A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  They say anyone can recall this way; but for you, with what the psycho-dynamicians have done to you—or is it for you?—you can do more of this than anybody. There isn’t anything that ever happened in your whole life that you can’t remember. You can start at the beginning and go all the way through. You can start at the beginning and leap years in a second, and go through an episode again...get mad again...fall in love again. And when you get tired of the events themselves, you can run them off again, to find out why. Why did Steih go through those years of study and preparation, those months of competition, when all the time he didn’t want to be in the Space Service? Why did Pegg conceal from himself that he wasn’t’ fit for the Space Service?

  So you cast back, comb, compare and ponder, keeping busy. If you’re careful, just remembering lasts a long time, then wondering why lasts even longer; and in between times there are the books and stereos, autochess and the music...until you’re ready to cast and comb in your memories again. But sooner or later—later, if you’re especially careful—you’ll get restless, and your life as it was played out, and the reasons why it was played just that way, all that gets old. You’ve been there. You can think of no new approach to any of it, and learn nothing more from it.

  That’s where the center-line bulkhead comes in handy. Its very shape is a friendly thing to you; the hull on your left is curved, as part of the ship’s side, but the bulkhead is a flat wall. Its ubiquitous presence is a reminder that it has a function, like everything else in your world; that it is by nature a partition; that the existence of a partition presupposes another compartment; and that the other compartment is the size and shape of this one, and designed for a similar purpose—to be a dwelling for someone. With no sound nor sign of occupancy, the bulkhead still attests the life behind it, just by being there. It’s a friendly flatness, a companionable feature of your world, and its company pervades all your thinking. You know it’s your last resort, but you know too that it’s a rich one. When at last you’re driven to use it, you’ll enter another kind of world, more complex and more engrossing than your own just because of the work it takes to get from place to place and the mystery of the fog between the places. It’s a mind, another human mind, sharing this prison with you when at last you need sharing more than anything in all of space.

  Who is it?

  You think about that. You think a whole lot about that. Back at Base, in your last year, you and the other cadets thought about that more than anything. If they’d ever given you the shadow of a hint...but wondering about it was apparently part of your training. You knew only that on your Long Haul, you would not be alone. You had a pretty good idea that the choice, of a shipmate for you would be a surprise. You looked around you at mess, in class, in the dormitory; you lay awake at night dealing out their faces in a sort of solitaire game; and sometimes you thought about one and said, that’d be fine, we’d get along; and sometimes you said, that stinker? Lock me up with him and that bulkhead won’t be tough enough. I’ll kill him after the third day, so help me.

  After they tapped you for your first Haul, this was the only thing you were scared about. Everything else, you thought you could handle. You knew your job inside out and backwards, and it wouldn’t whip you. You were sharp-tuned, fine-honed, ready for anything that was under your control. You were even confident about being alone; it wouldn’t get you. Away down deep no man believes he can be driven out of his mind, just as he cannot believe—really believe—he will ever be dead. That’s the kind of thing that happens to someone else.

  But this business of a shipmate wasn’t under your control. You didn’t control who it would be and you wouldn’t control the guy after blast-off. It was the only unknown, and therefore the only thing that scared you. Leave it alone and you didn’t have to so much as know you had a shipmate until you were good and ready. The only control you’d have would be the intercom button on your side of that bulkhead.

  Being able to shut off a voice isn’t control, though. You don’t know what your shipmate will do. Or—be.

  In those last tight days before blast-off there was one thing you became overwhelmingly aware of. Esprit de corps they call it. You and the other graduates were hammered into a mold, and hammered some more until the resiliency was gone out of you. You were alike and you did like things because you had grown to want to. You knew for certain that one of this tight, trustworthy little group would be picked for you; their training and yours, their whole lives and yours, pointed toward this ship, this Haul. Your presence on this ship summed up your training; your training culminated in your presence on the ship. Only a graduate cadet was fit to man the ship; the ship existed solely for the graduate cadet. This was something so self-evident that you never thought about it.

  Not until now.

  Because now, a few minutes ago, you were ready to push that button. You weren’t sure if you’d broken all records for loneliness, for duration of solitary confinement, but you’d tried. You’d looked through the viewport until it ceased to mean anything; you’d read until you didn’t care anymore; you’d lived the almost-life of the stereos until you couldn’t make believe you believed them; you’d listened to music until it didn’t matter; and you’d gone over and over your life from its very beginnings until you’d completely lost perspective on it or anything or anyone in it. You’d found that you could go back to the viewport and cycle through the whole thing again, but you’d done that too, until the whole matrix of personal involvement was milked and sere and intolerable. Then the flatness of the bulkhead made itself felt. It seemed to bulge toward you, crowd you against the ship’s side, and you knew it was getting to be time you pushed that button and started involving yourself in someone else.

  Who? Pete or Krakow or that crazy redhead Walkinok? Or Wendover—you all called him Bendover—with all those incomprehensible shaggy-dog stories? Harris? Flacker? Beerbelly Blaustein or Cohen the Wire-haired Terror? Or Shank—what you all called him was a shame? Or Gindes, whose inexplicable nickname was Mickey Mouse. You’d rather hoped it would be Gindes, not because you liked him but because he was the one classmate you’d never known very well. He always looked on and ‘kept his mouth shut. He’d be much more fun to explore than, say, old Shank, who was so predictable you could practically talk in chorus with him.

  So you tortured yourself, just for the sake of torture, with your thumb over the intercom button, until even the torture dried out and blew away.

  You pushed.

  You found out first of all that the intercom apparently had its own amplifier, energized when you held the button down, and that it took forever—well, three or four seconds—to warm up. First nothing, then a carrier, then the beginnings of a signal; then at last the voice of your shipmate, rushing up to full volume, as loud and as clear as if the bulkhead did not exist. And you get off that button as if it were suddenly white-hot, as if it had turned into a needle; and you’re cowering against the outboard bulkhead, deep in shock, physically in silence but with that voice going on and on and on, unbelievably in your unbelieving brain.

  It was crying.

  It wept wearily, as if you had tuned in toward the end of a long session of wild and lonesome grief. It cried quietly, exhaustedly, and as if there was in all the universe no hope. And it cried in a voice which was jokingly wrong for this place. It was a light, full voice, a tenor near to contralto in timbre. Its overtones were childlike—not childish; childlike—and it was wrong. Altogether wrong.

  The wild ideas come first: Stowaway?

  You almost laugh. For days before blast-off you were doped and drugged and immersed in high-frequency fields; hypnotized, worked and reworked mentally and physically. You were passively fed and passively instructed; you don’t know now and you may never know all they did to you. But you can be sure it was done inside six concentric rings of “security” of one kind and another, and you can be sure that your shipmate got the same. What it amounted to was concentrated attention from a mob of specialists, every sleep
ing and waking second from the time you beered it up at the class farewell dinner to the time the accelerator tug lifted your ship and carried it screaming up and outward. Nobody is in this ship but those who belong in it; that you can absolutely bank on.

  Mad idea the second: (Oh no; no! for a while you don’t even dare think it. But with that kind of voice, that crying, you have to think of something. So you do. and you’re scared! scared in a way you’ve never imagined before, and to a degree you didn’t think was possible.) There’s a girl in there!

  You run those wordless syllables, those tired sobs, through your mind again, seeking for vocalizations as separated from the breathy, painful gasping that accompanied them. And you don’t know. You just can’t be sure.

  So punch the button again. Listen some more. Or—ask. But you can’t, you can’t; the crazy idea might be true, and you couldn’t stand that. They couldn’t, they just couldn’t put a girl on these ships with you—and then put her behind the bulkhead.

  Then you have an instant fantasy about that; you kneel suddenly, bumping your skull on the overhead, and flap your hands around the bulkhead, where it meets deck plates, nose compartment, overhead, after bulkhead; and all around, your fingers ride the bead of a weld. You sit back, sweating a little and half laughing at yourself. Scratch one fantasy; there’ll be no sliding partitions into no harems, this trip.

  You stop laughing and think, they couldn’t be that cruel! You’re on a test run, sure, and it isn’t the ship that’s, being tested. You know that and you accept it. But tests, tests...must you throw a glass vase on a brick sidewalk to find out if it’s brittle? You see one of your own hands going up and out to check for a panel, a join again. You sneer at it, and watch it stop in embarrassment and slink home guiltily to the deck beside you.

  Well, say they weren’t that cruel. Who did they put in there?

  Not Walkinok. Not Shank. Not Harris or Cohen, or any cadet. A cadet wouldn’t lie there and cry like that, like a child, a schoolgirl, a baby.

  Some stranger, then. And now the anger comes, shouldering out all the fear. They wouldn’t! This ship is everything a cadet was born for—made for. That tight chain that bound you with the others, an easy thing you all shared and never had to think about, that was a thing that didn’t admit strangers. Aside from that, beyond that: this isn’t a matter of desecrated esprit; it’s a matter of moral justice. Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship! What did you give your life to, and what for? Why did you fluff off marriage, and freedom, and all the wonderful, unpredictable trivialities called “fun” that make most human lives worth living? Why did you hold still for Base routines, for the hazing you got from the upper classmen? Just to have some stranger, someone who wasn’t even a cadet, wander in without training, shaping, conditioning, experience, and get on your ship?

  Oh, it has to be a cadet. It couldn’t be anyone else. Even a cadet that could break down and cry—that’s a more acceptable idea than its being a woman, or a stranger.

  You’re-still angry, but now it’s not the kind of anger that stops you. You push the button. You hear the carrier, then the beginnings of something else...ah. Breathing. Difficult, broken breathing, the sound of someone too tired to cry any more, even when crying has changed nothing and there are more tears to come.

  “What the hell are you bawling about?” you yell.

  The breathing goes on, and goes on. Finally it stops for a moment, and then a long, whispery, shuddery sigh. “Hey!” you yell. “Hey—you in there!”

  But there is no answer. The breathing is fainter, more regular. Whoever it is, is going to sleep.

  You press even harder on the button, as if that would do any good, and you yell again, this time not even “Hey!” but a simpler, angrier syllable. You can think only that your shipmate chooses—chooses, by God—not to answer you.

  You’re breathing hard now, but your shipmate isn’t. You hold your breath and listen. You hear the deep, quiet inhalations, and then a small catch, and a little sigh, the ghost of half a sob. “Hey!”

  Nothing.

  You let the button go, and in the sharp silence that replaces the carrier’s faint hum, that wordless syllable builds and builds inside you until it bursts free again. You can tell from the feel of your throat and the ringing in your ears that it’s been a time, a long, long time since you used your voice.

  You’re angry and you’re hurt from these insults to yourself and to your service, and you know what? You feel good. Some of the stereos you have are pretty good; they take you right into battle, into the arms of beautiful women, into danger, and from time to time you could get angry at someone, in them. You could, but you haven’t for a long time now. You haven’t laughed or been angry since...since...well, you can’t even remember when. You forgot how and you’ve forgotten just when it was you forgot. And now look. The heart’s going, the sweat...this is fine.

  Push the button again, take another little sip of anger. It’s been aging; it’s vintage stuff. Go ahead. You do, and up comes the carrier.

  “Please,” says the voice. “Please, please...say something else.”

  Your tongue is paralyzed and you choke, suddenly, on a drop of your own saliva. You cough violently, let go the button, and pound yourself on the chest. For a moment you’re in bad shape. Coughing makes your thinking go in spurts, and your thinking is bouncing up and down on the idea that until now you didn’t really believe there was anyone in there at all. You get your wind and push the button again. The voice says, “Are you all right? Can I do anything?”

  You become certain of something else: that isn’t a voice you recognize. If you ever heard it before you sure don’t remember it. Then the content of it hits you. “Can I do anything?”

  You get mad again. “Yeah,” you growl, “hand me a glass of water.” You don’t have your thumb on the button so you just say what pops into your mind. You shake yourself like a wet bird dog, take a deep breath, and lean on the control again.

  Before you can open your mouth you’re in a hailstorm of hysterical laughter. “Glass of water...uh-uh-uh...that’s good. You don’t know what this means,” says the voice, suddenly sober and plaintive, “I’ve waited so long, I’ve listened to your music and the sound from your stereos....You never talk, you never say anything at all; I never even heard you cough before.”

  Part of your mind reacts to that: That’s unnatural, not even to cough, or laugh aloud or hum. Must be a conditioning. But most of it explodes at this stranger, this intruder, talking away like that without a word of explanation, of apology, talking as if that voice had a right to be here. “Shaddap!”

  “I was beginning to think you were deaf ‘n’ dumb. Or maybe even that you weren’t there at all. That was the thing that scared me the most.”

  “Shhut up,” you hiss, with all the fury, all the deadly warning you can command.

  “I knew they wouldn’t,” says the voice happily. “They’d never put a man out here by himself. That would be too—” It stops abruptly as you release the button.

  My God, you think. The dam has boist. That character’ll chunter along like that for the duration. You press the button quickly, hear “—all alone out here, you get scared to look out the viewp—” and you cut him off again.

  That stuff like an invisible mist you see melting away is all that conjecture, those wonderful half-formed plans of shipping out with Walkinok or the Wire-haired Terror. You were going to review your courses, remember? Slow and easy—take a week on spatial ballistics or spectroscopy. Think it all over for a day between sentences. Or laugh over the time you and the Shank got beered up at the canteen and pretended you were going to tie up the C.O. and jet him off with Provost, the head PD man, for a shipmate. The general would get all the psychodynamics he needed. The general was always talking psychodynamics, Colonel Provost was always doing psychodynamics. Ah, it seemed funny at the time, anyway. It wasn’t so much the beer. It was knowing the general, knowing Provost, that made it funny. How funny would it be with a stra
nger?

  They give you someone to talk to. They give you someone you haven’t anything to talk to about! The idea of shipping a girl behind the bulkhead, now, that was a real horrible idea. That was torture. Well, so’s this. Only much more refined.

  A thought keeps knocking, and you finally back off and let it in. Something to do with the button. You push it and you can hear your shipmate. You release it and...shut off the intercom? No, by the Lord you don’t. When you were coughing, you were off that button. “Can I do anything?”

  Now what the hell kind of business is this? (That detached part of your mind reaches hungrily for the pulses of fury: ah, it feels good!) Do you mean to sit there and tell me, you rage silently at the PD men who designed this ship, that unless I push that button my shipmate can hear everything that goes on with me? The intercom’s open on the other side all the time, open on this side only when I push the button, is that it?

  You turn and glare out the viewport, staring down the cold distant eye of infinity, and Where the hell, you rage silently, where the hell’s my privacy?

  This won’t do. This won’t do at all. You figured right from the start that you and your shipmate would be pretty equal, sure, but on a ship, even a little two-passenger can like this, someone’s got to be in command. Given that the other compartment has the same stereos, the same dispensers, the same food and water and everything else, and the only difference between these living quarters is that button—who’s privileged? Me, because I get to push the button? Or my shipmate, who gets to listen in on me when I so much as belch?