(3/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume III: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  "Four thousand three hundred and ninety-one," said Harta. She concentrated. "There are three thousand and five more in the mountain caves, waiting to come out as the others return."

  * * * * *

  They came in groups of about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly toward the edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area where the pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some were smaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their elders. But these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all after they had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few of medium height went back in pairs, firm taffy fingers intertwined in each other.

  "They mate," said Creno. "It is their custom."

  "How tiring they are," said Harta. "I have lost interest. We have seen thirty-one worlds with such customs and these creatures are too simple to be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system."

  "Not yet," Creno insisted. "We passed through the ocean and surveyed the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this one spot should something exist?"

  "But we have several parallel situations," Harta protested. "They were colonies landed in one spot by the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their feeder machine. And that is the explanation."

  "Your mind does not function well in a four-dimension continuum, Harta. You will need more training--"

  "But these cases are rare, and, Creno--"

  "I know they are rare, my child. But still they exist. You will have to learn eventually, a little at a time. Now then, it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that the movement of matter and events from place to place is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To transport a machine this size across their space would have required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have. More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller device would have supplied them with food. I am forced to conclude that--somehow--we are approaching this problem backwards."

  "Backwards? You mean they made the machine here after they came?"

  He did not reply to that. "We must concentrate together on thinking ourselves into their functioning in their manifold."

  Harta followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving among and within the striped creatures. The insides of their bodies consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance; but it had been modified by various organic structures. All, though, were built of the same fundamental units: elongated, thin cells which readily aligned themselves in semi-crystalline patterns.

  "Enough," Creno said, "back to the hill."

  Their rows of thin limbs rested on the ridge crest once more. "We have seen such cell crystals before," she sighed. "The inefficiencies in such a poverty of dimensions! Do you still think we have looked at it backwards?"

  "Of course we have. They did not bring the machine or make it--the machine made them!"

  "That is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters. We have never seen life created by a machine before. No one ever has, from the millions of reports I have seen at home."

  "Maybe we have and not known it. The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons and we could not see its origins clearly in most cases. Here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively little time." He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had said so much. "No, disregard such theories. You are still too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing--this machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared. Everything else was destroyed but it went right on producing its substance."

  "The substance is not life."

  "It is only four-dimensional matter, right. But over a long enough time--you know this as well as I do--random factors will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation this process has been speeded up here. The substance the machine produces has in turn produced life!"

  * * * * *

  Creno sensed with a tremor some dangerous shifting in Harta's consciousness. As an elder it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up. He must go no further.

  It was not necessary. Harta took it up for him.

  "Then any substance producing life and modified by it could--if you go far enough back--be the product of a machine. But it would have taken so long to produce life that the original matter, that bore the direct imprint of the machine, would have disappeared."

  "An error," said Creno desperately. "There is just this case."

  "By the time these creatures have arrived at self-knowledge the machine will be gone. They will not know it ever existed, and--"

  "That is all it means. There is just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant example of minor dimensions!"

  He strained consciousness to a forward movement but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back. "Start," he ordered.

  Her mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too. He applied all his force to bring her back into control, but she still held fast.

  "Something more is hidden from me. I will be back," she said. And she disappeared from the ridge.

  He had never faced such a quandary before on a training trip with a younger one. If he went in pursuit he would find her ultimately--that was in the nature of being older and wiser--but, if she revolted against his pursuit, she could extend the time considerably on this forsaken planet. And he wanted to get her away as soon as possible.

  The more time here the more chance that the awful truth would come to her before her time.

  He watched the growing waves of creatures floundering toward the vast oozing puddle, which refilled itself as quickly as it was diminished by them, and the receding waves of those that had already fed. This, he could see, was an endless process. The whole life of the species moved in continuous systole-diastole around the machine.

  Soon he would have to go in search of her.

  But then she was back at his side, her being for this world once more solidified. She concentrated for a moment on the pink-striped waves of rippling inward and outward around the great sustaining pool, then communicated with him.

  "We can leave now. There is nothing more to see."

  Something in her mind remained closed to his, as the mind of younger never should be to older. But at least he could see with relief that the worst had not happened. The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too early when it could only hurt. All he found turned to him--as they receded from this thin-manifold universe, then moved up the dimension ladder to their home level--was a surface of happiness.

  Suddenly, though, as they prepared for flight in that hyperspace all her joy was gone.

  "I saw it," she said. "In my free and unrestricted spirit I moved deep into the substance of that world, below all the total ruin, far below. And there was a monstrous machine, near the molten core, almost infinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it, too, had been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it had once produced the ooze from which came the life from which in turn come the beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe they, too, thought they were free and unrestricted!"

  He sighed for the bitter cost of knowledge.

  This one would no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration, and he would no longer live vicariously in the happiness of another being's innocence. Now Harta, too, would be seeking the answer to the question of original creation, the answer that he had not found in his journeys across a myriad worlds and dimensions....

  That no one had ever found.

  END

  * * *

  Contents

  HOMESICK

  By LYN VENABLE

  What thrill is there in going out among the stars if coming back means bitter loneliness?

  Frankston pushed listlessly at a red checker with his right forefinger. He knew the move would cost him a man, but he lacked enough interest in the game to plot out a safe m
ove. His opponent, James, jumped the red disk with a black king and removed it from the board. Gregory, across the room, flicked rapidly through the pages of a magazine, too rapidly to be reading anything, or even looking at the pictures. Ross lay quietly on his bunk, staring out of the viewport.

  The four were strangely alike in appearance, nearly the same age, the age where gray hairs finally outnumber black, or baldness takes over. The age when the expanding waistline has begun to sag tiredly, when robust middle age begins the slow accelerating decline toward senility.

  A strange group to find aboard a spaceship, but then The Columbus was a very strange ship. Bolted to its outer hull, just under the viewports, were wooden boxes full of red geraniums, and ivy wound tenuous green fronds over the gleaming hull that had withstood the bombardment of pinpoint meteors and turned away the deadly power of naked cosmic rays.

  Frankston glanced at his wristchrono. It was one minute to six.

  "In about a minute," he thought, "Ross will say something about going out to water his geraniums." The wristchrono ticked fifty-nine times.

  "I think I'll go out and water my geraniums," said Ross.

  * * * * *

  No one glanced up. Then Gregory threw his magazine on the floor. Ross got up and walked, limping slightly, to a wall locker. He pulled out the heavy, ungainly spacesuit and the big metal bulb of a headpiece. He carried them to his bunk and laid them carefully down.

  "Will somebody please help me on with my suit?" he asked.

  For one more long moment, no one moved. Then James got up and began to help Ross fit his legs into the suit. Ross had arthritis, not badly, but enough so that he needed a little help climbing into a spacesuit.

  James pulled the heavy folds of the suit up around Ross's body and held it while Ross extended his arms into the sleeve sections. His hands, in the heavy gauntlets, were too unwieldy to do the front fastenings, and he stood silently while James did it for him.

  Ross lifted the helmet, staring at it as a cripple might regard a wheelchair which he loathed but was wholly dependent upon. Then he fitted the helmet over his head and James fastened it down and lifted the oxygen tank to his back.

  "Ready?" asked James.

  The bulbous headpiece inclined in a nod. James walked to a panel and threw a switch marked INNER LOCK. A round aperture slid silently open. Ross stepped through it and the door shut behind him as James threw the switch back to its original position. Opposite the switch marked OUTER LOCK a signal glowed redly and James threw another switch. A moment later the signal flickered out.

  Frankston, with a violent gesture, swept the checker board clean. Red and black men clattered to the floor, rolling and spinning. Nobody picked them up.

  "What does he do it for?" demanded Frankston in a tight voice. "What does he get out of those stinking geraniums he can't touch or smell?"

  "Shut up," said Gregory.

  James looked up sharply. Curtness was unusual for Gregory, a bad sign. Frankston was the one he'd been watching, the one who'd shown signs of cracking, but after so long, even a psycho-expert's opinion might be haywire. Who was a yardstick? Who was normal?

  "Geraniums don't smell much anyway," added Gregory in a more conciliatory tone.

  "Yeah," agreed Frankston, "I'd forgotten that. But why does he torture himself like this, and us, too?"

  "Because that's what he wanted to do," answered James.

  "Sure," agreed Gregory, "the whole trip--the last twenty years of it, anyhow--all he could talk about was how, when he got back to Earth, he was going to buy a little place in the country and raise flowers."

  "Well, we're back," muttered Frankston, with a terrible bitterness. "He's raising flowers, but not in any little place in the country."

  * * * * *

  Gregory continued almost dreamily, "Remember the last night out? We were all gathered around the viewscreen. And there was Earth, getting bigger and greener and closer all the time. Remember what it felt like to be going back, after thirty years?"

  "Thirty years cooped up in this ship," grumbled Frankston. "All our twenties and thirties and forties ..."

  "But we were coming home." There was a rapt expression on Gregory's lined and weathered face. "We were looking forward to the twenty or maybe thirty good years we had left, talking about what we'd do, where we'd live, wondering what had changed on Earth. At least we had that last night out. All the data was stashed away in the microfiles, all the data about planets with air we couldn't breathe and food we couldn't eat. We were going home, home to big, friendly, green Earth."

  Frankston's face suddenly crumpled as though he were about to weep and he cradled his head against his arms. "God, do we have to go over it all again? Not again tonight!"

  "Leave him alone," ordered James with an inflection of command in his voice. "Go to the other section of the ship if you don't want to listen. He has to keep going over it, just like Ross has to keep watering his geraniums."

  Frankston remained motionless and Gregory looked gratefully at James. James was the steady one. It was easier for him because he understood.

  Gregory's face became more and more animated as he lost himself, living again his recollections: "The day we blasted in. The crowds. Thousands of people, all there to see us come in. We were proud. Of course, we thought we were the first to land, just like we'd been the first to go out. Those cheers, coming from thousands of people at once. For us. Ross-- Lt. Ross--was the first one out of the lock. We'd decided on that; he'd been in command for almost ten years, ever since Commander Stevens died. You remember Stevens, don't you? He took over when we lost Captain Willers. Well, anyway, Ross out first, and then you, James, and you, Frankston, and then Trippitt, and me last, because you were all specialists and I was just a crewman. The crewman, I should say, the only one left.

  "Ross hesitated and almost stumbled when he stepped out, and tears began pouring from his eyes, but I thought--well, you know, coming home after thirty years and all that. But when I stepped out of the lock, my eyes stung like fire and a thousand needles seemed to jab at my skin.

  "And then the President himself stepped forward with the flowers. That's where the real trouble began, with the flowers. I remember Ross stretching out his arms to take the bouquet, like a mother reaching for a baby. Then suddenly he dropped them, sneezing and coughing and sobbing for breath, and the President reached out to help him, asking him over and over what was wrong.

  "It was the same with all of us, and we turned and staggered back to the ship, closing the lock behind us. It was bad then. God, I'll never forget it! The five of us, moaning in agony, gasping for breath, our eyes all swollen shut, and the itching ... that itching." Gregory shuddered.

  * * * * *

  Even the emotionally disciplined James set his teeth and felt his scalp crawl at the memory of that horror. He glanced toward the viewport, as though to cleanse his mind of the memory. He could see Ross out there, among the geraniums, moving slowly and painfully in his heavy spacesuit. Occupational therapy. Ross watered flowers and Gregory talked and Frankston was bitter and ... himself? Observation, maybe.

  Gregory's voice began again, "And then they were pounding on the lock, begging us to let the doctor in, but we were all rolling and thrashing with the itching, burning, sneezing, and finally James got himself under control enough to open the locks and let them in.

  "Then came the tests, allergy tests. Remember those? They'd cut a little row of scratches in your arm ..." Each man instinctively glanced at his forearm, saw neat rows of tiny pink scars, row on row. "Then they'd put a little powder in each cut and each kind of powder was an extract of some common substance we might be allergic to. The charts they made were full of 'P's, P for positive, long columns of big, red 'P's. All pollen, dust, wool, nylon, cotton, fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, grain, milk, whisky, cigarettes, dogs, cats--everything! And wasn't it funny about us being allergic to women's face powder? Ha! We were allergic to women from their nylon hose to their face powder.

 
; "Thirty years of breathing purified, sterilized, filtered air, thirty years of drinking distilled water and swallowing synthetic food tablets had changed us. The only things we weren't allergic to were the metal and plastic and synthetics of our ship, this ship. We're allergic to Earth. That's funny, isn't it?"

  Gregory began to rock back and forth, laughing the thin high laugh of hysteria. James silently walked to a water hydrant and filled a plastic cup. He brought Gregory a small white pill.

  "You wouldn't take this with the rest of us at supper. You'd better take it now. You need it."

  Gregory nodded bleakly, sobering at once, and swallowed the pellet. He made a face after the water.

  "Distilled," he spat. "Distilled ... no flavor ... no life ... like us ... distilled."

  "If only we could have blasted off again." Frankston's voice came muffled through his hands. "It wouldn't have made any difference where. Anywhere or nowhere. No, our fine ship is obsolete and we're old, much too old. They have the spacedrive now. Men don't make thirty-year junkets into space and come back allergic to Earth. They go out, and in a month or two they're back, with their hair still black and their eyes still bright and their uniforms still fit. A month or two is all. Those crowds that cheered us, they were proud of us and sorry for us, because we'd been out thirty years and they never expected us back at all. But it was inconvenient for Spaceport." Bitter sarcasm tinged his voice. "They actually had to postpone the regular monthly Trans-Galactic run to let us in with this big, clumsy hulk."

  "Why didn't we ever see any of the new ships either going out or coming back?" asked Gregory.

  * * * * *

  Frankston shook his head. "You don't see a ship when it's in spacedrive. It's out of normal space-time dimensions. We had a smattering of the theory at cadet school ... anyway, if one did flash into normal space-time--say, for instance, coming in for a landing--the probability of us being at the same place at the same time was almost nil. 'Two ships passing in the night' as the old saying goes."

  Gregory nodded, "I guess Trippitt was the lucky one."