by Howard Fast
That night, they talked again; and when they had talked themselves close to the edge of madness, Briggs ordered them to silence and sleep. But he knew that he was not too far from the edge of madness himself.
6
On the third day, the starship came to rest on the edge of a lake, whose shores were marked with pleasure houses and dream places. They could think of no other names for the buildings. Phillips and Gluckman remained with the ship; Briggs led the others down to a dock that appeared to be carved out of alabaster, and he selected a boat moored there large enough to hold them all. As they took their places in the boat, it stirred to life with the strange, haunting music of the planet, and the music washed away their fears and their cares, and Briggs saw that they were smiling at some inner fulfillment.
“We could remain here,” Laura Shawn said lazily.
Briggs knew what she meant. Five years in the starship had merged all their secrets, all their memories. Laura Shawn was a product of poverty, unhappiness, and finally divorce. Her scientific triumphs had left a string of emotional defeats behind her. She had never been happy before, and Briggs wondered whether any of them had. Yet they were happy now—and he himself, too, for all of his struggle to preserve in himself a fortress of skepticism and wary doubt. Doubt was an anathema in this place.
The boat had a wheel and a lever. The lever gave it motion; the wheel steered it. There was no sign of a propeller; it glided through the water by its own inner force; but this was not disturbing since their own starship rode the waves and currents of magnetism and force that pervaded the universe. So it was, Briggs thought to himself, with all the mysteries and wonders that man had faced from his very beginning; they were miracles and beyond explanation until man discovered the reason, and then in the simplicity and self-evidence of the reason, he could smile at his former fear and superstition. Was this planet any more wonderful or puzzling than the web of force that held the universe in place and order? And when the explanation came, if it ever did, he was certain it would be simple and even obvious.
Meanwhile, he steered the boat across the lake, and as they skirted the shore, building after building welcomed them with music and invited them to its own particular pleasure. He ran the boat through a canal bordered with great, flower-bearing trees, into another lake, where the water was so clear and pure that they could see all the gold and red and purple rocks on the bottom and watch gold and silver fish swimming and darting here and there. Then they entered a winding river, placid and lovely and bucolic, and they had gone a mile or so along this river, when they saw the man.
He stood on a landing place of pink, translucent stone, where there were a circle of carved benches, and he waved to them, almost casually. “Did we also think him into being?” Briggs asked caustically, as he turned the boat toward the dock. They rode to the mooring, and the man helped them out of the boat onto the steps that led up to the dock. He was a tall, well-built man, smiling and pleasant, his brown hair cut in the” page-boy style of the olden times on earth. He was of an indeterminate middle age, and he wore a robe of some light blue material, belted at the waist.
“Please—join me and make yourselves comfortable,” he said to them, his voice warm and rich and his English without an accent. “I am sorry for these three days of bewilderment, but there were things I had to do. Now, if you will sit down here, we can relax for a while and talk about some problems we have in common.”
His four companions were speechless; as for Briggs, he could only say, “Well, I’ll be damned!”
7
“Call me Smith,” he said. “I don’t have a name in your sense of the word. Smith will make it easier for you. No, you’re not dreaming. I am real. You are real. The place we are in is real. There is no reason for fear, believe me. Please sit down.”
They sat down on the translucent benches. He answered the thought in their minds,
“No, I am not an Earth Man. Only a man.”
“Then you read our minds?” Frances Rhodes wondered, not speaking aloud.
“I read your minds,” Smith nodded. “That is one reason why I talk your language so easily.”
“And the other reason?” McCaffery was thinking.
“We’ve listened to your radio signals many years—a great many years. I’m a student of English.”
“And this planet,” Briggs whispered. “Do you live here, alone?”
“No one lives here,” Smith smiled, “except the custodians. And when we knew you would land here, we asked them to leave for a little while.”
“In God’s name,” Carrington cried, “what is this place?”
“Only what it appears to be.” Smith smiled and shook his head. “No mystery, believe me. What does it appear to be?”
“A garden,” Laura. Shawn said slowly, “the garden of all my dreams.”
“Then you dream well, Miss Shawn,” Smith nodded. “You have places like this on your planet, parks, playgrounds. This is a park, a playground for children. That’s why no one lives here. It’s a place for children to come to and play and learn a little about life and beauty—you see, in our culture, the two are not separate.”
“What children?”
“The children of the Galaxy,” Smith nodded, waving a hand toward the sky. “There are a great many children—a great many playgrounds and parks, not unlike this one. Today, it is empty—tomorrow, five million children—they come and they go, even as they do in your own parks—”
“Our own parks,” Briggs was thinking bitterly.
“No, Lam not sneering, Pilot Briggs. I am trying to answer your questions and your thoughts—and to connect these things with what you know and understand.”
“You’re telling us that the Galaxy is inhabited—by men?”
“Why not by men? Can you really believe that man is an accident on one planet in a billion? Wherever there is life, in time man appears—and he lives now on more than half a million planets—in our galaxy alone. And he makes places like this place for his children.”
“And who are you?” Carrington said. “And why are you here alone?”
“How would you think of me?” Smith wondered. “We don’t have government in your terms. We don’t have nations. I could call myself an administrator—we have a good many. And I was sent here to meet you and talk to you. We have been watching you for a long time, tracing you—yes, we’ve watched the earth too, for a long time.”
“Talk to us—” Frances Rhodes said softly.
“Yes.”
“About what?” Briggs demanded.
“About your sickness,” Smith replied sadly.
8
An hour had passed. They sat silently, looking at Smith, and he watched them, and then Briggs said,
“For heaven’s sake, don’t pity us. We don’t ask for pity—not from you or any of your breed of supermen.”
“Not pity,” Smith told them. “We don’t have pity—it’s a part of yourselves, not of us. Sorrow is a better word.”
“Spare us that too,” said Gene Ling.
Carrington refused to allow anger or impatience to disturb his own reasoning. He felt a compulsion to demonstrate to Smith that he could reason dispassionately, and he said quietly and firmly,
“You see, Smith—you ask a great deal when you ask us for an admission of our own insanity. You pointed out, quite properly, I think, that we were egotistical and unscientific to believe that man was limited by nature to one obscure planet on the edge of the Galaxy. I hold that it is just as unscientific for you. to claim that of all the races of man on all the planets, only the people of Earth are mentally sick, emotionally unstable—yes, insane, the one word you were kind enough not to use—”
“Carrington, you’re wasting your time,” Briggs said sourly. “He can read our thoughts—all of them.”
“Which doesn’t change any of my arguments,” Carrington said to Smith. “You mention our wars, our history of mass slaughter, our use of atomic weapons, our record of murdering and des
troying each other—but these are the particulars and the wasteful errors of our development—”
“They are the specifics of your development,” Smith nodded reluctantly. “I hate to repeat that no other race of man in all the universe pursue murder as his major occupation and force of development—yet I must. Only on Earth—”
“But we are not all murderers,” Frances Rhodes protested. “I am a physician. If you know Earth so well, you know the history of medicine and healing on Earth.”
“A physician who carries a gun in a holster at her side,” Smith shrugged.
“For my protection only!” she cried.
“Protection? Against whom, Miss Rhodes?”
“We didn’t know—”
“I’m sorry,” Smith sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“I told you it’s no use,” Briggs snapped. “He reads our thoughts. He knows. God help us, he knows!”
“Yes, I know,” Smith agreed.
“Then you must know that people like ourselves are not murderers,” Carrington persisted, his voice still calm and controlled. “We are scientists. We are civilized people. You speak of how we are ridden with superstition, with gargantuan lies, with a love of the obscene and the monstrous. You mention half a billion Earth people who vocalize Christianity while none of them practice it. You talk about the millions we have slain in the name of freedom, brotherhood and God. You talk of our greed, our meanness, our perversion of love and sex and beauty—don’t you realize that we know these things, that our best and bravest have struggled against them for ages?”
“I realize that,” Smith nodded.
“He reads our thoughts,” Briggs repeated stubbornly.
“We are scientists,” Carrington continued. “We built this starship that brought us here. We lay in its hull for five endless years—that the frontiers of space might be conquered. And now, when we discover a universe of men—men talented and wonderful beyond all our dreams and imaginings, you tell us that this is barred to us forever—that we must live and die on our own speck of dust—”
“Yes, I am afraid it must be that way,” Smith agreed.
“Everything but pity,” said Laura Shawn.
Smith opened his robe, let it slip off his body to the ground, and stood before them naked. The women instinctively turned their heads away. The men reacted in shocked disbelief. Smith picked up his robe and clothed himself again.
“You see,” he said.
The five men and women stared at him, their eyes full of realization now.
“In all the universe,” Smith said, “there is only one race of man that holds its bodies in shame and contempt. All others walk naked in pride and unashamed. Only Earth has made the image of man into a curse and a shame. What else must I say?”
“Do you intend to destroy us?” Briggs asked harshly.
Smith looked at him with regret. “We don’t destroy, Briggs. We don’t kill.”
“What then?”
“You have something we don’t have,” Smith said softly, gently. “We had no need of it, but you had to create it—otherwise you would have perished in your sickness. You know what it is.”
“Conscience,” Gene Ling whispered.
“Yes—conscience. It will help. Go back to your starship and plot your course for home. And then you must make the decision to forget. When you make that decision, we will help you—”
“If we make it,” Briggs said.
“If you make it,” Smith agreed.
“Hold out some hope,” Laura Shawn begged him. “Don’t send us away like this. We came across—we were the first—”
“You weren’t the first,” Smith said, the sadness in his voice unbearable. “There were others from Earth, but each time they destroyed each other and the knowledge too. You weren’t the first and you won’t be the last—”
“Can we hope?” Laura Shawn pleaded.
“All men hope,” Smith said. “More than that—I don’t know.”
9
The starship circled the beautiful planet, and the seven people of Earth sat in the wardroom. Gluckman and Phillips had been told of the encounter, and by now they had all discussed it into silence and weariness. Only Briggs had said nothing—until now, and now he said,
“Why can’t we remember that he reads our thoughts? He knew.”
“I’m selfish,” Laura Shawn whispered through her tears. “It is easier to give up all it might mean to mankind than to give up my own memories.”
“Of three days of childhood?” Briggs said bitterly. “To hell with that! To hell with his damned Utopia! To hell with the stars! We’ll make an atmosphere on Mars and drain the poison gas from Venus! To hell with him and his gardens! We have a job of work! So set your stinking course for home, McCaffery—and the rest of you to bed. There’s another day tomorrow!”
That was the virtue of Briggs; for he more than any of them knew how right Smith was, and he wept his own tears into his pillow for hours-before sleep came. In the morning, he was better. By then, the starship had flung itself a hundred million miles in the direction of home, and that gave Briggs a good feeling.
Like the others, he remembered only a wasteland of burning suns, and in all the galaxy, no other planets than those of the Solar System. Like the others, he knew that he was returning to a place unique and precious in its singularity—Earth, the sole habitat of man.
Biography
Howard Fast (1914-2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.
Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.
Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.
Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.
Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).
Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. "They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage," Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he "fell in love with the area" and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.
Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother "had no childhood." As a result of their mother's death in 1923 and their father's absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. "My brother was like a rock," he wrote, "and without him I surely would have perished."