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The next day, Scharber's protoplastic form was found inert in his small bachelor's apartment. When we were notified, Doc and I had a look at the place. On Scharber's study table were many brief messages, written on paper with a heat-charred line. The words were English, and spelled correctly; but the script was strange. I knew the instrument of the writing. I had written with it myself.
But Scharber had left a note of his own, written to us in ink:
Dear Dr. Lanvin, Mrs. Lanvin, Charlie, Jan. Everybody—So I win.... The Little Guy must have guessed. Anyway, he brought his ship here. Then he wrote his questions—though he could hear me answer. Do I want to come along? Yeah—look at the other papers—see for yourselves. You must have made a good impression out there—you who were there. So he likes Earthlings. For pets, maybe? Who knows? Well—I didn't say no.... Wish me luck, and the same to you. Do me a favor? Whoever goes first out to Sirius, take this big carcass of mine along—being android, it ought to keep for a long time. Maybe I'll need it after a while. Right now I'm getting a smaller edition. So long for maybe a hundred years, more or less.Scharber.
Dear Dr. Lanvin, Mrs. Lanvin, Charlie, Jan. Everybody—So I win.... The Little Guy must have guessed. Anyway, he brought his ship here. Then he wrote his questions—though he could hear me answer. Do I want to come along? Yeah—look at the other papers—see for yourselves. You must have made a good impression out there—you who were there. So he likes Earthlings. For pets, maybe? Who knows? Well—I didn't say no.... Wish me luck, and the same to you. Do me a favor? Whoever goes first out to Sirius, take this big carcass of mine along—being android, it ought to keep for a long time. Maybe I'll need it after a while. Right now I'm getting a smaller edition. So long for maybe a hundred years, more or less.
Scharber.
Smiling like an elf, Doc looked at me. "How do you feel?" he asked.
"Same as you, I suppose," I answered. "Haunted...."
During the year that followed, that first starship was completed, and ten others of the huge mile-long craft were begun. Jan and I saw them all in their cradles when we went out to the Moon to visit my mother and dad.
It was really meant to be a farewell trip. Jan and I hadn't expected to get berthed on that first starcraft, theEuclid, but it happened. Not all of the voyagers were of the new flesh.
"Farewell nothing," Dad told me slyly at the house. He looked more like a slightly older brother of mine, than somebody paternal.
"We're going along, Charlie," Mom intimated. "We've always been ready for new adventure, haven't we?"
In due course theEuclidcame to the New Mexico Spaceport to pick, up its passengers, Jan and I and the folks had been on Earth for over a month by then. We and Doc and Irma arrived at the port on the same rocket plane, and as I looked up at the brooding hull of that colossus I felt a little as if a kid dream of mine had come true—that I was matching my lusty strength against the whole universe, and winning. To fight and to win against something, has been a need in human blood and bone for uncounted eons. But should I feel a bit puny and sheepish, too? Comparing myself to Doc, for instance?
This was his special day. Back there behind us, as we approached the starship—back there beyond the guardropes—were the crowds of curious, thrilled, scared, envious humanity. Some cheered for what theEuclidmeant to progress—or perhaps they cheered more for a greater triumph—the thirty-thousand demigods who would be among its passengers. But was some of the cheering given in relief at being rid of them?
Bowhart was there, to shake hands with Doc and me and Irma and Jan, and to meet my folks.
"Good luck to you all," he said. "No Great Change, yet, for you, Charlie? So I hear. Funny, hunh? Dr. Lanvin—I want to give you special best wishes. You look happy, so I guess if you're satisfied, nothing I can say will be an offense. But I still wouldn't want to be you for a million dollars."
Bowhart must have known that much, saying what he did; because Doc wasn't at all offended—just airily nettled, like an ageless leprechaun pitied by an urchin.
"Oh?" he asked lightly. "In the past many a millionaire would have given more than a million for another week of life and vigor, and it was no sale. The value is a lot bigger; but it doesn't cost that, now—it doesn't cost anything except a little more growing up. What do you want to do, Bow? Drink beer, eat ice cream, make love? I can do all that, too. Someday you'll get it through your fuddled head that I'm still human. I think you're catching on already. Yes, the androids are leaving Earth; but you know that the process that makes them is still here. Every day there are more labs. Because people get hurt terribly, or wear out beyond reasonable repair. And what would you expect them to want to do then, just die?"
Doc wasn't just talking to slow minded Bowhart, but to all humanity that was like him. It was his final message. But there was another touch to it that wasn't in words. It was a cocky gentle air that maybe suggested the contrast of—say—eating a fine dinner, and then taking a long dive, unclothed, through the vacuum of space—both with equal relish.
Bowhart looked puzzled, and a bit sullen. Maybe he was beginning to catch on at last.
Well, we made that enormous jump across the light-years to the Sirian System. Seventy-nine years it took. I don't think that even an Xian ship could have done much better. There's no overdrive or time-travel in sight. Funny, isn't it—here, for once, nature resists us. But to avoid boredom there was the older idea of suspended animation—natural to the android, and capable of being induced in the older flesh by special anesthetics and chilling. My wife and our friends passed the first two years of the journey awake, to help operate the ship. The other seventy-seven years passed as a moment.
We found us a world just slightly smaller than the Earth, and young and beautiful. There was no native intelligence yet, comparable with the human. The valley in which we live is rich and lush, and it slopes down to the ocean. Like my dad and mother, Jan and I have a sturdy house of stone; cleared fields, and livestock descended from the animals and poultry brought out from Earth.
It's Mom's old rustic dream. It's even Cope's! It's an idyll.
A town is springing up fast nearby. It is one of the first colonial settlements of what may become a great Earthborn interstellar union.
Doc is in the town with Irma, building it, planning, full of goodwill for everyone. Scharber's normal-sized android body still sleeps in a special vault under the town hall. But who knows at what moment he and Kobolah may come?
Doc kids my folks and Jan; but especially he kids me:
"You're silly, Charlie, why don't you switch over to the android level? What are you waiting for? Sure, I like to live in a house, too; but sometimes I sleep out in the rain or the snow just for the hell of it! Of course there's no real good in that kind of nonsense! But changed over, a man has an average of a twenty per cent increase in intelligence, simply on the basis of better energy and alertness! You may think that you feel good, but even if no trials come to demand superior stamina, you'll feel better; you'll do three times the work, and never tire at all! Why, even on Earth, according to reports that are relayed from starship to starship coming this way in a long string, humans as they were are almost gone. So what are you—a diehard, a stick-in-the-mud? Even—you?"
"Maybe it's the seventy-seven years lost, Doc," I josh back at him. "I've got to catch up, perhaps. Of course I recognize all the advantages. I've been through the mill. Just as with you, in my head, lodged against my upper skull and doing me no harm, the medics say, is a micro-android which my ego has inhabited, and which I almost never use now. I remember what it is like to be super, Doc. I grant that it is all the truth. But there's time. Just let me think some more."
Yeah, Jan and I think of all we've seen, that we never dreamed was there. Beauty, strangeness, vastness, smallness, wonder, knowledge. We've come a long awesome way.
You feel that you know a little more about the universe, and that you're warmly and humbly a little nearer to its ultimate Mystery, and are at peace. You know that the Great Change in man is right, and was intended.
We've been stubborn, and I'm not entirely sure why. I know that we and the others of the old flesh will yield to progress sooner or later. Maybe we've been clinging sentimentally to the past of man. But deep down, I believe I know the real reason. We're slow, we're human; just give us time. It's hard to accept the responsible role of demigod.
We're just scared of so much newness.