That the purposes of these places was at antipodes from that of the Nazi extermination centers of a century ago, made strangely little difference of aspect or mood. Vital statistics are always somewhat grim. Over no treasure can men go so mad as the treasure of life.
Awareness of all this crawled deep in Rube Jackson’s nerves. There was a sense of being useless and unwanted, and of having been paid in full in the coin of living, while others, who were younger, still waited their due. Justice was all in favor of youth, when there was not room enough in civilized places. It wasn’t only that Rube was just. He felt a guilty embarrassment. A person deserved only his century of possession.
He had voted that way himself. Then a person must start bare-handed in another place. Such justice gave reason to the compulsory renunciation of property and to the sealed trains speeding on to the vita camps, and then on into the night, silent and unlighted, to the dispersion centers.
In some of the latter it had been reported that great silvery ships would even point portentously spaceward, waiting. It was Carl Roland’s scheme.
“Maybe they’ll send us to Antarctica, Rube,” Joan mused.
He grinned back at her, seeking with belief, against the faint worry of an almost inconceivable unknown, for a future that was not too strange. “Maybe. It seems to have been turned into quite a nice place, with the aid of the atom. Beaches and everything—but let’s talk about the old days, hon.”
So their conversation retreated into that special land of the aged, where memories are golden and peaceful, and where even hardship takes on a certain humor and whimsy. To think back was a balm that could drug their tension and disorientation.
Their marriage in 1946. Joan had been slim, then; beautiful, blond, modern, athletic . . . It was as though Rube could see her slender hand on the wheel of the first new car they had ever owned—long ago. Three children had been born to them. They had built this house, which was still theirs. The memories were golden all right but into them crept a little of the sadness of farewell.
Their light lunch was prepared automatically in their robot kitchen. After eating they dozed for a while in the sun. Jim, their youngest son, phoned, as he did every afternoon. Jim, who was seventy-five and looked scarcely fifty by old standards.
“Hello, Dad. How does it go? How’s Mom?”
“Fine, Jim.”
Jim’s talk was brisk, gay, platitudinous, but with his constant concern for his parents lurking unspoken behind it.
Four p.m. found Rube and Joan driving in a rakish thing of glassite and blue plastic which was still called a car. In his pocket Rube carried a small tear-gas pistol. For in these times of unrest and prejudice certain ill-advised youths, prone to violence, and thinking too much that their world was cluttered by those whose lives were lived, could do worse than just sneer with wolfish amusement.
For Rube and his wife the drive had its unmentioned purpose—review and good-by. To the years they remembered. To the things they knew best. To the small steel town that had become a great, sprawling city. Away from its center the towers of apartment houses loomed at spaced intervals in a parklike landscape.
Beyond were the “farms”—row on row of coiled plastic pipe in which foggy green water circulated, generating in tiny granules of plant substance, the materials from which food of various sorts could be synthesized. And there still were nooks of lush, primitive woods.
Far from home they sat on the grass and ate a picnic supper and looked at the weather-control tower, shedding its invisible emanations miles away. The stars came out unchanged. But silvery specks crept with visible speed across the firmament. Orbiters. Tiny artificial satellites, serving their many purposes—television-relay, weather-study, space-navigation.
The old moon was dotted with bluish specks—the lighted airdomes of the mines. On the moon, which had been inviolable in Rube’s boyhood but which had been a source of metals, now, for thirty years. Young men had gone mad there.
It was the harsh bleakness, for which in the primitive emotions of mankind, conditioned through all the ages of their history to gentler circumstances, there often seemed no adjustment, no common ground. It was a little like trying to live in a sealed shell, sunk miles in the ocean—with plenty of food and air, but solitude and darkness.
Joan and Rube watched the wake of a spaceship, outward bound for the airdomes. A blue-white streak—atomic. Its temperature surpassed a million degrees. Most of its radiation must thus be invisible X-ray.
Rube felt the rhythm of the years, the incredible becoming the commonplace step by step, human emotions trying to keep pace.
Joan said quietly at his side, “Venus will set soon. And there, to the south, is Mars.”
He knew that her thoughts paralleled his own, groping at their futures. Rube took no stock in premonitions. It was just that people had that nervous habit of worrying that the worst would happen.
Both Mars and Venus had been visited all of twenty years ago. Venus, to sunward, had exaggerated seasons and vast smothering winds. Life had not gone far there.
Mars was farther away—at its nearest a hundred and fifty times as distant as the moon. It was chilly, arid and senile, smaller than Earth but still vast. In its early youth an Earthman might perhaps have breathed and lived in its even-then rarefied atmosphere.
Once it had supported intelligent beings though they were not—and could not have been—human. Remaining was certain hardy plant life that changed the tints of the planet with its shifting seasons. A few adventurers had gone there, young, vigorous, foolhardy. Some had disappeared though there was a station, where men lived an artificial existence for the sake of science.
The average youth, though he might be intrigued, cared far less to go to Mars than similar boys might once have cared to visit the South Pole. Mars was far too distant to make the ordinary metals it could supply worth the transport.
Rube had seen some museum specimens from out there—a mass of black glass, which might have been part of a wall, fused down by some atomic weapon, ages ago—and some rusted scraps of machinery. Such things helped him little to make Mars seem less shadowy.
His mind seemed to stumble over the puzzling thought of how a man could cross inconceivable distance to mingle his physical self with the tiny blob of a dust storm as seen through a telescope, or with the little white button of a Martian polar cap that in reality was fifteen hundred miles across. His intellect accepted such ideas. But some primal logic in his guts denied their possibility. So he felt lost.
At last with an effort he shrugged off such ruminations, which probably did not concern him anyway. His thinking leaped back to a central fact which was hard to grasp too.
“The important thing, Joanie,” he said aloud, “is that, barring accident, folks can go on living indefinitely.” In that moment, it struck through his sluggish blood like a vast thrill.
CHAPTER II Take-Off
The next morning their visitor came. That it was a girl detracted nothing from the effect for she was of a type. It was not hard to find in her all the multiple and contrasting marks of the period. She was slender and Nordic and she wore her trim uniform with a certain arrogance. Not altogether was she likable.
But she was benign, like the prevailing philosophy, which still had to make its compromises with reality, administering a great benefit to win the best good for the most people, with the least harm to the fewest. The pistol at her belt was clearly not just for melodramatic show, as evinced by the thin scar, not yet entirely faded out in her small chin, after plastic surgery had been applied.
It was not hard to imagine some hysterical individual, disturbed by a dictate regarding the next century of his future, or of that of a loved one, attacking her senselessly with a knife—for the power her kind represented. Though she only carried out orders—she did not make them.
At the door she said: “Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Jackson? Vita registration numbers UF nineteen thousand two hundred and seventy-five and -six?”
She spoke softly an
d with a good-humored smile but it was not hard to sense how her voice would show a steel edge through the velvet scabbard at the first sign of anger or confusion on the part of anyone with whom it was her job to deal.
Rube’s throat felt stiff. “Yes,” he said. “Good morning. Come in.” He thought of the fateful registration card in his pocket.
The girl rechecked data obtained months ago, at the time of the compulsory listing for vita, of everyone over a hundred. Rube had been born in 1922 and was now 123 years old. Joan was two years younger. Rube looked at his big, gnarled hands, amused that, to the government, he still had a profession, “Metal worker and machinist.”
The girl flashed him a bright smile. “Splendid!” she said. Then her fleshy eyelids lowered slightly and she launched into her explanatory talk, which sounded memorized.
“. . . the property of those who consent to the vita processes, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, goes to the heirs they designate, subject to inheritance tax. Those who decline retain their holdings until death and of course are not required to settle in frontier areas. Owing to the very large numbers of people now over a hundred refusal is final.
“Your cases are, however, somewhat unusual up to now—so you have a full week to decide. Registrant couples and single persons of the UF series, have been chosen by lottery for a radically new settling area, which may be considered objectionable. I refer to another planet— And to Dr. Carl Roland’s plan.”
The girl smiled again as if to lighten a blow. “Oh, it is not as bad as you think,” she went on. “Dr. Roland’s psychological tests prove that the old are emotionally more suited to such a venture than the young. They’ve had much more time to be experienced in hardship and change. They’re more seasoned and calmer. Report your decision as soon as possible to the local office.”
Rube glanced at Joan. It was almost coincidence that they had fallen into the small group chosen for Roland’s experimental venture. But now Rube suspected that it was not so small as he had supposed.
Joan’s faded eyes were calm. And Rube felt calmer than he had ever expected to be. Maybe his hunch had forewarned and braced him. Now too there was the relief from uncertainty.
After the girl had left they talked it over. “Nothing but vita can patch us up for much longer anyway, Rube,” Joan said, smiling. “Our bodies are too old. Shall we, Rube?”
For a moment against that other awesome future he felt the call of an ancient kind of peace—of green grass in a neglected cemetery.
He laughed indulgently. “No, Joanie. When you have a chance for life you hang onto it.”
It was their children and other descendants who were furious about their being included in the Roland scheme. Jim, their youngest son, raved and ranted.
“It’s insane!” he yelled over the phone when Rube told him. “Roland is just a bookish, impractical theorist!” Jim sounded haggard. “Besides,” he went on, “it’ll be twenty-five years before the earth will be acutely overcrowded. And to another planet! They didn’t even tell you which planet! How can they expect people who have been retired for years, who are used to sitting in rocking chairs on porches, to adjust to that?”
A lump formed in Rube’s throat as he felt the desperation behind Jim’s words. He was a type of son that was common today—worried about his parents tangling with the unknown. And now it was much worse. The distance was so great and the destination so strange, that good-by would be like the good-by of death. With a thought like that affecting his own, a peaceable man could go for his gun. Rube became concerned for his boy.
Nonetheless he was feeling pretty good himself just then. A perhaps naive sort of confidence had come over him, an airiness—and it was mixed with a spark of humor. He wouldn’t be occupying some young person’s place in the world for much longer. His conscience was clear.
“Shut up, Jim.” He chuckled with a faint edge of command in his tone. “I’d hate to see the pile of starving people, getting into each other’s hair if no really good ideas for drawing off the surplus were put into effect for twenty-five years more.
“Legal appeals have been made, I understand, for change of resettlement area. But there’d be a stigma now. Your mother and I don’t want to be called yellow. We’ve made up our minds and will take our chances. Maybe it’ll be fun. And time is longer now. Some time we’ll see you. Okay?”
It was a tough week for Joan and Rube to get through—especially for Joan. Their descendants came to the house, paid their respects and passed in review. They ranged down to tots—husky lads, and little girls looking very dainty, in their bright colored dresses.
“And now I’m glad that that’s over, darlin’. Whew!” Joan said on the second to the last day. She wiped away a womanly tear and grinned. “Now we can get ready.”
Walking in the street alone that evening, Rube saw a young man of about twenty whose face was somehow familiar. “Hi, Jackson!” he said. “Remember me? I’m back from Greenland—special leave. Getting vitaed yourself soon?”
Greenland! Envy hit Rube. And the bitterness of chance. This was no boy. This was an old schoolmate—an enemy then. Now, when they said good by, and passed out of each other’s lives for good, Rube found that he did not even remember the man’s name.
On the last day, Rube and Joan put their house in perfect order. Rube called a taxi at 10:30 p.m. To avoid possible outbursts of hysteria and violence, no relatives or friends were allowed to come to the station, where the train, which had already journeyed far and was almost loaded, brooded under the arches.
Guards, not too obviously armed with ionic pistols and tear-gas projectors, smiled at Rube and his wife and helped them board with the single small suitcases that each person was permitted to carry. At midnight the train began to move and then to tear. There were no more stops until, in the gray dawn, it glided into a siding within the barbed wire enclosure of a vita camp whose name Rube did not even know.
What followed was, in a way, familiar again from his remote past. There were curt orders, sharp and sometimes sarcastic evasion of questions, hours of waiting—not in line but in comfortable chairs—but the effect, against the mystery, was almost the same. There was no intentional unkindness.
“It has to be like this, Joanie,” Rube said. “When you have to handle a lot of ornery people in a hurry. And there is hurry. Plenty of these old timers couldn’t last more than a few months, without vita.”
Everything worked in an assembly-line manner: Physical checkups—psyching—some few who were considered emotionally unfit would be eliminated, to be routed to terrestrial resettlement areas.
Of grumbling, there was plenty. Strangers were thrown together in a strange situation. Some sought the reassurance of new friendships, and gabbled and questioned constantly. Some were painfully reserved. Stripped of their possessions, except for the skills in their heads and in their hands, all, however, seemed to have become more alike. Professional men and laborers, housewives, and women who had once served the machine age—they were all just scared human beings.
A little wizened man with a game leg kept up a flow of conversation. “Hi, everybody,” he would say. “My name’s Orville Hardy. Used to be an acrobat. Then a traveling salesman . . . On every train or plane I ever rode on I used to make friends. Folks gotta find friends on trips. Especially this one. Oh—snooty, huh? See if I care! See you where we’re goin’!”
Rube and Joan sort of took to Orville Hardy. And to a burly physician named Warren, whose first words to them were, “Here we go down the old roller-coaster, eh?” And there were others.
There was a day of sketchy briefing. They were shown a lightweight vacuum armor, with an oxygen helmet. They were shown how it was put on, how its controls worked. They were shown models of buildings whose interiors could be sealed and pressurized. Some were dwellings, some were glass-roofed hydroponic gardens, some were shops. And there were models of machines.
Once Carl Roland spoke to them—not in person but through a loudspeaker—and just a few words. Hi
s tones were clipped and confident—even cocky. “We’re going to begin rebuilding a world,” he said. “We’re going to prove against doubts that a person can live a second useful and happy life on another planet.”
He sounded a bit pompous. And the pronoun “we” represented him as one of his audience. But from reports Rube knew him to be only about seventy. Rube shrugged.
A practice sometimes followed by those in charge of a dangerous project is not to tell subordinates exactly what is in store for them or when. It does have several real advantages, one of which is that it prevents useless worry.
Thus, Rube and the others were taken wholly unawares on the morning of the third day. The men were ordered to file from the dormitories through the showers, to assemble in the great white-tiled room beyond. As they stood there, dripping and nude, enameled steel plates slid down in the doorframes, sealing the exits. Before real panic could start there was a hiss from vents low down in the walls. A sweetish, dizzying smell stole through the room.
Rube felt no fear or anger at all—only something like regret. He’d been tricked. This must be it. And he hadn’t even had a chance for a last word with Joan. Somewhere, in a similar place for women, she’d be undergoing this same thing.
He did not see the dark liquid that now welled through the wall-vents. It gurgled and swirled and rose higher, covering prone bodies and then filling the room to the ceiling. From suspended grids, energy flowed through it.
One thing that happened was that the excess accumulation of mineral, characteristic of aged tissues, was dissolved and carried away. But much more than that happened. The vita process was a sort of half-breed descendant of the first atomic bomb.
Certain other operations followed. The end product was a long line of capsule-shaped silvery objects, slightly flattened and a little more than two yards long. They moved on a conveyor belt, which loaded them in freight cars. A train carried them to a place in the desert two thousand miles away, where a spaceship waited.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 26