by Ben Bova
He finally settled on a high-necked shirt that was almost the same shade of blue as his eyes, and a dark-brown pair of pants. He found slippers in another bin, and even they adjusted their shape magically to fit his feet snugly.
“Hello!”
Linc jumped as if an electric shock sparked through him.
“Hello!” Jerlet’s rough, husky voice called again. “Can you hear me?”
It was coming from a speaker grill in the ceiling, Linc realized. There was a viewing screen on the wall facing the bed, but it was dark and dead.
“Look… I don’t even remember your name, dammit. I, uh, listen son, I got very upset yesterday and I acted like an idiot. I’m sorry.”
Linc saw that there was a small keyboard on the table beside the bed. Frowning, he wondered if he should touch any of the buttons.
“It won’t do you any good to hide from me. You’ll have to come out for food sooner or later,” Jerlet was saying. “And I really want to help you, son. Really I do. The way I acted yesterday… well, I’ll explain it if you’ll give me a chance. At least turn on one of the screens so I can talk to you face to face… what in hell is your name, anyway. I know you told me, but you mentioned all those other names, too, and now I can’t remember… guess I’m getting old.”
Linc stepped across to the table where the keyboard buttons glowed in their different colors. He felt as if his head was spinning; not just from the low gravity, but from the effort to decide what he should do. Slowly, reluctantly, he reached out for the buttons.
“If you want to turn on a screen,” Jerlet was saying, “just punch the red button on any of the keyboards—”
Linc’s outstretched finger touched the red button. Jerlet’s haggard, stubbly face leaped into view on the wall screen across the room.
He was still saying earnestly, “I know I acted like a madman last night, but I can explain… oh, there you are!”
Linc gazed straight into Jerlet’s eyes. They looked sad now. The pain was still there, but it was deeper, covered over by sadness.
“Linc. My name is Linc.”
Jerlet bobbed his head eagerly, making his fleshy jowls bounce. “Yep, that’s right. Linc. You told me, but I couldn’t remember.”
Linc started to reply, but found that he had nothing to say.
Jerlet filled in the silence. “I see you’ve cleaned up and changed clothes. Good! How about meeting me in the autogalley? Got a lot of things to show you.”
“The autogalley?” Linc asked.
“The eating room. Where the food selector is.”
“Oh…. Okay.”
“Do you know how to find it from where you are?” Jerlet asked.
Linc nodded. “I can find it.”
“Okay, good. I’ll meet you there.” The old man seemed genuinely happy.
He was still smiling when he eased his bulk through the doorway of the autogalley and glided toward Linc. He stuck out a heavy, short-fingered hand.
“Linc, I dunno what kind of customs you kids have put together down in the living section, but it’s an old human custom
for two men to shake hands when they meet.”
Thoroughly puzzled. Linc put his hand out.
•Jerlet waggled a finger at him. “No, no… the right hand.”
With a shrug, Linc raised his right hand and let Jerlet grasp it firmly. The old man’s a lot stronger than he looks, he realized.
“Good!” Jerlet beamed. “Now we’re formally met. Got so much to show you.” He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s start with the food selector. Show you how that works.”
They ate well. Jerlet showed Linc all sorts of new foods and tastes that he had never known before. As the food began to make a comfortable warm glow in his middle, Linc found his worries and suspicions about Jerlet melting away.
Then they were up and moving through the nearly weightless world of Jerlet. The old man showed Linc the power generators, the mysterious humming machines that kept electricity going out to all parts of the ship. Then the master computer, with its blinking lights and odd sing-song voices. And a room full of servomechs, standing stiffly at attention, mechanical arms at their sides, sensors turned off.
“Are they dead?” Linc asked, his voice hushed.
“You mean deactivated,” Jerlet replied in his normal booming tone. “Here… look, lemme show you.” He took a tiny control box from a shelf near the door and touched one of the buttons studding its top. The nearest servomech came to life. Its sensors glowed; it pivoted slightly to face Jerlet, moving on noiseless little wheels.
“See?” Jerlet said. “They all work fine.”
Linc shook his head. “Down in the Living Wheel they all died, a long time ago.”
Jerlet snorted. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that.”
He took Linc down the passageway and through a set of double doors into a strange, dead silent room. It felt odd. Linc knew he had never been here before, yet there was a faint odor of something that made his spine tingle and the back of his neck go shuddery. The room was filled with strange glass spheres, long looping tubes, viewscreens, desks, other things of glass and metal and plastic that Linc couldn’t even guess at.
“Genetics lab,” Jerlet said. His voice sounded odd; half-proud, half-sad. “This is where you were born, Linc. You and the others down in the living section.”
“Here?”
Jerlet nodded. “Yep. Took the sperm and ova from those cryofreezers, back behind the radiation shielding over there,” he pointed to a heavy-looking dull metal wall, “and brought the fetuses to term in these plastic capsules. All very carefully done, very scientifically. Each specimen picked for its genetic perfection. Each resulting infant nurtured as meticulously as the psychologists could hope. A generation of physically and mentally perfect children. Geniuses… left to live in an idiotic environment.”
Linc said, “I don’t understand you.”
Jerlet waved his pudgy hands about the laboratory.”! was in charge of the project. I made you. Right here. This is where you were all created. By me.”
(10)
Before Linc could ask any more questions, Jerlet swept him through the genetics lab and back out into the passageway.
“You haven’t seen the best part yet,” he said.
Totally puzzled by everything he’d seen and heard so far. Linc quietly followed the old man through a hatch into a tight little metal room. It felt cold and scary, like a deadlock. Bui even if he’s crazy, he wouldn’t put us both in a deadlock, Linc told himself. And a tiny voice asked back, Would he?
Jerlet’s massive bulk seemed to completely fill the metal chamber. Linc couldn’t breathe.
“Not too comfortable in here with both of us,” the old man muttered as he fingered a complicated row of buttons. “Not very comfy in here by myself, come to think of it.”
The top of the chamber swung open, and Linc realized it was another hatch. Jerlet grinned at him, then pushed against the sides of the chamber and floated up through the overhead hatch. Linc took a deep breath, glad to feel un-squeezed.
“Come on up and see the view!” Jerlet called. His voice suddenly sounded very distant and hollow.
Linc crouched slightly and sprang straight up. He shot through the open hatch and past Jerlet’s floating obesity___
And nearly screamed in terror. He was in the outer darkness! Surrounded by stars and the blackness of the outside where there was no air or warmth or–-
He felt a hand grabbing at his ankle and Jerlet calling, “Hey, whoa, take it easy.” He realized that there was warmth and air to breathe.
Jerlet was chuckling as the two of them floated slowly in the star-flecked darkness. Yet it really wasn’t dark, either. The stars glowed all around them, over their heads, below their feet.
“What is this place?” Linc asked. His voice seemed to float, too, strange and hollow and lost in vast distance.
“Used to bean observatory,” Jerlet’s voice came back toward him, echoing
.
Slowly, Linc’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. They were in a vast round room made almost entirely of glass: transparent plastiglass, actually, although Linc didn’t know that yet. The splendor of the stars surrounded them—stars powdering the blackness of infinity with endless points of light. White stars, blue stars, red stars, yellow stars… stars beyond counting, and even swirls and loops of brightness that glowed with strangely cool blues and pinks.
Linc felt his jaw hanging open as he floated in true weightlessness, hanging in the darkened observatory dome, gaping at the enormity of the universe.
And then he glanced downward, toward where his feet happened to be pointing, and saw the yellow star that was so close. He closed his eyes against its glare, but still its image burned against the inside of his eyelids.
“We’ll be there soon,” Jerlet’s voice sounded near to him.
Linc opened his eyes and saw the old man’s face next to him, haloed by the after-image of the yellow star. “It’s coming to swallow us,” Linc whispered. “It will kill us all in fire.”
Jerlet’s booming laughter surprised Linc. It echoed all around the huge dome.
“You’ve got it just about entirely wrong, son,” the old man said. “The yellow star isn’t coming toward us, we’re heading for it. And it’s not going to kill us—it offers us life. Hope. If we can get to it before this bucket falls completely apart!”
Linc started to say, I don’t understand, but it had become such an overworked Linc that he felt ashamed to use it again.
“C’mon down this way,” Jerlet tugged at his wrist, “and I’ll show you something.”
They swam weightlessly through empty air down to a patch of shadows that were deeper than the darkness of the rest of the dome. A spidery framework took shape as they approached, and Jerlet reached out a practiced hand for it.
“Careful,” he said to Linc. “Slow your speed or you’ll hurt yourself when you hit the deck. Just ‘cause you’ve got no weight doesn’t mean you’ve got no inertia.”
He can never say more than three words in a row that make sense. Linc thought. He always uses words I never heard before.
The deck was made of cold metal, and Linc could see that several desks and odd-looking instruments were attached to it. The biggest loomed far over their heads; the cylinder of metal struts that Jerlet had grabbed a few moments earlier.
“Telescopes,” Jerlet said. “Devil’s own time keeping them aligned right. Our closing rate is outrunning the old computer program and I haven’t figured out how to update it. Gyros must be wearing out, too.”
Linc shook his head and said nothing.
Jerlet squeezed his soft body into a seat behind one of the desks. “Take a look at this screen,” he said as he touched some buttons on the desk top. Linc noticed that the desk top seemed to be nothing but buttons, row upon row of them.
The screen lit up and showed a fiery yellow ball that seethed and shimmered and shot out tongues of what could only be pure fire.
“That’s the yellow sun we’re heading for,” Jerlet said. “I tried for years to find out if the old generations had a name for it, but the tapes don’t have their star catalogues on ‘em. Not anymore, anyway. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right tape— Anyway, I’ve named it Baryta, in honor of its color and in memory of my long-lost education in chemistry. That’s the name for our star: Baryta.”
A tiny voice inside Linc’s head began to whisper, He’s sounding crazy again.
Linc watched Jerlet’s face. The slanting light from the yellow star threw weird long shadows across his stubbly jowls and strongly-hooked nose. The creases under his eyes and around his mouth became deeply-shadowed crevasses. The glow from the little viewscreen .where the blazing star smoldered wasn’t enough to penetrate the shadows.
“Now my frightened-looking friend,” Jerlet smiled up at Linc, “take a look at this___”
H e touched another set of buttons, and the screen went blank for a moment, then showed a picture of a bluish-green circle. It was flecked with white spots. It seemed to be hanging in outer darkness, because all around it was nothing but black.
“The new world.” Jerlet’s voice was barely audible now, a low rumble of hope and awe. “It’s a planet, Linc. A world that orbits around Baryta. I call it Beryl. It’s the destination that this ship has been heading for, for who knows how many generations.”
“A… world?”
“An open, beautiful, free world, Linc. With good air and clean water and more room than any of us could even imagine. Like the old Earth, except better: cleaner, freer, newer. It’s our destination, Linc. Our new home. That’s where we’re going!”
Slowly, Linc began to learn.
With Jerlet as a teacher, and the ship’s computer and memory tapes to help, Linc began to understand the who, the how, and the why of life.
The ship was incredibly old, so old that no one—not even the computer and its memory tapes—knew how long it had been sailing through space. Linc saw that the Living Wheel, the section where he had lived all his life, was actually the outermost wheel in a series of twenty concentric circular structures. The tube-tunnels linked them together like spokes that radiated outward from the central hub. The hub was Jerlet’s domain, permanently weightless. The Living Wheel, turning endlessly on the widest arc of all the twenty wheels, was in a one g, Earth-normal gravitational condition.
The origins of the ship were shrouded in mystery, but the computer tapes made it clear that the ship’s oldest generation was forced to leave Earth, sent away to roam the stars against their will. Watching the men and women who spoke from the computer’s viewscreen, Linc saw that they regarded the Earth as evil and corrupt.
But when the history tapes showed pictures of Earth on the viewscreens, the pangs of ancient memories twisted inside Linc and made tears flow. All the old stories he had seen as a child, before the machines had died down in the Living Wheel: open skies of blue, bright soft clouds of purest white, mountains with snow on their shoulders, streams of clear water, grass and farms and forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. Cities that gleamed in the sunlight and sparkled at night. And people!
People of all ages, all sizes, all colors. By the uncountable multitudes. People everywhere.
Not everything he saw of Earth was good. There, was sickness. There was death. There was violence that turned-Linc’s stomach—gangs beating people on city streets, strange machines that spewed fire, people lying dead and twisted on the streets.
Now I know why Jerlet warned us against violence. Linc told himself.
But even at its worst, it was clear to see that Earth was a beautfiul world. It made the cold metal walls of the ship seem like a prison to Linc.
“Beryl’s a planet that’s very much like Earth,” Jerlet said one evening as they watched the ancient tapes together. The viewscreen was showing a broad grassland with strange, long-tailed beasts thudding across the landscape on hooved slim legs. “It’ll be even better than Earth. U ntouched. Our new world. Our new Eden.”
“When will we get there?” Linc asked.
“Not when, son… if.”
As Linc learned more of the history of the ship, he soon realized how badly the machines had fallen apart. Here in Jerlet’s domain everything worked well, but that was only one tiny section of the vast ship. Most of the other sections were shattered, ruined, decayed beyond all hope of repair.
“Some of the machines are still working down in the Living Wheel,” he told Jerlet.
“I know,” the old man said. “We spent the best years and the best people we had among us to set you kids up in a strong, safe area. But it might not have been good enough. We’re in a race against time.”
Again and again Jerlet told him the story. How the ship had come to a planet almost like Earth. How the people aboard had decided not to stop there, but to look for a world that was exactly like Earth.
“Beryl is that world… but it might be too late for you kids. It’s
already too late for me.”
Jerlet explained it all. Time after time. He kept talking about the ship’s bridge, and how important it was to make the
machines there work again. Slowly Linc began to realize that he was speaking of the Ghost Place, and the “ghosts” were Jerlet’s friends and companions who had been killed in some terrible accident.
The old man taught Linc how to read and count, how to work the computers, how to understand the strange words that were needed to run the ship. And every night, during dinner and far into the night, until Linc nodded and fell asleep, Jerlet would tell his own story.
