by Hank Davis
When they reached Arcadia, he waited until the thunder died and the ship was still. Then he shoved the lever that opened up the port and slid out the ramp.
The port came open ponderously and he saw blue skies and the green of trees and the far-off swirl of chimney smoke mounting in the sky.
He walked slowly forward until he stood upon the ramp and there lay Sleepy Hollow, a tiny, huddled village planted at the river’s edge, with the forest as a background. The forest ran on every side to a horizon of climbing folded hills. Fields lay near the village, yellow with maturing crops, and he could see a dog sleeping in the sun outside a cabin door.
A man was climbing up the ramp toward him and there were others running from the village.
“You have cargo for us?” asked the man.
“A small consignment,” Richard Daniel told him. “You have something to put on?”
The man had a weather-beaten look and he’d missed several haircuts and he had not shaved for days. His clothes were rough and sweat-stained and his hands were strong and awkward with hard work.
“A small shipment,” said the man. “You’ll have to wait until we bring it up. We had no warning you were coming. Our radio is broken.”
“You go and get it,” said Richard Daniel. “I’ll start unloading.”
He had the cargo half-unloaded when the captain came storming down into the hold. What was going on, he yelled. How long would they have to wait? “God knows we’re losing money as it is even stopping at this place.”
“That may be true,” Richard Daniel agreed, “but you knew that when you took the cargo on. There’ll be other cargoes and goodwill is something—”
“Goodwill be damned!” the captain roared. “How do I know I’ll ever see this place again?”
Richard Daniel continued unloading cargo.
“You,” the captain shouted, “go down to that village and tell them I’ll wait no longer than an hour . . .”
“But this cargo, sir?”
“I’ll get the crew at it. Now, jump!”
So Richard Daniel left the cargo and went down into the village.
He went across the meadow that lay between the spaceport and the village, following the rutted wagon tracks, and it was a pleasant walk. He realized with surprise that this was the first time he’d been on solid ground since he’d left the robot planet. He wondered briefly what the name of that planet might have been, for he had never known. Nor what its importance was, why the robots might be there or what they might be doing. And he wondered, too, with a twinge of guilt, if they’d found Hubert yet.
And where might Earth be now? he asked himself. In what direction did it lie and how far away? Although it didn’t really matter, for he was done with Earth.
He had fled from Earth and gained something in his fleeing. He had escaped all the traps of Earth and all the snares of Man. What he held was his, to do with as he pleased, for he was no man’s robot, despite what the captain thought.
He walked across the meadow and saw that this planet was very much like Earth. It had the same soft feel about it, the same simplicity. It had far distances and there was a sense of freedom.
He came into the village and heard the muted gurgle of the river running and the distant shouts of children at their play and in one of the cabins a sick child was crying with lost helplessness.
He passed the cabin where the dog was sleeping and it came awake and stalked growling to the gate. When he passed it followed him, still growling, at a distance that was safe and sensible.
An autumnal calm lay upon the village, a sense of gold and lavender, and tranquility hung in the silences between the crying of the baby and the shouting of the children.
There were women at the windows looking out at him and others at the doors and the dog still followed, but his growls had stilled and now he trotted with prick-eared curiosity.
Richard Daniel stopped in the street and looked around him and the dog sat down and watched him and it was almost as if time itself had stilled and the little village lay divorced from all the universe, an arrested microsecond, an encapsulated acreage that stood sharp in all its truth and purpose.
Standing there, he sensed the village and the people in it, almost as if he had summoned up a diagram of it, although if there were a diagram, he was not aware of it.
It seemed almost as if the village were the Earth, a transplanted Earth with the old primeval problems and hopes of Earth—a family of peoples that faced existence with a readiness and confidence and inner strength.
From down the street he heard the creak of wagons and saw them coming around the bend, three wagons piled high and heading for the ship.
He stood and waited for them and as he waited the dog edged a little closer and sat regarding him with a not-quite-friendliness.
The wagons came up to him and stopped.
“Pharmaceutical materials, mostly,” said the man who sat atop the first load, “It is the only thing we have that is worth the shipping.”
“You seem to have a lot of it,” Richard Daniel told him.
The man shook his head. “It’s not so much. It’s almost three years since a ship’s been here. We’ll have to wait another three, or more perhaps, before we see another.”
He spat down on the ground.
“Sometimes it seems,” he said, “that we’re at the tail-end of nowhere. There are times we wonder if there is a soul that remembers we are here.”
From the direction of the ship, Richard Daniel heard the faint, strained violence of the captain’s roaring.
“You’d better get on up there and unload,” he told the man. “The captain is just sore enough he might not wait for you.”
The man chuckled thinly. “I guess that’s up to him,” he said.
He flapped the reins and clucked good-naturedly at the horses.
“Hop up here with me,” he said to Richard Daniel. “Or would you rather walk?”
“I’m not going with you,” Richard Daniel said. “I am staying here. You can tell the captain.”
For there was a baby sick and crying. There was a radio to fix. There was a culture to be planned and guided. There was a lot of work to do. This place, of all the places he had seen, had actual need of him.
The man chuckled once again. “The captain will not like it.”
“Then tell him,” said Richard Daniel, “to come down and talk to me. I am my own robot. I owe the captain nothing. I have more than paid any debt I owe him.”
The wagon wheels began to turn and the man flapped the reins again.
“Make yourself at home,” he said. “We’re glad to have you stay.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Richard Daniel. “I’m pleased you want me.”
He stood aside and watched the wagons lumber past, their wheels lifting and dropping thin films of powdered earth that floated in the air as an acrid dust.
Make yourself at home, the man had said before he’d driven off. And the words had a full round ring to them and a feel of warmth. It had been a long time, Richard Daniel thought, since he’d had a home.
A chance for resting and for knowing—that was what he needed. And a chance to serve, for now he knew that was the purpose in him. That was, perhaps, the real reason he was staying—because these people needed him . . . and he needed, queer as it might seem, this very need of theirs. Here on this Earth-like planet, through the generations, a new Earth would arise. And perhaps, given only time, he could transfer to the people of the planet all the powers and understanding he would find inside himself.
And stood astounded at the thought, for he’d not believed that he had it in him, this willing, almost eager, sacrifice. No messiah now, no robotic liberator, but a simple teacher of the human race.
Perhaps that had been the reason for it all from the first beginning. Perhaps all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny. If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this instinct of the mind
, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of one of their creations. Perhaps this, after all, unknown to Man himself, had been the prime purpose of the robots.
He turned and walked slowly down the length of village street, his back turned to the ship and the roaring of the captain, walked contentedly into this new world he’d found, into this world that he would make—not for himself, nor for robotic glory, but for a better Mankind and a happier. Less than an hour before he’d congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
But that was wrong, he told himself. The trap had not been on this world at all, nor any other world. It had been inside himself.
He walked serenely down the wagon-rutted track in the soft, golden afternoon of a matchless autumn day, with the dog trotting at his heels.
Somewhere, just down the street, the sick baby lay crying in its crib.
THE CAVE OF NIGHT
by James E. Gunn
As I’ve said in the introduction, this anthology is not intended as a history of space travel, and this story could only have happened in a universe parallel to the one which you, gentle reader, are sitting in. And yet, if Russia hadn’t launched that beeping metal basketball on October 4, 1957 and panicked the US, something like this might have been necessary. Along with three associated stories, “The Cave of Night” was knit together into a paste-up novel, Station in Space (currently not in print, damfino why), and that novel would fit the theme of Space Pioneers to a T (or maybe a P, for “pioneer”) but there wouldn’t have been room for it. So here’s the opening shot, one heard (pardon the cliché) around the world.
The phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:
At eight o’clock, after the Sun has set and
the sky is darkening, look up!
There’s a man up there where no man has ever been.
He is lost in the cave of night . . .
The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck.
If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn’t find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.
What goes up doesn’t always come back down.
That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.
The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine.
That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: “What’s the latest about the cave?” It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.
Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, comparing; and they remembered the little girl—Kathy Fiscus, wasn’t it?—who was trapped in that abandoned California drain pipe; and a number of others.
Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so accidentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their terrors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.
The essential ingredients are these: a person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have duration. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be widespread.
One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never forgive.
Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfort. Every waking moment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev!
We pass on the street, we who would not have nodded, and ask, “Will they get there in time?”
Optimists and pessimists alike, we hope so. We all hope so.
In a sense, this one was different. This was purposeful. Knowing the risk, accepting it because there was no other way to do what had to be done. Rev had gone into the cave of night. The accident was that he could not return.
The news came out of nowhere—literally—to an unsuspecting world. The earliest mention the historians have been able to locate was an item about a ham radio operator in Davenport, Iowa. He picked up a distress signal on a sticky-hot June evening.
The message, he said later, seemed to fade in, reach a peak, and fade out:
“. . . and fuel tanks empty receiver broke . . . transmitting in clear so someone can pick this up, and . . . no way to get back . . . stuck . . .”
A small enough beginning.
The next message was received by a military base radio watch near Fairbanks, Alaska. That was early in the morning. Half an hour later, a night-shift worker in Boston heard something on his short-wave set that sent him rushing to the telephone.
That morning, the whole world learned the story. It broke over them, a wave of excitement and concern. Orbiting 1,075 miles above their heads was a man, an officer of the United States Air Force, in a fuelless spaceship.
All by itself, the spaceship part would have captured the world’s attention. It was achievement as monumental as anything Man has ever done and far more spectacular. It was liberation from the tyranny of Earth, this jealous mother who had bound her children tight with the apron strings of gravity.
Man was free. It was a symbol that nothing is completely and finally impossible if Man wants it hard enough and long enough.
There are regions that humanity finds peculiarly congenial. Like all Earth’s creatures, Man is a product and a victim of environment. His triumph is that the slave became the master. Unlike more specialized animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent to the Arctic icecap.
Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plain dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home.
Man made his own environment.
With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness, aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had conquered everything. He had become independent of the world that bore him.
It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age.
Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake.
But it was more, too. When everything is considered, perhaps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief days, united humanity and made possible what we did.
It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth; he carries with him his environment; he is always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mellowed by a confession of mortality and error.
It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of circumstance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves.
Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph; his peril—more fully and finely—was our peril.
Reverdy L. McMillen, III, first lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as any member of our own family.
The news came as a great personal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college, and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered aeroplanes with Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket programme was that close to space.
Nobody did. It was a better-kept secret that the Manhattan Project.
I remember staring at Rev’s picture in the evening newspaper: the straight
black hair; the thin, rakish moustache; the Clark Gable ears; the reckless, rueful grin and I felt again, like a physical thing, his great joy in living. It expressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well, drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic inventiveness, and talked incessantly.
Now he was alone and soon all that might be extinguished. I told myself that I would help.
That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida, wildly volunteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn’t even a welder or a riveter. At best, I was only a poor word mechanic.
But words, at least, I could contribute.
I made a hasty verbal agreement with a local paper and caught the first plane to Washington, D.C. For a long time, I liked to think that what I wrote during the next few days had something to do with subsequent events, for many of my articles were picked up for reprint by other newspapers.
The Washington fiasco was the responsibility of the Senate Investigating Committee. It subpoenaed everybody in sight—which effectively removed them from the vital work they were doing. But within a day, the Committee realized that it had bitten off a bite it could neither swallow nor spit out.
General Beauregard Finch, head of the research and development programme, was the tough morsel the Committee gagged on. Coldly, accurately, he described the development of the project, the scientific and technical research, the tests, the building of the ship, the training of the prospective crewmen, and the winnowing of the volunteers down to one man.
In words more eloquent because of their clipped precision, he described the take-off of the giant three-stage ship, shoved upward on a lengthening arm of combining hydrazine and nitric acid. Within fifty-six minutes, the remaining third stage had reached its orbital height of 1,075 miles.