ve got to know something special, Joe,” I said patiently. “Like Dave, here. He knows all about air-conditioning.”

  Joe’s face remained as deadpan as if he were a wooden Indian rather than a real one. “I know plenty special,” he answered after a moment. “Hunt—track—new place—good. Plenty game.”

  Something in the glint of his black eyes told me that he was way back in his youth.

  Frank busted out laughing. So did I. But there was a faint lump in my throat, made up of all my memories of Joe Whiteskunk. Teaching me to ride and to shoot, not by long-winded explanations but by example—or perhaps more by letting me be part of him. It’s kind of hard to explain.

  So I didn’t want to say good-by to Joe. I knew that my brother didn’t, either. We wanted to postpone it as long as possible. Besides we were a little worried about what might happen to him, left alone.

  Combine all this with a certain residual kid-prankishness. We weren’t above hazing Joe—letting his abysmal innocence lead him on—in this case toward the inevitable moment when his own ignorance must put a harmless and disgruntling end to his sudden urge to go where we went.

  My brother Frank winked at me—such a wink as one Katzenjammer kid might give to the other. “Sure, Joe,” he said, sober as a judge, “you come along with us. You hunt and track while we dig holes in all those mountains.”

  Joe seemed not even to realize that he was being kidded.

  So the next morning we drove into White Sands with him. There, in the offices of Unified Lunar Enterprizes, Frank and I knew beforehand just about what we’d have to write of ourselves in the application blanks they gave us. We had our specialties. My line was minerals and mining.

  We were sure of ourselves. We were in step with the exciting imperialistic rhythm that had seized the world. The outward thrusting, the adventure, the military significance, the dangerous industries that could be developed on the Moon, far away from the densely populated Earth.

  Yep, to Frank and me they gave the glad eye. A big burly official grinned at us. “Pass your physicals, fellas,” he said, “and we’ll ship you out tonight.”

  About Joe? Well—you know. He got a look as if he was at least a little loopy—the hopeless sort of character that keeps popping up all the time, asking foolish questions. Like the guy ninety years old who tried to enlist in the Army.

  “Come back in fifty years,” he was told indulgently. “Maybe by then the Moon will be changed enough by science so that there are woods and game on it.”

  Joe looked a little puzzled. That was all. Of course this wasn’t funny now for Frank and me. What could you do? Life consists of living and learning.

  I’m sentimental. Halfway I wanted to stay behind with old Joe Whiteskunk. Frank is different. “Well, Dave,” he said, “this is it. So let’s do what the man says. We can phone Dad’s lawyer to see that the ranch is looked after. Nothing much there anyway. We won’t even have to take the car home.”

  “Sure—you fellas go,” Joe told us. “I come too, pretty soon.” So, that night, strapped to chairs in a cabin that looked like the inside of a bus, Frank and I were sick as dogs in the absence of gravity as the sharp stars of space blossomed beyond the window-ports around us. Facing the prospect of living on the Moon—an idea somehow out of tune with the instincts in human entrails, even when you’re an enlightened young man—we were scared half to death.

  “Good thing Joe couldn’t come,” Frank grunted. “He wouldn’t understand anything. He’d die—just as if he’d suddenly found himself in an unnamed hell.”

  Right then we weren’t very inspiring symbols of the pioneering urges of the human race.

 
Had we known that at that very moment old Joe Whiteskunk was huddled in the darkest comer of the dark baggage compartment of our spaceship we would really have blown our tops. Because in such a place during a Lunar hop a man could freeze to death or suffocate easily. Even if he were a trained scientist, who knew how to protect himself.

  We were in space for better than seventy hours. I was too ill to pay much attention to the landing. But it was accomplished in a manner that was almost exactly the reverse of the takeoff.

  Balanced by whirling gyroscopes, we came down sternward toward Camp Copernicus, our flaming jets gradually reducing speed. During the last few feet before we touched the ashy ground we hung almost motionless, swinging in the seats that adjusted automatically to the proper up-down direction of any gravitational attraction.

  Then we were on the moon. Taking orders—fumbling our way into space-armor—looking at harsh sunlight and black shadows and jagged mountains that have driven many a man nuts with homesickness. Filing in a column across the ash to a large pressurized shelter of magnesium alloy that had been brought prefabricated from Earth.

  This proved to be the entrance to a labyrinth of tunnels, newly excavated underground. This was Camp Copernicus, built in the bottom of the great lunar crater of the same name.

  All of us greenhorn arrivals looked pretty awful. I felt like a foolish romantic, led into a death-trap by my own romanticism. God, how I wanted to go home!

  While quarters and bunks were being assigned the cry of “Stowaway!” arose. Right away I had a premonition that put my heart in my mouth.

  Then they carried Joe in, tucked into a suit of space-armor. The story of what he had done came out, mixed with curses, from the mouths of the baggage-handlers. Right then Joe was a very frost-bitten, very disoriented Indian, whose swollen face nonetheless showed a flash of truculence.