Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  Sam slapped his knee. “Now don’t that beat all? Too stubborn, he says.”

  Sam leaned back against a row of crates. His eyes glistened in the light. Then the excitement died from them.

  “No, Johnny. It don’t seem right for me to go on livin’ when people come down to ’ponies every day to do my work. It ain’t right, Johnny.”

  “But Sam—”

  “Oh. I know. You tell me we’re almost Home. But Johnny,” Sam leaned forward, “there ain’t no Home. It’s just a story they tell you when you’re little . . . Or maybe when you’re old, like me. There ain’t nothing but this here Ship and—”

  “Sam, listen—”

  “But me no buts, Johnny. Old Sam knows. Yes, sir, he’s been around too long. You’re all trying to fool him, but you’re not.” He paused for breath. “I know, Johnny. That’s why I got this here bottle. You don’t need to hint around, trying to make it easy. You just speak up. Old Sam can do what’s got to be done.”

  Johnny Nine stood up.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take that bottle, Sam.”

  “No, Johnny.”

  “Give it to me!”

  Johnny Nine took the bottle and smashed it against the deck plates.

  “We’ll never need one of those again. Where we’re going there’s no tolerance factor. A man doesn’t have to die just because he can’t do all the work he once could. Earth is such a big terrarium that a man can just keep on living.”

  “Johnny, old Sam’s confused. He’s all mixed up.” One lone tear ran down his cheek.

  “You go to your cabin and get some rest. You’ll never need a bottle. Understand that, Sam? You’ll never need a bottle.”

  Then you weren’t foolin’ me? We’re really goin’ Home? Somebody said we were, and I thought we were, and then I thought you were all foolin’ me and then—

  “I guess I better had, Johnny. Old Sam’s tired. Old Sam’s awful tired.”

  He limped out of the compartment.

  Johnny Nine watched his back until it disappeared down the companionway ladder to the passenger quarters. The rest of the passengers had been doing Sam’s work for nearly three years now. But it didn’t matter. They were so near Home that it didn’t matter. They no longer needed to produce a balance for a new generation; it was journey’s end.

  Johnny Nine began to rummage through the supplies, extra parts for all sorts of fancied emergencies that never occurred, and no parts, of course, for those that did, over the long, four hundred years of the trip.

  Johnny Nine finally found the radio spares. Mislaid behind a mass of junk that once had been air control gauges. One of the First Generation had smashed the gauges when he went mad. But the Ship had been lucky. It had survived without them.

  “HELLO, Johnny. The Captain said you were—oh! Johnny?” Johnny Nine looked up; he smiled. He slipped out of the headset. “ ’Lo, Marte. They’re broadcasting music to us. Want to listen?” He held out the headset. “It sounds better over these than over the speaker.”

  She crossed to him, in lithe, swaying youth movements, and took the headset. She fitted it over her hair and began to listen.

  At first her face was expressionless. After a while, her mouth formed a little “o” and her eyes widened; she stood for a long time listening, making no sound.

  Finally, she removed the headset and laid it on the table. She seemed vaguely puzzled.

  “It’s awful funny music, isn’t it, Johnny? Not at all like ours . . .

  “But then I guess they’d think our songs——”

  She began to hum the tune of Long Night. Then she sang softly:

  It’s a long nighty

  A dark night.

  Before the day.

  It’s a long night before

  the long day,

  And we’re going Home:

  Yes

  We’re going Home!”

  She stopped.

  “I guess they’ll think that’s funny, Johnny. Let’s not sing it for them, ever. If somebody would laugh at that, it would hurt me, down inside. Let’s never sing it again.”

  “All right, Marte,” Johnny Nine said.

  After a moment, he stood up. “You didn’t come here with the rest.”

  “No . . . I wanted to wait. I hoped maybe I could look at it while you were here. Just you and me.”

  He crossed to the Observation window. “It’s just the little ’scope . . . But here, I’ll——”

  He peered into the eyepiece and adjusted the knobs. “There . . . Ah . . . That does it. There, Marte.”

  He stood aside.

  She bent over the telescope. The silence drew out and out, almost breath-held.

  “It’s . . . It’s . . . Johnny, I feel like it was ours. Just yours and mine. Isn’t it beautiful, all hazy blue?”

  “Can you see the continents?”

  “Yes . . . Yes, I think I can. Not very well. Just dark patches.”

  She looked up. “It looks so little, Johnny, like a little ball. So little that if I had a chain, I could put it on it and then wear the chain around my neck.”

  Johnny Nine laughed gently. “But it’s really big, Marte. Bigger than the Ship. A hundred times that big, a thousand——”

  “A million!”

  “Yes, maybe even that. It doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

  “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, I’m so happy!” She looked into the eyepiece again, “I’ll never forget this, not as long as I live. That little tiny ball and the Sun. I think I feel something like God must have felt when he made it.”

  “If you were to look hard enough, Marte, you could almost see our little farm down there——”

  “Our farm . . . Say it again, Johnny.”

  “Our farm,” he said.

  THE Ship drew nearer and nearer.

  The balanced terrarium pointed Home, rushing faster than the wind, faster than sound, faster.

  The Captain sat at his desk. For the past hour he had been drawing strange designs, contorted in helical animation, on a pad of yellow paper. Occasionally, he paused to stare out of the Observation window, lost in thought.

  Absently, he let the pencil drop to the deck; the sound it made spun away his reverie. He bent and retrieved the pencil.

  “Skippy?”

  The Mate looked up from a book. “Yes?”

  The Captain chuckled. “I’ve been thinking about what Johnny said a while back.”

  The Mate waited.

  “You see that star, out there, Skippy? The bright one, there on the left of the field? I’ve been watching her for years. Even thought up a name for her. Mary Anne. It almost seems that if I could say something, in just the right way, she could understand and answer me.”

  The Mate closed the book and placed it on the table. When the two of them were alone, they sometimes talked of things that only friends can talk of. He maintained an encouraging silence.

  “I’ve been thinking, too,” the Captain continued, “that when I get to Earth, I can still see Mary Anne. If I know where to look, she’ll be there, just the same as always . . .

  “There was old Grandfather John Turner (you remember how he used to cuss the filters?) Remember how he talked of going Home. ‘I won’t live to see it,’ he would say. ‘I won’t be here then,’ he would say. But when he talked about it, it didn’t seem to matter . . .

  “It was the dream that mattered. A dream of everything that’s wonderful. It meant peace and beauty and rest. It meant something too wonderful ever to happen . . . For him, it was just a dream.

  “Now that we can practically touch it, and see it, and feel it, I find it a rather frightening thing. It makes me feel cold inside; it makes my mouth get dry; it makes my hair prickle.

  “Funny, how it gets me.”

  “I know what you mean,” the Mate said.

  “Maybe I’ve been afraid all along to admit that I wanted to go Home; afraid that somehow wanting something so much like a dream would keep me from ever getting it
.

  “But now that we’re almost there, I’ve changed. Remember what Johnny said, ‘How would you like to sit on a porch and tell the kids how you came back from the stars?’ ”

  The Mate nodded and smiled. “It kinda got me too.”

  The Captain looked at the icy points of light again, set against the ebon of eternal night. “It does get you . . .

  “On Earth, Mary Anne will sparkle. I guess everything sparkles there. Stars sparkle; water sparkles in the sunlight; the air sparkles; life sparkles.”

  He stood up and turned his back on the window.

  “You know, once I get my feet down there, I’m going to see that they stay. I’m never going to take them off. Not even so much as a single mile. I’m going to get me a bushel basket, and I’m going to fill it with Earth, and when I go to bed, I’m going to have it right there beside me, so I can reach out with my hands, anytime in the night, and feel it.”

  “For a long time, Ed, I was scared, like you were, that something would happen. But now we’re so near, I don’t know . . . I was afraid that maybe things had changed; that there wouldn’t be any people. That maybe—I guess I always see the dark side, don’t I?”

  The Captain said, “Maybe there’s some good in that. But this time I’m going to sound a little like Johnny. Things may have changed, Skippy. From what we’ve read about. We’ve got to expect that. But it can’t be too different. We can adjust. Man can always adjust.”

  He turned again to the window.

  “And there’s always Earth herself. You can look through the ’scope and see her out there, just like she’s been for a billion years. Home. That hasn’t changed. The air of Home; the water of Home. That doesn’t change.”

  “I guess you’re right, Ed,” the Mate agreed. “That can’t change.”

  HE found her down below the motors on the last level. Their light was burning dimly.

  She had been crying.

  Johnny Nine stood watching her for a long time. Finally he said, “I’m sorry, Marte.”

  She looked up. Her face was tear-cast, and her eyes were red. “It’s . . . It’s . . Her voice caught in a sob. “Oh, Johnny, why? Why, Johnny?” Johnny Nine had no answer to that question.

  “Why did he have to do it—just when we were almost Home?” She began to cry again.

  He sat down beside her, drew her head over on his shoulder.

  “We’ve all got to die sometime. You, me . . . Sam.”

  “But not now, Johnny. Not now!” He let out his breath in a long sigh. “I know. I—I liked Sam. He was always good to me, always ready to stop work and explain things to me. But he was old, Marte, so awful old.”

  “But not to see Home, when you’re almost there . . . He looked through the ’scope, but his eyes were bad and he couldn’t see it. And he thought we were all fooling him . . . But Johnny, he’d had to believe, once he got his feet down on Earth, once the wind was all around him. Even if he was old. He’d had to believe, them.”

  “I know, Marte.”

  There was silence for a moment. “You know what they say. ‘When you die, you go to Earth’. Maybe Sam’s already there. Ahead of us. Somehow.”

  “He used to tell me—me—me—” She choked up; she let out her breath unevenly. “When I was little and went down to look at the gardens, he used to tell me how he—”

  “Don’t, Marte. Try not to think of it.”

  “All right, Johnny. I won’t. I’ll try not to think of it. But Johnny—”

  “Now, now, that’s enough.”

  For fully five minutes neither of them spoke.

  Then Marte asked, in a small voice, “Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder how he got the bottle.”

  “Please, Marte . . .”

  “I know, Johnny. But that way. It was so cruel. If he’d just waited.” She looked at Johnny Nine. “Johnny?”

  He was staring at his sandals. “Johnny?”

  “Yes?”

  “We aren’t—aren’t going to reconvert him, are we? Not now?”

  “No, Marte.” Johnny Nine took a deep breath. “Not now. We’re going to take him with us, and bury him, really bury him. Put the Earth over him. He’d like that, Marte. Not in the reconverter, but in the cool Earth, the Earth of Home.”

  “Yes,” she said very softly, “he’d like that.”

  CLOSER and closer. The Ship was well inside Jupiter, skyrocketing to her rendezvous with the pilot ship. The radio lapse was less than thirty minutes now.

  The Captain turned from the speaker. “You heard it, Johnny. What can we tell them?”

  Earth wanted press comments. Tell us about the trip!

  The Mate stood up.

  Johnny Nine shuffled his feet. There was an awkward silence.

  The History of the Ship. Which of them would dare attempt that?

  The life of twenty-one generations; the death of nineteen; the dream of Earth . . .

  Their little, circumscribed hopes and fears. The little things out of the night drench of a thousand lives. How well they lived together, the mutual respect and the mutual affection . . .

  The little things whose total is life. Or the big things.

  Like the Great Sickness, during the Second Generation. It had almost finished the Ship.

  The little things and the big, all rolled into an emotion that meant the Ship. That was the Ship . . .

  The History of the Ship. Who could tell that? Who?

  The Captain walked to the transmitter. He picked up the microphone and switched the “send” lever over.

  “Hello, Earth . . . Hello, Earth . . . Interstellar Flight One . . . Interstellar Flight One . . . For your press . . . Repeat . . . For your press . . .”

  There was only one thing to say: “We’re coming Home!”

  That single sentence crackled its way across the vastness of space.

  THE Ship sped on. Its forty-nine people worked and slept and played, as their fathers before them, and their fathers before that. But their hearts were glad with a new gladness.

  “We’re inside Mars!”

  Johnny Nine settled back in the pilot seat, aft in the Ship, above the tubes.

  “We’re inside Mars!”

  No one heard him. He was alone in the cramped pilot quarters.

  He threw in the forward jets, unused for almost two hundred years, cut in the forward jets to break their fall. Prayed.

  The great Ship trembled.

  Johnny Nine’s hands skipped, in carefully trained movement, over a bewildering array of firing studs. His eyes seemed to dart everywhere, checking the banks of dials. The tempo increased. For ten years he had trained for this job; he knew it well.

  Then the Ship began to turn. Slowly, lazily, its nose spewing fire.

  It took two hours, and by then, Johnny Nine was exhausted. But it was done. His job was done. He had set the Ship safely in an orbit around the Sun, between Mars and Earth.

  He left the tiny pilot cabin.

  They would be waiting for him, forward. He wanted to run along the long companionway. He forced himself to walk. His heart was hammering with a mounting tempo.

  * * *

  They were all assembled in the play-area, the only large open space in the whole Ship. Johnny Nine came out onto the platform above it. His hands gripped the guard rail tightly.

  He looked down at the passengers below him, saw their white upturned faces, strained, tense. Saw Marte, holding her breath.

  “You felt the jets,” he said, and his voice carried clear. “That means we’re in an orbit around the Sun. Our own Sun. Just like a planet.”

  There were no cheers. His announcement was greeted only by the low hum of voices, breaking like wind in pines, a sigh of relief.

  Then there was a stunned silence, when, for a moment, no one knew quite what to do with himself.

  After that, they began to mill around, each going to his neighbor and repeating the news again.

  “Well, we’re Home.”
/>   “Yes, we’re Home.”

  THE Ship drifted in its orbit, now, like a planet, like a very small planet, the balanced terrarium.

  “Listen!” the Mate said. “I’ve got him!”

  He took off the headset and switched open the speaker.

  “Interstellar Flight One . . .”

  The voice sounded strong and clear and near.

  The Mate spoke into the microphone.

  And then they waited, their eyes on the huge sweep hand of the clock.

  One second, two, three—

  Four—

  Five . . .

  “Flight One. Read you fine. Expect to make approach within an hour. Has yur Ship a carrier magnet plate for coupling?”

  The Captain frowned. “Tell him no.”

  “Hello, pilot ship. No magnet plate, repeat, no magnet plate.”

  “. . . All right, Flight One. Has yur Ship serviceable suits?”

  The Captain said, “Better check them, Johnny.”

  Johnny Nine left at a run to test the space suits.

  It took him almost half an hour. When he came back, he was breathless.

  “They tested, Captain!”

  The Mate threw the sending switch.

  “Pilot ship. Have suits. Repeat. Have suits.”

  “Look!” Johnny Nine cried. He was pointing to the Observation window. “See it, that little light. It’s their ship!”

  The three men looked.

  They could see a moving finger of fire, like a tiny comet, except that its tail thrust sunward.

  “Have located yur Ship, Flight One. We are making ready for the approach.”

  The radio was silent a moment. Then:

  “We have a request.”

  “Yes?” the Mate said into the microphone.

  “. . . We have full transmission equipment on our ship for a world program. Since you have no magnet plates to couple us, will you send one of yur passengers over for formal welcome?”

  “Tell them yes.”

  “Yes,” the Mate echoed.

  The wait was infinitesimal now. “Fine. Brief ceremony planned. To be broadcast to the three planets. At conclusion of it, we will send yur pilot to you. He will move yur Ship into an orbit around Earth, and you can be taken down within three days. That will be the fastest course, and we know all of you are anxious to land at the first possible moment.” Johnny Nine started for the door. “Wait!” the Captain ordered. “Fll tell the passengers. You get ready to board their ship for the welcome.” Johnny Nine felt a lump in his throat. “Yes, sir!”