“How much?” I said. “And what kind?”
The director shook his head. “No information,” he said. “We’ve just been told what to do. She’ll be docking in thirty-six hours. Can you two get your affairs in order by then? Do you have someone who can take over necessary work in progress?”
I shrugged, having virtually lost interest in work in progress. “You must know something,” I said.
“Not about the kind of problems they’ve run into out there,” he said. “All I know is that the HSB that the Earth Spirit homed in on was lit by another ship—the Ariadne.”
“I never heard of an FTL ship called the Ariadne,” I said.
“That,” he said, “is the point. The Ariadne, so the reference tapes assure me, left Earth orbit three hundred and fifty years ago. She went the long way around.”
I’d already had my fill of surprises. My mind could no longer boggle. “Well, well,” I said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “So one of the flying freezers finally thawed out. Plan B worked out after all.”
“I’m sorry,” put in Zeno. “I don’t quite understand.” I looked at Schumann, but he just raised his eyebrows and let me tell it.
“It was long before the golden moment when our two species made the marvelous discovery that they were not alone,” I said. “When we first realized that hyperspace gave us a gateway to the universe but that we couldn’t navigate in it. We lost a number of ships which couldn’t find their way home before hoisting HSB-One. That solved half the problem—but the probes we sent out, jumping at random, kept coming out in the middle of nowhere. We realized for the first time how big space is and how little solar systems are. People got depressed about having the means to dodge the problems of relativity without having any obvious way to make it pay off. Without other HSBs to use as targets, hyperspace was just one big sea of nothing. It dawned on people pretty quickly that the only immediately obvious way to establish a hyperspace route to Alpha Centauri—or even to Pluto—was to transport an HSB on an orthodox ship at sub-light speed. It made the business of opening up the universe a pretty slow and painful one, but it was all we had—and all we have.
“Nowadays, of course, we use robot ships, which we dispatch with clinical regularity from Earth orbit, targeting them at all the G-type stars in the neighborhood. In those days, it wasn’t so obvious that that was the way to play it. We didn’t know then how very few of those stars would have planets with usable habitats—though we might have guessed that the neighborhood wasn’t exactly overpopulated by virtue of the fact that no one else had any HSBs already hoisted. The wise guys of the day decided that if hyperspace was a bust as far as quick access to the universe was concerned, they might as well put some eggs in another basket. The flying freezers were ships carrying a crew, mostly in suspended animation, and passengers—mostly conveniently packaged as fertilized eggs ready to be incubated in artificial wombs. The idea was that they were to travel from star to star, planting beacons but not hanging around. Eventually, it was thought, they’d find a new Earth, and could set about the business of colonization right away.”
“I don’t see how that makes sense,” said Zeno.
“It doesn’t,” said Schumann. “Not now. But it seemed to, then. Now we know that there are very, very few habitable worlds; and we also know that anywhere we can live is likely to be inhabited already. Neither of those things was obvious in the early days. We had no standards for comparison. There was a popular myth, bred by a couple of hundred years of speculation, that somewhere out in space we might find a paradise planet—green and lovely and hospitable, just waiting for people to move in. In fact, we thought there might be dozens of them. The idea of colonizing twenty or thirty planets via hyperspace seemed out of the question. Too difficult to sustain a warp field around anything much bigger than a touring caravan—too many trips to transport the essentials. Now, of course, if we really did find ourselves knocking at the Gates of Eden, we wouldn’t care if it took a thousand trips—because we’d know it was once in a dozen lifetimes. They were hoping it would be a regular thing; far easier to do the trick in one fell swoop. The colony ships seemed to make sense.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I pointed out. “This was the last part of the twenty-first century. The time of the Crash. We were making big strides in space, and stumbling over our feet at home. Earth itself was in a bad way. The colony ships made another kind of sense: they were a kind of insurance policy. Seeds...in case the parent plant shriveled up and died. Eggs in more than one basket, see?”
“I think so,” answered Zeno.
I turned my attention back to Schumann.
“How far did the Ariadne get?”
He shook his head. “No details—but the records show that she never planted a beacon. She never passed through a single system. That means she was rerouted from every one she got close enough to survey, probably with minimum slowdown. Taking into account the relativistic effects, I’d say she may have covered a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty light-years.”
Known space, as we are pleased to call it, is a bumpy spheroid about sixty light-years in radius. Only the G-type stars within it are “known,” of course. and not all of them. We could have done better, if we’d only worked harder. More ships, more strategy, more sense. A station a hundred and eighty light-years away—even if it were just a station, and not a living world at all, would be a very useful stepping stone.
“Toward galactic center?” I asked.
He nodded. After a moment’s pause, he said: “That’s all there is. I hate to push when you’ve just had such wonderful news, but you do have things to do here. I asked you once—can you hand over everything that needs to be carried on within the next day and a half?”
“Who to?” I asked, ungrammatically.
“That’s your problem,” he retorted. That’s how you get to be director—you have to know how to delegate. I forgave him for sounding tough. After all, he was stuck on Sule while we were about to set forth on the Great Adventure.
“Come on, friend,” I said to Zeno as I stood up, “the cause of civilization needs us. We are the conquistadores of the new Earth.” I glanced back at Schumann, and said: “They really must think we’re good, if they picked us out of all the men available.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the director, smoothing back the few grey hairs he had left. “Maybe they just think you’re expendable.”
I laughed. I really thought it was a joke!
CHAPTER TWO
We got back to the lab, and sat down facing one another beside the main bench.
“What we have to do,” said Zeno, “is to decide which projects we can simply terminate, and which we should reallocate. It would be easier, of course, if our writing-up were up to date. There are half a dozen things we should have put into the bulletin before now. Anything which has to be taken over by someone else has to be brought up to date, and really needs supplementary annotation.”
“Zee,” I said, “you have a distorted sense of priorities. Do you really think any of this can possibly matter now?”
“Of course it matters,” he said.
“It’s junk,” I told him. “Slime from some ugly ball of rock. It’s an aborted life-system. Evolutionary ABC. Little bags of chemicals. Sure they have nucleic acids swilling around in their microscopic cells. They have their mutations and their viruses and all the other nasty little shocks that flesh is heir to, but it’s just marking time. Nobody cares about it. If the entire life-system were to be wiped out by a nova, no one would shed a tear. It’s a finger-exercise, Zee—it’s allowed us to practice for the real thing, to sharpen our techniques and sharpen our wits. But it has nothing to offer—it doesn’t even pose a threat to us, even if some of the lousy viruses have found a hook to hang themselves on in Scarlatti’s lousy mice. Forget it!”
He heard me out, politely, then he picked up the phone. “I’m calling Tom Thorpe,” he said. “He can take my stuff on until they replace us.
I suppose they will replace us?”
I shook my head, but not in answer to his question. I listened while he apologized to Tom for troubling him on a holiday, and asking him politely if he could please spare the time to drop in at the lab. Tom would spare the time, all right. Like everyone else—including me—he was hung up on his work. Single-mindedness was an essential characteristic in those so close to the top of their profession that they could swing an assignment like Sule. It costs a lot to hoist a man out of a gravity well like Earth’s and ship him all the way to Mars-orbit; they always make sure they’re getting value for money.
Zeno was right, of course, but I still wanted to take time out to think about it all. This was the kind of thing that we all dreamed about...except, of course, when we were busy having nightmares.
“Lee,” said Zeno softly (my name’s Leander—Lee and Zee for the purposes of the double act), “you don’t know that they’ve found a habitable world—or even a world at all. For all you know, the Ariadne may have lit the Hyper-Space Beacon just to call for help. It might be some kind of shipboard problem—nothing to do with a new planet.”
“And for that they need a physiologist and two geneticists who specialize in alien life-systems?”
“Who knows?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “The ship’s been invaded by froglike monsters—monsters even more froglike than you. Or long exposure to cosmic rays has engendered some frightful new life-form in the egg factory which has started to feed on the frozen flesh of the off-duty crewmen. Then again....”
“Then again,” conceded Zeno, “they may have found a new world, with a life-system that’s a little weird. Something their own biologists can’t cope with, because they’re three hundred and fifty years behind the times. I concede—Occam’s razor cuts your way.”
This is how great partnerships work.
Tom Thorpe came into the lab, and eyed us suspiciously. “Hello Zeno,” he said. “You too, Lee—where did you disappear to last night?”
That was just about number one on my top ten list of embarrassing questions.
“Oh...you know,” I said, hoping that he didn’t. Thirty-six hours, I’d be away, and it wouldn’t matter anymore.
“Sometimes,” said Tom, “I get the feeling that you’re anti-social. What’s up?”
I told him what was up, at great length. Anything to make him forget the small talk. With Tom’s help, we began to work out a plan for shifting most of the work we’d been doing into somebody else’s area of responsibility. We gave some to Biochemistry, some to Physiology and some (bending the rules a little) to Pathology. It was all a matter of changing definitions. As Zeno had pointed out, though, that still left the spadework to do. If the point of what we’d been working on wasn’t to be lost—whether our lines of work were continuing or not—we had a hell of a lot of writing up to do. I cheated, and got out the dictaphone. Typing was never my strong suit.
In the afternoon, I tried to get clearance to send a telegram to my mother, but the application was overruled. They call it “information control” these days, but what they mean is censorship. Space Agency is sensitive about its affairs. They always tell the Soviets, but never the free press. Marsbase is an independent political domain in all but name, and by no means a republic. Not even the ghost of democracy. There are reasons for that, of course. There always are. I took time out to write her a letter instead. Bits of it would probably be deleted and there would be “unavoidable” delays in transmission, but enough would get through to let her know that I’d been moved, and that she needn’t worry if she didn’t hear from me in a while. She wouldn’t like it—somehow, during the last couple of years, she’d convinced herself that Sule was just around the corner really, and we got to see one another’s faces on telecast occasionally. She wouldn’t feel the same way about a jump through hyperspace, and who could blame her? It wasn’t easy for her—my father was killed when I was three years old, and for fifteen years I’d been her sole companion, Losing me to space was bad enough. Losing me to hyperspace was the next best thing to receiving news of my death.
I made it a long letter, and promised that every FTL ship that came back from the new beacon would bring a message from me along with it. She’d grown used to my absence by degrees—first there was university, then assignment in America, then Sule. I did wonder, though, as I signed the letter, whether I’d ever make landfall on Earth again, or whether she’d live to see the day if I did. It was an awkward thought, reminding me of a kind of loneliness that I could never quite put behind me.
I ate all my meals in my room or in the lab; I couldn’t face the common room, even though I knew there’d be something special on the menu. Usually, any change from the customary diet of synthetic pabulum was an opportunity too good to think of missing, but the circumstances were special. I had the Great Adventure lurking a few hours in my future, and I didn’t want anyone else inquiring where I’d been during the crucial hour. Someone, I supposed, must know—but I didn’t want to meet them any more than I want to meet inquiring minds which might get too curious about my state of mental health.
When I finally went to bed, I had no difficulty in getting to sleep, and if I dreamed the dreams are mercifully beyond the reach of my memory.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day dragged as the business of tidying up the loose ends of our work grew more and more tedious and the bits we were picking over grew steadily more trivial and more troublesome. When it got to the stage where I was picking petty quarrels with Zeno in order to have some way of venting my frustration, I decided that it was time to pack up and isolate myself.
I set off along one of the spoke-shafts, climbing the stairways to the upper decks until there was only the ladder to go. I was moving toward the hub of the station, and as I went the gravity declined along with the angular velocity. I always liked that feeling of slowly decreasing weight when I was feeling a little uptight. Lessening the burden of your body always seems to be taking a load off your mind.
The transfer from the spinning station to the “stationary” spindle made me feel a little giddy, and I had to pause at the portal to settle down. Because the spindle was a zero-g environment it no longer made sense to think in terms of up and down, but in my private thoughts I always imagined the docking bays to be “downward” and the observation tower to be “upward,” on the grounds that a place where you could look at the naked stars just had to be beneath the sky; to contemplate the awful star-strewn infinity you have to think of yourself as looking up, if only because up, in metaphorical terms, is the right way to Heaven.
The boys in Astronomy were back at work, it being January the second by our Earth-imitation reckoning, and no longer a holiday. They didn’t pay any attention to me, though. They didn’t use the observation balcony much themselves; star-gazing and astronomy, they assure me, are two very different things.
I floated over to the rail, and anchored myself so I could look straight out into Sagittarius, where the center of the galaxy hid behind its curtain of interstellar dust.
The configuration of bright stars that had somehow suggested itself to the ancients as the figure of a centaur archer was lost in a starfoam sea, whose light dazzled the eyes and startled the mind. It was a sight you had to get used to—some people found it too much to bear, and it made them sick. In all probability, half of the station staff had been up here no more than once, and some might serve a five-year stretch without ever once seeing the naked stars. Some claimed that the sight made them feel as if they were in the presence of God; others that it made them feel so tiny that they were haunted by humility. They had to work hard, though, to cultivate feelings as specific and articulate as that. For me, it was a sensation that didn’t translate into any kind of awestruck silliness. It was an experience unique in itself, that didn’t need to be compared with some kind of imaginary transcendental nonsense.
There was a tiny spider working its way along the rail, plainly unimpressed by the grandeur b
eyond the wall, for all that it had so many eyes to see it with. It was an Earthly spider, of course. The main work of the station was to do with alien biology, but we didn’t let the specimens run around loose. Plague-paranoia forbade such recklessness, except insofar as Zeno was concerned (the Calicoi had long since served out their period of quarantine). Anyhow, only Earth and Calicos had life-systems sufficiently well-developed to have produced organisms as high on the evolutionary scale as spiders. So far.
I blew the spider off its perch, knowing that it would float around, spinning a string of invisible silk until it caught on something solid. It looked as if it had had a lot of practice in dealing with a no-g environment. It might be the hundredth generation to be born here. I wondered what kind of changes might have been made at the biochemical level by natural selection operating in zero g, and wondered briefly whether I ought to start hunting spiders to prepare for a long-term study. Then I remembered that there wasn’t time, and made a mental note to put the idea on the dictaphone. Come to think of it, spiders implied flies—some prey species, at least, maybe feeding on bits of human skin and other debris that collected here. Maybe, I thought, there was a full-blown zero-g ecosystem here, waiting to be investigated.
I looked out at the blazing panorama, wondering where the star might be that would be the sun warming Earth Three. It would be a visible star, I presumed, if it was a G-type less than two hundred light-years away, but it would be insignificant within the multitude.
All the stars I could see were within easy reach of Mars-orbit, through hyperspace, but we had managed to find the way to a mere handful of them. The rest beckoned us with light that left them hundreds or thousands of years before, but in hyperspace they were invisible. All leaps in hyperspace, save those to human-built beacons, were leaps in the dark; and darkness, in accordance with the calculus of probability, was where all such leaps came out. Our FTL ships had jumped into the spaces between stars far too remote to be seen from Earth, and had even ventured into the intergalactic gulf beyond our spiral arm, knowing they could get home again by tracking the glimmer of the HSBs in Mars-orbit. But finding other star systems—trying by random leaps to wind up within a few million kilometers of an alien star—was far, far more difficult than trying to locate half a dozen needles in a haystack.
The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel Page 2