World without Stars (3 page)

I said in haste: “But let’s keep to facts. The Yonderfolk did at last venture to the galactic rim, with heavy radiation screening.
It so happened that the first world they came on which was in contact with our civilization was Zara. Our own company had
a factor there.”

We didn’t yet know how many suns they visited first. Our one galaxy holds more than a hundred billion, most of which have
attendants. I doubt if we’ll ever see them all. There could be any number of civilizations as great as ours, that close to
home, unbeknownst to us. And yet we go hopping off to Andromeda!

(I made that remark to Hugh Valland, later in the voyage. “Sure,” he said. “Always happens that way. The Spanish were settlin’
the Philippines before they knew the coastal outline of America. People were on the moon before they’d got to
the bottom of the Mindanao Deep.” At the time I didn’t quite follow him, but since then I’ve read a little about the history
of Manhome.)

“Zara.” Rorn frowned. “I don’t quite place—”

“Why should you?” Valland replied. “More planets around than you could shake a stick at. Though I really can’t see why anybody’d
want to shake a stick at a planet that never did him any harm.”

“It’s the same type as the Yonderfolk’s home,” I said. “Zara, that is. Cold, hydrogen-helium atmosphere, et cetera. They made
contact with our factor because he was sitting in the only obviously machine-culture complex on the surface. They went through
the usual linguistic problems, and finally got to conversing. Here’s a picture.”

I activated my projector and rotated the image of a being. It was no more inhuman than many who had been my friends: squat,
scaly, head like a complicated sponge; one of several hands carried something which sparkled.

“Actually,” I said, “the language barrier was higher than Ordinary. To be expected, no doubt, when they came from such an
alien environment. So we don’t have a lot of information, and a good deal of what we do have must be garbled. Still, we’re
reasonably sure they aren’t foolish enough to be hostile, and do want to develop this new relationship. Within the galaxy,
they’re badly handicapped by having to stay behind their rad screens. So they asked us to come to them. Our factor notified
the company, the company’s interested … and that, sirs, is why we’re here.”

“Mmm. They gave location data for their home system?” Valland asked.

“Apparently so,” I said. “Space coordinates, velocity vector, orbital elements and data for each planet of the star.”

“Must’ve been a bitch, transforming from their math to ours.”

“Probably. The factor’s report gives few details, so I can’t
be sure. He was in too big a hurry to notify headquarters and send the Yonderfolk back—before the competition heard about
them. But he promised we’d soon dispatch an expedition. That’s us.”

“A private company, instead of an official delegation?” Rorn bridled.

“Oh, come off it,” Valland said. “Exactly which government out of a million would you choose to act? This is too damn big
a cosmos for anything but individuals to deal with it.”

“There’ll be others,” I said fast. A certain amount of argument on a cruise is good, passes the time and keeps men alert;
but you have to head off the kind which can fester. “We couldn’t keep the secret for long, even if we wanted to. Meanwhile,
we do represent the Universarium of Nordamerik, as well as a commercial interest.

“Now, here are the tapes and data sheets ….

T
HE SHIP DROVE OUTWARD
.

We had a large relative velocity to match. The days crawled past, and Landomar’s sun shrank to a star, and still you couldn’t
see any change in the galaxy. Once we’d shaken down, we had little to do—the mechs operated everything for us. We talked,
read, exercised, pursued our various hobbies, threw small parties. Most of us had lived a sufficient number of years in space
that we didn’t mind the monotony. It’s only external, anyhow. After a century or three of life, you have plenty to think about,
and a cruise is a good opportunity.

I fretted a little over Yo Rorn. He was always so glum, and apt to be a bit nasty when he spoke. Still, nothing serious developed.

Enver Smeth, our chemist, gave me some concern too. He was barely thirty years old, and had spent twenty-five of them under
the warm wing of his parents on Arwy, which is a bucolic patriarchal settlement like Landomar. Then he broke free and went
to the space academy on Iron—but that’s another tight little existence. I was his first captain and this was his first really
long trip. You have to start sometime, though, and he was shaping up well.

Very soon he became Hugh Valland’s worshiper. I could see why. Here the boy encountered a big, gusty, tough but good-natured
man who’d been everywhere and done everything—and was close to three thousand years old, could speak of nations on Manhome
that are like myth to the rest
of us, had shipped with none less than Janosek—and to top the deal off, was the kind of balladeer that Smeth only dreamed
of being. Valland took the situation well, refrained from exploiting or patronizing, and managed to slip him bits of sound
advice.

Then came the Captain’s Brawl. In twenty-four hours we would be making the jump. You can’t help feeling a certain tension.
The custom is good, that the crew have a final blast where almost anything goes.

We ate a gourmet dinner, and made the traditional toasts, and settled down to serious drinking. After a while the saloon roared.
Alen Galmer, Chu Bren, Gait Urduga, and, yes, Yo Rorn crouched over a flying pair of dice in one corner. The rest of us stamped
out a hooraw dance on the deck, Valland giving us the measure with ringing omnisonor and bawdy words, until the sweat rivered
across our skins and even that mummy-ancient line, “Why the deuce aren’t you a beautiful woman?” became funny once more.

“—
So let’s hope other ladies

Are just as kind as Alixy
,

For, spaceman, it’s your duty

To populate the galaxy!
”

“Yow-ee!” we shouted, grabbed for our glasses, drank deep and breathed hard.

Smeth flung himself onto the same bench as Valland. “Never heard that song before,” he panted.

“You will,” Valland drawled. “An oldtimer.” He paused. “To tell the truth, I made it up myself, ’bout five hundred years back.”

“I never knew that,” I said. “I believe you, though.”

“Sure.” Smeth attempted a worldly grin. “With the experience you must’ve had in those lines by now. Eh, Hugh?”

“Uh … well—” The humor departed from Valland. He emptied his goblet with a sudden, almost violent gesture.

Smeth was in a lickerish mood. “Womanizing memories, that’s the kind you never edit out,” he said.

Valland got up and poured himself a refill.

I recalled that episode at Lute’s, and decided I’d better divert the lad from my gunner. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “those
are among the most dispensable ones you’ll have.”

“You’re joking!” Smeth protested.

“I am not,” I said. “The really fine times, the girls you’ve really cared for, yes, of course you’ll keep those. But after
a thousand casual romps, the thousand and first is nothing special.”

“How about that, Hugh?” Smeth called. “You’re the oldest man aboard. Maybe the oldest man alive. What do you say?”

Valland shrugged and returned to us. “The skipper’s right,” he answered shortly. He sat down and stared at what we couldn’t
see.

I had to talk lest there be trouble, and wasn’t able to think of anything but banalities. “Look, Enver,” I told Smeth, “it
isn’t possible to carry around every experience you’ll accumulate in, oh, just a century or two. You’d swamp in the mass of
data. It’d be the kind of insanity that there’s no cure for. So, every once in a while, you go under the machine, and concentrate
on the blocs of memory you’ve decided you can do without, and those particular RNA molecules are neutralized. But if you aren’t
careful, you’ll make big, personality-destroying gaps. You have to preserve the overall pattern of your past, and the important
details. At the same time, you have to be ruthless with some things, or you can saddle yourself with the damnedest complexes.
So you do
not
keep trivia. And you do not overemphasize any one type of experience, idea, or what have you. Understand?”

“Maybe,” Smeth grumbled. “I think I’ll go join the dice game.”

Valland continued to sit by himself, drinking hard. I wondered about him. Being a little tired and muzzy, I stayed on the
same bench. Abruptly he shook his big frame, leaned over toward me, and said, low under the racket:

“No, skipper, I’m neither impotent nor homosexual. Matter’s very simple. I fell in love once for all, when I was young. And
she loves me. We’re enough for each other. We don’t want more. You see?”

He hadn’t shown it before, but he was plainly pretty drunk. “I suppose I see,” I told him with care. “Wouldn’t be honest to
claim I feel what you mean.”

“Reckon you don’t,” he said. “Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything. Not necessarily for the worse.
I pass no judgments on anybody.” He pondered. “Could be,” he said, “if I’d stayed on Earth, Mary and I would’ve grown apart
too. Could be. But this wanderin’ keeps me, well, fresh. Then I come home and tell her everything that happened.”

He picked up his omnisonor again, strummed a few bars, and murmured those lyrics I had heard when first we met.

“
I’ll sing me a song about Mary O’Meara, with stars like a crown in her hair
.

Sing of her memory rangin’ before me whatever the ways that I fare
.

My joy is to know she is there
.”

Well
, I thought with startling originality,
it takes all kinds
.

W
E WERE
ready to jump.

Every system was tuned, every observation and computation finished, every man at his post. I went to the bridge, strapped
myself into recoil harness, and watched the clock. Exact timing isn’t too important, as far as a ship is concerned; the position
error caused by a few minutes’ leeway is small compared to the usual error in your figures. But for psychological reasons
you’d better stay on schedule. Pushing that button is the loneliest thing a man can do.

I had no premonitions. But it grew almighty quiet in my helmet as I waited. The very act of suiting up reminds you that something
could go wrong; that something did go wrong for others you once knew; that our immortality isn’t absolute, because sooner
or later some chance combination of circumstances is bound to kill you.

What a spaceship captain fears most, as he watches the clock by himself on the bridge, is arriving in the same place as a
solid body. Then atoms jam together and the ship goes out in a nuclear explosion. But that’s a stupid fear, really. You set
your dials for emergence at a goodly distance from the target sun, well off the ecliptic plane. The probability of a rock
being just there, just then, is yanishingly small. In point of fact, I told myself, this trip we’d be in an ideal spot. We
wouldn’t even get the slight radiation dosage that’s normal: scarcely any hydrogen for our atoms to interact with, between
the galaxies.

Nevertheless, we were going two hundred and thirty thousand light-years away.

And I do not understand the principle of the space jump. Oh, I’ve studied the math. I can recite the popular version as glibly
as the next man: “Astronomers showed that gravitational forces, being weak and propagating at light velocity, were insufficient
to account for the cohesion of the universe. A new theory then postulated that space has an intrinsic unity, that every point
is equivalent to every other point. One location is distinguished from another only by the n-dimensional coordinates of the
mass which is present there. These coordinates describe a configuration of the matter-energy field which can be altered artificially.
When this is done, the mass, in effect, makes an instantaneous transition to the corresponding other point in space. Energy
being conserved, the mass retains the momentum—with respect to the general background of the galaxies—that it had prior to
this transition, plus or minus an amount corresponding to the difference in gravitational potential.”

It still sounds like number magic to me.

But a lot of things seem magical. There are primitives who believe that by eating somebody they can acquire that person’s
virtue. Well, you can train an animal, kill it, extract the RNA from its brain, put this into another animal, and the second
beast will exhibit behavior characteristic of that same training.

The clock showed Minute One. I cut the drive. We ran free, weight departed, silence clamped down on me like a hand.

I stared out at the chaotic beauty which flamed to starboard.
So long, galaxy
, I thought.
I’ll be seeing you again, in your entirety; only what I’ll see is you as you were a quarter of a million years ago
.

The time reeled toward Minute Two. I unfastened the safety lock and laid my gloved finger on the red button.

Nothing came over the comsystem into my earplugs. We were each without words.

Time.

The shock was too horrible. I couldn’t react.

No blackness, with the great spiral for background and a wan red star, glowing before us. A planet filled the screen.

I saw the vision grow, kilometers per second; hurtling upon us or we upon it. Half was dark, half was mottled with landscape,
agleam with waters, under a blood-colored day. No chance to reset the jump unit and escape, no chance to do anything but gape
into the face of Death. A roaring filled my helmet. It was my own voice.

Then Hugh Valland’s tone cut through, sword-like with what I should have cried. “Pilots! For God’s sake, reverse us and
blast!
”

That jarred me loose from my stupor. I looked at the degree scale etched in the screen and the numbers on the radar meters,
I made an estimate of vectors and ripped out my commands. The engine boomed. The planet swept around my head. Acceleration
stuffed me down into my harness and sat on my chest. Unconsciousness passed in rags before my eyes.