And Now the News (16 page)

She settled back slightly. He knew why; she was going to wait again. He wouldn't be able to cope with that, he knew, so he said quickly, “It's all right for Billy to be that way. He can do things I—other people can't do. I'm not mad about that, not mad at him. There's nothing to be mad at. It would be like—being mad at a bird because it has wings. He's just different.”

He realized that he had wandered from the area of her question, so he stopped, thought back, located it. Billy gets what he wants—
instead of you
.

He began again: “It's all right for Billy to get what he wants, even if it's something I happen to want, too, and don't get … How can I explain it?”

Rising suddenly, he began pacing, always turning away from her,
passing her with his eyes downcast. It was as if the sight of her chained him, and with his eyes averted, he could run with his own thoughts again.

“It's as if Billy wasn't something separate at all, but just another side of me. Part of me wants to go to the Academy—Billy goes. Part of me wants to go out with Tess, not just to the movies, but
out
with her, make her feel—you know. Well, Billy does it. Or talk like Billy, look like him, all that racket and fast gab.” He laughed, almost fondly. He sounded, then, just like his mother. “Sometimes he's a nuisance, but mostly I don't care. There's other things, lots of them, that I do that Billy couldn't. There's another part of me that does those things.”

He allowed himself another quick look at Gerda Stein. She had turned to follow his pacings. He was in the far corner of the room and she sat with her cheek on her bare forearm, her head inclined as on a pillow and her hair hung down over the arm of the couch, heavy and bright.

“What things?” she asked.

He came back and sat down beside her. “It's hard to say. It's very hard to say.”

He sat for a long time performing the totally unprecedented task of verbalizing what he had never given words to before, the thoughts and feelings, ideas and intuitions so intimately, so mutely his own; all the things he set aside when he talked to Tess, all the things which occupied and preoccupied him during that ninety percent of his life when he must commune and could not communicate. He sat there striving with it while she waited. Her waiting was no longer a trial to him. He realized that, but would not think about it. Yet.

“The nearest I can get to it,” he said when he was ready, “is this: I've found out something that's at the root of everything anyone can think about, something that all thinking gets to sooner or later, and starts from, too. One simple sentence … Now wait.” He put his simple sentence in front of his mind and looked at it for a long studious time. Then he spoke it. “Nothing is always absolutely so.”

He turned to face her. She nodded encouragingly but did not speak.

“It's a—help. A big help,” he said. “I don't know when I first found it out. A long time back, I suppose. It helps with people. I mean the whole world is built on ideas that are caused by finding out that one thing or another around them just
isn't
so. Or it isn't so any longer. Or it's almost so, but not absolutely.”

On receipt of another encouraging nod from Gerda Stein, “Nothing is always absolutely so,” he said again. “Once you know that, know it for sure, you can do things, go places you never thought about before. Everything there is gives you some place to go, something to think about. Everything. Take a—a brass rivet, say. It's brass; you start with that. And what is brass? An alloy. How much change of what metal would make it not be brass? Given enough time, would radioactive decay in one of the metals transmute it enough so it wouldn't be brass any more?

“Or take the size. How big is it? Well, doesn't that depend? It's smaller after it's been used than when it was new. What color is it? That depends, too. In other words, if you're going to describe to me exactly what that rivet is, you're going to have to qualify and modify and get up a list of specs half as long as a tide chart and half as wide as Bowditch. And then all I have to do is sweat one drop of sweat on that rivet and wait twenty-four hours and you'll have to revise your specs.

“Or drop down a level. Pass a current through my rivet. The copper has this resistance and the zinc has another and a trace of iron has still more. What's the velocity of electromagnetic force through all this mess, and what kind of arguments do the atoms have about it? Or use a strong magnetic field. Why—really why, aside from ‘It just happens'—is the copper so shy magnetically in brass and so out-and-out ferrous in alnico?”

He stopped to breathe. He breathed hard. It recalled to him how she had smiled when he had puffed into her room with the bags.

He realized suddenly that he had been altogether wrong in his estimate of that smile. He had feared it because he was ready to fear any smile. Now he knew that it was not just any smile, but the one he saw now—warm, encouraging, much like the smile which Tess Milburn had found and kept.

“What I'm driving at is, with this idea, that nothing is always absolutely so. You don't really need people or anything about them—movies, TV, talk; anyway, not for hours at a time, days. You don't have to hate people; I don't mean that at all. It's just that people's worries don't matter so much. People's troubles you can answer every time by saying, ‘Nothing is always absolutely so,' and go on to something else.

“But when you see that the wet half of the towel is darker than the dry half, or hear the sound of a falling bomb descending when all reason says it ought to rise in pitch, and you know where you're going to start:
Why?
and where you'll wind up:
Nothing is always absolutely so
, and challenge yourself to find the logic between start and finish—why, then you have your hands full; then you have a place to go.”

“Isn't that a sort of escape?” the girl asked quietly.

“Depends on where you're standing at the time. Mixing yourself up with human problems is maybe escaping from these other things. Anyway, these other things
are
human problems.”

“Are they?”

“E=MC
²
turned out to be. First it had to be thought out, with the thinking all the reward in sight, and after that it had to be applied, but don't tell me it isn't a human problem! Someone, for instance, had to put pineapple rings on a ham before baking, for the very first time! Or eat a raw oyster. That seems to me to be the kind of thinking I'm talking about.” He brought his hand down for emphasis on the arm of the couch; it fell right on hers. “That's why Billy's at the Academy, because someone, and then some people, and then mankind began to want space.”

She curled her fingers around his hand, not quite clasping it, and looked down contemplatively. “A good hand,” she said in an impersonal voice, and gave it back to him.

“Huh? It's crummy—solder burns, ground-in bench dirt …” He held it as if it no longer completely belonged to him.
And it doesn't
, he thought with a start.

“Tell me,” she asked lazily, “is the Academy's way the right way to get to space?”

“The only way,” he said positively, and then, because his reason caught up with his honesty, he amended, “that's being tried.”

Suddenly she sat up straight, leaned forward. She tossed her hair back as she turned toward him, with a gesture he knew he'd never forget.

She said, “I wonder about that. I wonder about fine-tuning men physically until they're all muscle and bounce, just to coop them up in a cabin for months on end. I wonder about all the training in astrogation when even primitive computers can do better, and no training at all in conversation, which we don't have a machine for yet. I wonder at the thinking behind hundred percent male complements on those ships. I wonder about 10
G
stress tests on men who will have to develop an inertialess drive before they can think about
real
space travel. But most of all, I wonder—I worry—about putting extroverts on spacecraft.”

She settled back again, looking at him quizzically.

“All right,” he said, “I can play that game. Suppose I took every one of those wonderments of yours and turned them over to look at the other side. What would you do instead—man your ships with soft-bellied bookworms with no reflexes? Train them in philosophy and repartee in an eighteenth-century salon? Teach them to rely on their computers and never know what the machines are doing? Put women on the ships for them to get jealous about and fight over? Lay in a pack of brooding introverts, neuroses and all?”

“Neuroses,” she repeated. “I'm glad you mentioned them. I imagine you're pretty sure that humanity is by and large a pretty neurotic species.”

“Well, if your definition—”

“Never mind the specs,” she said, interrupting him.

There was a new, concise ring to her voice that affected him much as had the first sight of her, standing out there under the porch light. Breathless, he fell silent.

“Yes, humans are neurotic,” she answered her own question. “Insecure, disoriented, dissatisfied, fearful, full of aggressions against their own kind, always expecting attack, always afraid of being misunderstood, always in conflict between the urge to fly like a bird and
the urge to burrow like a mole. Now why should all this be?”

He simply shook his head, bewildered.

“You have a very special mind, Chris, with your hypotheses and your lower levels and your quarreling atoms. Can you take a really
big
hypothesis?”

“I can try.”

“Hypothesis,” she said, making it sound like a story title. “There is a space-traveling species that achieved space flight in the first place because, of all species, it was the most fit. It established a commerce throughout a system, systems of systems, a galaxy, another. It had an inertialess faster-than-light drive, a suspended animation technique, sub-etheric communications—why go on listing all its achievements? Just say it was technologically gifted and its gift was only one facet of the whole huge fact that it was born and bred for space travel.

“Now, expanding as it must, it spread itself thin. It compensated as well as it could by learning to breed fast, by reducing to the minimum the size of its crews and increasing the efficiency of its ships. But each of these expedients only increased the spread; there's an awful lot of business in this universe for the sole qualified species.

“The only way out was to locate planets similar to their own home world and seed them with people. That way, crews could be formed from one end of the explored universe to the other. The best way to do this would be to put down large colonial ships on suitable planets, complete with everything they might need to raise six or seven generations while acclimating to the planet. Thereafter, the colonies could be self-sustaining. That's the overall pic—uh—hypothesis. Are you still with me?”

“N-no,” said Chris dazedly, “but go on.”

She laughed. “Now suppose one of these big colonial vessels had some trouble—an impossible series of unlikely happenings that threw it out of control, while in faster-than-light flight with the personnel in suspended animation and all automatic orientation gear washed out. Centuries go by. If it encounters a galaxy, it will search out the right kind of planet, but it doesn't encounter anything until—”

Her voice died down. Chris looked at her, bent closer. Her eyes
were closed and she was breathing very slowly, very deeply. As if she sensed him near her, she opened her eyes suddenly and gave a queer twisted smile.

“Sorry,” she murmured, and took his hand so he would not move away. “This is the part I—don't like to think about, even—hypothetically.”

For a moment, all the senses in Chris's body seemed to concentrate and flow together, to lie ecstatic in the hollow of her hand. Then she began to speak again.

“The ship was old, old by then, and the machinery badly butchered. It found a galaxy all right, and, in time, a planet. It snapped into normal space; it started the gestators …”

“Gestators?” he echoed blankly.

“Artificial placentae. Easier to carry fertilized ova and nutrients than children or even parents. But the revitalizers, for the suspendees—they failed, about ninety-eight per cent of them.”

She sighed. It was a mourning sound. “No one knows what happened, not all of it. No one … should. The ship wasn't designed to make planetfall; it was an orbital, true-space vessel. They landed it, somehow, the few that were left. The crash took more lives—most, perhaps. The scout ships, the ferries, neatly stacked in the gimbal locks—all wrecked. Stores,
books
—call them books, it's simpler—everything lost. And all that was left, all that lived … a couple of hundred babies, helpless, hungry, many hurt, and a handful of maimed adolescents to care for them.

“The ship didn't last long; it wasn't built to take what a corrosive oxygen atmosphere could do to it. The boats hadn't been coated and they went, too, in weeks.

“But this is a hardy breed. Most died, but not all. Perhaps, to some, this would be a fascinating study in the old heredity-environment haggle; personally, I wouldn't have the stomach for it. They lost their language, their culture, their traditions and age-old skills. But they kept their genes. And in time, two prime characteristics showed through their savagery, come straight from their heritage: They bred fantastically and they reached for the stars.

“Unlike any other civilized species, they would breed beyond the
ability of the land to support them, breed until they had to kill one another to survive at all—a faculty developed through eons of limitless
lebensraum
, but a deadly quality for a planet-bound race. It decimated them and they outbred even their own deadliness, so that in a brief time—twenty, twenty-two thousand years—they went from the dozens to the billions, threatening to carpet the planet with their bodies. Meanwhile the suicidal other-worldly urge to breed colored their mores and their literature until it stood unique among the galactic cultures.