The Martian Way and other Stories Part 12

TWO.

Wenda's relations.h.i.+p to Roi was as close as one could imagine, closer by far than it was decent for her to know.

She had been allowed to enter the ovarium only once in her life and it had been made quite clear to her that it was to be only that once.

The Raceologist had said, "You don't quite meet the standards, Wenda, but you are fertile and we'll try you once. It may work out."

She wanted it to work out. She wanted it desperately. Quite early in her life she had known that she was deficient in intelligence, that she would never be more than a Manual. It embarra.s.sed her that she should fail the Race and she longed for a single chance to help create another being. It became an obsession.

She secreted her egg in an angle of the structure and then returned to watch. The "randoming" process that moved the eggs gently about during mechanical insemination (to insure even gene distribution) did not, by some good fortune, do more than make her own wedged-in egg wobble a bit Un.o.btrusively she maintained her watch during the period of maturation, observed the little one who emerged from the particular egg that was hers, noted his physical markings, watched him grow.

He was a healthy youngster and the Raceologist approved of him.

She had said once, very casually, "Look at that one, the one sitting there. Is he sick?"

"Which one?" The Raceologist was startled. Visibly sick infants at this stage would be a strong reflection upon his own competence. "You mean Roi? Nonsense. I wish all our young were like that one." I At first, she was only pleased with herself, then frightened, finally horrified. She found herself haunting the youngster, taking an interest in his schooling, watching him at play. She was happy when he was near, dull and unhappy otherwise. She had never heard of such a thing, and she was ashamed.

She should have visited the Mentalist, but she knew better. She was not so dull as not to know that this was not a mild aberration to be cured at the twitch of a brain cell. It was a truly psychotic manifestation. She was certain of that. They would confine her if they found out. They would euthanase her, perhaps, as a useless drain on the strictly limited energy available to the race. They might even euthanase the offspring of her egg if they found out who it was.

She fought the abnormality through the years and, to a measure, succeeded. Then she first heard the news that Rio had been chosen for the long trip and was filled with aching misery.

She followed him to one of the empty corridors of the cavern, some miles from the city center. The city! There was only one.

This particular cavern had been closed down within Wenda's own memory. The Elders had paced its length, considered its population and the energy necessary to keep it powered, then decided to darken it. The population, not many to be sure, had been moved closer toward the center and the quota for the next session at the ovarium had been cut.

Wenda found Rio's conversational level of thinking shallow, as though most of his mind had drawn inward contemplatively.

Are you afraid? she thought at him.

Because I come out here to think? He hesitated a little, then said, "Yes, I am. It's the Race's last chance. If I fail-"

Are you afraid for yourself?

He looked at her in astonishment and Wenda's thought stream fluttered with shame at her indecency.

She said, "I wish I were going instead."

Roi said, "Do you think you can do a better job?"

"Oh, no. But if I were to fail and-and never come back, it would be a smaller loss to the Race."

"The loss is all the same," he said stolidly, "whether it's you or I. The loss is Racial existence."

Racial existence at the moment was in the background of Wenda's mind, if anywhere. She sighed. "The trip is such a long one."

"How long?" he asked with a smile. "Do you know?"

She hesitated. She dared not appear stupid to him.

She said primly, "The common talk is that it is to the First Level."

When Wenda had been little and the heated corridors had extended further out of the city, she had wandered out, exploring as youngsters will. One day, a long distance out, where the chill in the air nipped at her, she came to a hall that slanted upward but was blocked almost instantly by a tremendous plug, wedged tightly from top to bottom and side to side.

On the other side and upward, she had learned a long time later, lay the Seventy-ninth Level; above that the Seventy-eighth and so on.

"We're going past the First Level, Wenda."

"But there's nothing past the First Level."

"You're right. Nothing. All the solid matter of the planet comes to an end."

"But how can there be anything that's nothing? You mean air?"

"No, I mean nothing. Vacuum. You know what vacuum is, don't you?"

"Yes. But vacuums have to be pumped and kept airtight."

"That's good for Maintenance. Still, past the First Level is just an indefinite amount of vacuum stretching everywhere."

Wenda thought awhile. She said "Has anyone ever been there?"

"Of course not. But we have the records."

"Maybe the records are wrong."

"They can't be. Do you know how much s.p.a.ce I'm going to cross?"

Wenda's thought stream indicated an overwhelming negative.

Roi said, "You know the speed of light, I suppose."

"Of course," she replied readily. It was a universal constant infants knew it. "One thousand nine hundred and fifty-four times the length of the cavern and back in one second."

"Right," said Roi, "but if light were to travel along the distance I'm to cross it would take it ten years."

Wenda said, "You're making fun of me. You're trying to frighten me."

"Why should it frighten you?" He rose. "But I've been moping here long enough-"

For a moment, one of his six grasping limbs rested lightly in one of hers, with an objective, impa.s.sive friends.h.i.+p. An irrational impulse urged Wenda to seize it tightly, prevent him from leaving.

She panicked for a moment in fear that he might probe her mind past the conversational level, that he might sicken and never face her again, that he might even report her for treatment Then she relaxed. Roi was normal, not sick like herself. He would never dream of penetrating a friend's mind any deeper than the conversational level, whatever the provocation.

He was very handsome in her eyes as he walked away. His grasping limbs were straight and strong, his prehensile, manipulative vibrissae were numerous and delicate and his optic patches were more beautifully opalescent than any she had ever seen.

THREE.

Laura settled down in her seat. How soft and comfortable they made them. How pleasing and unfrightening airplanes were on the inside, how different from the hard, silvery, inhuman l.u.s.ter of the outside.

The ba.s.sinet was on the seat beside her. She peeped in past the blanket and the tiny, ruffled cap. Walter was sleeping. His face was the blank, round softness of infancy and his eyelids were two fringed half-moons pulled down over his eyes.

A tuft of light brown hair straggled across his forehead, and with infinite delicacy, Laura drew it back beneath his cap.

It would soon be Walter's feeding time and she hoped he was still too young to be upset by the strangeness of his surroundings. The stewardess was being very kind. She even kept his bottles in a little refrigerator. Imagine, a refrigerator on board an airplane.

The people in the seat across the aisle had been watching her in that peculiar way that meant they would love to talk to her if only they could think of an excuse. The moment came when she lifted Walter out of his ba.s.sinet and placed him, a little lump of pink flesh encased in a white coc.o.o.n of cotton, upon her lap.

A baby is always legitimate as an opening for conversation between strangers.

The lady across the way said (her words were predictable), "What a lovely child. How old is he, my dear?"

Laura said, through the pins in her mouth (she had spread a blanket across her knees and was changing Walter), "He'll be four months old next week."

Walter's eyes were open and he simpered across at the woman, opening his mouth in a wet, gummy grin. (He always enjoyed being changed) "Look at him smile, George," said the lady.

Her husband smiled back and twiddled fat fingers.

"Goo," he said.

Walter laughed in a high-pitched, hiccupy way.

"What's his name, dear?" asked the woman.

"He's Walter Michael," Laura said, then added, "After his father."

The floodgates were quite down. Laura learned that the couple were George and Eleanor Ellis, that they were on vacation, that they had three children, two girls and one boy, all grown-up. Both girls had married and one had two children of her own.

Laura listened with a pleased expression on her thin face. Walter (senior, that is) had always said that it was because she was such a good listener that he had first grown interested in her.

Walter was getting restless. Laura freed his arms in order to let some of his feelings evaporate in muscular effort.

"Would you warm the bottle, please?" she asked the stewardess.

Under strict but friendly questioning, Laura explained the number of feedings Walter was currently enjoying, the exact nature of his formula, and whether he suffered from diaper rash.

"I hope his little stomach isn't upset today," she worried. "I mean the plane motion, you know."

"Oh, Lord," said Mrs. Ellis, "he's too young to be bothered by that. Besides, these large planes are wonderful. Unless I look out the window, I wouldn't believe we were in the air.

"Don't you feel that way, George?"

But Mr. Ellis, a blunt, straightforward man, said, "I'm surprised you take a baby that age on a plane."

Mrs. Ellis turned to frown at him.

Laura held Walter over her shoulder and patted his back gently. The beginnings of a soft wail died down as his little fingers found themselves in his mother's smooth, blond hair and began grubbing into the loose bun that lay at the back of her neck.

She said, "I'm taking him to his father. Walter's never seen his son, yet."

Mr. Ellis looked perplexed and began a comment, but Mrs. Ellis put in quickly, "Your husband is in the service, I suppose?"

"Yes, he is."

(Mr. Ellis opened Ms mouth in a soundless "Oh" and subsided.) Laura went on, "He's stationed just outside of Davao and he's going to be meeting me at Nichols Field."

Before the stewardess returned with the bottle, they had discovered that her husband was a master sergeant with the Quartermaster Corps, that he had been in the Army for four years, that they had been married for two, that he was about to be discharged, and that they would spend a long honeymoon there before returning to San Francisco.

Then she had the bottle. She cradled Walter in the crook of her left arm and put the bottle to his face. It slid right past his lips and his gums seized upon the nipple. Little bubbles began to work upward through the milk, while his hands batted ineffectively at the warm gla.s.s and his blue eyes stared fixedly at her.

Laura squeezed little Walter ever so slightly and thought how, with all the petty difficulties and annoyances that were involved, it yet remained such a wonderful thing to have a little baby all one's own.

FOUR.

Theory, thought Gan, always theory. The folk of the surface, a million or more years ago, could see the Universe, could sense it directly. Now, with eight hundred miles of rock above their heads, the Race could only make deductions from the trembling needles of their instruments.

It was only theory that brain cells, in addition to their ordinary electric potentials, radiated another sort of energy altogether. Energy that was not electromagnetic and hence not condemned to the creeping pace of light. Energy that was a.s.sociated only with the highest functions of the brain and hence characteristic only of intelligent, reasoning creatures.

It was only a jogging needle that detected such an energy field leaking into their cavern, and other needles that pin-pointed the origin of the field in such and such a direction ten light-years distant. At least one star must have moved quite close in the time since the surface folk had placed the nearest at five hundred light-years. Or was theory wrong?

"Are you afraid? Gan burst into the conversational level of thought without warning and impinged sharply on the humming surface of Roi's mind.

Roi said, "It's a great responsibility."

Gan thought, "Others speak of responsibility." For generations, Head-Tech after Head-Tech had been working on the Resonizer and the Receiving Station and it was in his time that the final step had to be taken. What did others know of responsibility.

He said, "It is. We talk about Racial extinction glibly enough, but we always a.s.sume it will come someday but not now, not in our time. But it will, do you understand? It will. What we are to do today will consume two thirds of our total energy supply. There will not be enough left to try again. There will not be enough for this generation to live out its life. But that will not matter if you follow orders. We have thought of everything. We have spent generations thinking of everything."

"I will do what I am told," said Roi.

"Your thought field will be meshed against those coming from s.p.a.ce. All thought fields are characteristic of the individual, and ordinarily the probability of any duplication is very low. But the fields from s.p.a.ce number billions by our best estimate. Your field is very likely to be like one of theirs, and in that case, a resonance will be set up as long as our Resonizer is in operation. Do you know the principles involved?"

"Yes, sir."