Dorsey cut off the machine. "I've got four hours of the same thing on this thread," he said. "Want to hear it all, or have you got it already?"
"It's obvious, up to a point," I asked. "It's a table of the first eight natural integers and their squares, except for the number seven, which for some reason is split in two."
"It took me quite a while to recognize what happened to that seven," Dorsey said. "Listen to it again." He spooled the thread back and I listened again to the fractured seven: "DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT." Then again the forty-nine clicks, seven-squared. Dorsey switched off the player.
"Let's have the distillate of your cerebrations now, Brother Bogardus," he said, dropping into the deep, red-leather easy chair beside the thread-player.
"It's syncopation, Brother Dorsey," I said.
"I'd never have given my own modest observations so high-flown a title," Dorsey said. "I'd simply have called it, country boy at heart that I am, 'Shave-and-a-Haircut, two-bits!'"
"So it is," I said. "Now we've deciphered that broadcast, and listened to the singing commercial. But I'm still puzzled, Bud. We don't have the sponsor's name and address; and I'm not at all sure I caught the name of his product. What's he advertising?"
"His presence," Dorsey said. "I interpret the message as a simple CQ."
"Seek you?" I asked.
"Yes. Radio-ham code for, I'm lonely—will somebody please talk to me?'"
"I'll accept that interpretation only till I can think of one even more fantastic," I said.
"O.K., John," Dorsey said. "Getting the address of the station was a simple exercise, thanks to my Digger confreres in Adelaide and the men at Harvard's South African radio observatory. We first heard the message two years ago. It's still being broadcast, unchanged. The fist on the key that sent out our arithmetic message belongs to someone in the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri."
"Hot damn!" I said. "But why didn't I know about this? I readTime, and all. Why wasn't this headlined?"
"Because it's guesswork," Dorsey explained. "This may be the result of some cosmic coincidence as unrelated to intelligent planning as Bode's Law."
"You'll have to explain that to this groundsman," I said.
"Bode's law, too, looks like an intelligently devised code of some sort," Dorsey said. "Take the series: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192. Add 4 to each number, and divide by ten. The result will be, when you take the asteroid belt into consideration and fudge a little, very nearly the proportional distance from the sun of the first seven planets. Accident, or evidence of intelligent planning? Turned out there are excellent physical reasons for this relationship, reasons old Johann Elert Bode couldn't possibly have guessed. Things like this make astronomers leary of teleology. Make them avoid the splendid guess."
"Go ahead, make a splendid guess," I said. "I won't report you to the Astronomers Union."
"Sure," Dorsey said. "Alpha Centauri, as the U. Cal's five-meter Luna 'scope demonstrated several years ago, has a system of at least three planets. We don't know much about those planets except their time of revolution."
"And that one of them has a citizen clever enough to calculate natural squares and build a radio transmitter...."
"... one hell of a transmitter!" Dorsey said.
"... and whistle, 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,'" I went on; "which musical interlude argues for a certain degree of conviviality on the part of our Centaurian. This thing of his message, though. Do you think he was just looking for other hams to talk with?"
"Then he's awfully patient, sending out the same 'CQ' for two solid years," Dorsey said. "It's hardly practical to communicate between stars, John. Broadcasting from here to Alpha C. and back, it would take more than nine years just to ask how's the wife and kids.
"The way it looks to me, our friend out there got the duty of cutting an educational recording to be broadcast automatically to the rest of the galaxy. Kind of a lighthouse, to help his race get in touch with any relatives it might have. That same recording has been played over and over again ever since, sending To Whom It Might Concern its dual message. Simple math—and the most persistent rhythmical cliche known to man."
"What's being done about it?" I asked.
"We've answered," Dorsey said. "A big radio noise on the moon is broadcasting the same message, minus the syncopation, and adding the next two terms; all this beamed toward Alpha Centauri. And two years ago, the Defense Department cut other programs to the bone to start construction ofOrion Zeta, the sixth of the big nuclear-pulse ships. She's up in von Weizsäcker Crater on the back of the moon now, John, nearly finished. She's not meant to call at solar-system ports."
"The government thinks, and you think, that our operator four and a half light-years from here was human," I said.
"I can't speak for the government. But that's what I think. Isn't it human to toss notes out to sea in bottles? What's more human than dropping a joke into an arithmetical table?"
"All we've got to do to prove your splendid guess is to highjack a germ-free spaceship," I said. "You and me and any of the other Lapins who feel as we do. We'll go shake the hand—or other prehensile member, if he's not human after all—of our Centaurian thread-jockey. What's to keep our feet in the mud, when our heads are 'way the hell out in a southern constellation?"
"I gather, Herr Doktor, that you jest," Dorsey said. "If you were serious, I'd point out one minor flaw in your blueprint for adventure. It would take our little band of pirates one hundred twenty-five years to get to Alpha Centauri, after we'd stolen the ship. That's with the gas-pedal to the floor."
"I was joking," I said. "I was pretending to be the hero of one of those TV space-operas we used to watch.... But if I were serious, I don't think a mere century and a quarter would faze me. We couldn't reach our goal in person, Bud; but we could send our children's children. All we'd need to make the trip, if I were serious about my suggestion, would be a few more volunteers. A proper proportion of those volunteers had best be philoprogenitive females."
"Do you think the BICUSPID brass will be happy to see its expensive guinea-pigs taking off into space?" Dorsey asked. "Since '29, John, there's been eighty million bucks poured into gnotobiotics here at Central University. We're the payoff. We can hardly expect Dr. McQueen to stand on the launching-pad, tossing roses and shouting Bon Voyage as we blast off forever."
"I think they could be persuaded to be, if not enthusiastic, at least resigned to our departure," I said.
"It does prisoners good to plot escape-plans, even when they're as obviously fantastic as this one," Dorsey said. "Go on, John."
"As you say, our purpose in this adventure would be to escape," I said. "There's no place on earth that can take us, so we're forced to escape into space. We'll have to talk this up around the Big Tank to see how many want to break out with us. What the sex-distribution of the volunteers is, whether we've got the right range of specialists to man a spaceship. Right, Bud?"
"It's your dream," Dorsey said.
"O.K. Immermann Man appears to have been germ-free," I said. "Perhaps his culture had been gnotobiotic for so long that they'd forgotten the existence of micro-organisms. Landing on other planets, they'd not rediscover the danger of infectious disease till it was too late. Suddenly they'd start falling, dying of illnesses as mysterious to them as the plague was to men of the Renaissance. This may have been the manner in which the original owner of the Immermann skull died, on Mars. We have a reasonable suspicion that there was germ-free human life in our corner of the galaxy twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps, as you suggested, these visitors were members of an exploration party. From Alpha Centauri? Is our ham who hammered out the table-of-squares a member of that gnotobiotic race? Is he our brother in purity?"
"Go on, Johnny," Dorsey said. "You ain't even winded, yet."
"TheOrion Zetais being built for deep space," I went on. "Some group from earth is certain to set out in her on the four-generation hop to Alpha Centauri. Would it be morally right to allow this group of ambassadors to be made up of 'normal,' contaminated humans? To carry to a possibly defenceless population a mixed bag of goodies likeMicrococcus ureae,Bacillus vulgaris,Staphylococcus aureus,Mycobacterium tuberculosis—a whole spectrum of benign and malignant bacteria? Remember, Bud, bugs that are benign or only mildly pernicious on earth might prove to be killers away from home."
"Lots of maybes," Dorsey said. "Lots of perhapses."
"I've got one more shaft in the quiver," I said. "This one's got a poisoned point, and it carries the names of our keepers. It's dirty, Bud. It's hardly fair to Dr. McQueen to use such blackmail."
"Blackmail sounds like just what we need," Dorsey said.
"O.K. Thirty of us were born into the Big Tank," I said. "One has already died as a result of his mental state, caused by imprisonment. Another is certain to die within the next few days. Had they been entirely sane, Mike Bohrman and Mary deWitte wouldn't have shed their sterility-suits outside the Tank. Without purpose to their lives, they cracked up.
"Two of us dead in the first twenty-six years of the human studies at BICUSPID," I went on. "Two, out of an original thirty. An attrition-rate of six and seven-tenths percent. How many more Lapins will wander out to commit innocent suicide in the snow, their minds messed up by the frustration and hopelessness of the guinea-pig way of life? How many more of us will escape from the Big Tank into the morgue? TheOrion Zetacould be our salvation, Bud. It could give us the sort of purpose human beings must have in order to live."
Dorsey shook his head. "The Defense Department set up its young Clydeside in von Weizsäcker Crater just to build, test, and launch one ship: theZeta. Two years of round-the-chronometer work have been poured into her," he said. "She's cost four billion dollars so far, Johnny; and they haven't bought the living-room furniture yet. I hardly think the generals will volunteer the result of all this effort to serve as psychotherapy for twenty-eight neurotic Hoosiers."
"You miss the point, Bud," I said. "We Lapins were born to crew theZeta. Where else could you find a crew that's already spent twenty-odd years or so inside a box, living together in close quarters, being conditioned against claustrophobia? This Big Tank of ours could be a grounded spaceship, Bud! It's airtight, armored against outside dangers, even has the formaldehyde sump to serve us for airlock. What's a sterility-suit, anyway, but a special breed of space suit? Could you find a better crew than us twenty-eight, skilled in two dozen professions, young, sound of wind and limb, and willing as hell to take on the job? None of whom will ever have appendicitis, halitosis, toothache, barber's itch, or athlete's foot? Any one of whom can, in case of accident, first-aid his wounds with a spit-damp handkerchief, and heal wholesome? Man, we're what those generals have been dreaming of! Once we've been trained to aim that big ship and kick her off the back of the moon, we'll be the finest extra-solar crew that ever blasted free of the system!"
"One question," Dorsey said. "Where do I sign Ship's Articles?"
Dr. McQueen was in Chicago for three days before he found Mary Lofting, née deWitte. She had wakened that morning suffering from a headache, a stiff neck, and four degrees of fever. Her husband had called an ambulance to take her to Michael Reese Hospital. There, just before she'd lost consciousness, Mary had asked a nurse to call BICUSPID. The C.U. authorities had in turn called Dr. McQueen in Chicago.
She came home on a stretcher, a bottle of fructose solution dripping into her veins. Mary had already been loaded with a double-barreled shotgun-blast of every antibiotic she could safely take. Dr. McQueen rode back to the University in the ambulance with her, and with her husband. Lofting, holding the girl's hand, explained time after time that she'd never told him about the likely consequence of her removing her chastity-suit in an un-chaste world. The basketball player said he'd never forgive himself if she didn't recover.
Mary was taken to the C.U. hospital. Wearing a sterility-suit, I attended her examination, which was conducted by my chief-of-service, the staff pathologist, as well as the hospital's internist and neurologist. I took a few cc's of Mary's cerebrospinal fluid back with me to the BICUSPID contaminated labs. There, to anticipate a few days' deliberate bacterial growth in media, her meningoencephalitis was discovered to have been caused byErysipelothrix monocytogenes, an organism whose more usual victims are rabbits. Mary's husband could explain her coming in contact with so exotic a pathogen only by the fact that they'd visited the Brookfield Zoo on the second, and last, day of their honeymoon.
By the time these technical details were known they were academic. The epidemiological problem had become secondary to the pathological. Mary Lofting had died.
I was asked to assist Dr. McQueen and the senior pathologist at autopsy—I was, after all, a resident in pathology, and had besides a special interest in this case—but I found the job more than I could take. Mary had been a sister to me for twenty-three years. In tears, I left the morgue during the classic cruciform incision.
I found the Firebird in the library. I recognized her through the anonymity of her chastity-suit by the characteristic pose of her head and arms as she sat reading: elbow braced on the table-top, her right fist blocked stubbornly against the plastic cheek of her helmet, her left arm curved around the book as though to be a break-water against distraction. I sat beside her, and said, "Dorothy."
Without a word she closed her book, stood, and replaced it on the shelf. We walked hand in hand out into the autumn campus.
"Last year," I said, "it was Mike Bohrman, walking through snow-drifts in his suit-shorts, wanting for once in his life to feel the real world against his skin. Sohedied. Five days ago, Mary deWitte married the man she loved. So she died," I said.
"Our life isn't generally as hopeless as that," the Firebird said.
"No," I said. "We're fed and entertained. We're being educated at one of the finest universities in the world—for us, she's been a genuine, homogenized-milk Alma Momma. She even gives us an allowance to buy airmail stamps for our collection, or bar-bells, or gas for our sports-car. She's given us everything we need for happiness. Everything, Firebird, but purpose. That's why we're all going nuts—why Mike went barefoot in the snow and Mary used love for a suicide-weapon. That's why we've got to break free."
"Free?" she asked. "You mean, free to step outside the Big Tank, shed our sterility-suits, turn septic—and die?"
"I mean free to step off earth."
We sat by mutual consent on a bench beneath a sugar maple, brushing aside half an inch of multicolored leaves. I told the Firebird of the broadcast from a southern star, and about the Immermann skull. I told her all I knew about the Orion rockets, the nuclear-pulse ships that had gone through five prototypes to reach theZeta. "She's built to travel light-years," I said. "I'm going with her when she leaves."
"Of course, I'm going with you," she said. "Your spacemen will need a dietitian to make metabolic sense out of algal soups and hydroponic salads for the first couple of generations, and to teach the youngsters to take over the kitchen once they're on their own."
"Firebird," I said, "I'm happy to welcome you aboard. Now we've got to get that ship."
"We'll get it," she said. "Understand, Johnny, it's not the professional challenge that makes me want to blast off for Alpha Centauri with four generations to feed. I've got no special urge to tame frontiers. The reason I'm going—forgive me for mentioning it again, and cold sober—is to stay near you."
I stood up, drawing her up after me, and was struck again by the aptness of the nickname, "chastity-suit."
"Perhaps I've overestimated the effectiveness of a certain taboo," I said. "Come on, sweet Firebird. Let's get back to the Tank to help Bud recruit the rest of our crew."
Colonel Barrett was young for eagles. My fellow volunteers-designate and I, all twenty-eight of us, were gathered in the lounge of English Hall, creaking and wheezing in our sterility-suits, looking very ready for hard space.
The colonel wore crisp blues. His tunic was decorated by a triple row of medals-for-merit. It was not his fault that he wore no battle-stars. Barrett had graduated from the Air Academy into our seemingly endlessPax Desperandum. He'd never had a chance to see a roentgen radiated in anger. The Marsman Badge at the center of his left breast pocket was one rarely seen: the circle-with-arrow symbol of Mars had within it a "III," signifying that its wearer had been a member of the Third Mars Expedition, back in the days when a flight to Mars had been something more than a teamster's run. The Marsman Badge was balanced by the star-topped, laurel-wreathed—and anachronistic—silver wings of a Command Pilot.
As I shook hands with Colonel Barrett I found it difficult to conceal the envy that writhed in me. He'd seen the continents spread cloud-flecked on the receding, curving earth, the stars shining beside the sun against the black sky. He'd splashed across the dust-carpet of the moon, tasted water melted from the polar cap of Mars. As a member of Expedition Three, he'd been with the crew of theOrion Gammawhen Immermann discovered the twenty-thousand-year-old skull at the base of Roosevelt Ridge.
Colonel Barrett addressed his remarks to me. "Central University," he said, "will lose the results of an eighty-million-dollar investment if you people leave. They'll be getting off cheap, compared to us. The Defense Department has been requested to turn over to you twenty-eight untrained grounds-men the greatest spaceship yet built, the first of the interstellar ships. TheZetacost the taxpayers four dollars a pound to build. She weighs five hundred thousand tons, Dr. Bogardus."
"You're mistaken, Colonel, when you say that the University's investments in gnotobiotic research over the past eighty years will be lost if we Lapins end our part of the experiment. That's not true. That investment has been repaid many times over. More has been learned of human physiology, nutrition, and disease processes in the twenty-six years' study of germ-free humans than was learned concerning these subjects during any similar period in medical history.
"And, Colonel," I went on, "we're not untrained. Bud Dorsey, to your right, is an astrophysicist who worked with the Agassiz Observatory team in mapping the interstellar anti-matter dust clouds. Dr. Keto Hannamuri is a pediatrician. Dorothy Damien, our Firebird, is a dietitian. Fizz Ewell is a nuclear engineer. Karl Fyrmeister's degree is in chem engineering, as is Janie Bohrman's. Gloria Moss is working on her doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, Colonel, deals with the social dynamics of small human groups such as ours. Alfred MacCoy, standing behind you, has written three symphonies and an oratorio so far; and R.C.A. Victor has threaded them all with the New York Philharmonic. Lucy Cashdollar has had her works of sculpture displayed in the National Gallery and at London's Tate. There are some few resources here, Colonel."
"I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments, Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry, much less the techniques required to lift half a million tons on a nuclear-pulse thrust."
"We can learn," I said.
"I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach you."
"We're in?" Bud Dorsey demanded.
"You're in," Colonel Barrett said. "The decision in the Pentagon went against my recommendation that professionals in rocketry be recruited for the Alpha Centauri flight. The generals liked your argument, Dr. Bogardus, that we should send a germ-free ship and a germ-free crew to a possibly germ-free planet. In a sense, this is tradition. Back in the '50s, moon-missiles were sponged down with Lysol before launching, just in case they got where they were aimed at. Our people didn't want to contaminate the moon's surface with earthly micro-organisms, cluttering up the picture for the bacteriologists who were scheduled to arrive later. The Chief of Staff said that if there is a germ-free population on one of the Centaurus planets, we must not initiate our contact with them by handing out the sort of prizes Cook's crew brought to the South Seas—measles, tuberculosis, smallpox. We can't know that even innocuous bacteria might not be fatal to a gnotobiotic, alien population. So you go."
"Colonel," I said, "I'm sure that Washington didn't give up theZetato us out of sheer altruism. What's their real reason?"
"Where else could we get a crew of twenty-eight men and women who've given proof they can live together for a long period of time, peaceably, retaining a fair degree of sanity? Miss Moss's studies in group dynamics were most interesting to the Chief of Staff. Doubtless they did much to influence his decision in your favor."
"There's one thing I don't understand, Colonel Barrett."
"What's that, Miss Damien?" he asked.
"Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as theZeta'screw?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?"
"You're right, Miss Damien," Colonel Barrett said. "My new assignment is a vital one. You must forgive me if I seemed curt and unfriendly." He paused. "I've been trying to hide my feelings, but evidently I failed. You see, Miss Damien, my wife and I had headed the previous list of volunteers—the contaminated crew."
Looking from the ports of the rocket that had brought us from Memorial Orbital Station, I'd thought von Weizsäcker Crater the most impressive sight I'd ever seen. TheOrion Zetalooked from our height like nothing so much as a miniature silver cocktail-shaker, glinting at the center of the vast circle of von Weizsäcker.
Later, standing a few hundred feet fromZeta'sbase, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousand-foot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive than a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship.
We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrust-chamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From theZeta, our aged great-grandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri.
One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives!
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories.
As far away as those things lay our goal.
We entered the sublunarian chambers beneath the ship. Dr. McQueen had preceded us here; and under his direction theOrion Zetahad been made as aseptic as the Big Tank itself. Colonel Barrett and his subordinates who'd train us to operate theZetawould have to wear sterility-suits aboard her, and would enter through the formaldehyde sump that was now her only entrance. Even the dust of the moon was not entirely sterile.
The Firebird took my arm to urge me toward the liquid gateway to the ship, eager to see our new home. "Wait," I said, holding her back till all the others had gone through the antiseptic pool.
"Cold feet, Johnny?" she teased me.
"Gloria Moss once told me, Firebird, that a healthy respect for tradition is essential to the organic strength of a group such as ours," I said. "So...." I bent and picked the Firebird up, her weight moon-trimmed to that of a three-year-old. She put her arms around my neck as I carried her down the ladder into the poisonous decontamination tank that was our front door to Alpha Centauri.