by Anthology
Sam took a deep breath, drinking in the air. It was just right, and not completely artificial either. Cool it was, and fragrant with living smells: trees and wet-green grass and water that glided over rocks and earth that was soft and thick.
This was all that was left, a fact that Sam fully appreciated.
This was the world as it once had been, lost now and forever.
Man had come, mighty man. Oh, he was smart, he was clever. He had turned the seas into cesspools, the air into sludge, the mountains into shrieking cities. Someone had once said that one chimpanzee was no chimpanzee. It was true; they were social animals. But how about ten thousand chimpanzees caged in a square mile? That was no chimpanzee also—that was crazy meat on a funny farm.
Oh, man was clever. He raped a world until he could not live with it, and then he screamed for help.
Don’t call me, Al. I’ll call you.
Sam shook his head. It was no good thinking about it. He could not ride to the rescue, not with all of his billions. He had no great admiration for his fellow men, and it would not matter if he had.
There was only one thing left to try.
Sam tried to close his mind to it. He had to stay alive a little longer. He had to relax, value, enjoy—
He walked along an unpaved trail, very likely the last one left on the planet. He breathed clean air, he felt the warmth of the sun glowing through the pod, he absorbed . . .
There were squirrels chattering in the trees, rabbits busy at rabbit-business in the brush. He saw a deer, a beautiful buck with moss on his horns; the buck ran when he spotted Sam. He knew who the enemy was. He saw a thin raccoon, a female that stared at him from behind her bandit’s mask. She had three young ones with her and they were bold, but Mama herded them up into an oak and out of danger. He could see the three little masks peering down at him from the branches.
The trail wound along a stream of cold, fast water. Sam watched the dark olive shadows lurking in the pools. Trout, of course. Sam drew the line at bass and carp.
He came out of the trees and into a field of tall grass. There were yellow flowers and insects buzzed in the air. He sensed the closeness of shapes and forms, but he could not see them in the breeze-swept grass. There was life here, and death, and life again.
But not for long.
He turned and retraced his steps. He felt a little better.
The raccoons were still in the oak.
Sam went back inside. Back to the salt mine.
He worked hard until dinner.
“What was the exact hour?” Lois asked him, absently stroking one of her remarkable legs. (She had two of them.)
“I don’t remember,” Sam said. “I was very young.”
“Come on, Sam. I’m not stupid. You can’t tell me that with all the resources of your mysterious enterprises you can’t find out the exact time.”
“I am telling you. I don’t know.” Sam looked at her, which was always pleasant in a tense sort of way. Lois was sensual but there was no softness in her. She had a lacquered surface stretched like a drumhead over taut springs. She always looked perfect, but even her casual clothes were somehow formal. She never forgot herself. She was a challenge, which was fine once in a while. Sam was old enough to decline most challenges without dishonor.
Lois did not have to remind Sam that she had a brain. Sam never made that mistake. Her little reference to “mysterious enterprises” was an effective threat. At thirty, she had climbed the highest pinnacle on her scale of values: she was the wife of the richest man in the world. She didn’t want a settlement. She wanted it all. Sam had no children.
Bright, yes. Cunning, yes. Skilled, certainly. Faithful with her body, yes—Lois took no needless risks. But that fine-boned head enclosed a brain that was all output; not much of significance ever went in. The hard violet eyes looked out from jelly that had been molded in Neolithic times.
She would have made a dandy witch.
She spent her days puttering with expensive clothing and obscure cosmetics. She had a library of real books, thus proving her intellectual capacity. They were all about reincarnation and astrology. She considered herself something of an expert with horoscopes. A pun had frequently occurred to Sam in this connection, but he had refrained. He was not a cruel man.
“I want to do it for you,” she said. “You have decisions to make. It would help. Really, Sam.”
She was quite sincere, like all fanatics. It was a gift she could give him, and that was important to her. It was an ancient problem for women like Lois: what do you give to a man who has everything? The gag presents get pretty thin very quickly, and Sam was not a man who was easily convulsed.
He sipped his drink, enjoying it. He always drank Scotch; the labs could create nothing better. “Well,” he said. “I haven’t a clue about the minute of my birth. I’d just as soon forget my birthday.”
Lois was patient. “It would be so simple to find out.”
“But I don’t give a damn.”
“I give a damn. What about me? It’s a small thing. I know the day, of course. But if the moons of Saturn were in the right position . . .”
Sam raised his eyebrows and took a large swallow of Scotch before he answered. “They are always in the right position,” he said carefully. “That’s the way moons are.”
“Oh, Sam.” She did not cry; she had learned some things.
Sam Gregg stood up to refill his glass. He did not like to have obtrusive robots around the house. Self-reliance and all that.
He was not unaware of himself. He did not look his age. He was a tall, angular man. There was still strength in him. His hair was gray, not white. His craggy face was lined but there was no flab on him. His brown eyes were sharp, like dirty ice.
Sam sometimes thought of himself as a vampire in one of the still-popular epics. (“Ah, my dear, velcome to Castle Mordor. A moment vhile I adjust my dentures.”) Splendid looking chap, distinguished even. But then, suddinkly, at the worst possible moment, he dissolves into a puff of primeval dust . . .
“Let’s go beddy-bye,” Sam said, draining his glass. “Maybe I can remember.”
“I’ll help you,” Lois said, reporting for duty.
“You’ll have to,” Sam agreed.
Sam worked very hard the next few weeks. He even found time to check the hour and the minute of his birth. He was being very careful indeed, trying to think of everything.
Lois was delighted. She retreated to her mystic stewpot, consulted her illustrated charts, talked it over with several dead Indians, and informed Sam that he was thinking about a long, long journey.
Sam didn’t explode into laughter.
His work was difficult because so much of it involved waiting. There were many programs to consider, all of them set in motion years ago. They had to mesh perfectly. They all depended on the work of other men. And they all had to be masked.
It wasn’t easy. How, for instance, do you hide a couple of spaceships? Particularly when they keep taking off and landing with all the stealth of trumpeting elephants?
(“Spaceship? I don’t see any spaceship. Do you see a spaceship?”)
Answer: You don’t hide them. You account for them. For all practical purposes, Sam owned the space station that orbited the Earth. He controlled it through a mosaic of interlocking companies, domestic and foreign. It was only natural for him to operate a few shuttle ships. A man has a right to keep his finger in his own pie.
Owned the space station, Daddy?
Yes, Junior. Listen, my son, and you shall hear . . .
The great space dream had been a bust. A colossal fizzle. A thumping anticlimax.
The trails blazed by the space pioneers led—quite literally—Nowhere.
Fortunately or otherwise, Mighty Man could not create the solar system in his own image. The solar system was one hell of a place, and not just on Pluto. There were no conveniently verdant worlds. There were just rocks and craters, heat and cold, lifeless dust and frozen chemicals.
>
There were other suns, other planets. Big deal. There were no handy space warps, no faster-than-light drives. Unmanned survey ships took a very long time to report, and their news produced no dancing in the streets: rocks, craters, desolation. Who would spend a lifetime to visit Nothing?
Would you? (Naw, I’d rather go see Grandma.)
Scientific bases had been established on Luna, and they survived. They survived with enormous expense, with highly trained personnel, with iron discipline. Even the scientific teams had to be replaced at short intervals.
Radiation, you know. Puts funny kinks in the old chromosomes.
The Mars Colony of half a century ago, widely advertised as a solution to the population crisis, was a solution only in the grim sense of a Final Solution. Even with the life-support pods—Sam had lost a fortune on the early models, but he had learned a few things—it was no go. Five thousand human beings had gone to Mars to start the New Life. (A drop in the bucket, to be sure. But there was much talk about Beginnings, and Heroic Ancestors, and First Steps.) A few of them had gotten back. Most had died or gone mad or both. Some of them were still there, although this was not generally known. They were no longer human.
The problem was that it was perfectly possible to set up a scientific base on Mars, or even a military base if there had been any need for one. But soldiers on Mars are a joke, and appropriations committees had long since stopped playing the old game: Can You Top This? Scientists could do little on Mars that they could not do on Luna. And people—plain, ordinary people, the kind that swarmed the Earth and scratched for a living, the kind that had to go—could not exist on Mars.
And so?
And so, kiddies, what was left of the space program was taken over by what was referred to as the Private Sector of the Economy. Got your decoder badges ready? It works out to S-a-m G-r-e-g-g. Governments could not continue to pour billions into space when there was no earthly reason for doing so. But with existing hardware and accumulated expertise it was not prohibitively expensive for Sam Gregg to keep a few things going. There was the matter of motive, of course. Sam Gregg had one, and he made money besides.
There were other projects to conceal, but they were easier than spaceships. Genetics research? Well, cancer was still a killer and everyone wanted to live forever. Such work was downright humanitarian, and therefore admirable. Ecological studies? The whole wretched planet was fouled by its own ecology—a solution had to be found. (There was no solution at this late date, but so what? It was a Good Thing. Everyone said so.) Computers, robots, cybernetics? Certainly they were beyond reproach. Hadn’t they ushered in the Golden Age? Well, hadn’t they?
Sam Gregg had his faults—ask anyone—but wishful thinking was not among them. He knew that he could succeed if he just had time. He could succeed if they didn’t get him first. He could succeed because he had the resources and because the problem was essentially one of technology. No matter how complex they are, technological problems can be solved unless they involve flat impossibilities. You can build a suspension bridge, send a man to Mars or wherever, construct cities beneath the sea.
There are other problems, human problems. How do you build a bridge between people? How do you send a better man to Mars? How do you construct an anthill city that is not a bughouse? Money will not solve those problems. Rhetoric will not solve them. Technology will not solve them.
Therefore, Sam did not fool with them. He used them for protective coloration, but he did not kid himself.
He stuck to the art of the possible.
Oh yes, he had a dream.
There was justice in it, of a sort. But human beings care nothing for justice. They look out for Number One.
Number One?
Sam permitted himself a brief, cold smile.
They would tear him apart if they knew, all those billions of Number Ones . . .
A day came when all the bits and pieces fell into place. The data came back, coded across the empty hundreds of millions of miles. The columns added up. The light turned green.
Sam was exultant, in a quiet sort of way. He had expected it to work, of course. He had checked it all out countless times. But that was theory, and Sam was a skeptic about theories.
This was fact.
It was ready. Not perfect, no—but that too had been anticipated.
Ain’t science wunnerful?
He could not stay inside, not when he was this close. He had to get outside, taste what was left of freedom. At times like these, it was not enough to know that it was there. He had to see it.
He walked on the Estate.
Lois joined him, which was a pain in the clavicle but Sam did not allow her presence to destroy his mood. Lois had on one of her cunning Outdoor Suits. She always professed to adore what she called Nature, but she walked as though every blade of grass were poison ivy.
(Poison ivy had been extinct for decades. Lois would soon follow suit.)
“It’s so peaceful,” Lois said. She usually said that here.
Rather to his own surprise, Sam answered her. He wanted to talk to somebody, to celebrate. Failing that, he talked to Lois. “No,” he said. “Not really. It only seems peaceful because we are observers, not part of it. And it is controlled, to some extent.”
Lois looked at him sharply. It had been one of his longer speeches.
“See that cedar?” Sam pointed to it, knowing that she did not know a cedar from a cottonwood. “Tough little tree. It’ll grow in poor soil, it doesn’t take much water. See how the roots come up near the surface? It’s brittle, though. Won’t last long. That oak is crowding it, and it’s got a century or two to play with. See that little willow—there, the droopy one? It needs too much water and the drainage is wrong. It’ll never make it. Am I boring you?”
“No,” Lois said truthfully. She was too amazed to be bored.
“See the bunny rabbit?” Sam’s voice lapsed into parody. “See bunny run! He’d better run. Lots of things eat bunny rabbits. Hawks, bobcats, wolves. Snakes eat little bunnies—”
“Oh, Sam.”
As if to prove his point, a beagle hound stuck his wet nose out of the brush. His white-tipped tail wagged tentatively. His liquid eyes were pools of adoration. (Beagles were originally bred as hunters. Remember?)
Sam turned his back on the dog. “Man’s best friend. The supreme opportunist. He figured the odds twenty thousand years ago and threw in with us. K-9, Secret Agent. Con. Fink. Surplus now. Dear old pal.”
“I don’t understand you sometimes,” Lois said with rare perception.
I don’t understand them, either, Sam thought. Animals, not women. Little Forest Friends. Nobody understands them. We were too busy. There wasn’t even a decent field study of the chimpanzee until around 1930. Seventy years later there were no chimpanzees. We didn’t bother with the animals that were not like men; who cared? We learned exactly nothing about kudus and bears, coons and possums, badgers and buffalo. Too late now. They are gone or going, and so is their world.
Sam Gregg was not a sentimental man. He was a realist. Still, the facts bothered him. It was hard not to know. He would never know, and that was that. There was no way.
They walked along the trail together. (Arm in arm, lovely couple, backbone of empire.) Sam was a little nervous. It had been a long fight and—as they used to say—victory was at hand.
He felt a little like God and a lot like an old man.
From the branches of a gnarled oak, a masked mother and three small bandits watched them pass.
There were ancient raccoon thoughts in the air.
You are ready.
So do it. Don’t wobble.
Sam did it.
Sound dramatic?
It was (in the very long run) and it wasn’t (here and now). An extremely well-balanced, insulated, innocuous conveyor left the main lab and hissed gently to the spaceport. A large gray metallic box was loaded into a shuttle ship and locked into place. The box was ten feet square, and it was heavy. It could hav
e been much smaller and lighter—about the size of a jigger glass—except for the refrigeration units, the electronic circuits, the separation cubicles, and the protective layers.
The shuttle lifted to the space station. Strictly routine.
The gray cube of metal was transferred very gingerly to a larger ship. She (that was surely the proper pronoun) was a special ship, a swimmer of deep space. She was crammed with expensive gear. Say, a billion dollars worth. Maybe more.
She took off. She was completely automated, controlled by computers, powered by atomics.
There were no men on board.
The ship was never coming back.
Sam?
He stayed home.
There was nowhere for him to go.
Remember?
It is curious how a small gesture will offend some people.
There was no more capital punishment, unless living on earth was it, but good men and true were willing to make an exception in Sam’s case.
“So you sunk twenty billion into it over a ten-year period,” his chief lawyer said. He said it the same way he might have asked, “So you think you’re a kumquat, eh?”
“Give or take a few million. Of course, some of the basic research goes back more than ten years. If you figure all that in, it might go to twenty-two billion. Maybe twenty-three.”
“Never mind that.” The lawyer groaned. He really did.
Lois was not happy and developed a case of severe frigidity. She was not only married to a man confronting bankruptcy, but she was also the wife of a Master Criminal. It does imperil one’s social position.
(There was no way to keep it quiet, naturally. Sam had known that. Too many people were involved.)
They had a great time, the venom-spewers: senators and editorialists, presidents and kings, cops and commissions, professors and assorted hotshots. All the Good People.
