The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  The civilized ones seemed to be losing some of their civilization. When Hans showed us close-ups of one of the bombed-out cities I could see streams of four-legged Crabber people—mostly civilians, I guessed—who were making their way out of the ruins, carrying bundles, leading kids or holding them. A lot of them were limping, just dragging themselves along. Some were being pulled in wagons or sledlike things.

  “They look like they’re all sick,” I said, and Hypatia nodded.

  “Undoubtedly some of them are, dear,” she informed me. “It’s a war, after all. You shouldn’t be thinking just in terms of bombs and guns, you know. Did you never hear of biological warfare?”

  I stared at her. “You mean they’re spreading disease? As a weapon?”

  “I believe that is likely, and not at all without precedent,” she informed me, preparing to lecture. She started by reminding me of the way the first American colonists in New England gave smallpox-laden blankets to the Indians to get them out of the way—“The colonists were Christians, of course, and very religious”—and went on from there. I wasn’t listening. I was watching the pictures from the Crabber planet.

  They didn’t get better. For one moment, in one brief scene, I saw something that touched some sort of nearly atrophied nerve-ending in me. The scene was an archipelago in the Crabber planet’s tropical zone. One bit looked a little like my island, reef and lagoon and sprawling vegetation over everything. There were aboriginal Crabbers there, too, but they weren’t alone. There were also a company of the ones in uniform, herding the locals into a village square, for what purpose I could not guess—to draft them? to shoot them dead?—but certainly not a good one. And, when I looked more closely, all the plants were dying. More bioweapons, this time directed at crops? Defoliants? I didn’t know, but that looked as though someone had done something to that vegetation.

  I had had enough. Without intending it, I came to a decision.

  I interrupted my shipmind in the middle of telling me about America’s old Camp Detrick. “Hypatia? How much spare capacity do you have?”

  It didn’t faze her. She abandoned the history of human plague-spreading and responded promptly. “Quite a lot, Klara.”

  “Enough to store all the data from the installation? And maybe take Hans aboard, too?”

  She looked surprised. I think she actually was. “That’s a lot of data, Klara, but, yes, I can handle it. If necessary. What’ve you got in mind?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I was just thinking. Let me see those refugees again.”

  X

  I kept one eye on the time, but I had plenty for what I wanted to do. I even gave myself a little diversion first.

  I went to my island.

  I don’t mean in person, of course. I simply checked out everything on Raiwea through my monitors and listened to the reports from the department heads. That was almost as satisfying. Just looking at the kids, growing up healthy and happy and free the way they are—it always makes me feel good. Or, in this case, at least a little less bad.

  Then I left my remote-accessed Raiwea and went into the reality of the Phoenix ship.

  Hans was busily shifting focus every time a few new frames came in, so now the pictures were coming in faster than anybody could absorb them. That couldn’t be helped. There was a whole world to look at, and anyway it didn’t matter if we saw it all in real time. All the data were being stored for later analysis and interpretation—by somebody else, though. Not by me. I had seen all I wanted.

  So, evidently, had most of the Phoenix crew. Starminder and Julia Ibarruru were in the eating chamber, but they were talking to each other about the Core, and paying no attention to the confusing images that were pouring in. Bill Tartch had his cameras turned on the display, all right. But he was watching the pictures only with sulky half attention, while Denys hung, sound asleep, beside him. “What’s the use of this, Klara?” he demanded as soon as he saw me. “I can’t get any decent footage from this crap, and most of the crew’s gone off to sleep.”

  I was looking at Denys. The little tart even snored prettily. “They needed it,” I told him. “How about Terple?”

  He shrugged. “Kekuskian was here a minute ago, looking for her. I don’t know whether he found her or not. Listen, how about a little more of your interview, so I won’t be wasting my time entirely?”

  “Maybe later,” I said, not meaning it, and went in pursuit of June Terple.

  I heard her voice raised in anger long before I saw her. Kekuskian had found her, all right, and the two of them were having a real cat-and-dog fight. She was yelling at him. “I don’t give a snake’s fart what you think you have to have, Oleg! We’re going! We have to get the whole installation the hell out of here while we’re still in one piece.”

  “You can’t do that!” he screeched back at her. “What’s the point of my coming out here at all if I can’t observe the supernova?”

  “The point,” she said fiercely, “is to stay alive, and that’s what we’re going to do. I’m in charge here, Kekuskian! I give the orders, and I’m giving them now. Hans! Lay a course for the neutron star!”

  That’s when I got into the spat. “Cancel that, Hans,” I ordered. “From here on in, you’ll be taking your orders from me. Is that understood?”

  “It is understood, Ms. Moynlin,” the shipmind’s voice said, as calm and unsurprised as ever. Terple wasn’t calm at all. I made allowances for the woman; she hadn’t had much sleep and there was a lot of strain. But for a minute there I thought she was going to hit me.

  “Now what the hell do you think you’re doing, Moynlin?” she demanded dangerously.

  “I’m taking command,” I explained. “We’re going to stay for a while. I want to see that star blow up too.”

  “Yes!” Kekuskian shouted.

  Terple didn’t even look at him. She was giving her whole attention to me, and she wasn’t in a friendly mood. “Are you crazy? Do you want to get killed?”

  It crossed my mind to wonder if that would be so bad, but what I said, quite reasonably, was, “I don’t mean we have to stay right here and let the star fry us. Not the people, anyway. We’ll evacuate the crew and watch the blowup on the remote. There’s plenty of room for everybody in the two ships. I can take three or four with me, Bill can take the others in his rental.”

  She was outraged and incredulous. “Klara! The radiation will be enormous! It could destroy the whole installation!”

  “Fine,” I said. “I understand that. So I’ll buy you a new one:”

  She stared at me in shock. “Buy a new one? Klara, do you have any idea of what it would cost—”

  Then she stopped herself short, and gave me a long look. “Well,” she said, not a bit mollified, but more or less resigned to accepting the facts of life, “I guess you do know, at that. If that’s what you want to do, well, you’re the boss.”

  And, as usual, I was.

  So when I gave orders, no one objected. I got everybody back in the dining chamber and explained that we were abandoning ship. I told Terple she could come on my ship, along with Starminder and Ibarruru. “It’s only a few days to Earth; the three of you can all fit in my guest bedroom. Mason-Manley and Kekuskian can go with Bill and Denys. It’ll be a little crowded in his rental, but they’ll manage.”

  “What about Hans and me?” Rohrbeck asked, sounding puzzled.

  I said, off-handedly, “Oh, you can come with me. We’ll find a place for you.”

  He didn’t look as thrilled as he might have at the idea of sailing off through space with a beautiful, unattached woman, such as me. He didn’t even look interested. “I don’t just mean me personally, Klara,” he said testily. “I mean me and my shipmind. I put a lot of work into designing Hans! I don’t want him ruined!”

  I wasn’t thrilled by his reaction, either, but I do like a man who likes his work. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I asked Hypatia about that. She says she has plenty of extra capacity. We’ll just copy him and take him along.�
�

  XI

  I had never seen a supernova explosion in real time before—well, how many people have?—but that, at least, was not a disappointment. The show was everything it promised to be.

  When it happened we were hovering in our two ships, a few million kilometers off the prime focus. Hans was taking his orders from Kekuskian now, and he had ditched the Crabber planet for good to concentrate on the star. Hypatia whispered in my ear that, back on his rental, Bill Tartch was pissing and moaning about the decision. He had wanted to catch every horrible, tragic bit, if possible right down to the expressions on the faces of the Crabbers when they saw their sun go all woogly right over their heads. I didn’t. I had seen enough of the Crabbers to last me, and I was the one who had the say.

  In my main room we had a double display. Hypatia had rigged my ship’s external optics so we could see the great mirror and the tiny Phoenix ship, together like toys in one corner of the room, but the big thing was the Crabber star itself as seen from PhoenixCorp. It wasn’t dangerous—Hypatia said. Hans had dimmed it down, and anyway we were seeing only visible light, none of the wide-spectrum stuff that would be pouring out of it in a minute. Even so, it was huge, two meters across and so bright we had to squint to watch it.

  I don’t know much about stellar surfaces, but this particular star looked sick to me. Prominences stuck out all over its perimeter, and ugly sunspots spotted its face. And then, abruptly, it began to happen. The star seemed to shrink, as though Hans had zoomed back away from it. But that wasn’t what was going on. The star really was collapsing on itself, and it was doing it fast. (“That’s the implosion,” Hypatia whispered.) While we watched, it went from two meters to a meter and a half, to a meter, to smaller still—

  And then it began to expand again, almost as fast as it had shrunk, and far more bright. Hypatia whispered, “And that’s the rebound. I’ve instructed Hans to cut back on the intensity. It’s going to get worse.”

  It did.

  It blossomed bigger and brighter—and angrier—until it filled the room and, just as I was feeling as though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the picture began to break up. I heard Terple moan, “Look at the mirror!” Then I understood what was happening to our image. The little toy PhoenixCorp ship and mirror in our viewers were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation from the supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp craft were blazing bright themselves, reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from the gravitational lensing. As I watched, the mirror began to warp. The flimsy sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of plasma, like blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh underneath the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot and glowing.

  I thought we’d seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A moment later the image of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn’t anywhere near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright as it had been before, but it was still something scary to look at. “What—?” I began to ask, but Hypatia had anticipated me.

  “We’re looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, Klara,” she explained. “We’re not getting shipside magnification from the mirror anymore. That’s gone. I’m worried about that camera, too. The gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last much—” She stopped, as the image disappeared for good. Simply winked out and was gone. “—longer,” she finished, and, of course, it hadn’t.

  I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her eyes. Ibarruru and Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. “That’s it,” I said briskly. “The show’s over.”

  Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. “Hans has all the data,” he reported. “He’s all right.”

  Terple had her hand up. “Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the dish burned pretty fast and the hull’s probably intact, so if we can get a repair crew out there—”

  “Right away,” I promised. “Well, almost right away. First we go home.”

  I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the cheer was rapidly fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. “Where’s that?” he asked glumly.

  I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said sympathetically, “You’re missing your kids, aren’t you? Well, I’ve got a place where there are plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up male on my island, you’ll be the only dad they’ve got.”

  XII

  That blast from the supernova didn’t destroy PhoenixCorp after all. The mirror was a total write-off, of course, but the ship itself was only cooked a little.

  So June Terple stooged around for a bit while it cooled down, then went back to check it out with what was left of her crew. Which wasn’t much. Mason-Manley talked his way back into her good graces once Denys wasn’t around anymore. Kekuskian promised to come out for the actual blow-up, eighty years from now, provided he was still alive. And, of course, Terple still had the indestructible Hans, now back in his own custom-designed datafan. The rest of her crew were all replacements. Starminder went back to her family in the Core, and I paid Ibarruru’s fare to go along with her as a kind of honorary Citizen Ambassador.

  Naturally, Terple invited me to join them for their stint at the neutron star. She couldn’t really avoid it, since the new money was coming from the same place as the old, namely mostly me. I said maybe, to be polite, but I really meant no. One look at the death of a world was enough for me. And Bill Tartch’s special show on the Crabbers went on the net within days. He had a great success with it, easily great enough so that he didn’t really mind the fact that he no longer had me.

  Hypatia kept copies of all the files for me, and those last little bits of data stayed with me on my island for a long time, until things went sour and everything got ruined at once. (But that’s another story. A really bad one, and I don’t want to think about it.) I played pieces of the files now and then, for any of the kids that showed an interest, and for their moms, too, when they did. But mostly I played them for myself.

  Mark Rohrbeck stayed with me on Raiwea for a while, too, though not that long. That’s the way my island works. When my kids are ready for the world outside, I let them go. It was the same with Rohrbeck. For him it took just a little over three months. Then he was ready, and kissed me good-bye, and went.

  8

  * * *

  On the Forested Planet

  I

  To get off the spacecraft Estrella and Stan walked out a five-meter passage. Then they were out on a platform, in bright sunshine. That is where they both stopped in shock. “My God,” Estrella whispered. “There’s a million of them!”

  It wasn’t a million, really, but it surely was a lot of Heechee, and all of them bunched around them on the platform and staring…or ranked farther away on porches and terraces and staring…or clustered on roofs and in windows as much as half a kilometer away, and also staring. That was what all of them were doing: staring. All of them were also muttering and chirping to each other—each one decorously soft-voiced, to be sure, but collectively like the whir of an immense flight of locusts. Stan put his arm around Estrella. “So where the hell is Salt?” he demanded.

  There wasn’t any answer from the press of Heechee, none of whom appeared to speak English. Though they were all out in the open Stan wrinkled his nose at the persistent Heechee sting of ammonia in the air, along with spicy scents and fruity ones—coming, Stan guessed, from woods somewhere nearby. (This was, after all, the “Forested Planet.”) Stan wasn’t interested in smells just then. “Damn her,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”

  Others did, though. Two of them, perhaps high-ranking Heechee to judge from the lines of red, blue and yello
w embroidery that decorated their smocks, came forward. Each took an arm, one for Estrella and one for Stan. The Heechee were surprisingly small, ten or a dozen centimeters shorter even than Estrella, but she didn’t resist. Neither did Stan, though he thought of it, but saw no point, when he felt the strength of that bony grasp. Both humans let the Heechee do what they would. Which was to conduct the humans to another, higher-up sort of stage. Then the two Heechee took turns speaking—in their own language—perhaps to the crowd, perhaps to the tiny lenses Stan could see winking at them from the crowd. “I think we’re on the evening news,” he muttered to Estrella, but she was peering past the bulk of the ship that had brought them, now kneeling quietly in its landing receptacle. Then, as the two Heechee grasped their arms again, he added, “Now what do they want?”

  They wanted Stan and Estrella to board a topless, three-wheeled vehicle, which had no driver at its sort of tiller but two rows of Heechee perches. No proper seats, of course.

  That was when Salt at last appeared. “Yes, one understands,” she said, sounding slightly remorseful but also harried, “that is too bad about the sitting down, is that not the case? But do not be concerned. The distance is much less than far.”

  “Distance to where?” Stan demanded, while Estrella asked, “Aren’t you coming with us?”