"And seldom ever have," muttered Nolokov somberly.
"What!?" asked Bjornson, mystified.
Boozie aimed his most eloquent smirk at him. "Axel, my boy," he said, "now that was cryptic!"
* * * *
Later, a small group of friends came to say their goodbyes to Homer Fox. Foxy had grown more portly and had really gone native, wearing a fiber-cloth skirt which he called his tapa special. His thatch-roofed house on the beach appeared to be the answer to his earthy needs. And there was shy and smiling Nagala, his chesty Talavat wife, pregnant again, plus a fine fat baby girl.
"She's a bit on the white side," he commented, "but with just a shade of copper in her. I call her Penny."
When he looked seaward to the shadowy line of the anchored fleet beyond the outer reefs, however, there was something in his light agate eyes that was not so simple or childlike. It was pride mixed with a dream.
"She'll see other lands someday. My sons will be the new Vasco da Gamas and Columbuses. We'll build us some real ships here. Under the admiralship of Axel Bjornson they'll open up new horizons." As if too heavy a philosophy conflicted with his basic nature, he suddenly grinned brightly. "Lebensraum, man! Your high-rent district's a million years away!"
* * * *
At last, under an old lowering moon, the final goodbyes between Danny and Freddie, and Jerry and Lalille were said.
They stood on a lonelier stretch of beach near the great sandbar. A mile away was the gleaming dome of the life-pod and the smaller shuttle craft. All four of the star travelers were World Servers, two for the new world and two for the old, that distant Earth which was never to feel alone again.
"With the native need for agriculture," Jerry told them, "I've got a career cut out for me, and Lalille will be more or less our guardian angel as far as the Moals and dakshas are concerned. They're still sacred to the Tallies, so there's not much of a problem on the indigenous side of social integration." He frowned a bit ruefully. "Of course it will still require an adaptation phase for us 'contaminants' to find a complete adjustment here..."
"Considering," added Lalille, "that in terms of root-race cycles, we're caught here between what might be the equivalent of Lemurian and Atlantean epochs." She smiled apologetically. "At least that's the way I think Sambhava might have expressed it."
"Ah yes, Sambhava," said Jerry. "There's a final mystery for you."
"That's right!" commented Danny. "Lalille, what about Holy Sam?"
"In other words," added Freddie, "since you were as close to him as Nolokov – or maybe closer – what did your psychic instincts tell you about him?"
"In those last hours in the temple," Danny interjected, "he seemed somehow bigger than life. In a nutshell, Lil, what was he? Was he what Noley sometimes hinted at – 'something we don't talk about'?"
Lalille smiled mysteriously. "Maybe something that one of the Great Ones spoke of – 'an advanced state in the ever-evolving kingdoms of Nature!'"
"You mean like a saint or maybe a Laha?" asked Danny.
She shook her head as though her thought could not be put into words. "At least let's say – he was the one among us who was indisputably a non-contaminant..."
There was more. Lalille remembered something she had told Nolokov and Akala and their Krias. Back in the temple of Terra Nova when she had first sensed the presence of the Lahas, she hadn't been wrong.
"From our space photos," said Jerry, "we know there's a continental chain of high mountains to the north, very much like the Himalayas. Lalille swears the Lahas are there in human form, and the Krias sense it, too. Khyatri calls them World Watchers."
"Noley is going up there someday," said Lalille. "He thinks that is where poor Saussure may find himself again." She added musingly, "Sambhava sometimes used to talk about Ancient Wisdom, which spoke of Mahatmas in the Himalayas of Earth."
"What are Mahatmas?" asked Danny.
"It's a Sanskrit term for 'Great Ones.'"
* * * *
When Freddie and Lalille walked away like sisters to have their cry and really say goodbye, Danny sought to have a few private words with Jerry. As the two of them stood silently beside each other, watching the quiet surf in the starlight, a question haunted Danny that he didn't feel like carrying through life unanswered.
"When the Rak carried Tallullah away," he asked, "couldn't you have palavered with Ughur and saved her? Or is that the way you wanted it?"
Jerry looked away toward the village. "I don't know, Danny. Maybe I wasn't shielding my soul anymore, as Freddie advised. Anyway, my prime concern was for Lalille, and it all seemed to be out of my hands, maybe a part of the prophecy."
"The prophecy? In what way?"
He turned to meet his questioning gaze. The strong, undreaming face broke into an ironic smile. "I mean symbolically. That most cosmic justice that happened to Tallullah was like opening the door on all that's been dark and evil. This world is virginal. It can do without the evil aspects of human nature until it's old and wise enough to cope with it. We do have a darker side to our makeup, in spite of all the signals. Pray God we'll all emerge out of those densities the Lahas spoke of."
Danny put a hand on the other's shoulder. "If we're into last words here, Jerry, you'd better quit while you're ahead. Let's go with that one!"
Jerry shook his head. "You don't get off that easy, Commander. As our fearless leader, you have the last word." While Danny stared at him, seemingly trapped and at a loss for words, he added, "As the Laha said, when the question is known, the answer will come."
"Maybe," said Danny, finally, "we have to cap that pyramid and become our own solution..."
EPILOGUE
The long journey home was far different from the outward quest. The ship's company was greatly reduced in numbers but the levels of consciousness had been increased. They knew that other starmen like themselves would be returning with the nameless answer, at least ready now to "know."
Somewhere out in the unknown immensities a day came when everyone was treated to a concert of electronic organ music. Boozie had gone back to his first love. He was playing his latest concerto over the P.A. system. The composition was alien yet strangely inspiring with its untried medleys of flourishing epic cadenzas, its rippling and haunting riffs and its delicate subliminal descants.
"He calls it the Music of the Spheres," said Danny.
Freddie had joined him in one of the more intimate recreation rooms. They were alone, sharing the concert as if it were therapy for their weathered spirits.
"I know." She smiled pensively, looking soft and petite in her simple blue jumper suit. The chignon was gone, and so were the horn-rim glasses. "He's been studying the music on his cosmo-tapes, compositions from other souls out there in forever. It's like a musical signature to life eternal."
"Well! We're really poetic today!"
"You're hearing his Earth dream, Danny, the gift that should never have been deserted."
"Like our own dreams, honey. Something like the bluebird in your own backyard. I guess that was what the Star Quest was all about. The answer is never 'out there'. Just like the eternal Now, there's an eternal Here. Our work is within ourselves."
Long after the concert had ended, they sat together discussing their dreams, Danny's ideas for blighted areas of the Earth, and Freddie's research foundation. Now, however, she said she wanted to concentrate on a study of the real meaning of parapsychology, "our lost faculties returning to us."
Finally, on the library screen she noted the title of the digital book he'd been reading. She glanced at him dubiously. "UFOs again?"
"Why not? We're packing a hell of a lot of answers into our basket, sweetie. Why not solve that puzzle, too? After all, we still haven't figured out what Boozie saw when he said there was something big out there near his orbit. We had a visitor that day. Somebody answered his cosmic SOS and just in time. You can't walk away from a thing like that."
She sighed as if this wasn't the particular subject she had
come to talk about. "I know. I heard Poyntner discussing it the other day. If no mechanical vessel is supposed to get through the Barrier Wall, how do you account for almost instant transportation like that?"
Danny got up from the reading console. "Well, things would be dull if we knew all the answers, come to think of it. But the whole thing still bugs me."
She also got up, relieved to dismiss the subject. She smiled at him coyly. "You haven't said anything about my new look, Danny,"
He paused beside a pneumatic device that protruded from the wall. "What, you mean the sexy hairdo? I never did like it up in that tight little bun on your head. Far too antiseptic for romance. Freddie, here's a little present for you." He held a CD cartridge in his hand and opened the pneumatic receiver.
"What do you mean, for me? That's a disposal tube."
"Right!" He popped the cartridge into the tube and pressed a button. There was a brief hissing sound. The capsule was gone into the outer void. He grinned at her. "That was my Pit tape, baby. Kitty Keene would agree. No more hollow phonies for me."
Freddie blushed, but then he realized what she had been getting at. He looked at her amber eyes more closely.
"Hey, are you wearing contacts?"
"Well, I was down in the optics lab the other day, and I thought– What are you grinning at now? Do they look funny?"
He took her into his arms and held her gently to him. More than Kitty's tape had gone out the tube. His nervous little virgin had just dropped her chastity belt.
* * * *
In the absence of day and night while traversing the abysmal intergalactic void, time seemed immeasurable, marked only by human events or circumstances on board the hurtling star ship. A growing focal point of human concern was Alfred Poyntner's anguish and frustration in his struggle to organize his findings into a scientific report to Earth that would not seem to be "so much spaced-out deep purple or voodoo madness," as he expressed it. There was growing concern for him principally because of his having lost all awareness of time.
"Ye gods!" Fitz exclaimed. "I've timed him twice now. He sometimes will go twenty hours straight, beating his brains out, or trying to wear out that whiteboard in the astrolabe!"
The whiteboard was a chalk board except that the "chalk" used was an electronic pencil. Poyntner always had the board filled with abstruse calculations. No one was quite sure when he slept or ate.
As the ship's medi-psychiatrist, Frederica finally convinced Danny and his closest staff members that their long-maligned "Old Pointed Head" was in critical need of some "Intervention." Whether this would be merely moral support or some kind of actual prophylaxis remained to be seen, as she and Danny invaded the astrolabe accompanied by Boozie, Fitz, and Hapgood. Danny simply walked over to the whiteboard and appropriated the electro-marker, causing Poyntner to glare at him in shocked indignation.
"Doc," said Danny, "take the load off. It's time for a break."
Freddie and Fitz helped to guide and half force the remonstrating astrophysicist to a seat.
"Come on, Al," urged Hapgood. "Don't burn yourself out. That won't deliver a thing!"
"That's right," added Fitz with a worried frown on his broad Irish face. "No man climbs his mountains without taking a breath of air."
"You know," said Freddie, "we can make a Council decision here – or a crisis call if necessary – to give you a sleeping hypo." In contrast to her old white-smock clinicality, she gently placed a hand on his shoulder and gave him a conciliatory smile. "This is the Med Department talking, old sweetie."
Danny could practically see Poyntner's wheels turning actually the workings of a brilliant mentality and a formidable personality. As he stared up at Freddie it was obvious that her startling departure from her old vitriolic attitude toward him was a stopper. In fact he stared at all of them analytically, suddenly realizing that new ground was being broken here. He had always been the contentious one, and they the contenders, but quite obviously here was a delegation of close travelers who were genuinely concerned about his personal welfare.
He was trapped, floundering for words.
So Boozie broke the impasse. "Speaking of hypos," he said with a cordial smirk, "here's something to uncinch the old deck clamps." He opened a satchel he had surreptitiously brought with him, which revealed a compact little bar, replete with glasses and a mysterious, rather large gourd wrapped in native inhudesi fiber. "A bon voyage present from Jerry, since he didn't get to plant me a vineyard."
"Good Lord!" Danny exclaimed. "Is that more uighyic?"
"Au contraire!" The aesthete Belgian poured a glass full and lifted it as though to make a toast. "It's the improved version, from Dyana-Chenravaloc, remember? Land of New Life. And Alfred old boy, maybe that's where we're headed, too!"
Danny was about to object to this diversion, but Freddie touched his arm to stay the impulse – which proved to be psychologically insightful.
"I'll take that!" said Poyntner suddenly, and he promptly relieved Boozie of his glass.
* * * *
Thus began one of the most unique human dialogues in the annals of World Council Authority, while the Sirius III hurtled on its undefined course through imponderable realms of the Cosmos. A time had come for synthesis – for a verbal conceptualization of their transcendent journey beyond known time and space. Fitz, Boozie and Hapgood had not shared the experience of the Oracle, so they could only struggle to understand or comprehend what had been described to them by Danny, Freddie and Poyntner who were Earth's sole returning witnesses to the seeming miracle.
After absorbing several shots of what Boozie had dubbed "Tally Twang" – embellished by Fitz to "TNT" – Poyntner began to reveal some of the source of his anguish. It was in a sense a kind of "stage fright" when he considered the august audience of his scientific peers, to whom he would have to present his universe-altering "paper."
"You know," he said, "the Tallies had their Krias, but my professional community also has its high priests – some of the most brilliant minds on the face of the Earth." A wistful smile touched his weary features. "But there were no mantras or chants – no ceremony at all when it came to the Cosmos tinkering and theoretical in-fighting. I mean, these were highly degreed recognized scholars – some of them Nobel prize winners – from the top universities and observatories of the world! We'd meet somewhere in a quiet place and just bang heads together while sitting around in our jeans and sweat shirts, or no shirts at all. No podiums or panel tables or batteries of microphones." His features tensed, revealing his anguish again. "The bullshit stayed outside. This was just pure minds – freely attacking the unknowables of existence."
"And what you're worried about," mused Boozie over his glass, "is how you're going to tear up all their pet models of the universe without making it sound like bullshit."
Poyntner glared at him. "Precisely!"
"Maybe it isn't all that bad," suggested Danny, at last also sampling Boozie's "Twang." "Remember what one of the Lahas told you, and I think I can quote: 'Your time of science's knowing is near. Your colleagues are already staring at the answers, lacking only a final interpretation.'"
Deep into his own glass of TNT, Fitz chuckled. "Faith, if it don't remind me of the old one about the blindmen who went to see the elephant. Each of them had his own idea because he couldn't see the whole of the beast!"
"Back off of that, Fitz," argued Hapgood, pouring himself a shot. "I've read up some on all that deep space stuff, and what they say is that the astrophysicists and the quantum physicists are hanging on to opposite ends of the same cantankerous animal."
Poyntner glared at Danny and Boozie while shrugging in resignation. "That's staring at the answers, all right!"
Boozie smirked, apparently settling into the discussion with relish. "Don't knock it, Al," he said. "They have a point. This whole problem is a matter of interpretation."
Poyntner sprang to his feet and began pacing angrily.
"For the love of God – or at least Universal Intellig
ence – will you all please get out of here and leave me alone? This isn't helping!"
"You spoke fondly of your head-banging sessions," Boozie persisted. "So maybe it would help to bang some of your pet universes around. You know, I once got pretty hip deep into astrophysics 101, but when you boys came up with the Big Bang I walked out. Nature doesn't work that way."
This launched both men into a fast-paced harangue, which threatened to cover the whole gamut of cosmology, from Big Bang and Big Crunch to inflationary, string, and oscillation theory. Danny grinned and drew Freddie and the other two aside.
"Who's the headshrink now, Doctor?" he asked her.
"My Flemish buddy seems to be drawing the old boy out!"
"No," countered Freddie concernedly. "Poyntner's right, this isn't helping! And I can tell you why..."
She quickly went into a huddle with the three men and proposed a psychological approach. She intuited that Poyntner was under high tension because of something he was obviously suppressing.
"To relieve that tension, you have to pull the plug," she insisted. "Danny, I have a strong hunch. Don't block me on this – just do what I say. Walk in there between them and tell them to shut up. I have one basic question to ask our world-class cosmologist!"
Danny met the somewhat wavering stares of Happy and Fitz, then gazed speculatively at Boozie and Poyntner, who appeared to be in a wildly pacing and hand-waving session. When he turned back to Freddie, raising a querulous brow at her, his incipient grin froze when she snapped at him in her old clinical tone.
"That is a medical order, Commander!"
He stared at her in momentary wonderment, but then realized that she was the only sober member among them. He straightened up in a mock heel-clicking gesture and saluted. Then he turned resolutely and wove his way to the cosmological contenders. He gently shoved them apart, and when they stared at him in open-mouthed amazement, he ordered them to sit down.
"Doctor Frederica Sachs tells me she can straighten this out, Alfred, so just pay attention now, and lend an ear."
Frederica was there immediately. "Doctor Poyntner," she said briskly, "you will recall in the temple of the Lahas that, when Bishop Saussure challenged the Oracle to identify itself, he was suddenly struck dumb as if by a thunderbolt."
Star Quest Page 29