Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  I knew the midperiod was about over, but I sat there with my eyes closed just the same. I didn’t want to open them to look at the clock until I could sec the clock as a clock and not as whatever it might be this time. I sat there and thought.

  I felt a bit hurt about Reagan’s casualness in accept­ing the message. He’d been a good friend of mine for ten years; he could at least have said he was sorry I was go­ing to leave. Of course, there was a fair chance that he might get the promotion, but even if he was thinking about that, he could have been diplomatic about it. At least, he could have—

  Oh, quit feeling sorry for yourself, I told myself. You’re through with Placet and you’re through with Earth Center, and you’re going back to Earth pretty soon now, as soon as they relieve you, and you can get another job there, probably teaching again.

  But darn Reagan, just the same. He’d been my student at Earth City Poly, and I’d got him this Placet job and it was a good one for a youngster his age, assistant admin­istrator of a planet with nearly a thousand population. For that matter, my job was a good one for a man my age—I’m only thirty-one myself. An excellent job, except that you couldn’t put up a building that wouldn’t fall down again and . . . Quit crabbing, I told myself; you’re through with it now. Back to Earth and a teaching job again. Forget it.

  ~ * ~

  I was tired. I put my head on my arms on top of the desk, and I must have dozed off for a minute.

  I looked up at the sound of footsteps coming through the doorway; they weren’t Reagan’s footsteps. The illu­sions were getting better now, I saw. It was—or appeared to be—a gorgeous redhead. It couldn’t be, of course. There are a few women on Placet, mostly wives of tech­nicians, but she said, “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Rand?” It was a woman; her voice was a woman’s voice, and a beauti­ful voice. Sounded vaguely familiar, too.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. ”How can I recognize you at midper—” My eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of the clock past her shoulder, and it was aclock and not a funeral wreath or a cuckoo’s nest, and I realized sud­denly that everything else in the room was back to nor­mal. And that meant midperiod was over, and I wasn’t seeing things.

  My eyes went back to the redhead. She must be real, I realized. And suddenly I knew her, although she’d changed, changed plenty. All changes were improve­ments, although Michaelina Witt had been a very pretty girl when she’d been in my Extraterrestrial Botany 1II class at Earth City Polytech four . . . no, five years ago.

  She’d been pretty, then. Now she was beautiful. She was stunning. How had the teletalkies missed her? Or had they? What was she doing here? She must have just got off the Ark, but— I realized I was still gawking at her. I stood up so fast I almost fell across the desk.

  “Of course I remember you, Miss Witt,” I stammered. ”Won’t you sit down? How did you come here? Have they relaxed the no visitors rule?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “I’m not a visitor, Mr. Rand. Center advertised for a technician-secretary for you, and I tried for the job and got it, subject to your approval, of course. I’m on probation for a month, that is.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. It was a masterpiece of understatement. I started to elaborate on it: “Marvelous—”

  There was the sound of someone clearing his throat. I looked around; Reagan was in the doorway. This time not as a blue skeleton or a two-headed monster. Just plain Reagan.

  He said, “Answer to your radiotype just came.” He crossed over and dropped it on my desk. I looked at it. “O.K. August 19th,” it read. My momentary wild hope that they’d failed to accept my resignation went down among the widgie birds. They’d been as brief about it as I’d been.

  August 19th—the next arrival of the Ark. They cer­tainly weren’t wasting any time—mine or theirs. Four days!

  Reagan said, ”I thought you’d want to know right away, Phil.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. I glared at him. “Thanks.” With a touch of spite—or maybe more than a touch—I thought, well, my bucko, you don’t get the job, or that message would have said so; they’re sending a replacement on the next shuttle of the Ark.

  But I didn’t say that; the veneer of civilization was too thick. I said, “Miss Witt, I’d like you to meet—” They looked at each other and started to laugh, and I remem­bered. Of course, Reagan and Michaelina had both been in my botany class, as had Michaelina’s twin brother, Ichabod. Only, of course, no one ever called the red-headed twins Michaelina and Ichahod. It was Mike and Ike, once you knew them.

  Reagan said, “I met Mike getting off the Ark. I told her how to find your office since you weren’t there to do the honors.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Did the reinforcing bars come?”

  “Guess so. They unloaded some crates. They were in a hurry to pull out again. They’ve gone.”

  I grunted.

  Reagan said, “Weil, I’ll check the ladings. Just came to give you the radiotype; thought you’d want the good news right away.”

  He went out, and I glared after him. The louse. The—Michaelina said, ”Am I to start to work right away, Mr. Rand?”

  I straightened out my face and managed a smile. “Of course not,” I told her. “You’ll want to look around the place, first. See the scenery and get acclimated. Want to stroll into the village for a drink?”

  “Of course.”

  ~ * ~

  We strolled down the path toward the little cluster of buildings, all small, one-story, one square.

  She said, “It’s . . . it’s nice. Feels like I’m walking on air, I’m so light. Exactly what is the gravity?”

  “Point seven four,” I said. “If you weigh . . . umm, a hundred twenty pounds on Earth, you weigh about eighty-nine pounds here. And on you, it looks good.”

  She laughed. ”Thank you, professor—oh, that’s right; you’re not a professor now. You’re now my boss, and I must call you Mr. Rand.”

  “Unless you’re willing to make it Phil, Michaelina.”

  “If you’d call me Mike; I detest Michaelina, almost as much as Ike hates Ichabod.”

  “How is Ike?”

  “Fine. Has a student instructor job at Poly, but he doesn’t like it much.” She looked ahead at the village. “Why so many small buildings instead of a few bigger ones?”

  “Because the average life of a structure of any kind on Placet is about three weeks. And you never know when one is going to fall down—with someone inside. It’s our biggest problem. All we can do is make them small and light, except the foundations, which we make as strong as possible. Thus far, nobody has been hurt seriously in the collapse of a building, for that reason, but . . . Did you feel that?”

  “The vibration? What was it, an earthquake?”

  “No,” I said. “It was a flight of birds.”

  “What?”

  I had to laugh at the expression on her face. I said, ”Placet is a crazy place. A minute ago, you said you felt as though you were walking on air. Well, in a way, you are doing just exactly that. Placet is one of the rare objects in the universe that is composed of both ordi­nary and heavy matter. Matter with a collapsed molecu­lar structure, so heavy you couldn’t lift a pebble of it. Placet has a core of that stuff; that’s why this tiny planet, which has an area about twice the size of Man­hattan Island, has a gravity three-quarters that of Earth. There is life—animal life, not intelligent—living on the core. There are birds, whose molecular structure is like that of the planet’s core, so dense that ordinary matter is as tenuous to them as air is to us. They actually fly through it, as birds on Earth fly through the air. From their standpoint, we’re walking on top of Placer’s atmos­phere.”

  “And the vibration of their flight under the surface makes the houses collapse?”

  “Yes, and worse—they fly right through the founda­tions, no matter what we make them of. Any matter we can work with is just so much gas to them. They fly through iron or steel as easily as through sand or loam. I’ve just got a shipment
of some specially tough stuff from Earth—the special alloy steel you heard me ask Reagan about—but I haven’t much hope of it doing any good.”

  “But aren’t those birds dangerous? I mean, aside from making the buildings fall down. Couldn’t one get up enough momentum flying to carry it out of the ground and into the air a little way? And wouldn’t it go right through anyone who happened to be there?”

  “It would,” I said, “but it doesn’t. I mean, they never fly closer to the surface than a few feet. Some sense seems to tell them when they’re nearing the top of their `atmosphere’. Something analogous to the supersonics a bat uses. You know, of course, how a bat can fly in utter darkness and never fly into a solid object.”

  “Like radar, yes.”

  “Like radar, yes, except a bat uses sound waves instead of radio waves. And the widgie birds must use something that works on the same principle, in reverse; turns them back a few feet before they approach what to them would be the equivalent of a vacuum. Being heavy matter, they could no more exist or fly in air than a bird could exist or fly in a vacuum.”

  While we were having a cocktail apiece in the village, Michaelina mentioned her brother again. She said “Ike doesn’t like teaching at all Phil. Is there any chance at all that you could get him a job here on Placer?”

  I said, ”I’ve been badgering Earth Center for another administrative assistant. The work is increasing plenty since we’ve got more of the surface under cultivation. Reagan really needs help. I’ll—”

  Her whole face was alight with eagerness. And I remembered. I was through. I’d resigned, and Earth Cen­ter would pay as much attention to any recommendation of mine as though I were a widgie bird. I finished weakly, “I’ll . . . I’ll see if I can do anything about it.”

  She said, “Thanks—Phil.” My hand was on the table beside my glass, and for a second she put hers over it. All right, it’s a hackneyed metaphor to say it felt as though a high-voltage current went through me. But it did, and it was a mental shock as well as a physical one, because I realized then and there that I was head over heels. I’d fallen harder than any of Placet’s buildings ever had. The thump left me breathless. I wasn’t watching Michaelina’s face, but from the way she pressed her hand harder against mine for a millisecond and then jerked it away as though from a flame, she must have felt a little of that current, too.

  I stood up a little shakily and suggested that we walk back to headquarters.

  Because the situation was completely impossible, now. Now that Center had accepted my resignation and I was without visible or invisible means of support. In a psy­chotic moment, I’d cooked my own goose. I wasn’t even sure I could get a teaching job. Earth Center is the most powerful organization in the universe and has a finger in every pie. If they blacklisted me—

  Walking back, I let Michaelina do most of the talking; I had some heavy thinking to do. I wanted to tell her the truth—and I didn’t want to.

  Between monosyllabic answers, I fought it out with myself. And, finally, lost. Or won. I’d not tell her—until just before the next coming of the Ark.I’d pretend everything was O.K. and normal for that long, give myself that much chance to see if Michaelina would fall for me. That much of a break I’d give myself. A chance, for four days.

  And then—well, if by then she’d come to feel about me the way I did about her, I’d tell her what a fool I’d been and tell her I’d like to . . . No, I wouldn’t let her return to Earth with me, even if she wanted to, until I saw light ahead through a foggy future. All I could tell her was that if and when I had a chance of working my way up again to a decent job—and after all I was still only thirty-one and might be able to... .

  That sort of thing.

  ~ * ~

  Reagan was waiting in my office, looking as mad as a wet hornet. He said, “Those saps at Earth Center shipping department gummed things again. Those crates of special steel—aren’t.”

  “Aren’t what?”

  “Aren’t anything. They’re empty crates. Something went wrong with the crating machine and they never knew it.”

  “Are you sure that’s what those crates were supposed to contain?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Everything else on the order came, and the ladings specified the steel for those particular crates.” He ran a hand through his tousled hair. It made him look more like an airedale than he usually does.

  I grinned at him. ”Maybe it’s invisible steel.”

  “Invisible, weightless and intangible. Can I word the message to Center telling them about it?”

  “Go as far as you like,” I told him. “Wait here a min­ute, though. I’ll show Mike where her quarters are and then I want to talk to you a minute.”

  I took Michaelina to the best available sleeping cabin of the cluster around headquarters. She thanked me again for trying to get Ike a job here, and I felt lower than a widgie bird’s grave when I went back to my office.

  “Yeah, chief?” Reagan said.

  “About that message to Earth,” I told him. “I mean the one I sent this morning. I don’t want you to say anything about it to Michaelina.”

  He chuckled. “Want to tell her yourself, huh? O.K., I’ll keep my yap shut.”

  I said, a bit wryly, “Maybe I was foolish sending it.”

  “Huh?” he said. “I’m sure glad you did. Swell idea.” He went out, and I managed not to throw anything at him.

  ~ * ~

  The next day was a Tuesday, if that matters. I remem­ber it as the day I solved one of Placet’s two major prob­lems. An ironic time to do it, maybe.

  I was dictating some notes on greenwort culture—Placet’s importance to Earth is, of course, the fact that certain plants native to the place and which won’t grow anywhere else yield derivatives that have become impor­tant to the pharmacopoeia. I was having heavy sledding because I was watching Michaelina take the notes; she’d insisted on starting work her second day on Placet.

  And suddenly, out of a clear sky and out of a muggy mind, came an idea. I stopped dictating and rang for Reagan. He came in.

  “Reagan,” I said, “order five thousand ampoules of J-17 Conditioner. Tell ‘em to rush it.”

  “Chief, don’t you remember? We tried the stuff. Thought it might condition us to see normally in mid-period, but it didn’t affect the optic nerves. We still saw screwy. It’s great for conditioning people to high or low temperatures or—”

  “Or long or short waking-sleeping periods,” I inter­rupted him. ”That’s what I’m talking about, Reagan. Look, revolving around two suns, Placet has such short and irregular periods of light and dark that we never took them seriously. Right?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “But since there’s no logical Placet day and night we could use, we made ourselves slaves to a sun so far away we can’t see it. We use a twenty-four hour day. But midperiod occurs every twenty hours, regularly. We can use conditioner to adapt ourselves to a twenty-hour day—six hours sleep, twelve awake—with everybody blissfully sleeping through the period when their eyes play tricks on them. And in a darkened sleeping room so you couldn’t see anything, even if you woke up. More and shorter days per year—and nobody goes psy­chopathic on us. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  His eyes went bleak and blank and he hit his forehead a resounding whack with the palm of his hand.

  He said, “Too simple, that’s what’s wrong with it. So darned simple only a genius could see it. For two years I’ve been going slowly nuts and the answer so easy nobody could see it. I’ll put the order in right away.”

  He started out and then turned back. “Now how do we keep the buildings up? Quick, while you’re fey or whatever you are.”

  I laughed. I said, “Why not try that invisible steel of yours in the empty crates?”

  He said, “Nuts,” and closed the door.

  ~ * ~

  And the next day was a Wednesday and I knocked off work and took Michaelina on a walking tour around Placer. Once around is just a nic
e day’s hike. But with Michaelina Witt, any day’s hike would be a nice day’s hike. Except, of course, that I knew I had only one more full day to spend with her. The world would end on Friday.

  Tomorrow the Ark would leave Earth, with the ship­ment of conditioner that would solve one of our prob­lems—and with whomever Earth Center was sending to take my place. It would warp through space to a point a safe distance outside the Argyle I-II system and come in on rocket power from there. It would be here Friday, and I’d go back with it. But I tried not to think about that.