Collected Short Fiction, page 278
Pearce turned back to Locke. “No doubt you hoped I would hurry to my laboratory to rescue my samples,” he said, “but I’m afraid there’s nothing there to rescue. Or to search my apartment for notes. But I don’t keep them there, as Tom Barnett no doubt told you.”
“Who?” Locke asked.
“But I’ll accept you as a patient, if you’re still serious about that, because I’m a physician and that’s what I do. And I will accept your grant to perform my research, if you’re still serious about that, because I need it and the work is important.”
Locke stood up, revealing what had been malformed about his figure. Through the part in the gown Pearce could see a metal framework that supported Locke’s body from his shoulders to his ankles and no doubt turned Locke’s nerve impulses into movement. Locke moved toward Pearce. Pearce kept himself from recoiling as Locke grasped his wrist in fingers like steel. No nerve damage here, or perhaps the external skeleton dived into Locke’s hands to become bone and sinew. Herod had turned himself into Frankenstein’s monster.
“I will fund your research,” Locke said, “because I think you may be the only one who can do it. I believe you have Cartwright connections because that’s what I would do if I were in your place. And when you have the elixir, you will turn it over to me.”
“I will publish the results like any scientist.”
“You will submit them,” Locke said. “They will not be published.”
“You’re over-confident.”
“Just realistic. I know my powers. And I know what would happen to the world if the elixir became public knowledge. There would be murders, riots, wars—and later on there would be the insoluble problems of overpopulation or a dropping birthrate and stagnation. But you will do the research because you are the kind of person you are, and you will give it to me because I am the kind of person lam.”
Pearce pried Locke’s hand from his wrist, one finger at a time. “I’m not your creature,” he said. “But we understand each other. I will synthesize the elixir with the hope of getting it free from you somehow and getting it to the people who can use it more wisely than you or I. And if I fail at that and it becomes yours to do with as you wish, I won’t despair. It will take the pressure off the Cartwrights, and gradually, no matter what you do, the secret will leak out and it will become the property of all humanity.”
Pearce turned and walked through the door past the threatening bodyguard and through the familiar corridors and down the elevators until he found himself once more in the clean, cool purity of his laboratory, his refuge from the aggravations and petty concerns of the outside world. Now he knew that his apprehensions about someone’s presence while he was gone had been mere paranoia. If Locke had known he had samples of Cartwright blood, he would never have let him go without confiscating them.
Someone buzzed at the door for admission, and Pearce went to the intercom. “It’s me, Julia,” a voice said. “Are you all right?”
Pearce went into the airlock to admit her, hoping she was alone but knowing that it didn’t matter: he could not exclude the world. She was alone, and she took hold of his arm in reassurance as she entered. “Sure,” he said.
“So much has happened.”
“My grant has been renewed,” Pearce said. “It seems the Executive Director of the National Research Institute has checked in as a patient.” Did he detect a flicker of awareness? “But I think it’s time Tom Barnett moved on. He’s capable enough to handle his own operation. Do you think you can find him another position?”
They had moved into the laboratory and stood in front of his experiment in apoptosis. “I’ll do better than that,” Hudson said. “I’ll recommend him to a friend in Chicago, who’s looking for a senior geriatrician.”
“I’ll need a new assistant,” Pearce said. “Would you like to apply?”
She looked at him as if he had made a declaration of love. “I’d have to give up what little free time I have, like reading and maybe some social obligations, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
“I was hoping you’d give up administration,” he said.
“Not yet,” she said. “Maybe in a couple of years.”
“I want you to see this,” he said, opening the lid of his experiment. All the cell cultures were dead except for two.
“Success already?” she said.
“It’s a beginning,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. But it was more than a beginning. It was the beginning of the end. The long search was almost over, and he knew he would discover what the alchemists had searched for all their lives: the secret of immortality. But he would not give it to the world until Locke was dead; no doubt he would be replaced by someone just as determined and just as ruthless, but he would not have Locke’s combination of qualities nor experience.
Julia put her arm around his waist, and they stood looking down at the immortal cells. He felt like the hero of an interplanetary romance.
And yet he knew that it would take a long time before he was confident that Julia herself was not one of Locke’s agents, as Barnett had turned out to be. He could love her, and he would have to trust her, but he might never be sure.
Maybe that was the human condition.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of the same history as “New Blood,” which first appeared in Astounding, October 1955, and was the basis for [among other things] the television movie and series The Immortal. A new, expanded edition of The Immortals will be published by Pocket Books in July.)
2005
Uncreated Night and Strange Shadows
An unexpected journey leads to an unprecedented payoff—and a new beginning.
For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity’,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
The image in the viewscreens frightened Frances Farmstead in ways she could not identify.
The small K-type star hung against the backdrop of empty space like a lantern set out for the weary traveler. Beyond loomed the impenetrable night of the intergalactic void. Behind glowed the remote swarm of what Adrian Mast believed to be the Milky Way galaxy. In front of the spaceship from Earth loomed the goal of their long journey, this odd single planet, a bit larger than Mars but smaller than Earth, in an eccentric orbit around an old sun, here at stars’ end.
The battered spaceship had been making its way toward the strange system for six months at one-gravity acceleration and six months more at one-gravity deceleration. A year of travel after their emergence from the wormhole that had spit them out on the far edge of what might be still the local galaxy. “But it could be any galaxy, couldn’t it?” Frances asked. “What’s distance to a wormhole? If it’s like jumping across a folded sheet of paper, one place is as close as any other.”
Frances stood behind Adrian and Jessica Buhler. They were seated in the control room of the ship they had decided to call Ad Astra but Frances insisted on referring to as Aspera—she had suffered with spacesickness and other problems during the trip. The control room provided evidence of long occupation: the air was thick with humidity and the odors of imperfect human bodies and not-quite-perfect machines, paint was worn down to bare metal in places, panels were dented, gauges flickered or were dark. But the viewscreens were clear, and what they revealed was disturbing.
“True ” Adrian said, “but it’s difficult enough to keep track of intelligent life in one galaxy. Why cross intergalactic space? What could be the purpose of that?”
“What could be the purpose of sending spaceship plans across the galaxy and building a wormhole to bring us here?” Jessica asked.
That question had propelled them and their crew across measureless space and across twenty years from its obscure beginning. First had come the message in the form of energetic cosmic rays decoded by a troubled genius and smuggled out of SETI in the form of a UFO book called Gift from the Stars. The book had been discovered by Adrian on a remainder table in a bookstore owned by Frances, and together they had set out to find the author, only to discover him, certifiably psychotic, in a mental hospital.
But just because the author was crazy didn’t mean the spaceship designs in the back of the book were not legitimate, and Adrian and Frances had forced the information on a world whose leaders were afraid of the change it would bring. The alien ship was designed to be propelled by antimatter. The plans included devices for collecting antimatter from the sun; when the machines were built and started providing clean and virtually free power to Earth, most of humanity’s problems, it turned out, were caused by the competition for scarce energy. And once the problems were solved, Earth became a paradise that nobody wanted to leave. Except a few hundred malcontents like Adrian and Frances. A decade after the discovery of Gift from the Stars, they and Jessica, the government agent turned confederate, finally persuaded Earth’s Energy Board that it was cheaper and easier to let them go than to suffer their unrest.
Five years in space turned the alien plans into a ship, and a year and a half of acceleration took them to a white hole far beyond the Oort Cloud. And a disorienting few hours—or many subjective years—in the wormhole had brought them to the place where they could see their journey’s destination. But they still had no answers to the question of why the aliens had sent them the plans, what the aliens wanted from humanity—or any other creature who might receive those cosmic rays and have the scientific understanding to record them and the wit to decipher them and the technology to turn them into a vessel capable of traversing space. Did they want to help humanity, or themselves? Were they benefactors or predators, or simply disinterested observers? These were the questions that had toppled the original genius, Peter Cavendish, over the precipice edge of sanity into the chasm of madness.
And now they were close to their destination and maybe to their answers. The little world they were approaching seemed to be studded with objects like cloves in a Christmas orange. When they got near enough they realized the studs were spaceships like their own. Or maybe not quite like their own, and maybe only the starting point for new questions. Like: what were all those other strange ships doing in orbit around the little planet? It was like a Sargasso of space. They had thought the message was a summons to them, but maybe the invitation had been broadcast to the universe and they were only the last to respond. . . .
***
Within a few hundred kilometers from the world—if that was what it was— Adrian and his fellow travelers could make out finer detail on the viewscreens of the control cabin. The ships were of many sizes and shapes and colors, as if the only thing they had in common was that they could traverse space. Some of the colors were so strange that the viewers could scarcely perceive them—or the viewscreens could scarcely record them.
“Maybe,” Adrian said, “they come from places that radiate mainly in the infrared or ultraviolet.” He was seated in front of the main forward plate, at a control panel whose purpose was mostly psychological; the computers handled everything except intentions.
Some of the shapes seemed to twist into another dimension and disappear, or the human eye was not trained to follow their pathways.
When they were close enough they saw that the ships were arranged symmetrically around the world, like electrons around a nucleus. “Must be hundreds of them,” Jessica said, standing behind Adrian, on her hip a three-month-old baby clad in a diaper.
“None of them human,” Frances added grimly. She was standing beside Jessica as if ready to catch the baby if it fell from its perch, even though, in weightlessness, it would fall gently if at all.
“No prejudice,” Adrian said. “We’re aliens among aliens, and we’re likely to suffer as much from discrimination as they are.”
They guided the Ad Astra around the little world, studying the ships and looking at the world they orbited with emotions ranging from concern to dismay. The planet was not much larger than Mars. It had a surface that was rocky in most places and in others softened, perhaps, by areas of sand. There was no sign of water and no perceptible atmosphere. It was a rocky asteroid blown up to planet size.
The motley collection of ships around it offered no evidence of life, no light, no exhalations of rocket or waste exhaust. The ships orbited in silence. The Ad Astra found an empty place in the shell—there weren’t many—and eased itself into it. And waited. And waited.
“Nobody seems in any hurry to welcome us,” Jessica said. She was slender and athletic and seemed as comfortable in weightlessness as under deceleration, but Frances was swallowing and the baby seemed as happy as if it still were floating in the womb.
“What is one more guest among so many? ” Adrian said.
“You think they’re all in the same situation?” Frances asked. She held out her arms for the baby and Jenny surrendered him without hesitation.
“I think they all got the same message, or a similar one,” Adrian said. “Some a lot sooner than us, or they were prepared to receive it sooner, or they deciphered it sooner.”
Some of the ships looked far older than the Ad Astra, as if they had been in space—bombarded by space dust—for centuries, maybe even millennia.
“If they got the same plans,” Jessica said, “why are they so different?”
“Maybe they got plans suited to their own technologies and cultures,” Adrian said.
“Or maybe they got the same plans,” Frances said, making faces at the baby, distracted from her zero-gravity unease, “and read them differently, like people reading the same novel or watching the same movie.”
“If that’s the case,” Jessica said, “we may spend a long time waiting for the welcome wagon. Whoever the others are, and whoever brought us here, probably don’t have the same concept of hospitality, or of courtesy.” She took the baby back from Frances. “It’s time for Bobby’s nap,” she said. The baby didn’t complain, as if it were accustomed to being parented by many different adults.
“I don’t know why you call him ‘Bobby,’ ” Frances said.
“We have enough Adrians,” Jessica said.
“Only four,” Frances said.
“And at least one on the way,” Jessica said. She moved out of the control room toward the ship’s living quarters.
“They could have longer lives than we do ” Adrian mused, “and thus time doesn’t have the same urgency. Particularly if they’ve been in this business for thousands of years.”
“What business is that?” Frances asked.
Adrian waved his hand at the display of ships on the viewscreens. “The contact business. The summons business. Bringing sentient species here. We thought it was just us, but it wasn’t. The message seems to have been intended for any technological species. But if that is the case, why are they still here?”
Frances clenched her hands around the arm rests of her chair. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of Jessie, but this is like a Sargasso of space. Ships are stuck, unable to move, unable to leave.”
“You’ve been reading too much romantic fiction again,” Adrian said.
“All this may be the realization of poor Peter’s worst fears. The aliens’ purpose in sending the plans was to collect specimens, or to restock their larder.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Adrian said. “There are easier and cheaper ways to get food.”
“But not specimens,” Frances said. “The zoo keeper doesn’t even have to send out an expedition; the specimens come to him and deliver themselves up.”
“Now you’re into the horror genre,” Adrian said.
“Or maybe sick comedy.”
“So what do you recommend?” Adrian asked. “That we turn around and go back? It’s going to take a while to replenish our antimatter supply, particularly from this old sun. And even if we had the fuel, how are we going to face traveling all this way and going back without any answers?”
“Maybe we should knock on a few doors,” Frances said.
“That sounds like human impatience,” Adrian said. “And, as Jessie pointed out, we’re not sure how the aliens welcome newcomers, if at all. Maybe we have to prove our good intentions by waiting; maybe a decent interval is an essential element in civilized relationships.”
“Maybe it’s hazing,” Frances said.
“Let’s give it a better name: an initiation ceremony. We’ll wait a reasonable time, and in the meanwhile, we’ll send out our antimatter collectors to replenish our fuel supply, just in case we need to leave in a hurry.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Frances said. “Are there any other antimatter collectors in orbit around that weak nuclear furnace they have for a sun?”
“Not that we can detect,” Adrian said. “But our instruments may not be sensitive enough, or the other collectors may not be the same design any more than the spaceships that brought them.”
So they sent their antimatter collectors to orbit the K-type sun and waited. And waited.
After thirty-five days—they still counted days and weeks and even months—human impatience being what it is, they decided to do something. Frances had said a week was long enough and Jessica, a month, but Adrian wanted to give the aliens more time. Finally he decided that five weeks was sufficient delay, for the human crew if not for the aliens. “It may be unwise to investigate the other ships,” Adrian said. “Even if we knew how to enter one; even if we knew they were empty. And they probably aren’t. They’re probably filled with aliens doing their alien things.”
“You mean, it would be like us going around to the other guests at the party, asking impertinent questions, like why they got invited, what they know about the hosts,” Frances said.
“That leaves the planet itself,” Jessica said.
“But what is there to look at?” Frances asked.
