The IF Reader of Science Fiction Read online

  “Oh, cripes, Norm! Honestly, you shouldn’t worry yourself—”

  “Dan, for thirty years you’ve never used the word ‘honestly’ except when you were lying to me. Now give. I sent for you this morning because you know the answer. I want it.”

  “For God’s sake, Dan.”

  Fleury glanced around the room, as though he were seeing the glowing points of light for the first time . . . perhaps he was, Marchand thought.

  He said at last, “Well, there is something.”

  Marchand waited. He had had a great deal of practice at waiting.

  “There’s a young fellow,” said Fleury, starting over again. “He’s named Eisele. A mathematician, would you believe it? He’s got an idea.”

  Fleury pulled over a chair and sat down.

  “It’s far from perfect,” he added.

  “In fact,” he said, “a lot of people think it won’t work at all. You know the theory, of course. Einstein, Lorentz-Fitzgerald, the whole roster—they’re all against it. It’s called—get this!—polynomiation.”

  He waited for a laugh, hopelessly. Then he said, “Although I must say he appears to have something, since the tests—”

  Marchand said gently and with enormous restraint: “Dan, will you please spit it out? Let’s see what you said so far. There’s this fellow named Eisele and he has something and it’s crazy but it works.”

  “Well—yes.”

  Marchand slowly leaned back and closed his eyes. “So that means that we were all wrong. Especially me. And all our work—”

  “Look, Norman! Don’t ever think like that. Your work has made it all the difference. If it weren’t for you, people like Eisele never would have had the chance. Don’t you know he was working under one of our grants?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.” Marchand’s eyes went out to the Tycho Brahe for a moment. “But it doesn’t help much. I wonder if fifty-odd thousand men and women who have given most of their lives to the deep-freeze because of—my work—will feel the way you do. But thanks. You’ve told me what I want to know.”

  When Czerny entered the chart room an hour later Marchand said at once, “Am I in good enough shape to stand a smith?”

  The doctor put down his bag and took a chair before he answered. “We don’t have anyone available, Norman. There hasn’t been a volunteer for years.”

  “No. I don’t mean smithed into a human body. I don’t want any would-be suicide volunteer donors; you said yourself the smithed bodies sometimes suicided anyway. I’ll settle ‘for a chimp. Why should I be any better than that young fellow—what’s his name?”

  “You mean Duane Ferguson.”

  “Sure. Why should I be any better than he is?”

  “Oh, cut it out, Norman. You’re too old. Your phosopho-lipids—”

  “I’m not too old to die, am I? And that’s the worst that could happen.”

  “It wouldn’t be stable! Not at your age; you just don’t understand the chemistry. I couldn’t promise you more than a few weeks.”

  Marchand said joyously, “Really! I didn’t expect that much. That’s more than you can promise me now.”

  The doctor argued, but Marchand had held up his end of many a hard-fought battle in ninety-six years, and besides he had an advantage over Czerny. The doctor knew even better than Marchand himself that getting into a passion would kill him. At the moment when Czerny gauged the risk of a smith translation less than the risk of going on arguing about it, he frowned, shook his head grudgingly and left.

  Slowly Marchand wheeled after him.

  He did not have to hurry to what might be the last act of his life. There was plenty of time. In the Institute they kept a supply of breeding champanzees, but it would take several hours to prepare one.

  One mind had to be sacrificed in the smith imposition. The man would ultimately be able to return to his own body, his risk less than one chance in fifty of failure. But the chimp would never be the same. Marchand submitted to the beginnings of the irradiation, the delicate titration of his body fluids, the endless strapping and patching and clamping. He had seen it done and there were no surprises in the procedure . . . He had not known, however, that it would hurt so much.

  III

  Trying not to walk on his knuckles (but it was hard; the ape body was meant to crouch, the arms were too long to hang comfortably along his sides), Marchand waddled out into the pad area and bent his rigid chimp’s spine back in order to look up at the hated thing.

  Dan Fleury came toward him. “Norm?” he asked tentatively. Marchand attempted to nod: it was not a success, but Fleury understood. “Norman,” he said, “this is Sigmund Eisele. He invented the FTL drive.”

  Marchand raised one long arm and extended a hand that resisted being opened: it was used to being clawed into a fist. “Congradulazhuns,” he said, as clearly as he could. Virtuously he did not squeeze the hand of the young dark-eyed man who was being introduced to him. He had been warned that chimpanzee strength maimed human beings. He was not likely to forget, but it was tempting to allow himself to consider it for a moment.

  He dropped the hand and winced as pain flooded through him.

  Czerny had warned him to expect it. Unstable, dangerous, won’t last had rumbled through his conversation; and don’t forget, Norman, the sensory equipment is set high for you; you’re not used to so much input: it will hurt.

  But Marchand had assured the doctor he would not mind that, and indeed he didn’t. He looked at the ship again. “Zo thads id,” he grumbled, and again bent the backbone, the whole barrel chest of the brute he occupied, to stare at the ship on the pad. It was perhaps a hundred feet tall. “Nod, mudge,” he said scornfully. “De Zirian, dad was our firzd, zdood nine hoonderd feed dall and garried adousand beople to Alpha Zendauri.”

  “And it brought a hundred and fifty back alive,” said Eisele. He didn’t emphasize the words in any way, but he said it quite clearly. “I want to tell you I’ve always admired you, Dr. Marchand. I hope you won’t mind my company. I understand you want to go along with me out to the Tycho Brahe.”

  “Why zhould I mind?” He did, of course. With the best will in the world, this young fellow had thrown seventy years of dedication, plus a handsome fortune—eight million dollars of his own, countless hundreds of millions that Marchand had begged from millionaires, from government handouts, from the pennies of school children—tossed them all into the chamber pot and flushed them into history. They would say: A nonce figure of the early twenty-first century, Norman Marchand, or Marquand, attempted stellar colonization with primitive rocket-propelled craft. He was of course unsuccessful, and the toll of life and wealth in his ill-conceived venture enormous. However, after Eisele’s faster-than-light became practicable . . . They would say that he was a failure. And he was.

  When Tycho Brahe blasted off to the stars massed bands of five hundred pieces played it to its countdown and television audiences all over the world watched it through their orbiting satellites. A president, a governor and half the senate were on hand.

  When Eisele’s little ship took off to catch it and tell its people their efforts had been all in vain, it was like the departure of the 7:17 ferry for Jersey City. To that extent, thought Marchand, had Eisele degraded the majesty of star-flight. Yet he would not have missed it for anything. Not though it meant forcing himself as supercargo on Eisele, who had destroyed his life, and on the other smithed chimpanzee, Duane Ferguson, who was for some reason deemed to have special privileges in regard to the Brahe.

  They shipped an extra FTL unit—Marchand heard one of (he men call it a polyflecter, but he would not do it the honor of asking anyone what that meant—for some reason. Because it was likely to break down, so spares were needed? Marchand dismissed the question, realizing that it had not been a fear but a hope. Whatever the reason he didn’t care; he didn’t want even to be here, he only regarded it as his inescapable duty.

  And he entered Eisele’s ship.

  The interior of Ei
sele’s damned ship was built to human scale, nine-foot ceilings and broad acceleration couches, but they had brought hammocks scaled to a chimpanzee torso for himself and Duane Ferguson. Doubtless they had looted the hammocks from the new ship. The one that would never fly—or at least not on streams of ionized gas. And doubtless this was almost the last time that a man’s mind would have to leave Earth in an ape’s body.

  What Eisele’s damned ship rode to the stars on in place of ionized gas Marchand did not understand. The whatcha-flecter, whatever the damned thing was named, was so tiny. The whole ship was a pigmy.

  There was no room for reaction mass, or at least only for enough to get it off-Earth. Then the little black box—it was not really little, since it was the size of a grand piano; and it was not black but gray; but it was a box, all right—would work its magic. They called that magic “polynomiation.” What polynomiation was Marchand did not try to understand, beyond listening, or seeming to listen, to Eisele’s brief, crude attempt to translate mathematics into English. He heard just enough to recognize a few words. Space was N dimensional. All right, that answered the whole question, as far as he was concerned, and he did not hear Eisele’s tortuous efforts to explain how one jacked oneself up, so to speak, into a polynomial dimension—or no, not that, but translated the existing polynomial extensions of a standard 4-space mass into higher orders—he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear any of it. What he was listening to was the deep liquid thump of the great ape’s heart that now was sustaining his brain.

  Duane Ferguson appeared, in the ape’s body that he would never leave now. That was one more count of Marchand’s self-indictment; he had heard them say that the odds had worked against Ferguson, and his body had died in the imposition.

  As soon as he had heard what Eisele was up to, Marchand had seized on it as a chance for expiation. The project was very simple. A good test for Eisele’s drive, and a mission of mercy, too. They indended to fleet after the plodding, long-gone Tycho Brahe and catch it in mid-space . . . for even now, thirty years after it had left Port Kennedy, it was still decelerating to begin its search orbit around Groombridge 1618. As Marchand strapped himself in, Eisele was explaining it all over again. He was making tests on his black box and talking at the same time: “You see, sir, well try to match course and velocity, but frankly that’s the hard part. Catching them’s nothing: we’ve got the speed. Then we’ll transfer the extra polyflecter to the Tyco Brahe—”

  “Yez, thanggs,” said Marchand politely, but he still did not listen to the talk about the machine. As long as it existed he would use it, his conscience would not let him off that, but he didn’t want details.

  Because the thing was, there were all those wasted lives.

  Every year in the Tycho Brahe’s deep freeze means a month off the life of the body that lay there. Respiration was slowed, but it was not stopped. The heart did not beat but blood was perfused through a pump; tubes dripped sugar and minerals into the torpid blood, catheters carried wastes away. And Groombridge 1618 was a flight of ninety years.

  The best a forty-year-old man could hope for on arriving was to be restored into a body whose biological age was nearly fifty—while behind him on the Earth was nothing but a family long dead, friends turned into dust.

  It had been worth it. Or so the colonists had thought. Driven by the worm that wriggled in the spine of the explorer, the itch that drove him on; because of the wealth and the power and the freedom that a new world could give them, and because of the place they would have in the history books—net Washington’s place, or even Christ’s. They would have the place of an Adam and an Eve.

  It had been worth it, all those thousands had thought when they volunteered and set out. But what would they think when they landed!

  If they landed without knowing the truth, if some ship like Eisele’s did not reach and tell them in mid-space, they would find the greatest disappointment any man had ever home. The Groombridge 1618 expedition aboard the Tycho lirahe still had forty years to go on its original trip plan. With Eisele’s invention driving faster-than-light commerce, I here would be a planet populated by hundreds of thousands of people, factories at work, roads built, the best land taken, the history books already into their fifth chapter . . . and what would the three thousand aging adventurers think then?

  Marchand moaned and shook, not entirely because the ship was taking off and the acceleration squeezed his rib cage down against his spine.

  When they were in the polyflecter’s grip he floated across the pilot room to join the others. “I was never in zpaze bevore,” he said.

  Eisele said with great deference, “Your work was on the Earth.”

  “Vas, yez.” But Marchand left it at that. A man whose whole life was a failure owed something to humanity, and one of the things he owed was the privilege of allowing them to overlook it.

  He watched carefully while Eisele and Ferguson read their instruments and made micrometric settings on the polyflecter. He did not understand anything about the faster-than-light drive, but he understood that a chart was a chart. Here there was a doubly profiled representation of the course-line of the Groombridge star in distance, which meant something under three-quarters of the way in time.

  “Mass detectors, Dr. Marchand,” said Eisele cheerfully, pointing to the charts. “Good thing they’re not much closer, or they wouldn’t have mass enough to show.” Marchand understood: the same detectors that would show a sun or a planet would also show a mere million-ton ship if its speed were great enough to add sufficient mass. “And a good thing,” added Eisele, looking worried, “that they’re not much farther away. We’re going to have trouble matching their velocity now, even though they’ve been decelerating for nine years . . . Let’s get strapped in.”

  From the hammock Marchand braced himself for another surge of acceleration. But it was not that, it was something different and far worse.

  It was a sausage-grinder, chewing his heart and sinews and spitting them out in strange crippled shapes.

  It was a wine-press, squeezing his throat, collapsing his heart.

  It was the giddy nausea of a roller-coaster or a small craft in a typhoon. Wherever it took them, the stars on the profile charts slipped and slid and flowed into new positions.

  Marchand, absorbed in the most crushing migraine of all but a century, hardly knew what was happening, but he knew that in the hours they found the Tycho Brahe, after giving it a thirty-year start.

  IV

  The captain of the Tycho Brahe was a graying, yellow-fanged chimp named Lafcadio, his brown animal eyes hooded with shock, his long, stringy arms still quivering with the reaction of seeing a ship—a ship—and human beings.

  He could not take his eyes off Eisele, Marchand noted, and looked? It had been thirty years in an ape’s body for the captain. The ape was old now. Lafcadio would be thinking himself more than half chimp already, the human frame only a memory that blurred against the everyday reminders of furry-backed hands and splayed prehensile feet. Marchand himself could feel the ape’s mind stealing back, though he knew it was only imagination.

  Or was it imagination? Asa Czerny had said the imposition would not be stable—something to do with the phospholipids—he could not remember. He could not, in fact, remember anything with the clarity and certainty he could wish, and it was not merely because his mind was ninety-six years old.

  Without, emotion Marchand realized that his measured months or weeks had dwindled to a few days.

  It could, of course, be the throbbing pain between his temples that was robbing him of reason. But Marchand only entertained that thought to dismiss it; if he had courage enough to realize that his life’s work was wasted, he could face the fact that pain was only a second-order derivative of the killer that stalked his ape’s body. But it made it hard for him to concentrate. It was through n liaze that he heard the talk of the captain and his crew—twenty-two smithed chimpanzees who superintended the mining of the Tycho Brahe and watched over the thre
e thousand frozen bodies in its hold. It was over a deep, confusing roar that he heard Eisele instruct them in the transfer of the FTL unit from his tiny ship to the great, lumbering ark that his box could make fleet enough to span it; stars in a day’s journey.

  He was aware that they looked on him, from time to time, with pity.

  He did not mind their pity. He only asked that they allow him to live with them until he died, knowing as he knew that that would be no long time; and he passed, while they were still talking, into a painful, dizzying reverie that lasted until—he did not know the measure of the time—until he found himself strapped in a hammock in the control room of the ship, and felt the added crushing agony that told him they were once again slipping through the space of other dimensions.

  “Are you all right?” said a familiar thick, slurred voice.

  It was the other, last victim of his blundering, the one called Ferguson. Marchand managed to say that he was.

  “We’re almost there,” said Ferguson. “I thought you’d like to know. There’s a planet. Inhabitable, they think.”

  From Earth the star called Groombridge 1618 was not even visible to the naked eye. Binoculars might make it a tiny flicker of light, lost among countless thousands of farther, but brighter, stars. From Groombridge 1618 Sol was not much more.

  Marchand remembered struggling out of his hammock, overruling the worry on Ferguson’s simian face, to look back at the view that showed Sol. Ferguson had picked it out for him, and Marchand looked at light that had been fifteen years journeying from his home. The photons that impinged on his eyes now had paused to drench the Earth in the colors of sunset when he was in his seventies and his wife only a few years mourned . . . He did not remember getting back to his hammock.

  He did not remember, either, at what moment of time someone told him about the planet they hoped to own. It hung low around the little orange disk of Groombridge 1618—by solar standards, at least. The captain’s first approximation made its orbit quite irregular, but at its nearest approach it would be less than ten million miles from the glowing fire-coal of its primary. Near enough. Warm enough. Telescopes showed it a planet with oceans and forests, removing the lingering doubts of the captain, for its orbit could not freeze it even at greatest remove from its star, or char it at closest—or else the forest could not have grown. Spectroscopes, thermocouples, filarometers showed more, the instruments racing ahead of the ship, now in