Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  Then why this feeling that millenniums had ticked by second on slow second? Why this eerie, empty awareness of a journey through fathomless, unending night? Was the human mind so easily fooled? It seemed to me, finally, that the answer was that I had been alive for those five hundred years, all my cells and my organs had existed, and it was possible that some part of my brain had been aware throughout the entire unthinkable period. And there was, of course, the psychological fact that I knew that five hundred years had gone by.

  I saw that my ten minutes were up. Cautiously, I turned on the massager. The gentle pads had been working on me for about fifteen minutes when my door opened; the light clicked on, and there stood Blake. The too-sharp movement of turning my head to look at him made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and heard him walk across the room toward me. When I was able to look at him again without seeing blurs I saw that he was carrying a bowl of soup. He stood staring down at me with a grim expression on his face. At last, his long, thin countenance relaxed into a wan smile.

  “ ’Lo, Bill,” he said. “Ssshh!” he hissed immediately. “Now, don’t try to speak. I’m going to start feeding you this soup while you’re still lying down. The sooner you’re up, the better I’ll like it.” He was bleak again as he added, “I’ve been up for two weeks.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and ladled out a spoonful of “soup.” There was silence, then, except for the rustling sound of the massager. Slowly the strength flowed through my body, and with each passing second I became more aware of the grimness of Blake.

  “What about Renfrew?” I managed finally. “He awake?”

  Blake hesitated, then nodded. His expression darkened with a frown; he said:

  “He’s mad, Bill. I had to tie him up. I’ve got him now in his room. He’s quieter now, but at the beginning he was a gibbering maniac.”

  “Are you crazy?” I whispered at last. “Renfrew was never so sensitive as that. Depressed and sick, yes; but the mere passage of time, abrupt awareness that all his friends are dead, couldn’t make him insane.”

  Blake was shaking his head. “It isn’t only that. Bill—” He paused, then: “Bill, I want you to prepare your mind for the greatest shock it’s ever had.”

  I stared up at him with an empty feeling inside me. “What do you mean?”

  He went on, “I know you’ll be able to take it. So don’t get scared. You and I, Bill, are just a couple of lugs. We’re along because we went to U with Renfrew and Pelham. Basically, it wouldn’t matter to insensitives like us whether we landed in 1,000,000 B.C. or A.D. We’d just look around and say: ‘Fancy meeting you here, mug!’ or ‘Who was that pterodactyl I saw you with last night? That wasn’t no pterodactyl, that was Unthahorsten’s bulbous-brained wife.’”

  “For Heaven’s sake,” I whispered, “get to the point. What’s up?”

  Blake rose to his feet. “Bill, after I’d read your reports and seen the photographs of that burning ship, I got an idea. The Alpha suns were pretty close two weeks ago, only about six months away at our average speed of five hundred miles a second. I thought to myself, ‘I’ll see if I can tune in some of their radio stations.’ ” He smiled wryly. “I got hundreds in a few minutes. They came in all over the seven wave dials with belllike clarity.” He paused; he stared down at me, and his smile was sickly. “Bill,” he groaned, “we’re the prize fools in creation. When I told Renfrew the truth, he folded up like ice melting into water.” Once more he paused. The silence was too much for my straining nerves. I parted my lips to speak, then closed them as the lightning of understanding flared over me. I lay very still. At last: “You mean—”

  Blake nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the way it is. And they’ve already spotted us with their spy rays and energy screens. A ship’s coming out to meet us. I only hope,” he finished gloomily, “that they can do something for Jim.”

  I was sitting in the control chair an hour later when I saw the glint in the darkness. There was a flash of bright silver, that exploded into size. The next instant an enormous spaceship had matched our velocity less than a mile away.

  Blake and I looked at each other. “Did they say,” I said shakily, “that that ship left its hangar ten minutes ago?”

  Blake nodded. “They can make the trip from Earth to Centauri in three hours,” he said.

  I hadn’t heard that before. Something happened inside my brain. “What!” I shouted. “Why, it’s taken us five hundred years—” I stopped. I sat there. “Three hours!” I whispered. “How could we have forgotten human progress?”

  In the silence that fell then, we watched a dark hole open in the cliff-like wall that faced us. Into this cavern I directed our ship. The rear-view plate showed that the cave entrance was closing. Ahead of us lights flashed on and focused on a door. As I eased our craft to the metal floor, a face flickered onto our radio plate.

  “Cassellahat!” Blake whispered in my ear. “The only chap who’s talked direct to me so far.”

  It was a distinguished, a scholarly-looking head and face that peered at us. Cassellahat smiled and said:

  “You may leave your ship and go through the door you see.”

  I had a sense of empty spaces around us as we climbed gingerly out into the vast receptor chamber. Interplanetary spaceship hangars were like that, I reminded myself. But I jumped as the door opened.

  “Nerves!” I thought sharply.

  I could see that Blake felt it, too. A silent duo, we filed through the doorway into a hall that opened into a very large, luxurious room.

  It was such a room as a king or a movie actress on set might have walked into without blinking. It was all hung with gorgeous tapestries—that is, for a moment I thought they were tapestries; then I saw they weren’t. They were—I couldn’t decide. I had seen expensive furniture in some of the apartments Renfrew maintained. But these chesterfields, chairs and tables glittered at us, as if they were made of a matching design of differently colored fires. No, that was wrong; they didn’t glitter. They—Once more I couldn’t decide.

  I had no time for a more detailed examination. For a man arrayed very much as we were was rising from one of the chairs. I recognized Cassellahat. He came forward, smiling. Then he slowed, his nose wrinkling. A moment later he hastily shook our hands, then swiftly retreated to a chair ten feet away and sat down rather primly. It was an ungracious performance. But I was glad that he had drawn back. Because as he shook my hand so briefly I had caught a whiff of perfume from him. It was a vaguely unpleasant odor; and besides, a man using perfume in quantities I

  He was motioning us to sit down. I did so, wondering if this was to be our only reception. Cassellahat began:

  “About your friend, I must caution you. He is a schizoid type and our psychologists will be able to effect a temporary recovery only for the moment. A permanent cure will require a longer period and your fullest co-operation. Fall in readily with all Mr. Renfrew’s plans, unless, of course, he takes a dangerous turn.

  “But now,” he squirted us a smile, “permit me to welcome you to the four planets of Centauri. It is a great moment for me, personally. From early childhood I have been trained for the sole purpose of being your mentor and guide; and naturally I am overjoyed that the time has come when my exhaustive studies of the middle period American language and customs can be put to the practical use for which they were intended.”

  He didn’t look overjoyed. He was wrinkling his nose in that funny way I had already noticed and there was a pained expression on his face. But it was his words that shocked me.

  “What do you mean,” I asked, “studies in American? Don’t people speak the universal language any more?”

  “Of course,” he smiled, “but the language has developed to a point where—I might as well be frank—you would have difficulty understanding such a simple word even as ‘yeih.’ ”

  “Yeih?” Blake echoed.

  “Meaning, ‘yes.’”

  “Oh!”

  We sat silent, Blake c
hewing his lower lip. It was Blake who finally said:

  “What kind of places are the Centauri planets? You said something on the radio about the population centers having reverted to the city structure again.”

  “I shall be happy,” said Cassellahat, “to show you as many of our great cities as you care to see. You are our guests and several million credits have been placed to your separate accounts for you to use as you see fit.”

  “Gee!” said Blake.

  “I must, however,” Cassellahat went on, “give you a warning. It is important that you do not disillusion our peoples about yourselves. Therefore, you must never wander around the streets or mingle with the crowds in any way. Always, your contact should be via newsreels, radio, or from the inside of a closed machine. If you have any plan to marry, you must now finally give up the idea.”

  “I don’t get it!” Blake said. And he spoke for the both of us. Cassellahat finished firmly, “It is important that no one becomes aware that you have an offensive physical odor. It might damage your financial prospects considerably. And now,” he stood up, “for the time being I shall leave you. I hope you don’t mind if I wear a mask in future in your presence. I wish you well, gentlemen, and—”

  He paused, glanced past us, said: “Ah, here is your friend.”

  I whirled and I could see Blake twisting, staring.

  “Hi, there, fellows,” Renfrew said cheerfully from the door, then wryly: “Have we ever been a bunch of suckers?”

  I felt choked. I raced up to him, caught his hand, hugged him. Blake was trying to do the same. When we finally released him and looked around, Cassellahat was gone. Which was just as well. I had been wanting to punch him on the nose for his final remarks.

  A slow week passed. We were sitting one afternoon in our apartment when Cassellahat came in. Renfrew waved at him jauntily, grinned and rubbed his hands together gleefully.

  “My boy,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of questions to ask you for a week. Where have you been?”

  “Making arrangements—reservations. Everything has to be authorized, you know. But ask your questions. We have a few minutes.”

  “What,” Renfrew said, “makes the speed of light constant?” Cassellahat did not even hesitate. “Velocity equals the cube of the cube root of gd,” he said, “d being the depth of the space-time continuum, g the total toleration or gravity, as you would say, of all the matter in that continuum.”

  “How are planets formed?”

  “A sun must balance itself in the space that it is in. It throws out matter as a sea vessel does anchors. That’s a very rough description. I could give it to you in mathematical formula, but I’d have to write it down. After all, I’m not a scientist. These are merely facts that I’ve known from childhood. Or so it seems.”

  “Just a minute,” said Renfrew, puzzled. “A sun throws this matter out without any pressure other than its—desire—to balance itself?”

  Cassellahat stared at him. “Of course not. The reason, the pressure involved, is very potent, I assure you. Without such a balance, the sun would fall out of this space. Only a few bachelor suns have learned how to maintain stability without planets.”

  “A few what?” exclaimed Renfrew.

  I could see that he had been jarred into forgetting the questions he had intended to ask. Cassellahat’s answer cut across my thought; he said:

  “A bachelor sun is a very old, cooled class M star. The hottest one known has a temperature of one hundred ninety degrees F., the coldest, forty-eight. Literally, a bachelor is a rogue, crotchety with age. Its main feature is that it permits no matter, no planets, not even gases in its vicinity.”

  Renfrew sat frowning, thoughtful. I seized the opportunity to carry on a train of ideas.

  “This business,” I said, “of knowing all this stuff without being a scientist interests me. For instance, back home every kid understood the atomic-rocket principle practically from the day he was born. Boys of eight and ten rode around in specially made toys, took them apart and put them together again. They thought rocket-atomic, and any new development in the field was just pie for them to absorb. Now, here’s what I’d like to know: What is the parallel here to that particular angle?”

  “The adeledicnander force,” said Cassellahat. “I’ve already tried to explain it to Mr. Renfrew, but his mind seems to balk at some of the most simple aspects.”

  Renfrew roused himself, grimaced. “He’s been trying to tell me that electrons think; and I won’t swallow it.”

  Cassellahat shook his head. “Not think. They don’t think. But they have a psychology.”

  “Electronic psychology!” I said.

  “Simply adeledicnander,” Cassellahat replied. “Any child—” Renfrew groaned, “I know. Any child of six could tell me.”

  He turned to us. “That’s why I lined up a lot of questions. I figured that if we got a good intermediate grounding, we might be able to slip into this adeledicnander stuff the way their kids do.” He faced Cassellahat. “Next question,” he said. “What—” Cassellahat had been looking at his watch. “I’m afraid, Mr. Renfrew,” he interrupted, “that if you and I are going to be on the ferry to the Pelham planet, we’d better leave now. You can ask your questions on the way.”

  “What’s all this?” I chimed in.

  Renfrew explained. “He’s taking me to the great engineering laboratories in the European mountains of Pelham. Want to come along?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  Blake shrugged. “I don’t fancy getting into one of those suits Cassellahat has provided for us, designed to keep our odor in but not theirs out. Bill and I will stay here and play poker for some of that five million credits’ worth of dough we’ve got in the State bank.”

  Cassellahat turned at the door; there was a distinct frown on the flesh mask he wore. “You treat our government’s gift very lightly.”

  “Yeih!” said Blake.

  “So we stink,” said Blake.

  It was nine days since Cassellahat had taken Renfrew to the planet Pelham, and our only contact had been a radio telephone call from Renfrew on the third day, telling us not to worry. Blake was standing at the window of our penthouse apartment in the city of Newmerica, and I was on my back on a couch, in my mind a mixture of thoughts involving Renfrew’s potential insanity and all the things I had heard and seen about the history of the past five hundred years.

  I roused myself. “Quit it,” I said. “We’re faced with a change in the metabolism of the human body, probably due to the many different foods from remote stars that they eat. They must be able to smell better, too, because just being near us is agony to Cassellahat, whereas we only notice an unpleasantness from him. It’s a case of three of us against billions of them, so let’s take it quietly.”

  There was no answer, so I returned to my reverie. My first radio message to Earth had been picked up, and so when the interstellar drive was invented in 2320 A.D., less than one hundred and forty years after our departure, it was realized what would eventually happen. In our honor, the four habitable planets of the Alpha A and B suns were called Renfrew, Pelham, Blake and Endicott. Since 2320, the populations of the four planets had become so dense that a total of nineteen billion people now dwelt on their narrowing land spaces. This in spite of migrations to the planets of more distant stars.

  The space liner I had seen burning in 2511 A.D. was the only ship ever lost on the Earth-Centauri lane. Traveling at full speed, its screens must have reacted against our spaceship. All the automatics would instantly have flashed on; and, as those defenses were not able at that time to stop a ship that had gone Minus Infinity, every recoil engine aboard had probably blown up. We had been told not to feel any sense of blame for that one disaster, as many of the most important advances in adeledicnander had been made as the result of analyses of the catastrophe.

  I grew aware that Blake had flung himself disgustedly into a nearby chair.

  “Boy, oh boy,” he said, “this is going to b
e some life for us. We can all anticipate about fifty more years of being pariahs in a civilization where we can’t even understand how the simplest machines work.”

  I stirred uneasily. I had had similar thoughts. But I said nothing. Blake went on:

  “I must admit, after I first discovered the Centauri planets had been colonized, I had pictures of myself bowling over some dame, and marrying her.”

  Involuntarily, my mind leaped to the memory of a pair of lips lifting up to mine. I shook myself. I said, “I wonder how Renfrew is taking all this. He—”

  A familiar voice from the door cut off my words. “Renfrew,” it said, “is taking things beautifully now that the first shock has yielded to resignation, and resignation to purpose.”

  We had turned to face him by the time he finished. Renfrew walked slowly toward us, grinning. Watching him, I felt uncertain as to how to take his built-up sanity. He was at his best. His dark, wavy hair was perfectly combed. His startlingly blue eyes made his whole face come alive. He was a natural physical wonder, and at his normal he had all the shine and swagger of an actor in a carefully tailored picture. He said now:

  “I’ve bought a spaceship, fellows. Took all my money and part of yours, too. But I knew you’d back me up. Am I right?”

  “Why, sure,” Blake and I said. Blake went on, “What’s the idea?”

  “I get it,” I chimed in. “We’ll cruise all over the universe, live our life span exploring new worlds. Jim, you’ve got something there. Blake and I were just going to enter a suicide pact.” Renfrew was smiling. “We’ll cruise for a while, anyway.” Two days later, Cassellahat having offered no objection and no advice about Renfrew, we were in space. It was a curious three months that followed. For a while I felt a sense of awe at the vastness of the cosmos. Silent planets swung into our viewing plates and faded into remoteness behind us, leaving nostalgic memory of uninhabited, wind-lashed forests and plains, deserted, swollen seas and nameless suns.