Stalking the Nightmare Part 7

Which was something I had little time for. Because without warning they started the question and answer tests again.

Those tests--sometimes I felt like slamming a wall. Tests unlike any that I'd known existed. Ponder the significance of this: Do you lose things constantly? (If answer is "yes" indicate how often, what type of thing lost, where found, mental condition at time of recovery, and any other emotional data.) On some days the questions came as adjuncts to weird movies. I remember some of them. The first was a reel of kaleidoscopic wheeling and whirling and shunting from one hue to another. Before it was done I felt as if I was beaten and tom. I felt as if the future had vanished and swallowed me.

The question was: What are your feelings about death in the abstract? In the specific? (Do not use qualifiers.) Later there was an existentialist movie about sadism, and a rose, and II fruitless love affair between a cripple and a girl with one eye. There was a miracle in the end. I didn't understand the picture, but I didn't want the lights to come back on.

Question two was: What is your stand on G.o.d? Answer bluntly, avoid partisan religious referents, where possible.

They gave us one more that first day. It was a movie about a man who dreamed strange dreams and who thought he was insane. The actor made it seem very real--chillingly real.

And the question was: Have you ever dreamed that you could fly or thought that you were flying without the use of any mechanical aid?

That one I had real trouble with. I answered it finally by saying that I had, "in my childhood."

And so it went. For better than a week. That sort of question. Some that were almost nonsense, some that were so sharp and keen that the point penetrated deep within me.

They told us we were not to discuss the questions in the barracks. So we did, of course. At great length. And there were a lot of theories, but nothing concrete.

Finally they told us.

There was this little man. He couldn't have been much over forty, but he wore the star of a brigadier. He was a Doctor Something, I later found out it was "Stein," a psychiatrist, with degrees in things that ran from linguistics to physics and a mind that worked like a fine computer. He must have come here voluntarily from some other country, I never found out which. His eyes were sad behind thick-lensed gla.s.ses and his voice was phlegmy with the heritage of Central Europe. He was rough to understand, but I felt an instinctive liking for him.

When he talked--we listened.

"It's different out there," he said. "We know that. On the few flights we've made we've found a great deal.

And still we know very little."

He looked out around the room and his eyes behind the lenses were lost in the big dream, the thwarted longing. "The things we do here don't work well out there--the stamina that we possess means little. Our laws of logic, our world's ethical structure, most of what we've postulated goes... wrong... out there. Ifs as if when the force of gravity, of Earth--touching, is lost, everything else is lost too. It's cost some good lives and it's made us change our method of selection.

"And now we're going out farther than ever before. We're going out--past the barrier. We have the means to do it. And you people are specially qualified to do it for us."

The room around me rippled with sound. My pulse sprinted and I forced calmness, so that I would not miss the words.

"We have asked you questions that made you feel we were not quite right in the head." He smiled. He was missing two teeth on the upper left.

"But the questions had a purpose--some to shock you into a non-conformist awareness--some to tell us things about you the Force-wide tests merely hinted at." He leaned forward on the podium. "Each of you is a loner.

Each of you has the ability to maintain, even to transcend against whatever conditions exist around you, remainingessentially yourselves, with no great personality change. There is a segment of the brain that does not work well under the pressure of gravity, but which tends to become dominant when gravity is removed as a factor. There are other areas that only work when gravity is present. We theorize that there are other areas that will work only under conditions produced by exceeding the speed of light. We have not been lucky with deep s.p.a.ce beyond the barrier so far. Yet we have learned. We feel that we'll be luckier now that we know-now that we are able to look for qualities such as you have." He looked out at us and I felt both excited and queasy. And I explored me and lost myself in what he was saying. What was he saying, actually? Psi? I knew something about that and Rhine's old failed experiments, decades ago. There were remarks about the cortex and four-fifths of the brain inactive, and random reflexes. And after awhile I only understood a word here and there.

But I understood his final remarks.

"We know the ship will work. There have been tests. We are more interested now in studying human behavior--in finding out if the human race can survive the trip to the stars. We have built our ship around a special bank of instruments, which will be closely telemetered, to record every thought, every emotion, every vision you sustain.

"Do any of you wish to volunteer?"

I put my hand up and then looked around. There were five more hands raised. My hand felt wet in the moving currents of the room, but my throat was dry.

Stein smiled. "We'll have to draw lots."

Whitelaw Fazio's luck. I pulled second. Ludwig pulled first, the star-marked ballot. She would be the first to go to the stars. I felt a deep disappointment when I saw her bright eyes.

And yet there was relief, too.

"Do any of you want to ask questions?" Dr. Stein asked, when the lottery was done.

Wash Jones's hand went up. "Sir," he said, "what have we discovered that will let us get to the stars? As far as we knew, a few months back, they couldn't even get one of the stage ships back."

The gla.s.ses came up and shone in the light. The face went a little strange. "I have a degree in physics, Mr.

Jones. But I was working on something else, something more in my own field of interest--you need not ask the nature of my primary specialty, I think you can guess--and I stumbled onto what we now call a 'force-bead-generator. ' It goes beyond accepted physics. It gives a sure, never failing power source."

Washington Jones looked over at me and it hit me then.

Fort's theory about the Era of Anything. This was the Time for s.p.a.ce Travel. The baby was ready to be born, so ready that a psychiatrist, trying to find something else, could discover it and recognize its significance. So maybe Fort had been right.

A week before the takeoff, Ludwig woke before dawn feeling as if she would die.

It turned out to be a burst appendix, so they operated.

Ludwig would be laid up for a long time.

I was shuttled out to the Kalahari jump-point and received my penultimate briefings from Stein, who was in charge of the project.

He was nervous when he talked to me and he was envious, too. He kept talking about how the acceleration would take me through what he called" Bounces" or" Progressions." He p.r.o.nounced them bunces and prugrooshens.

I felt, listening to him, as if I were royalty. He spoke to me with deference.

He said that they had sent six of the ships out on remote control voyages and that five of them had returned.

The night before takeoff my dream was back so near and close that I seemed but inches away. I saw my fluted organ-pipe cathedral and me above it. I came awake all sweat and tears for the building had talked to me and though I couldn't recall now what had been said, I was scared. I lay there and wrestled with myself and my desires for a long time. Then I called Stein. I felt I must, even if it took away my chance. If I was insane then I had to be replaced.

"All of you have had that dream, or one similar to it,,, he said. "All six of you." He looked at me and his face was very sad. "I never dream," he said softly.

It wasn't much of a ship, as far as size. When you're used to monstrosities, you'd expect a starship to be that much more impressive, that much larger. But it wasn't.

It was just a teardrop, with a small room in the bulge that was mine. There were extrudable wings and tail for atmosphere landings, wherever I was going, and a cleverly geared set of drop-wheels guaranteed to hold on the shiftiest desert or marsh. And in my cubicle, all around, there were instruments.

There were instruments that watched me, instruments that hooked into me, fed me, bathed me, relieved me, metered me, and weighed me.

I said goodbye to the others and on the proper day, at the proper time, they locked me into the cubicle. And somewhere the countdown began. But I didn't know that. I'd been drugged. Lying on my gelatin-pad couch, I was insensitive to the rustlings and clangings and preparations. A machine was carrying me, on orders set forth by another machine, using calculations done by a third. I'd have manual control only when I came within safe range of that star, and then only if a machine decided I should.

Which star? A machine would calculate that, too.

I had the distinct impression I was supercargo on this flight. And yet, more essential than the finest, mostcleverly made machine ever a.s.sembled. I was grateful that machines did not have whims or temperament.

I slept while things happened and technicians sweated. I slept while pencils toted figures and graph-dials. I slept while a tiny bead of cadmium and thirty-six other trace metals built a field of force around itself, while the Earth whirled blindly beneath me. I slept while people died and others were reborn in the story which had no answer--then.

The ship was towed into its berth, and I tossed restlessly and then did not toss at all when the force bead unleashed its power, throwing the tiny ship far into the darkness, and pushing me smoothly, deeply into the gel-pad. I did not waken while a soundless force pushed me past the speed of light in "progressions" and to a mult.i.tude of speeds in "bounces."

But there wasn't any dream in this sleep. There was no need for the dream now.

I was different when I awoke. I didn't know how, but I was different. Not altered, just different. How can I put it?--have you ever seen a goldfish bowl after the water has been in it for a few days? All bubbled and odd-looking, not at all clear the way it had been at first. Well, that was me. All bubbled and changed, but still the same in most ways.

I was better, somehow. And calm.

I remained in that tranquil state for a long time. Months perhaps. There are records.

The machines tended to me, and that was a good thing, for I was under the spell of that sense of comfort and rightness. Then, finally-- The star has no name--not now--not any more. But once we knew its name, a long time ago.

I could not have headed for any other place had I wanted to. Fate and Destiny had planned it that way; Fate and Destiny had been keeping steady company for a long, long time.

The machines ratcheted and catalogued and a.n.a.lysed, and the ship slowed so the points of light in the darkness surrounding me were stationary again, instead of moving and wheeling.

There were twenty-one planets. I took the twelfth. Instinctively. The machines did not interfere with my course selection.

I came down slowly. The planet was misty and quiet. I did not bother to check whether the air was Earth-breathable. I knew it would be.

We have been lost a long, long time, I think. But it was a short time in the history of the race. Why we were allowed to remain lost, I do not yet know, but I will know.

I broke down through the clouds of pink mist, and it was where I'd known it would be. There is no such thing as Chance. In an ordered universe, all is planned.

It didn't look alien any more, my cathedral. It looked like a home I'd once known, a long time before, and was seeing again with eyes of reminiscence. I knew this place. I knew it with racial memory, damped out by time and Earth living, by Earth gravity.

I knew it again.

I knew my home.

It was there. The organ pipes towered. The strange apertures yawned.

I came down to land.

To see where we are going; to see what we are to become.

And I knew it would be stunning, what we are to become, for as the ship settled among the pastel ground-mists, our ancestors and our descendants began to emerge from those strange apertures.

It was the Cathedral of Man.

But man could not use those entrances.

There were still changes to come. Many changes. We had been lost... and now were found.

Djnn, No Chaser

"Who the h.e.l.l ever heard of Turkish Period?" Danny Squires said. He said it at the top of his voice, on a city street.

"Danny! People are staring at us; lower your voice!" Connie Squires punched his bicep. They stood on the street, in front of the furniture store. Danny was determined not to enter.

"Come on, Connie," he said, "let's get away from these junk shops and go see some inexpensive modern stuff. You know perfectly well I don't make enough to start filling the apartment with expensive antiques."

Connie furtively looked up and down the street--she was more concerned with a "scene" than with the argument itself--and then moved in toward Danny with a determined air. "Now listen up, Squires. Did you or did not marry me four days ago, and promise to love, honor and cherish and all that other good jive?"

Danny's blue eyes rolled toward Heaven; he knew he was losing ground. Instinctively defensive, he answered. "Well, sure, Connie, but--"

"Well, then, I am your wife, and you have not taken me on a honeymoon--"

"I can't afford one!"

"--have not taken me on a honeymoon," Connie repeated with inflexibility. "Consequently, we will buy a little furniture for that rabbit warren you laughingly call our little love nest. And little is hardly the term: that vale of tears was criminally undersized when Barbara Fritchie hung out her flag.

"So to make my life bearable, for the next few weeks, till we can talk Mr. Upjohn into giving you a raise--"

"Upjohn!" Danny fairly screamed. "You've got to stay away from the boss, Connie. Don't screw around. He won't give me a raise, and I'd rather you stayed away from him--"

"Until then," she went on relentlessly, "we will decorate our apartment in the style I've wanted for years."

"Turkish Period?"

"Turkish Period."

Danny flipped his hands in the air. What was the use? He had known Connie was strong-willed when he'd married her.

It had seemed an attractive quality at the time; now he wasn't so sure. But he was strong-willed too; he was sure he could outlast her. Probably.

"Okay," he said finally, "I suppose Turkish Period it'll be. What the h.e.l.l is Turkish Period?"

She took his arm lovingly, and turned him around to look in the store window. "Well, honey, it's not actually Turkish. It's more Mesopotamian. You know, teak and silk and..."

"Sounds hideous. "

"So you're starting up again!" She dropped his arm, her eyes flashing, her mouth a tight little line. "I'm really ashamed of you, depriving me of the few little pleasures I need to make my life a blub, sniff, hoo-hoo..."

The edge was hers.

"Connie... Connie..." She knocked away his comforting hand, saying, "You beast." That was too much for him. The words were so obviously put-on, he was suddenly infuriated: "Now, G.o.ddammit!"

Her tears came faster. Danny stood there, furious, helpless, outmaneuvered, hoping desperately that no cop would come along and say,, 'This guy botherin' ya, lady?"

"Connie, okay, okay, we'll have Turkish Period. Come on, come on. It doesn't matter what it costs, I can sc.r.a.pe up the money somehow."

It was not one of the gla.s.s-brick and onyx emporia where sensible furniture might be found (if one searched hard enough and paid high enough and retained one's senses long enough as they were trying to palm off modernistic nightmares in which no comfortable position might be found); no, it was not even one of those. This was an antique shop.

They looked at beds that had canopies and ornate metalwork on the bedposts. They looked at rugs that were littered with pillows, so visitors could sit on the floors. They looked at tables built six inches off the floor, for low banquets. They inspected incense burners and hookahs and coffers and giant vases until Danny's head swam with visions of the courts of long-dead caliphs.

Yet, despite her determination, Connie chose very few items; and those she did select were moderately-priced and quite handsome... for what they were. And as the hours pa.s.sed, and as they moved around town from one dismal junk emporium to another, Danny's respect for his wife's taste grew. She was selecting an apartment full of furniture that wasn't bad at all.