Mitchell Prell had not yet come aboard. Abel Freeman had already left for Titan—without his willful daughter. Schaeffer, the scientist, had gone with him.
Under Harwell's commands, the colossal craft kept taking on migrants at top speed for thirty hours. They boarded in numbers out of all proportion to the available living space. Meanwhile there were needles to submit to. Vitaplasm could be more rugged and adaptable now than when it was first used. The fluids from hollow needles were the means of imparting the improvements.
At last the ship quivered slightly. In contact with the heat of fusion of hydrogen and lithium to form the gaseous stellar ash called helium, any material rocket chamber would have been scattered instantly as incandescent vapor. But space warps stood firm in their place, squeezing with an atom-crushing pressure of their own, natural only at the centers of stars. And now there was no secondary arrangement for the conversion of such power as was released into electricity. Even the helium became pure radiation that emerged in a stream. It was a continuous, directed explosion of light, far stronger within its narrow limits than the outburst of a supernova. It had been known for centuries that light had both mass and pressure, and here it was concentrated matter—the ultimate in propulsive thrust—changed completely to energy. On the sullen Earth, neither man nor android dared watch that thin thread of fury, while slowly the ship began to accelerate toward a five-figure number of miles per second.
It was the start of the departure of fear from an ancient race. Or so it was meant to be. From Earth, curses no doubt followed the ship—and sighs of relief, and regrets, and good wishes. This setting forth should have been a human triumph. Many would insist that it was not that. Others knew that it was.
Braced in a cubicle two meters long, one wide and half a meter high, Ed Dukas held his wife's hand. Tiered rows of other cubicles were around them. Mitchell Prell had been with them minutes ago, and he had simply said, "Good night," half jokingly. Or was it more whistling in the dark?
"Just good night. That's how it'll be, sweet," Ed whispered now. "The years won't mean anything. In the old mythology, the demigods could sleep for a millennium."
So the small spark of dread flickered out in them, as they invoked a power which they had used before, in smaller android bodies, and for a much shorter interval. No drug was needed. Their sleep became suspended animation.
Fine dust began to settle on them. But after forty years, measured by the ship's chronometers—on the basis of a retarded time imparted to objects moving at high velocity, a somewhat longer interval must have passed on Earth—Ed was awakened to help patrol the vessel.
With a few other silent men, he moved through its ghostly, dimly lighted corridors and compartments inhabited by the living dead. The stillness was all around, and outside only the stars burned in the void. The decades had been like the passing of a night of sleep; yet now awake, Ed was aware that the time had gone, building up an unimaginable distance. Here was the abyss. It was a cold awareness which made him neither confident nor happy. Sometimes he looked down at Barbara's quiet face, but he did not wish her to awaken now.
Ahead was Sirius, brighter than before. Beside it, visible at least to the unaided eye, was the dim speck of its companion star, a white dwarf, shrunken and old, little larger than the Earth, but incredibly massive, the very atoms at its core compressed by its fearsome gravity and the weight of material above them. This dwarf's internal substance, largely pure nuclear matter, would have weighed tons per cubic inch.
Instruments, brought nearer to a destination, now showed more clearly, by the irregularities in the movements of this binary system, the existence of planets pursuing changing paths in the complicated cross drags of two stellar bodies revolving around a common center. Those worlds, known of on Earth for a quarter century, were still out of telescopic view. Their seasons must be crazy—hot, cold, uncertain. Yet other, nearer star systems had the same, and worse, drawbacks. And Sirius was relatively near, too. Besides, need an android worry about the fluctuations of mad climates so much?
After a month, Ed Dukas relinquished his duties to others who were aroused briefly. He slept again, for more decades, and on through the first contact with a Sirian world. His mind still slightly blurred, he came down in a tender from the orbiting star ship, after others had landed. Barbara was with him. Somewhere far ahead, among hills rapidly shedding their glacial coat under hot sunshine, was Mitchell Prell.
The sunshine came from Sirius itself, farther away than the distance from Earth to Uranus; hence its size and brilliance were counteracted. Yet this world did not attend Sirius directly. It belonged to the white-hot speck at zenith—the dwarf with an almost equal attraction—tiny, but much closer. The planet hurried like a moon around this miniature sun.
Ed looked up at thin fish-scale clouds that were rose-tinted. Before him was a prairie covered with waving stalks bearing white plumes. Might you call them flowers blown by the wind?
High up among the melting ice he saw a tower and maybe a roadway. Later he beheld two shapes, brown and rough, with four tapered, flexible limbs radiating from a central lump. Man, with his arms and legs, also has vaguely the form of a cross. But these were different, though sometimes they almost walked, and metal devices glinted in the equipment they wore. Had he dreamed all this somewhere years ago?... Sometimes they rolled quickly like wheels, or they crept along, their limbs coiling. Once they flew, with bright flashes and without wings. But that was artificial. They moved off at last beside a shallow, salt-rimmed sea.
"We can't stay here, Eddie," Barbara stated. "It could be fascinating, but it would be worse than on Earth."
"As everyone will realize," Ed Dukas answered.
So the explorers came back to the tender. Nearer to the dwarf sun they found a world with a more stable orbit and less extremes of cold and heat. If it was nearer the dwarf with its almost negligible radiance, it also did not approach as close to Sirius, nor swing so far away. It was a chilly little planet that had once been inhabited, too; but now there were only shattered stone and glass and rusted steel. Much of it was desert. But there were forests here and there, and high glaciers.
High on a clifftop in the thin, cold atmosphere, the refugees built their first city. It began with houses of rough logs and stone. But as time passed and the population increased, its metal-sheathed towers began to soar. In its glassed-in gardens, terrestrial flowers and trees thrived, while out of doors beautiful plants of a neo-biology easily surpassed in vigor the hardy local growths. There were theaters, stores and libraries. There was feminine fashion. Thus, nostalgically, an old earthly way was copied, though Earth was lost. There was no method to speak across the light-years. Earth might even belong to a somewhat different branch of time. But all this did not include the major point of separation. That was expressed in the way these people climbed the highest mountains without tiring and let the hoarfrost of fearsome cold gather on their bare faces without discomfort.
Sometimes, on blizzard nights, while they took the sleep that they did not need for more than the pleasure of it, Barbara and Ed would leave the windows open to the storm.
"Roofs, buildings—why do we even bother with them?" Ed would say jokingly.
His wife would look at him somewhat worriedly, as if he meant it. As if here there were a bitter strangeness that lowered all earthly art and charm and comfort and sense of home to a futility. But then she'd manage to laugh lightly, though often she didn't quite feel that way. "You know why we bother, Ed," she'd answer. "Because we want to stay somewhat as we once were. Didn't you always agree to that? Because it's hard to change old habits and limitations, and grasp the freedom you're thinking about, Eddie. Sometimes I even suspect that we try to hide from that freedom."
Ed would scowl, feeling all of these thoughts, too. They had all the freedom that men had envisioned long ago: practical freedom from death, except from extreme violence; freedom from aging, freedom of mind, of action, of shape and size; the freedom of peace and plenty, and boundless energy. But beyond all this, like a goad, there often was, already, much more than a ghost of that ancient human restlessness that always had thrived on strength.
"Are you happy here, Babs?" Ed asked once when there had been time to doubt.
By then they already had two young sons, born of new flesh in an old way.
"Of course—reasonably," she chuckled. "Though I have my moods. Then I don't quite know.... But, Eddie, this is the great, marvelous future, isn't it—the one we looked forward to with longing and wonder? We ought to appreciate it completely."
"It is that future. But now, sweetheart, it's also just the present."
There were incidents to match such restless talk and thinking. There was Mitchell Prell, always groping for new things, shouting down from a cragtop, or from his laboratory, "Hey, Ed! Barbara! Come here!"
Maybe he'd discovered a vein of ore that might be mined, or a strange specimen of hitherto unnoticed local fauna or flora. He remained a scientist, while Ed had become a mere builder of buildings.
More than likely, the woman Prell had married would be with him—she had been Nancy Freeman of a fantastic origin. That he had separated himself enough from his studies to take a wife was a minor miracle. That these so-different two should be together was certainly another. That she had learned to be both tasteful and poised, though no less vigorous than ever, had perhaps been hoped for by the first romancing thought that had given her real being on Earth.
To live in peace, comfort and beauty, Ed now realized, was not a final goal. The wild nomad, like Prell, shouting down from mountaintops, always seeking the unknown and straining to be bigger than his powers—however great they might have become—still had to be served. Otherwise pride was insulted, the urge to learn and progress was defeated; boredom set in, and centuries of life were not worth living.
Besides, belatedly, after years, there were voices, speaking out of wireless equipment in a way that Ed and Barbara Dukas and Mitchell Prell had reason to remember. That this world was now haunted by beings that floated with the dust in the air was a fact which in itself had an eerie, nomadic charm. Three tiny beings. No, now there were four.
"Hello! Did you guess that we came with you on the star ship?... But we stayed on that first planet. Then we visited others. Once we slept under a glacier—we don't know how long. Now we have built another biological workshop. So we will not be lonely. There will be many of us. I see you have done well. What comes next?"
Ed had the odd and startling impression of having been spoken to by himself. But he and a tiny speck of the clay of the half-gods were entirely distinct, even if their names were the same. The vast difference in size, enforcing separate thought patterns to meet the problems of different environment, had widened the gap further.
"It's us!" Barbara said.
Mitchell Prell and Nancy were also present just then, in the Dukas house. Perhaps the visitors had waited for them to be there.
"I know who you mean," Nancy remarked. "Your little folk, Mitch. Tell them something. Or do they embarrass you by being so strange? Have you forgotten?"
Prell laughed somewhat unsteadily. Other interests had long ago taken his attention away from the small regions that were within the reach of android powers.
"They're special friends," he said. "We won't have any trouble talking to them. Hello yourselves!"
So it was, for an hour. There was a mood of elfin charm, of expanded dimensions, of soft, rich colors; of physical laws wonderfully different in effect. The memory was haunting. But the larger Ed and Barbara had no present wish to return to that fantastic land. It was not their destiny.
"So long for now...." The voices faded away playfully. But as Sirian time built Terran years, they were occasionally heard again, bearing a note of challenge.
The new city had grown huge. The surrounding country was becoming populous. And the inevitable happened, like part of a plan implanted in the nature of man from the beginning—to grow, to reach out, to be bigger in all things than he was before, though perhaps even to imagine the final goal itself was still beyond his intelligence and his experience. Now a more rugged body only made the drives stronger and the outcome more sure.
Still orbiting around this first colonial world, outside the old solar system and linked to the history of Earth, was the star ship, kept always in careful order. But on a small, jagged moon, a larger, better craft was under construction. It would have thrilled ancient blood; it could stir an android more.
Something sultry began to ache in Ed Dukas's mind at the thought of restraint.
"Some of us will have to go on, Babs," he said one dwarf-lit half-night. "Blame it on fundamental biological law—in me, and the boys, too. Call it building an empire too big for any government. Maybe it's an intended step—toward some other condition still out of sight. No doubt we're far from the end of what we can become. I don't know. I don't really care. I'm just a man and glad of it. I only know how I feel, and I suspect that, deep down, you feel the same!"
For a moment Barbara was angry and sad. She still had a woman's wish for permanence. She knew that Ed was thinking of other stars and their systems—red giants, flickering variables, bursting novae—a whole universe of mystery beckoning to a new kind of human. Even the ugly coal-sack clouds of cosmic dust could have their appeal. She herself was not beyond being intrigued by such things.
She walked across her pleasant room, which had begun to bore her a little, as Ed knew. "I'm game," she said mildly.
Inconceivably far off were other galaxies. Maybe Ed read her mind a little, as she thought of the vast, tilted swirl of the one in Andromeda, almost as big as their native Milky Way. It was the nearest, but so distant that all the light-years they had crossed could seem a mile by comparison. As a child she used to look at a picture of it and think that everything she could imagine, and much more, was there: books, musical instruments, summer nights, dark horror.
Ed and she were like the pagan divinities dreamed up wistfully long ago. Yet now she felt very humble.
"Ed—"
"Yes?"
"I was just wondering where God lives," she said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray Gallun's stories have appeared in virtually every science-fiction magazine known to English-speaking man—Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales, Startling Stories,etc.,etc.,plusCollier's, Family Circle, Utopia (Germany),and various anthologies.
He was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in 1910, attended the University of Wisconsin, and has since spent most of his time, when not writing, traveling through the U. S., Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently a resident of New York City.
"AMONG THE BETTER SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS."—Wilmington News
"Scientific experiments on the moon and an accidental lunar explosion that seared the earth triggers another tale from the imaginative pen of Raymond Z. Gallun, a familiar name to science-fiction readers.
"The secret of life and the restoring to the living of victims of the holocaust initiate a conflict for Ed Dukas, Gallun's scientific pioneer of the future. Restoring persons through scientific methods, personality records and the memories of near kin, leaves one fatal flaw. They lack one indefinable quality—a divine spark, perhaps a soul.
"Gallun depicts a struggle between the restored people and the natural living. Life on the asteroids, thought machines, a journey to Mars and a star ship expedition to Sirius are woven into the plot.
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