by Gunn, James
“It wouldn’t cost you much,” Frances said. “The energy moths are self-replicating and by the time construction on the spaceship gets going you won’t know what to do with all the excess energy.”
“Materials can be mined in space,” Adrian said. “Asteroids. Comets. Hydrogen from Jupiter for reaction mass, if that is needed.”
“Let us go,” Jessie said.
“Us?” Frances echoed.
“I want to go, too.”
“But what about the aliens?” the oriental woman asked.
“We’ll never know, will we?” Frances said. “Until we go.”
“Do we risk something by going?” Adrian continued. “The people who go risk a lot. The people who stay behind risk a bit less, but still enough to concern them. Maybe the designs are a trick, some nefarious plot to trap humanity. But they’ve made us stronger; they’ve unified us by removing the inequalities that kept us apart. So not going is a bigger risk.”
The faces on the wall seemed to exchange glances with the Chairman before he waved his hand and they disappeared to be replaced by the image of the sun. “The one function we have,” the Chairman said, “is to transmit power. We have decided that you should have it.” He held up his hand as they started to speak. “Your argument about ridding ourselves of the malcontents was persuasive. We have no desire to contact aliens, no aspirations for the transcendental. We are content to be no more than we are, the transmitters of power to those who need it, the conservators of human happiness.”
“You have conserved our happiness,” Frances said.
The Chairman waved his hand once more at the wall, and once more it responded with the sun girdled by energy-absorbing black moths. And when the design for the spaceship ghosted across the screen, it seemed to those who watched that it was already transforming itself into something substantial enough to carry humanity to the stars.
Shape has no shape, nor will your thinking shape it;
Space has no confines; and no borders time.
And yet, to think the abyss is to escape it.
CONRAD AIKEN, SONNET XXVI
Part Three
THE ABYSS
JESSICA BUHLER LOOKED UP FROM THE SEAM on the cigar-shaped spaceship whose far end, like the horizon, hid what lay beyond. A hand-held electronic weld-checker, secured by a safety cord, dangled from the glove of her spacesuit. The ship had been put together from oddly shaped pieces of metal, like a child’s puzzle, and the job of checking thousands of seams might never be done. The devices that sealed the seams checked welds as they were made, but when survival depended on every part and every person functioning perfectly, Adrian believed in checking and rechecking. That was his nature, Jessica knew, but it also was a measure of his commitment to the mission he had chosen. Before she was born, she amended. It was important to keep matters in perspective.
Beneath her was the long hull of the spaceship, apparently complete but as yet untested against the forces of acceleration. Frances Farmstead would have identified the genre as 1930s science fiction. She could tell, she would have said, because the ship looked as if it had been lifted from the cover of Astounding Stories, maybe the first installment of The Skylark of Valeron. Images that endure, she said, characterize situations better than rational analysis. They encapsulated the wisdom of the species.
Some of the crew laughed at Frances and her genres. “How’d them aliens get hold of a copy of Astounding?” they’d say. But Frances was unperturbed. “If you don’t identify the situation, you won’t know what to do when it comes times to act,” she said, and she was so sure of herself that some of them began to wonder if she might be right.
But building the ship hadn’t been as easy as the stories made it sound. There was none of this “they all pitched in and by working hard they put the ship together in a few weeks,” or “they built the ship in an empty barn by working after school and on weekends.”
Jessica was attached to the smooth metal surface by magnetic grapples as she moved, with her machine, from seam to seam. When she raised her head she could see the blue, cloud-strewn globe of the Earth disturbingly above, and then, in a gut-wrenching transformation, like some inescapable abyss yawning below. She closed her eyes and mentally readjusted her relationship to the universe. It was an exercise in which they all had grown skillful—all except Frances who, in spite of her experience in identifying situations according to the genre models that came to her so readily, had been space-sick until the chemists and physicians found a medicine that worked. Even then Frances had never been able to labor outside where the need to invent one’s own orientation had left her dizzy and disturbed.
Past the far end of the ship Jessica could see the skeleton of the old space station, half its parts scavenged for structural elements and hull plates. Like the Kennedy Space Center from which they had boosted into orbit, the space station had been abandoned in place. At first the construction workers who would become the crew had lived in the quarters that once had housed astronauts and experiments. As soon as they had settled in, the station itself, trembling in all its fragile connections, had been raised from its degraded orbit by rocket motors carefully placed to minimize stress. Only afterwards, as people considered the difficulty of constructing the ship that would house the alien-designed equipment and of boosting into orbit the necessary parts, did someone suggest supplementing what had to be manufactured below with materials already available. The first part of the spaceship built, then, was the crew’s living quarters. In the alien designs those spaces had been left blank, as if the aliens had understood that creatures who received their message were likely to come in many shapes and sizes. It was an issue frequently discussed over the mess table and in late night bull-sessions: what did it mean that the aliens made no assumptions about the physiology of sentience?
Nobody wept over the deconstruction of the space station except a few sentimentalists who had pinned their hopes for space on this stepping-stone to the stars. That would once have included Jessica and the head of the project, Adrian Mast, and the ageless Frances, his adviser and co-conspirator. But that had been twenty-five years earlier, when all this started in a book found by Adrian on a UFO remainder table. Five years earlier the Energy Board had given them the power, but that left the would-be space-travelers dependent upon their own manpower and the construction workers they could recruit. The number of volunteers had surprised them, but all this, and their training, had taken a year, and the construction itself, another four years.
Part of the resources allotted to them was the space station. In another form it might, indeed, reach the stars. If the alien designs worked. That was the immediate concern. What would happen when the button was pushed? Would the containment vessel work or would the ship simply disappear in a titanic union of matter and antimatter? Would the ship disintegrate under acceleration? If it moved, would it move at interstellar speeds? Could they control it? Could their bodies endure it? If everything worked properly, where would they go and how long would the voyage take?
Those were the questions that worried Adrian, even if he didn’t show it. They worried Cavendish, who fretted about it all the time until everybody told him to shut up. And it worried Frances most of all, although she concealed it from Adrian and everybody else. She couldn’t conceal it from Jessica, however; nothing can be concealed between two women who love the same man, and everything is obscure to the man who is so wrapped up in his job that he has no time for personal relationships.
All this passed through Jessica’s mind in the fleeting moment of relaxation and attitude adjustment before the terrible realization hit her that the ship had begun to tremble beneath her feet.
“What’s going on?” she said into the suit radio she had activated with her chin. The receiver only crackled as if someone had leaned against the on-switch. By that time Jessica had slipped the seam-checker into magnetic catches on her suit and was running across the outer hull, breaking one magnetic grapple free and swinging it ahead, and th
en the other, in an unconscious coordination of movements that she had perfected over the past years. “What’s happening?” she asked again. Unfortunately, she was almost as far as she could get from the nearest open hatch. By the time she was halfway there, her body had tightened with the notion that the ship had begun to move. She looked back over her shoulder. It was a contortion in the airtight suit made possible only by her slender athleticism. The skeleton of the space station seemed farther away. It was all subjective, she told herself, and then she was at the hatch and pulling herself into it, locking the hatch door in place with another athletic contortion, and waiting for the air pressure to build to the point where the inner door could be unlocked.
She backed into the clamps that held a row of spacesuits just inside the inner hatchway. It was a slow process, but faster than trying to maneuver down narrow corridors in a bulky suit and then being unable to communicate except by radio. Finally she was free. Dressed in what looked like a one-piece garment of long underwear, she propelled herself down a zero-gravity corridor toward the forward control room. It was like a high-platform dive without an entry, a repetition in which she caught herself with bent knees at a turn and launched herself again until she arrived, at last, at a room crowded with dials and screens and computers and keyboards and distraught people milling about aimlessly and weightlessly.
Adrian was among them and Francis and Peter and a dozen or more others whose names and faces had become as familiar to her as neighborhood buddies. Some of them hung upside down or sideways to her orientation, but that surrealistic panorama no longer had the power to surprise. She had no time now to identify them individually. “What’s going on?” she asked again.
They looked at her, in every possible configuration. “Someone programmed an engine test into the control-room computer,” Adrian said. “Fortunately, there were only a few atoms of antimatter in the containment vessel—maybe a billion or so—left over from the preinstallation tests. And only a similar femtogram of matter. Otherwise it might have been catastrophic.”
“We didn’t move,” Frances said. “Just shuddered.”
“Who did it?” Jessica asked.
Frances shrugged.
“No way to know,” Adrian said. “We don’t even know how it was done.”
“But you said a test was programmed into the control-room computer?” Jessica said.
“That’s the only way the engine could be started,” Adrian said. “The entire process is so complex that the human mind can’t perform the necessary calculations or react quickly enough. We’ll check the computer programs, but I suspect that whoever was clever enough to install the program so that it nestled, unsuspected, among the computer’s legitimate programming, won’t have left any digital fingerprints.”
“At least,” Peter said nervously, “we know that the engines work.”
“We knew that already,” Adrian said. “From the static tests.”
“But we didn’t know if the mountings would hold or the ship would blow up.” A muscle twitched near Peter’s left eye.
“We still don’t know,” Adrian said.
“Some people have said they saw the bearded man,” Frances said.
“The bearded man,” Jessica repeated.
The bearded man had become a legend within the crew. Ever since workmen had taken up residence within the space station, one person or another had reported brief glimpses of a strange man. He was described by each of the viewers as wiry in appearance, with skin burnt nearly black by space radiation, against which an unkempt white beard was even more spectacular. The sightings were so fleeting or so isolated that no verification was possible. As difficult as it was to imagine a mysterious person existing within the closed community of space workers, some people were beginning to believe in him; others thought he was a ghost or maybe a mass hallucination brought on by concern about their work and its risks, or the brooding presence of the aliens and all the unanswered questions they trailed behind them.
“We’ll put our best people to work analyzing the computer data,” Adrian said, “and providing safeguards against future sabotage.”
“Sabotage?” Jessica asked. “You think it was sabotage?”
“It certainly seems like it, but we can’t let it interfere with our mission or it will have succeeded. Let’s get back to finishing up. Tomorrow we load antimatter and reaction mass, and the day after that we take our first test-flight. Everything has to be ready by then.”
“You haven’t said yet who’s going to be on board during the test flight,” Peter said.
“Everybody who wants to be,” Adrian said. “Anyone who doesn’t want to share the risks can back out if they wish, with no hard feelings. We’ll let them board afterwards.”
“And what if it blows up?” Peter asked.
“Then we’ll all go with it,” Adrian said. “We might as well face reality: This is our only chance. The Energy Board won’t give us another. Who wants to survive their dreams?”
Jessica turned from the door into the control room to head back to her lonely job of checking seams. They were airtight, that had been clear ever since the crew moved in, but suddenly it seemed vitally important that they hold up under acceleration.
“Jessie,” Frances said, coming after her. “Can we talk?”
As soon as they had reached a point beyond earshot of the others, Frances stopped Jessica with a hand on her arm. “You asked who did it,” Frances said. “Some members of the crew think it was you.”
Jessica looked at Frances, wondering why the old woman who was her unlikely rival was telling her this. “Why would anyone think that?”
“You were Makepeace’s agent,” Frances said. “People remember.”
“I’ve worked five years on this project,” Jessica said. “How long does it take to earn people’s trust?”
Frances gestured as if to say, “People have long memories.” And “Look at you—young and shapely and pretty. How can anyone who isn’t any of those things be sure what people like you would do?” The movement made her spin gently until Jessica reached out a hand to stop her and relieve Frances’s nervous inner ears. Unlike the revealing long underwear most of them wore, Frances was wearing loose coveralls; although biogenetic treatment had removed fat and years, it could not change the fact that she was short and sturdy.
“Anyway,” Jessica said, “why would I want to sabotage the ship when I was out checking seams?”
“I didn’t say it was reasonable,” Frances said. “I just thought you ought to know what people were saying.”
“I’m sure they’re saying the same thing about everybody, with the possible exception of Adrian,” Jessica said. “Nobody’s above suspicion, and even Adrian might be trying to test the crew.”
“Or get rid of people he doesn’t trust by assigning them to duties on the hull,” Frances said, “at the time of the test.”
“While we’re at it,” Jessica said, “we might as well throw in the bearded man.”
“Him, too.”
“Well,” Jessica said, spinning toward the distant hatchway, “at least I know you set them straight. About me.”
“You know I did,” Frances called after her.
But Jessica carried her suspicions back onto the hull and her lonely job. Was it ever going to end? Would she always be an outsider?
At the end of her long shift, tired and hungry and still brooding over Frances’s subtle accusation, she straightened up from the last seam and took one final look around. The next day she would be loading antimatter and who knew whether some accident would destroy all their work and hopes and them as well. The following day, if all went without disaster, they would make a test run. However matters went, there would not be many more chances to stand free above the abyss and consider her birth planet, a blue, water-blessed oasis in the vast desert of space. She looked at it steadily for several minutes, thinking warm thoughts of home and family and favorite things, before she sighed, secured her equipment to the magn
etic catches on the suit, and turned toward the nearest hatch.
Only then did she think about the bearded man and swung around to face the ruins of the space station, looking like the archeological remains of a curiously shaped dinosaur. On an impulse she moved to a portion of the ship closest to the former station and launched herself into the dark desert she had just been considering. She made a small adjustment of her steering jets and caught a girder on the station as she passed. That sort of space maneuvering had become commonplace in the past four years, although some of the crew were better at it than others and a few, like Frances, never did it at all.
Jessica swung herself along the girder until she reached a portion of the station that still retained a few plates. There she used her magnetic grapples to walk toward the part of the station that was relatively untouched. In the middle of a solid metal wall was a hatch that she didn’t remember, that had no business still being there. She cycled it open. Beyond was darkness, and, from the lack of condensation when the hatch opened, airlessness as well. Her suit lights revealed a storeroom in which discarded equipment and tools floated like a Dalí nightmare. She shut the door behind her, to keep the debris from cluttering nearby orbit, and made her way through this obstacle course to the far wall where another closed hatch waited to be opened.
She hesitated. Why had no one been here before? Or if they had been here, why had they left the equipment loose behind them and why were the hatches closed? But then, before further doubts could damage her resolve, she reached forward to palm the hatch switch.
The hatch opened. A gush of ice particles rushed past her helmet as moisture from the air within froze instantly. Jessica was glad she had closed the far hatch; the equipment and maybe she herself might have been expelled through it. The segment of station in which she was standing, it was clear now, had been used as an airlock for the room beyond and the debris, as camouflage. In the next section someone had been living. A net-enclosed sleeping niche was in one corner and in another a closet that might house a toilet and perhaps a shower. A water spigot broke the smooth surface of a far wall next to plastic-fronted cupboards stacked with dehydrated food and quick meals, and a microwave.
