Brock nodded. “Good. Give us the forms.” He signed first; I added my name below, finishing with a flourish. I stacked the triplicate forms neatly together and shoved them back at the half-synthetic recruiter.
“Excellent. Excellent. Welcome to the Corps.”
He shook our hands, giving the hairy-knuckled right hand to Brock, the waxy left to me. I gripped it tightly, wondering if he could feel my grip.
Three days later, we were in space, bound outward. In all the time since the original idea had sprung up unvoiced between us, neither Brock nor myself had paused to ask the damnable question.
Why?
We had joined the Corps; we had renounced Earth. Motive, unstated, or unknown. We let the matter lie dormant between us for eleven years, through a procession of strange, and then less strange worlds.
Until Brock’s agony broke forth to the surface. He destroyed eleven years of numb peace with one half-whispered syllable, there in the ship’s lab, our fourth morning on Alphecca II.
I looked at him for perhaps thirty seconds. Moistening my lips, I asked, “What do you mean, Brock?”
“You know what I mean.” The flat declarative tone was one of simple truth. “The one thing we haven’t been asking ourselves all these years, because we knew we didn’t have an answer for it and we like to have answers for things. Why are we here, on Alphecca II—with a hundred sixty-three visited worlds behind us?”
I shrugged. “You didn’t have to start this, Brock.” Outside the sun was climbing towards noon height, but I felt cold and dry, as if the ammonia atmosphere were seeping into the ship. It wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to start this. I could have let it fester for another eleven years. But it came popping out, and I want to settle it. We left Earth because we didn’t like it there. Agreed?”
I nodded.
“But that’s not why enough,” he persisted. “Why do we explore? Why do we keep running from planet to planet, from one crazy airless ball to the next, out here where there are no people and no cities? Green crabs on Rigel V, sandfish on Caph. Dammit, Hammond, what are we looking for?”
Very calmly I said, “Ourselves, maybe?”
His face crinkled scornfully. “Foggy-eyed and imprecise, and you know it. We’re not looking for ourselves out here. We’re trying to lose ourselves. Eh?”
“No!”
“Admit it!”
I stared through the quartz window at the stiff, almost wooden vines that covered the pebbly ground. They seemed to be moving faintly, to be stretching their rigid bodies in a contraction of some sort.
In a dull, tired voice, Brock said, “We left Earth because we couldn’t cope with it. It was too crowded and too dirty for sensitive, shrinking souls like us. We had the choice of withdrawing into shells, and huddling there for eighty or ninety years, or pulling up and leaving for space. We left. There’s no society out here, just each other.”
“We’ve adjusted to each other,” I pointed out.
“So? Does that mean we could fit into Earth society? Would you want to go back? Remember the team—McKees and Haugmuth, is it?—who spent thirty-three years in space and came back. They were catatonic eight minutes after landing, the report said.”
“Let me give you a simpler why,” I ventured. “Why did you start griping all of a sudden? Why couldn’t you hold it in?”
“That’s not a simpler why. It’s part of the same one. I came to an answer, and I didn’t like it. I got the answer that we were out here because we couldn’t make the grade on Earth.”
“No!”
He smiled apologetically. “No? All right, then. Give me another answer. I want an answer, Hammond. I need one, now.”
I pointed to the synthesizer. “Why don’t you have a drink instead?”
“That comes later,” he said somberly. “After I’ve given up trying to find out.”
The stippling of fine details was becoming a sharp-focus picture. Brock—self-reliant Brock, self-contained—had come to the end of his self-sufficiency. He had looked too deeply beneath the surface.
“At the age of eight,” I began, “I asked my father what was outside the universe. That is, defining the universe as That Which Contains Everything, could there possibly be something or someplace outside its bounds? He looked at me for a minute or two, then laughed and told me not to worry about it. But I did worry about it. I stayed up half the night worrying about it, and my head hurt by morning. I never found out what was outside the universe.”
“The universe is infinite,” said Brock moodily. “Recurving in on itself, topologically…”
“Maybe. But I worried over it. I worried over First Cause. I worried all through my adolescence. Then I stopped worrying.”
He smiled acidly. “You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance, and decided not to pull loose because it was too painful. Am I right, Hammond?”
“No. I joined the Exploratory Corps.”
I dreamed, that night, as I swung in my hammock. It was a vivid and unpleasant dream, which stayed with me well into the following morning as a sort of misshapen reality that had attached itself to me in the night.
I had been a long time falling asleep. Brock had brooded most of the day, and a long hike over the bleak tundra had done little to improve his mood. Towards nightfall he dialed a few drinks, inserted a disc of Sibelius in his ear, and sat staring glumly at the darkening sky outside the ship. Alphecca II was moonless. The night was the black of space, but the atmosphere blurred the neighboring stars.
I remember drifting off into a semi-sleep: a half-somnolence in which I was aware of Brock’s harsh breathing to my left, but yet in which I had no volition, no control over my limbs. And after that state came sleep, and with it—dreams.
The dream must have grown from Brock’s bitter remark of earlier: You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance.
I accepted the statement literally. Suddenly I was a vegetable, possessed of all my former faculties, but rooted in the soil.
Rooted.
Straining for freedom, straining to break away, caught eternally by my legs, thinking, thinking…
Never to move, except for a certain thrashing of the upper limbs.
Rooted.
I writhed, longing to get as far as the rocky hill beyond, only as far as the next yard, the next yard, the next inch. But I had lost all motility; it was as if my legs were grasped in a mighty trap, and, without pain, without torment, I was bound to the earth.
I woke, finally, damp with perspiration. In his hammock, Brock slept, seemingly peacefully. I considered waking him and telling him of the nightmare, but decided against it. I tried to return to sleep.
At length, I slept.
Dreamlessly.
The pre-set alarm throbbed at 0700; dawn had preceded us by nearly an hour.
Brock was up first; I sensed him moving about even as I stirred toward wakefulness. Still caught up in the strange unreal reality of my nightmare, I wondered on a conscious level if today would be like yesterday—if Brock, obsessed by his sudden thirst for an answer, would continue to brood and sulk.
I hoped not. It would mean the end of our team if Brock cracked up; after eleven years, I was not anxious for a new partner.
“Hammond? You up yet?”
His voice had lost the edgy quality of yesterday, but there was something new and subliminally frightening in it.
Yawning, I said, “Just about. Dial breakfast for me, will you?”
“I did already. But get out of the sack and come look at this.”
I lurched from the hammock, shook my head to clear it, and started forward.
“Where are you?”
“Second level. At the window. Come take a look.”
I climbed the spiral catwalk to the viewing-station; Brock stood with his back toward me, looking out. As I drew near, I said, “I had the strangest dream last night…”
“The hell with
that. Look.”
At first I didn’t notice anything strange. The bright-colored landscape seemed to be unchanged; pebbly orange soil, dark-blue trees, a tangle of green vines, the murk of the morning atmosphere. But then I saw I had been looking too far from home.
Writhing up the side of the window, just barely visible to the right, was a gnarled knobby green rope. Rope? No. It was one of the vines.
“They’re all over the ship,” Brock said. “I’ve checked all the ports. During the night the damned things must have come crawling up the side of the ship like so many snakes and wrapped themselves around us. I guess they figure we’re here to stay, and they can use us as bracing-posts, the way they use those trees.”
I stared with mixed repugnance and fascination at the hard bark of the vine, at the tiny suckers that held it fast to the smooth skin of our ship.
“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s sort of an attack by extraterrestrial monsters, isn’t it?”
We suited up and went outside to have a look at the “attackers.” At a distance of a hundred yards, the ship looked weirdly bemired. Its graceful lines were broken by the winding fingers of the vine, spiraling up its sleek sides from a thick parent stem on the ground. Other shoots of the vine sprawled near us, clutching futilely at us as we moved among them.
I was reminded of my dream. Somewhat hesitantly I told Brock about it.
He laughed. “Rooted, eh? You were dreaming that while those vines were busy wrapping themselves around the ship. Significant?”
“Perhaps.” I eyed the tough vines speculatively. “Maybe we’d better move the ship. If much more of that stuff gets around it, we may not be able to blast off at all.”
Brock knelt and flexed a shoot of vine. “The ship could be completely cocooned in this stuff and we’d still be able to take off. A spacedrive wields a devil of a lot of thrust. We’ll manage.”
And whick!
A tapering finger of the vine arched suddenly and whipped around Brock’s middle. Whick! Whick!
Like animated rope, like a bark-covered serpent, it curled about him. I drew back, staring. He seemed half amused, half perplexed.
“The thing’s got pull, all right,” he said. He was smiling lopsidedly, annoyed at having let so simple a thing as a vine interfere with his freedom of motion. But then he winced in obvious pain.
“…Tightening,” he gasped.
The vine contracted muscularly; it skittered two or three feet towards the tree from which its parent stock sprang, and Brock was jerked suddenly off balance. As the corded arm of the vine yanked him backward he began to topple, poising for what seemed like seconds on his left foot, right jutting awkwardly in the air, arms clawing for balance.
Then he fell.
I was at his side in a moment, carefully avoiding the innocent-looking vine-tips to right and left. I planted my foot on the trailing vine that held Brock. I levered downward and grabbed the tip where it bound his waist. I pulled; Brock pushed.
The vine yielded.
“It’s giving,” he grunted. “A little more.”
“Maybe I’d better go back for the blaster,” I said.
“No. No telling what this thing may do while you’re gone; it may cut me in two. Pull!”
I pulled. The vine struggled against our combined strength, writhed, twisted; but gradually we prevailed. It curled upward, loosened, went limp. Finally it drooped away, leaving Brock in liberty.
He got up slowly, rubbing his waist.
“Hurt?”
“Just the surprise. Tropistic reaction on the plant’s part; I must have triggered some hormone-chain to make it do that.” He eyed the now quiescent vine with respect.
“It’s not the first time we’ve been attacked,” I said. “Alpheraz III—”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t needed to mention it. Alpheraz III had been a hellish jungle planet; the image in his mind, as it was in mine, was undoubtedly that of a tawny beast the size of a goat held in the inexorable grip of some stocky-trunked plant, rising in the air, vanishing into a waiting mouth of the carnivorous tree…
…and seconds later, another tendril dragging me aloft. Only a hasty blaster-shot by Brock keeping me from being a plant’s dinner.
We returned to the ship, entering the hatch a few feet from one of the vines that now encrusted it. Brock unsuited; the vine had left a red, raw line about his waist.
“The plant tried,” I said.
“To kill me?”
“No. To move on. To get going. To see what was behind the next hill.”
He frowned and said, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m not so sure, yet. I’m not good at seeing patterns. But it’s taking shape. I’m getting it now, Brock. I’m getting it all. Dammit, I’m getting your answer!”
He massaged his stomach. “Go ahead,” he said. “Think it out loud.”
“I’m putting it together out of my dream and out of the things you said and out of the vines down there.” I walked slowly about the cabin. “Those plants—they’re stuck there, aren’t they? They grow in a certain place and that’s where they remain. Maybe they wiggle a little, and maybe they writhe, but that’s the size of it.”
“They can grow long.”
“Sure. But not infinitely long. They can’t grow long enough to reach another planet. They’re rooted, Brock; their condition is permanently fixed. Brock, suppose those plants had brains?”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with…”
“It does,” I said. “Just assume those plants are intelligent. They want to go. They’re stuck. So one of them lashes out in fury at you. Jealous fury.”
He nodded, seeing it clearly now. “Sure. We don’t have roots; we can go places. We can visit a hundred sixty-four worlds and walk all over them.”
“That’s your answer, Brock. There’s the why you were looking for.” I took a deep breath. “You know why we go out to explore? Not because we’re running away. Not because there’s some inner compulsion driving us to coast from planet to planet. Uh-uh. It’s because we can do it. That’s all the ‘why’ you need. We explore because it’s possible for us to explore.”
Some of the harshness faded from his face. “We’re special,” he said. “We can move. It’s the privilege of humanity. The thing that makes us us.”
I didn’t need to say any more. After eleven years, we don’t need to vocalize every thought. But we had it, now: the special uniqueness that those clutching vines down there envied so much. Motility.
We left Alphecca II finally, and moved on. We did the other worlds of the system and headed outward, far out this time, as much of a hop as we could make. And we moved on from there to the next sun, and from there to the next, and onward.
We took a souvenir with us from Alphecca II, though. When we blasted off, the vine that had wrapped itself round the ship gripped us so tightly that it wasn’t shaken loose by the impact of blastoff. It remained hugging us as we thrust into space, dangling, roots and all. We finally got tired of looking at it, and Brock went out in a spacesuit to chop it away from the ship. He gave a push, imparted velocity to it, and the vine went drifting off sunward.
It had achieved its goal: it had left its home world. But it had died in the attempt. And that was the difference, we thought—all the difference in the universe—as we headed outward and outward, across the boundless gulfs.
THE OUTBREEDERS
This, on the other hand, was a story that I did take a chance with. Fat lot of good it did me. I wrote it in May, 1957, thought that it was a cut above my usual level of work at that time, and with high hopes tried it on Horace Gold and John Campbell and maybe even Tony Boucher. They all swiftly handed it back to me. And so I took it over to Hans Stefan Santesson at Fantastic Universe, who accepted it that October, giving me (not very swiftly) $55 for it, and published it (in an equally leisurely way) in the issue of September, 1959.
For some reason that I’m not able to remember the story appeared the
re under the highly Protestant pseudonym of “Calvin M. Knox.” Randall Garrett had dreamed up that byline for me in 1955, at a time when I had not yet sold a story to John W. Campbell under my own name, as a way of getting around Campbell’s supposed anti-Semitism; according to Garrett, Campbell was reputed to dislike seeing Jewish names in his magazine. I had been using it sporadically ever since, both for Campbell’s Astounding and elsewhere. (Campbell, who had never displayed the slightest sign of anti-Semitism in his professional and personal dealings with me, found the whole notion pretty amusing, when around 1960 I finally explained the reason for the creation of the pen name to him, and reminded me that a certain Isaac Asimov had been appearing regularly on his contents page for two decades. He had also regularly published the work of such notorious non-Aryans as Alfred Bester and C. M. Kornbluth, and, in an earlier era, that of Nathan Schachner and Donald A. Wollheim.)
Why the Knox byline was used for this one, I can’t say: certainly I was glad to lurk behind some pseudonym when I was producing “Tyrants of the Purple Void,” or whatever, for one of the trashier magazines, but this story always seemed a charming one to me, and I would have had no reason to want to conceal my authorship of it—other than, perhaps, that my own name was being seen with such embarrassing frequency in every magazine of the era that it seemed best to hide some of my output behind false whiskers rather than let the public know I was really as prolific as in fact I was. Prolific writers are often mistrusted: people wonder how anything written so quickly can be worth reading. (But you damned well had to be prolific when stories you wrote in the spring of 1957 earned you $55 minus your agent’s commission, payable two years after acceptance, as this one did.)
——————
The week before his impending marriage, Ryly Baille went alone into the wild forests that separated Baille lands from those of the Clingert clan. The lonely journey was a pre-nuptial tradition among the Bailles; his people expected him to return with body toughened by exertion, mind sharp and clear from solitary meditation. No one at all expected him to meet and fall in love with a Clingert girl.
To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One Page 29
