The Unicorn Trade

by Poul Anderson

  She used to be real pretty, Mother did. I’ve seen pictures. She’s gotten kind of scrawny, worrying about Dad, I guess, and about how to get along after the last pay cut they screwed the spacefolk with. But when I came in and saw her sitting, not on the sofa but on the carpet, the dingy gray carpet, crying—She hung onto that sofa the way she’d hung on Dad.

  But why did she have to be so angry at him too? I mean, what happened wasn’t his fault.

  “Fifty billion munits!” she screamed when we’d started trying to talk about the thing. “That’s a hundred, two hundred billion meals for hungry children! But what did they spend it on? Killing twelve men!”

  “Aw, now, wait,” I was saying, “Dad explained that. The resources involved, uh, aren’t identical,” when she slapped me and yelled:

  “You’d like to go the same way, wouldn’t you? Thank God, it almost makes his death worthwhile that you won’t!”

  I shouldn’t have got mad. I shouldn’t have said, “Y-y-you want me to become … a desk pilot, a food engineer, a doctor … something nice and safe and in demand … and keep you the way you wanted he should keep you?”

  I better stop beating this rail. My fist’ll be no good if I don’t. Oh, someday I’ll find how to make up those words to her.

  I’d better not go in just yet.

  But the trouble wasn’t Dad’s fault. If things had worked out right, why, we’d be headed for Alpha Centauri in a couple of years. Her and him and me—The planets yonderward, sure, they’re the real treasure. But the ship itself! I remember Jake-Jake telling me I’d be dead of boredom inside six months. “Bored aboard, haw, haw, haw!” He really is a lardbrain. A good leader, I guess, but a lardbrain at heart—hey, once Mother would have laughed to hear me say that—How could you get tired of Dad’s ship? A million books and tapes, a hundred of the brightest and most alive people who ever walked a deck—

  Why, the trip would be like the revels in Elf Hill that Mother used to read me about when I was small, those old, old stories, the flutes and fiddles, bright clothes, food, drink, dancing, girls sweet in the moonlight.…

  Murphy’s Hill?

  From Ganymede, Jupiter shows fifteen times as broad as Luna seen from Earth; and however far away the sun, the king planet reflects so brilliantly that it casts more than fifty times the radiance that the brightest night of man’s home will ever know.

  “Here is man’s home,” Catalina Sanchez murmured.

  Arne Jensen cast her a look which lingered. She was fair to see in the goldenness streaming through the conservatory’s clear walls. He ventured to put an arm about her waist. She sighed and leaned against him. They were scantily clad—the colony favored brief though colorful indoor garments—and he felt the warmth and silkiness of her. Among the manifold perfumes of blossoms (on planets everywhere to right and left and behind, extravagantly tall stalks and big flowers of every possible hue and some you would swear were impossible, dreamlike catenaries of vines and labyrinths of creepers) he caught her summary odor.

  The sun was down and Jupiter close to the full. While the terraforming project was going rapidly ahead, as yet the satellite had too little air to blur vision. Tawny shone that shield, emblazoned with slowly moving cloud-bands that were green, blue, orange, umber, and with the jewel-like Red Spot. To know that a single one of the storms raging there could swallow Earth whole added majesty to beauty and serenity. A few stars had the brilliance to pierce that luminousness, down by the rugged horizon. The gold poured soft across crags, cliffs, craters, glaciers, and the machines that would claim this world for man.

  Outside lay a great quietness, but here music lilted from the ballroom. Folk had reason to celebrate. The newest electrolysis plant had gone into operation and was releasing oxygen at a rate fifteen percent above estimate. However, low-weight or no, you got tired dancing—since Ganymedean steps took advantage, soaring and bounding aloft—mirth bubbled like champagne and the girl you admired said yes, she was in a mood for Jupiter watching—

  “I hope you’re right,” Arne said. “Less on our account—we have a good, happy life, fascinating work, the best of company—than on our children’s.” He squeezed a bit harder.

  She didn’t object. “How can we fail?” she answered. “We’ve become better than self-sufficient. We produce a surplus, to trade to Earth, Luna, Mars, or plow directly back into development. The growth is exponential.” She smiled. “You must think I’m awfully professorish. Still, really, what can go wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “War, overpopulation, environmental degradation—”

  “Don’t be a gloomy,” Catalina chided him. The lambent light struck rainbows from the tiara of native crystal that she wore in her hair. “People can learn. They needn’t make the same mistakes forever. We’ll build paradise here. A strange sort of paradise, yes, where trees soar into a sky full of Jupiter, and waterfalls tumble slowly, slowly down into deep-blue lakes, and birds fly like tiny bright-colored bullets, and deer cross the meadows in ten-meter leaps … but paradise.”

  “Not perfect,” he said. “Nothing is.”

  “No, and we wouldn’t wish that,” she agreed. “We want some discontent left to keep minds active, keep them hankering for the stars.” She chuckled. “I’m sure history will find ways to make them believe things could be better elsewhere. Or nature will—Oh!”

  Her eyes widened. A hand went to her mouth. And then, frantically, she was kissing him, and he her, and they were clasping and feeling each other while the waltz melody sparkled and the flowers breathed and Jupiter’s glory cataracted over them uncaring whether they existed.

  He tasted tears on her mouth. “Let’s go dancing,” she begged. “Let’s dance till we drop.”

  “Surely,” he promised, and led her back to the ballroom.

  It would help them once more forget the giant meteoroid, among the many which the planet sucked in from the Belt, that had plowed into grim and marginal Outpost Ganymede precisely half a decade before the Martian colony was discontinued.

  Well, I guess people don’t learn. They breed, and fight, and devour, and pollute, till:

  Mother: “We can’t afford it.”

  Dad: “We can’t not afford it.”

  Mother: “Those children—like goblins, like ghosts, from starvation. If Tad were one of them, and somebody said never mind him, we have to build an interstellar ship … I wonder how you would react.”

  Dad: “I don’t know. But I do know this is our last chance. We’ll be operating on a broken shoestring as is, compared to what we need to do the thing right. If they hadn’t made that breakthrough at Lunar Hydromagnetics Lab, when the government was on the point of closing it down—Anyway, darling, that’s why I’ll have to put in plenty of time aboard myself, while the ship is built and tested. My entire gang will be on triple duty.”

  Mother: “Suppose you succeed. Suppose you do get your precious spacecraft that can travel almost as fast as light. Do you imagine for an instant it can—an armada can ease life an atom’s worth for mankind?”

  Dad: “Well, several score atoms’ worth. Starting with you and Tad and me.”

  Mother: “I’d feel a monster, safe and comfortable en route to a new world while behind me they huddled in poverty by the billions.”

  Dad: “My first duty is to you two. However, let’s leave that aside. Let’s think about man as a whole. What is he? A beast that is born, grubs around, copulates, quarrels, and dies. Uh-huh. But sometimes something more in addition. He does breed his occasional Jesus, Leonardo, Bach, Jefferson, Einstein, Armstrong, Olveida—whoever you think best justifies our being here—doesn’t he? Well, when you huddle people together like rats, they soon behave like rats. What then of the spirit? I tell you, if we don’t make a fresh start, a bare handful of us free folk whose descendants may in the end come back and teach—if we don’t, why, who cares whether the two-legged animal goes on for another million years or becomes extinct in a hundred? Humanness will be dead.”

 
; Me: “And gosh, Mother, the fun!”

  Mother: “You don’t understand, dear.”

  Dad: “Quiet. The man-child speaks. He understands better than you.”

  Quarrel: till I run from them crying. Well, eight or nine years old. That night, was that the first night I started telling myself stories about Murphy’s Hall?

  It is Murphy’s Hall. I say that’s the right place for Dad to be.

  When Hoo Fong, chief engineer, brought the news to the captain’s cabin, the captain sat still for minutes. The ship thrummed around them; they felt it faintly, a song in their bones. And the light fell from the overhead, into a spacious and gracious room, furnishings, books, a stunning photograph of the Andromeda galaxy, an animation of Mary and Tad; and weight was steady underfoot, a full gee of acceleration, one light-year per year per year, though this would become more in shipboard time as you started to harvest the rewards of relativity … a mere two decades to the center of this galaxy, three to the neighbor whose portrait you adored.… How hard to grasp that you were dead!

  “But the ramscoop is obviously functional,” said the captain, hearing his pedantic phrasing.

  Hoo Fong shrugged. “It will not be, after the radiation has affected electronic parts. We have no prospect of decelerating and returning home at low velocity before both we and the ship have taken a destructive dose.”

  Interstellar hydrogen, an atom or so in a cubic centimeter, raw vacuum to Earthdwellers at the bottom of their ocean of gas and smoke and stench and carcinogens. To spacefolk, fuel, reaction mass, a way to the stars, once you’re up to the modest pace at which you meet enough of those atoms per second. However, your force screens must protect you from them, else they strike the hull and spit gamma rays like a witch’s curse.

  “We’ve hardly reached one-fourth c,” the captain protested. “Unmanned probes had no trouble at better than ninety-nine percent.”

  “Evidently the system is inadequate for the larger mass of this ship,” the engineer answered. “We should have made its first complete test flight unmanned too.”

  “You know we didn’t have funds to develop the robots for that.”

  “We can send our data back. The next expedition—”

  “I doubt there’ll be any. Yes, yes, we’ll beam the word home. And then, I suppose, keep going. Four weeks, did you say, till the radiation sickness gets bad? The problem is not how to tell Earth, but how to tell the rest of the men.”

  Afterward, alone with the pictures of Andromeda, Mary, and Tad, the captain thought: I’ve lost more than the years ahead. I’ve lost the years behind, that we might have had together.

  What shall I say to you? That I tried and failed and am sorry? But am I? At this hour I don’t want to lie, most especially not to you three.

  Did I do right?

  Yes.

  No.

  O God, oh, shit, how can I tell? The moon is rising above the soot-clouds. I might make it that far. Commissioner Wenig was talking about how we should maintain the last Lunar base another few years, till industry can find a substitute for those giant molecules they make there. But wasn’t the Premier of United Africa saying those industries ought to be forbidden, they’re too wasteful, and any country that keeps them going is an enemy of the human race?

  Gunfire rattles in the streets. Some female voice somewhere is screaming.

  I’ve got to get Mother out of here. That’s the last thing I can do for Dad.

  After ten years of studying to be a food engineer or a doctor, I’ll probably feel too tired to care about the moon. After another ten years of being a desk pilot and getting fat, I’ll probably be outraged at any proposal to spend my tax money—

  —except maybe for defense. In Siberia they’re preaching that strange new missionary religion. And the President of Europe has said that if necessary, his government will denounce the ban on nuclear weapons.

  The ship passed among the stars bearing a crew of dead bones. After a hundred billion years it crossed the Edge—not the edge of space or time, which does not exist, but the Edge—and came to harbor at Murphy’s Hall.

  And the dust which the cosmic rays had made began to stir, and gathered itself back into bones; and from the radiation-corroded skeleton of the ship crept atoms which formed into flesh; and the captain and his men awoke. They opened themselves and looked upon the suns that went blazing and streaming overhead.

  “We’re home,” said the captain.

  Proud at the head of his men, he strode uphill from the dock, toward the hall of the five hundred and forty doors. Comets flitted past him, novae exploded in dreadful glory, planets turned and querned, the clinker of a once living world drifted by, new life screamed its outrage at being born.

  The roofs of the house lifted like mountains against night and the light-clouds. The ends of rafters jutted beyond the eaves, carved into dragon heads. Through the doorway toward which the captain led his crew, eight hundred men could have marched abreast. But a single form waited to greet them; and beyond him was darkness.

  When the captain saw who that was, he bowed very deeply.

  The other took his hand. “We have been waiting,” he said.

  The captain’s heart sprang. “Mary too?”

  “Yes, of course. Everyone.”

  Me. And you. And you. And you in the future, if you exist. In the end, Murphy’s Law gets us all. But we, my friends, must go to him the hard way. Our luck didn’t run out. Instead, the decision that could be made was made. It was decided for us that our race—among the trillions which must be out there wondering what lies beyond their skies—is not supposed to have either discipline or dreams. No, our job is to make everybody nice and safe and equal, and if this happens to be impossible, then nothing else matters.

  If I went to that place—and I’m glad that this is a lie—I’d keep remembering what we might have done and seen and known and been and loved.

  Murphy’s Hell.

  —Poul and Karen Anderson

  SINGLE JEOPARDY

  Benrud contented himself with phoning Horner and inviting him to drop in, have a drink, and discuss a little business.

  He stood for a minute with his hand still on the phone, a short man who had never been heavy and was now being hollowed out by approaching death. The breath toiled in his throat. But for some reason, possibly a small excitement which stimulated the glands, pain had left him. He felt pain only in the pause after talking, and so he remained silent as much as possible.

  Now if he could just sleep nights. The sheer work of operating his lungs kept him awake as much as the cough, and he could scarcely remember a day when weariness had not filled his skull with sand. The condition hadn’t been very long in him, a matter of months, but the memory of the years before, years of health, had already grown blurred.

  The house was very silent. Moira had taken the kids to visit her mother, a hundred miles away. That was at Benrud’s instigation: he had explained there was a lot to do and he would be poor company till it was finished.

  “You shouldn’t saddle yourself like that,” Moira had said. Lamplight touched the small lines around her eyes, almost the only signal that she was forty. “You aren’t well.”

  “I told you and I told you,” Benrud answered, “it’s some damn allergy, and until they find out what it is I’ll have to make the best of things. Did you know I’ve been practicing coughing in different keys? I’m best in A sharp, but I sound so well on all notes that I think I’ll arrange a concert tour.”

  She smiled, still worried, but comforted by him and by her own negligible knowledge of medicine. “Well, do find out quick,” she said, “because it’s getting awful boring alone at night.”

  “For me too,” he said. He had moved into the spare bedroom since he got the diagnosis. Partly, as he told her, so his noise would not keep her awake, and partly, as he did not tell her, so she wouldn’t see the blood he had begun to spit up.

  “I still think it must be something in the lab,” she said. “All
that stuff you handle.”

  He shrugged, having already claimed negative results in allergy tests for the organic compounds he used daily. Which was true enough, or would have been if those tests had actually been made. In reality, he hadn’t bothered with tests, for by the time he was to have taken them he knew what the trouble was.

  She leaned forward in her chair and touched his hand. The light glowed off mahogany hair as she moved, and this evening her eyes were almost green. “Can’t you at least take a vacation?” she asked. “Jim will understand. He can handle everything while you’re away, and if you get well then it proves—” She sensed his invisible frown and stopped. “Anyhow, a rest would help you. Jim urged me himself to make you take off, the last time I saw him.”

  “Good old Jim Horner,” muttered Benrud.

  “Look, why don’t we leave the kids at my mother’s and take off? She’ll understand. Just us. Maybe down to that little place in Mexico again. It can’t have changed much, sweetheart, even in, how long, eighteen years, and—”

  “Good idea.” He wished he had the strength to sound enthusiastic. “Yes, I want a vacation. Sure. But I’ve got to clear away this business first, or I’ll have it on my mind all the while.” She nodded acceptingly, having come to know him in their time together. “That’s why I want you to go off now, let me clear the decks. As soon as that’s taken care of, sure, I’ll have a long rest.”

  “You’ll call me the minute you’re through, promise?”

  “Uh-huh.”