Shakespeare's Planet (2 page)

He twisted his head to one side and saw the hatch, with the port of heavy glass set into it. Through the glass he could see into the tiny room, with the four lockers ranged against the wall. There was no one about—which meant, he told himself, the others were still in their cubicles. He considered shouting to them, but thought better of it. It would be unseemly, he thought—too exuberant and somewhat juvenile.

He reached out a hand to the latch and pulled down on it. It operated stiffly, but finally he got it down and the hatch swung out. He jackknifed his legs to thrust them through the hatch and had trouble doing it, for there was little room. But finally he got them through, and twisting his body, slid carefully to the floor. The floor was icy to his feet, and the metal of the cubicle was cold.

Stepping quickly to the adjacent cubicle, he peered through the glass of the hatch and saw that it was empty, with the life-supports retracted into the ceiling slots. The other two cubicles were empty as well. He stood transfixed with horror. The other three, revived, would not have left him. They would have waited for him so they all could go out together. They would have done this, he was convinced, unless something unforeseen had happened. And what could have happened?

Helen would have waited for him, he was sure of that. Mary and Tom might have left, but Helen would have waited.

Fearfully, he lunged at the locker that had his name upon it. He had to jerk hard on the handle once he had turned it to get the locker open. The vacuum inside the locker resisted, and when the door came open, it opened with a pop. Clothing hung upon the racks and footwear was ranged neatly in a row. He grabbed a pair of trousers and climbed into them, forced his feet into a pair of boots. When he opened the door of the suspension room, he saw that the lounge was empty and the ship's main port stood open. He raced across the lounge to the open port.

The ramp ran down to a grassy plain that swept off to the left. To the right, rugged hills sprang up from the plain and beyond the hills a mighty mountain range, deep blue with distance, reared into the sky. The plain was empty except for the grass, which billowed like an ocean as wind gusts swept across it. The hills were covered with trees, the foliage of which was black and red. The air had a sharp, fresh tang to it. There was no one in sight.

He went halfway down the ramp and still no one was in sight. The planet was an emptiness and the emptiness seemed to be reaching out for him. He started to cry out to ask if anyone were there, but fear and the emptiness dried up the words and he could not get them out. He shivered in the realization that something had gone wrong. This was not the way it should be.

Turning, he went clumping up the ramp and through the lock.

“Ship!” he yelled. “Ship, what the hell is going on?”

Ship said, calmly, unconcernedly, inside his mind,
What's the problem, Mr. Horton?

“What's going on?” yelled Horton, more angry now than frightened, angered by the supercilious calmness of this great monster, Ship. “Where are all the others?”

Mr. Horton
, said Ship,
there aren't any others
.

“What do you mean there aren't any others? Back on Earth there was a team of us.”

You are the only one
, said Ship.

“What happened to the others?”

They are dead
, said Ship.

“Dead? How do you mean, dead? They were with me just the other day!”

They were with you
, said Ship,
a thousand years ago
.

“You're insane. A thousand years!”

That's the span of time
, said Ship, speaking still inside his mind,
we have been gone from Earth
.

Horton heard a sound behind him and spun about. A robot had come through the port.

“I am Nicodemus,” said the robot.

He was an ordinary robot, a household service robot, the kind that back on Earth would be a butler or a valet, or a cook or errand boy. There was no mechanical sophistication about him; he was just a sloppy, slat-footed piece of junk.

You need not
, said Ship,
be so disdainful of him. You will find him, we are sure, to be quiet efficient
.

“Back on Earth …”

Back on Earth
, said Ship,
you trained with a mechanical marvel that had far too much that could go wrong with it. Such a contraption could not be sent out on a long-haul expedition. There would be too much chance of it breaking down. But with Nicodemus there is nothing to go wrong. Because of his simplicity he has high survival value
.

“I am sorry,” Nicodemus said to Horton, “that I was not present when you woke. I had gone out for a quick scout around. I had thought there was plenty of time to get back to you. Apparently, the recovery and reorientation drugs worked much more swiftly than I'd thought. It usually takes a fair amount of time for recovery from cold-sleep. Especially cold-sleep of such long duration. How are you feeling now?”

“Confused,” said Horton. “Completely confused. Ship tells me I am the only human left, implying that the others died. And he said something about a thousand years …”

To be exact
, said Ship,
nine hundred fifty-four years, eight months and nineteen days
.

“This planet,” said Nicodemus, “is a very lovely one. In many ways like Earth. Slightly more oxygen, a bit less gravity …”

“All right,” said Horton, sharply, “after all these years we are finally landed on a very lovely planet. What happened to all the other lovely planets? In almost a thousand years, moving close to the speed of light, there must have been …”

“Very many planets,” Nicodemus said, “but none of them lovely. Nothing a human could exist upon. Young planets, with the crusts unformed, with fields of bubbling magma and great volcanoes, vast pools of molten lava, the sky seething with boiling clouds of dust and poisonous vapors and as yet no water and little oxygen. Old planets slipping down to death, the oceans dry, the atmosphere thinned out, without sign of life upon them—life, if it ever had existed, now wiped out. Massive gas planets rolling along their orbits like great striped marbles. Planets too close to their suns, scoured by solar radiation. Planets too far from their suns, with glaciers of frozen oxygen, seas of slushy hydrogen. Other planets that somehow had gone wrong, clothed in atmosphere deadly to all life. And a few, a very few, too lusty with life—jungle planets occupied by ravening life-forms so hungry and ferocious that it would have been suicidal to set foot upon them. Desert planets where life had never started—barren rock, with no soil ever formed, with very little water, the oxygen locked in eroding rock. We orbited some of the planets that we found; we merely glanced at others. A few we landed on. Ship has all the data if you want a printout.”

“But now we've found one planet. What do we do now—look it over and go back?”

No
, said Ship,
we can't go back
.

“But this is what we came out for. We and the other ships, all of them hunting planets the human race could colonize.”

We've been out too long
, said Ship.
We simply can't go back. We've been out almost a thousand years. If we started back right now, it would take almost another thousand years. Perhaps a little less, for we'd not be slowing down to have a look at planets, but still not too far from two thousand years from the time we left. Perhaps a great deal longer, for time dilation would be a factor, and we have no reliable data on dilation. By now we've probably been forgotten. There would have been records, but more likely they now are lost or forgotten or misplaced. By the time we got back, we'd be so outdated that the human race would have no use for us. We and you and Nicodemus. We'd be an embarrassment to them, reminding them of their bumbling attempts of centuries before. Nicodemus and we would be technologically obsolescent. You'd be obsolescent as well, but in another way
—
a barbarian come from the past to haunt them. You'd be outdated socially, ethically, politically. You'd be, by their standards, a possibly vicious moron
.

“Look,” protested Horton, “there is no sense in what you say. There were other ships …”

Perhaps some of them found suitable planets
, said Ship,
shortly after they had left. In such cases they could safely have returned to Earth
.

“But you went on and on.”

Ship said,
We performed our mandate
.

“You mean, you hunted planets.”

We hunted for one particular planet. The kind of planet where man could live
.

“And took almost a thousand years to find it.”

There was no limit on the search
, said Ship.

“I suppose not,” said Horton, “although it was something we never thought about. There were a lot of things we never thought about. A lot of things, I suppose, we were never told. Then tell me this: Suppose you'd not found this planet. What would you have done?”

We'd have kept on searching
.

“A million years, perhaps?”

If need be, a million years
, said Ship.

“And now, having found it, we cannot go back.”

That is correct
, said Ship.

“So what's the good of finding it?” asked Horton. “We find it, and Earth will never know we found it. The truth of the matter is, I think, that you have no interest in returning. There is nothing back there for you.”

Ship made no answer.

“Tell me,” Horton cried. “Admit it.”

Nicodemus said, “You'll get no answer now. Ship stands on silent dignity. You have offended it.”

“To hell with Ship,” said Horton. “I've heard enough from them. I want some answers from you. Ship said the other three are dead …”

“There was a malfunction,” said Nicodemus. “About a hundred years out. One of the pumps ceased functioning, and the cubicles heated up. I managed to save you.”

“Why me? Why not one of the others?”

“It was very simple,” said Nicodemus, reasonably. “You were number one in line. You were in cubicle number one.”

“If I had been in cubicle number two, you would have let me die.”

“I let no one die. I was able to save one sleeper. Having done that, it was too late for the others.”

“You did it by the numbers?”

“Yes,” said Nicodemus, “I did it by the numbers. Is there a better way?”

“No,” said Horton. “No, I guess there's not. But when three of us were dead, was there no thought of aborting the mission and going back to Earth?”

“There was no thought of it.”

“Who made the decision? I imagine Ship.”

“There was no decision. Neither of us ever mentioned it.”

It had all gone wrong, thought Horton. If someone had sat down and worked at it, with wholehearted concentration and a devotion that fringed on fanaticism, they couldn't have done a better job of screwing it all up.

A ship, one man, one flat-footed stupid robot—Christ, what an expedition! And, furthermore, a pointless one-way expedition. We might just as well not have started out, he thought. Except that if they hadn't started out, he reminded himself, he'd now be dead for many centuries.

He tried to remember the others, but could not remember them. He could see them only dimly, as if he were seeing them through fog. They were indistinct and blurred. He tried to make out their faces and they seemed to have no faces. Later on, he knew, he'd mourn them, but he could not mourn them now. There was not enough of them to mourn. There was no time now for mourning them; there was too much to do and to think about. A thousand years, he thought, and we won't be going back. For Ship was the only one that could take them back, and if Ship said it wasn't going back, that was the end of it.

“The other three?” he asked. “Burial in space?”

“No,” said Nicodemus. “We found a planet where they'll rest through all eternity. Do you want to know?”

“If you please,” said Horton.

4

From the platform of the high plateau where Ship had landed, the planetary surface stretched out to distant, sharp horizons, a land with great blue glaciers of frozen hydrogen creeping down the slopes of black and barren rock. The planet's sun was so distant that it seemed only a slightly larger, brighter star—a star so dimmed by distance and by dying that it did not have a name or number. On the charts of Earth there was not even a pinprick marking its location. Its feeble light never had been registered on a photographic plate by a terrestrial telescope.

Ship
, asked Nicodemus,
is this all that we can do?

Ship said,
We can do no further
.

It seems cruel to leave them here, in this place of desolation
.

We sought a place of solitude for them
, said Ship,
a place of dignity and aloneness, where nothing will find them and disturb them for study or display. We owe them this much, robot, but when this is done, it is all that we can give them
.

Nicodemus stood beside the triple casket, trying to fix the place forever in his mind, although, as he looked out across the planet, he realized there was little he could fix. There was a deadly sameness here; wherever one might look at it all seemed to look the same. Perhaps, he thought, it is just as well—they can lie here in their anonymity, masked by the unknownness of their final resting place.

There was no sky. Where there should have been a sky was only the black nakedness of space, lighted by a heavy sprinkle of unfamiliar stars. When he and Ship were gone, he thought, for millennia these steely and unblinking stars would be eyes staring down at the three who lay within the casket—not guarding them, but watching them—staring with the frosty glare of ancient, moldering aristocrats regarding, with frigid disapproval, intruders from beyond the pale of their social circle. But the disapproval would not matter, Nicodemus told himself, for there now was nothing that could harm them. They were beyond all harm or help.