by Ben Bova
“See?” Jerlet said. “They all work fine.”
Linc shook his head. “Down in the Living Wheel they all died, a long time ago.”
Jerlet snorted. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that.”
He took Linc down the passageway and through a set of double doors into a strange, dead silent room. It felt odd. Linc knew he had never been here before, yet there was a faint odor of something that made his spine tingle and the back of his neck go shuddery. The room was filled with strange glass spheres, long looping tubes, viewscreens, desks, other things of glass and metal and plastic that Linc couldn’t even guess at.
“Genetics lab,” Jerlet said. His voice sounded odd; half-proud, half-sad. “This is where you were born, Linc. You and the others down in the living section.”
“Here?”
Jerlet nodded. “Yep. Took the sperm and ova from those cryofreezers, back behind the radiation shielding over there,” he pointed to a heavy-looking dull metal wall, “and brought the fetuses to term in these plastic capsules. All very carefully done, very scientifically. Each specimen picked for its genetic perfection. Each resulting infant nurtured as meticulously as the psychologists could hope. A generation of physically and mentally perfect children. Geniuses… left to live in an idiotic environment.”
Linc said, “I don’t understand you.”
Jerlet waved his pudgy hands about the laboratory.”! was in charge of the project. I made you. Right here. This is where you were all created. By me.”
10
Before Linc could ask any more questions, Jerlet swept him through the genetics lab and back out into the passageway.
“You haven’t seen the best part yet,” he said.
Totally puzzled by everything he’d seen and heard so far. Linc quietly followed the old man through a hatch into a tight little metal room. It felt cold and scary, like a deadlock. Bui even if he’s crazy, he wouldn’t put us both in a deadlock, Linc told himself. And a tiny voice asked back, Would he?
Jerlet’s massive bulk seemed to completely fill the metal chamber. Linc couldn’t breathe.
“Not too comfortable in here with both of us,” the old man muttered as he fingered a complicated row of buttons. “Not very comfy in here by myself, come to think of it.”
The top of the chamber swung open, and Linc realized it was another hatch. Jerlet grinned at him, then pushed against the sides of the chamber and floated up through the overhead hatch. Linc took a deep breath, glad to feel un-squeezed.
“Come on up and see the view!” Jerlet called. His voice suddenly sounded very distant and hollow.
Linc crouched slightly and sprang straight up. He shot through the open hatch and past Jerlet’s floating obesity—
And nearly screamed in terror. He was in the outer darkness! Surrounded by stars and the blackness of the outside where there was no air or warmth or--
He felt a hand grabbing at his ankle and Jerlet calling, “Hey, whoa, take it easy.” He realized that there was warmth and air to breathe.
Jerlet was chuckling as the two of them floated slowly in the star-flecked darkness. Yet it really wasn’t dark, either. The stars glowed all around them, over their heads, below their feet.
“What is this place?” Linc asked. His voice seemed to float, too, strange and hollow and lost in vast distance.
“Used to bean observatory,” Jerlet’s voice came back toward him, echoing.
Slowly, Linc’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. They were in a vast round room made almost entirely of glass: transparent plastiglass, actually, although Linc didn’t know that yet. The splendor of the stars surrounded them—stars powdering the blackness of infinity with endless points of light. White stars, blue stars, red stars, yellow stars… stars beyond counting, and even swirls and loops of brightness that glowed with strangely cool blues and pinks.
Linc felt his jaw hanging open as he floated in true weightlessness, hanging in the darkened observatory dome, gaping at the enormity of the universe.
And then he glanced downward, toward where his feet happened to be pointing, and saw the yellow star that was so close. He closed his eyes against its glare, but still its image burned against the inside of his eyelids.
“We’ll be there soon,” Jerlet’s voice sounded near to him.
Linc opened his eyes and saw the old man’s face next to him, haloed by the after-image of the yellow star. “It’s coming to swallow us,” Linc whispered. “It will kill us all in fire.”
Jerlet’s booming laughter surprised Linc. It echoed all around the huge dome.
“You’ve got it just about entirely wrong, son,” the old man said. “The yellow star isn’t coming toward us, we’re heading for it. And it’s not going to kill us—it offers us life. Hope. If we can get to it before this bucket falls completely apart!”
Linc started to say, I don’t understand, but it had become such an overworked Linc that he felt ashamed to use it again.
“C’mon down this way,” Jerlet tugged at his wrist, “and I’ll show you something.”
They swam weightlessly through empty air down to a patch of shadows that were deeper than the darkness of the rest of the dome. A spidery framework took shape as they approached, and Jerlet reached out a practiced hand for it.
“Careful,” he said to Linc. “Slow your speed or you’ll hurt yourself when you hit the deck. Just ’cause you’ve got no weight doesn’t mean you’ve got no inertia.”
He can never say more than three words in a row that make sense. Linc thought. He always uses words I never heard before.
The deck was made of cold metal, and Linc could see that several desks and odd-looking instruments were attached to it. The biggest loomed far over their heads; the cylinder of metal struts that Jerlet had grabbed a few moments earlier.
“Telescopes,” Jerlet said. “Devil’s own time keeping them aligned right. Our closing rate is outrunning the old computer program and I haven’t figured out how to update it. Gyros must be wearing out, too.”
Linc shook his head and said nothing.
Jerlet squeezed his soft body into a seat behind one of the desks. “Take a look at this screen,” he said as he touched some buttons on the desk top. Linc noticed that the desk top seemed to be nothing but buttons, row upon row of them.
The screen lit up and showed a fiery yellow ball that seethed and shimmered and shot out tongues of what could only be pure fire.
“That’s the yellow sun we’re heading for,” Jerlet said. “I tried for years to find out if the old generations had a name for it, but the tapes don’t have their star catalogues on ’em. Not anymore, anyway. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right tape— Anyway, I’ve named it Baryta, in honor of its color and in memory of my long-lost education in chemistry. That’s the name for our star: Baryta.”
A tiny voice inside Linc’s head began to whisper, He’s sounding crazy again.
Linc watched Jerlet’s face. The slanting light from the yellow star threw weird long shadows across his stubbly jowls and strongly-hooked nose. The creases under his eyes and around his mouth became deeply-shadowed crevasses. The glow from the little viewscreen where the blazing star smoldered wasn’t enough to penetrate the shadows.
“Now my frightened-looking friend,” Jerlet smiled up at Linc, “take a look at this —”
H e touched another set of buttons, and the screen went blank for a moment, then showed a picture of a bluish-green circle. It was flecked with white spots. It seemed to be hanging in outer darkness, because all around it was nothing but black.
“The new world.” Jerlet’s voice was barely audible now, a low rumble of hope and awe. “It’s a planet, Linc. A world that orbits around Baryta. I call it Beryl. It’s the destination that this ship has been heading for, for who knows how many generations.”
“A… world?”
“An open, beautiful, free world, Linc. With good air and clean water and more room than any of us could even imagine. Like the old Earth, except b
etter: cleaner, freer, newer. It’s our destination, Linc. Our new home. That’s where we’re going!”
Slowly, Linc began to learn.
With Jerlet as a teacher, and the ship’s computer and memory tapes to help, Linc began to understand the who, the how, and the why of life.
The ship was incredibly old, so old that no one—not even the computer and its memory tapes—knew how long it had been sailing through space. Linc saw that the Living Wheel, the section where he had lived all his life, was actually the outermost wheel in a series of twenty concentric circular structures. The tube-tunnels linked them together like spokes that radiated outward from the central hub. The hub was Jerlet’s domain, permanently weightless. The Living Wheel, turning endlessly on the widest arc of all the twenty wheels, was in a one g, Earth-normal gravitational condition.
The origins of the ship were shrouded in mystery, but the computer tapes made it clear that the ship’s oldest generation was forced to leave Earth, sent away to roam the stars against their will. Watching the men and women who spoke from the computer’s viewscreen, Linc saw that they regarded the Earth as evil and corrupt.
But when the history tapes showed pictures of Earth on the viewscreens, the pangs of ancient memories twisted inside Linc and made tears flow. All the old stories he had seen as a child, before the machines had died down in the Living Wheel: open skies of blue, bright soft clouds of purest white, mountains with snow on their shoulders, streams of clear water, grass and farms and forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. Cities that gleamed in the sunlight and sparkled at night. And people!
People of all ages, all sizes, all colors. By the uncountable multitudes. People everywhere.
Not everything he saw of Earth was good. There, was sickness. There was death. There was violence that turned-Linc’s stomach—gangs beating people on city streets, strange machines that spewed fire, people lying dead and twisted on the streets.
Now I know why Jerlet warned us against violence. Linc told himself.
But even at its worst, it was clear to see that Earth was a beautiful world. It made the cold metal walls of the ship seem like a prison to Linc.
“Beryl’s a planet that’s very much like Earth,” Jerlet said one evening as they watched the ancient tapes together. The viewscreen was showing a broad grassland with strange, long-tailed beasts thudding across the landscape on hooved slim legs. “It’ll be even better than Earth. Untouched. Our new world. Our new Eden.”
“When will we get there?” Linc asked.
“Not when, son… if.”
As Linc learned more of the history of the ship, he soon realized how badly the machines had fallen apart. Here in Jerlet’s domain everything worked well, but that was only one tiny section of the vast ship. Most of the other sections were shattered, ruined, decayed beyond all hope of repair.
“Some of the machines are still working down in the Living Wheel,” he told Jerlet.
“I know,” the old man said. “We spent the best years and the best people we had among us to set you kids up in a strong, safe area. But it might not have been good enough. We’re in a race against time.”
Again and again Jerlet told him the story. How the ship had come to a planet almost like Earth. How the people aboard had decided not to stop there, but to look for a world that was exactly like Earth.
“Beryl is that world… but it might be too late for you kids. It’s already too late for me.”
Jerlet explained it all. Time after time. He kept talking about the ship’s bridge, and how important it was to make the machines there work again. Slowly Linc began to realize that he was speaking of the Ghost Place, and the “ghosts” were Jerlet’s friends and companions who had been killed in some terrible accident.
The old man taught Linc how to read and count, how to work the computers, how to understand the strange words that were needed to run the ship. And every night, during dinner and far into the night, until Linc nodded and fell asleep, Jerlet would tell his own story.
The ship was never designed to function for so long without complete overhaul and repair. Although the ancient generations had been very wise, still they could not keep the ship’s machinery from slowly deteriorating.
As the ship cruised blindly through the depths of interstellar space, seeking the unknown world that was exactly like Earth, the machines that kept the people alive began to break down and die.
Whole sections of the ship became unlivable. The sections that remained intact were quickly overcrowded with too many people. Tempers flared. Violence erupted. And for generations the people of the ship lived in separate warring groups, each hating all the others, learning to fear strangers, to fight, to kill.
The cycle grew tighter and tighter. As more years passed, more and more of the ship’s complex machinery broke down. It became a greater struggle to survive, to keep the air pumps working and the farm tanks productive. Bands of marauding killers skulked through the tube-tunnels, breaking into living areas to steal and murder.
“The most ironic part of all,” Jerlet would say each night to Linc, “was that there was a scientific renaissance going on up here at the same time.”
In the hub of the ship a few dozen people had established themselves in some degree of comfort. They had control of the ship’s main power generators, and could turn off the supply of electricity—which meant warmth, air, life—to any group that displeased them. They tried to put an end to the roving bands of looters, but were never successful at it. On the other hand, the looters never tried to harm them.
The men and women who lived in the hub were scientists. Never more than a handful, they still managed to maintain themselves in relative peace.
“The things they learned!” Jerlet would always shake his head at the thought.
Their work in genetics reached the stage of perfection where they could, if they wanted to, create perfectly normal human children in their lab. The physicists probed deeply into the relationship of matter to energy, in an attempt to find a way to break free of the confines of the dying ship.
“They learned how to turn solid objects into a beam of energy, and then re-assemble them back into solid objects again, the way they were when they started,” Jerlet said. “But it took too much power for anything we really needed. We couldn’t get a rat’s whisker off the ship and back to Earth. But when we get close enough to Beryl’s surface, you’ll be able to whisk yourself down to the planet’s surface in an eyeblink.”
“But us, the kids down in the Living Wheel,” Linc always asked. “How did we come about? Why did you make us?”
And Jerlet would smile.
“We finally found a star like the Sun, and it had a few planets around it, although we were still too far away to see if any of the planets were truly like Earth. But we decided to take the risk. We had to…we knew the ship couldn’t last much longer, no matter what we did.
“I was getting to be middle-aged when we started the program to create you in the genetics lab. A hundred perfect specimens, as physically strong and mentally bright as we could produce. A hundred supermen and women.
“Well, we did it. And we set you up in the living section down in the one g wheel, next to the bridge. Six of us stayed with you the first few years, to get you started right. The servomechs did most of the dirty work, of course. But still… it was damned noisy down there!
“Around the time you were learning to walk, some marauders got to us. We protected you kids, but it cost us the lives of two people. One of them was my wife—”
Linc knew that a wife was a fully-grown girl.
“None of us could live indefinitely in a one g environment. We had all spent too much of our lives up here, in zero-g. I stayed the longest, and I worked damned hard to make sure that all the machines and servomechs would work right and take care of you until you were old enough to take care of yourselves. Meanwhile, the rest of my friends systematically finished off all the marauders on the ship. We weren’t going to let them
raid you again.”
“And then you left us on our own?”
Jerlet would nod his head sadly. “Had to. Gravity got to my heart. I had to come back up here. Then, while you pups were still growing up, the rest of my friends died off, most of them in an accident down on the bridge. I’m the last one left.”
Linc heard the story many times. But one particular night, as Jerlet wound up the tale, Linc said brightly:
“Well, at least you’ll be able to come with us to the new world… if the ship makes it there.”
Jerlet fixed him with a stern gaze. “It’s up to you to make sure this bucket limps into orbit around Beryl. That’s what I’m training you for, Linc. I spent a lot of years waiting for you kids to grow up and come up here and find me. You’ve got to keep this ship going until all you kids are safely transferred to the planet’s surface.”
For several minutes neither of them said a word. Finally, Linc nodded solemnly and said, “I’ll do it. I’ll get us all to Beryl if I have to go outside the ship and push it with my bare hands.”
Jerlet laughed. “That’d be something to see!”
“I’ll get us there. All of us. And that includes you.”
But the old man slowly shook his head. “No, not me. I can’t leave this zero g environment. My heart would go poof if I even tried to walk a few levels down the tube-tunnel, where the gravity starts to build up.”
Linc said, “No… we’ll find a way… something—”
“Listen, son,” Jerlet said calmly. “I’m an old man. I might not even make it to the time when we go into Orbit around Beryl. That’s why I’m pushing you so hard. It’s all on your shoulders. Linc. You’re the difference between life and death for all your friends.”
Book Two
11
The inflated pressure suit stood before Linc like a live human being. But its “face”—the visor of its helmet—was blank and empty. Linc tested each joint for air leaks: ankles, knees, hips, wrists, shoulders. All okay.