“What are they?” Palmer murmured. “There can’t be planets out here….”
“They’re not planets,” Lingo said, changing the ship’s attitude in space so that the discs in the indicator circle were centered in the ship’s line-of-flight indicator.
“But we’re nowhere near any multiple star system like that!” Palmer exclaimed.
“They’re not stars either,” Lingo said, turning on the ship’s Resolution Drive. “And they’re a lot closer than you seem to think. Watch.”
Faster and faster they accelerated towards the enigmaticodies, and the five closely clustered discs grew and grew, until they became globes, until detail was visible, until the five discs became five globes, until it became clear that the things were…what?
Palmer saw, but he did not comprehend.
They were far too small to be planets, but they were globes. Five small planetoids, in tight formation, each one perhaps ten miles in diameter.
As they moved ever closer, Palmer realized that these globes were like no planetoids he had ever heard of. All five of them were absolutely regular, perfect spheres, five perfect spheres floating together in the middle of nowhere.
They approached to within a mile or two of the formation.
Palmer’s jaw dropped. He gaped in amazement.
They were metal.
Not metallic rock, but metal. Metal plates. They were artificial. They were five identical metal globes. They had no markings, no external features except…except what looked disconcertingly like Resolution Field antennae distributed evenly about their equators. They were patently manufactured!
“What…what in space are they?”
Lingo laughed. “Someone, in a black mood, dubbed them ‘Meatwagons.’ The name sort of stuck. They’re spaceships.”
“Spaceships…?” exclaimed Palmer. “But it can’t be! I’m no mathematician, but I know that there’s something called the Hayakawa equation which limits the size of Stasis-Fields to bubbles with fifteen hundred foot diameters. Otherwise, everything would be very different…. We could build ships as big as we wanted, since there’s no limit to the theoretical size of Resolution Fields. Why, theoretically, you could fly a planet, I suppose. But it’s simply impossible to throw up Stasis-Fields big enough to take things like those…those ‘Meatwagons,’ whatever they are, from star to star!”
“You’re right all the way, Jay,” Lingo said. “Nevertheless, the Meatwagons are spaceships. After all, what do you think happened to the population of Fortress Sol?”
Palmer stared dully at Lingo. The price that Man had paid, that Sol had paid, for victory was something he had tried hard to forget. Now Lingo had brought it back, and he was reliving those terrible moments once more.
“I…I thought there was no point in saying anything about that, Dirk,” he said softly. “I understand that the sacrifice had to be made, if the human race was to survive, but even so….”
Lingo stared at him incredulously for a long moment. Then comprehension came into his face, followed by surprise, then by a strange, almost stunned look that was unreadable.
“Once again, I’ve underestimated you, Jay,” he said. “When you were so willing to forgive and understand, I naturally thought you realized…. But you seem to have seen more deeply into our minds than we have ourselves. Yes, we would’ve sacrificed five billion Solarians to save the human race, if that had been the only choice. Now I realize that; if we had had to do it, we would’ve. Even that’s a horrible thought to have to face. But Jay, don’t you remember, I told you that the outer satellites, Mars, the Moon, had all been evacuated?”
“Yes, but to where else but Earth? And Earth….”
“You don’t understand, Jay. The whole Sol system was evacuated. Every last human being on every last inhabited body, including Earth.”
“But how? To where?”
“There,” said Lingo, pointing to the five huge metal globes floating in space. “There, in the Meatwagons.”
“What! But as big as those things are, five billion people can’t live on them. They could never carry enough food or water or air. And even if they could, the people on them would die of old age before they reached the planets of the Confederation. Those things can’t go into Stasis-Space.”
“You’re right and you’re wrong, Jay,” Lingo said. “You’re right—the Meatwagons can’t travel faster than light. You’re right, they can’t carry enough food or water or air for five billion people. And you’re right, they’ll take so long to reach the Confederation that people living in them would die of old age. But, Jay, but! Remember your ancient history. Men did go to the stars before the Stasis-Field was discovered, at least to the nearer stars. And how did they do it?”
“Why, they used some kind of suspended animation, didn’t they? Deep Sleep they called it?”
“I don’t know what they called it, but I know how they did it. They simply froze themselves in liquid helium. Since they were traveling only through interstellar space while frozen, the cold of space kept the helium at near-absolute-zero, and they remained in suspended animation until they reached their destination.”
“You mean….?”
“Yes, Jay,” Lingo said. “The Meatwagons are little more than tanks of liquid helium, with Resolution Drives attached. Don’t forget, we knew what was going to happen years ago. So the entire population of the Sol system was frozen in liquid helium two years ago, and the Meatwagons were given long head starts. You know, people in suspended animation require no food, water, air or even space to move around in. And five spheres, each ten miles in diameter, can hold a hell of a lot of people when they’re all in suspended animation and stacked like cordwood.
“But…but…where are the Meatwagons going? What are you going to do with…with five billion supermen?“
“Not supermen, Jay!” Lingo snapped. “Men, Jay, men. Not superhuman, but totally human. Those five billion people represent about a billion Organic Groups. And as long as the Organic Groups are kept together, there’ll be no need to thaw out all five billion people at any one place. As you well know, an Organic Group is a complete unit, a little culture in itself. Every one of those people has at least one Talent. Don’t think of the Meatwagons as problems, Jay. They’re not. They’re the greatest storehouses of treasure in the history of the human race—the kind of treasure that really counts: people. There are hundreds of planets in the Confederation. Each one can easily accomodate a few million more people. Those five billion Solarians will be spread throughout the entire Confederation. They’ll become one with the rest of humanity, five billion merging with hundreds of billions, like a drop of water into the sea.”
“Not exactly a valid analogy,” Palmer said dryly. “They aren’t five billion ordinary people, Dirk, no matter what you say. They’re different, and as I have to admit, they’re better. They’ll transform the human race completely…if the human race will let them survive.”
Lingo smiled slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “But is that something to be afraid of? What we have learned, what we have become, will be the heritage of the entire human race. Intrinsically, there is no difference between the people of Sol and the people of the Confederation. The people of the Confederation have potential Talents too, but they’ve not been developed. You, Jay, for example, are probably a latent Game-master and Leader as well. Kurowski is a latent Leader, or he could never have become a High Marshal. Yes, Man is going to change—he is going to awaken. He is going to awaken to the full potential of his humaness, he is going to become something beyond his wildest dreams. And you, Jay, are the key.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You’ve proven that it can be done, that a man of the Confederation can become integrated into a Solarian Organic Group. You were an experiment, and the experiment has been a success. Now you know the full significance of the experiment. For in the decades to come, all mankind will organize itself into Organic Groups. You were the first, but you will not be the last. The great unk
nown in our plan has been resolved: the people of the Confederation are capable of change, of growth. The history of the human race is just beginning. What we will eventually become, no man alive can imagine. But one thing is certain, Jay: it will be men like you who will lead your people…our people. Men who can stand apart from both the Confederation and the memory of lost Sol, and be simply human beings…. Which, of course, is not a simple thing at all.”
And Palmer knew deep within him that it was so. Together, he and the Solarians had fought and won. Together, in that no-longer-distant day when the human race would be united and whole, they would go forth, Solarians and men of the Confederation alike, to meet the future.
Palmer gazeoff into space, at that insignificant point of light that was Sol, at a Sol whose image was almost two years old, the light of whose passing would not illumine the worlds of the Confederation for decades.
Arid when at last the light of nova Sol would reach the worlds of the Confederation to shine for a few brief days in the heavens, men would recognize it not as the funeral pyre of the human race, but as the dawning light of a brave tomorrow.
A light that would never die.
END
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Also By Norman Spinrad
Novels
The Solarians (1966)
Agent Of Chaos (1967)
The Men In The Jungle (1967)
Bug Jack Barron (1969)*
The Iron Dream (1972)
Riding the Torch (1978)*
A World Between (1979)
Songs From The Stars (1980)
The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)
Child Of Fortune (1985)
Little Heroes (1987)
Russian Spring (1991)
Pictures at 11 (1994)
Journals Of The Plague Years (1995)
Greenhouse Summer (1999)
He Walked Amongst Us (2003)*
Collections
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)*
No Direction Home (1975)
The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
Other Americas (1988)
Deus X and Other Stories (2003)
Non-Fiction
Science Fiction In The Real World (1990)
Norman Spinrad (1940 – )
Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1941. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad's work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Norman Spinrad 1966
All rights reserved.
The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11719 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of thithoutlisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
* Not available as an SF Gateway eBook
Table of Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Website
Also By Norman Spinrad
Author Bio
Copyright
The Solarians Page 21