The Old Man of the Stars

by John Burke

  It was a warm day, and by the time they had finished the five or six miles, they were hot and weary. They stopped a hundred yards away from the fallen spaceship, and looked at it speculatively.

  Matthew said: “Better be careful.”

  There was no sound from the interior. No sound, no movement.

  Clifford abruptly strode forward, indicating that the other two should stay where they were. He went up to the jagged opening where the nose had been blown off.

  They saw him peer in. Then he stepped cautiously over the raw edges of torn metal, and disappeared from their sight inside the remains of the hull.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Light fell obliquely through holes and shattered ports. Clifford picked his way over a tangle of wiring and metal fragments. In the comer he saw a torn heap of something that was not metallic—something that might once have been a living being.

  The horrors of the morning’s investigation had hardened him. He looked down with no more than a slight, involuntary contraction of his throat at the pulped flesh. Whatever it had once been, it was nothing human: it was an alien, unrecognisable creature.

  He turned away and was about to open the door that hung loosely across the corridor when he heard a faint scratching noise.

  Clifford stood quite still.

  It came again, faint but unmistakable.

  He moved cautiously along the wall and reached silently towards the door. Then he kicked it open and went through.

  Below a control panel that formed the whole of one wall lay something that was alive—just alive.

  It scrabbled long, fine claws against the floor, and made a guttural noise that might have been a word or a groan of pain.

  It was a creature that did not seem to belong to the order of vertebrates as men knew it. There was a slackness about its whole bulky body that reminded Clifford of some reptile—only the body was grey and possessed none of the beautiful flickering colours of the Elysian reptiles. The head was flattened and marked out with a pattern of scaly flaps that might have been eyes or other sensory organs. Incongruously, the mouth might have been a human mouth, though it was thicker and more fleshy than any human mouth had ever been.

  Clifford bent over the creature. The weak throbbing and twisting of its body testified to its agony. Even with the memory of the destroyed town fresh in his mind, he instinctively sought for some way to alleviate this being’s pain.

  But before he could even begin to think of what could be done, the creature spoke. It spoke to him in his own language. It said in a thick slurring voice:

  “Earthman.... Go away. Do not touch me. I wish to die unpolluted.”

  Clifford stood up, dumbfounded. His first impulse was to fire questions, to demand why such a murderous attack had been made on the towns of Elysium. Before he could speak, the creature thrust itself up into an ungainly mound, struggling to rise to its strangely flexing legs.

  “I die hating you,” it mouthed. “We did well before you struck us. We destroyed nobly, and it is good. Conquerors, exploiters...your day has come.”

  “Now, hold it a minute,” said Clifford. “I want to know what—”

  The voice rose to a scream. “Hatred of your people is a sacred duty, and we of this ship have done our duty. The day of reckoning is here. You shall be wiped from the universe.”

  The effort had been too much. It slumped down and did not move again.

  There were other voices—familiar, reassuring voices—calling Clifford’s name. The two men outside were getting worried. He went further along the corridor and found the airlock door, pulled away from its mountings. He opened it, and Matthew and Bellhouse climbed in.

  Clifford led them into what was obviously the control cabin, and showed them the dead mass on the floor. He repeated what he had heard.

  “There must be some others aboard. Perhaps one or two were quite blotted out when the nose was hit, but there must be some in the stern of the ship.”

  Warily, they explored the rest of the small craft. They found six more bodies. Bellhouse shuddered.

  “Hideous things. They’re not natural.”

  Matthew chuckled. “There are stranger things than that in the universe. Actually, this is a life-form that I’ve seen once or twice—or variations of it, that is.” He frowned thoughtfully. “These creatures remind me of something. I believe there were such beings on one of the outer worlds. They were friendly when we arrived. We left a fairly large group of our people there to establish good relations, so that trade possibilities could be opened up when a good regular service had been established with Earth. They were friendly,” he repeated.

  “They certainly aren’t friendly any longer,” said Clifford. “Come on, let’s see what we can find out about the ship itself. The controls and the drive chambers don’t seem to have suffered too badly. We might find out something useful.”

  Bellhouse said: “It’s very doubtful if we can follow the workings of an alien mind. Their engines and indicators won’t mean a thing to us.”

  “Perhaps not, but there’s no harm in trying to sort out a few loose ends.”

  He examined the dials on the control panel, and then looked down at a chart on the slanting panel at which two pilots obviously sat.

  “If only we knew what this meant.”

  “I once had a head for figures,” said Matthew self-consciously. “Surely we can find some relation between their figures and our own. Mathematics can’t vary.”

  “I’m not sure that I believe in mathematical absolutes,” said Clifford, “but I’m willing to make the effort.”

  They were in a way, thought Matthew, complementary: Clifford had an urge to know, to pull things to pieces, to drag the truth forcibly out of things; he himself had lived too long to be impatient—he saw things in perspective, set them in their places, and worked methodically.

  They worked in the ship until the late afternoon, Bellhouse spending most of his time in the cramped engine-room, the other two comparing charts and trying to make sense of the characters on the displays. When they decided to call it a day, they had reached certain conclusions—conclusions that made them shake their heads incredulously. Bellhouse, coming in from the engine-room, said:

  “It’s queer. I can’t make out what all that stuff in there is supposed to do, and yet I can guess what a lot of the components are for.”

  Matthew and Clifford exchanged glances.

  “You mean that the—er—well, what you might call basic elements are the same as our own?” asked Clifford.

  “Something like that. They must have a different way of making the ship move from what we have, but the machinery isn’t at all strange.”

  Clifford nodded. “It’s more or less the same is here,” he said. “The symbols aren’t the same as ours, but it’s only a matter of mathematical transposition. These displays are easy to read, though of course we don’t know the actual value of the quantities represented: we only know—and recognise—the proportions, the relation of one symbol to another. There’s even a clock here: and I’m willing to swear it’s based on the same principles as our own clocks.”

  Matthew hastened to agree. “After seeing the linear clocks of Antares and some of the weird devices used by other races,” he said, “it hits you in the eye when you come across a clock that looks like a clock.”

  “What it amounts to,” murmured Clifford, “is that these creatures started from the same basic suppositions as the builders of our own space ship—of our own civilisation, even. It’s not just that they worked away at a problem and came to the same conclusion; they started out the same. There’s a family likeness in everything here that can’t be mistaken. Everything fits into our own scheme of knowledge. And that dying creature spoke to me in our own language. It’s as though he were a member of a race that had been educated by Earthmen, taught to cope with things as Earthmen cope with them. This race may have learned its groundwork from Earthmen, just as a musical genius-to-be learns his basic theory from a tea
cher; and then they’ve developed these techniques further—”

  “And then,” Matthew continued, “they’ve turned against their benefactors.”

  “If they were benefactors,” said Clifford.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know. It was a thought that came into my head. I’m not really sure,” he frankly laughed, “that I know what I mean. I was just groping.”

  They looked at the array of displays on the control panel as though expecting them to surrender their meaning at once.

  Clifford went on: “But what’s so impossible is that if these figures we’ve worked out mean anything at all—and they tally in every way—this ship travels at a speed that...that...well,” he waved his right hand vaguely, “we’ve never believed in such a thing.”

  Matthew said: “It’s no good pretending we’re not sure. We’re quite certain. These figures can’t lie. We’ve worked out the relationship between the clock symbols, those four displays above the scanner, and this heap of charts, and we know we’ve worked it out right. And if these figures mean what we think they mean—what we’re damned sure they mean—then a ship powered by these engines could reach Earth in twenty-five years.”

  Bellhouse shook his head dazedly. He said: “But that means—”

  “It means,” said Matthew, “that if we could transfer the engines to our own ship, or adapt them for our own use, everyone on board could reach Earth alive. Not just myself, and not the descendants of the original crew, but all those who actually embark!”

  They went out into the open air and looked up at the stars that were already bright in the first haze of twilight.

  Clifford said: “We don’t know how those engines work. We don’t know how seriously damaged they are. We don’t know if they will work in a larger ship such as ours. But by heaven, we’re going to find out. I want to see Earth and find out what has been happening. The prospect of seeing Earth itself was only a dream, but now it’s a possibility. And by the time we’ve finished it will be a probability!”

  * * * *

  They worked for three months on exasperating preparations that had to be made before the real work could be tackled. Men whose work would have been welcomed full-time on the mechanical side had to spend a certain amount of time on the land, maintaining food supplies for present requirements and preparing concentrates for the journey. Most of the food would of course be grown on board by the shallow culture method, providing concentrates in sufficient quantity to feed the crew effectively. Someone had to make experiments with this technique, as none of those at present available were experts on such matters.

  Fortunately, at the end of the first month, an experienced biologist appeared. He came trudging into sight across the plain in company with four others—survivors of Decelonia, the town beyond Martinstown.

  “We heard your signals and questions on the day of the attack,” he told Matthew and Clifford, “but after that the building was destroyed, and we had no way of getting in touch with you.”

  He and his companions had come through Martinstown and found no one left alive there. But from the hills they had seen the shattered enemy ship, and signs of activity in the distance, and they had come on full of hope.

  “Must have been different ships that attacked you,” said Clifford after a comparison of times on that fateful day had been made. “Mm. They were certainly out to finish us off.”

  The biologist gladly set to work to develop the shallow culture beds. Three of the women who had come with him began to make clothing. “We shall wear as little as possible on board ship,” Matthew explained. “You’ll find it gets intolerably hot inside the ship, even though space itself is icy cold. But the climates of other planets are nothing like Elysium. We must have plenty of adequate clothing stowed away, ready for when we need it.” And so the various tasks were allotted to eager helpers. Setting off into space was not merely a matter of building a suitable engine into a ship, and then launching it: food and clothing, air purification plant and the manufacture of oxygen in conjunction with the food culture shelves were all prime essentials.

  Innumerable frustrating difficulties were encountered. A prosperous industrial civilisation had first conceived and built the spaceship that had left Earth for the stars. A pastoral civilisation whose members had nearly all been blotted out in a ruthless attack was now trying to make that ship spaceworthy again, and it was not an easy task. The months rolled by. The furnaces in the old factories on the far side of the town had to be brought into use, and their inefficiencies rectified.

  Clifford and Bellhouse spent weeks tracing the convolutions of the drive mechanism in the enemy ship. They evolved a theory, experimented, and nearly blew out the side of the main building. But they insisted that they were on the right track, and went on until they were satisfied.

  Matthew found it hard now to control his impatience. Despite all the setbacks, his dream of going home was nearer realisation than it had ever been before; but that only had the effect of making him more and more irritable. How long would these wearisome constructional jobs take? How long before they soared up into space and turned towards Earth?

  There were other problems to be dealt with, too. Human problems.

  Most of those preparing for the flight into space had been enthusiasts from the start. The nucleus of the group was formed of men and women whose imaginations had been excited by Matthew’s hopes and by the stories he told, and now that their homes had been destroyed they had an additional reason for no longer staying on this planet. Added to that, the promise of getting to Earth in twenty-five years was a real incentive.

  But there were one or two people who were not too happy about the voyage. Two young men and a middle-aged woman who had come from Decelonia were particularly hostile.

  “Why should we slave to go out and spend the better part of our lives cooped up in a spaceship?” they demanded. “Better to stay here. We can live simply, and slowly rebuild a town here.”

  “A hundred years from now,” grumbled the woman, “there could be a thriving town here again—or at the very least a village—instead of nothing at all. If we set off in this ship, we may all be killed, and there will be nothing left on Elysium but ruins. But if we stay, in a few hundred years there will be happiness and life here again—”

  “And in a few hundred years,” said Clifford, “that planet will come swimming back along its orbit, and the destroying ships may come again. They may come along before then, because new drives will have been perfected—and new weapons of destruction.”

  “Well, it won’t be in my lifetime, anyway,” said the woman.

  It was not easy to be patient with such people. Nor did it do any good to smile calmly and say that they could stay behind if they wished: they became rapidly abusive, as though it had been suggested that they should be brutally murdered or left to starve.

  And in addition to this small group, there were one or two waverers. There was, for example, Alida.

  Matthew saw Alida frequently, as he went to and fro in the clamour of each energetic day, and each time he saw her his envy of Clifford increased. The girl had such a brittle, fragile appearance, and yet was so taut and full of vitality. It was not often that she smiled, but that slow reflective parting of her lips was worth waiting for. Even Elysium had rarely produced a creature so beautiful.

  And she did not want to leave Elysium.

  In the evening, when the clangour and confusion around the spaceship had ceased, Matthew would sometimes see her walking in the shadows of the wood with Clifford, They walked slowly, and talked spasmodically, in an intimate undertone. Sometimes Clifford would be moody the next day.

  On one such occasion Matthew decided to tackle the matter openly. He strolled up the slope as Clifford and Alida emerged from the woods, and waited for them to join him.

  The evening light cast a glow on Alida’s bare arms. She looked up at the splashes of colour that lay across the sky, and then glanced out across the
plain as though anxious to fix it all in her memory—as though reluctant ever to be forced to leave it.

  Matthew said: “You two look glum. Getting tired of waiting for the ship to be finished?”

  Alida sensed the irony in his tone if Clifford didn’t and she said at once: “It breaks my heart to think of leaving here. These wonderful evenings; the afternoons of summer; the sounds and scents of this world....”

  “I should have thought,” said Matthew quietly, “that the sight of the town ruins would have depressed you. There would always be too many memories here.”

  “We could go away. There are thousands of miles of the planet that have never been travelled at all.”

  “But wherever you go on this planet, one day the ships will come back, and there will be destruction once more—if not for you, for those who come after you.”

  Sadly she nodded. “I know that well. I know that we must go. But it’s so hard. To turn your back on beauty and resign yourself to imprisonment for twenty-five years is a bitter thing.”

  Matthew tried to point out that they would not be in space for the whole time. They would stop on the way: they would visit other worlds and try to make contact with the other races, to find out what had happened to the pioneers from Earth who had been left behind on that outward journey. None had ever come on to Elysium: that was not surprising, as the leap to Elysium had been the longest and most arduous stretch of all; but one wanted to know, to learn, to be told the innumerable histories.

  Alida nodded her acceptance of all that he said. She would come with Clifford—there was no question of that—but she did not pretend that she was happy. Her imagination had once been kindled by the enthusiasm of the two men, but that spurt of interest had been overcome by her longing for the tranquility of life on the world she knew so well.

  Leaving them, Matthew found himself wondering if he was justified in driving these people so hard. If he were to cease harrying them, they would not leave Elysium. With the pressure relaxed, they would fall into their old ways. Even Clifford, drawn into contentment with Alida, would probably not persist for long. The ship would remain where it was, almost ready for a take-off that it would never make.