The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 6

  But why had they passed themselves off as strangers?

  Well, they had been strangers, hadn’t they? And if they had told him the truth, would he have believed them?

  Of course he wouldn’t have.

  None of which explained why Miss Sands disliked him.

  But did she dislike him? Maybe her reaction to him resulted from the same cause that was responsible for his reaction to her. Maybe she worshipped him as much as he worshipped her, and became as tongue-tied in his presence as he did in hers. Maybe the reason she had never looked at him any longer than was absolutely necessary was that she had been afraid of betraying the way she felt before he learned the truth about her.

  He found it suddenly hard to see.

  The smooth purring of Edith’s battery-powered motor filled the cabin. For quite some time now there had been no other sound.

  “What’s the matter?” Miss Sands said suddenly out of clear blue sky. “Cat got your tongue, Mr. Carpenter?”

  He stood up then. She had turned, and was facing him. Her eyes were misted, and she was looking at him gently, adoringly . . . the way she had looked at him last night, in one sense, and 79,062,156 years ago in another, by a Mesozoic campfire in an upper Cretaceous cave. Why I’ll bet if you told her you loved her, she’d throw herself into your arms!

  “I love you, pumpkin,” Carpenter said.

  And Miss Sands did.

  Norman Marchand sat in the wings of the ballroom’s small stage, on a leather hassock someone had found for him. There were fifteen hundred people outside in the ballroom, waiting to do him honor.

  Marchand remembered the ballroom very well. He had once owned it. Forty . . . no, it wasn’t forty. Not even fifty. Sixty years ago it had been, sixty and more years ago that he and Joyce had danced in that ballroom. Then the hotel was the newest on Earth and he was the newly married son of the man who had built it, and the party was the reception for his wedding to Joyce. Of course, none of these people would know about that. But Marchand remembered . . . Oh, Joyce, my very dear! But she had been dead a long time now.

  It was a noisy crowd. He peered out through the wings, and could see the head table filling up. There was the Vice-President of the United States shaking hands with the Governor of Ontario as though, for the moment, they had forgotten they were of different parties. There was Linfox, from the Institute, obligingly helping a chimpanzee into the chair next to what, judging by the microphones ranked before it, would probably be Marchand’s own. Linfox seemed a little ill at ease with the chimp. The chimpanzee had no doubt been smithed, but the imposition of human intelligence did not lengthen its ape’s legs.

  Then Dan Fleury appeared, up the steps from the floor of the ballroom where the rest of the fifteen hundred diners were taking their places.

  Fleury didn’t look well at all, Marchand thought—not without a small touch of satisfaction, since Fleury was fifteen years younger than himself. Still, Marchand wasn’t jealous. Not even of the young bellman who had brought him Che hassock, twenty years at the most and built like a fullback. One life was enough for a man to live. Especially when you had accomplished the dream you had set out to bring to fruition. Or almost.

  Of course, it cost him everything his father left. But what else was money for?

  “It’s time to go in, sir. May I help you?” It was the young fullback nearly bursting his bellman’s uniform with the huge hard muscles of youth. He was very solicitous. One of the nice things about having this testimonial dinner in a Marchand hotel was that the staff was as deferential to him as though he still owned the place. Probably that was why the committee had picked it, Marchand ruminated, quaint and old-fashioned as the hotel must seem now. Though at one time—

  He recollected himself. “I’m sorry, young man. I was—woolgathering. Thank you.”

  He stood up, slowly but not very painfully, considering that it had been a long day. As the fullback walked him onto the stage the applause was enough to drive down the automatic volume control on his hearing aid.

  For that reason he missed the first words from Dan Fleury. No doubt they were complimentary. Very carefully he lowered himself into his chair, and as the clapping eased off he was able to begin to hear the words.

  Dan Fleury was still a tall man, built like a barrel, with bushy eyebrows and a huge mane of hair. He had helped Marchand’s mad project for thrusting man into space from its very beginnings. He said as much now. “Man’s grandest dream!” he roared. “The conquering of the stars themselves! And here is the one man who taught us how to dream it, Norman Marchand!”

  Marchand bowed to the storm of applause.

  Again his hearing aid saved his ears and cost him the next few words: “—and now that we are on the threshold of success,” Fleury was booming, “it is altogether fitting that we should gather here tonight . . . to join in fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope . . . to rededicate ourselves to its fulfillment . . . and to pay our respects, and give of our love, to the man who first showed us what dream to have!”

  While the AVC registered the power of Dan Fleury’s oratory Marchand smiled out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of Fleury to put it like that. The threshold of success indeed! How many years now had they waited on it patiently?—and the door still locked in their faces. Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest. But still . . . There was something in his tone. Was there—Could there be—

  There could not, he told himself firmly. There was no news, no breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships, no dream come true at last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing.

  “—and now,” Fleury was saying, “I won’t keep you from your dinners. There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterwards, I promise you! But now, let’s eat!”

  Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks.

  The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He sat with his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just a touch deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn’t envy the young people anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth or their life expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice.

  He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in crackers and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had kept Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his life expectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of those remaining months he was willing to give up for one really good meal. He rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of hick he still had a month. Perhaps as much as two . . . “I beg your—pardon,” he said, halfturning to the chimpanzee. Even smithed, the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that he was being addressed.

  He should not have turned.

  His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted: the soggy crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the way—it was bad enough to be old, he did not want to be sloppy—and he moved too quickly-

  The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself going over.

  Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought; if I was going to do this sort of thing I might just as well have eaten some of those shrimp . . . But he did not kill himself.

  He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that, because he began to wake up while they we
re still carrying him back to his dressing room behind the stage.

  Once upon a time, Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope.

  Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had taken everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing Extra-Solar Planets. He had, to begin with, given away several million dollars.

  That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and it was nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used it to hire publicity men, fund-raisers, investment counselors, foundation managers. He had spent it on documentary films and on TV commercials. With it he had financed cocktail parties for United States senators and prize contests for the nation’s sixth grades, and he had done what he set out to do.

  He had raised money. A very great deal of money.

  He had taken all the money he had begged and teased out of the pockets of the world and used it to finance the building of twenty-six great ships, each the size of a dozen ocean liners, and he had cast them into space like a farmer sowing wheat upon the wind.

  I tried, he whispered to himself, returning from the darkest place he had ever seen. I wanted to see man reach out and touch a new home . . . and I wanted to be the one to guide him there . . .

  And someone was saying: “—he know about it, did he? But we were trying to keep it quiet—” Someone else told the first person to shut his mouth. Marchand opened his eyes.

  Czerny was there, unsmiling. He saw that Marchand was conscious. “You’re all right,” he said, and Marchand knew that it was true, since Czerny was scowling angrily at him. If the news had been bad he would have smiled—“No you don’t!” cried Czerny, catching him by the shoulder. “You stay right there. You’re going home to bed.”

  “But you said I was all right.”

  “I meant you were still breathing. Don’t push it, Norm.”

  Marchand protested, “But the dinner—I ought to be there—”

  Asa Czerny had cared for Marchand for thirty years. They had gone fishing together, and once or twice they had gotten drunk. Czerny would not have refused for nothing. He only shook his head.

  Marchand slumped back. Behind Czerny the chimpanzee was squatting silently on the edge of a chair, watching. He’s worried, Marchand thought. Worried because he feels it’s his fault, what happened to me. The thought gave him enough strength to say: “Stupid of me to fall like that, Mr. Czerny. I’m sorry.”

  Czerny supplied the introduction. “This is Duane Ferguson, Norman. He was supernumerary on the Copernicus. Smithed. He’s attending the dinner in costume, as it were.” The chimpanzee nodded but did not speak. He was watching that silver-tongued orator, Dan Fleury, who seemed upset. “Where is that ambulance?” demanded Czerny, with a doctor’s impatience with internes, and the fullback in bellman’s uniform hurried silently away to find out.

  The chimpanzee made a barking sound, clearing his throat. “Ghwadd,” he said—more or less: the German ich sound followed by the word “what”—“Ghwadd did jou mee-an aboud evdial, Midda Vleury?”

  Dan Fleury turned and looked at the chimp blankly. But not, Marchand thought suddenly, as though he didn’t know what the chimp was talking about. Only as if he didn’t intend to answer.

  Marchand rasped, “What’s this ‘evdial,’ Dan?”

  “Search me. Look, Mr. Ferguson, perhaps we’d better go outside.”

  “Ghwadd?” The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. “What did you bean—did you mean?”

  He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was tiring him.

  Although there was something about that insistent question—

  Marchand winced and felt for a moment as though he were going to throw up. It passed, leaving him wobbly. It wasn’t possible he had broken anything, he told himself. Czerny would not lie about that. But he felt as if he had.

  He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and low-pitched chirrup like the scratching of a cricket’s legs.

  If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind, thoughts and—yes—soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand.

  Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for the ambulance. Men who volunteered for the interstellar flights he had done so much to bring about knew what they were getting into. Until some fabulous super-Batman invented the mythical FTL drive it would always be so. At possible speeds—less than light’s 186,000 mps crawl—it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile planet that was known.

  The Smith process allowed these men to use their minds to control chimpanzee bodies—easily bred, utterly expendable—while their own bodies rested in the deep-freeze for all the long years between the stars.

  It took brave men, naturally. They were entitled to courtesy and consideration.

  But so was he, and it was not courteous to blather about “evdial,” whatever that was, while the man who had made the trip possible was seriously injured. . .

  Unless . . .

  Marchand opened his eyes again.

  “Evdial.” Unless “evdial” was the closest chimpanzee vocal chords and chimpanzee lips could come to—to——unless what they had been talking about, while he was unconscious, was that utterly impossible, hopeless and fantastic dream that he, Marchand, had turned his back upon when he began organizing the colonization campaign. Unless someone had really found the way to FTL travel.

  II

  As soon as he was able the next day, Marchand got himself into a wheelchair—all by himself; he didn’t want any help in this—and rolled it out into the chart room of the home the Institute had given him rentfree for all of his life. (He had, of course, given it in the first place to the Institute.)

  The Institute had put three hundred thousand dollars into the chart room. Stayed and guywired stars flecked the volume of a forty-foot ballroom, representing in scale all the space within fifty-five light-years of Sol. Every star was mapped and tagged. They had even moved a few of them slightly, a year ago, to correct for proper motion: it was that carefully done.

  The twenty-six great starships the Institute had financed were there, too, or such of them as were still in space. They were out of scale, of course, but Marchand understood what they represented. He rolled his chair down the marked path to the center of the room and sat there, looking around, just under yellow Sol.

  There was blue-white Sirius dominating them all, Procyon hanging just above. The two of them together were incomparably the brightest objects in the room, though red Altair was brighter in its own right than Procyon. In the center of the chamber Sol and Alpha Centauri A made a brilliant pair.

  He gazed with rheuming eyes at the greatest disappointment of his life, Alpha Centauri B. So close. So right. So sterile. It was an ironic blunder of creation that the nearest and best chance of another home had never formed planets . . . or had formed them and swept them into the Bode-area traps set by itself and its two companions.

  But there were other hopes . . .

  Marchand sought and found Tau Ceti, yellow and pale.

  Only eleven light-years away, the colony should be definitely established by now. In another decade or less they should have an answer . . . if, of course, it had planets Man could live on.

  That was the big question, to which they had already received so many “nos.” But Tau Ceti was still a good bet, Marchand told himself stoutly. It was a dimmer, cooler sun than Sol. But it was type G, and according to spectropolarimetry, almost certainly planetiferous. And if it were another disappointment—

  Marchand turned his eyes to 40 Eridani A, even dimmer, even farther away. The expedition to 40 Eridani A had been, he remembered, the fifth ship he had launched. It ought to be reaching its destination soon—th
is year, or perhaps next. There was no sure way of estimating time when the top velocity was so dose to light’s own . . .

  But now of course the top velocity was more.

  The sudden wash of failure almost made him physically ill. Faster than light travel—why, how dared they!

  But he didn’t have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight again, looking around. At ninety-six you dare not do anything slowly, not even daydream.

  He glanced at, and dismissed, Procyon. They had tried Procyon lately—the ship would not be even halfway. They had tried almost everything. Even Epsilon Eridani and Groombridge 1618; even, far down past the probably good bets among the spectroscopic classes, 61 Cygni A and Epsilon Indi, a late and despairing try at Proxima Centauri (though they were very nearly sure it was wasted: the Alpha Centauri expedition had detected nothing like viable planets).

  There had been twenty-six of them in all. Three ships lost, three returned, one still Earthbound. Nineteen were still out there.

  Marchand looked for comfort at the bright green arrow I hat marked where the Tycho Brahe rode its jets of ionized pis, the biggest of his ships, three thousand men and women. It seemed to him that someone had mentioned the Tycho lirahe recently. When? Why? He was not sure, but the name stuck in his mind.

  The door opened and Dan Fleury walked in, glancing at the arrayed stars and ships and not seeing them. The chart room had never meant anything to Fleury. He scolded, “Damn it, Norman, you scared us witless! Why you’re not in the hospital now—”

  “I was in the hospital, Dan. I wouldn’t stay. And finally I got it through Asa Czerny’s head that I meant it, so he said I could come home if I would stay quiet and let him look in. Well, as you see, I’m quiet. And I don’t care if he looks in. I only care about finding out the truth about FTL.”