In ten more minutes, Arpad was in the same grass that had hidden him two nights before. Above him was the cut bank, the fire circle, the sleepers, the ship, and two drowsy children on guard. The grass surrounding him, shielding him, nodded and lied again, as grass will. Then Arpad slipped up the bank, crouching low, into the circle, and was one more quiet sleeper, quickly, silently, cleanly. No one saw him move at all.
He relaxed, and this time he hoped Churchward would be embarrassed. In any case he felt good. He felt free. He felt equal to anything. He had decided to deal with one set of problems at a time, and this had been the first. Tomorrow would bring others, but he would cope with each in its turn. First things first.
He was tired, and he fell asleep quickly.
5
How Georges Duchamps Discovered a Plot to Take Over the World
GEORGES WAS making love to Marie when he made his discovery. She was, in truth, a most piquant thing with black hair and black eyes and skin of pale ivory. But, it cannot be denied, she had a button in a most unusual place.
“What is this?” Georges said. “A button?”
“But of course,” she said. “Continue to unbutton me.”
“No, no,” he said. “This button.”
He touched it with a finger and she chimed gently.
“You are not human,” he said.
She spread her hands, an enchanting effect. “But I feel human. Most decidedly.”
“Nonetheless, it is apparent that you are not human. This is most strange. Is it, perhaps, a plot to take over the world?”
Marie shook her head. “I am sure I do not know.”
Georges touched the button and she produced another bell-note, quiet, bright, and clear. “Most strange. I wonder whom I should inform? If there is a plot to take over the world someone should know.”
“But how could I be unaware?” Marie asked. “I am warm. I am French. I am loving. I am me.”
“Nonetheless…” Ding-g-g. “It is incontrovertible.”
Marie frowned. “Pardon,” she said. “Turn again.”
“Turn?”
“As you were. Yes.” She stretched an inquiring finger, and touched. There was a deep and mellow sound like a pleasant doorbell.
“And what is this?” she asked.
“Mon Dieu!” he said in surprise. “Is that me?” He got up and went to look in the mirror, twisting somewhat uncomfortably, and sure enough, it was. He rang twice to make sure.
“In that case,” he said, “it no longer seems important.”
He kissed Marie and returned to the point of interruption. Skin of smooth pale beautiful ivory. I understand that if Georges receives the promotion he expects they are thinking of marriage in a year, or perhaps two.
6
One Sunday in Neptune
BEN WISEMAN and I were the first people to land on Neptune, but he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He thinks I betrayed him.
The assignment to Triton Base, an opportunity for me, was for him simply one final deadend. I couldn’t yet see the limits of my life, but he could see the limits of his. His life was thin, and he had a hunger for recognition.
He was a man of sudden enthusiasms, haphazardly produced. He knew next to nothing about biology, but having a great deal of time to stare at the green bulk of Neptune in our sky, he had conceived the idea that there was life on the planet, and he had become convinced that if he proved it, he would have the automatic security of a place in the reference library. His theory was lent a certain force by the fact that we had found life already on our own Moon, on Venus and Mars, on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and even on Ganymede. Not on Mercury—too small, too close, too hot. Not on Pluto—too small, too far, too cold. But the odds seemed good to him, and the list of names he would join short enough to give him the feeling of being distinguished.
“Life is insistent,” Ben said. “Life is persistent.”
He approached me because he had no one else. He was an extremely difficult man. At the age of thirty-five, he still hadn’t discovered the basic principles of social dealing. On first acquaintance he was too close too quickly. Then he took anything less than total reciprocation as betrayal. The more favorable your initial response to him, the greater wound he felt when he was inevitably betrayed. He had no friends, of course.
I betrayed him early in our acquaintance, something I was unaware of until he told me. After that he was always stiff and generally guarded, but since he found me no worse than the general run of humanity, and since the company on Triton numbered only twenty, he used me to talk to. I was willing to talk to him, and in this case I was willing to listen.
Triton, Neptune’s major satellite, is a good substantial base. It comes close to being the largest moon in the Solar System, and it is two fingers larger than Mercury. It’s the last comfortable footing for men in the Solar System, and the obvious site for a major base.
With Operation Springboard complete and our first starship on its way to a new green and pleasant land, major activity had ceased at Triton Base. We twenty were there to maintain and monitor. Some of us, like me, were there because we were bright young men with futures. Some, like Ben Wiseman, were there because no one else would have them.
But in general life was a bore. Maintenance is a bore. Monitoring is a bore. Even the skies are dull. Neptune is there, big and green. Uranus can be found if you look for it. But the Sun is only a distant candleflame flickering palely in the night and the inner planets are impossible to see. You feel very alone out there.
I was interested in Ben’s suggestion. Mike Marshall, our leader, had dropped the morale problem on me in one of his fits of delegation, and since I was bored myself I was in favor of any project that might give us something to do on Sundays.
I said, “This is a good idea, Ben. There’s one problem, though. We don’t have the equipment for an assault like that. You know how tight the budget is, too. I could ask Mike.”
“Don’t ask Mike!”
“Well, I’d have to ask Mike. And he could ask. But I don’t think we’d get what we have to have.”
“But it’s much simpler than that,” Ben said. “The Uranus bathyscaphe is still on Titania. It’s old, of course, but there is no reason it couldn’t be used here. The two planets are practically twins. Opposition is coming up. The bathyscaphe could be brought here for almost nothing. I thought you could requisition it through your department.”
That was Ben for you. A very strange man. I think he supposed that I would very quietly requisition the bathyscaphe that had been used to probe the atmosphere-ocean of Uranus, and just not say anything to Mike. Then he and I would slip quietly over to Neptune on our weekends. If he could have obtained and operated the machine by himself, I’m sure he would have preferred that.
“If the equipment is still on Titania, we may be able to get it,” I said. “I’ll ask Mike when I take up department operations with him tomorrow.”
“Don’t ask Mike.”
“Look, Ben. If you want this at all, it has to go through Mike. There’s no other way. You know that.”
“No,” he said. “Just forget the whole thing. I’m sorry I brought the subject up.”
Ben was jealous of his ideas. If they passed through too many hands, they lost their savor for him. This was a good idea, or so it seemed to me, but he would prefer to let it lapse than to have the rest of our little colony involved.
I talked to Mike the next day. Mike was another odd one. At some previous time he may have had drive, but he no longer cared very deeply. He delegated as much responsibility as he possibly could. He worked erratically. And he greeted my proposal with no great interest.
“Who cares if we find life on Neptune? We already know that ammonia-methane worlds can support life, and none of it has been very interesting after the novelty wears off.”
“That’s true,” I said, “but do you suppose I care one way or the other if we find another strange kind of minnow? The important thing is that it would g
ive as many of us as turned out to be interested something constructive to do. It’s a project I could enjoy.”
“Do you think anybody else would?” Mike asked. “How many first landings have there been? If you count everything, there must have been fifty or sixty. Who remembers them all? Who cares?”
“The point isn’t whether anybody else would be interested,” I said. “This isn’t for outsiders. Mike, this morning I got out of my chair and I found that my rear end had gone to sleep. I want something to do.”
It took argument, but Mike finally agreed to find out if the bathyscaphe was available. It turned out to be, and it arrived at Triton Base aboard ship some seven months later. That wasn’t so very long. We didn’t have anything else to do. We didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Ben, of course, was hopping mad, mostly with me. I’d stolen his idea. I’d ruined his idea. I’d betrayed his trust. I’d spoiled things.
“It’s the last time I ever tell you anything,” he said. As he had said more than once before.
The project turned out to be far more of a success than I had ever anticipated. Our job was to keep contact with the starship, which we did adequately, and to keep a large, empty house in order, which we did inadequately. Not that anybody cared.
After the bathyscaphe arrived, however, schedules started being observed. People cared whether or not they were relieved on time. There was less dust in corners, less dirt on people. Minor illness fell off dramatically. And my rear end stopped going to sleep on me. Even Mike, of all people, became interested.
It was all very much like the boat you built in your basement when you were fourteen. It was what we did in our spare time. It was the Project.
Ben was in and Ben was out. Ben worked sometimes and sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t feel the venture was quite his anymore, but he couldn’t bring himself to stay away. So even he wound up involved.
Everybody else cared a lot. There was work to do. The bathyscaphe had to be overhauled completely. That took a lot of spare time. And when we were done, there was every prospect of even more spare time being whiled away in months and months of exploration.
Like all the outer planets except Pluto, which is a misplaced moon, Neptune is a gassy giant. At one time it was expected to have a layer of ice and rocky core beneath its atmosphere. In fact, however, it has no solid surface. It’s all atmosphere, a murky green sea of hydrogen and helium and methane and ammonia. There are clouds and snowstorms, but no place to put your feet. More than anything else, it is like the oceans of Earth, and the vehicle we intended to use to explore its unknown depths was a fantastic cross between a dirigible and the bathyscaphes of Piccard and his successors. Neptune was no well-tended garden, safe and comfortable, but in fact it was more easily accessible than are Earth’s hostile ocean deeps with their incredible pressures.
The planet was only a step away from us on Triton, closer than the Moon is to Earth. It was possible for the bathyscaphe to reach Neptune under its own power, but not for it to return up the gravity well. Consequently we decided to use a mother ship, like a tender for a helmet diver, that would drop the bathyscaphe and then recover it. In a way I was sorry, because I found the idea of a hydrogen-filled balloon chugging its way through space amusing.
In time we were ready to make our first probe. The question then became one of who would be the two of us to go first. It was a painful question. Should it be settled by rank? Should it be settled by amount of work contributed? Should it be settled by lot? As the day of readiness came closer, the issue became more acute. Each method of choice had its champions. By and large we were polite about the subject, but there was one fistfight between Arlo Harlow, who had worked particularly hard, and Sperry Donner, who was second-in-command, which was terminated when both participants discovered they actually had no particular enthusiasm for fistfighting.
Mike finally settled the issue. The first trip would be Ben and me because we were responsible. After that it would be alphabetically by pairs. He told me later that he had been intending to be strictly alphabetical, but that would have thrown Ben into the last pair, which was one problem, and would have made Ben the partner of Roy Wilimczyk, which was another.
“This seemed the best solution,” he said. “If anybody can cope with him, it’s you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he understood that I didn’t mean it.
Ben was frankly mellow that week—mellow for Ben. This means that about forty percent of the time he was his obnoxious ingratiating self instead of his normal obnoxious uningratiating self. He even forgave me.
Finally, on a Sunday that was as brisk and bright and sunny as a day ever gets on Triton, four of us set off toward the great green cotton-candy boulder that filled a full ten degrees of sky. Ben and I didn’t wait to see it grow. Long before the ship was in a parking orbit, Ben and I were in the cabin of the bathyscaphe and the whole was enclosed in a drop capsule.
I was piloting our machine. Ben was to supervise the monitoring equipment that would record our encounters with the planet.
We weren’t lowered over the side in the tradition of Earth’s oceans. We were popped out like a watermelon seed. We were strapped in and blind. I had my fingers on the manual switch and had no need to trigger it. The rockets did what rockets do. The drop capsule peeled away automatically.
Then when our lights came on, we were deep in a green murk. It wasn’t of a consistency. There were winds or eddies, call them whichever you choose. Our lights probed ahead. Sometimes we could see for considerable distances—yards. Often we could only see a few feet. We had the additional eyes of radar, which looked in circles about us and saw nothing except once what I took to be an ammonia snowstorm and avoided. Other sensors listened to the sound of the planet, took its temperature and pulse. Its temperature was very, very cold. Its pulse was slow and steady.
I feathered my elevators and found that the bathyscaphe worked as I had been assured that it did. The turboprops drove us steadily through the green. I was extremely glad to have my instruments. They told me I was right-side up, a fact I would not otherwise have known. And they kept me connected to our mother ship.
“I hope you are keeping in mind why we are here,” Ben said.
“I am,” I said. “However, until we know the planet better, I think one place will be about as likely as the next. I haven’t seen any whale herds yet.”
“No,” said Ben, “but it doesn’t mean they’re not out there. They may simply be shy. After all, the existence of the Great Sea Serpent wasn’t definitely established until the last ten years. I’d settle for something smaller, though.”
We had collecting plates out. They might well demonstrate the presence of the same sort of soupy life that was found on Uranus. Ben kept busy with his monitoring. I kept busy with my piloting.
I had helped on this venture because I was bored, thoroughly tired of doing nothing in particular. I had come to Neptune with only the mildest interest in proving Ben’s case. Now, however, I began to feel pleased to be where I was. The view, as we drove ourselves through the currents of this gassy sea, was monotonous, monochromatic, but weirdly beautiful. This was another sort of world than any I had been used to. I liked it. It may sound funny, but I respected it for being itself in the same way that you respect a totally ugly girl who has come to terms with herself.
I was pleased that men should be here in this last dark corner of the Solar System, and glad that I was one of the men. There is a place in reference books for this, too, if only in a footnote with the hundreds of people who have made first contacts.
It was a full five hours before we were back aboard our mother ship. Arlo Harlow helped us out of the bathyscaphe.
“How did it go?” he said.
“We won’t know until we check through the data,” Ben said. “We didn’t see anything identifiable. Not where he drove.”
I said, “You’ll have to see it for yourself. I don’t think I can describe it for you. You’ll see. It’s a rea
l experience.”
Arlo said, “Mike wants to talk to you. He’s got news.”
Ben and I went forward to talk to Mike back at Triton Base. The satellite was invisible ahead of us—with Neptune full, Triton was necessarily a new moon, and dark.
“Hello, Mike,” I said. “Arlo says you have news. Did the starship check in?”
“No,” he said. “The news is you. You two are a human-interest story. The last planet landing in the Solar System. Hold on. The first fac sheet has already come through. The headline is, ‘NEPTUNE REACHED.’ It begins, ‘In these days of groups and organizations and institutions, in these days when man’s first ship to the stars casts off with a crew of ten thousand, stories of individual human courage seem a thing of the distant past.’ And it ends, ‘If men like these bear our colors forward, the race of man shall yet prevail.’”
“I like that,” Ben said. “That’s very good.”
Mike said, “There’s also a story that wants to know why money was ever spent on such pointless flamboyance as this landing.”
“Tell them in the first place that there wasn’t any landing,” I said. “We were in Neptune, not on it. Then make the point that the bathyscaphe was left over from the Uranus probe and that we put it in shape ourselves.”
“I did that,” Mike said. “They got it in the story. The first one. The writer applauds your courage in chancing your life in such a primitive and antiquated exploratory vehicle.”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“Listen. They have some questions they want answered. They want to know why you went. Why did you go, Bob?”
“Tell them that it seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.
“I can’t give them that.”
“We wanted to find out whether there was life on Neptune,” Ben said.
“Did you find any?”
“As far as we know, we didn’t,” I said.
“Then I can’t give them that. Try again.”
I thought. After a moment I said, “Tell them that we didn’t think it was right for men to go to the stars without having touched all the bases here.”
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 9