Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

  If you go up on your roof on a dear night, the stars look so plentiful you would think that planets very much like Earth must he as common as eggs in a hen yard. Well, they are: Harry estimates that there arc between a hundred thousand and a hundred million of them in our own Milky Way—and you can multiply that figure by anything you like for the whole universe.

  The hitch is that they aren’t conveniently at hand. Tau Ceti was only eleven light-years from Earth; most stars in our own Galaxy average more like fifty thousand light-years from Earth. Even the Long Range Foundation did not think in those terms; unless a star was within a hundred light-years or so it was silly to think of colonizing it even with torchships. Sure, a torchship can go as far as necessary, even across the Galaxy—but who is going to he interested in receiving its real estate reports after a couple of ice ages have come and gone? The population problem would he solved one way or another long before then…maybe the way the Kilkenny cats solved theirs.

  But there are only fifteen-hundred-odd stars within a hundred light-years of Earth and only about a hundred and sixty of these are of the same general spectral type as the Sun. Project Lebensraum hoped to check not more than half of these, say seventy-five at the outside—less since we had lost the Vasco da Gama.

  If even one real Earth-type planet was turned up in the search, the project would pay off. But there was no certainty that it would. A Sol-type star might not have an Earth-type planet; a planet might be too close to the fire, or too far, or too small to hold an atmosphere, or too heavy for humanity’s fallen arches, or just too short on the H20 that figures into everything we do.

  Or it might be populated by some rough characters with notions about finders-keepers.

  The Vasco da Gama had had the best chance to find the first Earth-type planet as the star she had been beading for, Alpha Centauri Able, is the only star in this part of the world which really is a twin of the Sun. (Able’s companion, Alpha Centauri Baker, is a different sort, spectral type K.) We had the next best chance, even though Tau Ceti is less like the Sun than is Alpha Centauri-B, for the next closest G-type is about thirteen light years from Earth…which gave us a two-year edge over the Magellan and nearly four over the Nautilus.

  Provided we found anything, that is. You can imagine how jubilant we were when Tau Ceti turned out to have pay dirt.

  Harry was jubilant, too, but for the wrong reasons. I had wandered into the observatory, hoping to get a sight of the sky—one of the Elsie’s shortcomings was that it was almost impossible to see out—when he grabbed me and said, “Look at this, pal!”

  I looked at it. It was a sheet of paper with figures on it; it could have been Mama O’Toole’s crop-rotation schedule.

  “What is it?”

  “Can’t you read? It’s Bodes Law, that’s what it is!”

  I thought back. Let me see…no, that was Ohm’s Law—then I remembered; Bode’s Law was a simple geometrical progression that described the distances of the Solar planets from the Sun. Nobody had ever been able to find a reason for it and it didn’t work well in some cases, though I seemed to remember that Neptune, or maybe Pluto, had been discovered by calculations that made use of it. It looked like an accidental relationship.

  “What of it?” I asked.

  “‘What of it?’ the man says! Good grief! This is the most important thing since Newton got conked with the apple.”

  “Maybe so, Harry, but I’m a little slow today. I thought Bode’s Law was just an accident. Why couldn’t it be an accident here, too?”

  “Accident! Look, Tom, if you roll a seven once, that’s an accident. When you roll a seven eight hundred times in a row, somebody has loaded the dice.”

  “But this is only twice.”

  “It’s not the same thing. Get me a big enough sheet of paper and I’ll write down the number of zeros it takes to describe how unlikely this ‘accident’ is.” He looked thoughtful. “Tommie, old friend, this is going to be the key that unlocks how planets are made. They’ll bury us right alongside Galileo for this. Mmm… Tom, we can’t afford to spend much time in this neighborhood; we’ve got to get out and take a look at the Beta Hydri system and make sure it checks the same way—just to convince the mossbacks back Earthside, for it will, it will! I gotta go tell the Captain we’ll have to change the schedule.” He stuffed the paper in a pocket and hurried away. I looked around but the anti-radiation shutters were over the observatory ports; I didn’t get to see out.

  Naturally the Captain did not change the schedule; we were out there looking for farm land, not trying to unscrew the inscrutable. A few weeks later we were in orbit around Constance. It put us into free-fall for the first time during the trip, for we had not even been so during acceleration-deceleration change-over but had done it in a skew path instead; chief engineers don’t like to shut a torch down unless there is time for an overhaul before starting up again—there was the case of the Peter the Great who shut hers off, couldn’t light up again, and fell into the Sun.

  I didn’t like free-fall. But it’s all right if you don’t overload your stomach.

  Harry did not seem disappointed. He had a whole new planet to play with, so he tabled Bode’s Law and got busy. We stayed in orbit, a thousand miles up, while research found out everything possible about Connie without actually touching it: direct visual search, radiation survey, absorption-spectra of her atmosphere. She had two moons, one a nice size, though smaller than Luna, so they were able to measure her surface gravity exactly.

  She certainly looked like a home away from home. Commander Frick had his boys and girls set up a relay tank in the mess room, with color and exaggerated stereo, so that we all could see. Connie looked like the pictures they show of Earth from space stations, green and blue and brown and half covered with clouds and wearing polar ice like skullcaps. Her air pressure was lower than ours but her oxygen ratio was higher; we could breathe it. Absorption spectra showed higher carbon dioxide but not as high as Earth had during the Coal Age.

  She was smaller but had a little more land area than Earth; her oceans were smaller. Every dispatch back to Earth carried good news and I even managed to get Pat’s mind off his profit-and-loss for a while…he had incorporated us as “Bartlett Brothers, Inc.” and seemed to expect me to be interested in the bookkeeping simply because my accumulated LRF salary had gone into the capitalization. Shucks, I hadn’t touched money for so long I had forgotten anybody used the stuff.

  Naturally our first effort was to find out if anybody was already in occupation…intelligent animal life I mean, capable of using tools, building things, and organizing. If there was, we were under orders to scoot out of there without landing, find fuel somewhere else in that system, and let a later party attempt to set up friendly relations; the LRF did not want to repeat the horrible mistake that had been made with Mars.

  But the electro-magnetic spectrum showed nothing at all, from gamma radiation right up to the longest radio wavelengths. If there were people down there, they didn’t use radio and they didn’t show city lights and they didn’t have atomic power. Nor did they have aircraft, nor roads, nor traffic on the surface of their oceans, nor anything that looked like cities. So we moved down just outside the atmosphere in an “orange slice” pole-to-pole orbit that let us patrol the whole surface, a new sector each half turn.

  Then we searched visually, by photography, and by radar. We didn’t miss anything more conspicuous than a beaver dam, I’m sure. No cities, no houses, no roads, no bridges, no ships, nobody home; Oh, animals, surely—we could see herds gazing on the plains and we got lesser glimpses of other things. But it looked like a squatter’s paradise.

  The Captain sent a dispatch: “I am preparing to land.”

  I promptly volunteered for the reconnaissance party. First I braced my uncle Major Lucas to let me join his guard. He told me to go roll my hoop. “If you think I have any use for an untrained recruit, you’re crazier than you apparently think I am. If you wanted to soldier, you should have tho
ught of it as soon as we torched off.”

  “But you’ve got men from all the departments in your guard.”

  “Every one of ’em trained soldiers. Seriously, Tom, I can’t afford it. I need men who will protect me; not somebody so green I’ll have to protect him. Sorry.”

  So I tackled Harry Gates to let me join the scientific party the ship’s guard would protect. He said, “Certainly, why not? Plenty of dirty work that my gang of prima donnas won’t want to do. You can start by checking this inventory.”

  So I checked while he counted. Presently he said, “How does it feel to be a little green man in a flying saucer?”

  “What?”

  “An oofoe. We’re an oofoe, do you realize that?”

  I finally understood him—an U.F.O., an “unidentified flying object.” There were accounts of the U.F.O. hysteria in all the histories of space flight. “I suppose we are an U.F.O., sort of.”

  “It’s exactly what we are. The U.F.O.’s were survey ships, just as we are. They looked us over, didn’t like what they saw, and went away. If they hadn’t found Earth crawling with hostile natives, they would have landed and set up housekeeping, just as we are going to do.”

  “Harry, do you really believe the U.F.O.’s were anything but imagination or mistakes in reporting? I thought that theory was exploded long ago.”

  “Take another look at the evidence, Tom. There was something going on up in our sky shortly before we took up space jumping ourselves. Sure, most of the reports were phonies. But some weren’t. You have to believe evidence when you have it in front of you, or else the universe is just too fantastic. Surely you don’t think that human beings are the only ones who ever built star ships?”

  “Well…maybe not. But if somebody else has, why haven’t they visited us long ago?”

  “Simple arithmetic, pal; it’s a big universe and we’re just one small corner of it. Or maybe they did. That’s my own notion; they surveyed us and Earth wasn’t what they wanted—maybe us, maybe the climate. So the U.F.O.’s went away.” He considered it. “Maybe they landed just long enough to fuel.”

  That was all I got out of my tenure as a member of the scientific party; when Harry submitted my name an his list, the Captain drew a line through it. “No special communicators will leave the ship.”

  That settled it; the Captain had a will of iron. Van got to go, as his brother had been killed in an accident while we were at peak—so I called Pat and told him about Van and suggested that Pat drop dead. He didn’t see anything funny in it.

  The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as I know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been unable to do while underway. They didn’t care where they were or where they were going so long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.

  “Is that normal?” I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.

  “For his breed of cat, it’s robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the keyhole.”

  Sam Rojas was as annoyed as I was at the discrimination against us telepaths; he had counted on planting his feet on strange soil, like Balboa and Columbus and Lundy. He came around to see me about it. “Tom, are you going to stand for it?”

  “Well, I don’t want to—but what can we do?”

  “I’ve been talking to some of the others. It’s simple. We don’t.”

  “We don’t what?”

  “Mmm…we just don’t. Tom, ever since we slowed down, I’ve detected a falling off in my telepathic ability. It seems to be affecting all of us—those I’ve talked to. How about yourself?”

  “Why, I haven’t—”

  “Think hard,” he interrupted. “Surely you’ve noticed it. Why, I doubt if I could raise my twin right now. It must have something to do with where we are…maybe there is something odd about the radiation of Tau Ceti, or something. Or maybe it comes from Connie. Who knows? And, for that matter, who can check on us?”

  I began to get the pattern. I didn’t answer, because it was a tempting idea.

  “If we can’t communicate,” he went on, “we ought to be useful for something else…like the landing party, for instance. Once we are out of range of this mysterious influence probably we would be able to make our reports back to Earth all right. Or maybe it would turn out that some of the girls who didn’t want to go with the landing party could manage to get in touch with Earth and carry the reports…provided us freaks weren’t discriminated against.”

  “It’s an idea,” I admitted.

  “Think about it. You’ll find your special talent getting weaker and weaker. Me, I’m stone deaf already.” He went away.

  I toyed with the idea. I knew the Captain would recognize a strike when he saw one…but what could he do? Call us all liars and hang us by our thumbs until we gave in? How could he be certain that we hadn’t all gone sour as m-r’s? The answer was that he could not be certain; nobody but a mind reader knows what it feels like, nobody but the mind reader himself can tell that he is doing it. When we slipped out of contact at peak he hadn’t doubted us, he had just accepted it. He would have to accept it now, no matter what he thought.

  For he had to have us; we were indispensable.

  Dad used to be arbitration representative in his guild local; I remembered his saying once that the only strike worth calling was one in which the workers were so badly needed that the strike would be won before a walkout. That was the pinch we had the Captain in; he had to have us. No strikebreakers closer than eleven light-years. He wouldn’t dare get rough with us.

  Except that any one of us could break the strike. Let’s see—Van was out of it and so was Cas Warner; they were no longer telepaired, their twins were dead. Pru’s sister Patience was still alive, but that telepair had never been mended after peak—her sister had refused the risky drugs and hypnosis routine and they never got back into rapport. Miss Gamma did not count, because the ships her two sisters were in were still peaking, so we were cut off from sidewise relay back to Earth until one of them decelerated. Not counting Sam and myself, whom did that leave? And could they be counted on? There was Rupe, Gloria, Anna, and Dusty…and Unc of course. And Mei-Ling.

  Yes, they were solid. Making us feel that we were freaks when we first came aboard had consolidated us, even if one or two didn’t feel right about it, nobody would let the others down. Not even Mei-Ling who was married to an outsider. It would work. If Sam could line them up.

  I wanted to go dirtside the worst way…and maybe this was the worst way, but I still wanted to.

  Just the same, there was something sneaky about it, like a kid spending his Sunday School collection money.

  Sam had until noon the next day to get it lined up, because we were down to one watch a day. A continuous communication watch was not necessary and them was more ship’s work to do now that we were getting ready to explore. I tabled the matter and went down to tag the rats that would he used by the scientific survey.

  But I did not have to wait until the following day; Unc called us together that evening and we crowded into his room—all but Miss Gamma and Van and Pru and Cas. Unc looked around, looking horse-faced and sad, and said he was sorry we couldn’t all sit down but he wouldn’t keep us long. Then he started a meandering speech about how he thought of us all as his children and he had grown to love us and we would always be his children, no matter what. Then he started talking about the dignity of
being a human being.

  “A man pays his bills, keeps himself clean, respects other people, and keeps his word. He gets no credit for this; he has to do this much just to stay even with himself. A ticket to heaven comes higher.”

  He paused and added, “Especially he keeps his promises.” He looked around and added, “That’s all I had to say. Oh, I might as well make one announcement while we are here. Rupe has had to shift the watch list around a little bit.” He picked out Sam Rojas with his eyes. “Sam, I want you to take next watch, tomorrow noon. Will you do it?”

  There wasn’t a sound for about three heart heats. Then Sam said slowly, “Why, I guess so, Unc, if you want me to.”

  “I’d he much obliged, Sam. One way and another, I don’t want to put anybody else on that watch…and I wouldn’t feel like standing it myself if you couldn’t do it. I guess I would just have to tell the Captain there wasn’t anybody available. So I’m pleased that you’ll do it.”

  “Uh, why, sure, Unc. Don’t worry about it.”

  And that was the end of the strike.

  Unc didn’t let us go quite yet. “I thought I’d tell you about the change in the watch list while I had you here and save Rupe from having to take it around to have you initial it. But I called you together to ask you about something else. The landing party will be leaving the ship before long. Nice as Constance looks, I understand that it will be risky…diseases that we don’t know about, animals that might turn out to he deadly in ways we didn’t expect, almost anything. It occurred to me that we might be able to help. We could send one of us with the landing party and keep one of us on watch in the ship—and we could arrange for their telepairs to relay by telephone. That way we’d always be in touch with the landing party, even if radios broke down or no matter what. It would be a lot of extra work and no glory…but it would be worth it if it saved the life of one shipmate.”