In the psychic mode . . . Lorimer surfaces back to his real self, cocooned in Gloria’s big cluttered cabin, seeing Connie’s living face. “It must be hours, how long has he been dreaming?”
“About two minutes,” Connie smiles.
“I was thinking of the first time I saw you.”
“Oh, yes. We’ll never forget that, ever.”
Nor will he. . . . He lets it unroll again in his head. The interminable hours after the first long burn, which has sent Sunbird yawing so they all have to gulp nausea pills. Judy’s breathless voice reading down their approach: “Oh, very good, four hundred thousand . . . Oh, great, Sunbird, you’re almost three, you’re going to break a hundred for sure—” Dave has done it, the big one.
Lorimer’s probe is useless in the yaw, it isn’t until they stabilize enough for the final burst that they can see the strange blip bloom and vanish in the slot. Converging, hopefully, on a theoretical near-intersection point.
“Here goes everything.”
The final burn changes the yaw into a sickening tumble with the star field looping past the glass. The pills are no more use, and the fuel feed to the attitude jets goes sour. They are all vomiting before they manage to hand-pump the last of the fuel and slow the tumble.
“That’s it, Gloria. Come and get us. Lights on, Bud. Let’s get those suits up.”
Fighting nausea, they go through the laborious routine in the fouled cabin. Suddenly Judy’s voice sings out, “We see you, Sunbird! We see your light! Can’t you see us?”
“No time,” Dave says. But Bud, half-suited, points at the window. “Fellas, oh, hey, look at that.”
Lorimer stares, thinks he sees a faint spark between the whirling stars before he has to retch.
“Father, we thank you,” says Dave quietly. “All right, move it on, Doc. Packs.”
The effort of getting themselves plus the propulsion units and a couple of cargo nets out of the rolling ship drives everything else out of mind. It isn’t until they are floating linked together and stabilized by Dave’s hand jet that Lorimer has time to look.
The sun blanks out their left. A few meters below them Sunbird tumbles empty, looking absurdly small. Ahead of them, infinitely far away, is a point too blurred and yellow to be a star. It creeps: Gloria, on her approach tangent.
“Can you start, Sunbird?” says Judy in their helmets. “We don’t want to brake anymore on account of our exhaust. We estimate fifty kay in an hour, we’re coming out on a line.”
“Roger. Give me your jet, Doc.”
“Good-bye, Sunbird,” says Bud. “Plenty of lead, Dave-o.”
Lorimer finds it restful in a childish way, being towed across the abyss tied to the two big men. He has total confidence in Dave, he never considers the possibility that they will miss, sail by, and be lost. Does Dave feel contempt? Lorimer wonders; that banked-up silence, is it partly contempt for those who can manipulate only symbols, who have no mastery of matter? . . . He concentrates on mastering his stomach.
It is a long, dark trip. Sunbird shrinks to a twinkling light, slowly accelerating on the spiral course that will end her ultimately in the sun with their precious records that are three hundred years obsolete. With, also, the packet of photos and letters that Lorimer has twice put in his suit-pouch and twice taken out. Now and then he catches sight of Gloria, growing from a blur to an incomprehensible tangle of lighted crescents.
“Woo-ee, it’s big,” Bud says. “No wonder they can’t accelerate, that thing is a flying trailer park. It’d break up.”
“It’s a spaceship. Got those nets tight, Doc?”
Judy’s voice suddenly fills their helmets. “I see your lights! Can you see me? Will you have enough left to brake at all?”
“Affirmative to both, Gloria,” says Dave.
At that moment Lorimer is turned slowly forward again and he sees—will see it forever: the alien ship in the star field and on its dark side the tiny lights that are women in the stars, waiting for them. Three—no, four; one suit-light is way out, moving. If that is a tether, it must be over a kilometer.
“Hello, I’m Judy Dakar!” The voice is close. “Oh, mother, you’re big! Are you all right? How’s your air?”
“No problem.”
They are in fact stale and steaming wet; too much adrenaline. Dave uses the jets again and suddenly she is growing, is coming right at them, a silvery spider on a trailing thread. Her suit looks trim and flexible; it is mirror-bright, and the pack is quite small. Marvels of the future, Lorimer thinks; Paragraph One.
“You made it, you made it! Here, tie in. Brake!”
“There ought to be some historic words,” Bud murmurs. “If she gives us a chance.”
“Hello, Judy,” says Dave calmly. “Thanks for coming.”
“Contact!” She blasts their ears. “Haul us in, Andy! Brake, brake—the exhaust is back there!”
And they are grabbed hard, deflected into a great arc toward the ship. Dave uses up the last jet. The line loops.
“Don’t jerk it,” Judy cries. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She is clinging on them like a gibbon, Lorimer can see her eyes, her excited mouth. Incredible. “Watch out, it’s slack.”
“Teach me, honey,” says Andy’s baritone. Lorimer twists and sees him far back at the end of a heavy tether, hauling them smoothly in. Bud offers to help, is refused. “Just hang loose, please,” a matronly voice tells them. It is obvious Andy has done this before. They come in spinning slowly, like space fish. Lorimer finds he can no longer pick out the twinkle that is Sunbird. When he is swung back, Gloria has changed to a disorderly cluster of bulbs and spokes around a big central cylinder. He can see pods and miscellaneous equipment stowed all over her. Not like science fiction.
Andy is paying the line into a floating coil. Another figure floats beside him. They are both quite short, Lorimer realizes as they near.
“Catch the cable,” Andy tells them. There is a busy moment of shifting inertial drag.
“Welcome to Gloria, Major Davis, Captain Geirr, Dr. Lorimer. I’m Lady Blue Parks. I think you’ll like to get inside as soon as possible. If you feel like climbing go right ahead, we’ll pull all this in later.”
“We appreciate it, ma’am.”
They start hand-over-hand along the catenary of the main tether. It has a good rough grip. Judy coasts up to peer at them, smiling broadly, towing the coil. A taller figure waits by the ship’s open airlock.
“Hello, I’m Connie. I think we can cycle in two at a time. Will you come with me, Major Davis?”
It is like an emergency on a plane, Lorimer thinks, as Dave follows her in. Being ordered about by supernaturally polite little girls.
“Space-going stews,” Bud nudges him. “How ‘bout that?” His face is sprouting sweat. Lorimer tells him to go next, his own LSP has less load.
Bud goes in with Andy. The woman named Lady Blue waits beside Lorimer while Judy scrambles on the hull securing their cargo nets. She doesn’t seem to have magnetic soles; perhaps ferrous metals aren’t used in space now. When Judy begins hauling in the main tether on a simple hand winch, Lady Blue looks at it critically.
“I used to make those,” she says to Lorimer. What he can see of her features looks compressed, her dark eyes twinkle. He has the impression she is part black.
“I ought to get over and clean that aft antenna.” Judy floats up. “Later,” says Lady Blue. They both smile at Lorimer. Then the hatch opens, and he and Lady Blue go in. When the toggles seat, there comes a rising scream of air and Lorimer’s suit collapses.
“Can I help you?” She has opened her faceplate, the voice is rich and live. Eagerly Lorimer catches the latches in his clumsy gloves and lets her lift the helmet off. His first breath surprises him, it takes an instant to identify the gas as fresh air. Then the inner hatch opens, letting in greenish light. She waves him through. He swims into a short tunnel. Voices are coming from around the corner ahead. His hand finds a grip and he stops, feeling his heart shudder in his chest
.
When he turns that corner the world he knows will be dead. Gone, rolled up, blown away forever with Sunbird. He will be irrevocably in the future. A man from the past, a time traveler. In the future . . .
He pulls himself around the bend.
The future is a vast bright cylinder, its whole inner surface festooned with unidentifiable objects, fronds of green. In front of him floats an odd tableau: Bud and Dave, helmets off, looking enormous in their bulky white suits and packs. A few meters away hang two bareheaded figures in shiny suits and a dark-haired girl in flowing pink pajamas.
They are all simply staring at the two men, their eyes and mouths open in identical expressions of pleased wonder. The face that has to be Andy’s is grinning openmouthed like a kid at the zoo. He is a surprisingly young boy, Lorimer sees, in spite of his deep voice; blond, downy-cheeked, compactly muscular. Lorimer finds he can scarcely bear to look at the pink woman, can’t tell if she really is surpassingly beautiful or plain. The taller suited woman has a shiny, ordinary face.
From overhead bursts an extraordinary sound which he finally recognizes as a chicken cackling. Lady Blue pushes past him.
“All right, Andy, Connie, stop staring and help them get their suits off. Judy, Luna is just as eager to hear about this as we are.”
The tableau jumps to life. Afterward Lorimer can recall mostly eyes, bright curious eyes tugging his boots, smiling eyes upside down over his pack—and always that light, ready laughter. Andy is left alone to help them peel down, blinking at the fittings which Lorimer still finds embarrassing. He seems easy and nimble in his own half-open suit. Lorimer struggles out of the last lacings, thinking, a boy! A boy and four women orbiting the sun, flying their big junky ships to Mars. Should he feel humiliated? He only feels grateful, accepting a short robe and a bulb of tea somebody—Connie?—gives him.
The suited Judy comes in with their nets. The men follow Andy along another passage, Bud and Dave clutching at the small robes. Andy stops by a hatch.
“This greenhouse is for you, it’s your toilet. Three’s a lot, but you have full sun.”
Inside is a brilliant jungle, foliage everywhere, glittering water droplets, rustling leaves. Something whirs away—a grasshopper.
“You crank that handle.” Andy points to a seat on a large cross-duct. “The piston rams the gravel and waste into a compost process, and it ends up in the soil core. That vetch is a heavy nitrogen user and a great oxidator. We pump CO2 in and oxy out. It’s a real Woolagong.”
He watches critically while Bud tries out the facility.
“What’s a Woolagong?” asks Lorimer dazedly.
“Oh, she’s one of our inventors. Some of her stuff is weird. When we have a pluggy-looking thing that works, we call it a Woolagong.” He grins. “The chickens eat the seeds and the hoppers, see, and the hoppers and iguanas eat the leaves. When a greenhouse is going darkside, we turn them in to harvest. With this much light I think we could keep a goat, don’t you? You didn’t have any life at all on your ship, true?”
“No,” Lorimer says, “not a single iguana.”
“They promised us a Shetland pony for Christmas,” says Bud, rattling gravel. Andy joins perplexedly in the laugh.
Lorimer’s head is foggy; it isn’t only fatigue, the year in Sunbird has atrophied his ability to take in novelty. Numbly he uses the Woolagong, and they go back out and forward to Gloria’s big control room, where Dave makes a neat short speech to Luna and is answered graciously.
“We have to finish changing course now,” Lady Blue says. Lorimer’s impression has been right, she is a small light part-Negro in late middle age. Connie is part something exotic too, he sees; the others are European types.
“I’ll get you something to eat,” Connie smiles warmly. “Then you probably want to rest. We saved all the cubbies for you.” She says “syved”; their accents are all identical.
As they leave the control room, Lorimer sees the withdrawn look in Dave’s eyes and knows he must be feeling the reality of being a passenger in an alien ship; not in command, not deciding the course, the communications going on unheard.
That is Lorimer’s last coherent observation, that and the taste of the strange, good food. And then being led aft through what he now knows is the gym, to the shaft of the sleeping drum. There are six irised ports like dog-doors; he pushes through his assigned port and finds himself facing a roomy mattress. Shelves and a desk are in the wall.
“For your excretions.” Connie’s arm comes through the iris, pointing at bags. “If you have a problem stick your head out and call. There’s water.”
Lorimer simply drifts toward the mattress, too sweated out to reply. His drifting ends in a curious heavy settling and his final astonishment: the drum is smoothly, silently starting to revolve. He sinks gratefully onto the pad, growing “heavier” as the minutes pass. About a tenth gee, maybe more, he thinks, it’s still accelerating. And falls into the most restful sleep he has known in the long weary year.
It isn’t till next day that he understands that Connie and two others have been on the rungs of the gym chamber, sending it around hour after hour without pause or effort and chatting as they went.
How they talk, he thinks again, floating back to real present time. The bubbling irritant pours through his memory, the voices of Ginny and Jenny and Penny on the kitchen telephone, before that his mother’s voice, his sister Amy’s. Interminable. What do they always have to talk, talk, talk of?
“Why, everything,” says the real voice of Connie beside him now, “it’s natural to share.”
“Natural . . .” Like ants, he thinks. They twiddle their antennae together every time they meet. Where did you go, what did you do? Twiddle-twiddle. How to you feel? Oh, I feel this, I feel that, blah blah twiddle-twiddle. Total coordination of the hive. Women have no self-respect. Say anything, no sense of the strategy of words, the dark danger of naming. Can’t hold in.
“Ants, beehives,” Connie laughs, showing the bad tooth. “You truly see us as insects, don’t you? Because they’re females?”
“Was I talking aloud? I’m sorry.” He blinks away dreams.
“Oh, please don’t be. It’s so sad to hear about your sister and your children and your, your wife. They must have been wonderful people. We think you’re very brave.”
But he has only thought of Ginny and them all for an instant—what has he been babbling? What is the drug doing to him?
“What are you doing to us?” he demands, lanced by real alarm now, almost angry.
“It’s all right, truly.” Her hand touches his, warm and somehow shy. “We all use it when we need to explore something. Usually it’s pleasant. It’s a laevonoramine compound, a disinhibitor, it doesn’t dull you like alcohol. We’ll be home so soon, you see. We have the responsibility to understand, and you’re so locked in.” Her eyes melt at him. “You don’t feel sick, do you? We have the antidote.”
“No . . .” His alarm has already flowed away somewhere. Her explanation strikes him as reasonable enough. “We’re not locked in,” he says or tries to say. “We talk. . . .” He gropes for a word to convey the judiciousness, the adult restraint. Objectivity, maybe? “We talk when we have something to say.” Irrelevantly he thinks of a mission coordinator named Forrest, famous for his blue jokes. “Otherwise it would all break down,” he tells her. “You’d fly right out of the system.” That isn’t quite what he means; let it pass.
The voices of Dave and Bud ring out suddenly from opposite ends of the cabin, awakening the foreboding of evil in his mind. They don’t know us, he thinks. They should look out, stop this. But he is feeling too serene, he wants to think about his own new understanding, the pattern of them all he is seeing at last.
“I feel lucid,” he manages to say, “I want to think.”
She looks pleased. “We call that the ataraxia effect. It’s so nice when it goes that way.”
Ataraxia, philosophical calm. Yes. But there are monsters in the deep, he thinks or sa
ys. The night side. The night side of Orren Lorimer, a self hotly dark and complex, waiting in leash. They’re so vulnerable. They don’t know we can take them. Images rush up: a Judy spread-eagled on the gym rungs, pink pajamas gone, open to him. Flash sequence of the three of them taking over the ship, the women tied up, helpless, shrieking, raped, and used. The team—get the satellite station, get a shuttle down to Earth. Hostages. Make them do anything, no defense whatever. . . . Has Bud actually said that? But Bud doesn’t know, he remembers. Dave knows they’re hiding something, but he thinks it’s socialism or sin. When they find out. . . .
How has he himself found out? Simply listening, really, all these months. He listens to their talk much more than the others; “fraternizing,” Dave calls it. . . . They all listened at first, of course. Listened and looked and reacted helplessly to the female bodies, the tender bulges so close under the thin, tantalizing clothes, the magnetic mouths and eyes, the smell of them, their electric touch. Watching them touch each other, touch Andy, laughing, vanishing quietly into shared bunks. What goes on? Can I? My need, my need—
The power of them, the fierce resentment . . . Bud muttered and groaned meaningfully despite Dave’s warnings. He kept needling Andy until Dave banned all questions. Dave himself was noticeably tense and read his Bible a great deal. Lorimer found his own body pointing after them like a famished hound, hoping to Christ the cubicles are as they appeared to be, unwired.
All they learn is that Myda’s instructions must have been ferocious. The atmosphere has been implacably antiseptic, the discretion impenetrable. Andy politely ignored every probe. No word or act has told them what, if anything, goes on; Lorimer was irresistibly reminded of the weekend he spent at Jenny’s scout camp. The men’s training came presently to their rescue, and they resigned themselves to finishing their mission on a super-Sunbird, weirdly attended by a troop of boy and girl scouts.
In every other way their reception couldn’t be more courteous. They have been given the run of the ship and their own dayroom in a cleaned-out gravel storage pod. They visit the control room as they wish. Lady Blue and Andy give them specs and manuals and show them every circuit and device of Gloria, inside and out. Luna has bleeped up a stream of science texts and the data on all their satellites and shuttles and the Mars and Luna dome colonies.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 24
