And that will be the best.
A. E. Housman
Our galaxy
is about to be destroyed. Another galaxy is colliding with ours and it is approaching the speed of light. When the speed of light is exceeded, it will convert to energy and we shall be engulfed by the same process. The human race prepares for death. But Clovis Marca, 30th century Earth’s First Citizen, is searching frantically for something else. He, in turn, is pursued by two people—Fastina Cahmin, who loves him, and a mysterious man called Take who appears to know exactly what Marca is searching for. When aliens from the other galaxy arrive with pos
sible salvation, Marca leaves Fastina and rushes away, making for his spaceship. He intends to go to the Bleak Worlds of Antares where he believes he’ll find what he’s looking for. But humanity is psychologically and physiologically unable to remain away from Earth for long
The hugh scaffolding rose hundreds of metres high, each piece shining, each more than a kilometre in diameter. And stretched about it were the delicate webs of wire and coils, merged circles, triangles and squares of vibrating blues and golds. Beneath it, looking up, stood three human figures and a fourth figure who was not human. His name was Sahaa and he was a bird-like Shreelian.
The shortest man pushed his mane of white hair away from his face with an old, slim hand. “Well, Andros— it’s finished. It didn’t take as long as you expected, did it? ”
Andros Aimer’s dark face was frowning. He seemed to disapprove of Narvo Velusi’s massively fragile transmitter. He shook his head and held his peace.
But Fastina Cahmin, the third human member of the group, was enthusiastic. “It’s wonderful, Narvo. It will send your message through the universe for ever. Even when the Solar System leaves this galaxy, even when the galaxy itself is energised, your message will sing on— ‘ We are here! ’ ”
“Perhaps ‘ We were here ’ would be better,” Andros’s voice was dry. “You known I’ve no quarrel with the idea of the message, Narvo—it’s the content of the message that bothers me. It was good enough, I suppose, while we were ready to accept the death of everything—but now Sahaa’s people have given us a means of escaping, I feel we should do something more. We could broadcast the total sum of human knowledge with that transmitter of yours. Then, if the Shreelian scheme fails—as we know it can—we shall have left something worthwhile behind us.”
“That would defeat the whole spirit of the venture,” Navo said quietly. “The simplicity is important.” He sighed. “Six months age we were all agreed, all enthusiastic, now we quibble over this point and that. We should have been transmitting by now. Perhaps I am an inadequate leader, perhaps ...”
Fastina took his hand. “You are doing marvellously, Narvo. You know how everyone was shocked when Clovis went away—everything was confused. You got both projects going—the transmitter and the artificial gravitational field. You supervised the modifications necessary for making the computer complex function on an industrial scale, you got the plants set up and working, the machinery transported to Mercury and Pluto. In another six months the field should encompass the whole Solar System and we can begin tests. It’s everything Clovis would have achieved ...”
Narvo shook his head. “No—Clovis was a leader— people had an almost mystical faith in his judgment. They respected me, certainly, but they do not trust me in the way they trusted Clovis. The coming six months could result in a division of the people into a dozen opposed factions. Admittedly we all have the same aims —but we are not all agreed on means ...” he glanced at Aimer.
Aimer said: “You’re overstating the importance of these differences, Narvo. After all, we cannot just go plunging off into space in a direction chosen at random. Neither can we decide at once whether to admit every outworlder into the System. The new agricultural projects can only support so many and I’m not sure ...”
Fastina was angry.
“
Narvo has made that decision. We admit everyone. The whole race! We stand or fall as a united race. If you begin to say who should come and who shouldn’t, then ...”
Narvo interrupted. “Fastina is right. Secondly the men of the industrial and agricultural worlds will be more useful to us than the men of Earth. Our skills are largely in abstract matters, theirs are material and, at this stage, infinitely more valuable.”
“But Earth is being ruined by the factories and the farms. Gardens are churned up, forests are cut down, landscapes are marred by the airshafts from the underground manufacturing plants. Earth is becoming an ugly world. If we limited the numbers, we should not need to provide for so many, destroy so much.”
Sahaa the alien looked on politely. Although he could speak Earthish and understand it, much of what was said was well below his own sonic range.
Narvo was turning away, escorting Fastina. “You are a selfish man, Andros. Sometimes I regret accepting your offer of help.”
As Narvo and Fastina seated themselves in their gleaming red aircar Andros shrugged and shouted: “Without me it would have taken you a very long time to understand what the Shreelians were getting at—and you might never have interpreted their science.
You
are ungrateful, Narvo Velusi! Luckily, the majority of the people on Earth are not! ”
Narvo blew on his sonarkey and ignored Aimer. The carriage rose into the air. As they moved away from the shining vastness of the transmitter, Narvo rubbed his face with his hands.
“I can’t blame him for his fears,” he sighed. “But how can I quiet them—how can I keep the race calm and moving towards the same goal? At this rate we’ll be fighting so much amongst ourselves that the Shreelians will give up helping us and leave us to our fate. It will be well-deserved.” He raised his face to look westwards and Fastina saw that his eyes had tears in them.
He's right,
she thought,
we need Clovis. But, oh, my love where are you?
She remembered on the night he had left, when she had met Take on the roof of Narvo’s house, she had tried to find out from Take what Clovis sought, but the strange man had refused to answer. And when she had asked him why he pursued Clovis, Take had seemed surprised. “I’m not his pursuer,” he had said. “I am more or less his guardian—though not of an ordinary kind, perhaps.”
Then Take had left, following Clovis towards the space field.
Oh, Clovis, come back. Come back!
T
he individual who called himself Take had been following Clovis Marca for six months of his time and Earth’s and something like two weeks ship time. Take had given himself a shot of tempodex which slowed his time sense as well as ensuring that his body-processes functioned in relation to the time that would have passed on Earth had he been there. This was unusual, since most men wanted the time to pass as quickly as possibly. The anguish they called
space-ache
was only bearable for a short time. Yet Take seemed to suffer nothing.
Following Marca had been difficult at first, not because of the warp jumps which were regular and automatic, but because when in normal space, as they were now, Marca’s course had been erratic. Evidently he had lost control of his ship several times before taking the decision to put the ship on a fully-automatic pre-set course. As Take knew, the only trouble with letting the ship do everything was that once the necessary co-ordinates had been locked in it was impossible to alter them until planet-fall was made. This was to ensure that a man gone mad with
space-ache
could not do anything harmful to himself. It had seemed that Marca had not immediately decided where he was going although Take, who had seen Marca’s astrocharts and the course plotted on them, had felt sure he would make straight for the Bleak Worlds of Antares.
Take could not anticipate which planet in Antares Marca was now heading for, but at least he knew for certain now that that was where Marca was going.
Take rubbed the muscles at the back of his neck and watched his screen. They should be going into warp soon. He hoped that Marca didn’t know he was being followed.
Clovis Marca didn’t know he was being followed. He didn’t know very much more than that he was in extreme pain.
It was pain bearing little relation to earthly pain. It was pain that could only be described in one word— space-ache—and that word could only be understood by those who experienced a journey away from Earth.
It was a pain that dredged burning fantasies from the complex labyrinth of the mind, a pain that created illusions that created pain. Away from Earth, away from its precedents and its heritage, the human body and its brain found itself unable to accept that it
could
be somewhere else, and it reacted desperately. Nerves and muscles, unable to adapt to the concept given them by the brain, sought
return.
And the mind itself, bewildered, attempted to create, somehow, what it had lost. Yet part of the mind could accept the concept, could accept where it was, and that part sought to control the rest. Thus the body and mind of Clovis Marca became a battleground and though he was conscious, though his senses were functioning and his motor-impulses were usually under his control, he lived in a half-world of agonised illusion wherein he sometimes thought he was on Earth yet
knew
he was in space.
And all the time—pain.
The longer he remained away from Earth, the worse his condition became.
Fed automatically, exercised automatically, he lay enclosed in a rigid cocoon. Sometimes he was aware of the cocoon and sometimes he was not. He had been imprisoned ,at his own instigation when he had locked the ship’s destination in to the pilot-computer. He would not be released until he made planet-fall, yet even on a planet that was not Earth he would have to fight off the space-ache and its effects.
The illusions came and went. Sometimes he lay in the grass, a small boy reading by a river, sometimes he talked with friends, sometimes he made love to a woman. Pleasant enough illusions, these, when not accompanied by the pain. But they were always accompanied by the pain, always showed him what he could enjoy, but never allowed him to enjoy it. And although all the illusions were of Earth and the things of Earth, they were not always so inviting. Sometimes they were nightmares of shouting voices, violent gestures, threatening figures of beasts and men, earthquakes and tempests, whirlpools and volcanoes, all the most menacing images of nature at its most destructive, images that had no relation to his own experiences, that were racial memories, handed down by remote ancestors to torment him and order him home.
But home he would not go. He had given up the chance when he locked his destination in.
His destination was Klobax in Antares. All the worlds of Antares could support Man, though none of them were to his taste. They were barren worlds of raw, overpowering colours that made Man seem an insignificant intruder, totally out of place in their bleak and ragged landscapes. Even the vegetation was massive and of solid, ungraded colours—slabs of colours that blinded the eye and confused the mind. Bleak they were, and with only the most primitive animal and insect life and thus their dramatic and well-deserved name—the Bleak Worlds.
Yet some were attracted to them. Some would submit to the complex conditioning, training and drugging that, together with simulated Earthly-environments, would make stay on a planet almost bearable. For there was something archetypal in these worlds, a grandeur that could only elsewhere be experienced in a mescalin-dream. Some who first saw the Bleak Worlds even doubted their existence in material space, for they seemed to be the work of mad painters possessed of alarming and metaphysical visions.
There was a faint sound from the ship’s engine, a vibration through its semi-sentient atomic nervous system, and Clovis Marca’s clenched and wincing body was borne into hyper-space for seventeen seconds.
Then the ship was in normal space again and Antares was only 5,926,000 million miles away.
There were five worlds circling Antares. Klobax lay fourth from the sun, a large world in a system where the largest planet was the size of Mars.
The ship was soon inside the system and heading for Klobax, though Clovis Marca did not know it.
All Clovis Marca knew before the ship touched down was that he swam in a salt-warm sea and every movement of his arms tangled his nerves into nests of incessant agony.
The ship landed beneath ochre skies shot with a lurid yellow. The dull grey expanse of the pads terminated abruptly at a rolling landscape of scarlet and black moss that was relieved by slim, jagged crags of brown and orange. Near the ship was a large building, not unlike similar buildings on the spacefields of Earth. A man left the building and began to move slowly towards the ship.
The man was young, but his face was lined and sagging. He had the face of a hound and his large, black eyes were soft, giving no indication as to his character. He was dressed in a tight-fitting jerkin and slacks of a dull, purplish colour. He was fairly short and he held his shoulders back as he walked. He gripped a small kit-box in his hand. In it was a master sonar-key with which he could open the ship’s airlock if it became necessary, a hypogun and an arsenal of drug cartridges.
But inside the ship, Clovis Marca was already being irradiated in the cocoon. The illusions disappeared and so did much of the pain. He blinked his eyes and hauled himself upwards, like a man rising from his coffin. His face was pale, gaunt and held more than a hint of torment. He checked the ship’s instruments, picked up his sonarkey and shut off the power. Then he went to the airlock and opened it manually. He looked out, blinking as the colours struck his eyes. He saw the man below him, looking up.
“How are you feeling? ” the man said. “I’m Retorsh.”
“I feel better than I did.” Clovis squeezed the grav-strap under his arm and stepped out of the lock, drifting down towards the short man. “My name is Clovis Marca.”