The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  “Sure, but why do you think they’re airborne? How do you know they aren’t ships of some kind?” I asked, and then said at once, “No, cancel that.” I had figured it out for myself. If they had been surface vessels they would have produced some sort of wake in the water. They were aircraft, all right, so I changed the question to, “Where are they going, do you think?”

  “Wait a minute,” June Terple said. “Hans, display the projection for Ms. Moynlin.”

  That sheet of ocean disappeared, and in its place there was a globe of the Crabber planet, its seas in blue, land masses in gray. Eight little oval figures, greatly out of proportion, were over the ocean. From them a silvery line extended itself to the northeast, with another line, this one golden, going back past the day-night terminator toward the southwest. Terple said, “It looks like the blimps came from around that group of islands at the end of the gold course-line, and they’re heading toward the dumbbell continents up on the right. Unfortunately, those are pretty far north. We can’t get a good picture of them from here, but Hans has enhanced some of the data on the island the blimps came from. Hans?”

  The globe disappeared. We were looking down on one of those greenish infrared scenes: shoreline, bay—and something burning around the bay. Once again the outlines of the burning areas were geometrically unnatural. “As we speculated, it is almost certainly a community, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans informed me. “However, it seems to have suffered some catastrophe, similar to what we observed on the continent which is now out of sight.”

  “What kind of catastrophe?” I demanded.

  Hans was all apologetic. “We simply don’t have the data as yet, Ms. Moynlin. A great fire, one might conjecture. I’m sure it will all make sense when we have better resolution—in a few hours, perhaps. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Please do,” I said. And then, without planning it, I found myself saying, “I think I’ll go back to my ship and lie down for a while.”

  Bill looked suddenly happy and began to unhook himself from his perch. I gave him a little shake of the head.

  “I’m sorry. I just want to rest,” I said. “It’s been an exhausting few days.”

  That wasn’t particularly true, of course. I didn’t want to rest. I just wanted to be by myself, or at any rate with no company but Hypatia, which comes to pretty much the same thing.

  As I came into my ship she greeted me in motherly mode. “Too many people, hon?” she asked. “Shall I make you a drink?”

  I shook my head to the drink, but she was right about the rest of it. “Funny thing,” I said, sprawling on the couch. “The more people I meet, the fewer I am comfortable around.”

  “Meat people are generally boring,” she agreed. “How about a cup of tea?”

  I shrugged, and immediately heard the activity begin in the kitchen. Hypatia had her faults, but she was a pretty good mom when I needed her to be. I lay back on the couch and gazed at the ceiling. “You know what?” I said. “I’m beginning to think I ought to settle down on the island.”

  “You could do that, yes,” she said diplomatically. Then, because she was Hypatia, she added, “Let’s see, the last time you were there you stayed exactly eleven days, wasn’t it? About six months ago?”

  She had made me feel defensive—again. I said, “I had things to do.”

  “Of course you did. Then the time before that wasn’t quite that long, was it? Just six days—and that was over a year ago.”

  “You’ve made your point, Hypatia. Talk about something else.”

  “Sure thing, boss.” So she did. Mostly what she chose to talk about was what my various holdings had been doing in the few hours since I’d checked them last. I wasn’t listening. After a few minutes of it I drank the tea she’d made for me and stood up. “I’m going to soak in the tub for a while.”

  “I’ll run it for you, hon. Hon? They’ve got some new pictures from the Crabber planet if you want to see them while you soak.”

  “Why not?” And by the time I’d shucked my clothes the big onyx tub was full, the temperature perfect as always. I closed my eyes and lay back to let the sweet-smelling foamy waters make me feel whole and content again. As I had done many thousands of times, sometimes with success.

  This was one of the successes. The hot tub did its work. I felt myself drifting off to a relaxed and welcome sleep…

  And then, suddenly, a vagrant thought crossed my mind and I wasn’t relaxed anymore.

  I got out of the tub and climbed into the shower stall, turning it on full; I let cold water hammer at me for a while, then changed it to hot. When I got out I pulled on a robe.

  As I was drying my hair, the door opened and Hypatia appeared, looking at me with concern. “I’m afraid what I told you about Tartch upset you, hon,” she said, oozing with compassion. “You don’t really care what he does, though, do you?”

  I said, “Of course not,” wondering if it were true.

  “That’s my girl,” she said approvingly. “There are some new scenes from the planet, too.”

  “Not now,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

  She didn’t move, but the scene disappeared. “What’s that, Klara?”

  “While I was dozing in the tub I thought for a moment I might fall asleep, and slip down into the water, and drown. Then I thought you surely wouldn’t let that happen, because you’d be watching, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m always aware of any problems that confront you, yes, Klara.”

  “And then it occurred to me that you might be tempted to let me go ahead and drown, just so you could get me into that machine storage you’re always trying to sell me. So I got out of the tub and into the shower.”

  I pulled my hair back and fastened it with a barrette, watching her. She didn’t speak, just stood there with her usual benign and thoughtful expression. “So would you?” I demanded.

  She looked surprised. “You mean would I deliberately let you drown? Oh, I don’t think I could do that, Klara. As a general rule I’m not programmed to go against your wishes, not even if it were for your own good. That would be for your good, you know. Machine storage would mean eternal life for you, Klara, or as close as makes no difference. And no more of the sordid little concerns of the meat that cause you so much distress.”

  I turned my back on her and went into my bedroom to dress. She followed, in her excellent simulation of walking. What I wanted to know was how general her general rule was, and what she would have deemed a permissible exception. But as I opened my mouth to ask her, she spoke up.

  “Oh, Klara,” she said. “They’ve found something of interest on the planet. Let me show you.” She didn’t wait for a response; at once the end of the room lit up.

  We were looking again at that first little fleet of blimps. They were nearly at the coast, but they weren’t in their tidy Vee formation anymore. They were scattered over the sky, and two of them were falling to the sea, blazing with great gouts of flame. Small things I couldn’t quite make out were buzzing around and between them.

  “My God,” I said. “Something’s shooting them down!” Hypatia nodded. “So it would appear, Klara. It looks as though the Crabbers’ blimps are filled with hydrogen, to burn the way they do. That suggests a rather low level of technological achievement, but give them credit. They aren’t primitives, anyway. They’re definitely civilized enough to be having themselves a pretty violent little war.”

  VIII

  There wasn’t any doubt about it. The Crabbers were industriously killing each other in the kind of aerial combat that was right out of the old stories of—what was it? I guess World War I. I couldn’t see much of the planes that were shooting the blimps down. They were there, though, and what was going on was a bunch of real old-fashioned dogfights.

  I don’t know what I had hoped to see when we brought the long-dead Crabbers back to some kind of life. This definitely wasn’t it. When the scenes changed—Hans was assiduous in zooming down to wherever on the planet’s surface thin
gs were going on—it didn’t improve. It got worse. There was a harbor crammed with surface vessels, where a great river joined the sea; but some of the ships were on fire, and others appeared to be sinking. (“Submarines did that, I think,” Hypatia judged. “It could possibly be from bombing planes or mines, but my money’s on submarines.”) Those strange patterns of heat in the cities weren’t a mystery any longer. The cities had been burned to the ground by incendiary bombing, leaving only glowing coals. Then, when we were looking down on a plain where flashes of white and reddish light sparkled all over the area, we couldn’t see what was making them, but Hypatia had a guess for that, too. “Why,” she said, sounding interested, “I do believe we’re looking at a large-scale tank battle.”

  And so on, and on.

  It was all so pointless! They didn’t have to bother killing each other. Their star was going to do it for them soon enough. All unknowing, every one of those Crabbers was racing toward a frightful and near-term death from their bursting sun.

  An hour earlier I had been pitying them for the fate that awaited them. Now I couldn’t say that I thought that their fate was unjust.

  Hypatia was looking at me in that motherly way she sometimes assumes. “I’m afraid all this is disturbing for you, Klara,” she murmured. “Would it cheer you up to invite Mr. Tartch aboard? He’s calling. He says he wants to talk to you about the new pictures.”

  “Sure he does,” I said, pretty sure that what Bill really wanted to talk about was why he didn’t deserve being treated so stand-offishly by me. “No. Tell him I’m asleep and don’t want to be disturbed. And, listen, tell me all about Mark Rohrbeck.”

  “Ah,” she said, in that tone of voice that makes one syllable speak volumes.

  I wasn’t having any of that. “If you’ve got something to say to me, say it!”

  “But I don’t, dear,” she said, patently falsely. “You know I don’t criticize you for your obsession with men.”

  She was getting close to the line. Then she crossed it. “You’d think,” she said meditatively, “that after some of the experiences you’ve had with men you’d be more wary. Is it that you keep hoping you’ve already had the worst? Like that wretched little orphan, Wan.”

  I didn’t answer that. I didn’t even let her finish. I just said, “Shut up,” and, wisely, she did. There are some subjects I don’t discuss, and Hypatia is well aware that Wan, his rescue of me from my black hole and my brief, but not brief enough, time as his live-in lover are three of them.

  Then she began to recite all of Mark Rohrbeck’s stats. Mark’s parents had died when he was young and he had been brought up by his grandfather, who had once made his living as a fisherman on Lake Superior. “Mostly the old man fished for sea lampreys—know what they are, Klara? They’re ugly things. They have big sucking disks instead of jaws. They attach themselves to other fish and suck their guts out until they die. I don’t think you’d want to eat a sea lamprey yourself, but they were about all that was left in the lake. Rohrbeck’s grandpa sold them for export to Europe—people there thought they were a delicacy. They said they tasted like escargot. Then, of course, the Food Factories came along and put the old guy out of business—”

  “Get back to talking about Mark Rohrbeck,” I ordered. “The grandson. The one that’s here.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Well, young Mark got a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, did well, went on to grad school at MIT, made a pretty fair reputation in computer science, married, had two kids, but then his wife decided there was a dentist she liked better than Rohrbeck, so she dumped him. And as I’ve mentioned before,” she said appreciatively, “he does have really great genes. Does that cover it?”

  I mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Just about. Don’t go drawing any conclusions from this, do you hear?”

  “Certainly, Klara,” she said, but she still had that look.

  I sighed. “All right. Now turn that damn thing back on.”

  “Of course, Klara,” she said, unsurprised, and did. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been getting any better.”

  It hadn’t. It was just more of the same. I watched doggedly for a while, and then I said, “All right, Hypatia. I’ve seen enough.”

  She made it disappear, looking at me curiously. “There’ll be better images when they finish with the mirror. By then we should be able to see actual individual Crabbers.”

  “Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, and then I burst out, “My God, what’s the matter with those people? There’s plenty of room on the planet for all of them. Why didn’t they just stay home and live in peace?”

  It wasn’t meant to be a real question, but Hypatia answered it for me anyway. “What do you expect? They’re meat people,” she said succinctly.

  I wasn’t letting her get away with that. “Come on, Hypatia! Human beings are meat people, too, and we don’t go tearing halfway around the world just to kill each other!”

  “Oh, do you not? What a short memory you have, Klara dear. Think of those twentieth-century World Wars. Think of the Crusades, tens of thousands of Europeans dragging themselves all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to kill as many Muslims as they could. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, murdering their way across the Americas. Hey, for that matter you could even think of the lousy monks that tore the meat to shreds in Alexandria. Of course,” she added with faint distaste, “those people were all Christians.”

  I blinked at her. “You think what we’re looking at is a religious war?”

  She shrugged gracefully. “What does it matter? Meat people don’t need reasons to kill each other, dear.”

  IX

  By the time the mirror was complete we could make out plenty of detail. We were even able to see individual Centaur-like Crabbers—the same build, four legs and upright torso, that they’d inherited from the primitives I’d seen.

  That is, sometimes we could see them. Not always. The conditions had to be right. We couldn’t see them when they were in the night part of the planet, of course, except in those ghostly-looking infrared views, and we couldn’t optically see them at all when they were blanketed with clouds. But we could see enough. More than enough, as far as I was concerned.

  The crew of PhoenixCorp was going crazy trying to keep up with the incoming data. Bill seemed to have decided to be patient with my unpredictable moods, so he paid me only cheerful but absent-minded attention. He kept busy working. He and Denys were ecstatically interrupting everyone in their jobs so that he could record their spot reactions, while the crew did their best to get on with their jobs anyway. June Terple stopped sleeping entirely, torn between watching the new images as they arrived and nagging her shipmind to make sure we would have warning in time to get the hell out of there before the star blew.

  Only Mark Rohrbeck seemed to have time on his hands. Which was just the way I wanted it.

  I found him in the otherwise empty sleep chamber, where Hans had obligingly set up duplicate incoming scenes. Mark’s main area of concern was their shipmind and the functions it controlled, but those things were working smoothly without his attention. He was spending most of his time gazing morosely at the pictures.

  I hooked myself up nearby. “Nasty, isn’t it?” I said sociably, to cheer him up.

  He didn’t want to be cheered. “You mean the Crabbers?” Although his eyes had been on the display, his mind evidently hadn’t. He thought it over for a moment, then gave his verdict. “Oh, I guess it’s nasty enough, all right. But it all happened a long time ago, didn’t it?”

  “And you’ve got more immediate problems on your mind,” I offered helpfully.

  He gave me a gloomy imitation of a smile. “I see the shipminds have been gossiping again. Well, it isn’t losing Doris that bothers me so much,” he said after a moment. “I mean, that hurt, too. I thought I loved her, but—well, it didn’t work out, did it? Now she’s got this other guy, so what the hell? But”—he swallowed unhappily—“the thing is, she’s keeping the kids.”

&
nbsp; He was not only a nice man, he was beginning to touch my heart. I said, sounding sympathetic and suddenly feeling that way, too, “And you miss them?”

  “Hell! I’ve been missing them most of the time since they were born,” he said, self-accusingly. “I guess that’s what went wrong. I’ve been away working so much, I suppose I can’t blame Doris for getting her lovemaking from somebody else.”

  That triggered something in me that I hadn’t known was there. “No!” I said, surprising myself by my tone. “That’s wrong. Blame the bitch! People are supposed to be faithful to each other!”

  I startled Rohrbeck, too. He looked at me as though I had suddenly sprouted horns, but he didn’t get a chance to speak. June Terple came flying by the room and saw us. She stuck her nose in, grabbing a hold-on to yell at Mark in passing. “Rohrbeck! Get your ass in gear! I want you to make sure Hans is shifting focus as fast as possible. We could be losing all kinds of data!” And then she was gone again, to wherever she was gone to.

  Mark gave me a peculiar look, but then he shrugged, and waved his hands to show that when the boss gave orders, even orders to do things he had already done, he couldn’t just stay and talk anymore, and was gone as well.

  I didn’t blame him for the peculiar look. I hadn’t realized I was so sensitive in the matter of two-timing partners. But apparently I was.

  I went back to my ship to stay out of everybody’s way, watching the pictures as they arrived with only Hypatia for company.

  She started the projections up as soon as I came back, without being asked. I sat down to observe.

  If you didn’t think of the Crabbers as people, what they were doing was certainly interesting. So were the Crabbers themselves, for that matter. I could see traces of those primitive predators in the civilized—civilized!—versions before me. Now, of course, they had machines and wore clothes and, if you didn’t mind the extra limbs, looked rather impressive in their gaudy tunics and spiked leggings, and the shawl things they wore on their heads that were ornamented with, I guessed, maybe insignia of rank. Or junk jewelry, maybe, but it looked to me as though most of them were definitely in one or another kind of uniforms. Most of the civilized ones, anyway. In the interior of the South Continent, where it looked like rain forest and savannah, there were lots of what looked like noncivilized ones. Those particular Crabbers didn’t have machines. They didn’t have much in the way of clothing, either. They lived off the land, and they seemed to spend a lot of time gaping up worriedly at the sky, where fleets of blimps and double-winged aircraft buzzed by now and then.