Venus on the Half-Shell (8 page)

Simon conducted the old man into the
Hwang Ho.
He sat him down in an easy chair and gave him a glass of rice wine. The old man drank it all at once, and then, holding Simon with a skinny hand, he spoke.

“Who won the series?”

“What?” Simon said. “What series?”

“The World Series of 2457,” the old man said. “Was it the St Louis Cardinals or the Tokyo Tigers?”

“For God’s sake, how would I know?” Simon said.

The old man groaned and poured himself another glass of wine. He smelled it, wrinkled his nose, and said, “You got any beer?”

“Just German beer,” Simon said.

“That’ll have to do,” the old man said. “Oh, how I’ve longed all these centuries for a cold glass of American beer. Especially good old St Louis-brewed beer!”

Simon went into the pantry for the only bottle of Lowenbrau left. This must have been the property of the sole German sailor aboard. By his bunk were portraits of Beethoven, Bismarck, Hitler (after a millennium a romantic hero), and Otto Munchkin, the first man to die in a Volkswagen. The sailor also had a small library, mostly Chinese or German books. Simon had been intrigued by the title of one,
Die Fahrt der Snark,
but it turned out not to be a commentary on Lewis Carroll’s digestive problems after all. It was all about a journey some early 20th-century writer named Jack London had made to the South Seas. London had later on committed suicide when the people he loved and trusted gave him the shaft.

Simon returned to the old man and handed him the beer.

“Do you remember now?” the ancient said.

“Remember what?”

“Who won the series?”

“I never cared for baseball,” Simon said. “You
are
talking about baseball, aren’t you?”

“I thought you were an American?”

“There are no nationalities anymore,” Simon said. “Just Earth people, an endangered species. What’s your name?”

“Silas T. Comberbacke, Spaceman First Class,” the old man said. He drank deeply and sighed with ecstasy. But he said, “Those Germans never did learn to make good beer.”

Once Comberbacke’s mind was off baseball, he talked as if he hadn’t seen a human being in six hundred years. Which was true. He’d left Earth in
A.D.
2457 because his fiancée had run off with a hairdresser.

“Which gives you some idea of her basic personality,” old Comberbacke said. “Jesus, he knew nothing about baseball!”

One day, while drinking in a bar on a planet in Galaxy NGC 7217, Comberbacke suddenly decided to go home and find out who won the 2457 series. He’d been asking other spacemen for years, but even the aficionados didn’t know. They were all too young to remember that far back. So, on impulse, he’d signed up as a S1C on a Ugandan freighter and was headed directly home—he thought. On the way, though, the ship had received a Mayday from a planet in NGC 5128.

“NGC 5128 is actually a collision between two galaxies, you know,” he said. “It’s been colliding for a couple of million years, but the spaces between the suns are so big that most of the people on the planets there thought they didn’t have anything to worry about. But this planet, Rexroxy, was going to be hit in a thousand years. So they were getting everybody off. Actually, that Mayday had been transmitting for five hundred years. We landed on Rexroxy and made a deal with the locals. We dumped our cargo and crammed about three thousand aboard. They paid plenty for that, believe it!

“The captain was going to head out for a planet of a star near Orion and dump his passengers there. But he needed to send a message quick to his home office. I volunteered to take it in a one-man ship. I wasn’t going to lose a month taking those funny-looking cyanide-breathers for a ride. I got here two days ago, parked my ship on the other side of the mountain, and walked around trying to find someone who could tell me what the score was.”

“I was hoping you’d know what caused this rain,” Simon said.

“Oh, I do! I meant, who won the series? The day I left, the Cardinals and the Tigers were tied. Dammit, if I hadn’t been so mad at Alma, I’d have stayed until it was over.”

“I know my question is trivial,” Simon said. “But what
did
happen to make it rain so hard?”

“Don’t get so mad,” the old spacer said. “If you’d seen as many wrecked worlds as I have and as many about to be wrecked, you wouldn’t take it so personal.”

Comberbacke finished his bottle and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Finally, Simon said, “Well, what did happen?”

“Well, it must of been them Hoonhors!”

“What’s a Hoonhor?”

“Jesus, kid, you don’t know nothing, do you?” Comberbacke said. “They’re the race that’s been cleaning up the universe!”

Simon sighed and patiently asked him to back up and start at the beginning. The Hoonhors, he found, were a people from a planet of some unknown galaxy a trillion lightyears away. They were possibly the most altruistic species in the universe. They had done very well for themselves and now they were out doing for others.

“One thing they can’t stand is seeing a people kill off their own planet. You know, pollution. So they’ve been locating these, and when they do, they clean it up.

“They’ve sanitized, that’s what they call it, sanitizing, they’ve sanitized maybe a thousand planets so far in the Milky Way alone. Haven’t you
really
ever heard of them?”

“I think if anybody on Earth had, we’d all have heard of them,” Simon said.

Comberbacke shook his head and said, “If I’d of known that Earth hadn’t, I would of hurried home and warned everybody. But space is big, and I didn’t think the Hoonhors would get around to Earth for a thousand years or so. Plenty of time, I thought.”

Comberbacke knew that it was the Hoonhors who had caused the Second Deluge. He’d seen one of their ships heading out when he went past the orbit of Pluto on his way in.

“What they do, they release into a planet’s atmosphere a substance that precipitates every bit of H
₂
0 in the air. You wouldn’t believe the downpour!”

“Yes, I would,” Simon said.

“Yeah, I guess you would. Say, are you sure you don’t have any more beer? No? Well, the precipitation cleans the air and the land and drowns almost everybody. After the water has evaporated, the trees start growing again from seeds, and there’s always a few birds and animals left up in the mountains to renew the animal life. There’s always a few sentients left, too, but it takes them a long time to breed to the point where they again start polluting their planet. The Hoonhors schedule the planets they’ve drowned for a regular sanitizing every ten thousand years. Actually, though, they’re short-handed, and they might not come back for fifty thousand or so years.”

The old man had spent much of his time while away from Earth traveling in ships which went faster than the speed of light. This explained why he hadn’t died and become dust six hundred Earth-years ago. People in ships going at lightspeeds, or faster, aged very slowly. Everything inside the ship was slowed down. To an observer outside the ship, a passenger would take a month just to open his mouth to ask somebody to please pass the sugar. An orgasm would last a year, which was one of the things the passenger liners stressed in their advertising.

What the PR departments didn’t explain was that the people in the ship thought they were moving at normal speed. Their subjective senses told them they were living according to time as they knew it. When a passenger complained about false advertising because he’d really only taken four or five seconds to come, the captain would reply that that was true in the ship. But back on Earth, by the clocks the company kept in headquarters, the passenger had taken four hundred days.

If the passenger still bitched, the captain said it was Einstein’s fault. He was the one who’d thought up the theory of relativity.

The old man got drunk and passed out. Simon put him to bed and took the dog for a walk. The breeze, which came from the south, was thick and sticky with the odor of rotting bodies. As the water had evaporated, it had left bodies of animals, birds, and humans along the slope of the mountain. This made the few surviving vultures and rats happy, which goes to show that the old proverb about an ill wind is true. But the wind almost gagged Simon. He couldn’t hang around here much longer unless he shut himself up in the ship and waited for the rotting meat to be eaten up.

Simon looked down from the cliff on the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children, and he wept.

All of them had once been babies who needed and wanted love and who thought that they would be immortal. Even the worst of them longed for love and would have been the better for it if he or she had been able to find it. But the more they grabbed for it, the more unlovable they had become. Even the lovable find it hard to get love, so what chance did the unlovable have?

The human species had been trying for a million years to find love and immortality. They had talked a lot about both, but humankind always talked most about those things which did not exist. Or, if they did, were so rare that almost nobody recognized them when they saw them. Love was rare, and immortality was only a thing hoped-for, unproven, and unprovable.

At least, it was so on Earth.

A little while later, he stood up and shook his fist at the sky.

And this was when he decided to leave Earth and start asking the primal question.

Why are we created only to suffer and to die?

5

Simon explored the area on foot. He found the one-man spaceship where Comberbacke had left it. It had been built by the Titanic & Icarus Spaceship Company, Inc., which didn’t inspire confidence in Simon. After looking it over, however, he decided to fly it back to the
Hwang Ho.
He would store it in the big dock area in the ship’s stern. He could use it for a shuttle or a lifeboat during his voyages through interstellar space.

When he got back to the big ship, he discovered that the old man was gone. Simon set out on foot again. After he had walked down the muddy slope, he found Comberbacke rooting around among the ruins of a village. The old man looked up when he heard Simon’s feet pulling out of the mud with a sucking sound.

“Even an Armenian village must have a library,” he said. “Nobody’s illiterate anymore. So there must be a book that gives the scores of the World Series.”

“Is that all it’ll take to make you happy?”

The old man thought a minute, then said, “No. If I could get a hard-on, I’d be a lot happier. But what good would that do? There ain’t a woman in sight.”

“I was thinking more of somebody who’d be a companion for you and maybe a nurse, too.”

“Find somebody who likes baseball,” Comberbacke said.

Simon went away shaking his head. In the next few weeks he went over every inch of Great and Little Ararat, but the only humans he found were dead. The last day of his search, he started back to the ship with the idea of flying it around until he located land on which were some survivors. He’d make sure they’d take care of the old man, and then he’d leave for interstellar space.

It was dusk when he got to the ship. It lay broadside to him and, as usual, the sight of it disturbed him. He could never put his mental finger on the reason. It was about six hundred feet long, its main length cylindrical-shaped. The nose, however, was bulbous, and its stern rested on two hemispheres. These housed the engines which drove the
Hwang Ho.
They were separate from the ship so they could be released if the engines threatened to blow up.

Light streamed out from the main sideport, which had been left open. Simon was exasperated when he saw this. He had told the old man to keep it shut at night. The mosquitoes were fierce now that spring was here. Somehow, the deluge had not killed them all off, and they were multiplying by the billions since most of their natural enemies, the bats and the birds, were dead. He hurried into the ship and closed the port after him. He called out the old man’s name. Comberbacke did not reply. Simon went to the recreation room and found the old man dead in a chair. The side of his head was blown off. A Chinese pistol lay on his lap. On the table before him was a mud-and-water-stained book, its open pages streaked with water. But it wasn’t rain that had fallen on these pages. The marks were from tears.