I knocked.
“Get away from here, Loeb!” Murchison bellowed from within.
I had forgotten that he had rigged a one-way vision circuit outside his door. I said, “Let me in, Murchison. Let me in or I’ll blast out the lock.”
I heard a heavy sigh and the whisper of the lock contracting. “Come on in, then.”
Nervously I pushed the door open and poked my head and the blaster snout in, half expecting Murchison to leap on me from above. But he was sitting at an equipment-jammed desk scribbling notes, which surprised me. I stood waiting for him to look up.
And finally he did. I gasped when I saw his face: drawn, harried, pale, tense. I had never seen an expression like that on Murchison’s face before.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “We’re all waiting to get moving, and—”
He turned to face me squarely. “You want to know what’s going on, Loeb? Well, listen: the ship’s blind. None of the equipment is reading anything. No telemeter pickup, no visual, no nothing. You scrape up some coordinates, if you can.”
We held a little meeting half an hour later, in the ship’s Common Room. Murchison was there, and Knight, and myself, and Navigator Henrichs, and three representatives of the cargo.
“How did this happen?” Knight demanded.
Murchison shrugged. “It happened while we were in warp.”
Knight glanced at Henrichs. “You ever hear of such a thing happening before?” He seemed to suspect Murchison of funny business.
But Henrichs shook his head. “No, Chief. And there’s a good reason why, too. If this happens to a ship, the ship doesn’t get back to tell about it.”
Captain Knight looked grey-faced. He asked worriedly, “What could have caused this?”
“No one knows what subspace conditions are like,” Henrichs said. “It may have been a fluke magnetic field, as Murchison suggests. Or anything at all. The question’s not what did it, Captain—it’s how do we get back.”
“Murchison, is there any chance you can repair the instruments?”
“No.”
“Just like that—flat no? Hell, man, we’ve seen you do wonders with instruments on the blink before.”
“No,” Murchison repeated stolidly. “I tried. I can’t do a damned thing.”
“That means we’re finished, doesn’t it?” asked Carney, one of our returnees. His voice was a little wild. “We might just as well have stayed on Shaula! At least we’d still be alive!”
“It looks pretty lousy,” Henrichs admitted. The thin-faced navigator was frowning blackly. “We don’t dare try a blind approach. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing at all.”
“There’s one thing,” Murchison said.
All eyes turned to him.
“What’s that?” Knight asked.
“Put a man in a spacesuit and anchor him to the skin of the ship. Have him guide us in by voice—he’ll be able to see, even if we can’t.”
“He’d incinerate once we hit Earth’s atmosphere,” I said. “We’d lose a man and still have to land blind.”
Murchison puckered his thick lower lip. “You’ll be able to judge the ship’s height by hull temperature when you’re that close. Besides, as soon as the ship’s inside the ionosphere, you can use ordinary radio for the rest of the way down. The trick is to get that far.”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Captain Knight said. “I guess we’ll have to draw lots. Loeb, get some spaghetti from the galley to use as straws.” His voice was grim.
“Never mind,” Murchison said.
“How’s that again?”
“I said, never mind. Forget about drawing straws. I’ll go.”
“Murchison—”
“Skip it!” he barked. “It’s a failure in my department, so I’m going to go out there. I volunteer, get it? If anyone else wants to volunteer, I’ll wrestle him for it.” He looked around at us. No one moved. “I don’t hear any takers. I’ll assume the job’s mine.” Sweat streamed down his face.
There was a startled silence, broken when Carney made the lousiest remark I’ve ever heard mortal man utter. “You’re trying to make it up for hitting that defenseless Shaulan, eh, Murchison? Now you want to be a hero to even things up!”
But the big man only turned to Carney and said quietly, “You’re just as blind as the others. You don’t know how rotten those defenseless Shaulans are, any of you. Or what they did to us.” He spat. “You all make me sick. I’m going out there.”
He turned and walked away…out, to get into his spacesuit and climb onto the ship’s skin.
Murchison’s explicit instructions, relayed from the outside of the ship, allowed Henrichs to bring us in. It was quite a feat of teamwork.
At 50,000 feet above Earth, Murchison’s voice suddenly cut out. We were able to pick up ground-to-ship radio by then and we taxied down. Later, they told us it seemed like a blazing candle was riding the ship’s back. A bright, clear flame flared for a moment as we cleaved the atmosphere.
And I remember the look on Murchison’s face as he left us to go out there. It was tense, bitter, strained—as if he were being compelled to go outside—as if he had no choice about volunteering for martyrdom.
I often wonder about that now. No one had ever made Murchison do anything he didn’t want to do—until then.
We think of the Shaulans as gentle, meek, defenseless. Murchison crossed one of them, and he died. Gentle, meek, yes—but defenseless?
Maybe they sabotaged the ship somehow and forced Murchison into self-martyrdom because he knew he’d been the cause. I don’t know.
It sort of tarnishes his glorious halo.
But sometimes I think Murchison was right about the Shaulans, after all. In any case, I’ve never been back there. And I don’t intend to, even if the computer picks me to go.
WHY?
I think this one might have pleased Horace too, or even Tony Boucher, if I had ever submitted it to them. But, like many of my stories at that time, it was written to order—for Bob Lowndes’ Science Fiction Stories—around a cover painting, and I got a safe, easy $85 for it in March, 1957, half of what Galaxy would have paid for it if I had taken the risk of sending it there on a speculative basis instead of embodying my story idea in a sure-thing commission for Lowndes. (I should also point out, since we are dealing in alternative realities here, that I might never have had the idea for this story in the first place without the inspiration that Ed Emshwiller’s vivid cover painting provided.)
“Why?” ran in Lowndes’ November, 1957 issue. I have no notion how much it cost me in the long run to do these sold-in-advance stories for the lower-paying magazines instead of taking my chances on everything with the top-paying ones first. But at least the rent got paid on time every month, a fact which, as you surely must have gathered by now, was a matter of no trivial concern to me back in the early months of 1957, less than a year after my graduation from college.
——————
And we left Capella XXII, after a six-month stay, and hop-skipped across the galaxy to Dschubba, in the forehead of the Scorpion. After the eight worlds of Dschubba had been seen and digested and recorded and classified; and after we had programmed all our material for transmission back to Earth, we moved on again, Brock and I.
We zeroed into warp and doublesqueaked into the star Pavo, which from Earth is seen to be the brightest star of the Peacock. Pavo proved to be planetless, save for one ball of mud and methane a billion miles out; we chalked the mission off as unpromising, and moved on once again.
Brock was the coordinator; I, the fine-tooth man. He saw in patterns; I, in particulars. We had been teamed for eleven years. We had visited seventy-eight stars and one hundred sixty-three planets. The end was not quite in sight.
We hung in the greyness of warp, suspended neither in space nor in not-space, hovering in an interstice. Brock said, “I vote for Markab.”
“Alpha Pegasi? No. I vote for Etamin.”
But Gamma Draconis held
little magic for him. He rubbed his angular hands through his tight-cropped hair and said, “The Wheel, then.”
I nodded. “The Wheel.”
The Wheel was our guide: not really a wheel so much as a map of the heavens in three dimensions, a lens of the galaxy, sprinkled brightly with stars. I pulled a switch; a beam of light lanced down from the ship’s wall, needle-thin, playing against the Wheel. Brock seized the handle and imparted axial spin to the Wheel. Over and over for three, four, five rotations; then, stop. The light-beam stung Alphecca.
“Alphecca, then,” Brock said.
“Yes. Alphecca.” I noted it in the log, and began setting up the coordinates on the drive.
Brock was frowning uneasily. “This failure to agree…this inability to decide on a matter so simple as our next destination…”
“Yes. Elucidate. Expound. Exegetise. What pattern do you see in that?”
Scowling he said, “Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is unhealthy. Conflict is valuable, but not for its own sake. It worries me.”
“Perhaps we’ve been in space too long. Perhaps we should resign our commissions, leave the Exploratory Corps, return to Earth and settle there.”
His face drained of blood. “No,” he said. “No. No.”
We emerged from warp within humming-distance of Alphecca, a bright star orbited by four worlds. Brock was playing calculus at the time; driblets of sweat glossed his face at each integration. I peered through the thick quartz of the observation panel and counted planets. “Four worlds. One, two, three, and four.”
I looked at him. His unfleshy face was tight with pain; after nearly a minute he said, “Pick one.”
“Me?”
“Pick one!”
“Alphecca Two.”
“All right; we’ll land there. I won’t contest the point, Hammond. I want to land on Alphecca Two.” He grinned at me—a bright-eyed wild grin that I found unpleasant. But I saw what he was doing; he was easing a stress-pattern between us, eliminating a source of conflict before the chafing friction ignited trouble. When two men live in a spaceship eleven years, such things are necessary.
Calmly and untensely I took a reading on Alphecca Two. I sighted us in and actuated the computer. This was the way a landing was effected; this was the way Brock and I had effected one hundred sixty-three landings. The ion-drive exploded into life.
We dropped “downward.” Alphecca Two rose to meet us as our slim pale-green needle of a ship dived tail-first towards the world below.
The landing was routine. I sketched out a big 164 on my chart, and we donned spacesuits to make our preliminary explorations. Brock paused a moment at the airlock, smoothing the purple cloth of his suit, adjusting his air-intake, tightening his belt-cincture. The corners of his mouth twitched nervously. Within the head-globe he looked frightened, and very tired.
I said, “You’re not well. Maybe we should postpone our first look-see.”
“Maybe we should go back to Earth, Hammond. And live in a beehive and breathe filthy grey soup.” His voice was edged with bitter reproach. “Let’s go outside.” He turned away, face shadowed morosely, and touched the stud that peeled back the airlock hatch.
I followed him into the lock and down the elevator. He was silent, stiff, reserved. I wished I had his talent for glimpsing patterns: this mood of his had probably been a long time building.
But I saw no cause for it. After eleven years, I thought, I should know him almost as well as I do myself. Or better. But no easy answers came, and I followed him out onto the exit stage and dropped gently down.
Landing One Six Four was entering the exploratory stage.
The ground spread out far to the horizon, a dull orange in color, rough in texture, pebbly, thick of consistency. We saw a few trees, bare-trunked, bluish. Green vines swarmed over the ground, twisted and gnarled.
Otherwise, nothing.
“Another uninhabited planet,” I said. “That makes one hundred eight out of the hundred sixty-four.”
“Don’t be premature. You can’t judge a world by a few acres. Land at a pole; extrapolate utter barrenness. It’s not a valid pattern. Not enough evidence.”
I cut him short. “Here’s one time when I perceive a pattern. I perceive that this world’s uninhabited. It’s too damned quiet.”
Chuckling, Brock said, “I incline to agree. But remember Adhara XI.”
I remembered Adhara XI: the small, sandy world far from its primary, which seemed nothing but endless yellow sand dunes, rolling westward round and round the planet. We had joked about the desert-world, dry and parched, inhabited only by the restless dunes. But after the report was written, after our data were codified and flung through subspace towards Earth, we found the oasis on the eastern continent—a tiny garden of green things and sweet air, so sharply unlike the rest of Adhara XI. I remembered sleek, scaly creatures slithering through the crystal lake, and an indolent old worm sleeping beneath a heavy-fruited tree.
“Adhara XI is probably swarming with Earth tourists,” I said. “Now that our amended report is public knowledge. I often think we should have concealed the oasis from Earth, and returned there ourselves when we grew tired of exploring the galaxy.”
Brock’s head snapped up sharply. He ripped a sprouting tip from a leathery vine and said, “When we grow tired? Hammond, aren’t you tired already? Eleven years, a hundred sixty-four worlds?”
Now I saw the pattern taking fairly clear shape. I shook my head, throttling the conversation. “Let’s get down the data, Brock. We can talk later.”
We proceeded with the measurements of our particular sector of Alphecca II. We nailed down the dry vital statistics, bracketing them off so Earth could enter the neat figures in its giant catalogue of explored worlds.
GRAVITY—1.02 E.
ATMOSPHERIC CONSTITUTION—ammonia/carbon dioxide Type ab7, unbreathable
ESTIMATED PLANETARY DIAMETER—.87 E.
INTELLIGENT LIFE—none
We filled out the standard forms, ran the standard tests, took the standard soil samples. Exploration had become a smooth mechanical routine.
Our first tour took three hours. We wandered over the slowly rising hills, with the spaceship always at our backs, and Alphecca high behind us. The dry soil crunched unpleasantly beneath our heavy boots.
Conversation was at a minimum. Brock and I rarely spoke when it was not absolutely necessary—and when we did speak, it was to let a tight, tense remark escape confinement, not to communicate anything. We shared too many silent memories. Eleven years and one hundred sixty-four planets. All Brock had to do was say “Fomalhaut,” or I “Theta Eridani,” and a train of associations and memories was set off in whose depths we could browse silently for hours and hours.
Alphecca II did not promise to be as memorable as those worlds. There would be nothing here to match the fantastic moonrise of Fomalhaut VI, the five hundred mirror-bright moons in stately procession through the sky, each glinting in a different hue. That moonrise had overwhelmed us four years ago, and remained yet bright. Alphecca II, dead world that it was—or rather world not yet alive—would leave no marks on our memories.
But bitterness was rising in Brock. I saw the pattern forming; I saw the question bubbling up through the layers of his mind, ready to be asked.
And on the fourth day, he let it be asked. After four days on Alphecca II, four days of staring at the grotesque twisted green shapes of the angular sprawling vines, four days of watching the lethargic fission of the pond protozoa who seemed to be the world’s only animal life, Brock suddenly looked up at me.
He asked the shattering question that should never be asked.
“Why?”
Eleven years and a hundred sixty-four worlds earlier, the seeds of that unanswered question had been sown. I was fresh out of the Academy, twenty-three, a tall, sharp-nosed boy with what some said was an irritatingly precise way of looking at things.
I should say that I bitterly resented being told I was coldly
precise. People accused me of Teutonic heaviness; a girl I once had known said that to me, after a notably unsuccessful romance had come trailing to a halt. I recall turning to her, glaring at the light dusting of freckles across her nose, and telling her, “I have no Teutonic blood whatsoever. If you’ll take the trouble to think of the probable Scandinavian derivation of my name…”
She slapped me.
Shortly after that, I met Brock—Brock, who at twenty-four was already the Brock I would know at thirty-five, harsh of face and voice, dark of complexion, with an expression of nervous wariness registering in his blue-black eyes always and ever. Brock never accused me of Teutonicism; he laughed when I cited some minor detail from memory, but the laugh was one of respect.
We were both Academy graduates, both restless. It showed in Brock’s face, and I don’t doubt it showed in mine. Earth was small and dirty and crowded, and each night the stars (those bright enough to glint through the haze and brightness of the cities) seemed to mock at us.
Brock and I gravitated together. We shared a room in Appalachia North; we shared a library planchet; we shared reading-tapes and music-discs, and occasionally sweethearts. And eight weeks after my twenty-third birthday, seven weeks before Brock’s twenty-fourth, we hailed a cab and invested our last four coins in a trip downtown to the Administration of External Exploration.
There, we spoke to a bland-faced, smiling man with one leg prosthetic (he boasted of it) and his left hand a waxy synthetic one. “I got that way on Sirius VI,” he told us. “But I’m an exception. Most of the exploration teams keep going for years and years, and nothing ever happens to them. McKees and Haugmuth have been out twenty-six years now; that’s the record. We hear from them, every few months or so. They keep on going, further and further out.”
Brock nodded. “Good. Give us the forms.” He signed first; I added my name below, finishing with a flourish. I stacked the triplicate forms neatly together and shoved them back at the half-synthetic recruiter.
To Be Continued 1953-1958 Page 28