A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “You did. You did.” The colonel covered his face. “All that power. All that control. You could have had the whole world for the taking, if you’d wanted it. Instead—”

  “Instead, everyone on Earth has a job, enough food, good quarters, and an equal chance at education. I have it on good authority that the next session of Congress will unify divorce laws and traffic laws in this country. Russia has not only a second party, but a third one. Social legislation is beginning to follow the lines of the Postal Union, and already a movement has started to have the governments pay the people their full wages during a six-week vacation. No communism, no fascism; function is the law, and social security—lower-case—is function.”

  “Shut up!” mouthed the colonel in a peculiar tone, half moan, half roar. He held his head and he rocked.

  The doctor clasped his shoulder and laughed. “Listen to me, Leroy,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something funny. You know how little, stupid anecdotes will stick with you, like the limerick about the young lady from Wheeling, and the time you took the ball of tar to bed with you and we had to shave your head? Well, believe it or not, I honestly think that this job I have just done had its source in a couple—no, three—things that happened to me when I was young. When I think of them, and look at the world today—my!”

  He took a turn around the floor. His brother sat still.

  “Wells had something to do with it. Wells pointed out, mostly indirectly, that only a miracle could make humans work together. And sometimes his miracle was entertaining but untenable, because it constituted a common aim for mankind. That never did work. World peace is the finest aim a race could have, but it never tempted us much. Wells’ other miracle was a common enemy—the Martian invasion, for example. Now, that makes sense. It did then and it does now.

  “And here are the silly little things that have stuck with me. Remember that summer when I got a job as a dirt-moving foreman on a canal job? Two of the muckers got into a fight out by one of the machines. I got up into the dragline and dumped a load of sand on the two of them. They stopped fighting, ganged up on me, and punched the daylights out of me.” He laughed.

  “Then there was the other one. It was even sillier. It was in a restaurant, right after I started to teach at Drexel Tech. There were two bubble-headed little chicks sitting at a nearby table, verbally clawing each other’s eyes out over a young man. Just as I was about to get up and move back out of the combat area, they spotted the young man in question submitting to the wiles of a very cute redhead. Whereupon the combatants were suddenly allies, and on the spot”—he laughed again—“concocted a devilish scheme to squirt ink on the contents of the redhead’s clothesline!”

  The colonel was looking at him dully.

  “The common denominator,” continued the doctor, “in the analysis of Wells, the fight on the canal job, and the feline fiddle-faddle in the café, was surprisingly valid, considering the wide difference in the nature of the fields of combat. It boils down to this: that human conflicts cease to be of importance in the face of a common enemy. ‘Divide and rule’ has its obverse; ‘unite and conquer.’ That’s what the world has done during the Attack; except that instead of conquering the Outsider, it has conquered itself—still its common enemy.”

  “Wells,” murmured the colonel. “I remember that. I was reading him and told you the miracle idea. I was in military prep, and you were a freshman in college.”

  “Gosh yes,” said the doctor. “I remember, Leroy.”

  The colonel seemed to be thinking hard, and slowly. He spoke slowly. “Muscles,” he said, “remember how I wore your freshman dinky when you came home for a weekend?”

  “Do I!” chuckled the doctor. “You wouldn’t give it back, and I spent the next six weeks sweeping out seniors’ rooms because I showed up at school without it. Heh! Remember me strutting around in your gray cape when you were at the Point?”

  “Yeh. We were always doing that. Your tie, my tie, our tie. Those were the days. You wouldn’t fit my clothes now, Fatso.”

  “Is that so!” laughed the doctor, delighted to see his brother making some effort to come up out of his doldrum. “Listen, son, you rate too much to be in shape. Too many flunkies to bend over for you when you want your shoes tied.”

  The colonel whipped off the coat with all those shiny buttons. “You couldn’t button that around your fallen chest.”

  In answer the grinning doctor shucked out of his laboratory smock and put his arms into the uniform jacket. With some difficulty and a certain amount of sucking in and holding back, he got it buttoned. “The hat,” he demanded. He put it on. It was too small.

  Meanwhile the colonel slipped into the smock, with its solder-flux stains and its worn elbows. He flapped it in front of him. “What do you do with all this yardage? Smuggle stuff? Hey, Muscles; let’s have a look in the cheval glass in the office. I want to see what I’d look like as a Great Brain.”

  They went into the office, through the door in the shower stall. The doctor, all aglitter in his brother’s jacket, went first. There was a man standing just by the outside door. He had a black cloth over his nose and mouth and a silenced automatic in his hand.

  The colonel, his smock flapping, pushed past his brother and walked out into the room. The man shot him twice and disappeared through the door.

  “Leroy! Who did it, kid?”

  “I did,” said the colonel. “No! No doctor. Too late. Stay—” “You...oh. Oh! That bullet was meant for me. The jacket switch! But why? Who was it?”

  “Never mind...him,” said the colonel. “Hired. Psychoed. Whole thing planned. Foolproof escape. All witnesses called away. He doesn’t know you. Or me. My idea. Was very...careful.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Found out you...work with...enemy—” His voice trailed off. He closed his eyes sleepily and lay still for a moment. Then, his face twisted with effort, he sat suddenly upright. His voice returned—his normal, heavy, crackling tone. “I had proof—proof enough that you were a traitor, Muscles. I was afraid you’d get clear if you got a chance to work on a court. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill you with my own hands. I figured it out this way.”

  “So he’d be there, and shoot me when we came out of the office. But why didn’t you call him off?”

  “Couldn’t. He had orders to shoot the civilian. You were an officer for the moment. He didn’t know us, I tell you. I radioed to a third party, who knows nothing. He gave this hood the starting gun.” He raised his left hand. On the wrist was the miniature transmitter. “I called him when you admitted you worked with the Outsiders...then you explained...and I couldn’t call back; he was on his way here.”

  “Leroy, you fool! Why didn’t you let him go ahead? Why did you make that silly switch? My work’s done. Nothing can change it now.”

  “Muscles...I’m...old-line Army. Can’t help it...don’t like this...brave new...never could. You’re fit for it. You made it; you live in it. Besides, you’ll...appreciate the joke better than...I would.”

  “What do you mean, kid?”

  “You underestimated...you thought you’d be dead when the...spacemen heard your recording.” He laughed weakly. “You won’t be, you know. Things’re moving too fast.”

  There was a sudden, horrible spell of coughing.

  And then Dr. Simmons was alone, holding his dead brother’s head in his arms, rocking back and forth, buffeted and drowning in an acid flood of grief.

  And behind it—far, far behind it, his articulate mind said dazedly, Great day in the morning, he’s right! What’ll they make of me—a saint, or a blood-red Satan?

  SPECIAL APTITUDE

  AS WE APPROACH THE YEAR 2300, the most popular parlor game seems to be picking the Man of the Century. Some favor Bael benGerson because he rewrote the World Constitution, and some hark back to Ikihara and his work on radiation sickness. More often than not, you’ll hear Captain Riley Riggs nominated, and that comes pretty close to the mark.

  But i
t misses—it misses. I’m just an old space-hound, but I know what I’m talking about. I was communications officer with Riggs, remember, and even if it was all of sixty years ago I remember it as if it was last month. The Third Venus Expedition, it was, and the trip that changed the face of the earth. That was the space voyage that brought back the Venus crystals, and made you and you into the soft and happy butterflies you are today. Things were different in the old days. We knew what it was to put in a solid five-hour workday, and we had no personal robots the way everyone has now—we had to put our clothes on by ourselves in the morning. Well, it was a tougher breed then, I guess.

  Anyway, my bid for the Man of the Century was on that ship, the old Starlure—but it wasn’t Riggs.

  They were a. grand crew. You couldn’t want a better skipper than Riggs nor a better mate than Blackie Farrel. There was Zipperlein, the engineer, a big quiet man with little eyes, and his tube techs, Greaves and Purci—a wilder pair of fire-eaters never hit black space. And there was Lorna Bernhard, the best navigator before or since. She was my girl, too, and she was gorgeous. There were two other women aboard—a ray analyst by the name of Betty Ordway and Honey Lundquist, the damage control officer.-But they were strictly from blueprints and homely to boot.

  And for comic relief we had this character Slopes. He was shipped because of some special training in the Venus crystals. I don’t know why they bothered to put him aboard. Any development work on the crystals would have to be done on Earth when—if—we got back. I guess they figured there was room for him, and maybe he’d be needed to locate the crystals or something. Meanwhile, he was useless. We all thought he was and we told him about it often enough to keep him reminded.

  Not that he was a nuisance to anybody. It was just that he was funny. A natural comic. I don’t mean the kind who slips an antigravity plaque under the tablecloth and switches it on when somebody sets down the soup, and I don’t mean the life-of-the-party who sticks a brace of fluorescent tubes under his collar and pretends he’s a Martian. This Slopes was just automatically funny to have around. He wasn’t quite big enough, see, and though he wasn’t homely, he also wasn’t good-looking enough to do himself any good. His voice wasn’t quite deep enough or loud enough to be completely heard....I guess the best way to say it is to call him an Almost; a thorough-going Almost. And the difference between Almost and Altogether—at least in Slopes—was very funny to ship out with, and he had it in every department.

  None of us knew him before he came aboard, which he Hid two hours before blast-off in civilian clothes. That was his first mistake, though why I should call it a mistake...after all, ne was a civilian technician. Even so, all the rest of us were from one or another of the Services, and we just naturally had something on him from the start. Purci, the Number Two Tube Man, was lounging in the alleyway when Slopes stepped off the cargo-lift with his gear, and he sized the man up right now. Purci was tall, loose-jointed, relaxed, deadpan. He took Slopes aft (down, that is, since the Starlure stood upright on her tail-vanes when she was aground) and showed him where to stow his gear. The locker Purci gave him happened to be the garbage port, which scavenged out automatically when we hit the ionosphere. There was no real harm in that—there was plenty of gear in the slop-chest which almost fit him, and at least he looked halfway “regulation.” But he sure was funny. The look on his face when he went to that garbage port six hours out was indescribable. I have to laugh now thinking about it. And for the rest of the trip all he had to do was ask where anything was, and someone’d say, “Look in the garbage!” and the whole crew would lay back and roar.

  Probably the most fun we had was at “turnover,” when we stopped accelerating and went into free fall. For Slope’s benefit the artificial gravity was left off, and all hands but Zipperlein, who was at the drive controls, gathered in the wardroom to watch. Word had been passed to everyone but Slopes as to just when the gravity would cut out, and believe me, it was a tough job to keep from busting out laughing and spoiling the whole deal. We all sprawled around hard by a stanchion or a bolted-down table so we’d have something solid to grab when the time came. Slopes came in and sat by himself near the chow-chutes, innocent as a babe. Greaves sat with one hand cupping his wrist watch and his eyes on the sweep second hand. About three seconds short of turnover, he barked, “Slopes! Come over here, huh?”

  Slopes blinked at him. “Me?” He uncrossed his legs and got to his feet, timidly. He had taken about two steps when the drive cut off.

  I guess nobody ever gets really used to turnover. Your stomach gives a delicate little heave and the semi-circular canals in your inner ear rebel violently. You tense yourself, all over, to the cramping point, and get no end confused because, though you know you’re falling, you don’t know which way—and anyhow, your reflexes expect a swift and sudden impact (because you’re falling) and there just isn’t any impact, so your reflexes feel foolish. Your hair drifts out every which way, and through and through, completely separated from your intense panic, is the damnedest feeling of exhilaration and well-being. They call it Welsbach’s Euphoria. Psychological stuff. Anxiety relief with the gravityless state.

  But I was talking about Slopes.

  When Zipperlein cut the drive, Slopes just went adrift. His advancing foot touched and lightly scraped the floor instead of making a good solid pace. He flung his arms backward, I guess because he thought he was falling that way, and as his shoulders checked the arm motion, they were carried down while his feet went up. He did a slow-motion half-somersault and would have gone all the way around if his feet hadn’t touched the overhead and stopped his rotation. He hung in mid-air with his head down and his feet up, with nothing to hang on to, and with the powerful feeling that, though the blood ought to be rushing to his face, it wasn’t. All of a sudden, everything around him acted like up, and there wasn’t any down left anywhere. He grabbed wildly toward the bulkhead, the overhead, the door—things he knew he couldn’t reach. After that he subsided, trembling, and by that time the rest of us had recovered from the weird impact of turnover—after all, we’d all felt it before—and we could enjoy the fun.

  “I said, ‘Come here’!” Greaves snapped.

  Slopes sort of flailed at the air and jigged with his feet. It made no never mind—he just stayed where he was, head down and helpless. We roared. He flapped his lips a couple of times, and then said, real strained, “Mmmph. Mmmph.” I thought I’d die.

  “Don’t be so standoffish,” said the Lundquist chick, the damage control officer. “Come on down and give us a kiss.”

  Slopes whispered, “Please...please.”

  Betty Ordway said, “Make him say ‘pretty please.’” We laughed.

  “Reckon maybe he don’t like us,” I piped up. “Come on down and join the crowd, Slopesy.”

  Somebody said, “Hold out some garbage,” and everybody laughed again.

  Zipperlein came in, hand over hand. “Looky there,” he said in his big, fat, flatulent voice. “Man can fly.”

  “Got his head in the clouds,” said the skipper. Everybody laughed again—not because it was funny—because it was the skipper.

  “Please,” said Slopes, “get me down. Somebody get me down.”

  Greaves said, “I like a shipmate that can stand on his own feet. Slopes, I asked you real polite-like to come on over and be sociable.”

  Zipperlein laughed. “Oh—you want him?” He went from the door to the scuttlebutt, from the wardroom table to a lighting fixture, one hairy hand after another, until he could reach Slopes’s foot. “Greaves wants you,” he said, and shoved.

  Slopes spun end over end. He began to wail, “Ow-oo! Ow-oo!” as he turned. Spinning, he went from one end of the wardroom to the other toward Greaves. Greaves was ready for him, his hands firm to a banister-bar, his feet doubled up. When Slopes reached him, he planted his feet in Slopes’s back and booted him, spinning no longer, upship toward the Captain. Riggs gave him a shoulder and shunted him over to me. I butted him back to Gre
aves. Greaves reached but missed him, and he hit the bulkhead with a crunch. Weight is one thing—you can get rid of that. Mass is something else again. Slopes’s hundred and fifty-odd pounds were all with him, at high velocity, when he hit the wall. He hovered near it, whimpering.

  “Zip,” said the Captain, “Turn on the grav plates. This could go on all day.”

  “Aye,” said the engineer, and swarmed out.

  I’d been hanging on to Loma, partly because I knew she’d have hold of something solid, and partly because I just liked to hang on to her. “Ace,” she said to me, “whose idea was this?”

  “Guess.”

  “Ace,” she told me, “you know what? You’re a skunk.”

  “Ah, climb off,” I grinned. “You should see what they did to me when I was a cadet.”

  She turned to look at me, and there was an expression I’d seen in her eyes only twice before. Both times she and I had been strangers. She said, “I guess you learn something new every day. Even about people you know pretty well.”

  “Yep,” I said, “and it’s a blessing. You can look at the stars just so long on these trips, and then you can watch just so many visitape recordings. After that you need something to relieve the monotony. I think we all owe Slopes a rousing vote of thanks. He’s a very funny man.”

  She said something then but I didn’t get it. Everyone was laughing too hard. Zipperlein had cut in the artificial gravity and Slopes had thumped to the floor, where he writhed, hugging it to him as if he loved it, which of course he did. Everyone does coming out of free fall.

  Oh, we had a time that evening. I’ll never forget it.

  There was a lot of chit-chat aboard about our mission. Now that we have Venus crystals by the hundreds of millions, it’s not easy to tell you just how valuable they were sixty years ago. The Second Venus Expedition had picked up two of them, and both were destroyed in the tests that determined their characteristics. The first was shattered purposely—nobody knew at that time that it was different from any other crystal—so it could be chemically analyzed, a solution prepared, and new crystals grown. But Venus crystals just don’t grow. The second crystal was subjected to some high-frequency resonance tests. Someone got a little too experimental with the frequencies and the crystal blew up. Data on the explosion showed that what we had just had in our hands, but didn’t have any more, was the key to broadcast power—power so plentiful that everyone could have it practically for free. The power we already had, since the techniques for fissioning copper atoms had been developed. But broadcasting it was something else again, unless a tight beam could be aimed from power plant to receiver and kept that way, even if the receiver was on an automobile or a ‘copter and dodging. The Venus crystal could do that job—vibrating to power frequencies and sending back radiations that would guide in the power beam. Get enough of those crystals and we could do away with millions of miles of transmission wire, and convert it to enough fuel to power Earth for a couple of centuries. Don’t forget, mankind has been laying a network of copper over the world for going on four hundred years, and there’s lots of it.