Mission to Universe

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Ben sorted through the orders and extracted a long envelope, also sealed. It was addressed to Brigadier General Benjamin Allen Shore and was of some light shade impossible to make out in the dawn light, not white but close to white, and of heavy, rich paper. Seals were impressive on it.

  “Look if you want, now,” said Marsh. His voice was harsh and throaty. It seemed to be always on the verge of breaking out into angry argument. “Just something to keep everyone happy.”

  “You’ve read it?” Ben said. “You know what’s in it?”

  “I don’t have to,” said Marsh. “You expect too much of the man, Ben. He’s President of the United States, not God. Four billion people in the world now, and they all want to live. So we’ve got fifty nations with gigaton bombs and all ready to shoot the first time anyone sends up a toy Fourth of July rocket. It’s not his fault.”

  “Someone has to make a move,” said Ben, breaking the seals on the envelope.

  “No,” said Marsh. “It’s no use, I tell you. Everybody’s under the ax, and everybody wants to live. So, it’s a world gone paranoiac as the psychologists say. Saying it doesn’t change it Nobody dares disarm, nobody dares attack. We all sit waiting for the accident—for the pin to drop. Test-flying this phase ship would be the pin, Ben.”

  “No,” said Ben. “Radar can’t see us if we make one big jump to orbit position. We don’t go from here to there. We stop being here and appear there.” He was unfolding the pages inside the envelope. “I tell you, Marsh, it’s a matter of breaking a stalemate. Just let us loose to find one livable planet—”

  “Ben! Ben, will you stop it!” said Marsh, harshly and wearily. “How many times have you told me? How many times have I told them down in Washington? It’s no good. Eight years ago you had me convinced, and I thought it was good. But it’s no good now. It’s eight years worse.The people want to live, Congress wants to live—even the President wants to live. Oh, he’d give you the order if it were just his own neck, but in one week word would leak, the country would blow up, and then the world would blow up!”

  He stopped. Ben, who was reading the pages could not see the older man’s face.

  “Face it, will you, Ben?” Marsh’s voice said. “It’s too late. All your bright ideas about the world coming to its senses when it finds out the phase ship’s in space, the idea we can find new worlds—it’s all a dream. It never was anything but a dream, and it never would have stopped the way things are anyway—”

  He broke off. Ben, now done reading, looked up, refolded the sheets, and put them back into the envelope with exaggerated care.

  “What is it?” Marsh’s voice was suddenly sharp.

  “It seems you’re wrong,” said Ben. He was making a great effort to speak calmly, but inside him his heart was thudding with steady, slow blows in his chest. “I’ve been ordered to take independent military command of both Installations here and test the phase ship.”

  Marsh stood absolutely motionless, looking at him. The light had brightened, and the lines on his face no longer caught darkness. Instead his whole face looked washed-out, gray, and old.

  “Ben—” he said. “Ben—”

  Ben put the envelope into an inside pocket of his leather jacket.

  “If you’ll wait a few hours before heading back to Washington,” he said, “I’ll have something to send back with you.” He took a step away from where he was standing, but Marsh flung out a hand and caught hold of a leather-jacketed arm to stop him.

  “Ben,” said Marsh, hoarsely, “that message didn’t say anything like that.”

  Ben pulled his arm loose.

  “I’m sorry, Marsh,” he said. “It did. I’ve got to go now, there’s a lot to do.”

  He took another step away—and Marsh’s voice stopped him.

  “Ben!” The voice rattled. “Ben, let me see that message!”

  “I’m sorry, Marsh,” said Ben, without turning around. “It comes under the regulations of military security now. I can’t show it to you.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving Marsh behind him. He came to the camouflage of the hillock hiding the phase ship and lifted a flap of canvas to go through it

  Inside, in a shallow concrete well, was the seventy-five foot long egg-shape of the phase ship. Workers were still busy loading cartons of freeze-dried rations aboard it. He went down the concrete steps to the floor of the well, across to the loading ramp, and up through the entry airlock to the inside of the ship. Inside, he walked down the short, echoing, close-walled metal corridor to the Crew Chiefs quarters in the center of the shop.

  There he sat down at a desk in the office half of the quarters and pushed the call button on his desk phone.The screen above it came alight with a lean, tired face under close-trimmed hair.

  “Message Center. Waller speaking,” said the face. “Oh, Ben.”

  “Jim,” said Ben. “This is an official call. Both Installations as of now constitute a single military Command under authority delegated to me by the Congress and the President I've just now got the orders. My rank is Brigadier General, and other ranks will be given later. But as of now this Command by my order to you is put in a condition of strictest security. No planes and no personnel, including the plane on which Mr. Otam just arrived, are to be allowed to leave. No outgoing calls will be allowed. All incoming calls to be taken and handled under conditions of strictest secrecy concerning the change of these Installations from civilian to military authority. You’re to act as if we were still under ordinary conditions and civilian control.” He paused.

  “You understand?” he said, looking keenly at Waller. A week since, he had arranged things so that it would be Waller who would be on duty at this hour—now he counted on the intelligence and perceptivity of the man. Waller’s slightly sunken blue eyes stared at him from the screen for a second.

  “Just one question,” said Waller, slowly, after a moment. “Ben—I mean, General. Am I in the military and under your orders, now?”

  “That’s right, Jim,” said Ben. “I’ll tell you about your rank later.” —It was an innocent lie though the commissions were only for the crew of the phase ship. “And we’ll publish the orders. Meanwhile—”

  “All right,” said Waller. “All right—General. I’ll handle things the way you say. Is that all?”

  “That’s all,” said Ben. He punched off the phone, then punched it swiftly on again. “One more thing. This office I’m calling from, here on the phase ship, will be my headquarters for the moment.”

  Waller nodded. Ben punched off again. He looked up and was suddenly aware of one of the loading crew standing in the doorway of his office, staring at him.

  “Mr. Otam’s at the airlock,” said the man. “I told him no one was allowed in—”

  "That was right,” said Ben. He looked narrowly at the man. “You heard what I was saying on the phone just now?”

  The man nodded.

  “Then you understand the new situation here,” said Ben, evenly. “What about Mr. Otam?”

  “He wants to see you. Can he come in and see you?”

  “No,” said Ben. “No, he can’t see me.” He looked again at the crew member. “I’m going to give you an order,” he said. “Find someone else on the loading crew, and the two of you take Mr. Otam to one of the empty staterooms on the ship here and keep him there until you get further orders from me. —Can you do that?”

  The man hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ben. “Mr. Otam won’t give you any trouble. That’s why I said take two of you. Go ahead, then.” The man turned and left. Ben sighed and leaned for a moment on the desk with his elbows and rubbed his forehead. He was mildly surprised to find, when he took his fingers away, that they were damp. He felt shaky inside and in need of coffee.

  He reached out and switched on the screen’s connection to the receptors outside the camouflage dome. He wanted one more last look at the wheat field and the unbroken horizon stretching towa
rd the dawn. It came on the screen.The sun was not yet up, but a bright band of daylight stretched above the wheat field. Far off, black against it ,a V-shaped flight of gray Canadian geese headed south like trailing dots of movement. The sight of them raised his spirits. He was reminded that they made the trip every year, putting their individual lives at stake, but they had to make it—or else the race of geese would not go on. He felt the urge to wash his hands and get down to work. He looked down at them on the table. The fingers of the right hand were still damp from his forehead. The fingers of his left were still stained with dirt.

  Chapter 2

  “Excuse me, Ben,” said Lee Ruiz, then checked himself “—or should I be saying 'sir’?"

  It was a seriously put question, Ben saw, as he looked up from his desk to see Lee in the doorway of the crew chief's office. Lee, like the rest had been informed of his new commission and captain’s rank, directly after the early morning medical inspection and before breakfast like the rest Ben saw, Lee had been made self-conscious by it. Ben was tempted to grin at his friend of eight years, to put him at ease, but stopped himself in time. His grinning days, he thought soberly, were over. In charge of the phase ship now, his authority was linked to his impartiality and isolation from the others.

  “Not yet,” he said, unsmiling, grateful again for the hard mask of his face. “What is it?”

  “Well. . . the ship’s team. . . I mean the crew,” said Lee. Two weeks back Ben had ordered the change of title for the group that would move and handle the phase ship, but old habits stuck. “There’s a lot going on. That is, a sort of rumor that this isn’t just another simulated, full-dress takeoff—but a real one. Can I ask. . . is it?” Ben, out of the loneliness of his new authority about to say no, checked himself just in time. Plainly—he looked at the tanned, pleasant piratical face of Lee—some of the crew had put Lee up to asking this. He would not have been so demanding on his own. Lee, Ben remembered now, was the man he had picked to be his pipeline to the crew—it could not be Walt, with his computer-like self-sufficiency. To use a pipeline, you had to keep it working.

  “It isn’t,” said Ben. He watched as Lee’s face lit up and added, “We’re taking her up into orbit in a single jump.” He saw Lee gazing at him, teetering on the edge of a temptation to ask what would come once they were in orbit, and deliberately kept his own gaze forbidding and uncommunicative to block the question.

  “Thanks,” said Lee, turning away. “Everybody’s going to be glad lo know we’re moving at last.”

  He was going out the door when Ben remembered something.

  “Oh, Lee,” he said. “Will you see if someone can find me a pair of scissors?”

  Lee looked back over his shoulder, puzzled. “Scissors?” Lee said.

  “Scissors.”

  “I’ll—I’ll see,” said Lee, and went off, still plainly trying to fit scissors, somehow, into the fact that they were finally going to test the ship.

  Left alone, Ben remembered to look at his clock on the desk. It was almost 8:00 a.m. He thought again of coffee, which he had never got around to having—or breakfast. The crew would be on board the ship, now, and somebody could bring him some—he suddenly remembered that he had also forgotten to send the imprisoned Marsh Otam, to say nothing of the men who were guarding him, any breakfast. He was reaching for the phone button when Nora appeared in the doorway, holding a pair of scissors.

  “Lee said you wanted these.” She brought them to his desk. Ben realized that, since Nora was the Stores Officer, as Lee was Equipment Officer and Walt was Navigation Officer, he should have asked Nora for the scissors in the first place.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking them. He looked up into her calm face, curious to rediscover the traces of loneliness he had seen on it, or thought he had seen on it, when she had been sleeping earlier this morning during his phone call from the women’s barracks. But he saw no signs of it now.

  “Oh, Nora,” he added, “I seem to be asking for things from all the wrong people this morning—but Marsh Otam is locked up in one of the staterooms with a couple of the loading crew standing guard. —No, don’t ask me why, please. But, would you see if you can find him and have the guards turned loose and Marsh sent in to me here?”

  She took it calmly.

  “Right away,” she said. She went out. Like all the crew members, she was wearing the white coveralls that were their uniforms aboard the spaceship—somehow, thought Ben, watching her back as she left the office, she looked smaller in them than he usually thought of her as being.

  He picked up the scissors and took up the envelope containing the pages he had read before telling Marsh that the ship was ordered on a test flight. The second page was a duplicate. The first was signed by Walter Eugene, President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

  He read it through again:

  To: Brigadier General Benjamin Allen Shore and officers of Phase Ship Mark III:

  You are hereby ordered to hold yourself in readiness to take off on any training flight that later may be ordered.It is hoped that before long you may one day leave the surface of our Earth and even the vicinity of our solar system to find and claim a world habitable by the human race. Indeed it is hoped that the day may soon come on which there may be no misunderstanding as to the aim and purpose of such a flight and on which the latitude and freedom of your search may be unlimited. This is the earnest hope of this nation and, I know, of all peoples of the world.

  Meanwhile, pending that day, you are hereby ordered to prosecute your work upon the phase ship itself until it may be capable of a safe search, if necessary to such ultimate limits of space and time as the outermost reaches of the physical universe and for a voyage of forever and a day. For I promise you that the time is coming in which we will so search all systems within reasonable range of our own before accounting the search a failure and returning with such a new home for our human race unfound.

  Walter Eugene

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Ben laid the second sheet aside and spread the first out before him. Taking a pencil from the desk, he began going through the lines of print before him, crossing out sections of it. When he was done, he read it through again and then picked up the scissors and took a sheet of blank typewriting paper from a drawer of his desk.

  He cut narrow strips of white paper from the blank sheet and fastened them with transparent tape over the sections of the page he had lined out with pencil. Then he ran the censored message through a dry-copier on his desk, making two copies. The copies showed a mutilated, but understandable, text. He was just putting the copies away in his desk when the loading crew guard ushered in Marsh.

  “Thank you,” said Ben to the guard. “That’s all. You can leave the ship now. Close the door, will you?”

  The man went out, closing the door. Marsh dropped heavily into a chair facing Ben’s desk. He looked shambled and broken.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get any breakfast—” began Ben. Marsh’s hand, lifted and dropped, showed what he cared for breakfast. He sat slumped in the chair, hardly looking at Ben.

  Ben reached for an official envelope and a desktop sealing machine. He put one of the duplicates of the censored message into the envelope and began using the sealer on it, actually heat bonding the special paper of the envelope together under the large blue seals affixed by the machine.

  “Ben,” Marsh’s voice was hoarse but steady. “Let me seet hat message.”

  “I’m sorry. No,” said Ben. “But I’m sending a copy of it back with you.”

  He passed the now blue-sealed envelope across the desk into Marsh’s hands. Marsh sat turning it over and staring at it.

  “Ben,” he said. “Don’t go.”

  There were two patches of red, like stage makeup standing out against the gray skin surrounding Marsh’s cheekbones. Watching this man, whom he also had known for eight years now, Ben felt his inner self, his bowels
of compassion they would, have said with biblical flavor two hundred years ago, twist with pity and a little disgust. Then the disgust evaporated, and he was only sorry for Marsh.

  “Marsh,” he said, as gently as he could, “the world isn’t going to blow up.”

  “It’s not that I’m afraid of,” said Marsh. “I’m. not afraid of dying—even if I’m still a young man.” He raised his eyes suddenly to meet Ben’s. “Did you realize that, Ben? As politics goes, I’m a young man. I’ve got twenty more years to aim for one of the top jobs.”

  But he would never make it, thought Ben, watching him. He had been close enough to politics these last eight years to see that it was no different from other professions. In the end, the top positions went to the men who had proved themselves unstoppable. Walt, with a Nobel Prize for science in his twenties, was such a man. It made no difference that Walt had won that prize before he was thirty. If somehow he had not won it then, he would have won it be-fore he was forty—or fifty—eventually. It was the men only death could stop that ended up in the top positions.Marsh’s twenty years would do him no good.

  “What is it you’re afraid of, then?” Ben asked.

  “You know.” Marsh’s eyes were red and rimmed with creases, staring at Ben. “I’m afraid of what you’ll find, out there.”

  Ben stared at him. “You’ve been seeing too many monster movies.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t movies!” Marsh’s voice went up and he leaned forward, putting a thick-fingered hand on the outer edge of Ben’s desk. “Ben, a hundred trillion stars, a hundred trillion suns in the galaxy. A billion of them maybe with planetary systems—there has to be something out there, alive, out of all those possible worlds where life could be, that can do something to us worse than we ever imagined. —If we let it find, out we’re here.”