The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (39 page)

It was worse than the takeoff, and he had not thought that anything could be worse than that. If he lived forever, he would never forget those last still minutes, strapped into a recoil chair, trying to relax and not succeeding, listening to ringing alarm bells, watching the blinking of lights, feeling the deep quivering of the ship as it gathered itself for the outward leap, his heartbeats choking him and the icy sweat running, trying to tell himself that it was no different from taking off in a plane… And then the lift, the pressure, the instinctive gasp for breath, the terrible claustrophobia of being shut into a moving thing over which he had no control.

He could not know yet by what mastery of science the occupants of the ship were shielded from the enormous pressures of that acceleration. Yet shielded they were, for the pressure was not so much worse than that in a fast ascending elevator. It was the knowledge that Earth was falling irretrievably away that made the lift horrible. He could hear the whisper and the hiss and then the scream of air against the cleaving hull, and then almost at once it was gone. He was in space. And he was sick with the age-old fear of abysses and of falling. He thought of the emptiness that lay beneath his feet, beyond that thin floor of metal, and he shut his teeth hard on his tongue to keep from screaming.

“Don’t think about it,” Gorr Holl had said. “And remember, there’s a first time for all of us! I thought I wouldn’t live through my own first takeoff.” He had helped Kenniston get to his feet. “Let’s go up on the bridge. You might as well get it all over with at once.”

And so they had come to the bridge, and Kenniston had looked into outer space where the great Suns burned unveiled and there was neither air nor cloud to hide them. And he had got hold of himself, because he was too proud to do what he wanted to do, which was to get down on his belly and whimper like a dog.

He tried now to visualize the ordeal that awaited him there at Vega where he must plead the cause of little Middletown to the Governors of the stars. How could he make people who traveled casually in ships like this one, understand the passionate devotion of his own people to their little, ancient planet?

Yet if he failed to do so, he would fail the people of Middletown, who had such hope in his mission. That was what he had to think about—not space, nor his sensations about it, but the task he had ahead of him.

He glanced at Gorr Holl and said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

They left Piers Eglin there and went below again, and when they were in the main corridor, alone, Kenniston said, “All right, Gorr. I want to know what I’ve got myself in on.”

The big Capellan nodded. “Let’s join Magro and Lal’lor. They’re waiting for us.”

He led Kenniston along companionways and narrow corridors, to a cabin only two doors from his own. And it was a relief for Kenniston to be in a closed place without windows, so that he need not look at the staggering, crushing emptiness of space, where only the proud Suns had any right to be. There was a wild thrill to it, underneath the fear—but a twentieth century man couldn’t take much of it at first.

Lal’lor’s massive gray form was bent over a table littered with sheets of complicated symbols. Margo, who was sprawled in the bunk, explained to Kenniston, “He works theorems for amusement. He even claims he knows what all those figures mean.”

Lal’lor’s small eyes twinkled in his flat, featureless face. He thrust the sheets aside and said, “Sit down, Kenniston. So we are to be allies now, as well as friends.”

“I wish,” said Kenniston, “that someone would tell me just what this alliance means. Remember, I’m gambling the fate of my people on faith, without knowing a damned thing.”

“There’s nothing sinister about it,” said Gorr Holl. He eased his furry bulk onto the corner of Lal’lor’s table, which was quite strong enough to hold him. “As I told you, we all have the same problem, and the solution to that problem revolves around a man and a process.”

He paused. “By a peculiar freak, Kenniston, you have been thrown with us rather than with your own kind. The human races spread out from Earth so long ago, and have continued to move and spread, constantly expanding, that they have lost all sense of identification with their old birthworld, or any other. The universe is their home, not a planet.”

Kenniston was beginning to understand that better with every passing minute. The impersonal magnitudes of space, many times recrossed, would tend to sever a man from the old narrow ways of thought. Carol had been right about that.

Gorr Holl went on. “But we of the humanoid races don’t have that background. When the humans came to our worlds, we were nearly all barbarians, and quite happy in our barbarism. Well, they civilized us, and now we are accepted as equals. But we’re still more primitive in thought than they, we still cling to our native worlds, and whenever it becomes necessary to move us, we balk—just as your people are balking now, though we have learned to be less violent. In the end, of course, we’ve always given in. But in the last few years we’ve hung on more desperately because we’ve had something to hope for—this process of Jon Arnol’s.”

“Hold on,” said Kenniston. “All I know of Jon Arnol is his name. What exactly is this process? You said it was a process for the rejuvenation of cold and dying planets?”

Lal’lor answered that. “Arnol’s plan is this—to start a cycle of matter-energy transformation similar to the hydrogen-helium transformation which gives a Sun its energy—to start such a nuclear cycle operating deep inside a cold planet.”

Kenniston stared at him, completely stunned. “But,” he said at last, “that would be equivalent to creating a giant solar furnace deep inside a planet!”

“Yes. A bold, brilliant idea. It would solve the problem of the many cold and dying worlds within the Federation—since, as you know, a planet may live on its interior heat long after the parent Sun’s heat has decreased.”

He paused. “Unfortunately, when Arnol tested his process on a small asteroid, the results were disastrous.”

“Disastrous?”

“Quite disastrous. Arnold’s energy bomb, designed to start the cycle inside that asteroid, went wrong and caused terrible quakes. In fact, the asteroid was wrecked. Arnol claims that it was because he was not allowed a large enough planet for his test. His equations bear him out.”

Kenniston said, “Why didn’t he make another test on a bigger planet, then?”

“The Governors would not allow it,” said Lal’lor, “They said it was too dangerous.”

“But couldn’t he have tested it on an uninhabited planet without danger?”

Lal’lor sighed. “You don’t understand, Kenniston. The Governors don’t want Arnol’s process to succeed. They don’t want to make it possible for primitive peoples to cling to their native worlds. That’s the kind of provincial patriotism they oppose, in their efforts to establish a truly cosmopolitan star-community.”

Kenniston thought about that. It fitted what he had seen and heard of this vast Federation of Stars. And yet…

He said, slowly, “It comes down to the fact that you want to use my world, our Earth, to test a scheme which your Governors, whatever their motives, have already ruled as dangerous.”

Lal’lor nodded calmly. “Yes. It comes down to that. But whether the test is made first on Earth or some abandoned planet is beside the point. The point is to force the Board of Governors to allow another test.”

Gorr Holl exclaimed, “Don’t you see how it links up? Alone, your plea to remain on Earth will be turned down because you can’t present any alternative to evacuation. But by advancing Jon Arnol’s planet-reviving process as an alternative, you might be able to help both Earth and us!”

Kenniston struggled to comprehend the galactic complexity of the problem. “In other words, if we could persuade the Governors to give Arnol another chance, they would delay the evacuation of Earth?”

“They would,” said Lal’lor. “And if Arnol succeeded, Earth and our similar worlds throughout the Federation could be made warm and livable again. Is it not worth trying for?”

“When you put it like that,” said Kenniston, “yes. Yes, it is.” He was beginning to be hopeful again. “And you think this—this solar-furnace thing might succeed? Safely, I mean?”

“According to all mathematical evidence, yes.” Still Kenniston hesitated, and Gorr Holl said, “The decision would be up to your people, Kenniston, and not you—whether they’d take the risk, I mean. And remember, it’s a small population and could be taken off quite easily until any danger was over.”

That was true. He need not be afraid of committing his people too deeply, because he had not the power to do that. And it might be a way.

“Is it agreed, then?” asked Lal’lor. “Arnol has been my friend for many years, and I can message ahead to him to be there when we land. He can help you prepare your plea.”

Kenniston looked at them, the three familiar, unhuman faces. He had to trust them, to take what they said on trust. Suddenly, he knew he did trust them.

“All right,” said Kenniston. “I guess any hope is better than none.”

“Then we are agreed,” said Lal’lor quietly.

Kenniston felt a little breathless, as though he had taken an irrevocable plunge into deeps far beyond his own fathoming. Gorr Holl shot a keen glance at him, and said, “You need something. And I think I know what it is.”

He went out, and returned in a moment with a large flat flask of gray metal. He showed his great teeth in that frightening grin. “Fortunately, not being ship’s personnel, we of the technical staff are not forbidden stimulants. Get some cups, Magro.”

The white-furred Spican brought only three of the plastic cups. “Our wise Lal’lor prefers to stimulate himself with equations,” he explained, and the grey one nodded.

Gorr Holl carefully poured a clear liquid from the flask. “Try this, Kenniston.”

The liquid had a musty, mushroomy taste. Then it seemed to explode inside Kenniston, sending waves of heat to his fingertips. When he could breathe again, he gasped, “What is the stuff?”

Gorr Holl said, “It’s distilled from fungus growths found on the worlds of Capella. Smooth, eh?”

Kenniston, as he drank again, felt his worries recede a little. He sat relaxed and listening as these children of alien worlds talked. He knew they were talking now just to let down his tension.

“First voyages can be tough.” Magro was saying. He was curled up on the bunk like a sleepy cat, with a distant, lazy gleam in his eyes. “I remember my own. We shot the Pleiades with half our power burned out, and the little worlds swarming around us like angry bees.”

Gorr Holl nodded. “Do you remember that wreck in the Algol stardrift? I lost good friends then. A cold grave, those empty deeps.”

Kenniston listened as they talked on, of old voyages beyond the Federation’s starry frontiers, of dangers from nebula and comet and cosmic cloud, of shipwreck on wild worlds.

He quoted slowly, “Then shall we list to no shallow gossip of Magellans and Drakes. Then shall we give ear to voyagers who have circumnavigated the Ecliptic; who have rounded the Polar Star as Cape Horn—”

Lal’lor asked interestedly, “Who wrote that? Some man of your own time who foresaw space travel?”

“No,” said Kenniston. “A man of a century before even my time. His name was Melville, and he was a sailor too, but on Earth’s seas.”

Gorr Holl shook his head. “Queer days they must have been, with only the water oceans of one little planet to venture on.”

“Yet there was adventure enough in that,” Kenniston said. “The Atlantic in a fall storm, the Gulf on a moonlight night…” An aching nostalgia took him again, that haunting homesickness for an Earth lost forever, for the smell of leaves burning on crisp fall nights, for a clover field under the summer Sun, for the blue skies and green hills, the snowy mountains and the sleepy villages and the old cities and the roads that went between them, for all that was gone and could never be again. It made him long even for the Earth that still was, the tired, dying old planet that at least held memory of the world he had known, the people there who had known that world too. Carol was right, the old ways and the old things were best! What was he doing out here in these alien immensities?

Then he saw that the others were looking at him with a queerly sympathetic understanding in their faces, those strange and yet familiar and friendly humanoid faces.

“Give me another drink,” he said.

It did not help any. It only seemed to heighten his futile yearning. Presently Kenniston left them, and went to his own cabin.

He switched off the cabin lights and pressed the stud that made a window of the solid hull. The black, star-shot gulf opened to infinity beyond. He sat on the edge of the bunk and stared, hating that uncaring, unhuman vastness, brooding upon his desperate mission.

Presently he realized that someone was knocking at his door. He rose and opened it, and the light in the corridor showed him that it was Varn Allan.

She glanced quickly from his face to the darkened room, and then back at him, with a look of understanding. She asked, “May I come in?”

He stepped aside, reaching for the switch, and she said, “No, don’t. I like to look out, too.”

She took the chair by the window and sat for a few moments in silence, looking out, the dim starglow touching her face.