A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  He felt no fear now; he was beyond that. He knew that he was in a state of shock where nothing could get through to him, nothing could hurt him. He felt only a kind of sadness, the sadness a man knows when he walks through the tunnels of a pyramid or passes a graveyard on a lonely night.

  The ship that men had built was vast, so silent, so empty …

  A door opened ahead of them.

  Light spilled out into the corridor. Ben followed the robot into a large, comfortable room. The room was old, old and worn, but it was alive. It was warm and vital and human because there were two people in it. Ben had never before been quite so glad to see anyone.

  One of the persons was an elderly woman he had never seen before.

  The other was Franz Gottwald.

  “Hello, Ben,” he said, smiling. “I don’t believe you’ve met my wife.”

  Ben didn’t know whether he was coming into a nightmare or coming out of one, but his manners were automatic.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, and meant it.

  The room had a subtle strangeness about it that once more reminded Ben of a dream. It was not merely the expected strangeness of design of a new kind of room, a room lost in the lonely miles of a silent spaceship; it was an out-of-phase oddness that at first he could not identify.

  Then he caught it. There were alien things in the room: furniture that was planned for human beings but produced by a totally different culture pattern, carvings that were grotesque to his eyes, rugs that glowed in curiously wrong figures. But there were also familiar, everyday items from the world he knew: a prosaic reading lamp, a coffee pot bubbling on a table, some potted plants, a framed painting by Covarrubias. The mixture was a trifle jarring, but it did have a reassuring air of homeliness.

  How strange the mind is. At a time like this, it concentrates on a room.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Franz said. “Coffee?”

  “Thank you.” Ben tried a chair and found it comfortable.

  The woman he persisted in thinking of as Mrs. Gottwald—though that was certainly not her actual name—poured out a cup and handed it to him. Her lined, delicate face seemed radiant with happiness, but there were tears in her eyes.

  “I speak the language too a little,” she said hesitantly. “We are so proud of you, so happy—”

  Ben took a sip of the coffee to cover his embarrassment. He didn’t know what he had expected, but certainly not this.

  “Don’t say anything more, Arnin,” Franz said sharply. “We must be very careful.”

  “That robot of yours,” Ben said. “Couldn’t you send him out for oiling or something?”

  Franz nodded. “I forgot how weird he must seem to you. Please forgive me. I would have greeted you myself, but I am growing old and it is a long walk.” He spoke to the robot in a language Ben had never heard, and the robot left the room.

  Ben relaxed a little. “Do you two live up here all alone?”

  An inane question. But what can I do, what can I say?

  Old Franz seated himself next to Ben. He still wore his white suit. He seemed tired, more tired than Ben had ever seen him, but there was a kind of hope in his eyes, a hope that was almost a prayer.

  “Ben,” he said slowly, “it is hard for me to talk to you—now. I can imagine how you must feel after what you have been through. But you must trust me a little longer. Just forget where you are, Ben—a spaceship is just a ship. Imagine that we are back at the Station, imagine that we are talking as we have talked so many times before. You must think clearly. This is important, my boy, more important than you can know. I want you to tell me what you have discovered—I want to know what led you here. Omit nothing, and choose your words with care. Be as specific and precise as you can. Will you do this one last thing for me? When you have finished, I think I will be able to answer all your questions.”

  Ben had to smile. “Be as specific and precise as you can.” How many times had he heard Franz use that very phrase on examinations?

  He reached for his pipe. For a moment he had a wild, irrational fear that he had forgotten it—that would have been the last straw, somehow—but it was there. He filled it and lit it gratefully.

  “It’s your party, Franz. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Proceed, Ben—and be careful.”

  Mrs. Gottwald—Arnin?—sat very still, waiting.

  The ship was terribly silent around them.

  Ben took his time and told Franz what he knew and what he believed. He left nothing out and made no attempt to soften his words.

  When he was finished, Gottwald’s wife was crying openly.

  Franz, amazingly, looked like a man who had suddenly been relieved of a sentence of death.

  “Well?” Ben asked.

  Gottwald stood up and stroked his white beard. “You must think I am some kind of a monster,” he said, smiling.

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Gottwald dried her eyes. “Tell him,” she said. “You can tell him now.”

  Gottwald nodded. “I am proud of you, Ben, very proud.”

  “I was right?”

  “You were right in the only thing that matters. The fossils were a test, and you have passed that test with flying colors. Of course, you had some help from Edward—”

  “I’ll give him part of the banana.”

  Gottwald’s smile vanished. “Yes. Yes, I daresay you will. But I am vain enough to want to clear up one slight error in your reconstruction. I do not care for the role of monster, and mad scientists have always seemed rather dull to me.”

  “The truth is the truth.”

  “A redundancy, Ben. But never mind. I must tell you that what has happened on Earth was not a mere scientific experiment. I must also tell you that I am not only a scientist who has come back, as you put it, to see how the chimpanzees are doing. In fact, I didn’t come back at all. We—my people—never left. I was born right here in this ship, in orbit around the Earth. It has always been here.”

  “For twenty-five thousand years?”

  “For twenty-five thousand years.”

  “But what have you been doing?”

  “We’ve been waiting for you, Ben. You almost did not get here in time. My wife and I are the only ones left.”

  “Waiting for me? But—”

  Gottwald held up his hand. “No, not this way. I can show you better than I can tell you. If my people had lived—my other people, I should say, for I have lived on the Earth most of my life—there would have been an impressive ceremony. That can never be now. But I can show you the history lesson we prepared. Will you come with me? It is not far.”

  The old man turned and walked toward the door, his wife leaning on his arm.

  “So long,” she whispered. “We have waited so long.”

  Ben got up and followed them into the corridor.

  In a large assembly room filled with empty seats, somewhere in the great deserted ship, Ben saw the history of Man.

  It was, more than a film, although a screen was used. Ben lived the history, felt it, was a part of it.

  It was not a story of what King Glotz did to King Goop; the proud names of conventional history fade into insignificance when the perspective is broad enough. It was a story of Man, of all men.

  It was Gottwald’s story—and Ben’s.

  Ben lived it.

  Millions of years ago, on a world that circled a sun so far away that the astronomers of Earth had no name for it and not even a number, a new animal called Man appeared. His evolution had been a freakish thing, a million-to-one shot, and it was not likely to be repeated.

  Man, the first animal to substitute cultural growth for physical change, was an immediate success. His tools and his weapons grew ever more efficient. On his home world, Man was a patient animal—but he was Man.

  He was restless, curious. One world could not hold him. He built his first primitive spaceships and set out to explore the great dark sea around him. He established colo
nies and bases on a few of the worlds of his star system. He looked outward, out along the infinite corridors of the universe, and it was not in him to stop.

  He tinkered and worked and experimented.

  He found the faster-than-light drive.

  He pushed on through the terrible emptiness of interstellar space. He touched strange worlds and stranger suns—

  And he found that Man was not alone.

  There were ships greater than his, and Beings—

  Man discovered the Enemy.

  It was not a case of misunderstanding, not a failure of diplomacy, not an accident born of fear or greed or stupidity. Man was a civilized animal. He was careful, reasonable, prepared to do whatever was ethically right.

  He had no chance.

  The Enemy—pounced. That was the only word for it. They were hunters, destroyers, killers. They were motivated by a savage hunger for destruction that Man had never known. They took many shapes, many forms.

  Ben saw them.

  He saw them rip ships apart, gut them with an utter ferocity that was beyond understanding. He saw them tear human beings to shreds, and eat them, and worse—

  Ben screamed.

  The Beings were more different from Man than the fish that swim in the sea, and yet …

  Ben recognized them. He knew them.

  They were there, all of them.

  Literally, the Beings of nightmares.

  The monsters that had troubled the dark sleeps of Earth, the things that crawled through myths, the Enemy who lived on the black side of the mind. The dragons, the serpents, the faces carved on masks, the Beings shaped in stones dug up in rotting jungles—

  The Enemy.

  We on Earth have not completely forgotten. We remember, despite the shocks that cleansed our minds. We remember, we remember. We have seen them in the darkness that lives always beyond the fires, we have heard them in the thunder that looms in the long, long night.

  We remember.

  It was not a war. A war, after all, is a specific kind of contest with rules of a sort. There were no rules. It was not a drive for conquest, not an attempt at exploitation. It was something new, something totally alien.

  It was destruction.

  It was extermination.

  It was a fight between two different kinds of life, as senseless as a bolt of lightning that forked into the massive body of a screaming dinosaur.

  Man wasn’t ready.

  He fell back, fighting where he could.

  The Enemy followed.

  Whether he liked it or not, Man was in a fight to the finish.

  He fought for his life. He pushed himself to the utmost, tried everything he could think of, fought with everything he had. He exhausted his ingenuity. The Enemy countered his every move.

  There was a limit.

  Man could not go on.

  Ben leaned forward, his fists clenched on his chair. He was a product of his culture. He read the books, saw the tri-di plays. He expected a happy ending.

  There wasn’t one.

  Man lost.

  He was utterly routed.

  He had time for one last throw of the dice, one last desperate try for survival. He did his best.

  He worked out the Plan.

  It wasn’t enough to run away, to find a remote planet and hide. It wasn’t enough just to gain time.

  Man faced the facts. He had met the Enemy and he had lost. He had tried everything he knew, and it hadn’t been good enough. One day, no matter how far he ran, he would meet the Enemy again.

  What could he do?

  Man lives by his culture, his way of life. The potential for any culture is great, but it is not limitless. Culture has a way of putting blinders on its bearers; it leads them down certain paths and ignores others. Technological complexity is fine, but it is impotent without the one necessary ingredient:

  Ideas.

  Man needed new ideas, radically new concepts.

  He needed a whole new way of thinking.

  Transplanting the existing culture would not do the job. It would simply go on producing variants of the ideas that had already been tried.

  Man didn’t need transplanting.

  He needed a transfusion, a transfusion of ideas.

  He needed a brand new culture with fresh solutions to old problems.

  There is only one way to get a really different culture pattern: grow it from scratch.

  Sow the seeds and get out.

  Man put the Plan into effect.

  With the last of his resources, he outfitted four fugitive ships and sent them out into the wastes of the seas between the stars.

  “We don’t know what happened to the other three ships,” Franz Gottwald said quietly when the projection was over. “No ship knew the destination of any other ship. They went in different directions, each searching for remote, hidden worlds that might become new homes for men. There is no way of knowing what became of the others; I think it highly unlikely that any of them survived.”

  “Then Earth is all there is?”

  “That is what we believe, Ben—we have to go ahead on that assumption. You know most of the rest of the story. This ship slipped through the Enemy and found the Earth. We landed human beings who were so conditioned that they could remember little or nothing, for they had to begin all over again. We planted the fossils and the apes as a test, just as you supposed.”

  “But why? There was no need for such a stunt—”

  Gottwald smiled. “It wasn’t a stunt, my boy. It was the key to everything. You see, we had to warn the men of Earth about what they had to face. More than that, once their cultures had developed along their own lines, we had to share what we had with them. I need hardly remind you that this ship is technologically many thousands of years ahead of anything the Earth has produced. But we couldn’t turn the ship over to them until we were certain they were ready. You don’t give atomic bombs to babies. The men of Earth had to prove that they could handle the toughest problem we could dream up. You solved it, Ben.”

  “I didn’t do it alone.”

  “No, of course not. I can tell you now that my people—my other people—never did invent time travel. That was a totally unexpected means of tackling the problem; we never could have done it. It is the most hopeful thing that has happened.”

  “But what became of the men and women who stayed here on the ship?”

  Franz shook his head. “Twenty-five thousand years is a long, long time, Ben. We were a defeated people. We worked hard; we were not idle. For one thing, we prepared dictionaries for every major language on Earth so that all the data in our libraries will be available to you. But man does not live well inside a ship. Each generation we became fewer; children were very scarce.”

  “It’s like the old enigma of the cities, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly. No city in human history has ever reproduced its population. Urban births are always lower than rural ones. All cities have always drawn their personnel from the surrounding countryside. The ship was sealed up; we had no rural areas. It was only a matter of time before we were all gone. My wife and I were the last ones, Ben—and we had no children.”

  “We were so afraid,” Mrs. Gottwald said. “So afraid that you would not come before it was too late …”

  “What would you have done?”

  Franz shrugged wearily. “That is one decision I was spared. I did cheat a little, my boy. I was careful to give you no help, but I did plant some projectors near you that kept you stirred up. They broadcast frequencies that … ah … stimulate the mind, keep it in a state of urgency. Perhaps you noticed them?”

  Ben nodded. He remembered the voice that spoke in his skull:

  Hurry, hurry—

  “Franz, what will happen now?”

  Gottwald stroked his beard, his eyes very tired. “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know the answer. I have studied the men of Earth for most of my life, and I still don’t know. You are a tough people, Ben, tougher than we ever were
. You have fought many battles, and your history is a proud one. But I cannot read the future. I have done my best, and the rest is up to you.”

  “It’s a terrible responsibility.”

  “Yes, for you and for others like you it will be a crushing burden. But it will be a long fight; we will not live to see more than the beginning of it. It will take centuries for the men of Earth to learn all that is in this ship. It’s an odd thing, Ben—I have never seen the Enemy face to face. You will probably never see them. But what we do now will determine whether mankind lives or dies.”

  “It’s too much for one man.”

  “Yes.” Gottwald smiled, remembering. “It is.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “We will wait for Edward—he will be here tomorrow, unless I don’t know him at all—and then the three of us will sit down together for one last time. We will think it out. I am very tired, Ben; my wife and I have lived past our time. It is hard to be old, and to have no children. I always thought of you and Edward as my sons; I hope you do not find this too maudlin.”

  Ben searched for words and couldn’t find any.

  Franz put his arm around his wife. “Sometimes, when the job was too big for me, when I felt myself giving up, I would walk up into the old control room of this ship. My wife and I have stood there many times. Would you like to see it?”

  “I need it, Franz.”

  “Yes. So do I. Come along.”

  They walked for what seemed to be miles through the dark passages of the empty ship, then rode a series of elevators up to the control room.

  Franz switched on the lights.

  “The ship is not dead, you know,” he said. “It is only the people who are gone. The computers still maintain the ship’s orbit, and the defensive screens still make it invulnerable to detection—you wouldn’t have seen it if you had not been coming up the light tube, and there is no way the ship can be tracked from Earth. What do you think of the control room?”

  Ben stared at it. It was a large chamber, acres in extent, but it was strangely empty. There were panels of switches and a few small machines, but the control room was mostly empty space.