by Ben Bova
The view abruptly changed to show an ancient city on old Earth. And Jerlet said, “I’m not sure which city this is, but it doesn’t make much difference. They all got to be pretty much the same–-” The crowds and noise were overwhelming. The sky was dark and somehow dirty-looking. Millions of people and vehicles snarled at each other along the city’s passageways.
Then the scene shifted to show mountains, rivers, oceans of pounding surf. And Jerlet’s voice continued:
“This is the world of our origin, where our ancestors came from, where this ship came from. It was a good world, long ago. But it turned rotten. Our ancestors fled in this ship… seems they were driven away by evil people, although they were glad enough to leave Earth; it had gone sour. They came out to the stars to find a new world where they could live in happiness and peace.”
The scene changed abruptly once again, showing a telescopic view of Beryl.
“This is the new world,” Jerlet said. “We can reach it, if we’re lucky. But there’s a lot of work ahead of us if we’re going to make it there safely___”
Linc left his helmet and gloves on the bunk and strode out toward the meeting room.
(15)
For a moment, Linc felt silly as he approached the library, clumping along the corridor in the bright-blue pressure suit. He hadn’t even bothered to take off the backpack. Only his gloves and helmet were missing.
But then he thought, I’ll need every bit of impact lean get. If the suit impresses them, so much the better.
He checked to see if the handwelder’s power Linc was connected to the suit’s electrical system. It was.
If Monel tries to send his guards at me, I’ll burn the wheels off his chair.
He paused at the double doors of the library. Peering through the discolored windows he could see that everyone in the room— including Magda—was sitting with their eyes riveted to the big wall screen. Quietly, Linc pushed one of the doors open and slipped inside.
The screen was showing engineering drawings of the ship. Specific areas were outLincd with pulsing yellow circles, as Jerlet’s voice commanded:
“The key to the whole damned thing is the bridge. That’s where the astrogation computer and all the necessary instruments are. Can’t start making course corrections until you know exactly where you are in relation to Baryta and Beryl. And I mean exactly. Laser wavelength accuracies, son.”
Linc smiled to himself. In his mind’s eye he could see the old man’s shambling figure, bloated and almost grotesque, and the intense glitter in his eyes as he tried to get his points across to Linc. Hard to think of him as dead. Linc said to himself. But it was still harder to understand how he could be frozen, like the ghosts on the bridge, and yet someday be brought back to life.
“The rocket engines ought to be all right; we checked them and repaired them back when you pups were being hatched,” Jerlet’s voice rumbled on. The screen showed red arrows where the thrusters were located. “You’ll have to make sure all the connections are still in place, so when the computer orders a burn the thrusters get the info. That’ll mean some outside work___”
The pictures went on, with Jerlet’s unmistakable voice explaining them, until they ended with another view of Beryl.
“That’s the new world, Linc,” the old man rasped. “Your world. Yours and the rest of the kids’. It’s up to you, son. You’ve got to get them there safely. It’s all up to you.”
The wall screen went blank.
No one in the room moved. They all kept staring at the screen,’ open-mouthed with awe.
“I intend to follow Jerlet’s command,” Linc said as loudly and strongly as he could.
They whipped around to see him. Magda’s hands flew to her face. A girl screamed. Monel sagged in his chair.
Slowly, deliberately, Linc walked through the shocked people sitting on the floor, up to the pedestal where Magda reigned.
He turned to face the people. “I’m not dead, as you can see. And I’m not afraid to face you. I’ve been with Jerlet, and he sent me back here to help us get to the new world.”
Jayna was sitting up front, her face glowing. No one spoke; the crowd hardly breathed.
Linc went on, “You all saw the pictures on the screen. There’s a new world waiting for us. A world that’s open and free. A world where we won’t have to worry about warmth or food or anything else.”
“Is it… is it really true?” someone in the crowd asked.
“Can it be really true?”
“It’s real,” Linc said. “I’ve seen it myself. The new world really exists. Its name is Beryl. Jerlet named it.”
“And we’re going there?”
“We can get there—but only if we fix the machines.”
“That’s forbidden!” Monel snapped.
A few people muttered agreement with him.
“Not anymore,” Linc said. “Jerlet forbade us from touching machinery while we were children, and too young to understand what we were doing. Now he wants us to fix the machines and save ourselves from death.”
Monel pushed his chair up toward Linc. “How do we know that was really Jerlet speaking to us? We didn’t see his face. And you said Jerlet is dead.”
A shocked murmur went through the crowd.
“He is dead, but he will come back to life someday. He left those words and pictures for us, to teach us, to show us what we’ve got to do.”
“Why didn’t he speak to us directly?” someone asked.
Monel added, “And all this talk about fixing the machines in the bridge. That’s the Ghost Place! How can Jerlet expect anyone to go there? It’s a place of death.”
“I was there a little while ago, and I’m not dead.”
They actually drew back away from him. Monet’s chair seemed to roll backward a few centimeters all by itself. The crowd sucked in its breath in a collective gasp of surprise and fear.
“I’m telling you,” Linc shouted to them, “that all this fear of the machines is stupid! Do you know what Jerlet thought of us? He called us superstitious idiots! He was ashamed of us!”
They muttered. They shook their heads.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Monel demanded. “Just because you say you’ve been with Jerlet, and you say you’ve been to the Ghost Place___”
Linc found that he had the welding laser in his hand. Its smooth grip felt good against his palm. His fingers tightened over it.
“This suit I got from Jerlet. None of you has ever seen anything like it, have you?”
A mumbled “No.”
“And this…” he held up the welder so that they could all see it, “I took from the bridge—the Ghost Place. Watch.”
He turned to one of the few ragged books Jeft on the shelves and pulled the laser’s trigger. A pencil-thin beam of red light leaped out. The book burst into flames.
The people oohed.
Linc eased off the trigger. He waved the laser in the general direction of one of Monel’s guards. “Put the fire out before it causes some real damage,” he ordered. The fellow hesitated a moment, then went over and smothered the smoldering book with a rag he pulled from his pocket.
“I have been with Jerlet,” Linc repeated to thecrowd. “I have been to the Ghost Place. Your fears are silly. It’s time for us to stop acting like children and start doing what’s needed to save ourselves and reach the new world.”
“No.”
Linc turned. It was Magda.
“You are wrong,” she said. “Misguided. You may honestly think that you’re doing Jerlet’s work, but you are wrong.”
“I lived with him!”
Magda’s face was a mask of steel. “There is no proof. You tell us that Jerlet is dead, yet will live again. You say that Jerlet spoke the words we heard from the screen, yet he didn’t show himself to us. You tell us to fix the machines, yet we have Jerlet’s own words warning us that we mustn’t touch the machines.”
And she pressed the yellow button on the pedestal w
here she sat.
The wall screen glowed again, and now Jerlet’s face appeared. Linc knew that it was the younger Jerlet, speaking to them when they had been only children.
“I’ve tried to set you kids up as well as possible,” the tape began as it always began.
Linc watched the screen in sullen rage as the old tape unwound its familiar message. How can I get it through their skulls? he fumed at himself. How can I make them see?
“Now remember,” Jerlet was saying, “all the rules I’ve set down. They’re for your own safety. Especially, don’t mess around with the machines….”
Magda turned from the wall screen to Linc. “That is Jerlet,” she said. “He still lives. He speaks to us when the priestess summons him.” Her mouth was tight and hard; her eyes burning with—what? Is it fear? Or pain? Or hate?
As Jerlet droned on, Magda raised a hand to point at Linc. “What you’ve told us is false!”
The laser was back in Linc’s hand. Without even thinking of it, he fired at the screen. It exploded in a shower of sparks and plastic shards. The crowd screamed.
“You’re wrong!” he shouted at them, waving the laser. “Superstitious idiots… Jerlet was right. Well, I’m going to the bridge. I’m going to repair those machines. By myself, if I have to. And don’t any of you .try to stop me!”
No one moved as he stomped out of the meeting room. Either to stop him or to help him.
(16)
Linc slammed the welder on the desk top in fury.
He was standing in front of the bridge’s main data screen. The access panels of the computer behind the screen were open, and the computer’s complex innards stood bare and revealed to him. They were a heartbreakingly hopeless mess. Something had smashed the plastic circuit chips, melted the metal tracings of the circuit boards, vaporized the eyelash-small transistors.
Hopeless, Linc told himself.
Two servomechs stood impassively behind him, waist-high cubes of metal with little domes of sensors atop them and tiny silent wheels underneath. Their mechanical arms hung uselessly at their sides. They couldn’t handle this kind of work, although they had been invaluable to Linc on many other jobs.
He still remembered how everyone in the corridors had fled in terror when the first few servomechs came through the tube-tunnel hatch and into the main passageway, trundling quietly and purposefully toward the bridge, under Linc’s radio command.
Now I’ll have to send one of them all the way back to the hub for more spare parts. Linc told himself. In the past months, more than one servomech had failed to make it all the way through the tube-tunnels and back again.
Linc frowned. “Well,” he said to the nearest of the little machines, “you’re just going to have to try to get through. I hope there are enough replacement parts left in the storage bins.”
For months now Linc had had no one to talk to except the servomechs. They weren’t very good company.
He programmed the servomech and it obediently rolled out to the hatch, snaked a flexible arm up to the control button, and let itself out of the bridge.
Linc arched his back tiredly. The bridge’s main observation viewscreen was focused on Baryta. The yellow sun was no longer merely a bright star; it showed a discernible disk. Even through the filtered screen display, it was bright enough to hurt Linc’s eyes. Close beside hung a bluish star: Beryl itself was now visible.
But no one came from the people to tell him that they saw Beryl, and that they now believed him.
“Let them meditate and frighten themselves to death,” Linc muttered as he walked tiredly toward the room he had made the servomechs fix up for him. His voice sounded harsh and strained; he hadn’t used it too much lately.
Starting to sound as ragged as Jerlet, he said to himself.
He glanced at the airtight hatch that let to the passageway as he walked down the long, curving length of the bridge. Once in a while he thought he saw someone peering through the tiny window at him, watching him. “Imagination,” he snorted. “You want them to come to you, so you imagine seeing faces. Next thing you know, you’ll start imagining the ghosts are real.”
They had seen the ghosts, all right. When the servomechs, led by Linc, carried the long-dead crew to the deadlock, the people had watched, aghast. No one offered to help. After the first few shocked moments of watching, they had all run into their rooms and shut their doors tightly.
The window in the hatch was dark, as usual, when he looked at___
There was a face there!
Linc stopped in his tracks. He blinked. The face was there, staring at him. The window was too clouded to make out who it was. A hint of yellow hair, that’s all he could see.
After a moment’s hesitation, Linc stepped over to the hatch. The face didn’t go away.
He reached for the hatch’s lever and pulled it open. Jayna stood on the other side, an odd-shaped package in her hands.
“H … hello,” Linc said, his voice nearly cracking.
She stood wide-eyed, frightened looking. But she didn’t run away.
“I brought you some food.” Jayna’s voice was high and trembly.
She looks so scared. Linc Thought. Scared and little and helpless. And awfully pretty.
“Thanks,” he said, reaching out for the package.
“I’ve been here before, but you never noticed me.”
“You should have rapped on the hatch.”
“Oh no… I didn’t want to… to bother you,” she said.
“I would have welcomed some company. It’s been pretty lonesome in here all by myself. Nothing to talk to except machines, and they don’t talk back.”
“Oh.”
They stood awkwardly facing each other, on either side of the hatch’s metal lip.
“Want to come in and see what I’m doing?” Linc asked.
An even deeper fear flickered across her face.
“It’s all right,” he said, smiling. “I’ve cleared away the ghosts and cleaned up the place.” He reached his freehand out for her.
She hesitated a second, then took his hand. Her grasp felt warm and wonderful to Linc.
She stepped inside and Linc swung the hatch shut.
“Do Monel or Magda know you’ve come here?”
Shaking her head, Jayna answered, “No. But I don’t care if they do. They’re going crazy, all of them. Every time we see the yellow star it’s closer and hotter. But they say if we work harder and meditate longer it’ll go away. But it’s not!”
Smiling grimly, Linc said, “It better not. It’s our chance for life. Has anybody noticed the little blue star beside it?”
“Yes…a few. Monel claims it’s not there. He says it’s a trick, to fool us.”
“Hmp. That ‘trick’ is Beryl. Our new homework!, if we can reach it.” He walked slowly back to the row of desks that Lincd the far wall of the bridge’s length, and placed the food package down.
“A trick, huh? And who’s playing this trick on everybody? Has Monel blamed anybody for it?”
Nodding, “Yes…. You.”
Linc nodded back. “I thought so.”
He showed Jayna the bridge, showed how many of the instruments and sensors he had already repaired. She watched in silent wonder as Linc made views of Beryl appear on the viewing screens that Lincd the bridge’s curving length.
“The sensors are starting to bring us information on how far away we are, and what changes in our course we need to make to get to the new world,” he explained to her. But it’s all useless if I can’t get the astrogation computer working, he added silently.
Linc showed the girl where he and the servomechs had repaired the hole in the ship’s hull, and how he had fitted out the room next to the bridge—the captain’s lounge, he had learned from the computer plans—for his own comfort. He kept the servomechs still while Jayna was near them; he didn’t want to frighten her with machines that rolled around the floor and blinked lights and used mechanical arms.
She was silent all
through the tour. Finally she said, “It’s all wonderful! Linc, what you’ve done is wonderful! You’re wonderful!”
“You’re not frightened of me now?”
“No.” She was looking up at him with those large, sweet blue eyes. “I was scared when I came in… I only meant to bring you some food. I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to really come inside.”
“There’s nothing here to be frightened of.”
She stepped close to him. “I know that… now.” His arms circled around her automatically.
