Return From The Stars Part 24

On the fourth day I heard her talking on the telephone and was terribly afraid. She cried afterward. But at dinner was smiling again.

And this was the end and the beginning. Because the following week we went to Mae, the main city of the district, and in an office there, before a man dressed in white, we said the words that made us man and wife. That same day I sent a telegram to Olaf. The next day I went to the post office, but there was nothing from him. I thought that perhaps he had moved, and hence the delay. To tell the truth, even then, at the post office, I felt a twinge of anxiety, because this silence was not like Olaf, but what with all that had happened, I thought about it only for a moment and said nothing to her. As if it were forgotten.

SIX.

For a couple joined only by the violence of my madness, we suited each other above expectation. Our life together was subject to a curious division. When it came to a difference in att.i.tudes, Eri was able to defend her position, but then the matter in question was usually of a general nature; she was, for example, a staunch advocate of betrization and defended it with arguments not taken from books. That she opposed my views so openly I considered a good sign; but these discussions of ours took place during the day. In the light of day she did not dare -- or did not wish -- to speak about me objectively, calmly, no doubt because she did not know which of her words would amount to pointing out some personal fault of mine, some absurdity of "the character from the pickle jar," to use Olaf's expression, and which an attack leveled at the basic values of my time. But at night -- perhaps because the darkness attenuated my presence somewhat -- she spoke to me about myself, that is, about us, and I was glad of these quiet conversations in the dark, for the dark mercifully hid my frequent amazement. She told me about herself, about her childhood, and in this way I learned for the second time -- for the first time, really, since with concrete, human content -- how finely wrought was this society of constant, delicately stabilized harmony. It was considered a natural thing that having children and raising them during the first years of their life should require high qualifications and extensive preparation, in other words, a special course of study; in order to obtain permission to have offspring, a married couple had to pa.s.s a kind of examination; at first this seemed incredible to me, but on thinking it over I had to admit that we, of the past, and not they, should be charged with having paradoxical customs: in the old society one was not allowed to build a house or a bridge, treat an illness, perform the simplest administrative function, without specialized education, whereas the matter of utmost responsibility, bearing children, shaping their minds, was left to blind chance and momentary desires, and the community intervened only when mistakes had been made and it was too late to correct them.

So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone. Furthermore, parents could not isolate children from their contemporaries; specially selected groups were formed, for both s.e.xes, and in these the most divergent temperaments were represented. So-called difficult children were given additional, hypnagogic treatment, and the education of all children was begun very early. Not reading and writing, which came much later, but the education of the youngest, introducing them -- through special games -- to the functioning of the world, Earth, to the richness and variety of life in society; four- and five-year-olds were instilled, in precisely this way, with the principles of tolerance, coexistence, respect for other beliefs and att.i.tudes, the unimportance of the differing external features of the children (and hence the adults) of other races. All of which seemed quite fine to me, with one single but fundamental reservation, because the immovable cornerstone of this world, its all-embracing rule, was betrization. The whole aim of a child's upbringing was to make it accept betrization as a fact of life no less unquestionable than birth or death. When I heard how ancient history was taught, even from Eri, I had difficulty containing my indignation. According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others. What once took untold effort, they said, and was attainable only by a few, the road to it bristling with danger and the necessity for sacrifice, compromise -- material success purchased only by moral defeat -- was now common, easy, and certain.

It was not so bad as long as one dealt in generalizations; I could go along with the condemnation of various aspects of the past, such as, say, war; and the lack -- the complete lack -- of politics, of friction or tension, of international conflict -- though a surprising lack, giving instant rise to the suspicion that such things existed but went unmentioned -- I had to admit was an accomplishment, not a loss; but it was bad indeed when this re-evaluation touched me personally. Because it was not only Starck who abandoned, in his book (written, nota bene, a half century before my return), the exploration of s.p.a.ce. Here Eri, as an archeology graduate, had much to teach me. The first betrizated generations radically changed their att.i.tude toward astronautics, but though the signs changed from plus to minus, the interest in it remained intense. The consensus, then, was that a tragic error had been committed, an error that reached its culmination in the very years during which our expedition was planned, because at that time similar expeditions were mounted in huge numbers. It was not that the yield of these expeditions had been so small, that the penetration of s.p.a.ce in a radius of many light years from the solar system had led only to the discovery, on a few planets, of primitive and strange forms of vegetation, not to contact with any highly developed civilization. Nor was it considered the worst thing that the terrible length of the voyage would change the crew of the s.p.a.cecraft, those representatives of Earth -- to an increasing degree, as the destinations became more remote -- into a group of wretched, mortally weary creatures who, after landing here and there, would require much care and convalescence; or that the decision to send forth such enthusiasts was thoughtless and cruel. The crux of the matter was that man wanted to conquer the universe without having attended to his own problems on Earth, as though it were not obvious that heroic flights would do nothing to alleviate the sea of human suffering, injustice, fear, and hunger on the globe.

But, as I say, only the first betrizated generation thought this way, because afterward, in the natural course of things, came oblivion and indifference; children marveled when they learned of the romantic period of astronautics, and possibly felt even a little fear toward their ancestors, who were as strange to them and as incomprehensible as the ancestors who engaged in wars of plunder and voyages for gold. It was the indifference that appalled me the most, far more than the condemnation -- our life's work had become wrapped in silence, buried, and forgotten.

Eri did not try to kindle enthusiasm in me for this new world, she made no effort to convert me; she simply told me of it in speaking about herself, and I -- precisely because she spoke about herself and was herself testimony to it -- could not shut my eyes to its virtues.

It was a civilization that had rid itself of fear. Everything that existed served the people. Nothing had weight but their well-being, the satisfaction of their basic as well as their most sophisticated needs. Everywhere -- in all walks of life where the presence of man, the fallibility of his pa.s.sions, and the slowness of his reflexes could create even the smallest risk -- man was replaced by nonliving devices, automata.

It was a world that had shut out danger. Threat, conflict, all forms of violence -- these had no place in it; a world of tranquillity, of gentle manners and customs, easy transitions, undramatic situations, every bit as amazing as my or our (I am thinking of Olaf) reaction to it.

For we, in the course of ten years, had gone through so many horrors, everything that was inimical to man, that wounded him and crushed him, and we had returned, sick of it, so very sick of it; any one of us, hearing that the return would be delayed, that there would be a few more months in s.p.a.ce to endure, would probably have leapt at the speaker's throat. And now we -- no longer able to stand the constant risk, the blind chance of a meteorite hit, that endless suspense, the h.e.l.l we went through when an Arder or an Ennesson failed to return from a reconnaissance flight -- we immediately began to refer to that time of terror as the only proper thing, as right, as giving us dignity and purpose. Yet even now I shuddered at the memory of how, sitting, lying, hanging in the oddest positions above the circular radio-cabin, we waited, waited, in a silence broken only by the steady buzz of the signal from the ship's automatic scanner, seeing, in the leaden bluish light, drops of sweat run down the forehead of the radio operator frozen in the same waiting -- while the clock, its alarm set, moved soundlessly, until finally the moment when the hand touched the red mark on the dial, the moment of relief. Relief. . . because then it was possible to go out and explore and die alone, and that truly seemed easier than waiting. We pilots, the nonscientists, made up the old guard; our time had stopped three years before the actual start of the expedition. In those three years we went through a succession of tests of increasing psychological stress. There were three main stages, three stations, which we called the Ghost Palace, the Wringer, and the Coronation.

The Ghost Palace: One was locked inside a small container, cut off completely from the world. No sound, ray of light, puff of air, or vibration from without reached the interior. Resembling a small rocket, the container was equipped with a mock-up of the same controls, supplies of water, food, and oxygen. And one had to stay there, idle, with absolutely nothing to do, for a month -- which seemed an eternity. No one came out the same. I, one of the toughest of Dr. Janssen's subjects, began in my third week to see the strange things that others had observed as early as the fourth or fifth day: monsters without faces, shapeless crowds that oozed from the dully glowing dials to enter into senseless conversations with me, to hover above my sweating body, my body that was losing its outline, was changing, growing larger, and that finally -- the most frightening thing -- began to a.s.sume an independence, first in spasms of individual muscles, then, after a tingling and a numbness, contractions, and finally movements, while I watched, amazed, not understanding. But for the preliminary training, but for the theoretical briefing, I would have sworn that my arms, head, neck were possessed by demons. The upholstered interior of the container had seen things that defied description -- Janssen and his staff, with the appropriate equipment, were monitoring what took place in there, but none of us knew that at the time. The feeling of isolation had to be genuine and complete. Therefore the disappearance of some of the doctor's a.s.sistants was a mystery to us. It was only during the voyage that Gimma told me that they had simply cracked. One of them, a certain Gobbek, had apparently tried to force open the container, unable to watch the torment of the man inside.

But that was only the Ghost Palace. Because then came the Wringer, with its tumblers and centrifuges, its h.e.l.lish accelerating machine that could produce 400 g's -- an acceleration, never used, of course, that would have turned a man into a puddle, but 100 g's was enough to make a subject's entire back sticky with blood forced out through the skin.

The last test, the Coronation, I pa.s.sed with flying colors. This was the final sieve, the final station for weeding us out. Al Martin, a strapping fellow who back then, on Earth, looked the way I do today, a giant, one hunk of iron muscle, and as calm as you could want -- he came back to Earth from the Coronation in such a state that they immediately removed him from the center.

The Coronation was quite a simple matter. They put a man in a suit, took him up into orbit, and at an alt.i.tude of some hundred thousand kilometers, where the Earth shines like the Moon enlarged fivefold, simply tossed him out of the rocket into s.p.a.ce, and then flew away. Hanging there like that, moving his arms and legs, he had to wait for their return, wait to be rescued; the s.p.a.cesuit was reliable and comfortable, it had oxygen, air conditioning, a heater, and it even fed the man, with a paste squeezed out every two hours from a special mouthpiece. So nothing could happen, unless maybe there was a malfunction in the small radio attached to the outside of the suit, which automatically signaled the location of the wearer. There was only one thing missing in the suit, a receiver, which meant that the man could hear no voice but his own. With the void and the stars around him, suspended, weightless, he had to wait. True, the wait was fairly long, but not that long. And that was all.

Yes, but people went insane from this; they would be dragged in writhing in epileptic convulsions. This was the test that went most against what lay in a man -- an utter annihilation, a doom, a death with full and continuing consciousness. It was a taste of eternity, which got inside a man and let him know its horror. The knowledge, always held to be impossible and impalpable, of the cosmic abyss extending in all directions, became ours; the never-ending fall, the stars between the useless, dangling legs, the futility, the pointlessness of arms, mouth, gestures, of movement and no movement, in the suit an earsplitting scream, the wretches howled, enough.

No need to dwell on what was only, after all, a test, an introduction, intentional, planned with care, with safety precautions: physically, none of the "coronated" were harmed, and the rocket from the base retrieved every one. True, we were not told that, either, to keep the situation as authentic as possible.

The "Coronation" went well for me. I had my own system. It was very simple and completely dishonest -- we were not supposed to do it. When they threw me out the hatch, I closed my eyes. Then I thought about various things. The only thing you needed, and needed in plenty, was will power. You had to tell yourself not to open those miserable eyes no matter what. Janssen, I think, knew about my trick. But there were no repercussions.

All this, however, took place on Earth or in its proximity. Afterward came a s.p.a.ce not contrived and not created in the laboratory, a s.p.a.ce that killed in fact, without pretending, and that sometimes spared -- Olaf, Gimma, Thurber, myself, those seven from the Ulysses -- and even let us return. Whereupon we, who longed most of all for peace, seeing our dream come true, and to perfection, immediately scorned it. I believe it was Plato who said, "O wretched one -- you will have what you wanted."

SEVEN.

One night, very late, we lay spent; Eri's head, turned to one side, rested in the crook of my arm. Raising my eyes to the open window, I saw the stars in the gaps among the clouds. There was no wind, the curtain hung frozen like some pale phantom, but now a desolate wave approached from the open ocean, and I could hear the long rumble announcing it, then the ragged roar of the breakers on the beach, then silence for several heartbeats, and again the unseen water stormed the night sh.o.r.e. But I hardly noticed this steadily repeated reminder of my presence on Earth, for my eyes were fixed on the Southern Cross, in which Beta had been our guiding star; every day I took bearings by it, automatically, my thoughts on other things; it had led us unfailingly, a never-fading beacon in s.p.a.ce. I could almost feel in my hands the metal grips I would shift to bring the point of light, distinct in the darkness, to the center of the field of vision, with the soft rubber rim of the eyepiece against my brows and cheeks. Beta, one of the more distant stars, hardly changed at all when we reached our destination. It shone with the same indifference, though the Southern Cross had long since disappeared to us because we had gone deep into its arms, and then that white point of light, that giant star, no longer was what it had seemed at the beginning, a challenge; its immutability revealed its true meaning, that it was a witness to our transience, to the indifference of the void, the universe -- an indifference that no one is ever able to accept.

But now, trying to catch the sound of Eri's breathing between the rumbles of the Pacific, I was incredulous. I said to myself silently: It's true, it's true, I was there; but my wonder remained.

Eri gave a start. I began to move away, to make more room for her, but suddenly I felt her gaze on me.

"You're not asleep?" I whispered. And leaned over, wanting to touch her lips with mine, but she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. She held them there for a moment, then moved them along the collarbone to the chest, felt the hard hollow between my ribs, and pressed her palm to it.

"What's this?" she whispered.

"A scar."

"What happened?"

"I had an accident."

She became silent. I could feel her looking at me. She lifted her head. Her eyes were all darkness, without a glimmer in them; I could see the outline of her arm, moving with her breath, white.

"Why don't you tell me anything?"

"Eri. . . ?"

"Why don't you want to talk?"

"About the stars?" I suddenly understood. She was silent. I did not know what to say.

"You think I wouldn't understand?"

I looked at her closely, through the darkness, as the ocean's roar ebbed and flowed through the room, and did not know how to explain it to her.

"Eri. . ."

I tried to take her in my arms. She freed herself and sat up in bed.

"You don't have to talk if you don't want to. But tell me why, at least."

"You don't know? You really don't?"

"Now, maybe. You wanted. . . to spare me?"

"No. I'm simply afraid."

"Of what?"

"I'm not sure. I don't want to dig it all up. It's not that I'm denying any of it. That would be impossible, anyway. But talking about it would mean -- or so it seems to me -- shutting myself up in it. Away from everyone, everything, from what is. . . now."

"I understand," she said quietly. The white smudge of her face disappeared, she had lowered her head. "You think that I don't value it."

"No, no," I tried to interrupt her.

"Wait, now it's my turn. What I think about astronautics, and the fact that I would never leave Earth, that's one thing. But it has nothing to do with you and me. Though actually it does: because we are together. Otherwise, we wouldn't be, ever. For me -- it means you. That is why I would like . . . but you don't have to. If it is as you say. If you feel like that."

"I'll tell you."

"But not today."

"Today."

"Lie back."

I fell on the pillows. She tiptoed to the window, a whiteness in the gloom. Drew the curtain. The stars vanished, there was only the slow roar of the Pacific, returning repeatedly with a dreary persistence. I could see practically nothing. The moving air betrayed her steps, the bed sagged.

"Did you ever see a ship of the cla.s.s of the Prometheus?"

"No."

"It's large. On Earth, it would weigh over three hundred thousand tons."

"And there were so few of you?"

"Twelve. Tom Arder, Olaf, Arne, Thomas -- the pilots, along with myself. And the seven scientists. If you think that it was empty there, you are wrong. Propulsion takes up nine-tenths of the ma.s.s. Photoaggregates. Storage, supplies, reserve units. The actual living quarters are small. Each of us had a cabin, in addition to the common ones. In the middle part of the body -- the control center and the small landing rockets, and the probes, even smaller, for collecting samples from the corona. . ."

"And you were over Arcturus in one of those?"

"Yes. As was Arder."

"Why didn't you fly together?"

"In one rocket? It's riskier that way."

"How?"

"A probe is a cooling system. A sort of flying refrigerator. Just enough room to sit down in. You sit inside a sh.e.l.l of ice. The ice melts from the shield and refreezes on the pipes. The air compressors can be damaged. All it takes is a moment, because outside the temperature is ten, twelve thousand degrees. When the pipes stop in a two-man rocket, two men die. This way, only one. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

She put her hand on that unfeeling part of my chest.

"And this. . . happened there?"

"No, Eri; shall I tell you?"

"All right."

"Only don't think. . . No one knows about this."

"This?"

The scar stood out under the warmth of her flngers -- as if returning to life.

"Yes."

"How is that possible? What about Olaf?"

"Not even Olaf. No one knows. I lied to them, Eri. Now I have to tell you, since I've started. Eri. . . it happened in the sixth year. We were on our way back then, but in cloudy regions you can't move quickly. It's a magnificent sight; the faster the ship travels, the stronger the luminescence of the cloud. We had a tail behind us, not like the tail of a comet, more a polar aurora, thin at the sides, deep into the sky, toward Alpha Erida.n.u.s, for thousands and thousands of kilometers. . . Arder and Ennesson were gone by then. Venturi was dead, too. I would wake at six in the morning, when the light was changing from blue to white. I heard Olaf speaking from the controls. He had spotted something interesting. I went down. The radar showed a spot, slightly off our course. Thomas came, and we wondered what the thing could be. It was too big for a meteor, and, anyway, meteors never occur singly. We reduced speed. This woke the rest. When they joined us, I remember, Thomas said it had to be a ship. We often joked like that. In s.p.a.ce there must be ships from other systems, but two mosquitoes released at opposite ends of the Earth would stand a better chance of meeting. We had reached a gap now in the cloud, and the cold, nebular dust became so dispersed that you could see stars of the sixth magnitude with the naked eye. The spot turned out to be a planetoid. Something like Vesta. A quarter of a billion tons, perhaps more. Extraordinarily regular, almost spherical. Which is quite rare. Two millipa.r.s.ecs off the bow. It was traveling, and we followed. Thurber asked me if we could get closer. I said we could, by a quarter of a millipa.r.s.ec.

"We drew nearer. Through the telescope it looked like a porcupine, a ball bristling with spines. An oddity. Belonged in a museum. Thurber started arguing with Biel about its origin, whether tectonic or not. Thomas b.u.t.ted in, saying that this could be determined. There would be no loss of energy, we hadn't even begun to accelerate. He would fly there, take a few specimens, return. Gimma hesitated. Time presented no problem -- we had some to spare. Finally he agreed. No doubt because I was present. Although I hadn't said a thing. Perhaps because of that. Because our relationship had become. . . but that's another story. We stopped; a maneuver of this kind takes time, and meanwhile the planetoid moved away, but we had it on radar. I was worried, because from the time we started back we had nothing but trouble. Breakdowns, not serious but hard to fix -- and happening without any apparent reason. I'm not superst.i.tious, but I believe in series. Still, I had no argument against his going. It made me look childish, but I checked out Thomas's engine myself and told him to be careful. With the dust."

"The what?"

"Dust. In the region of a cold cloud, you see, planetoids act like vacuum cleaners. They remove the dust from the s.p.a.ce in their path, and this goes on over a long period of time. The dust settles in layers, which can double the size of the planetoid. A blast from a jet nozzle or even a heavy step is enough to set up a swirling cloud of dust that hangs above the surface. May not sound serious, but you can't see a thing. I told him that. But he knew it as well as I did. Olaf launched him off the ship's side, I went up to navigation and began to guide him down. I saw him approach the planetoid, maneuver, turn his rocket, and descend to the surface, like on a rope. Then, of course, I lost sight of him. But that was five kilometers. . ."

"You picked him up on radar?"

"No, on the optical, that is, by telescope. Infrared. But I could talk to him the whole time. On the radio. Just as I was thinking that I hadn't seen Thomas make such a careful landing in a long time -- we had all become careful on the way back -- I saw a small flash, and a dark stain began to spread across the surface of the planetoid. Gimma, standing next to me, shouted. He thought that Thomas, to brake at the last moment, had hit the flame. That's an expression we use. You give one short blast of the engine, naturally not in such circ.u.mstances. And I knew that Thomas would never have done that. It had to be lightning."

"Lightning? There?"

"Yes. You see, any body moving at high speed through a cloud builds up charge, static electricity, from friction. There was a difference in potential between the Prometheus and the planetoid. It could have been billions of volts. More, even. When Thomas landed, a spark leapt. That was the flash, and because of the sudden heat the dust rose, and in a minute the entire surface was covered by a cloud. We couldn't hear him -- his radio just crackled. I was furious, mainly at myself, for having underestimated. The rocket had special lightning conductors, p.r.o.nged, and the charge should have pa.s.sed quietly into St. Elmo's fire. But it didn't. It was exceptionally powerful. Gimma asked me when I thought the dust would settle. Thurber didn't ask; it was clear that it would take days."

"Days?"

"Yes. Because the gravity was extremely low. If you dropped a stone, it would fall for several hours before hitting the ground. Think how much longer it would take dust to settle after being thrown up a hundred meters. I told Gimma to go about his business, because we had to wait."

"And nothing could be done?"

"No. If I could be sure that Thomas was still inside his rocket, I would have taken a chance -- turned the Prometheus around, got close to the planetoid, and blasted the dust off to all four corners of the galaxy -- but I could not be sure. And finding him? The surface of the planetoid had an area equal to, I don't know, that of Corsica. Besides, in the dust cloud you could walk right by him at arm's length and not see him. There was only one solution. He had it at his fingertips. He could have taken off and returned."

"He didn't do that?"

"No."

"Do you know why?"

"I can guess. He would have had to take off blind. I could see that the cloud reached, well, not quite a kilometer above the surface, but he didn't know that. He was afraid of hitting an overhang or a rock. He might have landed on the bottom of some deep gorge. So we hung there a day, two days; he had enough oxygen and provisions for six. Emergency rations. No I one was in a position to do anything. We paced and thought up ways of getting Thomas out of this mess. Emitters. Different wavelengths. We even threw down flares. They didn't work, that cloud was as dark as a tomb. A third day -- a third night. Our measurements showed that the cloud was settling, but I wasn't sure it would finish coming down in the seventy hours left to Thomas. He could last without food far longer, but not without oxygen. Then I got an idea. I reasoned this way: Thomas's rocket was made primarily of steel. Provided there were no iron ores on that d.a.m.ned planetoid, it might be possible to locate him with a ferromagnetic indicator -- a device for finding iron objects. We had a highly sensitive one. It could pick up a nail at a distance of three-quarters of a kilometer. A rocket at several kilometers. Olaf and I went over the apparatus. Then I told Gimma and took off."

"Alone."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because without Thomas there were only the two of us, and the Prometheus had to have a pilot."