The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  The lights illuminated a broad highway cut through what appeared to be a pine forest. When they entered the avenue, the horse broke into a trot. With the crisp air splitting on his cheeks and Helix’ hand in his under the lap robe, he felt a beginning joy that almost overrode his apprehensions.

  True, the man at the field had been sullen, and the horse-drawn sleigh was a primitive mode of travel, but Hargood was friendly, and there must be a technology of sorts on the planet since there was electricity and radio.

  There was another act on the part of Hargood which had not gone unnoticed by Haldane.

  Back in the shack, when Hargood had finished reading the card Haldane had filled out, he had casually torn it up and thrown it into the wastebasket.

  “I’m taking you into town and putting you up at the inn with the others,” Hargood explained, “but after you’ve bought clothes and gotten somewhat acclimated, you’ll be boarded out until your own home is built.

  “By the way,” he added, “you two are fortunate. Your presence has been requested at the home of a university man who lives on the college campus. Most arrivals are assigned by lot.”

  “How did he know we were coming?” Haldane asked.

  “He didn’t know you by name. He merely asked for the youngest theoretical mathematician on the H drop. He’s a very distinguished old gentleman, but quite active. I think he has in the neighborhood of a hundred offspring, so don’t leave him alone too long with Helix.”

  Hargood stroked his chin, “What confuses me is that he was able to figure I’d even have a theoretical mathematician on the H drop or the A or B drop, for that matter… You’re the first theoretical mathematician I’ve ever seen.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Our town is Marston Meadows on the mouth of the Redstone River; population, forty-five thousand; biggest industry, the university. Since the nearest population center is a copper-mining town two hundred miles upriver, you can see that we haven’t made a dent in the planet. But we follow the old Biblical maxim, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ Since we have long winters and no television, the population growth is coming nicely.

  “It’s an interesting town, mostly because of the university crowd. Some real cuties out there. Head of Economics, otherwise rational, preaches that someday earth and Hell will reunite in the final synthesis of the thesis and antithesis.

  “We have some beautiful beaches around here, and I’ll prophesy, right now. Helix, that when you walk out on them in a bathing suit, there’s going to be a riot.”

  “Do the natives call the planet Hell?” Haldane broke in.

  “Yes, out of deference to Fairweather I. Anyway, Hell means light in German.”

  “Do you defer to the man who exiled his son here?”

  “Our Fairweather II was rash in his youth, so his father sent him here to save his hide. Then he invented the pope to keep his son in high-level bridge partners… Do you swim, Helix?”

  “It’s one of my favorite sports.”

  “You’ll enjoy Marston Meadows, and Marston Meadows will enjoy you. Most Hell-born women are low-slung with broad bottoms. In a way, they tend to resemble wasps. They’re not unattractive; they simply have varying degrees of attraction, and you’ll be in the upper two per cent.”

  “You mean the pope is a trick on the executive departments?”

  “Yes… We have some very attractive women’s shops in Marston Meadows. They dress more provocatively here.”

  “I’m sure I’ll love sleek gowns and glitter. I can hardly…”

  “I cursed the pope!”

  “We all did.” Hargood turned to Helix. “The fact that you two were mated by the pope doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re restricted to each other…”

  “The planet moves in an ellipse around the sun, doesn’t it?” Haldane broke in.

  “Yes, so we have four months of winter, three of spring and fall, and two of summer, each half year… Our summers never get tedious, and our winters can be very interesting.”

  “What is your specialty?” Haldane asked.

  Hargood laughed. “Calling a man a specialist on this planet is almost as bad as calling him a son of a bitch.”

  “What’s that?”

  Helix laughed. “It’s an old expression. It means your mother was a dog.”

  Haldane fingered the expression in his mind. It was pungent, and he could see where it might react unfavorably on a man who had cultivated an undue affection for his mother.

  “Actually,” Hargood continued, “I was a gynecologist on earth…”

  “I thought you had more than a passing interest in such matters,” Haldane broke in.

  “Here, I’ve branched out. I’m a cellist in the town orchestra, on the board of aldermen, and teach in the university.

  “Very few men are specialists on this planet. I have eight children by my wife, and seven by the wives of other men, so I’m not even a specialist as a father. Rather unusual by earth standards”—he paused reflectively—“but we do have long winters.”

  “What does your wife think of this?” Helix asked.

  “She has twelve children.”

  “Why haven’t the spacemen reported to earth that this is not a planet of ice?”

  “When routine calculations were made by the probes, the exploring crew landed in the dead of winter and figured the planet had only minimal habitability. Fairweather I rechecked the calculations, discovered the error, and set up the schedules of the prison ships so that they always arrive in winter.”

  They passed the first dwelling, a two-storied structure faintly visible in the light of road lamps. It was made of logs, and its pointed roof mantled with snow, the glow of light in its windows, seemed poignantly cheerful to Haldane.

  After the horse clumped over a wooden bridge spanning a wide creek, there were more houses, and the pungency of woodsmoke in the air was exhilarating.

  Helix pressed his hand. “It could be eighteenth-century England.”

  They passed a church made of stone; lamps glowing in its vestibule illuminated scrollwork above the portal which read, “God Is Love.”

  Haldane called Hargood’s attention to the sign. “So you worship a God of love, not of justice.”

  “Emphatically,” Hargood said, “although we may use a rather loose definition of the word… Incidentally, if you were mated by the pope, there must have been a reason. If you need a gynecologist…”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” Haldane broke in.

  “You don’t seem to be very far advanced.”

  “I was in suspended animation, voluntarily, waiting for my lover to be shipped out.” She looked over at Haldane.

  “Incidentally, young man, you have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “About what?” he asked in genuine wonderment, thinking there were quite a few unexplained details that she had to clear up.

  “This is not the time or the place. But the place is close and the time is near.”

  What caprice guided this girl he would never know. On earth he had once been bothered by the fear that he would never be able to plumb her infinite variety, and now the old uncertainties were returning. But of one thing he was absolutely certain with hackle-raising intuition: if the task of understanding her was beyond him, the good Doctor Hargood would be glad to give it a try.

  Hargood was looking at her with eyes too openly admiring to be lecherous, giving her some fatherly medical advice. “Of course, at this stage of your pregnancy, your activities won’t be too hampered. You can have an uninhibited honeymoon.”

  “What’s a honeymoon?” Haldane asked.

  “It’s the period when the newly mated couples get to know each other. It’s an old earth custom we’ve revived on Hell.”

  “I thought we’d already had our honeymoon,” Helix said, “but I’ve discovered differently… Look, the shops are still open!”

  “We’re coming into the downtown area. I apologize for our lack of skyscrapers, but we don’t need the
m.”

  Few of the buildings were more than three stories high. They were close together with brightly lighted show windows on the ground level, and there were a few heavily bundled pedestrians abroad, apparently shopping. Haldane’s eyes registered the panorama of lights, decorations and the abundance of goods in show windows, but his mind played almost lovingly over the purposelessness of the people who ambled along the sidewalks. There was none of the precise, straightline walking one met on the streets of San Francisco.

  Hargood reined the horse down a narrow street that dead-ended in a courtyard before a two-story building which Haldane assumed, from its many lighted windows, was an inn. Here, the overhanging buildings and courtyard at the end of the lane were suddenly illuminated when a rift in the clouds let the moonlight through, and the glow on the snow gave a medieval quality to the scene.

  “Looks like it’s clearing up,” Hargood said, driving the sleigh in a broad arc to bring it before the inn door.

  A boy of about fourteen came running out of the inn to catch the reins that Hargood threw to him. “Hi, Doc,” the boy said.

  “Hello, Tommy. If you get a chance, will you curry my horse? I’d certainly appreciate it.”

  “Doc, I scraped that damned brute down to the skeleton this morning.”

  “All right. Tommy,” Hargood said patiently. “Don’t curry the horse.”

  As the boy led the horse across the courtyard to the stable and they walked toward the door of the inn, Haldane asked, “Is it customary for a hostler to deny the request of a professional?”

  “That hostler’s name is Tommy Fairweather. And there aren’t any professionals, as a class.”

  “I imagine his grandfather would turn over in his grave if he knew a Fairweather was working in a stable.”

  “If he did, it would surprise a lot of people over at the university, because they don’t know he’s dead… Now, one last ritual, folks. Turn around!”

  They had reached the lobby of the hotel, which was empty, and Hargood’s command was still a command. Haldane stopped, and did an about-face.

  He felt Hargood’s hand rip the initial from his parka, the classification initial he had forgotten. Hargood was saying, “There goes your last earthly classification. There are no dynastic numbers on Hell. We use Christian names, old style. Helix is now Helix Haldane. You need a first name.”

  “Don Juan,” Helix suggested.

  Haldane was not thinking about names. He turned.

  “Are you telling me that Fairweather II is still alive?”

  “Certainly. He’s only a hundred and eighty.”

  “How long do you live on this planet?”

  “As long as you wish. There are methods of retarding cell destruction. They’re known on earth, but they can’t be indulged. Here, the prolongation of life is almost mandatory.”

  Hargood was helping Helix take off her parka. Haldane slipped out of his and handed it to the doctor, who took it to a cloakroom behind the desk of the absent room clerk. “It’s almost fourteen o’clock, so Hilda, the barmaid, will be doubling as the room clerk.”

  Through an open doorway, Haldane could see a large dining room; across it, logs were burning in a fireplace. He turned to Helix. “Did you hear that? Fairweather’s still alive.”

  “Oh, no. He’s dead… Isn’t that a lovely fire?”

  She seemed hypnotized by the distant flames, a dream lost in a beautiful reverie.

  “Hargood says he’s alive!”

  “That’s Fairweather II.”

  “That’s who I mean. Helix! He’s the brush they smeared me with.”

  She seemed to snap out of her trance. “Of course, dear. But we were researching Fairweather I. I thought you were speaking of Fairweather I.”

  Hargood returned and guided them into the dining room. To the right of the entrance was a bar and to the left was a stairway leading to a balcony which lined one side of the room. The gloom of the huge room was lighted by individual table lamps, and across was a cleared area with a hardwood floor adjacent to the fireplace and a second bar not being used.

  Hargood steered them to the bar. “Hilda,” Hargood said, “meet Don and Helix Haldane, newly arrived newlyweds. Give them the bridal suite.”

  “Welcome to Hell,” the woman said, turning to a board behind her and grabbing a key. She was a tall, lanky woman with cadaverous cheeks. Her hips were in a line with her waist, and the expression in her eyes when they fell on Haldane was one of carnivorous hunger. Though her breasts flapped like dewlaps and the twin plaits of her hair were streaked with grey, her hungry eyes created a weird eroticism in Haldane. He knew that if Helix had lot been there, he would have remained at the bar.

  Hilda tossed the key before him in a manner casual but without insolence. “It’s room 204, straight up the stairs.”

  She turned to Hargood. “Real nice piece of man you brought this time. Doc. Young one, too.”

  She turned to Helix. “Most of the exiles we get here are n their forties, at least. Your man looks like a lot of action. He’s not as big as the average Heller, but he’s pretty tall for an earthman. And those arms look strong. If you get tired of him tonight, throw him down to me.”

  “Funny thing”—her voice dropped an octave as she leaned over to Helix to talk woman-talk—“I get some of my best action from the small, shy men. You never can tell from just looking at them.”

  Turning again to the trio in general, she said, “What will it be, folks? Drinks are on the house.”

  “Beer for us all,” Hargood said. “And she isn’t being generous. For exiles, everything’s on the house.”

  “Why take the wind out of my sails? I wanted them to think I was a philanthropist.”

  “I ordered beer,” Hargood explained, “because I wanted you to taste it. Everything tastes better here.”

  Hargood went in to a discussion of taste on the planet, attributing the flavor to the quality of the soil. As his attention was directed almost exclusively to Helix, Haldane’s eyes roamed the bar.

  Near them sat a slender, dark-haired man, almost raptly sipping a drink as he cast an unbroken series of polite glances at Helix in the bar mirror. Farther down the bar was a giant wearing seaman’s boots and a sailor’s hat. His mouth was open, and his red beard bristled with a static electricity which Haldane assumed was generated by desire. Haldane’s assumption came from a glance at the man’s eyes—the most expressive eyes he had ever seen. At the same time they were undressing Helix, they were concocting thirty-six variations—Haldane counted them—on a single theme.

  Haldane turned brusquely to Hargood. “Let’s go to a table.”

  “Just a minute.” He leaned over the bar and called down to the genteel ogler. “Halapoff, how about fixing up a dinner for eight?”

  “Sure, Doc,” the black-haired man answered. “When will they be here?”

  “Right behind us.”

  They took their glasses and walked across the room toward a table. There were more than a dozen couples in the dining room, and although the men were accompanied by women, there were low whistles of approval as Helix walked across the floor.

  Haldane felt a flash of anger which focused on Helix. She was conscious of the raw undertones to the sound, and that beautiful, free-swinging stride of hers slowed to a mincing step and her face flushed. She was strutting.

  His own beloved and pregnant bride enjoyed being whistled at!

  Haldane’s rising anger was halted abruptly.

  As they passed a table, he noticed a red-haired woman whose high cheekbones and erect carriage gave a regal touch to her undeniable beauty, which was accented by a full eight inches of cleavage above her low-cut gown. Her physical beauty was awe-inspiring, her cleavage an act of nature, but the attraction that emanated from her threw up such powerful fields of force that Haldane’s stride swerved in her direction.

  From a casual conversation with her table partner, the woman looked up, saw Haldane’s glance, flashed him a radiant, appreciative
smile, and whistled.

  Helix caught the contretemps and flashed the woman a look that collapsed her force field and restored Haldane’s compass bearings. She reached back, grabbed Haldane’s arm, and practically shoved him toward the table. “You liked that!” she hissed.

  “You were getting a few thrills yourself.”

  Hargood selected a table near the fireplace.

  Haldane asked what the open space with the polished floor was used for.

  “Mostly for dancing. Unfortunately, not always. We’ve revived social dancing as a recreation because it is stimulating.”

  Haldane exploded. “Do these people need stimulation?”

  Hargood laughed. “It wouldn’t seem so to a citizen of earth. Hell is literally hell for some earthmen, but very few females from earth are ever unhappy here. All of them are loved and appreciated, especially appreciated. There’s not a female without attraction. Some simply have more attraction.”

  He glanced at Helix.

  Haldane sat brooding in his beer. He wasn’t a prude, but he certainly didn’t care to ride shotgun on his wife whenever she went to the grocery store. He intended to move fast on this planet, and he didn’t wish to divert any energies guarding his rear, or his wife’s.

  “What sort of technology do you have on this planet?”

  “Sufficient for our needs, and we have tremendous natural resources.”

  “Could you build a starship?”

  “That’s a little out of my line. But I’m sure we could. We siphon the best minds from earth. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve got an idea for a starship which can exceed simultaneity… go faster than now. Have you got a pencil?”

  “Are you planning on going back to earth?” Helix asked.

  “Not to the one we left.”

  He took the pencil Hargood offered and began to sketch a design on the tablecloth. “Here’s a laser propulsion system. Light emitted from this source, here, streams forward to converge, here, allowing the stream of light to reinforce itself, here. As you can readily see, you’re exceeding the speed of light, as we know the speed of light, but the convergence principle, as you probably know, is limited by the focal length to the orifice from the lasers.”