The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Wouldn’t the beam you were using break after it had bent a certain distance?” Lavon asked.

  “Stock timber certainly would,” Stravol said. “But for this trick you use green wood, not seasoned. Otherwise you’d have to soften your beam to uselessness, as Tanol says. But live wood will flex enough to make a good, strong, single-unit hoop—or if it doesn’t, Shar, the little rituals with numbers that you’ve been teaching us don’t mean anything after all!”

  Shar smiled. “You can easily make a mistake in using numbers,” he said.

  “I checked everything.”

  “I’m sure of it. And I think it’s well worth a trial. Anything else to offer?”

  “Well,” Stravol said, “I’ve got a kind of live ventilating system I think should be useful. Otherwise, as I said, Than’s ship strikes me as the type we should build; my own’s hopelessly cumbersome.”

  “I have to agree,” Tanol said regretfully. “But I’d like to try putting together a lighter-than-water ship sometime, maybe just for local travel. If the new world is bigger than ours, it might not be possible to swim everywhere you might want to go.”

  “That never occurred to me,” Lavon exclaimed. “Suppose the new world is twice, three times, eight times as big as ours? Shar, is there any reason why that couldn’t be?”

  “None that I know of. The history plate certainly seems to take all kinds of enormous distances practically for granted. All right, let’s make up a composite design from what we have here. Tanol, you’re the best draftsman among us, suppose you draw it up. Lavon, what about labor?”

  “I’ve a plan ready,” Lavon said. “As I see it, the people who work on the ship are going to have to be on the job full-time. Building the vessel isn’t going to be an overnight task, or even one that we can finish in a single season, so we can’t count on using a rotating force. Besides, this is technical work; once a man learns how to do a particular task, it would be wasteful to send him back to tending fungi just because somebody else has some time on his hands.

  “So I’ve set up a basic force involving the two or three most intelligent hand-workers from each of the various trades. Those people I can withdraw from their regular work without upsetting the way we run our usual concerns, or noticeably increasing the burden on the others in a given trade. They will do the skilled labor, and stick with the ship until it’s done. Some of them will make up the crew, too. For heavy, unskilled jobs, we can call on the various seasonal pools of unskilled people without disrupting our ordinary life.”

  “Good,” Shar said. He leaned forward and rested linked hands on the edge of the table—although, because of the webbing between his fingers, he could link no more than the fingertips. “We’ve really made remarkable progress. I didn’t expect that we’d have matters advanced a tenth as far as this by the end of this meeting. But maybe I’ve overlooked something important. Has anybody any more suggestions, or any questions?”

  “I’ve got a question,” Stravol said quietly.

  “All right, let’s hear it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  There was quite a long silence. Finally Shar said: “Stravol, I can’t answer that yet. I could say that we’re going to the stars, but since we still have no idea what a star is, that answer wouldn’t do you much good. We’re going to make this trip because we’ve found that some of the fantastic things that the history plate says are really so. We know now that the sky can be passed, and that beyond the sky there’s a region where there’s no water to breathe, the region our ancients called ‘space.’ Both of these ideas always seemed to be against common sense, but nevertheless we’ve found that they’re true.

  “The history plate also says that there are other worlds than ours, and actually that’s an easier idea to accept, once you’ve found out that the other two are so. As for the stars—well, we just don’t know yet, we haven’t any information at all that would allow us to read the history plate on that subject with new eyes, and there’s no point in making wild guesses unless we can test the guesses. The stars are in space, and presumably, once we’re out in space, we’ll see them and the meaning of the word will become clear. At least we can confidently expect to see some clues—look at all the information we got from Lavon’s trip of a few seconds above the sky!

  “But in the meantime, there’s no point in our speculating in a bubble. We think there are other worlds somewhere, and we’re devising means to make the trip. The other questions, the pendant ones, just have to be put aside for now. We’ll answer them eventually—there’s no doubt in my mind about that. But it may take a long time.”

  Stravol grinned ruefully. “I expected no more. In a way, I think the whole project is crazy. But I’m in it right out to the end, all the same.” Shar and Lavon grinned back. All of them had the fever, and Lavon suspected that their whole enclosed universe would share it with them before long. He said:

  “Then let’s not waste a minute. There’s still a huge mass of detail to be worked out, and after that, all the hard work will just have begun. Let’s get moving!”

  The five men arose and looked at each other. Their expressions varied, but in all their eyes there was in addition the same mixture of awe and ambition: the composite face of the shipwright and of the astronaut.

  Then they went out, severally, to begin their voyages.

  —

  It was two winter sleeps after Lavon’s disastrous climb beyond the sky that all work on the spaceship stopped. By then, Lavon knew that he had hardened and weathered into that temporarily ageless state a man enters after he has just reached his prime; and he knew also that there were wrinkles engraved on his brow, to stay and to deepen.

  “Old” Shar, too, had changed, his features losing some of their delicacy as he came into his maturity. Though the wedge-shaped bony structure of his face would give him a withdrawn and poetic look for as long as he lived, participation in the plan had given his expression a kind of executive overlay, which at best made it assume a masklike rigidity, and at worst coarsened it somehow. Yet despite the bleeding away of the years, the spaceship was still only a hulk. It lay upon a platform built above the tumbled boulders of the sandbar which stretched out from one wall of the world. It was an immense hull of pegged wood, broken by regularly spaced gaps through which the raw beams of its skeleton could be seen.

  Work upon it had progressed fairly rapidly at first, for it was not hard to visualize what kind of vehicle would be needed to crawl through empty space without losing its water; Than and his colleagues had done that job well. It had been recognized, too, that the sheer size of the machine would enforce a long period of construction, perhaps as long as two full seasons; but neither Shar and his assistants nor Lavon had anticipated any serious snag.

  For that matter, part of the vehicle’s apparent incompleteness was an illusion. About a third of its fittings were to consist of living creatures, which could not be expected to install themselves in the vessel much before the actual takeoff.

  Yet time and time again, work on the ship had to be halted for long periods. Several times whole sections needed to be ripped out, as it became more and more evident that hardly a single normal, understandable concept could be applied to the problem of space travel.

  The lack of the history plate, which the Paras steadfastly refused to deliver up, was a double handicap. Immediately upon its loss, Shar had set himself to reproduce it from memory; but unlike the more religious of his ancestors, he had never regarded it as holy writ, and hence had never set himself to memorizing it word by word. Even before the theft, he had accumulated a set of variant translations of passages presenting specific experimental problems, which were stored in his library, carved in wood. Most of these translations, however, tended to contradict each other, and none of them related to spaceship construction, upon which the original had been vague in any case.

  No duplicates of the cryptic characters of the original had ever been made, for the simple reason that there was nothing in
the sunken universe capable of destroying the originals, nor of duplicating their apparently changeless permanence. Shar remarked too late that through simple caution they should have made a number of verbatim temporary records—but after generations of green-gold peace, simple caution no longer covers preparation against catastrophe. (Nor, for that matter, does a culture which has to dig each letter of its simple alphabet into pulpy waterlogged wood with a flake of stonewort encourage the keeping of records in triplicate.)

  As a result, Shar’s imperfect memory of the contents of the history plate, plus the constant and millennial doubt as to the accuracy of the various translations, proved finally to be the worst obstacle to progress on the spaceship itself.

  “Men must paddle before they can swim,” Lavon observed belatedly, and Shar was forced to agree with him.

  Obviously, whatever the ancients had known about spaceship construction, very little of that knowledge was usable to a people still trying to build its first spaceship from scratch. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the great hulk rested incomplete upon its platform above the sand boulders, exuding the musty odor of wood steadily losing its strength, two generations after its flat bottom had been laid down.

  —

  The fat-faced young man who headed the strike delegation to Shar’s chambers was Phil XX, a man two generations younger than Shar, four younger than Lavon. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, which made him look both like a querulous old man and like an infant spoiled in the spore.

  “We’re calling a halt to this crazy project,” he said bluntly. “We’ve slaved away our youth on it, but now that we’re our own masters, it’s over, that’s all. It’s over.”

  “Nobody’s compelled you,” Lavon said angrily.

  “Society does; our parents do,” a gaunt member of the delegation said. “But now we’re going to start living in the real world. Everybody these days knows that there’s no other world but this one. You oldsters can hang on to your superstitions if you like. We don’t intend to.”

  Baffled, Lavon looked over at Shar. The scientist smiled and said, “Let them go, Lavon. We have no use for the fainthearted.”

  The fat-faced young man flushed. “You can’t insult us into going back to work. We’re through. Build your own ship to no place!”

  “All right,” Lavon said evenly. “Go on, beat it. Don’t stand around here orating about it. You’ve made your decisions and we’re not interested in your self-justifications. Good-bye.”

  The fat-faced young man evidently still had quite a bit of heroism to dramatize which Lavon’s dismissal had short-circuited. An examination of Lavon’s stony face, however, seemed to convince him that he had to take his victory as he found it. He and the delegation trailed ingloriously out the archway.

  “Now what?” Lavon asked when they had gone. “I must admit, Shar, that I would have tried to persuade them. We do need the workers, after all.”

  “Not as much as they need us,” Shar said tranquilly. “I know all those young men. I think they’ll be astonished at the runty crops their fields will produce next season, after they have to breed them without my advice. Now, how many volunteers have you got for the crew of the ship?”

  “Hundreds. Every youngster of the generation after Phil’s wants to go along. Phil’s wrong about the segment of the populace, at least. The project catches the imagination of the very young.”

  “Did you give them any encouragement?”

  “Sure,” Lavon said. “I told them we’d call on them if they were chosen. But you can’t take that seriously! We’d do badly to displace our picked group of specialists with youths who have enthusiasm and nothing else.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind, Lavon. Didn’t I see a Noc in these chambers somewhere? Oh, there he is, asleep in the dome. Noc!”

  The creature stirred its tentacle lazily.

  “Noc, I’ve a message,” Shar called. “The Protos are to tell all men that those who wish to go to the next world with the spaceship must come to the staging area right away. Say that we can’t promise to take everyone, but that only those who help us to build the ship will be considered at all.”

  The Noc curled its tentacle again, and appeared to go back to sleep.

  Lavon turned from the arrangement of speaking-tube megaphones which was his control board and looked at Para.

  “One last try,” he said. “Will you give us back the history plate?”

  “No, Lavon. We have never denied you anything before. But this we must.”

  “You’re going with us, though, Para. Unless you give us back the knowledge we need, you’ll lose your life if we lose ours.”

  “What is one Para?” the creature said. “We are all alike. This cell will die; but the Protos need to know how you fare on this journey. We believe you should make it without the plate, for in no other way can we assess the real importance of the plate.”

  “Then you admit you still have it. What if you can’t communicate with your fellows once we’re out in space? How do you know that water isn’t essential to your telepathy?”

  The Proto was silent. Lavon stared at it a moment, then turned deliberately back to the speaking tubes. “Everyone hang on,” he said. He felt shaky. “We’re about to start. Stravol, is the ship sealed?”

  “As far as I can tell, Lavon.”

  Lavon shifted to another megaphone. He took a deep breath. Already the water seemed stifling, although the ship hadn’t moved.

  “Ready with one-quarter power….One, two, three, go.”

  The whole ship jerked and settled back into place again. The raphe diatoms along the under-hull settled into their niches, their jelly treads turning against broad endless belts of crude caddis-worm leather. Wooden gears creaked, stepping up the slow power of the creatures, transmitting it to the sixteen axles of the ship’s wheels.

  The ship rocked and began to roll slowly along the sandbar. Lavon looked tensely through the mica port. The world flowed painfully past him. The ship canted and began to climb the slope. Behind him, he could feel the electric silence of Shar, Para, and the two alternate pilots, Than and Stravol, as if their gazes were stabbing directly through his body and on out the port. The world looked different, now that he was leaving it. How had he missed all this beauty before?

  The slapping of the endless belts and the squeaking and groaning of the gears and axles grew louder as the slope steepened. The ship continued to climb, lurching. Around it, squadrons of men and Protos dipped and wheeled, escorting it toward the sky.

  Gradually the sky lowered and pressed down toward the top of the ship.

  “A little more work from your diatoms, Tanol,” Lavon said. “Boulder ahead.” The ship swung ponderously. “All right, slow them up again. Give us a shove from your side, Tol—no, that’s too much—there, that’s it. Back to normal; you’re still turning us! Tanol, give us one burst to line us up again. Good. All right, steady drive on all sides. It shouldn’t be long now.”

  “How can you think in webs like that?” the Para wondered behind him.

  “I just do, that’s all. It’s the way men think. Overseers, a little more thrust now; the grade’s getting steeper.”

  The gears groaned. The ship nosed up. The sky brightened in Lavon’s face. Despite himself, he began to be frightened. His lungs seemed to burn, and in his mind he felt his long fall through nothingness toward the chill slap of the water as if he were experiencing it for the first time. His skin itched and burned. Could he go up there again? Up there into the burning void, the great gasping agony where no life should go?

  The sandbar began to level out and the going became a little easier. Up here, the sky was so close that the lumbering motion of the huge ship disturbed it. Shadows of wavelets ran across the sand. Silently, the thick-barreled bands of blue-green algae drank in the light and converted it to oxygen, writhing in their slow mindless dance just under the long mica skylight which ran along the spine of the ship. In the hold, beneath the latti
ced corridor and cabin floors, whirring Vortae kept the ship’s water in motion, fueling themselves upon drifting organic particles.

  One by one, the figures wheeling outside about the ship waved arms or cilia and fell back, coasting down the slope of the sandbar toward the familiar world, dwindling and disappearing. There was at last only one single Euglena, half-plant cousin of the Protos, forging along beside the spaceship into the marshes of the shallows. It loved the light, but finally it, too, was driven away into deeper, cooler waters, its single whiplike tentacle undulating placidly as it went. It was not very bright, but Lavon felt deserted when it left.

  Where they were going, though, none could follow.

  Now the sky was nothing but a thin, resistant skin of water coating the top of the ship. The vessel slowed, and when Lavon called for more power, it began to dig itself in among the sand grains and boulders.

  “That’s not going to work,” Shar said tensely. “I think we’d better step down the gear-ratio, Lavon, so you can apply stress more slowly.”

  “All right,” Lavon agreed. “Full stop, everybody. Shar, will you supervise gear-changing, please?”

  The insane brilliance of empty space looked Lavon full in the face just beyond his big mica bull’s-eye. It was maddening to be forced to stop here upon the threshold of infinity; and it was dangerous, too. Lavon could feel building in him the old fear of the outside. A few moments more of inaction, he knew with a gathering coldness in his belly, and he would be unable to go through with it.