A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (6 page)

The mellow moonlight flooded Bronwyn’s apartment like spilled buttermilk, covering every surface with a faint opalescence, as though the room had been transformed into the secret, nacreous chamber of the pensive nautilus. Within it, Bronwyn’s body was a pale nimbus, like the noctilucent clouds that hover like ghosts in the midnight sky, like the ashen, meandering stream of the galaxy, like the
ignis fatuus
that insinuates itself within the bottomless tangles of the haunted forest, a languid, lonely phantom.

The professor informed the princess at breakfast the following morning that the date for the launch was finally set.

“And when would that be?” she asked.

“Scarcely soon enough,” he replied. “All of the engine’s results predict that the final disintegration is imminent.”

“How imminent?”

“A week, two weeks, perhaps.”

“So soon?” she asked, not a little surprised. “When are you proposing to leave, then? I had supposed that ‘soon’ meant, well, I don’t know . . . but you must be talking about . . . ”

“The day after tomorrow, at 3:15:42.5 in the morning, exactly.”

She found herself unable to complete her breakfast, which now looked as cold, congealed and lifeless as, well, the surface of the moon.

At his insistence, Bronwyn followed Wittenoom to the park to inspect the just-completed life compartment.

A scaffolding had been erected around the silvery tower, which now resembled more than ever a farmer’s silo. A steam winch operating a precarious lift carried them nearly to the summit, where Bronwyn found one of the small round manholes open. With its heavy, plug-like cover swung aside it looked a good deal like an open bank vault. She crawled inside and stood upright in the garishly lit interior. She turned to see the professor’s gangly body emerging through the port, like toothpaste extruding from a tube.

“It’s a little cozy in here,” she observed, correctly if not a little overkindly.

She was standing on a steel-mesh floor in a cramped, circular chamber. It reminded Brownyn of the pictures she had seen of the interiors of the ice houses that inhabitants of the far north built. A complicated-looking central column rose from the deck to the domed roof. Radiating from this were three reclined couches, filling much of the space between the column and the doubly-curving wall. Flanking the couches were complex controls, switches, dials and levers. Just above the heads of the couches was a wide vertical panel of the same mesh that covered the floor, forming a band that circled the chamber. Beneath her feet, through the interstices, Bronwyn could see a mass of boxes, spheres, packages, cartons, cylinders and other semi-identifiable paraphernalia. The brilliant light came from a cluster of electric lamps suspended from the central column. The circular ports in the walls and nose were at the moment dark, covered by the outer carapace which would protect the life compartment from air friction during the takeoff.

“There’s not much room in here,” the princess commented.

“It’ll be different once we are on our way,” replied the professor. “As soon as the rockets cease firing, we shall all be in a state of free fall . . . ”

“
Free fall?
I don’t much like the sound of that.”

“Well, I don’t know if I can explain it clearly since it’s a little outside my field, but the gist of it is that we’ll be weightless.”

“Because we’ll be beyond the earth’s gravity.”

“No, I don’t think that’s exactly the reason. But in any case, instead of being limited to the relatively small two-dimensional space of the floor, we will be able to utilize the three-dimensional space of the cabin’s volume.”

“You mean we’ll all be floating around in here, like . . . -like fish? I don’t know . . . “ Bronwyn thought back queasily to her few, usually disastrous, sea voyages and how little she had enjoyed those experiences.

“We have no idea how it’ll affect any of us,” offered Wittenoom. “If it proves to be a problem, we can rotate the compartment, setting it spinning on its axis. This will create a kind of artificial gravity and then this grill around the wall will become our floor and ‘up’ will be in the direction of the control column.”

Bronwyn looked around the interior, trying to imagine such weird upheavals in orientation and felt her stomach walls wobble in wary anticipation.
I don’t know about this,
she wavered. She wrenched her thoughts away from the disturbingly compelling subject of
mal de cosmos
and back to the professor, who had been meanwhile explaining the operation of the spaceship.

“All of the electrical ignition wires for all thousand-odd individual rockets come up through this central column, which also houses the coelostat (which will allow us to see out in case we have to rotate the ship), and connect with the appropriate controls. All of the firing sequences for the takeoff will be handled automatically, by this timer-switch.”

“Who’s going with us?” she asked. “Everyone in the Academy wants to go. Has the list been narrowed down at all yet?”

“Only a little. Needless to say, many of them only want to go out of sheer curiosity or a sense of adventure, while their scientific specialties are entirely inappropriate: ornithologists, oceanographers, topologists, that sort of thing. Of the remainder, I think that the only fair thing to do is to draw lots, I suppose. Not that that will make everyone happy.”

“Too bad,” she said unsympathetically.

“Not everyone is happy now,” he added, “with the idea that one of the three spaces available is being taken by you.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps it might not be better if a scientist goes in my place . . . ”

“Oh no, no, nonono, not at all!” the professor protested. “The whole idea was, after all, yours in the beginning . . . ”

“It was only a facetious suggestion . . . ”

“ . . . and, of course, without your influence I doubt that the king would have gone so far with our financing, which has gone so unfortunately beyond the original budget. For that, if for no other reason, you have as much right as anyone else to go. And we mustn’t underestimate or underappreciate the support we have gotten from the public! It seems that it is of the opinion that the lovely young princess is going to be the sole passenger. If you dropped out, the Academy would be stormed!”

“You exaggerate.”

“There would be delay, without doubt, and we cannot allow even a moment’s delay. No, no, I won’t hear of your not going.”

“All right, all right, forget it,” the princess replied a little testily and the professor looked at her sharply.

“My dear young friend,” he said, “whatever has been the matter with you lately?”

“I’ve been fine.”

“I must disagree,” he said kindly, sitting down on the edge of the one of the couches. “Although psychiatry could not be further removed from my field, there’s no mystery that something is troubling you. Your emotions are simply too transparent. Is it Gyven?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She sat on the opposite couch, placed her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in the palms of her hands. “I really don’t know, Professor; I’ve felt so . . . lost lately, so confused, so useless. I’ve been walking around in a fog, not knowing what to do, what I’m doing or what I’m going to do. Nor even what questions to ask. Nothing seems to really interest me; at the same time, I’m restless and bored.”

“And you miss Gyven?”

“Of course I do. No, I take that back. I’m not even sure of that any more. Do you know, I haven’t even thought much about him these last few days? Maybe not even for the last few weeks. I don’t remember how much I was thinking of him even when he was here and I don’t know if I feel bad about it. Is that wrong?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps it wouldn’t be if you had someone else to think about.”

“But wouldn’t that be more wrong? I still love Gyven and even if I didn’t, I still care about him very much. He’s done nothing intentionally to hurt me . . . ”

“Except to ignore you?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t think that he meant that to hurt me.”

“Look here, Princess,” Wittenoom said, his long body folding onto the couch next to her like a carpenter’s rule, “may I tell you what I think?”

“Of course you can.”

“I believe that you may have outgrown Gyven. He was exactly what you needed at the time you needed him. And he helped you become much of what you are, but in doing so he also changed you, and in changing you he made himself obsolete. Gyven was like the training wheels on the bicycle of your life.”

“But it seems so unfair to him! It’s as though I’ve used him and am tossing him aside.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t think that the situation is anything at all as calculatingly cold-blooded as that. No. You haven’t cold-heartedly cast him to the wayside, you have only weaned yourself from your need for Gyven, which of course doesn’t mean that you don’t need
somebody.
Everyone does. Even a misanthrope at least needs someone if only to have someone to hate. It is a rare and fortunate individual who discovers just one, single person who fills all of their needs all of their life.”

“Have you?”

“I did once.”

“I’m sorry!” said Bronwyn, instantly contrite, “I didn’t mean to . . .”

“No, it’s all right. I may not be a very good example, I don’t know. My . . . person . . . was so overflowing of everything that I ever needed that even though she’s been gone for many, many years she still continues to satisfy and help me.” For the briefest moment, the text of the only love poem he had ever written passed blurrily before the professor’s myopic eyes . . .

O sweet agglomeration of cells

In whom a summary beauty dwells,

O rarer much are you to me

Than globule animalculæ!

Come, come, be mine, and we will tread

Where tortuous fungi never spread.

Then will the fever of our bliss

Destroy bacilli in our kiss.

. . . as though he were seeing the meticulously-scrivened paper itself. His Great Love had never replied and, in fact, he had never seen her since.

“Anyway, it’s unfair to yourself to be compared with me,” he continued as he squeezed his eyes to clear his vision. “We’re a generation apart, if for no other reason. My time of change, of mutability, of uncertainty and doubt is long past. You are still in the midst of your plasticity, like a blob of molten glass just removed from the furnace. Who knows what that blob will become? A work of art? A pane of window glass? A paperweight? The lens of a telescope? It depends not entirely upon the quality of the glass itself, but also upon the artisan into whose hands it falls. You are still very much
potentiality.
You still need the influences of other people, different people, as many different people as possible, as your needs evolve and you yourself as a result become different. You have the advantage over the inanimate and mindless blob of molten glass in being able to pick and choose your artisans. But you must not fear that you are being selfish or exploitative. As all of these people touch your life and help to mold it, so you too alter theirs. You are just obeying something like the First Law of Thermodynamics, or perhaps the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Something like that. Gyven is no more the same man you first met, or even the man he was six months ago, than you are the same woman he first knew. Remember, he had become an almost mindless, colorless, inhuman creature under the dubious care of the Kobolds. Look at him now! You have not so much grown away from him as the both of you may have simply grown apart, rebounding like a pair of colliding masses, with altered energy and direction, each taking something from the other. You’ve done nothing more than become two distinct personalities. Perhaps you were never destined to grow into one being. But if that’s so, then it’s as good for him as it is for you.

“It’s possible, too,” he added by way of consolation, “that Gyven is going through metamorphoses of his own and he is receding from you faster than you are receding from him. And it’s even possible, if human development can be subjected to the laws of celestial mechanics, that your orbits will again intersect, like the shards of a shattered asteroid or disintegrated comet.”

“I suppose you may be right,” said Bronwyn, perversely unwilling to mitigate her misery or guilt. “But what if Gyven doesn’t return before we leave? What if he comes back and discovers that I’m gone . . . that I’m not even on the planet any longer?”

“You could leave him a note.”

When the scientist and the princess returned to the Academy, the former discovered a heavy parcel awaiting him at the concierge’s desk. He signed the form offered by the impatiently waiting delivery boy while Bronwyn struggled to carry the package into Wittenoom’s office. It was a small cube, wrapped in brown paper and coarse twine, scarcely eight inches on each side, but, as the princess set it onto the desk with a thump, she remarked on its disproportionate mass.

“It must weigh fifty pounds!” she said, as the professor entered, closing the door behind him. “Where’s it from?” he asked and she examined the stamps, cancellations and seals that plastered almost every one of the cube’s three hundred and eighty-four square inches of surface. “Great Musrum!” she exclaimed, “it’s from the Londeacan consulate in Spondula!”

“Spondula? The Spondula in Ibraila? What could possibly be in it? Who could it be from?”

While the professor speculated, Bronwyn bent her energies more practically. She snipped the heavy twine with a scissors and tore away the paper, of which there were two or three individual layers.

“I hate people who wrap packages like this. If they didn’t want us to get it open, why did they send it in the first place?”

“Why, it’s from Professor Melnikov!” exclaimed Wittenoom, who had been examining the discarded wrapping. “Whatever is he sending me anything for? He’s an archeologist, which is not my field at all, to say nothing of the fact that the man has been out of touch with the Academy for a year, off in the midst of deserts looking for lost cities and whatnot. Haven’t been able to read his reports: they’re boring as hell, as you might imagine. Dry as dust, in fact! Ha! Ha!”