Collected Short Fiction, page 761
The flight computer cut them off.
Congratulations, hero!” Tengel’s whisper roared again, bitterly sardonic. “When you reach this point, you’ll think you have it made. I want to tell you what you’ve done. I owe you that, because I once loved your mother. A pity she won’t know.
Better get set for a painful jolt. You’ll recall my own misadventures in the bomb-happy madhouse we used to call human civilization. I think you’ll understand the small cause I had to love humanity or to anticipate any brighter future for it. My life has taught me the saddest fact of all: We humans fatally muffed the miraculous chance that asteroid gave us.
“If mankind sinned, you and I have made a full atonement.
“With your mission done, you’ll be wondering what reward you can expect. Not much glory, I’m afraid. In the nature of the case, the world you saved can’t repay or even recognize you. Though the space-time dynamics are not entirely clear, I imagine you’ll soon discover that you’ve removed your own reason for being.
“With your situation so uncertain, I’ll be brief. What you don’t know—what I never told the Space Force—is simply this: My long-range drive is a time machine. It carried you back across the ages to destroy the asteroid that would otherwise have killed the dinosaurs.
“We’ll never know what use they’ve made of their second chance. If they evolved far enough to discover and understand what you’ve done, by rights they ought to honor you for repairing their unlucky break—”
The bitter whisper had died away. The instrument board and the metal hull around him were dimming, growing transparent, again revealing those perplexing disks inlaid upon the stark and transformed Moo . . .
Seedship
Jack Williamson was first published in Amazing in our December 1928 issue, not counting a fan letter that appeared in a 1927 issue. Since then he has appeared in the magazine from time to time; he’s also published over forty books, including such classic novels as The Legion of Space, Darker Than You Think, and The Humanoids. Recent works include The Queen of the Legion, Wall around a Star (written with Frederik Pohl), and Manseed, of which this story is a part.
Mr. Williamson writes: “The idea for Manseed was something new, at least to me, and entirely wonderful. Developing it cast the characters and shaped the plot and controlled everything. It let me feel that I was not exactly creating, but discovering form for the novel as well as the people in it. I hope it’s as much fun to read as it was to write.”
The ship’s computer broke into his happy dream of Megan Drake.
“Duty call, Defender!”
He hated the voice. Soundless, inhuman, yet edged with a mocking hint of hers.
“Ship in orbit around target planet. Your service now required.”
He shut himself against the call, groping to recover his joy in the dream. They had been racing down the highest slope at Angel Fire. She had passed him, red scarf flying, her lean face aglow with cold and her skis singing on the snow, close enough to touch. The wind swept her laugh away, but he had seen the teasing glint in her greenish eyes before she bent to vanish in the swirl of flakes ahead.
Crouching lower, heart thudding, he raced to overtake her. She meant him to—he still felt drunk with the wonder of that, still astonished that she could be so different here, away from the Albuquerque lab and all the driving demands of the project.
Megan—week-ending with him!
He strove to hold the dream, but it had shattered on hard recollection. Megan Drake was dead. A million years ago. Lost forever, with the human Earth and all he had ever known, somewhere in the bleak light-years and the measureless millennia behind.
“Attention, Defender.” The computer’s quick and brittle voice stabbed him again. “You will now survey target planet to determine whether landing is forbidden.”
He couldn’t reply. The dream still possessed him, the human Megan still alive in his mind. He wanted her again. The proud spirit and the sleeping passion beneath her cool reserve and all the wonder of her that he had only begun to discover. The magic sweetness of her hair and the taste of her mouth. Her joyous devotion to him—but that had been only in the dream. The ache of waking was still too sharp for him to bear.
In the dream he had forgotten what he was.
Nothing human, but only a gadget. Half machine and half alive, a creation of computer science and genetic engineering, his mind—rather, his own controlling program—patched from bits of skill and know-how the Defender had been expected to require, his human recollections a haphazard mix picked up by lab accident.
Floating weightless in the dark birthcell, he explored himself again. The cold and hairless flesh, pliantly metallic. The throbbing umbilical, only slightly warmer, coiling out of darkness to his belly. Shivering, yet nerved with sudden hope, he reached to feel his crotch.
All he found was stiffly yielding metal, slick and cold and hairless. Nothing had grown while he slept. Still he had no reason to dream of any woman—
“Defender, alert!” The computer again, icily unfeeling. “Free oxygen detected on target planet. Interpreted as evidence of life evolving here.
Our master control program forbids planting on advanced planets. If we find native culture evolved to our own level or above, mission must be aborted. You will survey target planet for indications of advanced intelligence.”
“Defender to Ship.” Automatic words, spoken by the machine he was. “I will comply.”
Fingers a-tingle as feeling came back, he searched the slick metallic wall of his narrow birthpod, found the seam where it closed. Squirming in the dark to reach the bulging opener, he hammered with his fist. Floating, waiting, he groped again for the source of that lost dream.
For it felt too real for a dream, and he thought it might lead him to more of himself. A mongrel half-thing, he yearned to be whole, hungered for humanity, longed to recover that lost instant of total happiness.
All his human fragments came from troubled men, trapped on a troubled planet, all in love with Megan—or at least itching for her. The project itself had been her only promise he remembered. A share in her eager hope for a new human start, a better human chance, on whatever worlds the seed might reach.
He wanted more. He wanted Megan.
Had any of them won her? Waiting for his dark cell to open, shrinking from the Defender’s hard and bitter lot, he tried to follow the clue of the dream. Sifting again through those fragmentary bits of mind and feeling, he groped for any island of joy, any moment of untroubled love, any real recollection of skiing with Megan at Angel Fire.
He found another talk with her.
The day in the lab had been too long. Used to action, he had been forced to lie too still in the scanner, too cold and sick from the radioactives filtering into his brain, battered too hard by too many demands for all he knew of combat.
“It’s all we offered.” A glint of malice in her tone. “A way for you to fight again.”
He hated the way, now that he knew what it was. Though in fact his bad knee didn’t matter here. All the job took was lying passive while they pounded him with questions to get unconscious reactions that Rablon’s computers could record.
Too many questions, most of them painful.
What conflicts had he seen? How had he planned for them? How had he trained? What forces had he commanded? Who had commanded him? What weapons did he know? Where had he used them? What engagements had been decisive? How had they been won? How defeated? How much had he been paid? How little? With whose funds? What laws had he broken? With what consequences? Had he ever looted? Killed civilians? Worked with terrorists? With the CIA? With any other such agency?
He had never liked looking back. There had been more blunders than victories, more pain than elation. Perhaps there were secret selves inside him that he didn’t want to meet. The moment now had always been enough, and lure of tomorrow—so long as he was fit to face it.
Why did men kill? Why had he enjoyed it?
Megan’s questions, most of them, asked with increasing shock and revulsion. She wanted to despise him. Yet, in spite of all her idealism, she had been fascinated by his dedication to that oldest and most absorbing human game, played for life or death. And she had fascinated him, not through anything intentional, but with the fierce emotion he could sense beneath her crisp control. Limping back from the shower after that hard session, he found her waiting for him in the lab.
“Buy you a drink?” He grinned wryly at her. “Something smoother than your radio cocktails.”
“My turn.” Her quick smile erased the ache in his knee. “With dinner. After all, it’s Friday night.”
She drove him to the Aztecan Temple, a shabby-looking little place off Central where the Mexican food was hot and the margaritas smooth enough. They talked. She asked for more about the elephant poachers he had fought in Africa and the Izquierdista rebellion. He relished her unwilling admiration. Nerved with the drinks and her clean loveliness, he begged her to come with him back to Mexico.
“I’ll rent a plane—the knee’s well enough for that—and fly you down to Baja.” He saw her start, eyes almost frightened. “Most of the crew will take the week end off,” he urged her. “We’ll be back Monday morning.”
“Don—”
Her breath had caught. For a long moment she looked at him across her salted glass, a flush of tangled feelings on her face. For a moment she was about to yield, but then he saw her ripe lips tighten, perhaps with pity for him.
“Not that I’ve a lot left for anybody,” he muttered. “And no harm intended. But—if I could love—I love you, Megan.”
“I’m sorry, Don.” Her fine head shook sharply and she leaned across the table, eyes very grave. “Terribly sorry. Because I—I like you, Don.”
“You forgive the killing?”
“Maybe—” She flinched as if to a stab of pain. “Maybe that’s why I like you. But—” Her eyes fell for an instant, then rose to meet his. “I’m a virgin, Don. Egan and my uncle used to say I ought to see a shrink, but I never did. Seldom ever thought about it, since the seedship project started. I’ve wondered if it somehow takes the place of sex.
“When it’s finished—” She drew a long breath, and her hand reached for his. “Maybe—”
The long slit was widening. He saw the glint of stars outside, swept past by the ship’s slow spin, but still Megan haunted him. Still he longed to know who—which part of him—could have been with her at Angel Fire. Not Don Brink. Even if she kept that uncertain promise in time for the event to get into the ship’s computer, Brink couldn’t have been the skier. Not with the mortar splinter in his knee.
Who else? Shadowy jealousies woke to spur him. If Megan had really been a virgin, all five men wanting her, who had been lucky? Watching the creeping stars, he sifted again through those scrambled scraps of memory. Few were clearly linked to any name, none of the rest quite so vivid as Brink’s.
Martin Rablon? The computer engineer, maybe hoping for Megan to replace his wife—though the glimpses of his faithless Jayna revealed little likeness. No idealist, born poor but bright, she had been plain Jane Jones when he met her. His student in beginning computer science, failing till she began to pay for her grades with what she did best. Torn between his science and his business interests and her witchery, Rablon had no time for sports; he had probably never learned to ski.
Ivan Tomislav, the genetics engineer?
Searching through random scraps of Tomislav, he found skis and poles and boots, but they lay gathering dust in a bedroom closet at the La Jolla bungalow. Tomislav was aging, overweight and on a diet. The gear had belonged to his dead son—
A burst of painful memory. Roger dead and Olga dying. Poor dear Olga, once fatter than he, skeletal and bedfast now, begging for the shots he couldn’t deny, doomed by the same rare genetic-linked malignancy that had driven Roger to suicide when it was diagnosed in him. Olga dying because his genetic science had been too slow with the benign synthetic virus that might have repaired those fatal genes.
For an instant he was Tomislav, puffing off the plane at Albuquerque, a little troubled by the altitude and more by Olga’s illness. Megan’s voice calling his name, and his wistful admiration when he saw her. As straight and strong as Olga had been when they met at Columbia. If he had only found the right research track ten years before—
But genetic clocks didn’t turn back, and the happy skier at Angel Fire had not been Tomislav.
Wardian, the airline pilot and ex-astronaut? More likely. Young enough, well-tanned and muscular, as tall as NASA allowed, he had an easy way with women. Angel Fire? He had known it most of his life. There with his Dad when he was a kid. Later with Debbie, teaching her to ski while she gave him more exciting lessons—
They were sitting in the lounge at the lab, drinking canned Coors while they waited for Ivan and his crew to run down a bug in the scanner.
“Megan?” Wardian gave him a startled grin. “Not for me. Though she is a stunner. Could be, anyhow, if she ever lets anybody turn her on.”
“I can’t help dreaming—”
He shook his head and eased the aching knee.
“Your lay.” Wardian lifted his beer with a half-ironic flourish. “If she ever lets you make her, which I don’t expect. As for me, I like to look, but I’ve got two rules for women. Never let ’em marry you. And never touch a virgin.”
If Wardian had kept that second rule, if Galen Ulver had been too old and frail for Angel Fire—
The slit had widened, and the ship’s slow tumble let a sun-blade slash across him. No clue found, he gave up the search for that lost instant of perfect-seeming love. Perhaps it had really been a dream. He would probably never know.
Not that it could matter now, because all those unlucky men were gone to dust a million years ago, their world forever lost. Shivering a little in the cold birthcell, he tried to brush their haunting ghosts away. He was all of them, none of them, more than any of them. Their wispy relics random defects in the defender of the ship, hazards to his duty now.
The opening door looked wide enough at last. Coiling the warm umbilical on his arm to keep it free, he squeezed his way outside.
Black space and blazing metal.
He was blind for an instant, until his eyes adjusted to the savage sun. Magnetic feet clinging to the metal, he stood up to orient himself. The ship was still beneath him, alive again, still slowly tumbling, its gold-filmed skin crudely patched where he had tapped into the hydrocarbon feedstocks, his slender yellow life-cord still trailing back through the slit behind him.
Searching, he found the planet—
Elation lifted him. Here at last, their long-lost goal? The new world where the seed of man might put out fresh roots and thrive again—if they got it safely planted.
Close below and more than half in shadow, the planet was a magnificent crescent, huge even before his eyes went telescopic. Dazzling clouds wound the equator in a snaky line which would be the zone of tropical convergence. Blue-black ocean reached north and south from that to meet white-swirling storms.
He saw no land.
“Ship to Defender.” The master computer. “Requesting data as you observe it.”
“Observation in progress.” Trying to forget Megan’s haunting overtones in the quick synthetic voice, he heard his own soundless reply, itself no more human. “Patterns of cloud reveal systems of air circulation which resemble Earth’s, indicating strong Coriolis effect due to planet’s rotation. Climatic environment should favor human survival, if we can land.”
“We continue to monitor entire radiation spectrum,” the computer said. “Sensor systems detect no evidence of life except atmospheric oxygen. You will search for possible touchdown site.”
“I am searching.”
He watched the planet’s slow rotation as they spun on around it. The bright crescent spread. New storm patterns crept over the limb. Dark sea and shining cloud. He found no solid surface—
“Nobody knows.”
In Megan’s office at the lab, Wardian leaned to frown at the big device he called a stellarium. Just installed, it still had a hot-plastic scent. The stars were tiny lights on thin rods radiating from the brighter central light that stood for the sun. A lucite sheet through the sun marked what he called the galactic plane. Two half-hoops swung around it to show galactic longitude and latitude, and the computer-linked CRT on Megan’s desk gave data on any star beneath their point of intersection.
Never data enough.
“Of course we hope for planets.”
Wardian shrugged. Just in from hang-gliding off the Manzano slopes, he looked lean and dashingly intrepid in a trimly tailored yellow jumpsuit, a little too certain of what he could do, a little too ironic about everything else.
What did Megan think of him?
“Theory says planets should exist.” Wardian spoke only half to him, fine eyes still fixed on her. “Planets enough like Earth to give the seed a chance, perhaps around every normal star. We do have uncertain evidence of a few gas giants, but our instruments aren’t good enough to show the worlds we’re looking for.”
“We’re shooting at planets we can’t even see?” He shook his head at Megan. “What sort of chance—”
“Please, Don.” Chiding him, Megan seemed almost hurt. “We’ve got good things going for us.”
Pity for her stabbed through his half-unwilling worship. Standing tall beside that glittering gadget, she was framed against the window, her lean vitality in bright contrast to the desert vista beyond. Bold enough to challenge mankind’s mortality. Lovely enough for anything, if she ever cared to be. But far too idealistic. Squandering herself on the project, her life a needless sacrifice for a goal most of the world would laugh at.
“The odds are terrible.” She nodded soberly. “Against any single seed. But we’re going to scatter them by the hundreds—thousands if we can—across a whole field of stars—”
“If the authorities ever let Galen test his fusion drive.” Wardian grinned wryly at her optimism. “If he can make it work when they do, and build the units cheap enough. If we have time to launch the ships before our own world blows up.”
