Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  Carefully, slowly, he pulled himself along the steel until he had a better grip upon the rung, but even with the better grip he had the feeling that some great hand had him in its fist and was swinging him in anger in a hundred-mile-long arc.

  Then the tubes left off their howling and there was a terrible silence and the stars were there, up above him and to either side of him, and they were steely stars with no twinkle in them. Down below, he knew, a lonely Earth was swinging, but he could not see it.

  He pulled himself up against the rung and thrust a leg beneath it and sat up on the hull.

  There were more stars than he’d ever seen before, more than he’d dreamed there could be. They were still and cold, like hard points of light against a velvet curtain; there was no glitter and no twinkle in them and it was as if a million eyes were staring down at him. The Sun was underneath the ship and over to one side; just at the edge of the left-hand curvature was the glare of it against the silent metal, a sliver of reflected light outlining one edge of the ship. The Earth was far astern, a ghostly blue-green ball hanging in the void, ringed by the fleecy halo of its atmosphere.

  It was as if he were detached—a lonely, floating brain that looked out upon a thing it could not understand nor could ever try to understand; as if he might even be afraid of understanding it—a thing of mystery and delight so long as he retained an ignorance of it, but something fearsome and altogether overpowering once the ignorance had gone.

  Richard Daniel sat there, flat upon his bottom, on the metal hull of the speeding ship and he felt the mystery and delight and the loneliness and the cold and the great uncaring and his mind retreated into a small and huddled, compact defensive ball.

  He looked. That was all there was to do. It was all right now, he thought. But how long would he have to look at it? How long would he have to camp out here in the open—the most deadly kind of open?

  He realized for the first time that he had no idea where the ship was going or how long it might take to get there. He knew it was a starship, which meant that it was bound beyond the solar system, and that meant that at some point in its flight it would enter hyperspace. He wondered, at first academically, and then with a twinge of fear, what hyperspace might do to one sitting naked to it. But there was little need, he thought philosophically, to fret about it now, for in due time he’d know, and there was not a thing that he could do about it—not a single thing.

  He took the suction cups off his body and stowed them in his kit and then with one hand he tied the kit to one of the metal rungs and dug around in it until he found a short length of steel cable with a ring on one end and a snap on the other. He passed the ring end underneath a rung and threaded the snap end through it and snapped the snap onto a metal loop underneath his armpit. Now he was secured; he need not fear carelessly letting go and floating off the ship.

  So here he was, he thought, neat as anything, going places fast, even if he had no idea where he might be headed, and now the only thing he needed was patience. He thought back, without much point, to what the religico had said in the study back on Earth. Patience and humility and prayer, he’d said, apparently not realizing at the moment that a robot has a world of patience.

  It would take a lot of time, Richard Daniel knew, to get where he was going. But he had a lot of time, a lot more than any human, and he could afford to waste it. There were no urgencies, he thought—no need of food or air or water, no need of sleep or rest. There was nothing that could touch him.

  Although, come to think of it, there might be.

  There was the cold, for one. The space-hull was still fairly warm, with one side of it picking up the heat of the Sun and radiating it around the metal skin, where it was lost on the other side, but there would be a time when the Sun would dwindle until it had no heat and then he’d be subjected to the utter cold of space.

  And what would the cold do to him. Might it make his body brittle? Might it interfere with the functioning of his brain? Might it do other things he could not even guess?

  He felt the fears creep in again and tried to shrug them off and they drew off, but they still were there, lurking at the fringes of his mind.

  The cold, and the loneliness, he thought—but he was one who could cope with loneliness. And if he couldn’t, if he got too lonely, if he could no longer stand it, he could always beat a devil’s tattoo on the hull and after a time of that someone would come out to investigate and they would haul him in.

  But that was the last move of desperation, he told himself. For if they came out and found him, then he would be caught. Should he be forced to that extremity, he’d have lost everything—there would then have been no point in leaving Earth at all.

  So he settled down, living out his time, keeping the creeping fears at bay just beyond the outposts of his mind, and looking at the universe all spread out before him.

  The motors started up again with a pale blue flickering in the rockets at the stern and although there was no sense of acceleration he knew that the ship, now well off the Earth, had settled down to the long, hard drive to reach the speed of light.

  Once they reached that speed they would enter hyper-space. He tried not to think of it, tried to tell himself there was not a thing to fear—but it hung there just ahead of him, the great unknowable.

  The Sun shrank until it was only one of many stars and there came a time when he could no longer pick it out. And the cold clamped down but it didn’t seem to bother him, although he could sense the coldness.

  Maybe, he said in answer to his fear, that would be the way it would be with hyperspace as well. But he said it unconvincingly. The ship drove on and on with the weird blueness in the tubes.

  Then there was the instant when his mind went splattering across the universe.

  He was aware of the ship, but only aware of it in relation to an awareness of much else, and it was no anchor point, no rallying position. He was spread and scattered; he was opened out and rolled out until he was very thin. He was a dozen places, perhaps a hundred places, all at once, and it was confusing, and his immediate reaction was to fight back somehow against whatever might have happened to him—to fight back and pull himself together. The fighting did no good at all, but made it even worse, for in certain instances it seemed to drive parts of him farther from other parts of him and the confusion was made greater.

  So he quit his fighting and his struggling and just lay there, scattered, and let the panic ebb away and told himself he didn’t care, and wondered if he did.

  Slow reason returned a dribble at a time and he could think again and he wondered rather bleakly if this could be hyperspace and was pretty sure it was. And if it were, he knew, he’d have a long time to live like this, a long time in which to become accustomed to it and to orient himself, a long time to find himself and pull himself together, a long time to understand this situation if it were, in fact, understandable.

  So he lay, not caring greatly, with no fear or wonder, just resting and letting a fact seep into him here and there from many different points.

  He knew that, somehow, his body—that part of him which housed the rest of him—was still chained securely to the ship, and that knowledge, in itself, he knew, was the first small step towards reorienting himself. He had to reorient, he knew. He had to come to some sort of terms, if not to understanding, with this situation.

  He had opened up and he had scattered out—that essential part of him, the feeling and the knowing and the thinking part of him, and he lay thin across a universe that loomed immense in unreality.

  Was this, he wondered, the way the universe should be, or was it the unchained universe, the wild universe beyond the limiting disciplines of measured space and time.

  He started slowly reaching out, cautious as he had been in his crawling on the surface of the ship, reaching out toward the distant parts of him, a little at a time. He did not know how he did it, he was conscious of no particular technique, but whatever he was doing, it seemed to work, for h
e pulled himself together, bit by knowing bit, until he had gathered up all the scattered fragments of him into several different piles.

  Then he quit and lay there, wherever there might be, and tried to sneak up on those piles of understanding that he took to be himself.

  It took a while to get the hang of it, but once he did, some of the incomprehensibility went away, although the strangeness stayed. He tried to put it into thought and it was hard to do. The closest he could come was that he had been unchained as well as the universe—that whatever bondage had been imposed upon him by that chained and normal world had now become dissolved and he no longer was fenced in by either time or space.

  He could see—and know and sense—across vast distances, if distance were the proper term, and he could understand certain facts that he had not even thought about before, could understand instinctively, but without the language or the skill to coalesce the facts into independent data.

  Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he’d gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.

  He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.

  He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the flat galactic plane.

  Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him—he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.

  There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder—and no actual knowledge, either.

  Then time came once again and suddenly his mind was stuffed back into its cage within his metal skull and he was again one with his body, trapped and chained and small and cold and naked.

  He saw that the stars were different and that he was far from home and just a little way ahead was a star that blazed like a molten furnace hanging in the black.

  He sat bereft, a small thing once again, and the universe reduced to package size.

  Practically, he checked the cable that held him to the ship and it was intact. His attachments kit was still tied to its rung. Everything was exactly as it had been before.

  He tried to recall the glories he had seen, tried to grasp again the fringe of knowledge which he had been so close to, but both the glory and the knowledge, if there had ever been a knowledge, had faded into nothingness.

  He felt like weeping, but he could not weep, and he was too old to lie down upon the ship and kick his heels in tantrum.

  So he sat there, looking at the sun that they were approaching and finally there was a planet that he knew must be their destination, and he found room to wonder what planet it might be and how far from Earth it was.

  He heated up a little as the ship skipped through atmosphere as an aid to braking speed and he had some rather awful moments as it spiraled into thick and soupy gases that certainly were a far cry from the atmosphere of Earth. He hung most desperately to the rungs as the craft came mushing down onto a landing field, with the hot gases of the rockets curling up about him. But he made it safely and swiftly clambered down and darted off into the smog-like atmosphere before anyone could see him.

  Safely off, he turned and looked back at the ship and despite its outlines being hidden by the drifting clouds of swirling gases, he could see it clearly, not as an actual structure, but as a diagram. He looked at it wonderingly and there was something wrong with the diagram, something vaguely wrong, some part of it that was out of whack and not the way it should be.

  He heard the clanking of cargo haulers coming out upon the field and he wasted no more time, diagram or not.

  He drifted back, deeper in the mists, and began to circle, keeping a good distance from the ship. Finally he came to the spaceport’s edge and the beginning of the town.

  He found a street and walked down it leisurely and there was a wrongness in the town.

  He met a few hurrying robots who were in too much of a rush to pass the time of day. But he met no humans.

  And that, he knew quite suddenly, was the wrongness of the place. It was not a human town.

  There were no distinctly human buildings—no stores or residences, no churches and no restaurants. There were gaunt shelter barracks and sheds for the storing of equipment and machines, great sprawling warehouses and vast industrial plants. But that was all there was. It was a bare and dismal place compared to the streets that he had known on Earth.

  It was a robot town, he knew. And a robot planet. A world that was barred to humans, a place where humans could not live, but so rich in some natural resource that it cried for exploitation. And the answer to that exploitation was to let the robots do it.

  Luck, he told himself. His good luck still was holding. He had literally been dumped into a place where he could live without human interference. Here, on this planet, he would be with his own.

  If that was what he wanted. And he wondered if it was. He wondered just exactly what it was he wanted, for he’d had no time to think of what he wanted. He had been too intent on fleeing Earth to think too much about it. He had known all along what he was running from, but had not considered what he might be running to.

  He walked a little further and the town came to an end. The street became a path and went wandering on into the wind-blown fogginess. So he turned around and went back up the street. There had been one barracks, he remembered, that had a transients sign hung out, and he made his way to it.

  Inside, an ancient robot sat behind the desk. His body was old-fashioned and somehow familiar. And it was familiar, Richard Daniel knew, because it was as old and battered and as out-of-date as his.

  He looked at the body, just a bit aghast, and saw that while it resembled his, there were little differences. The same ancient model, certainly, but a different series. Possibly a little newer, by twenty years or so, than his.

  “Good evening, stranger,” said the ancient robot. “You came in on the ship?”

  Richard Daniel nodded.

  “You’ll be staying till the next one?”

  “I may be settling down,” said Richard Daniel. “I may want to stay here.”

  The ancient robot took a key from off a hook and laid it on the desk.

  “You representing someone?”

  “No,” said Richard Daniel.

  “I thought maybe that you were. We get a lot of representatives. Humans can’t come here, or don’t want to come, so they send robots out here to represent them.”

  “You have a lot of visitors?”

  “Some. Mostly the representatives I was telling you about. But there are some that are on the lam. I’d take it, mister, you are on the lam.”

  Richard Daniel didn’t answer.

  “It’s all right,” the ancient one assured him. “We don’t mind at all, just so you behave yourself. Some of our most prominent citizens, they came here on the lam.”

  “That is fine,” said Richard Daniel. “And how about yourself? You must be on the lam as well.”

  “You mean this body. Well, that’s a little different. This here is punishment.”

  “Punishment?”

  “Well, you see, I was the foreman of the cargo warehouse and I got to goofing off. So they hauled me up and had a trial and they found me guilty. Then they stuck me into this old body and I have to stay in it, at this lousy job, until they get an
other criminal that needs punishment. They can’t punish no more than one criminal at a time because this is the only old body that they have. Funny thing about this body. One of the boys went back to Earth on a business trip and found this old heap of metal in a junkyard and brought it home with him—for a joke, I guess. Like a human might buy a skeleton for a joke, you know.”

  He took a long, sly look at Richard Daniel. “It looks to me, stranger, as if your body . . .”

  But Richard Daniel didn’t let him finish.

  “I take it,” Richard Daniel said, “you haven’t many criminals.”

  “No,” said the ancient robot sadly, “we’re generally a pretty solid lot.”

  Richard Daniel reached out to pick up the key, but the ancient robot put out his hand and covered it.

  “Since you are on the lam,” he said, “it’ll be payment in advance.”

  “I’ll pay you for a week,” said Richard Daniel, handing him some money.

  The robot gave him back his change.

  “One thing I forgot to tell you. You’ll have to get plasticated.”

  “Plasticated?”

  “That’s right. Get plastic squirted over you. To protect you from the atmosphere. It plays hell with metal. There’s a place next door will do it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get it done immediately.”

  “It wears off,” warned the ancient one. “You have to get a new job every week or so.”

  Richard Daniel took the key and went down the corridor until he found his numbered cubicle. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was small, but clean. It had a desk and chair and that was all it had.

  He stowed his attachments bag in one corner and sat down in the chair and tried to feel at home. But he couldn’t feel at home, and that was a funny thing—he’d just rented himself a home.

  He sat there, thinking back, and tried to whip up some sense of triumph at having done so well in covering his tracks. He couldn’t.

  Maybe this wasn’t the place for him, he thought. Maybe he’d be happier on some other planet. Perhaps he should go back to the ship and get on it once again and have a look at the next planet coming up.