No World of Their Own

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No World of Their Own

Poul Anderson

To

Hallie Kruse

with thanks

I

The spaceship flashed out of superdrive and hung in a darkness that blazed with stars. For a moment there was silence, then:

“Where's the sun?”

Edward Langley swiveled his pilot's chair around. It was very still in the cabin. Only the whisper of ventilators had voice, and he could hear his heart pound. Sweat prickled his ribs; the air was hot.

“I … don't know,” he said finally. The words fell hard and empty. There were screens on the control panel which gave him a view of the whole sky. He saw Andromeda and the Southern Cross and the great sprawl of Orion, but nowhere in that crystal black was the dazzle he had expected.

Weightlessness was like an endless falling.

“We're in the general region, all right,” he went on after a minute. “The constellations are the same, more or less. But …” His tones faded out.

Four pairs of eyes searched the screens with hunger. Finally Matsumoto spoke. “Over here—in Leo—brightest star visible.”

They stared at the brilliant yellow spark. “It's got the right color, I think,” said Blaustein. “But it's an awful long ways off.”

After another pause he grunted impatiently and leaned over in his seat toward the spectroscope. He focused it carefully on the star, slipped in a plate of the solar spectrum, and punched a button on the comparison unit. No red light flashed.

“The same, right down to the Fraunhofer lines,” he declared. “Same intensity of each line to within a few quanta. That's either Sol or his twin brother.”

“But how far off?” whispered Matsumoto.

Blaustein tuned in to the photoelectric analyzer, read the answer off a dial and whipped a slide rule through his fingers. “About a third of a light-year,” he said. “Not too far.”

“A damn sight too far,” grunted Matsumoto. “We should'a come out within one A.U. on the nose. Don't tell me the goddam engine's gone haywire again.”

“Looks that way, don't it?” murmured Langley. His hands moved toward the controls. “Shall I try jumping her in close?”

“No,” said Matsumoto. “If our positioning error is this bad, one more hop may land us right inside the sun.”

“Which'd be almost like landing in hell or Texas,” said Langley. He grinned, though there was an inward sickness at his throat. “Okay, boys, you might as well go aft and start overhauling that rattletrap. The sooner you find the trouble, the sooner we can get back home.”

They nodded, unbuckled themselves and swung out of the pilot room. Langley sighed.

“Nothing you or I can do but wait, Saris,” he said.

The Holatan made no answer. He never spoke unnecessarily. His huge sleek-furred body was motionless in the acceleration couch they had jury-rigged for him, but the eyes were watchful. There was a faint odor about him, not unpleasing, a hint of warm sunlit grass within a broad horizon. He seemed out of place in this narrow metal coffin; he belonged under an open sky, near running water.

Langley's thoughts strayed.
A third of a light-year. It's not too much. I'll come back to you, Peggy, if I have to crawl all the way on my belly.

Setting the ship on automatic, against the unlikely event of a meteor, Langley freed himself from his chair. “It shouldn't take them too long,” he said. “They've got it down to a science, dismantling that pile of junk. Meanwhile, care for some chess?”

Saris Hronna and Robert Matsumoto were the
Explorer's
chess fiends, and it was a strange thing to watch them: a human whose ancestors had left Japan for America and a creature from a planet a thousand light-years distant, caught in the trap of some ages-dead Persian. More than the gaping emptinesses he had traversed, more than the suns and planets he had seen spinning through darkness and vacuum, it gave Langley a sense of the immensity and omnipotence of time.

“No, t'ank you.” The fangs gleamed white as mouth and throat formed a language they were never meant for. “I would rather this new and surprissing dewelopment consider.”

Langley shrugged. Even after weeks of association, he had not grown used to the Holatan character—the same beast of prey which had quivered nose to spoor down forest trails, sitting as hours went by with dreamy eyes and a head full of incomprehensible philosophy. But it no longer startled him.

“Okay, son,” he said. “I'll write up the log, then.” He pushed against the wall with one foot and shot out the doorway and along a narrow hall. At the end, he caught himself by a practiced hand, swung around a post into a tiny room and hooked his legs to a light chair bolted in front of a desk.

The log lay open, held by the magnetism of its thin iron backstrap. With an idleness that was a fight against his own furious impatience, the man leafed through it.

Langley went through the record of the past year, the erratic leaps from star to star, cursing and sweating in a tangle of wires and tubes, blue flame over soldering irons, meters, slide rules, a slow battle slogging toward victory. There had been one cut-and-dried system after another, each a little better, and finally the leap from Holat back toward Earth. It had been the philosophers of Holat whose non-human minds, looking at the problem from an oddly different angle, had suggested the final, vital improvements; and now the
Explorer
was coming home to give mankind a universe.

Langley's thoughts wandered again over worlds he had seen, wonder and beauty, grimness and death, always a high pulse of achieving. Then he turned to the last page and unclipped a pen and wrote:

“19 July 2048, hours 1630. Emerged an estimated 0.3 light-year from Sol, error presumably due to some unforeseen complication in the engines. Attempts to correct same now being made. Position—” He swore at his forgetfulness and went back to the pilot room to take readings on the stars.

Blaustein's long thin form jack-knifed through the air as he finished; the gaunt sharp face was smeared with oil, and the hair seemed more unkempt even than usual. “Can't find a thing,” he reported. “We tested with everything from Wheatstone bridges to computer problems, opened the gyromatic cell—nothing looks wrong. Want we should tear down the whole beast?”

Langley considered. “No,” he said at last. “Let's try it once more first.”

Matsumoto's compact, stocky frame entered; he grinned around his eternal chewing gum and let out some competent profanity. “Could be she just got the collywobbles,” he said. “The more complicated a hookup gets, the more it acts like it had a mind of its own.”

“Yeah,” said Langley. “A brilliant mind devoted entirely to frustrating its builders.” He had his coordinates now; the ephemeris gave him the position of Earth, and he set up the superdrive controls to bring him there just outside the remaining margin of error. “Strap in and hang on to your hats, gents.”

There was no sensation as he pulled the main switch. How could there be, with no time involved? But suddenly the spark of Sol was a dull-purple disc as the screen polarized against its glare.

“Whoops!” said Matsumoto. “Honolulu, here I come!”

There was a coldness along Langley's spine. “No,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Look at the solar disc. It's not big enough. We should be just about one A.U. from it; actually we're something like one and a third.”

“Well, gawdam,” said Matsumoto.

Blaustein's lips twitched nervously. “That's not too bad,” he said. “We could get back on rockets from here.”

“It's not good enough,” said Langley. “We had—we thought we had the control down to a point where the error of arrival was less than one percent. We tested that inside the system of Holat's sun. Why can't we do as well in our own system?”

“I wonder—” Matsumoto's cocky face turned thoughtful. “Are we approaching asymptotically?”

The idea of creeping through eternity, always getting nearer to Earth and never quite reaching it, was chilling. Langley thrust it off and took up his instruments, trying to locate himself.

They were in the ecliptic plane, and a telescopic sweep along the zodiac quickly identified Jupiter. Then the tables said Mars should be over there and Venus that way—Neither of them were.

After a while, Langley racked his things and looked around with a strained expression. “The planetary positions aren't right,” he said. “I think I've spotted Mars … but it's green.”

“Are you drunk?” asked Blaustein.

“No such luck,” said Langley. “See for yourself in the scope. That's a planetary disc, and from our distance from the sun and its direction, it can only be in Mars' orbit. But it's not red, it's green.”

They sat very still.

“Any ideas, Saris?” asked Blaustein in a small voice.

“I iss rather not say.” The deep voice was carefully expressionless, but the eyes had a glaze which meant thought.

“To hell with it!” Recklessly, Langley sent the ship quartering across her orbit. The sun-disc jumped in the screens.

“Earth!” whispered Blaustein. “I'd know her anywhere.” The planet hung blue and shining against night, her moon like a drop of cool gold. Tears stung Langley's eyes.

He bent over his instruments again, getting positions. They were still about half an Astronomical Unit from their goal. It was tempting to forget the damned engines and blast home on rockets—but that would take a long while, and Peggy was waiting. He set the controls for emergence at 500 miles distance. Jump!

“We're a lot closer,” said Matsumoto, “but we haven't made it yet.”

For a moment rage at the machine seethed in Langley. He bit it back and took up his instruments. Distance about 45,000 miles this time. Another calculation, this one quite finicking to allow for the planet's orbital motion. As the clock reached the moment he had selected, he threw the switch.