He was quiet so long after that, I felt I had to nudge him along. “Could it be that there is a way to make you happy on Earth, and you just haven’t been able to find it?”
“Oh, no,” he said positively. Then he raised his head and stared at me. “Wait a minute. You’re very close to the mark there. That—that simple statement is trying to crawl out.” He frowned. This time I kept my mouth shut and watched him.
“The something I’m looking for,” he said finally, in the surest tones he’d used yet, “is something I lack, or something I have that I haven’t been able to name yet. If there’s anything on Earth or here that can fill that hollow place, and if I find it, I won’t want to go Out. I won’t need to go—I shouldn’t go. But if it doesn’t exist for me here, then Out I go, as part of a big something, rather than as a something missing a part. Wait!” He chewed his lower lip. His knuckle-joints crackled as he twisted his hands together. “I’ll rephrase that and you’ll have your simple statement.”
He took a deep breath and said, “I came to Curbstone to find out… whether there’s something I haven’t had yet that belongs to me, or whether I… belong to something that hasn’t had me yet.”
“Fine,” I said. “Very damned fine. You keep looking, Jud. The answer’s here, somewhere, in some form. I’ve never heard it put better: Do you owe, or are you owed? There are three possible courses open to you, no matter which way you decide.”
“There are? Three?”
I put up fingers one at a time. “Earth. Here. Out.”
“I—see.”
“And you can take the course of any one of the words you saw floating over the gate to the launching court.”
He stood up. “I’ve got a lot to think about.”
“You have.”
“But I’ve got me one hell of a blueprint.”
I just grinned at him.
“You through with me?” he asked.
“For now.”
“When do I start work for my certificate?”
“At the moment, you’re just about four-ninths through.”
“You dog! All this has been—”
“I’m a working man, Jud. I work all the time. Now beat it. You’ll hear from me.”
“You dog,” he said again. “You old hound-dog!” But he left.
I sat back to think. I thought about Judson, of course. And Clinton and his worrisome solo ideas. The trip can be done solo, but it isn’t a good idea. The human mind’s communications equipment isn’t a convenience—it’s a vital necessity. Tween. How beautiful can a girl get? And the way she lights up when she thinks about going Out. She’s certified now. Guess she and Wold will be taking off any time now.
Then my mind spun back to Flower. Put those pieces together… something should fit. Turn it this way, back—Ah! Clinton wants Out. He’s been waiting and waiting for his girl to get certified. She hasn’t even tried. He’s not going to wait much longer. Who’s his girl now…?
Flower.
Flower, who turned all that heat on Judson.
Why Judson? There were bigger men, smarter, better-looking ones. What was special about Judson?
I filed the whole item away in my mind—with a red priority tab on it.
The days went by. A gong chimed and the number-board over my desk glowed. I didn’t have to look up the numbers to know who it was. Fort and Mariellen. Nice kids. Slipped Out during a sleep period. I thought about them, watched the chain of checking lights flicker on, one after another.
Palm-patterns removed from the Gate scanner; they’d never be used there again. Ship replaced.
Quarters cleared and readied. Launching time reported to Coordination. Marriage recorded. Automatic machinery calculated, filed, punched cards, activated more automatic machinery until Fort and Mariellen were only axial alignments on the molecules of a magnetic tape… names… memories… dead, perhaps; gone, certainly, for the next six thousand years.
Hold tight, Earth! Wait for them, the fifty-four per cent (I hope, I ardently hope) who will come back.
Their relatives, their Earthbound friends will be long dead, and all their children and theirs; so let the Outbounders come home at least to the same Earth, the same language, the same traditions. They will be the millennial traditions of a more-than-Earth, the source of the unthinkable spatial sphere made fingertip-available to humankind through the efforts of the Outbounders. Earth is prepaying six thousand years of progress in exchange for the ability to use stars for stepping-stones, to be able to make Mars in a minute, Antares and Betelgeuse afternoon stops in a delivery run. Six thousand years of sacred stasis buys all but a universe, conquers Time, eliminates the fractionation of humanity into ship-riding, minute-shackled fragments of diverging evolution among the stars. All the stars will be in the next room when the Outbounders return.
Six thousand times around Sol, with Sol moving in a moving galaxy, and the galaxy in flight through a fluxing universe. That all amounts to a resultant movement of Earth through nine Mollner degrees around the Universal Curve. For six thousand years Curbstone flings off its tiny ships, its monstrous power-plant kicking them into space-time and the automatics holding them there until all—or until enough—are positioned. Some will materialize in the known universe and some in faintly suspected nebulae; some will appear in the empty nothingnesses beyond the galactic clusters, and some will burst into normal space inside molten suns.
But when the time comes, and the little ships are positioned in a great spherical pattern out around space, and together they become real again, they will send to each other a blaze of tight-beam energy.
Like the wiring of a great switchboard, like the synapses of a brain, each beam will find its neighbors, and through them Earth.
And then, within and all through that sphere, humanity will spread, stepping from rim to rim of the universe in seconds, instantaneously transmitting men and materials from and to the stars. Here a ship can be sent piecemeal and assembled, there a space-station. Yonder, on some unheard-of planet of an unknown star, men light years away from Earth can assemble matter transceivers and hook them up to the great sphere, and add yet another world to those already visited.
AND what of the Outbounders? Real time, six thousand years.
Ship’s time, from second-order spatial entry to materialization— zero.
Fort and Mariellen. Nice kids. Memories now; lights on a board, one after another, until they’re all accounted for. At Curbstone, the quiet machinery says, “Next!”
Fort and Mariellen. Clinging together, they press down the launching lever. Effortlessly in their launching, they whirl away from Curbstone. In minutes there is a flicker of gray, or perhaps not even that.
Strange stars surround them. They stare at one another. They are elsewhere… elsewhen. Lights glow.
This one says the tight-beam has gone on, pouring out toward the neighbors and, through them, to all the others. That one cries “emergency” and Fort whips to the manual controls and does what he can to avoid a dust-cloud, a planet… perhaps an alien ship.
Fort and Mariellen (or George and Viki, or Bruce, who went Out by himself, or Eleanor and Grace, or Sam and Rod—they were brothers) may materialize and die in an intolerable matter-displacement explosion so quickly that there is no time for pain. They may be holed by a meteor and watch, with glazing freezing eyes, the froth bubbling up from each other’s bursting lungs. They may survive for minutes or weeks, and then fall captive to some giant planet or unsuspected sun. They may be hunted down and killed or captured by beings undreamed of.
And some of them will survive all this and wait for the blessed contact; the strident heralding of the matter transceiver with which each ship is equipped—and the abrupt appearance of a man, sixty centuries unborn when they left Curbstone, instantly transmitted from Earth to their vessel. Back with him they’ll go, to an unchanged and ecstatic Earth, teeming with billions of trained, mature humans ready to fill the universe with human ways—the new humans who have left war
and greed behind them, who have acquired a universe so huge that they need exploit no creature’s properties, so rich and available is everything they require.
And some will survive, and wait, and die waiting because of some remotely extrapolated miscalculation. The beams never reach them; their beams contact nothing. And perhaps a few of these will not die, but will find refuge on some planet to leave a marker that will shock whatever is alive and intelligent a million years hence. Perhaps they will leave more than that. Perhaps there will be a slower, more hazardous planting of humanity in the gulfs.
But fifty-four per cent, the calculations insist, will establish the star-conquering sphere and return.
The weeks went by. A chime: Bark and Barbara. Damn it all, no more of Barbara’s banana cream pie. The filing, the sweeping, the recording, the lights. Marriage recorded.
When a man and a woman go Out together, that is marriage. There is another way to be married on Curbstone. There is a touch less speed involved in it than in joined hands pressing down a launching lever. There is not one whit less solemnity. It means what it means because it is not stamped with necessity. Children derive their names from their mothers, wed or not, and there is no distinction. Men and women, as responsible adults, do as they please within limits which are extremely wide. Except…
By arduous trial and tragic error, humanity has evolved modern marriage. With social pressure removed from the pursuit of a mate, with the end of the ribald persecution of spinsterhood, a marriage ceases to be a rubber stamp upon what people are sure to do, with or without ceremonies. Where men and women are free to seek their own company, as and when they choose, without social penalties, they will not be trapped into hypocrisies with marriage vows. Under such conditions a marriage is entered gravely and with sincerity, and it constitutes a public statement of choice and—with the full implementation of a mature society—of inviolability. The lovely, ancient words “forsaking all others” spell out the nature of modern marriage, with the universally respected adjunct that fidelity is not a command or a restriction, but a chosen path. Divorce is swift and simple, and almost unheard of. Married people live this way, single people live that way; the lines are drawn and deeply respected. People marry because they intend to live within the limits of marriage. The fact that a marriage exists is complete proof that it is working.
I had a word about marriage with Tween. Ran into her in the Gate corridor. I think she’d been in one of the ships again. If she was pale, her olive skin hid it. If her eyes were bloodshot, the lustrous ruby of her eyes covered it up. Maybe I saw her dragging her feet as she walked, or some such. I took her chin in my hand and tilted her head back. “Any dragons I can kill?”
She gave me a brilliant smile which lived only on her lips. “I’m wonderful,” she said bravely.
“You are,” I agreed. “Which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the way you feel. I won’t pry, child; but tell me—if you ever ate too many green apples, or stubbed your toe on a cactus, do you know a nice safe something you could hang on to while you cried it out?”
“I do,” she said breathlessly, making the smile just as hard as she could. “Oh, I do.” She patted my cheek. “You’re… listen. Would you tell me something if I asked you?”
“About certificates? No, Tween. Not about anyone else’s certificate. But—all he has to do is complete his final hypnopediae, and he just hasn’t showed up.”
She hated to hear it, but I’d made her laugh, too, a little. “Do you read minds, the way they all say?”
“I do not. And if I could, I wouldn’t. And if I couldn’t help reading ’em, I’d sure never act as if I could. In other words, no. It’s just that I’ve been alive long enough to know what pushes people around.
So’s I don’t care much about a person, I can judge pretty well what’s bothering him.
“’Course,” I added, “if I do give a damn, I can tell even better. Tween, you’ll be getting married pretty soon, right?”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. She gasped, and for a moment she just stopped making that smile.
Then, “Oh, yes,” she said brightly. “Well, not exactly. What I mean is, when we go Out, you see, so we might as well not, and I imagine as soon as Wold gets his certificate, we’ll… we kind of feel going Out is the best—I seem to have gotten something in my eye. I’m s-sor…”
I let her go. But when I saw Wold next—it was down in the Euphoria Sector—I went up to him very cheerfully. There are ways I feel sometimes that make me real jovial.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. His back bowed a bit and it seemed to me I felt vertebrae grinding together. “Wold, old boy,” I said heartily. “Good to see you. You haven’t been around much recently.
Mad?”
He pulled away from me. “A little,” he said sullenly. His hair was too shiny and he had perfect teeth that always reminded me of a keyboard instrument.
“Well, drop around,” I said. “I like to see young folks get ahead. You,” I added with a certain amount of emphasis, “have gone pretty damn far.”
“So have you,” he said with even more emphasis.
“Well, then.” I slapped him on the back. His eyeballs stayed in, which surprised me. “You can top me. You can go farther than I ever can. See you soon, old fellow.”
I walked off, feeling the cold brown points of his gaze.
And as it happened, next ten minutes later I saw that kakumba dance. I don’t see much dancing usually, but there was an animal roar from the dance-chamber that stopped me, and I ducked in to see what had the public so charmed.
The dance had gone through most of its figures, with the caller already worked up into a froth and only three couples left. As I shouldered my way to a vantage point, one of the three couples was bounced, leaving the two best. One was a tall blonde with periwigged hair and subvoltaic bracelets that passed and repassed a clatter of pastel arcs; she was dancing with one of the armor-monkeys from the Curbstone Hull Division, and they were good.
The other couple featured a slender, fluid dark girl in an open tunic of deep brown. She moved so beautifully that I caught my breath, and watched so avidly that it was seconds before I realized that it was Flower. The reaction to that made me lose more seconds in realizing that her partner was Judson. Good as the other couple were, they were better. I’d tested Jud’s reflexes, and they were phenomenal, but I’d had no idea he could respond like this to anything.
The caller threw the solo light to the first couple. There was a wild burst of music and the arc-wielding blonde and her arc-wielding boyfriend cut loose in an intricate frenzy of disjointed limbs and half-beat stamping. So much happened between those two people so fast that I thought they’d never get separated when the music stopped. But they untangled right with the closing bars, and a roar went up from the people watching them. And then the same blare of music was thrown at Jud and Flower.
Judson simply stood back and folded his arms, walking out a simple figure to indicate that, honest, he was dancing, too. But he gave it all to Flower.
Now I’ll tell you what she did in a single sentence: she knelt before him and slowly stood up with her arms over her head. But words will never describe the process completely. It took her about twelve minutes to get all the way up. At the fourth minute the crowd began to realize that her body was trembling. It wasn’t a wriggle or a shimmy, or anything as crude as that. It was a steady, apparently uncontrollable shiver. At about the eighth minute the audience began to realize it was controlled, and just how completely controlled it was. It was hypnotic, incredible. At the final crescendo she was on her tiptoes with her arms stretched high, and when the music stopped she made no flourish; she simply relaxed and stood still, smiling at Jud. Even from where I stood I could see the moisture on Jud’s face.
A big man standing beside me grunted, a tight, painful sound. I turned to him; it was Clinton. Tension crawled through his jaw-muscles like a rat under a rug. I put my hand on his arm. It was rocky. “Cli
nt.”
“Wh—oh. Hi.”
“Thirsty?”
“No,” he said. He turned back to the dance floor, searched it with his eyes, found Flower.
“Yes, you are, son,” I said. “Come on.”
“Why don’t you go and—” He got hold of himself. “You’re right. I am thirsty.”
We went to the almost deserted Card Room and dispensed ourselves some methyl-caffeine. I didn’t say anything until we’d found a table. He sat stiffly looking at his drink without seeing it. Then he said,
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“I was about to be real uncivilized in there.”
I just waited.
He, said truculently, “Well, damn it, she’s free to do what she wants, isn’t she? She likes to dance—good. Why shouldn’t she? Damn it, what is there to get excited about?”
“Who’s excited?”
“It’s that Judson. What’s he have to be crawling around her all the time for? She hasn’t done a damn thing about getting her certificate since he got here.” He drank his liquor down at a gulp. It had no apparent effect, which meant something.
“What had she done before he got here?” I asked quietly. When he didn’t answer I said, “Jud’s Outbound, Clint. I wouldn’t worry. I can guarantee Flower won’t be with him when he goes, and that will be real soon. Hold on and wait.”
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