The Creatures of Man

by Howard L. Myers

  "The chore is that Profanis isn't on the tapes of your ship, or any other ship," said Jonmak. "Even Admiration Accounting has nothing on it."

  "Then there ain't no such place."

  He smirked, and peeled a sheet of plaper out of his tunic pocket. "The government doesn't agree," he said, handing me the plaper.

  It was a fax of an official U.G. document, issued by the Standing Consolidation Commission of the Department of Justice:

  For use of DJ agents, here is a description of the Profanis system, unlocated and unconsolidated.

  The system takes its name from its principal planet, rather than from its sun, for a reason the diagram below makes plain. Note the system is abnormal and in high probability is artificial.

  I looked at the diagram, which showed the craziest looking system I ever saw.

  There was the planet labeled "Profanis" in the center, with about half a dozen satellites orbiting around it. One of the satellites was rayed, and was labeled "sun." The others were just ordinary moons, and their labels were meaningless symbols instead of words.

  And that was all. No real sun, no other planets. I thought for a moment that the diagram was not supposed to show the whole system. Then I noticed that stars were marked in a circle around the edge of the drawing, to indicate that beyond the outermost satellite was nothing but interstellar sky.

  Of course a "sun" the size and mass of a moon just doesn't exist in nature. But a moon can be fired up to burn like a sun for a few thousand years if someone wants to go to the expense. It involves setting up an anti-matter con-recon field around the object, and I don't know of anybody with enough Admires to pay for that kind of job.

  Still, that was what the drawing showed: a moon fired up to serve as a sun, and in an orbit low enough, presumably, to keep the planet Profanis comfortably warm.

  Below the drawing, and looking like part of the drawing instead of the text of the document, was a line that read: "The world Profane, least blest of God's creation."

  As most everybody knows, "God" is what the Sandman used to be called, back before the universe was explored out to the edge and the sand was discovered. Which meant that the drawing was pretty old . . . at least three thousand years. And now I noticed that the reproduced drawing showed smudges and crinkle marks. So it was old.

  I read the rest of the document, mostly about the urgency of Profanis being found and brought into the Admirable Society. Presumably the inhabitants lacked space travel, which meant that when their goofy little "sun" burned out they would all die.

  I never heard of anything so fantastic! A planet without space travel!

  The document concluded:

  Agents discovering any information concerning the Profanis system are instructed to report their findings at once. The accompanying drawing, which was found in the Astrographic Archives of Homeworld Earth, is the only source of information concerning Profanis now known. Additional data is urgently needed to expedite the early location of the system.

  I exploded, "This is crazy, man! All they have is that drawing! It doesn't have to mean anything. It could be out of a piece of fiction!"

  Jonmak gave a hard grin. "Then what was it doing in the Astrographic Archives?" he asked.

  I grimaced. He had me there.

  "The government doesn't make many mistakes, pal," he added. "If they say that drawing is of a real system, you better believe it is real. Now, are you going to give it a try?"

  I thought it over, and can't say I liked it. If the DJ agents had tried and couldn't find Profanis (and it stood to reason that they had; otherwise the government wouldn't be dealing amateur-doers in) my chances of success had to be extremely slim. Also, the guy who first said "It's a small universe" probably never had the job of locating a particular uncharted star system in it. Certainly not a system with a tiny fake "star" that would be out of detection at a quarter of a light-year!

  I told Jonmak, "It doesn't sound promising, but if it's the only thing going and has a big payoff . . ."

  "It does," he put into my pause. "Eight Big Ones."

  Eight thousand Admires seemed like a fortune right then. "Okay, I'll try it."

  He smiled like a guy who has found a doting sucker. "Great! And good luck in the hunt."

  * * *

  Feeling foolish, I returned to my ship. "Lift off," I said.

  "Yes, sir. Where to?"

  "Just off. I'll decide where later." The ship rose through the atmosphere, picked up speed as it wiggled between the stars and out into intergalactic space.

  "What's my balance now, ship?" I asked.

  "Still 217 Admiration Units, sir."

  I nodded, pleased. I didn't think that Jonmak had taken me for anything, but I always like to make sure. Sometimes Admiration can slip out of your subconscious without you being aware of it.

  "Ship, see what you make of this," I ordered, feeding the plaper about Profanis into its information bank.

  After a moment the ship replied, "It is a facsimile of a document of the Universal Government's Department of Justice, specifically the Standing Consolidation Commission, concerning the unlocated and unconsolidated system of Profanis—"

  "Never mind quoting it to me! I can read!" I snorted. "The point is, I've taken on the chore of locating Profanis. How do I go about it?"

  "Inasmuch as such a search has doubtless been conducted by Department of Justice agents—"

  "Right," I inserted.

  "And inasmuch as these agents doubtless made full use of such computerized reasoning as I can offer, any avenues of procedure I might propose can be presumed to have been fully explored."

  "A great help you are!" I sneered.

  "On the contrary, sir," said the ship, "I fear I can be of no help at all."

  "That's what I meant."

  "Very well, sir."

  I thought, and ate, and thought some more.

  "How much would it cost," I asked at last, "to put together a system like that?"

  "Depending on how many of its constituent objects were found in location, sir, the cost would run from a minimum of 16.4 billion Units. That covers essentially the expense of energizing the fourth satellite as a source of light and heat. If none of the satellites were in place—"

  "Never mind. The minimum's high enough. Now tell me this: who has Admires to spend on that scale?"

  "Nobody, sir. The highest personal fortune currently on record is 56 million Units. The highest corporate expendable balance is 1.3 billion Units. The highest government unaccountable expense is limited to 100 million Units by law."

  "Okay," I said. "When in the past did someone have that kind of Admires?"

  "Never, sir."

  "Then nobody could have ever done it; so Profanis can't exist," I growled angrily. "I thought this was nonsense to begin with!"

  "I did not say that, sir. You spoke of Admiration Units only. Before the Admirable Society was founded, and other mediums of exchange were in use, there was a period of some forty years when numerous fortunes of sufficient scope existed."

  "Oh, yeah," I said. "You mean the Worldking Generation."

  "Yes, sir."

  Which was an awful long time ago. The universe wasn't fully explored then.

  "Okay," I said, "how about this approach? Find out where the frontier was back then, take account of every factor we can think of, and figure out where a Worldking would be most likely to set up a secret planet where he could indulge his favorite sins. Does that narrow down a search area for us?"

  "Perhaps, sir. It will take several minutes to correlate the data."

  "Sure," I said, opening a beer. Before the drink was gone, the ship flashed a 3D map of the Home Cluster. As usual, it showed our own position with a blue dot. And there were about a dozen markings in green, scattered through seven galaxies.

  "The green indicates areas of search such as you described, sir," explained the ship.

  "Good. This one looks closest," I said, reaching an arm into the map to put my finger on a gre
en patch. "We'll start with it."

  "Yes, sir: Changing course for Stebbins Galaxy."

  * * *

  The next three days I spent filtering around as dusty a patch of backlight as I ever hope to encounter, the ship's receptors full on for any radiator that approached being right for that homemade "sun" of Profanis. It was slow, boring work, but I kept at it. And when I was sure there was no such radiator around there, I told the ship to move on to the next area.

  It was bigger, and took over a week to search. My morale was beginning to slip, but I consoled myself that we were looking in the right kind of places. I never realized before just how much of the galactic areas are uninhabited by man, even in the Home Cluster where you assume people are everywhere.

  But I could see that this search might take months. Naturally, I didn't want to fritter away my time to that extent.

  "Look, ship," I demanded, "how do we know that the DJ agents haven't already searched these same areas, after figuring the problem the same way I did?"

  "We don't know that they did not, sir," the ship replied. "In fact, the probability that we are duplicating their effort is .993, sir."

  "What?" I roared. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You did not ask, sir."

  "Oh, sand," I moaned. Nearly two weeks shot! And I couldn't blame the ship. Ships have to be inhibited on information feed-out; otherwise they would talk you deaf on the slightest provocation.

  "Well, I've had it with this chore," I said in disgust. "I'm going somewhere and have some fun."

  "Very well, sir, but you have instructed me to advise you when your financial status is insufficient to cover an intended activity. Such is now the case, sir."

  I groaned. Trapped! Me and my expensive tastes! "Damn it, I need companionship!" I complained.

  "Yes, sir. May I suggest one of the mock-ups—"

  "No! Who wants to fool with those things!" I wandered restlessly about the cabin. There was no getting away from it: I needed Admires, and this silly chore of finding Profanis was the only way I had to get them. Of course, I could go back to Greenstable and see if anything else was doing by now, but that would put me in a bad light there, quitting one chore that wasn't done to ask for an easier one.

  So, I had to find Profanis.

  Profanis.

  "Ship, what does 'profane' mean?"

  "It is essentially a negative word, sir, meaning 'not concerned with religion, not sacred.' "

  "That's what I thought it meant," I said. "Okay, let's approach it from that angle, then. Check for a colonized planet that doesn't have a church."

  "Very well, sir."

  "Hold on! What's the probability that the DJ agents have tried that?"

  "Quite high, sir—.997."

  "Forget it, then!" I was in a foul frame of mind—depressed, angry, and frustrated—and I wanted a Hallypuff very badly. But smokes are nonstandard fare, and wanting a Hallypuff as urgently as I did would make me Admire it just that much more.

  "Oh, sand! Gimme a beer!"

  For a long time I sat sipping and brooding. I still had the notion that the answer was locked up in that word "profane." The trouble was that, while I'm as religious as the next guy, I don't make a big thing out of it. I'm no expert on what is and isn't sacred.

  "Ship, what's the probability on the DJ agents consulting church fathers?"

  "It is approximately .992, sir."

  I grunted. Evidently I didn't have an original idea in my head.

  "Of course they would talk to the Pipe, then," I said glumly.

  "Yes, sir."

  "And the hermit sandpipers?"

  The ship hesitated. "The probability there is lower, sir, approximately .26. The hermit pipers are not highly regarded as authorities on questions of religion, sir."

  "Well, they handle sand more than the Pipe himself. He's too busy being an organization." I hesitated over the decision, but finally got it out timidly: "Head out to the sand, and we'll hunt a hermit."

  "Very well, sir."

  The ship didn't change course—after all, the sand is in every direction—but speeded up. I was so scared by what I was about to do that I had the ship untape a mocktwirl.

  I didn't tell her what I was doing, but when we zipped past the last of the galactic clusters, she began to get shakier than I was; so I kissed her and put her back on tape.

  "How much longer?" I asked. "Perhaps an hour, sir," said the ship. "We are entering the area of edge phenomena now, sir."

  "Okay, just don't show it to me."

  "Certainly not, sir."

  But even if I couldn't see what was happening to space outside the ship, I could feel it. All I could do was lie limply, but not feeling limp. My eyes were squeezing out of my head, and my throat was coming up and out of my mouth.

  Through my terror, I wondered how the first man had made it through to discover the sand. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that this would be over in less than an hour. The first explorer wouldn't have known that.

  I thought about that for a while, and was still thinking about it when the phenomena started to let go.

  "Approaching the sand, sir," announced the ship.

  I sat up slowly. "Okay, I'll look at it," I managed to mumble.

  The ship revealed the Sandwall stretching completely across the sky. It had a dim creamy glow (or anyway that is the way ships always show it . . . maybe it is really dark) and was featureless. I stared.

  It's a strange sight to look at, and even stranger to think about. The sheer size stuns the imagination. A solid surface of stuff that englobes the whole universe like a bubble.

  But it's not just a bubble, or even a wall, even if it is called the Sandwall. Maybe it goes on forever, and has other universe bubbles in it by the billions. The Pipe's pipers have probed it to a depth of five light-minutes, and the sand is still there. Just where it is in it that souls go to . . .

  I shrugged. I was wasting time mooning over religious riddles. "Are we close enough to detect hermitages yet, ship?"

  "Just coming into range now, sir."

  "Good. Let's start searching."

  The ship went into a search spiral along the surface of the Sandwall.

  "A hermitage is just a ship, isn't it, pushing against the Sandwall?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "If I stayed in the same place all the time, I'd want something more elaborate than a ship," I mused.

  "That would be difficult for a hermit sandpiper, sir. If the hermit traveled away from his stationary residence on the Sandwall, he would be unable to return to it."

  "Oh? Why not?"

  "He would be unable to find it, sir."

  "But of course he could find . . ." I started to object, and then stopped. That surface was big, and featureless, and the area of edge phenomena did strange things to navigation. If a hermit took a jaunt into the inhabited part of the universe, he might come back to a point on the wall a trillion lights from where he started. He'd never find his residence.

  That thought led to another, and the pit fell out of my stomach. "How many hermit sandpipers are there, ship?"

  "Slightly more than six million, sir."

  Six million little ships, scattered over a surface that ran all around the universe!

  "This," I said with apathetic calm, "is about as hopeless a search as trying to find Profanis by visiting every body in the universe."

  "The difficulties are of similar orders of magnitude, sir," the ship agreed.

  "Discontinue the search and give me a Hallypuff," I said.

  After a pause, the ship replied, "Very well, sir," and lifted me the reefer.

  I sat smoking it, not giving a damn how many Units it might cost me. I was beaten. Sunk without a trace. The End. The last of the red-hot twirl-chasers.

  I giggled and threw away the butt of my Hallypuff.

  "Just two choices left, ship. Suicide or become a hermit, and I'm not high enough for suicide. Push down to the surface."

  "Yes, sir."


  The Sandwall moved closer. There was a slight bump as contact was made.

  "We're there, sir."

  "Well, open me a compartment against the wall. I can't pipe sand through your damned hull."

  The ship constricted a bulkhead on the wall side, and I climbed over the lip to squat in actual contact with the Sandwall. It was so slick it felt wet, but it wasn't. I could see the sand grains just beneath the slickness, but couldn't touch them.