Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars

by William Sloane

  “‘This is the state in which our planet is now’” said the translator’s voice. “‘There is even ice at one of the poles’”

  Once again there was a period of silence in the command post. Then General Weinburger said: ‘

  ‘The Staff approves the Venus expedition, Chairman.”

  He tore up the order for the bombardment of the Cominworld cities, and the fragments fluttered to the floor.

  LIKE GODS THEY CAME

  IRVING COX, JR.

  ★ ★

  Here is the last story in this book. Perhaps it is also the last page in the Book of Earth, too, though that is for the reader to decide.

  Nothing, so far as we know, endures forever. The last dinosaur is dead; there are no more carrier pigeons. The great Egyptian and Mayan empires have vanished except for certain structures their citizens erected and for the heritage of myth and legend they left behind. It took decades of intensely skilled mathematical research to rediscover the lost arithmetic of the Mayas, engraved though it was on thousands of stone monuments. So, as some of Man’s greatest civilizations have perished under his very eyes and within the span of recorded history, the day may come when the whole of Earth’s parent culture may crumble to ruin in the midst of a galaxy peopled by Earths children.

  In such a galaxy, the Legend of Earth would endure for a long time. Milleniums as they passed would not wipe out the myth of the Original Home, the planet from which all men had once come, the satellite of Sol which had peopled those of Rigel, Arcturus, Sirius, Procyon I, Wolfe II and all the thousands of others. Many people today still believe in the myth of Atlantis with far less reason. And during those thousands upon thousands of years of galaxy-wide colonization, the myth of Earth would spread out into the farthest reaches of the stars.

  Almost sixty years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called “To the True Romance,” which tells in a few of its lines how that myth would seem to the people who took it with them:

  The children wise of outer skies

  Look hitherward and mark

  A light that shifts, a glare that drifts,

  Rekindling thus and thus,

  Not all forlorn, for Thou hast borne

  Strange tales to them of us.

  Sometime a last voyage will be made through space to Terra from Kipling’s “outer skies.” The “children wise” who make it will not come again; there will be no reason to do so. Perhaps the Earth will be deserted. Or, as Mr. Cox suggests, perhaps what remains of the original race will not be recognizable to its own children. But in any event those final visitors will feel a strange emotion as they look about them.

  ★ ★

  We returned to a strangling bleakness, to a whole people suddenly lost and drifting without purpose. Naturally the news had preceded us; it was inconceivable that we should not have sent back the truth as soon as we knew it.

  No one blamed us, of course, but the heart was torn out of the celebration. Long before our sleek space sphere settled into the landing ways the flags and streamers had been taken down. There were no cheering crowds to greet us, no clattering mobs of reporters, no batteries of teleview machines. For all the notice that was taken of our expedition, we might have been nothing more than a routine flight in from one of our own planet-colonies.

  And it was better so.

  I took the slow surface tube home. I needed the time to think, to organize the story I would tell Alyria. I hadn’t expected her to meet me at the field, for we had intentionally made no announcement of the time of our arrival. We wanted as little fuss about it as possible.

  It was painful for me to remember the exciting light of hope that had been in Alyria’s eyes the night before we left. When all the civic ceremonies were over, I took her to the Recreo-roof. We had planned to share a whiff of neurogas by way of a private celebration of our own. But we both found the banter and the laughter of the throng too much for us. We went out on the roof where we could be alone.

  We sat on one of the benches just beyond the rocket runway. Below us we could see the glitter of city lights, flashing gems forming a geometric pattern on the night velvet; and, above us, the curving sphere of the universe. Like a naive schoolgirl, Alyria pointed out the planets of our own system, naming them and their colonies. Then her finger swept in a dramatic arc toward a tiny pinpoint of light, and a shiver of nervous anticipation shook her body.

  “There it is,” she whispered, reaching for my hand. “How long will it take?”

  “The trip? With the new power, perhaps a year,” I answered.

  “And a year more before you return.” She sighed. “We have waited so long, two years should mean nothing. But I have so little patience! Now that we are about to find them again, a day stretches into an eternity.”

  “But you can follow us on the view-screen. You will see what we do.”

  “That isn’t the same thing! I want to see them as they really are, to talk to them, to know their thoughts and their wisdom as our ancestors did!” She got up and leaned against the guard-rail, staring up at the sky. A mystic, dreamy tone crept into her voice. “Think what it means. Think what it means! After so many centuries, we have found them again!”

  I never flatter myself that I am anything more than an ordinary technician, a designer of machines. My art and my understanding are commonplace beside Alyria’s. She is a researcher into the mechanism of society, a Keeper of the Legend. I can never follow her into her loftier visions; her intuitions and insights are wonders to me as our first space spheres must have been to my grandfather. Yet I understood Alyria’s feelings then. There was not a man in our world who did not share it. There was no child, no tottering Elder, who was not looking up at the skies that night and whispering the same golden words.

  For as long as the history of our people has been recorded we have dreamed the same dream. A thousand years ago our intelligentsia laughed at it; they told us it was a story invented by a primitive people to explain things they could not understand. As our society matured in its control of physical things, the story of the gods came to seem more and more improbable. Only a few faithful visionaries preserved it; we honor them, today, in their children, by calling them Keepers of the Legend.

  It was not until we conquered space and established colonies in the planets of our own sun system, not until our astronomers had devices for measuring the ends of the universe, that we suddenly understood the truth.

  The Legend told us we had been established in the beginning as a planet colony of a great race. They were a people who had all wisdom and knew all science. The universe was theirs, and we were the last outpost of their civilization. We thrived as long as they kept in touch with us.

  Then, suddenly, they no longer came to our world. Why, we never knew. They had been our teachers and technicians, and without them we were helpless. The Golden Age died and became a legend itself. We forgot everything we had learned from them. Our society collapsed into savagery; we could no longer speak their tongue or use their symbols; we forgot their law and their ethic.

  On the brink of chaos our descent halted. We began to climb slowly back to knowledge. One by one we mastered the sciences. We experimented blindly with politico-economic systems until greed and war taught us how to build a planetary brotherhood. And we discovered the power for space travel. Only then did we begin to examine the old Legend seriously. The pattern conformed to our most recently verified data. The Legend, then, was the ultimate truth of our being; it was within our power to find the gods again!

  That was a century ago.

  Our astronomers and our historians for a century examined and reinterpreted the ancient records. For a century they studied the limitless reaches of the universe, seeking the home-place of the gods. It required a patience and a persistence that only the united hope of a whole people could support. Everything we did was channeled toward that one goal. At last we had our reward. Two years ago we isolated the distant sun system from which we had come, and six months later our scientists
knew precisely which of the planets in that system was the home of our gods.

  All this Alyria talked of as we stood on the roof looking up at the stars. Her words had the familiar incantation of an enchantment, for she spoke from the soul of our people. Our hope lit stars in her eyes.

  Just before dawn I took her home. She said she preferred watching our departure on the view-screen, so the children could be with her.

  Except for the monotony, our trip through space was uneventful. In one day less than the anticipated time we were within the sun system of the gods; ten hours later our sphere plunged toward the planet.

  Our excitement mounted as we watched the green globe on the landing visor. Point magnification showed us a wonderful, fertile countryside spread with forests and fields, and dotted by blue lakes. The technology of the gods far exceeded ours, for nowhere had the bulk of a city been reared to mar the beauty of their world. We saw occasional sections of highway curling gracefully, like silk ribbons, among the trees. It was obvious (so we thought then) that their cities, concealed underground, would be close to a place where several of the roads joined. Near such a junction we set the space sphere down in a broad valley rimmed by low hills.

  We did not believe it would be necessary to wear the regulation landing helmets, but we tested the atmosphere to be sure and found it similar to our own. How could it have been otherwise? We were a colony established by these people; we would naturally be like them in the chemistry of our bodies.

  We turned up the landing port and descended to the ground. The air smelled fresh and unbelievably clean, like a city park after a spring rain.

  I had expected that we would be met as soon as we landed; and I was subtly frightened when we saw no one. After a while we walked to the confluence of highways near by. The white roads were cracked and broken, overgrown with plant life. We all knew the truth even then, yet no one had the courage to say it.

  We followed the highway for a little while until we came to a place where the surrounding ground was a mass of jagged masonry overgrown with moss and grass. Two of us had the heart to dig out one of the larger pieces of shattered granite. On it were symbols that we knew, a word from the tongue of the ancients.

  There was no doubt after that. Silently we turned back.

  As we approached our space sphere a group of fierce beasts sprang at us, throwing long, pointed sticks which they apparently used as weapons. They were disgusting to look at because they were like caricatures of ourselves: thin, white, hairless, naked things who walked almost erect and used their forepaws like arms. To scare them off we shot our flare guns into the air. They were terrified, but instead of scurrying back into the forest they flung themselves at our feet, crying piteously.

  We had no idea how many of them might be concealed in the woods; by sheer weight of numbers they could overwhelm us. We pushed through them and made haste to enter the sphere.

  I looked back just before we fired the take-off. The beasts were pouring into the field from all sides, prostrating themselves at intervals, raising their ugly, hairless paws toward us. It was such a mockery of a human gesture that it sickened me. I was glad when the flame of our exhaust burst over them and I could see them no longer.

  We remained on the planet for almost a week, and we made numerous landings wherever we thought we might find people. But everywhere it was the same. The cities were scattered ruins, some utterly deserted, others inhabited only by the hairless, white beasts.

  There was a possibility, of course, that our scientists had miscalculated. With some hope, we went to the other planets in the system. We found nothing, not even the dust of broken cities.

  Thus, the home of the gods.

  It has all been told before. The shock is gone, but the smashed dream of centuries cannot be healed.

  I had to carry some comfort to Alyria, some new reason for hope, and there was nothing. I could invent nothing. She is a dreamer, a Keeper of the Legend; I am a technician. I can go on building; I can design more efficient power units, faster space spheres; I can help plant new colonies on the unexplored planets. I can pretend my work has meaning; I can pretend I have a reason and a purpose for what I do.

  But what of Alyria? My soul is in the dexterity of my hand and brain; hers, in the elusive magnificence of the Legend. She had the vision, the insight into meaning and cause, the ultimate understanding of absolute truth. And in a breath it was taken from her. She had nothing, and she cannot delude herself with pretense.

  Is it any wonder that I took the surface tube home after we had landed? That I left it a block short of our dwelling unit and walked the rest of the way, racking my brain frantically for some shadow of consolation I could take her?

  Mechanically I shut the door of the vacuum-vertishaft and set the dial for the third level, fifty-three. Alyria was waiting at the door. And she was smiling!

  “I allowed the children to stay up past their bedtime so they could eat with us,” she said. But instead of letting me go into the house, she put her arm around me and drew me into the little garden at the back. Beyond the plastic guard-rail we could see the pattern of city lights at our feet, as we had two years before, and overhead the eternal rooftop of space.

  “I hope you’re ready to talk yourself hoarse,” Alyria said.

  “If you like, but it might be easier for you if …”

  “The children have a thousand questions. As far as they’re concerned, you’ve had an incredibly exciting adventure. I do hope you had at least one narrow escape. They’ve invented such wonderful stories; you’ll have to live up to some of them.”

  I kissed her then; I was proud of her. No Keeper of the Legend could have suffered more than she had, and none could have maintained her poise. She drew me down on the garden seat beside her.

  “At first it was very hard,” she whispered. “Sometimes at night I would come out here and look up at the stars. There was one terrible question pounding in my mind, and I never found an answer. What had happened to the gods who gave us our beginning? What did the Legend really mean? Had they destroyed themselves? But that was impossible; they were too wise to fall into discord. Had another race attacked them? Then what had become of it, and why had we been spared? Or perhaps the hairless things you found in the ruins had conquered them? But that was the most fantastic notion of them all! There is no answer; perhaps there were no gods. I was utterly lost and depressed, until I began to listen to the stories the children were inventing for themselves. None of it had meaning to them, except as an adventure. Slowly they taught me the truth. The past is a pretty story, but we cannot turn back to it. The future is ours. We can make what we like of it. We are gods in our own right!”

  She looked at me and I saw the light of the stars was in her eyes again. She put both her arms around me and clung to me tenderly; she was no dreamer then, no visionary, no Keeper of the Legend, but a woman. Her arm lay beside mine in the moonlight, its long, sleek, green hair as downy as air. It was a fascinating contrast to the bristling stubble that covered my own purple skin. I wondered, as I kissed her again, what our next child would be like. The others are all so different! Alyria and I are like any parents; we think the baby is the prettiest of the lot.

  “The people of the Earth are gone,” she said. “We do not know what happened to them, and it hardly matters. The Earth-people were men like ourselves, not gods. We possess what the Earth has lost, and perhaps something they never found.”

 

 

 

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