The Old Man of the Stars (5 page)

“Well, it won't be in my lifetime, anyway,” said the woman.

It was not easy to be patient with such people. Nor did it do any good to smile calmly and say that they could stay behind if they wished: they became rapidly abusive, as though it had been suggested that they should be brutally murdered or left to starve.

And in addition to this small group, there were one or two waverers. There was, for example, Alida.

Matthew saw Alida frequently, as he went to and fro in the clamour of each energetic day, and each time he saw her his envy of Clifford increased. The girl had such a brittle, fragile appearance, and yet was so taut and full of vitality. It was not often that she smiled, but that slow reflective parting of her lips was worth waiting for. Even Elysium had rarely produced a creature so beautiful.

And she did not want to leave Elysium.

In the evening, when the clangour and confusion around the spaceship had ceased, Matthew would sometimes see her walking in the shadows of the wood with Clifford, They walked slowly, and talked spasmodically, in an intimate undertone. Sometimes Clifford would be moody the next day.

On one such occasion Matthew decided to tackle the matter openly. He strolled up the slope as Clifford and Alida emerged from the woods, and waited for them to join him.

The evening light cast a glow on Alida's bare arms. She looked up at the splashes of colour that lay across the sky, and then glanced out across the plain as though anxious to fix it all in her memory—as though reluctant ever to be forced to leave it.

Matthew said: “You two look glum. Getting tired of waiting for the ship to be finished?”

Alida sensed the irony in his tone if Clifford didn't and she said at once: “It breaks my heart to think of leaving here. These wonderful evenings; the afternoons of summer; the sounds and scents of this world....”

“I should have thought,” said Matthew quietly, “that the sight of the town ruins would have depressed you. There would always be too many memories here.”

“We could go away. There are thousands of miles of the planet that have never been travelled at all.”

“But wherever you go on this planet, one day the ships will come back, and there will be destruction once more—if not for you, for those who come after you.”

Sadly she nodded. “I know that well. I know that we must go. But it's so hard. To turn your back on beauty and resign yourself to imprisonment for twenty-five years is a bitter thing.”

Matthew tried to point out that they would not be in space for the whole time. They would stop on the way: they would visit other worlds and try to make contact with the other races, to find out what had happened to the pioneers from Earth who had been left behind on that outward journey. None had ever come on to Elysium: that was not surprising, as the leap to Elysium had been the longest and most arduous stretch of all; but one wanted to know, to learn, to be told the innumerable histories.

Alida nodded her acceptance of all that he said. She would come with Clifford—there was no question of that—but she did not pretend that she was happy. Her imagination had once been kindled by the enthusiasm of the two men, but that spurt of interest had been overcome by her longing for the tranquility of life on the world she knew so well.

Leaving them, Matthew found himself wondering if he was justified in driving these people so hard. If he were to cease harrying them, they would not leave Elysium. With the pressure relaxed, they would fall into their old ways. Even Clifford, drawn into contentment with Alida, would probably not persist for long. The ship would remain where it was, almost ready for a take-off that it would never make.

Was he, Matthew, wrong: was he being as selfish as many people had accused him of being in the past, and as one or two still accused him of being?

“Home,” he said softly to himself. They could not understand what the conception meant.

Yet, was that true? To them, this was home. He was urging them to leave their home merely in order to accompany him on a voyage back to an old world they had never known and could hardly be expected to love.

He walked past the observatory and stood brooding over the darkening plain.

Somewhere a girl laughed, and a young man longingly called her name.

Why not let them stay? The murderous ships might come back, but that was no immediate concern of these people here today. Things might have changed. Whatever had prompted these strange beings to launch such a vicious assault might not have any effect a couple of hundred years from now. It might be safer to stay here and take a chance—or let one's descendants take a chance—than to go out into space in a reconditioned spaceship whose behaviour was, to say the least of it, unpredictable.

And then what of his dreams: what would remain for Matthew then?

The same life as before. He would help in the rebuilding of the community, knowing that on a planet like this, where living was easy, there would never be ambition, never any knowledge of the hopes and fears that he had known. At first, surrounded by this small group who regarded him with some respect, he would be a person of some consequence. But as the decades rolled past, there would be the inevitable decline. His histories would be laughed at as fables. Even his story of the attack from space, and his warnings of a possible recurrence, would become blurred and distorted. They would say he was telling fairy stories and that there had never been any such attack. They would find reasons for not listening to him. Realisation that he was considered a bore would creep over him again.

Death, then?

He felt a cold chill strike at his heart. The older he grew and the more tired he became of existence, the more he shrank from death. He was not a coward, but his instincts were not under the control of his mind. For a young man to commit suicide is difficult: a human being has to fight every natural impulse in order to put an end to his own life; but for a man of Matthew's age, the instinctive rejection of such a course was a hundred, a thousand times stronger than normal. That way out was a defeat—a defeat he could not, would not accept.

He knew that, selfish or not, he was going to go on: he was going to strike out on the long way back home. Nothing else was possible. They would go, all of them...and, he vowed, they would get there.

CHAPTER FOUR

At last they were ready. The ship lay out in the open, the launching cradle pointing it to the stars. Final preparations were made. Everything had been checked and double-checked, but still Matthew was pale with apprehension. Nothing could go wrong now: nothing must go wrong.

All possible stores had been taken aboard. It was now their last night on Elysium.

And during that last afternoon, a ceremony had taken place. Alida and Clifford had gone through the simple, formal ritual of the Elysian marriage agreement.

“The last wedding on Elysium,” commented one of the women sentimentally.

They all felt sentimental at that time. The risks they were about to take assumed colossal proportions. Matthew would not have been surprised if there had been an attempt to call the expedition off, even at this late date; but it seemed as though, now they had got this far, they were all determined to go through with it.

He and Clifford made a final check of their calculations. Tomorrow the lives of all of them would depend on the accuracy and relevance of those figures. If the two men had been working on false assumptions, or if Bellhouse and the mechanics had failed to comprehend fully the machinery that had been so laboriously adapted and built into this ship, they might in a matter of seconds be no more than a sudden spark in the sky, a molten mass falling back to the surface of Elysium or dropping forever through the vastness of space.

The ship vibrated, humming a tune to itself as Bellhouse made his last adjustments. Power throbbed in the heart of it, still leashed but ready to shake off restraint and hurl the ship outward.

The principle of the drive, they had discovered, was not a mere crude thrusting forward such as had been employed in the original Earth-made vessel. It relied on a twisting of the natural tensions of the cosmos. The stresses that held the universe together were all utilised, as a man might use any handhold he could find to make his way along a dangerous precipice. The creatures who had designed this space drive had adapted gravitational pulls and the force fields of different galaxies to their own uses. The ship would pursue a strange, erratic course that would nevertheless bring it to its destination sooner than if it had followed a straight line. Ricocheting, leaping from one system to another like a man throwing himself recklessly from one springboard to another, it would twist itself at incredible speed through the mesh of interwoven forces and gravitational fields that preserved the balance of the universe.

“Well,” said Clifford at last, his eyes tired, “we can't do any more. We ought to get some sleep.”

“You'd better go and comfort your wife,” said Matthew. “She hates to leave Elysium.”

“So do I, in a way. But in another way....”

He left the sentence unfinished, but he and Matthew exchanged an affectionate smile. They were both weary, yet both excited. They shared the exultation of knowing that at last the attempt was to be made.

Matthew remained in the control room for some minutes after Clifford had gone. Then he sighed, clambered down the great length of the hull to the ground, and looked up at the massive shape against the sky.

“Tomorrow,” he said softly. “Tomorrow.”

Then he went to bed, and slept a fitful, disturbed sleep gashed by many dreams.

In the morning there was too much bustle for there to be any time for regrets. Each of the thirty members of the crew turned at the airlock to take a last quick glance at the sunlit world; and then they were inside, strapping themselves to the sprung seats which would later be distributed throughout the ship, but which were for the present bolted to the floor of the communal lounge, facing towards the nose of the ship.

Matthew and Clifford sat side by side at the control panel. They thumbed the various relays to make sure that all the ports were closed, the whole vessel sealed up.

“Shall we go?” said Clifford with a strained, unreal laugh.

“Take her up,” said Matthew.

The engine room light glowed its readiness. A gentle shudder began to murmur through the length of the ship. A note starting at a low frequency rose like a faint far-off siren, and then was lost.

Clifford watched the dial before him, and then said:

“This is it.”

The pressure of his thumb released a force that seemed to strike them in the stomach. Breath went, sight and hearing were blotted out, and for thirty seconds there was nothing in existence but pain and constriction, a desperate struggle to fill the lungs and not to give way to panic as blood pounded in the head.

The intolerable pressure mounted. Then it was as though the ship had looped the loop. Everything went round. Matthew felt that his insides were being tossed about and jumbled up so that he would never be able to sort them out again. He knew that he was trying to say something to Clifford, but had not the faintest idea what it could be.

And then the pain died away. Bones were left aching, and Matthew felt that his head would split open, but the awful weight against his chest and stomach had gone.

He said: “Free.”

Clifford leaned his forehead against the cool panel in front of him.

“We're caught in the galactic flux,” he said. “So far so good. Theory and practice have tied up—so far.”

They looked at one another, and both of them had, absurdly, tears in their eyes.

From then on the main problem was an administrative one. The ship, moving at a fantastic speed through space, did not seem to its occupants to be moving at all. There were no landmarks and no sensation of movement. It was as though this scrap of metal and its human cargo were hanging motionless in infinity, lost in the star-studded vastness. There was no sense of danger: the only danger was boredom, and Matthew knew how serious that would become as time went on.

Looking at the stars through the glassite ports was a pastime that soon palled. The stars were fixed and immutable. They were apparently always in the same position: the ship did not approach them; no planets swam past, and there was no difference between night and day.

“We shall be all right for a little while,” said Matthew to Clifford, “and we must do all we can to foster friendships and—er—romances on board ship. The biologist, Richard, already enjoys the company of that woman who made such a fuss about leaving. If they marry, that'll keep them occupied for a few years before they get really fretful.”

“You make it sound very matter-of-fact,” said Clifford ruefully.

“We can't afford to be anything but realistic. The first world that we're headed for will take five years to reach. We've got to keep our tempers somehow for five years.”

There were thirty people aboard—ten women, twenty men, and two children. The six men who had been trained as pilots took their turns, two at a time, in the control cabin. This was mainly a matter of routine: held to its predicted course, the ship ran itself smoothly, but a constant watch was necessary in case a meteorite shower or some other unexpected phenomenon threatened.

The engine-room maintenance staff worked in similar shifts. Dr. Richard was fully occupied with the food culture shelves and the issue of concentrate capsules.

The women were the real trouble—or they would be, in time. Although each one was allotted a task, they still had time on their hands. Sitting in the communal lounge, they talked until it seemed there was nothing left to talk about, and then bickered irritably. Matthew had made sure that several sets of Elysian Tarasco cards had been manufactured before they left, and involved games of this were played for months on end. But the games became acrimonious, and there were perpetual outbreaks of hostility between different cliques—cliques to which the men as well as the women belonged.

As Matthew had predicted, the unmarried women were soon paired off with men of the crew. One of the two children who had come along was an attractive little girl who would undoubtedly prove a source of rivalry in a few years' time.

And after the marriages had taken place, it was inevitable that surreptitious affairs should commence—flirtations and passionate attachments that could not be kept secret for long in the cramped space of the ship.

“As long as nobody gets thrown out of the airlock, I suppose we mustn't complain,” remarked Clifford. But Matthew observed that the young man guarded his wife Alida jealously. He gossiped freely about the behaviour of other members of the crew, when he and Matthew were on duty together, but he would have been the first to start violence if anyone had made advances to Alida.

New games of cards were invented as they went on. One of the men had a fine voice and an imaginative gift for versifying, and he sang songs that had much in common with old primitive ballads: he set the memories of all of them to music, filling them with nostalgia as he dwelt on the beauties of the planet they had left. Matthew did not actively discourage this, but he hinted at one time that it would be better for everyone's morale if the singer could turn out some bright prophetic verses about the worlds they would visit in the future rather than about the one to which they could not return.

Week succeeded week, month trickled down upon meaningless month. They were one year out from Elysium; then two years.

One of the engineers had a fit of hysteria and would have smashed his hands to pulp against the unyielding side of the ship if Dr. Richards had not forced a sedative preparation down his throat.

Two men fought over the wife of one of them, and provided food for conversation for nearly a fortnight.

Gradually the star patterns in the sky shifted slightly.

A child was born to the wife of Dr. Richard. It was a boy. The women of the company showered attentions on him: no child had ever been so spoilt. But Matthew was glad to see him, and hoped, that there would be more. A new life always uplifted the dullest and weariest people. It brought with it hope and a sort of promise that they all recognised without being able to explain.

But there was still too much time to fill each day. Sleep, to which so many resorted, did not come easily. They none of them did enough work to be really tired, and they did not possess the hibernating faculty of certain animals. One day, thought Matthew, it will be possible, perhaps, to put ourselves to sleep for several years, and cross space in what seems a matter of seconds.

Trouble of some sort was bound to break out. It came from two of the men—the two who had opposed the idea of leaving Elysium in the first place.

They came into the control cabin when Matthew and Clifford were on duty. It was during the sleep period: it was still called ‘night' although the eternity outside made no difference between day and night.

Matthew glanced up and tensed at once, sensing trouble.

He said: “Only pilots should be in here.”

“That's a ruling that you yourself laid down. We're getting a bit tired of doing things your way.”

It was the taller of the two who spoke, a lean and resentful-looking man with a nervous habit of chewing his thin lips.

Clifford said: “We are all agreed that Matthew is the man who should make decisions.”

“Not all of us. We're tired. We're tired of this whole mad business.”

“We're all tired,” said Clifford in a level voice. “It's just a matter of carrying on.”

“Is it? That's what we want to settle. We don't think it's any such thing.”

The other man said aggressively: “There's such a thing as turning back.”

“You must be mad,” said Matthew.

“It's going on that's the madness. We've been talking to some of the women, and it's wearing them down. They can't take it. They want to get back to their homes. We've wasted over two years. We want to cut our losses and turn back to Elysium.”

“Back to Elysium?” Matthew echoed furiously. “You don't know what you're talking about. We're committed to this trip now, and we're going on. In any case—”

“I say we're going back!”

The man's voice had risen to a scream. The two of them suddenly sprang on Clifford and Matthew. Clifford was taken by surprise, and went over sideways. But Matthew had been braced for some such thing from the moment the two men came into the room. He struck out decisively, and sent the shouting, cursing man back across the room.

The one who had dislodged Clifford from his chair made a wild, insane grab at the control panel. Matthew grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Clifford, rolling over on his side, reached for the man's ankles, and brought him down with a heavy thud on the hard floor.

“That'll be all!” said Matthew harshly.

Breathing painfully, the two men stood sheepishly against the wall. The madness had been knocked out of them, but they were not prepared to give up their argument.

The taller of the two, his lip twitching, said:

“You can't go on holding us all forever, you know. Sooner or later everyone on board will be in here, insisting that you turn round and go back.”

Matthew gave a snort of exasperation. “It's not a question of going back. We're not just coasting down a straight road. We can't turn round and start travelling in the opposite direction. We're geared to a sequence of force fields—we pushed off from Elysium and we've got to keep jumping, following the sequence that was calculated in advance. When you jump from a trapeze you don't try to turn round in mid-air and get back.”

Mention of a trapeze meant nothing to them, but they grudgingly accepted the truth of what he had said.

“But when we get to this planet that we're visiting on the way? Couldn't we start back from there?”

“Yes,” said Matthew bluntly. “We could set up new co-ordinates and push ourselves off in the direction of Elysium. But for what purpose? It will take five years to get from Elysium to the first world we're going to visit, and then if yon turned back it would take another five years. Ten years wasted. Why not go on now that you've started?”