Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  There was a long silence in Captain Kleberg’s room while the four men thought of that lonely ship, alone for centuries, dead and silent and outmoded. A heroic thing, reduced to tragi-comic dimensions by the onrush of technology, and yet—

  Mark Langston put his cold pipe on the table and leaned forward. “My guess is yes,” he said carefully. “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “Air?” questioned Captain Kleberg doubtfully. “Water? Food? Gravity? The ship is dead, you know—there’s no question about that part.”

  Langston nodded. “Yes, I’ve taken that into account. Look at it this way: First of all, the Viking was not, of course, a faster-than-light ship. The trip to Capella was expected to occupy the better part of two hundred years, with the descendants of the original crew finishing the trip. The food would be synthetic, and there would of necessity be plenty. The air supply on the Viking was supplied by sealed hydroponic tanks, the valves of which, unless I’m greatly mistaken, were pressure affairs that operated independently of the main power source. I think the air supply would hold out—it’s at least possible. The water was carried in tanks and wouldn’t be markedly affected by a power failure. Gravity? Well, there wouldn’t be any, as far as I can see—”

  “Man is a very adaptable animal,” Stan Owens said, anticipating him. “He could survive—theoretically at any rate.”

  “That’s it, then,” McConnell said. “Until we find out differently, we’ll have to assume that there is life of some sort still present in that hulk. Two hundred plus years isn’t a fantastic length of time; there may very well be people on that ship. That takes care of our plan of action. It’s simple. They’re there, trapped. We’re here, with a nice new ship. Solution: Go get them and bring them aboard.”

  Stan Owens’ chair hit the floor with a bang.

  “Beg pardon,” he said, “but that’s the one thing we can’t do.”

  Mark Langston turned and looked at him.

  Stan Owens picked up the empty bottle from the table and jabbed it in McConnell’s general direction. “Think a moment, all of you,” he said. “This thing isn’t quite as simple as it looks and going off half-cocked isn’t going to get us anything but a nice soggy fizzle.”

  “O.K., ape-man,” McConnell sighed at the anthropologist. “I might have known that you would come up with something complicated. You guys wouldn’t fix a bicycle without a field report and culture analysis.”

  Mark Langston found himself grinning broadly. It was a good feeling. Up here, with these men, things suddenly began to make sense again. It was not anything concrete, nor could he have put it into words if he had been asked. It was simply that he was once more proud and happy to be a man. Mrs. Simmons and others of her ilk seemed to be denizens of another universe, living in another world—as, in a sense, indeed they were.

  Captain Kleberg drummed his fingers on the table. “Well?”

  “Look,” said Stan Owens patiently. “Let’s assume that everything Jim has said is true—if it isn’t, if the ship is dead inside as well as out, it doesn’t concern us. Let’s assume that there are people, human beings, still alive on the Viking—people who have lived their entire lives in the darkness, who have never known gravity, who have lived in a world as different from ours as hydrogen is from uranium, who have lived in a static world of death and decay, a world slowly running down—”

  A cold chill seemed to seep through the little room like an icy mist. The children of the Viking, Mark Langston thought with a feeling akin to awe, the strange children of the Viking—

  “Let’s not have any romantic hogwash, now,” Stan Owens continued, waving the empty bottle. “We have no way of knowing how long the Viking has been a dead ship, nor do we know what happened to her. But the drive was automatic, wasn’t it, Jim?”

  McConnell nodded. “That’s right. An early atomic drive, kicking up a thrust about equal to a bit less than one-fifth light-year per year in terms of unit distance.”

  “It wouldn’t have just failed,” Mark Langston added. “It must have been tampered with.”

  “Well, that’s all conjecture,” Owens said slowly. “The important point is that at best that ship has been dead for a good hundred and fifty years, otherwise it would have been contacted by the first faster-than-light ships that tried to hunt her down. That gives us a span of four or five generations living under those upsetting and difficult conditions. Don’t fool yourselves, gentlemen—man is not even a constant biologically, and when you get into psychology and culture you can expect practically anything. If there are people on that ship, I don’t profess to know anything much about them—but I’ll tell you for sure that they won’t be like any people you ever saw before.”

  The other men remained silent, watching him. The great ship around them seemed somehow fragile now, and Mark Langston thought of the infinite sea in which they swam, the dark sea of space that washed the black shores of more mysteries than man could ever know—

  “O.K., there they are,” Owens went on. “A hundred and fifty years is a long time—those people, if there are any, have changed. By this time they have either adapted themselves to their new environment or else they’re long ago kaput. We can just forget any drivel about their forgetting where they come from, or who they are, or what they’re doing there in the middle of nowhere. Some of them are bound to know—there were books on the Viking, certainly, and records, to say nothing of word-of-mouth communication. They’ll know, no question about that. Whether they’ll all believe it or not is something else again.”

  Jim McConnell shook his head. “O.K.,” he said, “then what’s the trouble all about? I still can’t see—”

  Stan Owens spun the bottle on the table with one hand. “We’ve got two possibilities,” he explained. “One, they know full well what the score is. In that case, their whole lives, their very reason for being, is tied up with the Viking—that ship reaching Capella under her own steam and through her own efforts is the only thing that can make their living hell mean anything. Take that away from them and they are broken, dead. Take that away from them and you are murderers.”

  “And if they don’t believe?” suggested Captain Kleberg.

  “The second possibility is tougher,” said Stan Owens. “If they have completely adapted to their new environment, then the shock of putting them on this ship would probably be fatal. The change would be too much; their whole culture, the very fabric of their lives, would be shattered with one blow. Ignoring that little point meant the extinction of more people than I like to think about, on Earth and elsewhere, to say nothing of butcher-wars and revolutions. We are smarter now, or at least we like to think that we are.”

  Mark Langston nodded at his friend. He had seen enough in his life to back up everything Owens had said, with interest. When you were dealing with human beings, you ignored the human element at your risk. “There’s the question of gravity, too,” he said.

  “Of course,” Owens agreed. “If there’s been no power on the Viking for over a century, and thus no artificial gravity, the sudden change would wipe them out—crush them like flies in a vice. And I dare say that Captain Kleberg wouldn’t care to throw this ship into free fall from here to Capella with a load of unconditioned and generally hysterical passengers. We’ve got a culture too, you know.”

  Captain Kleberg gave his best approaching-the-guillotine smile. “Don’t even think about it,” he advised. “We’ll all wind up in the funny room. But remember—we’ve got to make it fast, whatever we do. And no mistakes, of course. This may be a life or death matter for those people, and our own orbital error isn’t going to be any joke, even for the computers. I’ll hold this ship in position as long as necessary, but we’ll have to get with it. If there are people on that ship—”

  “That’s enough ‘ifs’ for one session, I think,” smiled Mark Langston, stoking up his pipe again. “This reminds me of that old problem in which some bright boy points to a wastebasket and asks his friends if they’ll bet him a million doll
ars that there isn’t a turtle in it. Chances are that there isn’t, but how do you know? You can theorize and reason all night, but there’s only one way to find out for sure whether or not there is a turtle in there under the daily garbage.” He paused, blowing a cloud of blue smoke across the table. “And that one way,” he finished, “is to go over and look.”

  The small but rugged space launch, utterly dwarfed by the vast distances all around her, came down with a wrenching whine—out of hyperspace and into normal sub-space where the dead Viking waited. The shock of the transition stunned even the trained crew, and offered convincing evidence of why the great star ship, the Wilson Langford, could not be so maneuvered into normal space without a minimum of five days of physical and psychological conditioning for her passengers.

  Mark Langston nursed the launch toward the dark shadow of the Viking, which was now visible to the naked eye. It floated ahead of them, cold and alone, like a vast creature of the ocean deeps that had grown old and tired and now only floated mindlessly with the currents it once had challenged. Despite the faint throbbing in his bad leg, Mark Langston felt better than he had in a long, long time. He was home, lost in the stars, and the weary years fell away from him one by one and left him young again.

  The Viking swam nearer, dominating space. Mark Langston guided the launch with well-remembered skill, listening to the hum of conversation behind him.

  “I guess my education’s been sadly neglected,” a voice belonging to one of the forced-entry technicians was saying, “but I swear I don’t see why the Viking started for Capella in the first place. Why not head for Alpha Centauri? They could have made that in twenty-plus years. Capella, unless it’s all hokum put out by the Interstellar Board of Trade to justify extortion rates, is forty-two light-years from Earth.”

  “It’s fairly simple, actually,” Stan Owens said. “They didn’t head for Alpha Centauri for the same reason you don’t go to a zoo when you’re looking for a dream-blonde in a bar—it didn’t suit their purpose. You have to think back and remember what conditions were like when the Viking left Earth. What had they found in the solar system?”

  “Same as now, more or less,” the man reflected. “Except for what we’ve built, Mars had those lichens left from better days, Venus her dust cacti, and that’s about it.”

  “O.K.,” Owens continued. “Unless he could reach the stars, man was alone in the universe to all practical purposes. And they were after a planet almost exactly like Earth, only older, following the logic that evolution there would have advanced the planet correspondingly and thus making it possible to harvest the fruits of many thousands—or even millions—of years of scientific advancement in just the space of time required to go from Earth to another Earth circling a Class G star of exactly the right specifications. They were hoping, of course, to find a faster-than-light drive to speed up the return trip for their children’s children—it seemed like quite an adventure at the time, with fabulous prestige for the crew, and the possible returns to Earth made financing no problem. It just so happened that Capella was the closest star that would serve their ends, and so that was their destination. As we know, it was a wise choice—”

  The launch swung alongside the Viking and Mark Langston eased her in toward an exact velocity-match. A wise choice, he thought, looking at the black tomb before him. A wise choice, but they couldn’t have known that we’d perfect a faster-than-light drive that would render them obsolete before they ever arrived, couldn’t have known what was to go wrong with their plans within fifty years there in the mute corridors of the Viking—

  “How about that?” questioned Jim McConnell thoughtfully. “If we find anyone alive in there, and manage do anything for them, what becomes of them when they chug into Capella some twenty-thirty years from now and find out that interstellar travel is already old-hat? You talk about destroying their values, Stan, but how do you think they’re going to feel when they find out that it’s all been for nothing, that they might as well have stayed home?”

  The launch hovered next to the black hulk of the Viking and Mark Langston swung her abreast of the engine room and clamped her there with gravitraction beams.

  “Spacesuits,” he said shortly.

  “That isn’t quite as tough a problem as it looks like,” Stan Owens explained as he struggled into his suit. “Remember that these are not the original members of the crew—they are a wholly new group, with new values. If they manage somehow to bring the Viking in, that in itself will be enough. Anyhow, in a sense they are the first. We’ve got lots of time before the Viking lands, if she does, and we can set the psychology boys to work in that interval. Don’t worry—when the Viking approaches the Capella system she’ll get a hero’s—or is it heroine’s—welcome that’ll put all others to shame, and what’s more it’ll be completely genuine. There are other distinctions in life besides winning the race, you know.”

  “You seem to have this all figured to the last decimal point,” laughed McConnell, “and we don’t even know whether or not the Viking is empty. Nothing like looking ahead.”

  “The time to make your plans is before the action starts,” Mark Langston said, talking now through the suit phones. “It’s only in quaint types of fiction that the hero strolls thoughtlessly into a hornet’s nest and then formulates stunning plans with his brilliant brain while being clubbed to death with crowbars. If he’s got brains enough to think his way out of a situation, then he’s got brains enough to do a little thinking before he gets up to his neck in hot water.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors, boy,” said Jim McConnell, moving into position. “What happens to all your fine plans if I can’t fix the drive on that baby?”

  Mark Langston grinned. “One vote for technology,” he said.

  The efficient team of the launch, spacesuited for protection, swung the emergency air lock and cutter into position between the launch and the dark shell of the Viking. McConnell’s crew set the cutters with meticulous care. There was a brief whine and the lights dimmed. That was all.

  “Let’s go,” said Mark Langston.

  Cautiously, ready for anything, the men moved through the air lock one by one into the black interior of the dead Viking.

  Four “days” passed. A class was taught and a battle fought, and an old man spoke with his son—

  Floating through the dark tunnels, smelling the cold metal all around him, Collins thought of destiny. Destiny, so the books would have you believe, was what you made of it—fate was up to you. But it was a strange destiny, surely, that had placed him in this dark asylum, protected for the moment against the frigid death outside, even deluded into a kind of comfort, but sinking, always sinking, into a living death in the black shadows below.

  Sometimes, it did seem hopeless. Without the captain, he knew, they would be lost—the captain would lead them to safety if anyone could. He thought of the early days of the Viking, the early halcyon days that he had heard about, when the scientists had lived in a veritable artificial paradise, with unlimited time at their disposal and the company of intelligent, congenial friends to make the long hours pass quickly. Collins wished fervently that he might have lived then, in the golden age—

  Ruthlessly, he thrust the thought from his mind. What was it that the captain had said? Man could not move backwards and survive—he must go forward, not to the good old days, but to the good new ones.

  But how much science had they managed to keep alive? Was it enough? Time was running out; and the problems yet to be solved were staggering. What was wrong with the engines? Even if they knew, could they fight their way through the world of the other men to the engine room? Where was the ship? If they could manage somehow to bring her to life again, would they have time to go anywhere—go before the synthetics were just a memory and the ship turned into a total horror of starving maniacs? And how long could even the captain bind the men to his will—men who had never known anything but darkness and free flight, men who with each passing “day” became m
ore and more adapted to their ship asylum in the black sea of space and less and less suited for the lives of human beings? Was their fight only a hopeless race up a blind, fantastic alley?

  Perhaps the younger men were right—perhaps they should simply treat the other men, with their back sliding primitive culture and superstition, as animals and try to exterminate them to make the synthetics last longer. Perhaps, from the initial revolution down to the present, it had all been their fault—perhaps they should forget about being men, forget about saving the ship, and just make the best of the life with which they were confronted.

  Collins shook the thought from his mind. That way only seemed to be the easy way, he knew. That way meant death for all of them. The time would come, the time must come, when they would need those savage people who now crouched around their strange fires in the black world below.

  Collins drifted around a corner and there was Malcolm.

  Malcolm, now growing old but still with a twinkle in his eye, seemed dignified as always in the light of his small torch. He floated rigidly in the air, his spine unbending and his clothing faultlessly neat as usual.

  “I say, Collins,” he said briskly, “good to see you.”

  Collins smiled. Malcolm had discovered from the records that his parents had been British, and he had therefore read all the books he could find upon an incredibly distant England and her people. He had picked up what he fancied to be British phrases, and he used them doggedly—a pathetic thing, to be sure, and a trifle comic, but Collins respected the man’s effort to build a desperate individual personality in the midst of chaos. Once he had even tried to find tea, although he hardly knew what it was.