A World Out of Time Part 3

They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sat nestled among sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of three: The State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-Moon flight must be a small thing these days.

The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing field for decades. Transparent bubbles cl.u.s.tered near the runway end of the linear accelerator. There were buildings and groves of trees inside the bubbles. s.p.a.cecraft of various shapes and sizes were scattered about the plain.

The biggest was Corbel's rams.h.i.+p: a silver skysc.r.a.per lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the s.h.i.+p a thick-waisted appearance. To Corbell's trained eye it looked ready for takeoff.

He was awed, he was humbled, he was proud. He tried to sort out his own reactions from RNA-inspired emotions, and probably failed.

Corbell donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. He took it slow. The suit came in two pieces: a skintight rubbery body stocking, and a helmet attached to a heavy backpack. On the chest was a white spiral with tapered ends: the sign of the State.

An electric cart came for them. Apparently Corbell was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the s.h.i.+p. It was a long way off.

It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath. A fat cylinder the size of a house swelled above the jeep: the life-support section, bound to the main hull by a narrower neck. The smaller dome at the nose must be the control room.

The guard said, "Now you inspect your s.h.i.+p."

"You can talk?"

"Yes. Yesterday, a quick course."

"Oh."

"Three things wrong with your s.h.i.+p. You find all three. You tell me. I tell him."

"Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?"

"Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you."

It was another test, of course. Maybe the last. Corbell was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this s.h.i.+p. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the s.h.i.+p itself. Corbell's impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the-the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn't wait.

"I'll slurry this now," he told the guard. "Get a tanker over there to top it off." He bled hydrogen gas slowly through the valve, lowering the fuel's vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the valve itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.

He finished the external inspection without finding anything more. It figured: The banks of dials would hold vastly more information than a man's eyes could read through opaque t.i.tan-alloy skin.

The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbell shut the outer door, used the others when green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.

Vacuum?

He stopped. The s.h.i.+p's gauges said air. The suit's said vacuum. Which was right? Come to that, he hadn't heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?

Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in a vacuum. Well, how to test?

Hah! Corbell found the head, turned on a water faucet. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.

Did a flaw in his suit const.i.tute a flaw in the s.h.i.+p?

Corbell doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.

There was no way to test the ram-field generators without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the tell-tales, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.

He decided to finish his inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his s.h.i.+p, his life.

The cold-sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbell shuddered, remembering two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbell were really dead-and then he shook off the thought and went to work.

No flaws in the cold-sleep system. He went on.

The computer was acting vaguely funny.

He had a h.e.l.l of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. He donned his suit and went out to report.

The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbell, "You did good. Now finish with the topping-off procedure. We fix the other things."

"There's something wrong with my suit, too."

"New suit aboard now."

"I want some time with the computer. I want to be sure it's all right now."

"We fix it good. When you top off fuel you leave."

That suddenly, Corbell felt a vast sinking sensation. The whole Moon was dropping away under him.

They launched him hard. Corbell saw red before his eyes, felt his cheeks dragged far back toward his ears. The s.h.i.+p would be all right. It was built to stand electromagnetic eddy currents from any direction.

He survived. He fumbled out of his couch in time to watch the moonscape flying under him, receding, a magnificent view.

There were days of free-fall. He was not yet moving at ramscoop speeds. But the State had aimed him inside the orbit of Mercury, straight into the thickening solar wind. Protons. Thick fuel for the ram fields and a boost from the sun's gravity.

Meanwhile he had most of a day to play with the computer.

At one point it occurred to him that the State might monitor his computer work. He shrugged it off. Probably it was too late for the State to stop him now. In any case, he had said too much already.

He finished his work with the computer and got answers that satisfied him. At higher speeds the ram fields were self-reinforcing- they would support themselves and the s.h.i.+p. He could find no upper limit to the velocity of a seeder rams.h.i.+p.

With all the time in the world, then, he sat down at the control console and began to play with the fields.

They emerged like invisible wings. He felt the buffeting of badly controlled bursts of fusing hydrogen. He kept the fields close to the s.h.i.+p, fearful of losing the balance here, where the streaming of protons was so uneven. He could feel how he was doing. He could fly this s.h.i.+p by the seat of his pants, with RNA training to help him.

He felt like a giant. This enormous, phallic, germinal flying thing of metal and fire! Carrying the seeds of life for worlds that had never known life, he roared around the sun and out. The thrust dropped a bit then, because he and the solar wind were moving in the same direction. But he was catching it in his nets like wind in a sail, guiding it and burning it and throwing it behind him. The s.h.i.+p moved faster every second.

This feeling of power-enormous masculine power-had to be partly RNA training. At this point he didn't care. Part was him, Jerome Corbell.

Around the orbit of Mars, when he was sure that a glimpse of sunlight would not blind him, he instructed the computer to give him a full view. The walls of the spherical control room seemed to disappear; the sky blazed around him. There were no planets nearby. All he saw of the sky was myriads of brilliant pinpoints, mostly white, some showing traces of color. But there was more to see. Fusing hydrogen made a ghostly ring of light around his s.h.i.+p.

It would grow stronger. So far his thrust was low, somewhat more than enough to balance the thin pull of the sun.

He started his turn around the orbit of Jupiter by adjusting the fields to channel the proton flow to the side. That helped him thrust, but it must have puzzled Pierce and the faceless State. They would a.s.sume he was playing with the fields, testing his equipment. Maybe. His curve was gradual; it would take them a while to notice.

This was not according to plan. Originally he had intended to be halfway to Van Maanan's Star before he changed course. That would have given him fifteen years' head start, in case he was wrong, in case the State could do something to stop him even now.

That would have been wise; but he couldn't do it. Pierce might die in thirty years. Pierce might never know what Corbell had done-and that thought was intolerable.

His thrust dropped to almost nothing in the outer reaches of the system. Protons were thin out here. But there were enough to push his velocity steadily higher, and that was what counted. The faster he went, the greater the proton flux. He was on his way.

He was beyond Neptune when the voice of Pierce the checker came to him, saying, "This is Peerssa Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbell. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We cannot send rescue but we can advise. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State-" for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbell. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We cannot send rescue but we can advise. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State-"

Corbell smiled tightly. Peerssa? The checker's name had changed p.r.o.nunciation in two hundred years. Pierce had slipped back to an old habit, RNA lessons forgotten. He must be upset about something.

Corbell spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling. When he had it adjusted he said, "This is Corbell for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm fine. How are you?"

He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return to Sol system. He planned to be away longer than the State would have expected. Suppose there was n.o.body on the Moon when he returned?

It was a problem, he found. If he could reach the Moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth's atmosphere. The s.h.i.+p was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his att.i.tude jets would not land him, properly speaking.

Unless he could cut away part of the s.h.i.+p. The ram-field generators would no longer be needed then.... Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.

The answer from the Moon took nine hours. "Peerssa for the State. Corbell, we don't understand. You are far off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan's Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike world in that direction. What the bleep do you think you're doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa-"

Corbell tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn't told him about an off switch. Finally, and it should have been sooner, he told the computer to switch the receiver off.

Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission.

"This is Corbell for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm getting sick and tired of having to find you every d.a.m.n time I want to say something. So I'll give you this all at once.

"I'm not going to any of the stars on your list.

"It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the s.h.i.+p in one direction and keep it going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor.

"It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, s.h.i.+p's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can't resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren't like the stars in the arms. And they're packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be pa.s.sing strange in there.

"So I'll go exploring on my own. Maybe I'll find some of your reducing-atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won't. I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away, or you'll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I'll join one of them. Or-"

Corbell thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. "I'll have to check it out on the computer," he said. "But if I don't like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I'll bet they aren't more than twenty-five years away, s.h.i.+p's time."

CHAPTER TWO:

DON JUAN.

I.

The naming of names was important to Corbell. Alone in his little universe, dissociated from all mankind, with only himself and his bland-voiced computer to talk to, Corbell hung tags on everything.

He called himself Jaybee Corbell, as he had in his former life.

Yes, it was was a major decision. For a while he was calling himself CORBELL Mark II (Corpsicle Or Rebellious Brain-Erasure: Lousy Loser). He gave that up after the shape of his nose stopped bothering him, after he got used to the look and feel of his shorter arms and slender hands, his alien body. There were no mirrors on the s.h.i.+p. a major decision. For a while he was calling himself CORBELL Mark II (Corpsicle Or Rebellious Brain-Erasure: Lousy Loser). He gave that up after the shape of his nose stopped bothering him, after he got used to the look and feel of his shorter arms and slender hands, his alien body. There were no mirrors on the s.h.i.+p.

What he called the Kitchen was a wall with slots and a menu display screen. The opposite wall was the Health Club: the exercise paraphernalia and the outlets that would turn this area into sauna or shower or steam bath. The medical dispensary and diagnostic tools were Forest Lawn; the cold-sleep tank was also in that room.

The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. The chair would a.s.sume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good ma.s.sages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Corebell and the control bank floated alone in s.p.a.ce. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the s.h.i.+p.

Corbell called it the Womb Room.

The computer could be voice-operated from anywhere aboard. There was a helmet, like a hair dryer with a thick cord attached, that would plug the pilot directly into the computer's senses. Corbell was afraid to use it. The computer answered to "Computer." Corbell refused to personalize it. He spoke to it only to give orders and request information.

But he dithered for months before naming the great seeder rams.h.i.+p he had stolen from Peerssa and the State. Don Juan Don Juan, he called it, for its phallic overtones.

Trivial decisions... but that was Corbell's problem. He had already made his major decisions. That was his finest hour, when he broke free of Peerssa and drove for the galactic core. Don Juan Don Juan should have capped his career then, by blowing up. should have capped his career then, by blowing up.

Twenty-one years from now he could make his next major decision.

A year on his way, and Corbell was starving for the sound of another voice.

He dithered. What could Pierce say that would be worth the hearing? A year ago he had hung up on Pierce, he had had the computer disconnect the message laser receiver, as a gesture of contempt. That gesture was important. Could Pierce know know, never mind how, that he was no longer talking to a void?

Corbell held lengthy conversations about it. "Can I possibly be that that lonely?" he demanded of himself. "Or that bored? Or that desperate to hear another human voice again? Other than my own-" His own voice echoed back from the Womb Room walls. lonely?" he demanded of himself. "Or that bored? Or that desperate to hear another human voice again? Other than my own-" His own voice echoed back from the Womb Room walls.

"Computer," he said at last, "reconnect the message laser receiver." And he waited.

Nothing. Hours pa.s.sed, and nothing. nothing.

He was savage. Pierce must have given up. Somewhere in the city that Pierce had never shown Corbell, Pierce the checker would be training another revived corpsicle.

The voice caught him at breakfast three days later. "Corbell!"

"Hah?" That was strange. Computer had never addressed him before. Was it an emergency?

"This is Peerssa, you traitorous son of a b.i.t.c.h! Turn this s.h.i.+p around and carry out your mission!"

"Get stuffed," Corbell said, feeling good.

"Get stuffed yourself," said the voice of Peerssa, turned suddenly silky-smooth.

Something was wrong here. Don Juan Don Juan was almost half a light-year from Sol. How could Peerssa... ? "Computer, switch off the message laser receiver." was almost half a light-year from Sol. How could Peerssa... ? "Computer, switch off the message laser receiver."

"That won't work, Corbell! I've beamed my personality at your computer, over and over again for these past seven months! Turn us around or I'll cut off your air!"

Corbell yelled something obscene. The silence that followed commanded attention. The purr of air moving through the life-support system was a sound he never heard anymore; but he heard its absence.

"Turn that back on!" he cried in panic.

"Will you bargain, Corbell?"

"Never! I'll throw-" What was heavy and movable? Nothing? "I'll pry the microwave oven loose and throw it into the computer! I'll give you nothing but a wrecked s.h.i.+p!"