Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.
"I'm not getting through to them," he whimpered. "I don't know. What's the mat…Oh, of course!"
"What?"
"The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can't get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building over the whole island!
There's nothing those people can't do!"
"He's crazy," Johansen muttered. "Poor little"
The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it.
He read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.
"Almighty," Kidder read falteringly, "pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to raise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer."
Kidder's fingers danced over the keys. "You can look now," he gasped. "Go on the telescope!"
Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.
He saw what looked like land fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn't see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky white streaks.
Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.
"They did it," he said happily. "You see?"
Johansen didn't see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside the blackest night when it should have been dusk. "What happened?"
"The Neoterics," said Kidder, and laughed like a child. "My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can't be touched now!"
And at Johansen's amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.
Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick.
Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island; slid off and sank.
And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a non-dead source.
In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, "I can't stand it anymore! I can't!" and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the president's desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.
And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.
The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there a great hemi-ovoid of gray material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.
Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for, the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from materials at hand, and they simply didn't care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterward.
All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn't matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Someday the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.
THE STARS ARE IN THE STYX
First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1950
Every few years someone thinks to call me Charon. It never lasts. I guess I don’t look the part.
Charon, you’ll remember, was the somber ferryman who steered the boat across the River Styx, taking the departed souls over to the Other Side. He’s usually pictured as a grim, taciturn character, tall and gaunt.
I get called Charon, but that’s not what I look like. I’m not exactly taciturn, and I don’t go around in a flapping black cloak. I’m too fat. Maybe too old, too.
It’s a shrewd gag, though, calling me Charon. I do pass human souls Out, and for nearly half of them, the stars are indeed the Styx— they will never return.
I have two things I know Charon had. One is that bitter difference from the souls I deal with.
They have lost only one world; the other is before them. But I’m rejected by both.
The other thing has to do with a little-known fragment of the Charon legend. And that, I think, is worth a yarn.
1
It’s Judson’s yarn, and I wish he was here to tell it himself—which is foolish; the yarn’s about why he isn’t here. “Here” is Curbstone, by the way—the stepping-off place to the Other Side. It’s Earth’s other slow satellite, bumbling along out past the Moon. It was built 7800 years ago for heavy interplanetary transfer, though of course there’s not much of that left any more. It’s so easy to synthesize anything nowadays that there’s just no call for imports. We make what we need from energy, and there’s plenty of that around. There’s plenty of everything. Even insecurity, though you have to come to Curbstone for that, and be someone like Judson to boot.
It’s no secret—now—that insecurity is vital to the Curbstone project. In a cushioned existence on a stable Earth, volunteers for Curbstone are rare. But they come in—the adventurous, the dissatisfied, the yearning ones, to man the tiny ships that will, in due time, give mankind a segment of space so huge that even mankind’s voracious appetite for expansion will be glutted for millennia. There is a vision that haunts all humans today—that of a network of force-beams in the form of a tremendous sphere, encompassing much of the known universe and a great deal of the unknown—through which, like thought impulses through the synaptic paths of a giant brain, matter will be transmitted instantly, and a man may step from here to the depths of space while his heart beats once. The vision frightens most and lures a few, and of those few, some are chosen to go out. Judson was chosen.
I knew he’d come to Curbstone. I’d known it for years, ever since I was on Earth and met him. He was just a youngster then, thirty or so, and boiling around under that soft-spoken, shockproof surface of his was something that had to drive him to Curbstone. It showed when he raised his eyes. They got hungry. Any kind of hunger is rare on Earth. That’s what Curbstone’s for. The ultimate social balance—an escape for the unbalanced.
Don’t wince like that when I say ‘unbalanced’. Plain talk is plain talk. You can afford to be mighty plain about social imbalance these days. It’s rare and it’s slight. Thing is, when a man goes through fifteen years of primary social—childhood, I’m talking about—with all the subtle tinkering that involves, and still has an imbalance, it’s a thing that sticks with him no matter how slight it is. Even then, the very existence of Curbstone is enough to make most of ’em quite happy to stay where they are. The handful who do head for Curbstone do it because they have to. Once here, only about half make the final plunge. The rest go back—or live here permanently. Whatever they do, Curbstone takes care of the imbalance.
When you come right down to it, misfits are that way either because they lack something or because they have something extra. On Earth there’s a place for everything and everything’s in its place. On Curbstone you find someone who has what you lack, or who
has the same extra something you have—or you leave. You go back feeling that Earth’s a pretty nice safe place after all, or you go Out, and it doesn’t matter to anyone else, ever, whether you’re happy or not.
I was waiting in the entry bell when Judson arrived on Curbstone. Judson had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even know he was on that particular shuttle. It’s just that, aside from the fact that I happen to be Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, I like to meet the shuttles. All sorts of people come here, for all sorts of reasons. They stay here or they don’t for all sorts of other reasons. I like to look at the faces that come down that ramp and guess which ones will go which way. I’m pretty good at it. As soon as I saw Judson’s face I knew that this boy was bound Out. I recognized that about him even before I realized who it was.
There was a knot of us there to watch the newcomers come in. Most were there just because it’s worth watching them all, the hesitant ones, the damn-it-alls, the grim ones. But two Curbstoners I noticed particularly. Hunters both. One was a lean, slick-haired boy named Wold. It was pretty obvious what he was hunting. The other was Flower. It was just as obvious what she had her long, wide-spaced eyes out for, but it was hard to tell why. Last I had heard, she had been solidly wrapped up in an Outbounder called Clinton.
I forgot about the wolf and the vixen when I recognized Judson and bellowed at him. He dropped his kit where he stood and came bounding over to me. He grabbed both my biceps and squeezed while I thumped his ribs. “I was waiting up for you, Judson,” I grinned at him.
“MAN, I’m glad you’re still here,” he said. He was a sandy-haired fellow, all Adam’s apple and guarded eyes.
“I’m here for the duration,” I told him. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I—I mean…”
“Don’t be tactful, Jud,” I said. “I belong here by virtue of the fact that there’s nowhere else for me to go. Earth isn’t happy about men as fat and funny-looking as I am in the era of beautiful people. And I can’t go Out. I have a left axis deviation. I know that sounds political; actually it’s cardiac.”
“I’m, sorry.” He looked at my brassard. “Well, you’re Mr. Big around here, anyway.”
“I’m just big around here,” I said, swatting my belt-line. “There’s Coordination Office and a half-squad of Guardians who ice this particular cake. I’m just the final check on Outbounders.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You don’t rate. Much. The whole function of this space-station waits on whether you say yes to a departure.”
“Shecks now,” I said, exaggerating my embarrassment to cover up my exaggerated embarrassment.
“Whatever, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. I could be wrong—we’ll have to run some more tests on you—but if ever I saw an Outbounder, it’s you.”
“Hi,” said a silken voice. “You already know each other. How nice.”
Flower.
There was something vaguely reptilian about Flower, which didn’t take a thing from her brand of magnetism. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she was a so-so looking girl. Her eyes were too long, and so dark they seemed to be all pupil and the whites too white. Her nose was a bit too large and her chin a bit too small, but so help me, there never was a more perfect mouth. Her voice was like a ’cello bowed up near the bridge. She was tall, with a fragile-in-the-middle slenderness and spring-steel flanks. The overall effect was breathtaking. I didn’t like her. She didn’t like me either. She never spoke to me except on business, and I had practically no business with her. She’d been here a long time. I hadn’t figured out why, then. But she wouldn’t go Out and she wouldn’t go back to Earth—which in itself was all right; we had lots of room.
Let me tell you something about modern women and therefore something about Flower—something you might not reason out unless you get as old and objective as I’ve somehow lived to become.
Used to be, according to what I’ve read, that clothes ran a lot to what I might call indicative concealment. As long as clothes had the slightest excuse of functionalism, people in general and women in particular made a large fuss over something called innate modesty—which never did exist; it had to be learned. But as long as there was weather around to blame clothes on, the myth was accepted. People exposed what the world was indifferent to in order to whip up interest in the rest. “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” one of the old books says. Clothes as weatherproonng got themselves all mixed up with clothes as ornament; fashions came and went and people followed them.
But for the past three hundred years or so there hasn’t been any “weather” as such, for anyone, here or on Earth. Clothes for only aesthetic purposes became more and more the rule, until today it’s up to the individual to choose what he’s going to wear, if anything. An earring and a tattoo are quite as acceptable in public as forty meters of iridescent plastiweb and a two-meter coiffure.
Now, most people today are healthy, well-selected, and good to look at. Women are still as vain as ever. A woman with a bodily defect, real or imagined, has one of two choices: She can cover the defect with something artfully placed to look as if that was just the best place for it, or she can leave the defect in the open, knowing that no one today is going to judge her completely in terms of the defect. Folks nowadays generally wait until they can find out what kind of a human being you are.
But a woman who has no particular defect generally changes her clothes with her mood. It might be a sash only this morning, but a trailing drape this afternoon. Tomorrow it might be a one-sided blouse and clinging trousers. You can take it as a very significant thing when such a woman always covers up. She’s keeping her natural warmth, as it were, under forced draft.
I didn’t go into all this ancient history to impress you with my scholastics. I’m using it to illustrate a very important facet of Flower’s complex character. Because Flower was one of those forced-draft jobs. Except on the sun-field and in the swimming pools, where no one ever wears clothes, Flower always affected a tunic of some kind.
The day Judson arrived, she wore a definitive example of what I mean. It was a single loose black garment with straight shoulders and no sleeves. On both sides, from a point a hand’s-breath below the armpit, down to the hipbone, it was slit open. It fastened snugly under her throat with one magne-clasp, but was also slit from there to the navel. It did not quite reach to mid-thigh, and the soft material carried a light biostatic electrical charge, so that it clung to and fell away from her body as she moved. So help me, she was a walking demand for the revival of the extinct profession of peeping Tom.
This, then, was what horned in on my first few words with Judson. I should have known from the way she looked that she was planning something—something definitely for herself. I should have been doubly warned by the fact that she took the trouble to speak up just when she did—just when I told Jud he was a certifiable Outbounder if I ever saw one.
So then and there I made my big mistake. “Flower,” I said, “this is Judson.”
She used the second it took me to speak to suck in her lower lip, so that when she smiled slowly at Jud, the lip swelled visibly as if by blood pressure. “I am glad,” she all but whispered.
And then she had the craft to turn the smile on me and walk away without another word.
“… Gah!” said Judson through a tight glottis.
“That,” I told him, “was beautifully phrased. Gah, indeed. Reel your eyeballs back in, Jud. We’ll drop your duffel off at the Outbound quarters and— Judson!”
Flower had disappeared down the inner ramp. I was aware that Judson had just started to breathe again. “What?” he asked me.
I waddled over and picked up his gear. “Come on,” I said, and steered him by the arm.
Judson had nothing to say until after we found him a room and started for my sector. “Who is she?”
“A hardy perennial,” I said. “Came up to Curbstone two years ago. She’s never been certified. She’ll get around to it soon—or never. Are you going
right ahead?”
“Just how do you handle the certification?”
“Give you some stuff to read. Pound some more knowledge into you for six, seven nights while you sleep. Look over your reflexes, physical and mental. An examination. If everything’s all right, you’re certified.”
“Then—Out?”
I shrugged. “If you like. You come to Curbstone strictly on your own. You take your course if and when you like. And after you’ve been certified, you leave when you want to, with someone or not, and without telling anyone unless you care to.”
“Man, when you people say ‘Voluntary’ you’re not just talking!”
“There’s no other way to handle a thing like this. And you can bet that we get more people Out this way than we ever would on a compulsory basis. In the long run, I mean, and this is a long-term project…six thousand years long.”
He walked silently for a time, and I was pretty sure I knew his thoughts. For Outbounders there is no return, and the best possible chance they have of survival is something like fifty-four per cent, a figure which was arrived at after calculations so complex that it might as well be called a guess. You don’t force people Out against those odds. They go by themselves, driven by their own reasoning, or they don’t go at all.
2
After a time Judson said, “I always thought Outbounders were assigned a ship and a departure time. With certified people leaving whenever they feel like it, what’s to prevent uncertified ones from doing it?”
“That I’m about to show you.” We passed the Coordination offices and headed out to the launching racks. They were shut off from Top Central Corridor by a massive gate. Over the gate floated three words in glowing letters:
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