The High Ones and Other Stories

by Poul Anderson

  The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned Lundgard down to the desk.

  It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow neat even without clothes. "Jonsson," said Bo. "Sorry to get you up, but I understood—"

  "Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm available."

  Bo felt his mouth gape open. "Huh? I never thought—"

  "We're both lucky, I guess." Lundgard chuckled. His English had only the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. "I thought I was stashed here too for the next several months."

  "How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?"

  "I'm with Fireball, was on the Drake—heard of what happened to her?"

  Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is doing at any given time. The Drake had come to Achilles to pick up a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew … spacemen were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the Sirius was already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of shop talk.

  "I thought she went back anyway," he said.

  Lundgard nodded. "She did. It was the usual question of economics. You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I volunteered, even suggested the idea, because … well, it happened during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling guilty."

  Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without men who had it.

  "The Company beamed a message: I'd stay here till their schedule permitted an undermanned ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for maybe months," went on Lundgard. "I can't see sitting on this lump that long without so much as a chance at planetfall bonus. If you'll take me on, I'm sure the Company will agree; I'll get a message to them on the beam right away."

  "Take us a while to get back," warned Bo. "We're going to stop off at another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment, and won't go into hyperbolic orbit till after that. About six weeks from here to Earth, all told."

  "Against six months here?" Lundgard laughed; it emphasized the bright charm of his manner. "Sunblaze. I'll work for free."

  "No need to. Bring your papers over tomorrow, huh?"

  The certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing Einar Lundgard to be a Spacetech 1/cl with eight years' experience, qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand professions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook hands on it. "Call me Bo. It really is my name … Swedish."

  "Another squarehead, eh?" grinned Lundgard. "I'm from South America myself."

  "Notice a year's gap here," said Bo, pointing to the service record. "On Venus."

  "Oh, yes. I had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better. I tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of howling desert— Well, let's start some math, shall we?"

  They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer; no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements, acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator.

  Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks with the tech. He had some good ones.

  The Sirius was loaded, inspected, and cleared. A "scooter" brought her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder of rockets.

  Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind them. "So long," he whispered. "So long, Johnny."

  III

  In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends, and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.

  Bo damped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not know.

  "Damn," he gasped. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn."

  He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.

  The plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. He peeled it off, trying not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. His body was slow, inert, a thing to fight. There was no more feeling in his back, was he dead already?

  Redness flamed before his eyes, red like Valeria's hair blowing across the stars. It was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the patch over the hole in his suit. The adhesive gripped, drying fast in the sucking vacuum. The patch bellied out from internal air pressure, straining to break loose and kill him.

  Bo's mind wavered back toward life. He opened the valves wide on his tanks, and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. For a long time he lay there, only lungs and heart had motion. His throat felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air through it was like being born again.

  Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold, to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and wanted to scream again.

  Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go right through a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.

  He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.

  It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on an asteroid.

  He wanted terribly to sleep.

  * * * *

  There wasn't much room in the Sirius, the only privacy was gained by drawing curtains across your bunk. Men without psych training could get to hate each other on a voyage. Bo wondered if he would reach Luna hating Einar Lundgard.

  The man was competent, a willing worker, tempering his cheerfulness with tact, always immaculate in the neat blue and white of the Fireball Line which made Bo feel doubly sloppy in his own old gray coverall. He was a fine conversationalist with an enormous stock of reminiscence and ideas, witty above a certain passion of belief. It seemed as if he and Valeria were always talking, animated voices like a sound of life over the mechanical ship-murmurs, while Bo sat dumbly in a corner wishing he could think of something to say.

  The trouble was, in spite of all his efforts, he was doing a cometary dive into another bad case of one-sided love. When she spoke in that husky voice of hers, gray gleam of eyes u
nder hair that floated flaming in null-gee, the beauty he saw in her was like pain. And she was always around. It couldn't be helped. Once they had gone into free fall he could only polish so much metal and tinker with so many appliances; after that they were crowded together in a long waiting.

  —"And why were you all alone in the Belt?" asked Lundgard. "In spite of all the romantic stories about the wild free life of the rockhound, it's the dullest place in the System."

  "Not to me," she smiled. "I was working. There were experiments to be done, factors to be measured, away from solar radiation. There are always ions around inside the orbit of Mars to jamble up a delicate apparatus."

  Bo sat quiet, trying to keep his eyes off her. She looked good in shorts and half-cape. Too good.

  "It's something to do with power beaming, isn't it?" Lundgard's handsome face creased in a frown. "Afraid I don't quite understand. They've been beaming power on the planets for a long time now."

  "So they have," she nodded. "What we're after is an interplanetary power beam. And we've got it." She gestured to the baggage rack and a thick trunk full of papers she had put there. "That's it. The basic circuits, factors, and constants. Any competent engineer could draw up a design from them."

  "Hmmm … precision work, eh?"

  "Obviously! It was hard enough to do on, say, Earth—you need a really tight beam in just the right frequencies, a feedback signal to direct each beam at the desired outlet, relay stations—oh, yes, it was a ten-year research project before they could even think about building. An interplanetary beam has all those problems plus a number of its own. You have to get the dispersion down to a figure so low it hardly seems possible. You can't use feedback because of the time lag, so the beams have to be aimed exactly right—and the planets are always moving, at miles per second. An error of one degree would throw your beam almost two million miles off in crossing one A. U. And besides being so precise, the beam has to carry a begawatt at least to be worth the trouble. The problem looked insoluble till someone in the Order of Planetary Engineers came up with an idea for a trick control circuit hooked into a special computer. My lab's been working together with the Order on it, and I was making certain final determinations for them. It's finished now … twelve years of work and we're done." She laughed. "Except for building the stations and getting the bugs out!"

  * * * *

  Lundgard cocked an oddly sardonic brow. "And what do you hope for from it?" he asked. "What have the psychotechs decided to do with this thing?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" she cried. "Power! Nuclear fuel is getting scarcer every day, and civilization is finished if we can't find another energy source. The sun is pouring out more than we'll ever need, but sheer distance dilutes it below a useful level by the time it gets to Venus.

  "We'll build stations on the hot side of Mercury. Orbital stations can relay. We can get the beams as far out as Mars without too much dispersion. It'll bring down the rising price of atomic energy, which is making all other prices rise, and stretch our supply of fissionables for centuries more. No more fuel worries, no more Martians freezing to death because a converter fails, no more clan feuds on Venus starting over uranium beds—" The excited flush on her cheeks was lovely to look at.

  Lundgard shook his head. There was a sadness in his smile. "You're a true child of the New Enlightenment," he said. "Reason will solve everything. Science will find a cure for all our ills. Give man a cheap energy source and leave him forever happy. It won't work, you know."

  Something like anger crossed her eyes. "What are you?" she asked. "A Humanist?"

  "Yes," said Lundgard quietly.

  Bo started. He'd known about the antipsychotechnic movement which was growing on Earth, seen a few of its adherents, but—

  "I never thought a spaceman would be a Humanist," he stammered.

  Lundgard shrugged wryly. "Don't be afraid. I don't eat babies. I don't even get hysterics in an argument. All I've done is use the scientific method, observing the world without preconceptions, and learned by it that the scientific method doesn't have all the answers."

  "Instead," said Valeria scornfully, "we should all go back to church and pray for what we want rather than working for it."

  "Not at all," said Lundgard mildly. "The New Enlightenment is—or was, because it's dying—a very natural state of mind. Here Earth had come out of the World Wars, racked and ruined, starving and chaotic, and all because of unbridled ideology. So the physical scientists produced goods and machines and conquered the planets; the biologists found new food sources and new cures for disease; the psychotechs built up their knowledge to a point where the socioeconomic unity could really be planned and the plan worked. Man was unified, war had sunken to an occasional small 'police action,' people were eating and had comfort and security—all through applied, working science. Naturally they came to believe reason would solve their remaining problems. But this faith in reason was itself an emotional reaction from the preceding age of unreason. "Well, we've had a century of enlightenment now, and it has created its own troubles which it cannot solve. No age can handle the difficulties it raises for itself; that's left to the next era. There are practical problems arising, and no matter how desperately the psychotechs work they aren't succeeding with them."

  "What problems?" asked Bo, feeling a little bewildered.

  "Man, don't you ever see a newscast?" challenged Lundgard. The "Second Industrial Revolution, millions of people thrown out of work by the new automata. They aren't going hungry, but they are displaced and bitter. The economic center of Earth is shifting to Asia, the political power with it, and hundreds of millions of Asians are skeptical aboard this antiseptic New Order the West has been bringing them: cultural resistance, and not all the psychotechnic propaganda in the System can shake it off. The men of Mars, Venus, the Belt, the Jovian moons are developing their own civilizations—inevitably, in alien environments; their own ways of living and thinking, which just don't fit into the neat scheme of an Earth-dominated Solar Union. The psychotechs themselves are being driven to oligarchic unconstitutional acts; they have no choice, but it's making them enemies.

  "And then there's the normal human energy and drive. Man can only be safe and sane and secure for so long, then he reacts. This New Enlightenment is really a decadent age, a period where an exhausted civilization has been resting under a holy status quo. It can't last. Man always wants something new."

  "You Humanists talk a lot about 'man's right to variability,' " said Valeria. "If you really carry off that revolution your writings advocate you'll just trade one power group for another—and more fanatic, less lawful, than the present one."

  "Not necessarily," said Lundgard. "After all, the Union will probably break up. It can't last forever. All we want to do is hasten the day because we feel that it's outlived its usefulness."

  Bo shook his head. "I can't see it," he said heavily. "I just can't see it. All those people—the Lunarites, the violent clansmen on Venus, the stiff correct Martians, the asteroid rockhounds, even those mysterious Jovians—they all came from Earth. It was Earth's help that made their planets habitable. We're all men, all one race."

  "A fiction," said Lundgard. "The human race is a fiction. There are only small groups with their own conflicting interests."

  "And if those conflicts are allowed to break into war—" said Valeria. "Do you know what a lithium bomb can do?"

  There was a reckless gleam in Lundgard's eyes. "If a period of interplanetary wars is necessary, let's get it over with," he answered. "Enough men will survive to build something better. This age has gotten stale. It's petrifying. There have been plenty of shake-ups in history—the fall of Rome, the Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars. It's been man's way of progressing."

  "I don't know about all those," said Bo slowly. "I just know I wouldn't want to live through such a time."

  "You're soft," said Lundgard. "Down underneath you're soft." He laughed disarmingly. "Pardon me. I didn't mean anything person
al. I'll never convince you and you'll never convince me, so let's keep it friendly. I hope you'll have some free time on Luna, Valeria. I know a little grill where they serve the best synthosteaks in the System."

  "All right," she smiled. "It's a date."

  Bo mumbled some excuse and went aft. He was still calling her Dr. McKittrick.

  IV

  You can't just lie here and let him come kill you.

  There was a picture behind his eyes; he didn't know if it was a dream or a long buried memory. He stood under an aspen which quivered and rustled as if it laughed to itself softly, softly, when the wind embraced it. And the wind was blowing up a red granite slope, wild and salt from the Sound, and there were towering clouds lifting over Denmark to the west. The sunlight rained and streamed through aspen leaves, broken, shaken, falling in spatters against the earth, and he, Bo Jonsson, laughed with the wind and the tree and the far watery glitter of the Sound.

  He opened his eyes, wearily, like an old man. Orion was marching past, and there was a blaze on crags five miles off which told of the rising sun. The asteroid spun swiftly; he had been here for many of its days now, and each day burdened him like a year.

  Got to get out of here, he knew.

  He sat up, pain tearing along his furrowed breast. Somehow he had kept the wrench with him, he stared at it in a dull wonder.

  Where to go, where to hide, what to do?

  Thirst nagged him. Slowly he uncoiled the tube which led from the electrically heated canteen welded to his suit, screwed its end into the helmet nipple, thumbed down the damp which closed it, and sucked hard. It helped a little.

  He dragged himself to his feet and stood swaying, only the near-weightlessness kept him erect. Turning his head in its transparent cage, he saw the sun rise, and bright spots danced before him when he looked away.

  His vision cleared, but for a moment he thought the shadow lifting over a nearby ridge was a wisp of unconsciousness. Then he made out the bulky black-painted edge of it, gigantic against the Milky Way, and it was Lundgard, moving unhurriedly up to kill him.