The Old Man of the Stars

by John Burke

  Matthew said: “You seem worried about my influence. If everyone feels as you do, why bother if I keep talking? Are you afraid of me?”

  “You’re a nuisance. You might talk some of them round....”

  “Ah! That’s it!” cried Matthew triumphantly. “You know that plenty of them feel ashamed of not going right on to the end. They’re wavering, but if I keep on at them they’ll come with me to Earth. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve no right to influence them. You’ve got to be silenced.”

  “You’ll never silence me.”

  The flame gun came up and pointed steadily at his chest. “We’ve had enough arguments. You’re going to be silenced, even if it means killing you.”

  And then a voice said: “There will be no killing.”

  Diemer and three of his men came briskly into the room, with Eve hurrying behind them. She gave a gasp of relief when she saw Matthew.

  The flame gun was wrenched from the man’s grasp.

  He said: “What right have you—?”

  “There has been enough killing. There has been too much murder and hatred in the universe. Here on Platonia we will have no bloodshed.”

  “This man is inhuman. He’s lived too long. He has no right to play with the destinies of short-lived human beings merely in order to satisfy his whims.”

  Diemer said gravely: “He has the right to try to convince people. Tomorrow we must have a decision. Tomorrow the whole matter must be discussed.”

  Eve was freeing Matthew’s hands. He felt the touch of her slim fingers on his skin, and looked up at her in wonderment. She smiled shakily. He felt a great surge of hope, mingled with downright disbelief, when he saw the expression in her eyes.

  She said: “I guessed what they were up to. I warned Diemer.”

  “I didn’t realise you were as...as interested,” he said lamely.

  Again she smiled. “We shall reach Earth,” she said.

  * * * *

  The next day there was a meeting attended by all the passengers of the ship and a large number of the Platonians. Matthew spoke fervently of the need to get to Earth and find out what had happened. He spoke of their ancestry, of Earth as the mother of all the people who had spread out across the universe.

  “Admittedly,” he said frankly, “the results of that expansion have been terrible. We cannot be proud of what our race has done. But is that any excuse for giving up our quest and settling down to a placid life in these surroundings? We said we would make the journey to Earth. We accepted a challenge. Are you going to give up now? If comfort is going to come before the sense of adventure, the human race is certainly doomed—and despite everything bad that has happened, I believe the human race should still strive and take risks, and ask questions.”

  He tried to put across to them his own conviction of the cosmic importance of this return to Earth. It was difficult. To them it was only a name. They had not been the pioneers: they were not going home.

  But suddenly Eve jumped up and stood beside him. She cried: “What’s wrong with everybody? Are you all afraid to face what may be waiting on Earth? It’s not just laziness and the desire for comfort that’s keeping you here: it’s cowardice. I’ve never seen Earth, and I’ve never seen Elysium. I know which is the nearer now, and I want to get there. I don’t want to die of boredom. At least while we were in the ship we were travelling—we were going somewhere, and wondering what it would be like. If we settle down here there will be no wonder left. We’ll know everything that is ever likely to happen to us. I want to strike out into the unknown—to ask questions and find the answers, and still keep asking questions....”

  She lashed them with her youthful, impetuous fury. Matthew listened, his mind in a turmoil. At one moment he caught her mother’s eye. Alida was staring at him, something also like fear in her eyes; and then there was compassion and a strange resignation in the place of fear.

  The arguments were over. Some of the men and women would stay, but several of them, including Dr. Richard, would carry on to the end of the journey. And there were actually some volunteers from Platonia. Several of the young men and women, and one or two middle-aged people, joined the crew.

  There were enough of them to take the ship safely to Earth.

  Matthew caught Eve’s hand and held it. They both laughed wildly, foolishly.

  Alida came up to them. She said to Matthew: “I shall come, too. Clifford would have wanted it. My daughter is quite right, and I’m proud of her. I want to see this journey through to the end.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  They were all five years older. Perhaps some of them regretted the decision they had taken. Perhaps they dreamed sometimes of the Platonian tranquillity just as, earlier, the original members of the crew had dreamed of Elysium. But they had come, and here they were in the spaceship as it spun down at last through the solar system that Matthew remembered.

  He was very silent. There was no exultation in his mind: only a numbness that made it impossible for him to describe his feelings, even to himself.

  The sun glowed in familiar skies. The pattern of stars was one that he remembered from a distant past that suddenly seemed very close.

  Eve stood by him in the control room. Every now and then she asked some question and he responded automatically. He did not let himself think of Eve too much. She was beautiful now, and he was afraid of her beauty. He wanted her as he had never wanted any woman before: but at the back of his mind was the knowledge that she would grow old while he stayed unnaturally young. For her sake he would not let her go through that experience.

  The ship quivered with the thrust of its retarding blasts. Slowly it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

  Now Matthew was to be put to the test. He sat rigid, afraid of what they would find. He had driven these people on: he had urged them to come with him, to keep travelling until they reached the home of their ancestors; and what would they find?

  It was as though Eve read his thoughts. She put her hand lightly on his shoulder.

  “Whatever happens,” she said, “it’s been a great adventure. It had to be undertaken.”

  He would have liked to show how grateful he was for her calm reassurance, but there was nothing he could say or do. Automatically he issued instructions to his young co-pilot, one of the Platonians who had passed five interested years learning all that the ship could teach him.

  Clouds writhed about the ship and then were gone.

  Abruptly, emerging like a picture that had come unexpectedly into focus, the Earth was below them, clear and bathed in sunlight.

  Matthew said tensely: “All right. I’ll take over.”

  He recognised the area of the North American coastline, above which they had come out. And he knew that the huddled ruins some miles to the south must represent what had once been New York.

  Ruins....

  For two days and nights he kept the ship on a zigzag, twisting course above the Earth. He refused to pass the controls over to any of the other pilots. Desperately, racing through hours of darkness into the sunlight of another day, he sought for a sign of hope. But cities were already being overrun by grass and weeds. Nature was reclaiming its old territories. In South America the jungles had marched back upon man’s civilisation. In the North, where once had been the great industrial and experimental area of White Sands City, there were only gaping craters, a bleak desert that looked like the surface of the moon.

  Across Asia and Europe—above places whose names were now only a memory: and, thought Matthew, those names existed only in his memory. There was nobody else alive who had known them. All that was left of human civilisation on Earth was locked in his mind.

  His eyes were red with weariness. Not just the weariness of this grim exploration, but the fatigue of centuries. He was conscious of the loss of friends across the years. One after another they had died, while he went on living. And now he looked down on the remains of what had once been his world. There was nothing left. There was only
himself, utterly alone. The people in the spaceship were not really his people. They were strangers.

  “Matthew....”

  Eve was talking to him. She was saying that he must rest. She was trying to persuade him to bring the ship down, to sleep and be quiet for a time until his energies were restored. He heard the words, but their meaning did not come over to him.

  The last place he meant to visit was not far away. He had half-deliberately slowed the ship, as though afraid to find this last proof of despair. But the English Channel gleamed below, and the shadow of the ship moved across it like a dark stain.

  There, at last, was London. The white belt of skyscrapers that had encircled the old city had fallen. From here the circle of buildings that had been conceived and constructed in Matthew’s youth looked like nothing so much as a ring of white ash. And within the circle lay what was left of the ancient metropolis. The dome of St. Paul’s, cracked like an eggshell, still stood up above the surrounding desolation, but most of the body of the building had crumbled. The dome itself would not stand up much longer. It was a memorial to vanished splendour, and soon it would collapse and lie defeated with the rest of the city.

  The spaceship veered in a dizzy arc, and began to lose height.

  Eve cried out. The co-pilot tried to wrench Matthew’s hands from the controls, but Matthew held on firmly without knowing what he was doing. A wave of darkness rolled up over his vision. He could no longer see. Tiredness and dizziness closed on him, yet through the haze he was aware of voices, and of a woman screaming down the echoing corridors of the ship.

  At the last moment he opened his eyes. Beyond the observation port a slanting green wall was racing up to meet them. A strip of sea glanced along a crazily tilted horizon.

  Then there was an impact that smashed Matthew forward against the control panel. The enclosed world of the ship was filled with a great explosion of noise, a splintering and a scream of shattered engines.

  And then silence.

  * * * *

  He awoke to pain. His head and his right shoulders throbbed with deep agony. He felt sick inside, as though his stomach had been pounded viciously.

  Light struck at his eyes and he turned his head. At once it was pain again, so swift that he almost fell again into unconsciousness. Very slowly he opened his eyes, carefully not moving his head.

  Eve said: “You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.”

  He was lying on a smooth stretch of grass, through which a faint wind whispered fretfully. Above him the sky seemed monstrous, a great curve over this expanse of flat land.

  “Don’t try to sit up.”

  “The others?” he asked weakly. “Everybody else—what happened to them?”

  “Nobody killed,” she said soothingly. “A few broken legs and arms. But it could have been worse. Much worse. We drove into the mud at the side of a ditch—we went in a long way. There was nobody in the nose of the ship, so things weren’t too bad.”

  “And the ship?”

  He knew the answer without being told. The ship had come off lightly, but it was certainly damaged: and how, on a forsaken world, could that damage ever be repaired?

  Bellhouse loomed above him, looking down with a twisted yet affectionate smile. He said: “Well, Matthew, we made it. We’re here. This is the end of the trip.”

  “The end? Yes,” said Matthew dully, “this is the end.”

  It was some time before he was steady enough to walk any distance. Bellhouse supervised the unloading of stores, ready for a long stay.

  “Somehow,” he said to Matthew a few days later, “I don’t think we’ll be making any more journeys.”

  They sat in the musty-smelling living room of an old farmhouse. There were holes in the roof, but this ancient building had stood up to the ravages of time better than most of the modem edifices they had seen. The main building and its outhouses served as a temporary headquarters.

  Behind the house was the gentle slope of a hill, at the top of which was another deserted house that could easily be taken over and repaired. Before them was the stretch of coastal plain that ended in a ridge of sand dunes. A warm breeze blew persistently off the sea, rustling without ceasing in the reeds and tall grasses that rose from the dykes and streams that made a complicated pattern over the plain. Here and there, along a ridge that stood above the level expanse, ran old forgotten roads, some of them no doubt dating back to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  Matthew said: “It certainly looks as though we won’t be able to take off for a long time. To repair that ship here will be even more difficult than it was to get it into shape on Elysium.”

  “We’ve got to make the best of things,” said Bellhouse coolly. “Here we are on Earth, and that’s that.”

  They watched Eve walking towards the farmhouse. She had been strolling across the fields, weaving her way in and out of the network of ditches, and bending over the wild flowers that sprang up from the banks. The eyes of the two men followed her, although they went on talking abstractedly.

  Matthew said: “I suppose there’s a great deal of resentment? I mean, now that they’ve seen what Earth is like, most of them will want to get back to Platonia, and it’s my fault that they can’t do it.”

  Bellhouse shook his head thoughtfully. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t believe it’s like that at all. They’re all interested. I don’t know what there is about the place but...well, now that we’re here, we’ve got a sort of feeling that it’s an important place. Our ancestors started out from here, and we’ve come back. The human race hasn’t been entirely wiped out from the face of the Earth. Not yet.”

  “It’s good to hear you say that. I hadn’t expected quite such a reaction. It...it means a lot to me.”

  Bellhouse got up from the old wooden chair on which he had been sitting.

  “Nobody’s despondent,” he said. “Some of the youngsters want to set out and explore the country. They think there must be somebody living, somewhere. And even if there isn’t, they want to—to—”

  “To see the world?” said Matthew with a laugh.

  “More or less.”

  “There may be some Inuits,” said Matthew wildly. “Or even some people hiding out in the Welsh mountains. And even in the ruins of London: you never can tell.”

  “There are thousands of things we have to find out,” said Bellhouse. “There must be records to be unearthed. One or two of us want to go to London and see what we can discover. Buried under all that rubble there must be books or visual records of events over the past centuries. We’ve got a lot to learn—a lot of history to reconstruct for ourselves.”

  “Do you think you will really learn anything from it?”

  “If we’re ever going to make an attempt to rebuild—”

  “To rebuild without mistakes?” said Matthew. “To start from the beginning, only making sure that this time there are no wars and no errors? It’s quite a task.”

  “It’s one worth tackling.”

  Eve came into the room, her face flushed and a new freedom in her movements.

  She said: “To be able to walk straight ahead for miles and miles if you want to, instead of turning round at the end of a metal corridor and pacing back again! It’s wonderful.”

  Bellhouse glanced at her and then at Matthew. He smiled slightly, and made some brief remark about going to see about the dismantling of some of the ship’s equipment.

  When he had gone, Eve came and stood by Matthew’s chair.

  “It’s a fascinating world,” she said. “Life is exciting.”

  “There’s nothing like it,” he agreed sardonically.

  She looked about the room, and nodded approval. “It could be nice here,” she said. Then, with a strange uncertainty in her voice, she went on. “What are you going to do now? Do you want to go with the London investigation group, or with the travellers? Or have you some other idea?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” said Matthew. “I simply don’t
know. I feel terribly tired. Nothing seems to mean anything any more.”

  He looked up into her face. Her lips were parted. He could not help himself. He reached up for her, and a stab of pain lanced through his arm, but he paid no heed to it: he had his arm round her, and she was bending over him and he was kissing her.

  “Matthew,” she said gently as she drew away. “Matthew, this is a time for new beginnings, for—”

  “No.” He snapped the word out abruptly. He turned away from her and stared resolutely out of the window. “No, it wouldn’t do. I ought not to have...oughtn’t to have made a fool of myself.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to do that for a long time.”

  He said, as curtly as possible: “I have lived for several hundred years, and I am likely to live for several hundred more. Do you want to grow old while I go on wearing this smirking, ridiculous young face? I’ve caused too much unhappiness already. I couldn’t bear to bring you any pain for the sake of a brief happiness—”

  “For me,” she said, “it wouldn’t be brief. For me it would be my lifetime.”

  “But—“

  “And I shall be content,” she said resolutely, “if I think that, two hundred years from now, I am nothing more than a memory in your mind—just one memory among thousands. That will be enough for me.”

  She was proof against all his arguments. Her faith and love shone from her eyes. He felt humble, and was at the same time filled with an incredible hopefulness.

  Eve said: “It will take hundreds of years—thousands, perhaps—before this planet is thickly populated again. It may become a menace to the universe once more, or it may become a world of enlightenment and reason. A lot depends on us. I’d like us to start out together. Not in any big way,” she added breathlessly: “The beginnings ought to be here, on this farm. Let the others explore and found new colonies, or dig up ancient records and piece the bits together. We’ll live here. If you want to, of course. If you want to go away, I’ll come with you.”