Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  He knocked on the door. “Come on out, Bob,” he said.

  The sobbing choked off, hurriedly. His knock wasn’t answered.

  “Come on, Bob,” he said tonelessly. “We’ve got work to do.”

  The door opened finally. Robert Chavez was twenty-one years old and he was dark and handsome in the classic tradition. His eyes were red now, and Martin reflected idly that this was the first time he had ever seen him without his hair combed.

  “Let me alone,” the boy said. “Go away.”

  Martin felt sorry for him, as much as he could feel sorry for anyone today, but it obviously wouldn’t do to leave Bob in there alone with his father. “We’re all that’s left, Bob,” he said quietly, “unless you count Gallen. I know how you feel, but that won’t help. We’ve got about twelve hours at the outside to orbit this ship and pick up a planet. I need your help.”

  “I don’t give a damn, Mart,” Chavez said. “I just don’t give a damn.”

  He started to close the door, but Martin had his foot in it. “It isn’t easy to grow up in a hurry,” he said, “but you’re going to have to do it. I’m going up to the control room, and I’ll give you fifteen minutes. You take a look at your father and figure out what you ought to do. I’m shoving off, and whether you come along or not is your business.”

  He turned and walked away. It would have to be Bob, he thought. It would have to be him, of all people.

  He walked toward the control room, smiling sourly.

  Fifty-one down and three to go.

  They had set up a cot for Ernest Gallen in the control room, by his radio equipment, just in case. When Martin Ashley came in and sat down next to him, he opened his eyes and managed to hold up two fingers in an ironic V for Victory.

  “Man,” he said, “I’m still alive. How do you like that?”

  “I like it fine, Ernie,” Martin said. “How do you feel?”

  “Like the worms wouldn’t have me. I’m afraid I may live.”

  “You’d better.”

  “Who else we got, Mart?”

  “The kid. Period.”

  Gallen sighed. “In that case,” he said, “suppose you just pick up a gun and put a bullet through my brain, and I’ll toddle along peacefully to the happy hunting ground. No point in prolonging the agony.”

  Martin Ashley looked at the man on the cot, sizing up what he knew about him. Ernie Gallen was about forty, with a short and stocky build, blondish hair and brown eyes. He was moody, and inclined to be at his most cheerful when the going was the toughest. He was—or had been—the radio expert on the Juarez, and in other fields he tended toward the “common sense” approach to problems. He had a sense of humor. Ashley liked the man, which helped. Ernie might be a good man to have along, from a purely objective viewpoint, or he might not.

  That would depend on what they ran into.

  “Hell of a note,” Gallen said, shifting his position on the cot. “Two guys left to run a spaceship in the middle of nowhere—an anthropologist and a radio bug. Add one kid who knows all the answers, and what have you got?”

  “Not very much,” Martin Ashley admitted. “Not enough, certainly.”

  The control room was silent around them, except for an occasional click or buzz from automatic equipment. The small noises served as a mechanical counterpoint to the not-sound of emptiness. The great viewer still flashed its images. The computer hummed with readiness. The dials presented their data with complete unconcern, and the lighted control bank was ready to go.

  But the ship was dead. The heart and brain and spirit were not working. They were stretched out in rows, with sheets over their faces. They were cold. The ship was a corpse—fine on the outside, and all the organs still in place, but incapable of thought or action. It kept going, zombie-fashion, but it was not alive.

  And the three who still lived? Martin Ashley smiled. An active thyroid gland—that was the kid. A larynx and a velum—that was Ernie. And himself?

  A bit of spinal cord, maybe. And, no doubt, a dash of ego.

  It wasn’t going to be a very lively corpse.

  “What can we do, Mart?”

  “The radio is out, I suppose?”

  Ernie Gallen shrugged as well as he could from a prone position. “There should be another ship from Earth out this way in another zillion hours or so,” he said. “Conceivably, there might be an alien ship along about the same time. Until then, we can chat with the star-static. There’s nothing coming in.”

  Martin Ashley grinned, deliberately keeping his mind from touching again on what had been his friends, stacked in neat white rows through the Juarez. His friends and Carol, who had been more than that. “The solution is obvious,” he said. “We just sit down and wait for a mutation to turn us into supermen. From that point, presumably, the problem will be duck soup. Neat, eh?”

  Ernie Gallen groaned.

  “There’s only one alternative, really,” Ashley said slowly.

  “That’s one more than is visible from here,” Ernie said. “Let’s have it.”

  “Well, let’s look at the facts. We’re a hundred light-years from home, and the three of us simply do not constitute an adequate crew for the Juarez. If three men—even three specialists—could handle this crate, they’d have sent out three men in the first place, and not fifty-four. We may be able to pull off some very simple and elementary type of maneuver at low speed, but trying to operate this monster in overdrive would be suicide, but fast—and no pun intended. You with me so far?”

  “No argument,” agreed Gallen. “You spoke of an alternative—?”

  “After a fashion. We agree that we can’t move this ship out of the Carinae system; O.K. We seem to agree also on the ugly point that there’s no practical chance of our being picked up before we’re too senile to care. So what’s left?”

  Gallen essayed another shrug, and Ashley noted with alarm that the strain of talking was already beginning to wear Ernie down. When he spoke of three men, even that was something of an overstatement.

  “Here’s the way I see it, then,” he said slowly. “We can either live out our lives on the Juarez, just sitting around staring at each other until we all flip our lids, or we can take the shuttle, pick us a planet, and go down and carve some sort of a life out for ourselves—or try to. Here’s another little fact for our collection: I figure that if we don’t swing the Juarez around within the next few hours, we’ll be out of the system into deep space—and I don’t know whether or not we can get it back again.”

  Ernie Gallen just looked at him, unspeaking.

  “If we can find a planet we can live on—and the survey showed several possibilities in that direction—we can try to orbit the Juarez around it, and take the shuttle down. That way, we can always come back if things get too rough. We can rig up a broadcast beam from the ship, telling where we are and who we are, just in case another ship should blunder out this way. That’s the only chance I see for us, Ernie. I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve only got one life to live according to the best information available, and I don’t want to live in this coffin. I want some grass under my feet, and some air over my head. I want a chance to be a human being, and not an animal floating around on a raft after the world’s gone bang. Excuse the speech.”

  The control room was lost in emptiness, with furtive clicks and buzzes chattering in the immensity.

  “What’s down there, Mart?” Ernest Gallen asked finally.

  Martin Ashley shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. No broadcast waves coming in that we’ve been able to pick up, and nothing on the energy detectors. That may mean that there’s nothing there, or it may mean there’s something around that hasn’t reached the Stage Four technology, or it may mean that we’ll be up against something so different we’ll never understand or live with it. Pick one.”

  Gallen smiled weakly. “You’re not much of an ad man,” he observed.

  Martin Ashley waved a hand at the steel hollowness around them. “I know what’s h
ere,” he said quietly, “and that’s enough data for me. I’m going. If you think your chances are better on the Juarez, you’re probably right. But it’s not for me, Ernie.”

  “Not for me either, Mart,” Gallen said in a low voice. “You’ll have to carry me out, though.”

  They were silent then, feeling the death all around them in the Juarez. The silence was broken with startling abruptness by a furtive sound from the control room door. Martin Ashley felt the hackles on the back of his neck crawl. He turned around, half expecting to see a walking corpse.

  Bob Chavez stood in the doorway. His face was very pale, his eyes very bright. He was breathing hard and fast.

  “They’re all dead,” he said in a high, taut voice. “All dead but us. What’s going to happen to us?”

  There was more silence.

  “That,” Martin Ashley said finally, “is a very good question.”

  II

  It was four “days” later.

  The shuttle from the Juarez blasted uneasily through the emptiness of space toward the blue-green globe that was the fourth planet in the system of Carinae. It was a tiny ship, designed for short ship-to-planet hops, and it was out of its depth now—a slender minnow from sun-drenched shallows, caught in the center of a dark sea, and going down and down and down—

  Into what?

  Martin Ashley, strapped in next to Ernie Gallen, kept his eyes on Bob Chavez at the controls. He did not look out at the sucking immensity that waited for them outside the plastiglass shield. But he felt it—a yellow, burning sun, a million stars, a vastness beyond imagination. It was a measurement of the infinite and it cut man down to size. It was a mirror that reflected back to every man a true and merciless image of himself.

  Looking out into space from a small ship was not a popular experience.

  “Try the beam, Ernie,” he said. “It’s too quiet in here, jets or no jets.”

  Ernie nodded. He was still weak, but he was stronger than he had been, and his brown eyes were clear. “You just like to hear yourself talk, Mart,” he said. He cut in the shuttle’s radio.

  Martin Ashley’s voice came in out of space.

  It was perma-recorded, coming from the transmitter of the empty Juarez. The Juarez was orbited about the fourth planet now, traveling in a long, silent circle through the emptiness that had been her home. There was no life on the dark Juarez, and the only sound on the ship came from Ashley’s steady flow of words into the unknown:

  “THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE OF CREW OF FIFTY-FOUR, THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN. WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH SHUTTLE RADIO. SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT. THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE—”

  Martin Ashley closed his eyes, remembering.

  He remembered ejecting fifty-one bodies into space.

  He remembered a nightmare of orbiting the massive Juarez.

  He remembered Carol.

  He remembered Earth—one hundred light-years away.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “Turn it off.”

  They were alone again, alone with the muted scream of the jets and the whispers from an endless sea.

  Ahead of them, waiting, was Carinae IV. Only a name to them now, a name and a sphere of blue and green—a whole world, utterly unknown.

  And three men would have to call it home.

  Bob Chavez, his face set and pale, pulled the shuttle out when they were five miles from the surface. He jockeyed the little ship down gingerly to a self-correcting altitude of one mile. The ship hissed through the atmosphere of Carinae IV, losing speed.

  The portable survey equipment from the Juarez was in action, but they all looked down.

  They saw great wooded tracts, soft brown under the yellow sun. They saw lush green fields, rolling away in search of the horizon. They saw emerald lakes and sparkling streams that spider-webbed across the land.

  And then there were blue-black mountain ranges, their peaks dusted with cloud, that the shuttle had to rise over sharply in order to pass. And a gray desert, cut with dry canyons and fluid with driven sand. And a band of thick green—

  And then the sea. An enormous sea, translucent green and flecked with white spray from long, chopping waves. A sea that seemed to go on forever, empty except for periodic outcroppings of coral islands, lightly sprinkled with green. A sea that stretched on and on, tossing fitfully, until it lost itself in darkness.

  The shuttle flashed on into the night side, its scream shattering the stillness of the deserted air. The three men sat quietly listening to the portable survey equipment clicking and buzzing as it picked up and integrated data from scanner beams and thermal radiations and movement indices, correlating them into rough ecological frameworks.

  Martin Ashley had already seen enough to confirm the preliminary distance survey made by the Juarez when they had first entered the Carinae system.

  There were no cities, no large concentrations of any sort, on Carinae IV. There was no detectable industry. There was no radio, no power, no technology that could register on the sensitive detectors.

  But they had all seen one thing that the distance survey had missed. One thing that made all the difference. Men.

  The planet was occupied.

  The shuttle stayed in the air, circling the planet. It whistled into the sunrise and hissed on toward high noon.

  Martin Ashley lit up his pipe and worked his way through the survey data, adding to it from his own observations and training. His green eyes were bloodshot now, and he was going on sheer nervous energy. He was tired, but there was a question he had to answer. He read the question in the eyes of his two companions:

  What kind of a world is it, this new home of ours?

  He took a deep breath and clamped his pipe more firmly in his teeth. He looked down at the world slipping by under the shuttle, jungle growth now, and felt vaguely amused at his own presumption in trying to sum up a whole planet in a few well-chosen words. Planets could be tricky enough in themselves, and when they were inhabited by human beings it was a rash observer indeed who would predict dogmatically what they were like.

  Human beings had a curious tendency to remain unpredictable, despite all the survey equipment and charts and figures and analyzers. Quite possibly, Martin Ashley had long ago decided, that was why they were human beings.

  He took a stab at it, though. That was his job.

  “It looks pretty good,” he said slowly, “if we handle ourselves right when we land. But I’ve got to warn you about something, and you’ll have to remember it if you want to stay alive down there—all I can tell you about right now is what this planet looks like on the surface. You’ve both kicked around on survey ships long enough to know that surface indications can be very misleading. There’s an example I want you to paste inside your skull somewhere; imagine yourself to be some alien observer that has come to Earth. Say you land on a beach, and there you see some old joker padding about in his shorts and getting sunburned. Let’s say that this old joker is one of the greats, taking a day off. You name him—Aristotle, Shakespeare, Einstein, Retokin. All you see is an old red man in his shorts. Maybe he looks stupid and senile. How are you going to evaluate this man, just by watching him soak up the sun? Your first impression may be very, very wrong—and if you treat our hypothetical bigwig as an ignorant lout, you may very well wake up dead in the morning.”

  He blew a smoke ring at the shuttle control panel and tried to judge what effect his words were having. Hard to tell. It was so easy to make a false move in a contact situation that sometimes fantastic precautions had to be taken. And if they guessed wrong on Carinae IV, there wouldn’t be any Juarez to get them out alive.

  It was strictly up t
o them.

  “O.K.,” he said. “You’ve been watching too, and I don’t know that I can add very much to what you’ve seen. On the surface, and as far as the survey equipment can analyze, there is nothing technologically complex down there. The atmosphere and general planet-type are fine and dandy, of course, or we wouldn’t have come here from the Juarez. The planet is definitely inhabited, and evidently inhabited by human beings. As far as I can see, the people here are pretty well scattered over the planet—you could see them in the forests and on the plains and even out on those coral islands in that one big ocean. There’s one very curious thing, and I don’t quite know what to make of it yet; all the people I saw appear to have a relatively uniform material culture. I didn’t see a single group practicing really advanced agriculture, but on the other hand I didn’t see a single group without cleared crops of some sort. If the data’s been analyzed correctly, those crops all seem to be of the same general type, with specialized local varieties for differing environmental conditions. That may be very significant, or it may be just a fluke of planetary ecology—but it’s worth bearing in mind. All the groups I saw appear to practice a mixed economy—some agriculture, some hunting and fishing and gathering. The largest group we picked up contained about one hundred individuals—no really large concentrations of population. House types look crude but adequate. No energy weapons at all, so I assume these people utilize either a spear or a bow, depending on how far they’ve gotten. That’s about it, the way I see it. A rather primitive level of cultural development, as far as I can tell from here, and only one puzzling feature—the culture seems amazingly uniform all over the planet. That’s really astonishing, considering that they appear to have little or no means of long-distance communication. I can’t explain it. Any ideas?”