The Perfect Host (37 page)

Much of Gudge’s writing is maundering in his own idiom: without background or references, it is impossible to decipher. “They talked about loyalty,” he wrote, near what, in order of pages at least, seems to be the beginning. “You do what you do because it is the last part of what you have done, and the first part of what you will do. Loyalty is the problem of minds which can think of stopping before the end, to take up something else after it has begun.”

And “Gryce is a lover, pursuing the stars, and Falu, who never knew a mother, wants to be the mother of Gryce.”

Between and among these extraordinary reflections, Gudge wrote enough about the trip so that a narrative emerges.

“Falu said to sleep in the ship. I thought there would be more boxes to pack but when I saw his face, his mouth so tight, his upper lip ballooning with the pressure inside, his eyes with bright tears in them behind the thick glasses, the glasses so thick the glass was frosted at the edges—why, I knew where we were going, and I did not ask about the boxes. I went into the ship and Hawton was there and Falu came after. And he did not take Pag and Freehold and the three Poynters, but locked the port. I saw them out there, understanding and frightened, and they ran away.”

Who were these five, and where did they go? And had they thought they were to leave with the ship?

“The noise of the jets was always a terror; a scream first, and then a blowtorch, and as we moved, a great blowtorch in a barrel. I fell and was hurt. Horton came to me, holding to the corridor rails.
I could hear his hands crackling. He put me to a bunk, and straps. He strapped himself, too. We were very heavy.”

So they blasted off—how far, and for how long, it is hard to tell. Probably it was a long time. There is a brief reference to Saturn “like two hats covering their mouths, one with another,” and a period after that. Then there is one of the few references to Gudge himself, and his strange attitude. “Horton struck me, which did not hurt me and which made him foolish. He said I should have shown him the leg so it could be cured. I think a man should die if he cannot mend himself. Hawton put me on the bunk and with rays and a paste, mended me.”

How long had it been—two months—three, since Gudge hurt himself on the takeoff? And yet he had no complaint to make then, nor when it got worse, nor when Horton struck him for it, nor when he treated the leg. One cannot help wondering whether Gudge was animal-like, abject, broken, or whether he had a strange, ascetic dignity.

“Falu put on the big ones. They started slowly, down in the belly of the ship, and Falu stood in the control room watching the meters. The big ones rumbled and rumbled, and though it never grew louder, it crept into the blood; the heart was pumping the rumble, the water we drank was full of the rumble, rumble.

“Hawton was white and sweaty. He put his hands on his temples and squeezed, and cried to Falu, ‘Englehart, in Heaven’s name, how much more of this do we have to take?’ and Falu talked to the instruments and said, ‘Not much more. We take off from the peak of one of these vibrations, but we’ve got to be vibrating in unison, or we’ll never get together in one piece.’

“A gong sounded, and light flashed on the board. Falu reached and chopped off the ignition, and the jets were silent, which was a terrible thing, for it left the big ones shrieking. I could hear them, and I could not, and they seemed to be tearing my blood apart. Horton cried.

“Falu was wet but quiet. He braced his knees between the chart table supports and passed his hand over the spot of light.”

(This was undoubtedly some sort of photoelectric control, installed in anticipation of the devastating effects of the capsule-entry on the
motor center. It is remarkable that Falu could direct his hand to it at such a time.)

“Then we were blind,” Gudge wrote, “and I heard them fall as I fell. We could not see and we could not move, but we were glad, because the silence was blessed.”

There is a gap here in the narrative. Apparently some time—ship’s time—passed, and their sight and motive power returned to them. Gudge wrote a great deal about the insubstantial appearance of everything aboard, and the changing shapes of utensils and stanchions. It would seem that Gudge’s ordinary observations, even in normal space, were somewhat similar; that is, everything, to him, was wavering and distorted, and he was more fit to adjust to the strange conditions of an encapsulated ship. Englehart doggedly and stolidly went about the ship’s business with a furious pretense of normalcy. There is no mention of Horton, and it is probable that he simply withdrew into himself.

And then they emerged. “Never was there such hurt,” wrote the man who had not complained of a takeoff injury for months, “never such bathing in pain, such twisting and writhing. Hawton’s arm tensed against itself and I heard the bone break. Falu sat at the chart table, his hands frozen to the edges, pulling himself on to it until thought he would cut himself in two. He screamed more than Hawton.”

They lay in space for some time, recovering from the brutal transition. Near them was a reddish sun. In all likelihood it was Antares; it was for Antares that Gryce had set his course, and the one-time popular Antares Leagues had that star as their goal, once the etheric drift theory showed that for all its distance it would be easiest to reach. It is difficult to be sure, however, since there is no record of the capsule-time Englehart spent, nor any real indication of his temporal directions.

They fired up the reaction drive and began to move toward the sun. With the restoration of gravity, Horton found it impossible to keep his food down, and Englehart complained of a splitting headache. These conditions apparently continued until the return.

Englehart ate and slept and lived at his instruments. And one day—

“I brought him his broth, and just as I set it down, Falu’s breath whistled suddenly, once, through a tight throat. He stared at the screen and cried for Horton.

“The screen was the large one for seeing ahead. It had colors. Space, outside the corona of the sun, was the color of a purple bruise, and beyond that black; and in the black floated a planet like Earth.

“But what made Falu cry out was the sight of the glimmering bowls, like parachutes without shrouds, which rushed toward us. I think there were seven.

“ ‘Ships!’ shouted Hawton. ‘Englehart—are they ships?’

“Falu said nothing then, but made us heavy as usual.”

(This odd phrase probably means that he cut the drive to one Earth gravity.)

“The bowl-ships were in a single line, but as we watched, they deployed, the leader rising, the last dropping, the others flanking, until they approached us as a ring.

“ ‘They’re going to box us,’ Hawton said. He was frightened. Falu said, ‘They can’t, at our combined speeds. Watch.’

“He set the starboard jet to roaring, and the ring of bowl-ships began to march sidewise across the screen as we turned.

“But Falu was wrong. The ring of bowl-ships, quite unchanged, began to shift with us, and it seemed that the planet and the stars were moving instead, and that the ring was painted on our screen.

“Falu shook his head and peered at them through his thick glasses. ‘How can they do it without killing everyone aboard them?’

“Horton said something about overcoming inertia. He said that perhaps there was nothing alive aboard the ships. He glistened with fear.

“When the ring of ships was centered on our screen again, Falu put his hand to the board and drove us harder so that we were heavy again. The ships began to grow, the ring widened, but with nearness. Falu said, through closed teeth, ‘Then we’ll go through them. Turning like that is one thing; to stop and follow is something else again.’

“ ‘They’ll fire on us,’ Hawton whimpered. ‘Falu—use the capsule drive!’

Falu snarled like an animal, and his voice was like a whip for animals. ‘Don’t be stupid. It takes three days to build up resonance for the capsule. They’ll be on us in an hour. Sit down and be quiet.’

“The ships grew and the ring widened until we could see the markings on their silver sides, red and blue, and the triangular openings around their bottom edges. Falu clicked on the small screens—sides, above, below—as we entered the ring.

“And at the instant we entered the ring, there were two ships above us, and two high on each side, and two low on each side, and one beneath—and they stayed with us. They approached us, they stopped and reversed to go with us, all in that instant of surrounding.

“Falu tried his forward jets, and then one side and the other, but the ring of ships stayed around us. They had no jets.

“And then, in the next hour, the ring began to shift, with those high on the right coming closer to us, and those low on the left moving away. Falu watched them, leaving his controls alone, while Hawton danced about him, mouthing advice. Falu did not answer him, but at last called me. ‘Gudge—get him out of sight.’ I went to Horton and pointed to his bunk room. He pushed me away. I hit him on the neck and put him on the bunk. I was careful of his broken arm. I think the pain he had been through had soured him through and through, like old warm milk.

“Falu waited and watched, while the ships above came closer and closer, and those below on the other side drifted away. Falu muttered, ‘They’ll crash us if they keep that up.’ And closer they came, and Falu watched them and I stood behind him, watching, too.

“At last Falu grunted and turned to his controls. The near ships seemed close enough to touch with the hand. Falu jetted away from them, down and away to the center of the ring. And it happened that that put the nose of our ship again on the planet; and now the ring of ships stayed equally distant from us as we drove toward this new world. Twice more in the next twenty hours Falu tried to change course, but each time the strange ships led us back toward the planet.

“Hawton cried to be freed. Falu told me to unstrap him. Hawton
was angry. He told me he would kill me if I ever touched him again. I said nothing and thought my own thoughts. He went to the control room and stared silently at the screens. Falu said, ‘Try to keep your head, Horton. Those ships want us to go to the planet. We were going there anyway; Gryce probably went there, too. So far these ships have made no hostile move except to keep us on course. They outnumber us and there is nothing we can do but go along with them.’

“Horton looked at the screens and trembled, and said nothing about the ships at all. Instead he said ‘What did you bring that stupid slug along for?’ He meant me.

“Falu said, ‘Because he does his work and he keeps his mouth shut. Try it.’ I knew then that Horton would hate me as long as he lived. He went to the settee by the port bulkhead and sat there with this arms folded around his hate.”

There follows, in Gudge’s account, another of those indeterminate periods of idiomatic reflection, in which Falu Englehart, Horton, and the lost Gryce expedition have no part. Probably some days passed, in which there was little to do except wait until they reached wherever it was that the bowl-ships intended to take them. Perhaps nine days passed—it may have been more. In any case, Gudge interrupted in mid-sentence an extraordinary series of thoughts on the similarity of his reactions to sound and to color: “They say all anger is red. Anger is not red while Red is peace in a bright light with your eyes closed—” to write:

“It looked like Earth at first, but not as blue. There were ice-caps and seas, and many clouds. Falu turned the magnescope on it, and when it could find rifts in the roiling clouds, valleys could be seen, and mountains, and once a rapid river. There were cities, too. I saw no life in them.

“The bowl-ships forced us around the planet. Falu said we were in a closed orbit. We stopped using the jets, and drifted weightless around the planet.

“Two of the ships fell away from the ring and dropped toward the blue world. Before them a great green light fanned out, and where
it touched the clouds they were gone. Down and down they went, circling around each other and destroying the clouds beneath us until we could see perhaps a quarter of a planet.

“The planet had a burned face. Burned and pitted and twisted, gouged out, melted, blasted. For miles around a boiling hell-pit which threw molten gobs of rock high in the air, the land was sere and smoking. The planet had a face like my face. The two ships came back up to airlessness, and clouds swirled in and mercifully covered the planet’s face.

“The two ships flashed past us, spacewards, and the other five began nudging us to follow. Falu ignited the jets, and Horton, who was taking courage now, helped him trim the ship to keep it inside the ring formation. They talked of the blasted planet, wonderingly. Earth had never seen such a cataclysm.

“ ‘They showed it to us,’ breathed Falu. ‘They just showed it to us, and then took us away. Why? Who are they? Why don’t they attack or free us? Why have we never seen ships like this in our System? Their science—’ and he fell silent, awed. Falu was awed.”

Falu’s awe is the only thing on which Gudge expresses astonishment. Apparently it shook Gudge to his roots, sending him off into a wild metaphysical orgy on the subject of constancy in the universe, and the half-dozen things he had felt he could rely upon to remain unchanged—the color of interstellar space; each man’s threshold of pain; what he called “the touch of greenness”; and two other items which are abbreviated and undecodable. If Gudge were not completely mad, he had a set of sensitivities completely alien to any human norm.

At this point in his narrative it is necessary to fill in certain movements which must have occurred, unmentioned by the chronicler. For his next mention of their trip describes four of the five escort ships deployed in a square before them, with the fifth above, and the other two holding a body, “a rock as big as our factory on Earth” between them by orange beams of light. These must have been the two ships which went down to disperse the clouds, and which led the flotilla out from the planet. Apparently they went to capture this asteroid and bring it to a rendezvous in space. At the rendezvous, the seven ships were motionless in relation to the
Gryce
.