All the time she talked about the first option and how it applied to her right away but not to him until later, he felt sick at heart. He pictured her saying that she would take the first option. That meant he would be all alone. True, she had been alone for more than two years, but now that he had enjoyed her companionship and benefited from her bit of extra knowledge and kissed her and hugged her and made love to her and fallen in love with her, the thought of her going away saddened him terribly.
The sadness came like arrows thrown from different directions. One arrow hurt because her going away would mean that he did not mean very much to her, certainly not nearly as much as she meant to him. Another arrow hurt because her going away would mean that he had only imagined that her feeling for him was as strong as his feeling for her. A third arrow hurt because he knew that, even if he returned to Earth in two years or thereabouts and sought her out, he might find that she had moved on with her life and developed other attachments and regarded him as nothing more than a temporary fling born out of the loneliness and sense of desperation that being in odd and dangerous circumstances invariably creates.”
One arrow of pain and sadness after another hit him and hurt badly. The hurt was cumulative. He wanted the pain to go away. He wanted her to stay with him. He needed her. He loved her.
He took his hands away from hers, placed them on the armrest of his chair, and began doing some imaginary doodling with the forefinger of his left hand. He was trying to act calm. He was trying to conceal his true feelings because he did not want to put her into too difficult a position when it came to her making up her mind.
He did say this, speaking low and as much to himself as to her, “I’ll really miss you. I enjoyed so much being with you. It was so nice to have somebody to talk to and to count on seeing whenever I wished. I liked sitting down to soup with you in the evening. I liked hearing you recite a poem while the soup bowls sat steaming in front of us. I liked hugging and kissing you. I liked seeing your sleepy face every morning. I liked holding your hand. I liked everything about you.”
“Me too,” she said, “I liked being with you. My life on Earth was not so hot. I seemed always to be very lonely. I didn’t quite seem to fit in wherever I was. That was part of the reason I volunteered to be an astronaut. I suppose a lot of us were misfits in one way or another, misfits not in the sense of being defective but misfits in the sense of just not being quite like most other people. They’d just not see me as anything more than someone to put in time with when working. No one ever went beyond that to invite me to their home or to a party—at least not in a genuine way that did not involve ulterior motives that I did not like.
“With you, it’s different. We just seemed to have, from the very first, fallen into the kind of relationship I always dreamed of having but never before succeeded in having. Here I am so far away from Earth, in circumstances that would seem to be most bleak, and then you show up and become a true friend and lover of mine. How can I walk away from something as wonderful as that? No, I’ve decided, I won’t leave you. I’m staying here.
“True, I have other reasons for staying, reasons that don’t involve you necessarily but that become more palatable when I know that I would be with you. Other reasons are the other options they are giving us, which I will share with you shortly. I also want to learn their language a little better and learn more about their customs and history. I want to learn to read the symbols so that I can translate for the people back on Earth (assuming I ever go there) the meanings of the symbols that they might not, despite all their expertise, be able ever to solve.”
She leaned forward in her chair and grabbed his hands again and said, “I’ve decided. I’m staying here a while longer at least. I want to stay with you. I don’t want to live without you. The thought of going back to Earth right now and being wined and dined and being treated like a celebrity just doesn’t appeal to me unless you were there being wined and dined and treated like a celebrity. I’m staying. My mind is made up.”
While she talked, he felt his heart soar. All that he had feared vanished in mid-air. All the arrows vanished. She liked him and probably, by most definitions, loved him. She was willing to, indeed determined to, give up returning to Earth right away mostly in order to stay with him.
He felt so happy he wanted to smile and laugh and jump for joy. He kissed her on the cheek. He said, “I can’t tell you how happy what you just said makes me feel. It would be horrible to be left alone here. It would make me sick to see you go. Thank you for staying. I can look forward to our days and nights. That is a lot to look forward to. Thank you.” He kissed her again and then put his hands on his chest as if to keep his heart from beating so fast as to leap out of his chest. “I am so happy.” He said aloud in a very soft voice, speaking as much to himself as to her.
After a little while passed during which he tried to absorb the new and happy vistas that her words revealed to him, he said, “I too want to learn the language. I too want to learn how to read the inscriptions. I too want to learn something about these creatures’ history, knowledge, and customs. Nevertheless, as appealing to me as all of that is, I am not too sure I would be able to sustain my interest in those things or in anything if you left. It would be horrible being left all alone. I’d miss you so much.”
He wouldn’t have to be alone. He could look forward to the days of learning beside her and to the nights of clinging to her soft naked body. What would have been utter misery, the sacrifice of his pleasure for his sense of duty and feeling of curiosity, became instead a chance at living a more fulfilling and satisfying life than any life possible for him back on Earth or anywhere else for that matter if she were not part of it. Now, he knew, he would not have to be without her.
“What is the second choice?” he asked her.
She said, “The second choice I could take today too though now you know I won’t, at least not until a few months down the road when you too will be allowed to avail yourself of it. The second choice is to tell them we want to enter that door.” She pointed to the door next to which they were sitting.
She explained to him that the door she pointed to also opened into an elevator car and that, if they chose to enter it, the car would take them up to a part of the asteroid’s surface opposite the part where the structure and the space ships were. In that place, there is no structure on the surface. There is nothing that would attract the attention of the kinds of sensors that the space ships carried. Instead, the surface going down several feet would look perfectly normal to any space ship that flew above it and would probably not even be detected by the probes the ship carried. This is intentional, she explained, for that part of the surface was carefully designed to look stark and unvisited while, a few feet below the surface, she had been told that there is a space ship and a portal that, though a part of the surface, is carefully camouflaged.
She explained, “The elevator would bring us to a space ship docked below the asteroid’s surface and separated from the surface by a portal that is covered with the same soil and rocks as those that cover most of the rest of the asteroid’s surface.
“The portal is camouflaged so that space ships and their instruments could not detect it. If we chose that option, we would simply wait beside this door until one of the creatures with knowledge of the meanings of the buttons inside of the panel pressed the right buttons in the right way so that the door opened for us. We would then go inside the car and just wait until it took us to a huge chamber just beneath the surface where a space ship of the kind the creatures use stood.
“With the help of creatures living up there, we would climb aboard the concealed space ship along with a few of the creatures who had volunteered to take the trip also. All of us would then go to our assigned places and get strapped into our seats. Once that happened, the portal would drop a few feet and then slide out of the way of the space ship. The space ship would shortly thereafter embark on its long journey to these creatures’ home planet. We would be
….”
He interrupted her. “I thought these creatures originated here. I thought this was their home.” “No,” she said. “The creatures we’ve seen are colonists. They feel as much of a connection to their home planet as we feel towards Earth even though most of them have never been there and will never return, at least not in this life.
“While I don’t know the location of their home planet (they seem to want to keep the exact location a secret), I have been shown pictures of it. It is a second Earth. There are rivers and oceans and continents (shaped very differently than ours) and jungles and deserts and ice caps and clouds and a blue haze softening the harsh outlines of the surface.
“I have been told that the atmosphere of their planet would support human life and that, if we went there, the creatures that rode with us would make sure that everyone understood that we had come in peace and should be treated kindly.”
“How far away from here is this place?” he asked her. “They tried explaining that to me but the explanation was so involved and included so many words and technical formulas and points of orientation in both space and time that I simply did not understand what they were saying. I had to give up on the idea of understanding where exactly they came from. One thing I did understand is that their planet is very far away from here, which I take to mean that, by our standards, the planet would be many light years away from here.”
While she talked, he began imagining what it would be like for the two of them to choose that option and go to that place. He imagined them as a new Adam and new Eve that, though inhabited by large intelligent creatures shaped like ticks or beetles, would seem to them uninhabited and pristine because the creatures found the desert and rocky parts of their planet more appealing than forested and mountainous and watery parts that the two of them would find most appealing. He imagined them going off on their own after getting vague directions of where to go and eventually stumbling across a garden spot—a second Eden—and choosing to build a home and plant a garden and raise a family and live and die there.
She saw that he had entered some kind of reverie and, not wanting to destroy it, put her hands on his shoulders and said very gently, “Are you listening to me? You seem to be very far away.”
“I was,” he said. “I imagined us living in that planet as a new Adam and Eve already in possession of the knowledge of good and evil and therefore not needing to obey and not subject to punishment. The creatures would stick to one part of the planet (the part they preferred) while we would, after much exploring, find a beautiful lush forested area where we could build a cabin from scratch, collect the seeds of edible plants, and plant our own garden. We’d have a few children. We’d be the founders of a new human civilization.”
After a pause, he said, “I suppose you are thinking that I was getting carried away by dreams like those and ignoring all the practical difficulties. But indulge me just as I indulged myself. It was, after all, a daydream. I knew it was but let it play out in my mind because of how beautiful it was. I had to let it play out.”
She said, “I have to admit that I too dreamed dreams like yours. And, in a way, I too thought how nice it might be just to go far away, cutting all ties or even chances at ties to Earth, forgetting all that I owed to those that sent me here and to the civilization that stood behind them, and living a beautiful life. But, after thinking about this option for a while, I began to realize the dangers and recklessness this second option entails.”
He too, even while daydreaming, realized that there were dangers but, rather than anticipating her, he asked her what dangers she foresaw.
“Well,” she said, “for one thing and this should not be overlooked, taking this option means not only breaking all ties with Earth but also forfeiting the chance of even letting the people back on Earth know what happened to us. We would just sneak away from this place. Both of us have a sense of responsibility to the people back on Earth. We both got here because of them. We both made copies of the inscriptions, thinking that people back on Earth would be interested in them and might even be able to crack the code. In light of all that, I can’t help but wonder how happy we would really be if we just took off clandestinely. I feel sure we might eventually regret what we did.
“Assuming we debated the wisdom of taking this option and assuming we would both later regret doing what we did, I suppose that eventually you’d blame me for convincing you to do this. Or I’d blame you for convincing me. Mutual recriminations might be so powerful as to amount to a wedge being driven between us. Even if we found our paradise, we might end up, because we chose to go there and regretted the choice, feel so uncomfortable in each other’s presence that we would end up drawing a boundary line in this paradise with me staying on one side of it and you staying on the other side.”
“What an awful thought!” he thought while, at the same time, realizing that what she said had a lot of truth in it. He added, “I suppose though that it could play out. Even people deeply in love can be pulled apart by regrets and recriminations. I’ve seen it happen. Nothing is guaranteed, neither on Earth nor, I suppose, on any other world, at least not insofar as human beings are involved.” he said.
He reached for her hand in order to reassure himself and her that such a thing had not happened and was not likely to happen even though there was a chance it could. For now, he preferred to think that such a thing would not and could not actually happen.
“There are other problems with that choice,” she said, glancing nervously through the opening in the alcove because the noise coming from the big room was mounting. The creatures seemed to be talking in unison. Maybe they were chanting. “Oh, well,” she said. “The festivities are beginning. It would have been nice to witness the pageantry. But we’ll still have time to do that. It goes on for a long time. At least, that is what I was told.”
“What other problems with the second choice occurred to you? I think I can imagine some of them now that I am no longer daydreaming; but I want first to hear what you have to say,” he said.
“There are a lot of problems. There’s the problem of the induced comas. Who knows how safe that is? These creatures know their own kind, but do they understand human beings well enough to induce and successfully accomplish as prolonged a coma as that which would be required for us to make that trip?
“We might wind up being vegetables. We might lose one or another of our mental capacities. For instance, we might lose our ability to remember in which case I would wake up wondering who you are. You might not remember me. We might wake up paralyzed or with personalities very different from the personalities we have now. We might not wake up at all but instead die somewhere along the way.”
“Yes, that is true. It’s something to think about and take seriously. What other problems do you think exist?”
“There is the problem of the space ship itself. Will it really work so flawlessly as to really bring us to that planet of theirs or might it instead break down or be somehow diverted in its course so that, when and if we wake up, we’d find ourselves in empty space or landing on an uninhabitable planet. Something might attack the space ship. Some piece of space debris might crash into it, destroying or disabling it. All of these are real possibilities.”
“True,” he said, “very true. In a way, the same problems exist if we return to Earth. Our space ships might never actually reach it because of unforeseen problems like those you have mentioned. I have to admit though that the danger would be much less because the trip would be shorter, we would not have to be put in a coma, and also, because two ships would be leaving at approximately the same time, if a problem arose that did not destroy both simultaneously, one ship could circle around so that the astronaut on board would either help repair the damaged ship or rescue its passenger. So there is a great deal of difference between the two voyages.”
He scratched his head and looked out into the corridor. He saw two creatures’ eyes, one belonging to each of their watchmen, jutting out from the edge o
f their respective walls and snaking around in such a way that the black eyeballs faced them.
He thought, “They probably wonder what is taking so long. They are probably anxious to join in on the festivities. Oh, well, let them practice a little more patience. They can wait a little while longer. They’ll have their fun eventually.” He touched Sylvia’s knee and, when he got her attention, he moved his eyes in such a way as to direct her attention to the two eyeballs. “I think they are tired of guarding us,” he whispered. She whispered back, “Let them be tired. They have a job to do. They just have to do it.”
He nodded in agreement, put his head against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes for a few seconds because he wanted to think about what she had just said. He realized that the more he thought about the choices discussed so far the less he liked the second one. There was just too much danger and uncertainty.
She reinforced his misgivings by what she said next.
“And there is the problem,” she said, “of the status of the creatures’ home planet. So much time has passed since they last saw it or even heard from it. Though I haven’t yet figured out how their way of measuring time differs from ours, it seems to me, from what I’ve heard, that they left their planet as far back as two thousand years ago (as we measure time) and got here about eight hundred years ago give or take one or two hundred years. During the time they traveled and once they arrived here and settled in, they got messages from their home planet about every two hundred years but failed to hear anything when a message was last expected which means that they have not heard from their home planet for about three hundred and fifty years. Why not? Perhaps some freakish storm in space disrupted the signal that was duly sent. Perhaps something more sinister happened.
“All of this makes me question the assumptions they make that their planet is the same as it was when they left it and would be the same another thousand years from now when their ship arrived. Now, it is possible that their assumptions would be true for them but not for us given the fact that their bodies can adapt to a much broader range of environments than the human body can.
A Theory of Gravity Page 25