And Now the News (17 page)

“But they reached for the stars. They excused their hunger for the stars in a thousand ways, and when they grew too rational for excuses, they made no more and still went starward.

“And now, today, they are on the verge of it, by themselves, struggling along in their own terrified, terrifying way, ignorant of their origins, mystified by the drive in their blood … yes, Chris, a neurotic people.”

After a time, Chris said, “How did you—uh—where did you hear—uh—read this …”

She laughed and looked down again at his hand. She patted it with her free one and then held it for a moment in both. “Hypothesis, remember?”

He shuddered, the late, large impact of her vivid voice and the pictures it evoked. It was somehow a delightful sensation.

“Will … did they ever find their own people?”

“They were found. Contact was made—oh, four hundred years ago.”

Chris exhaled explosively. “Then it isn't—” He looked closely at her face. Even now, he was afraid of what her laughter might be like. “… Earth?” he finished in a small voice.

“Isn't it?”

“Four hundred years … everybody would know.”

She shook her head soberly. “Consider: twenty thousand years of genetic drift, mutation, conditioning. The old drives may be there—statistically, and in the majority. But figure it out for yourself—what are the chances of a prototypical spaceman after all that time? You'd find most of the desirable characteristics in some, some in most.
You'd find all of them as a statistic, in a numerical sample. But if you were a captain looking for a crew, how would you find the man you wanted?”

“You already described the spacebound neurotic.”

“It can't be just any neurotic, only because he's neurotic! He has to be a very special—very
specialized
neurotic indeed. They're rare.”

“Then you'd have to announce yourself, advertise for what you wanted, have screenings, a training program—”

“Don't you know what would happen if all the world found out about the spacemen?”

“There'd be a riot, I guess—everyone wanting to go.”

“There'd be a riot, all right,” she said sadly, “but not that kind. There's one thing mankind is afraid of, sight unseen. It's a fear born of his slow growth on a strange and hostile planet, with only his brains as weapons and shelter.”

“One fear—”

“The alien. Xenophobia—virtually a racial disease. All through your history, you have it, and it's always there under the surface, waiting to break out again like an ugly fire. There would be an attack on the spacemen themselves, and then a witch-hunt the like of which even this planet has never seen before. First the ones who fully qualify as spacemen, though they were born here; next anyone who has some of spaceman's characteristics—and everyone has!”

“I don't believe it!” Chris protested hotly. “I don't think human beings would go that far, be that stupid!”

“Humanity lets itself live on bare sufferance as it is,” Gerda Stein said sorrowfully. “No, publicity isn't the answer.”

“Then what's been going on these four hundred years?”

She said, “Surveys. Spaceman still desperately needs recruits, especially in this galaxy, which is new, unexplored, practically. So spacemen come here, live among you, and every once in a while a candidate is spotted. He's observed for—well, long enough to determine if he's the right kind.”

“What's the right kind?”

“You gave a pretty good description yourself a while ago.”

“The introspective neurotic?”

“With special mechanical and computing skills, and an inner resource that needs no books or teleplays or joy-riding or depravity to keep him from being bored.”

“And what happens when someone like that turns up?”

“The—agent reports, and after a while the space captain shows up. If the candidate is willing, he goes. He disappears from Earth and just goes.”

“He has to be willing.”

“Of course! What good would he be if he was shanghaied?”

“Well,” said Chris primly, “that's something, anyway.”

She did laugh at him, after all. It didn't hurt. While she was laughing, he was so disarmed that he asked her a question. He hadn't meant to; it just slipped out.

“Why did you want to know all those things about Billy?”

“Don't you have any idea?”

He looked at his hands. He said, a little sullenly, “You seem to think Billy never started anything by himself. You don't seem to think he can. You—well, I got the idea you think he gets pushed into things.” He turned to her briefly. “By
me
, for Pete's sake!”

“And you don't think so?”

He gave a snort, embarrassed and negative. “If I could believe that, I—I could believe everything else you've been saying.”

She smiled a very special smile. “Why don't you try it, then, and find out who's right?”

Quietly, for a long time, he thought.

“I will,” he whispered at last. “I will.” He straightened and looked at her. “Gerda, where do you come from?”

She rose and, spectacularly, stretched. “A little place called Port Elizabeth,” she said. “Not very far from here. Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.”

“Oh.”

She laughed at him again and took his hand. “Good night, Chris. Can we talk some more about this?”

He shook his head. “Not until I really—
really
think about it.”

“You will.”

He watched her cross the foyer to the stairs. She put one hand
on the newel post and waved to him, crinkling her eyelids in a way he would find as unforgettable as that turn and sweep and uncovering when she threw back her hair to face him. He found himself quite incapable of a wave or anything else.

For a long time after he heard her door close, he stood in the parlor looking at the stairs. At last he shook himself, turned out the lights in the parlor and all but the night lamp in the foyer. He turned on the porch light for Billy and went upstairs to the room they shared.

He undressed slowly and absent-mindedly, looking around his room as if he had never seen it.

The orrery which he had started to build when he was ten, and which Billy had taken away from him and finished, all except the painting, which he did after all because Billy grew tired of it.

The charts of the Solar System from the celestial north (over Billy's bed) and from the south (over his). The Smithsonian photomap of the Moon, carefully pasted to the ceiling, which Billy had moved to another spot, apparently because he hadn't been consulted, so Chris had had to plaster up the first spot. The spaceships and Billy's toy space helmet. (Hadn't it been Chris's for his twelfth birthday? But somehow “your” helmet had become “our” helmet and then “mine.”) Anyway, it was all space stuff, everything in sight, and space meant Billy, so somehow it was all Billy. And Billy not back long enough even to open his bag.

Chris got the pattern suddenly, but very late. Years late. He lay back on his bed and grinned, then got up and switched on the light over the desk. He went into the lavatory and got a big cake of white soap and spread newspaper on the desk and went to work on the soap with a pocketknife, carving a cat's head.

Billy came in about two, clumping heavily, yawning noisily on the stairs. He banged into the room and kicked the door closed.

“Now you didn't have to wait up, shipmate,” he said facetiously.

“I wasn't.” Chris got up from the desk, put the knife down, and crossed to his bed.

Billy flung off his cape and tossed it on the easy chair. “Well, I tilted that chick clean off the orbit, shipmate. You can take down your meteor screens. She won't be dustin' around you
no
more.”

“Why do me a favor like that?” Chris asked tiredly.

“You and Mom, you mean,” said Billy, shucking out of his space boots. “You hadn't oughta worry Mom like that.”

“Like what?”

“She computed you an' li'l Heartburn on a collision orbit. Well, Billy fix. She'll have nothin' in her viewplates from now on but Space Academy blue.” He went to his cape and arranged it carefully on the chair-back. “It's not me, y'unnerstan', shipmate, not me pers'nal. It's just no one man can compete against the Space Corps. Not on a Venus sighting anyway,” he said with labored modesty. Chris could see his mind wandering away from the subject before he had gotten the whole sentence out. “How'd you make out?”

“Make out? Oh—Miss Stein.”

“Oh—Miss Stein. Fair warning, shipmate—that there's Target the Next.”

Chris lay back and closed his eyes.

“You ever satisfied?”

“Look, shipmate,” Billy said over his shoulder, “ ‘satisfied' didn't come inboard yet. These things I play straight and square, gyros on the ship's long axis and a-pointin' down the main tube. So get the brief, mudbound: tonight's mission was for you and for Mom. Tomorrow's for me. Over.” He banged open his kit and pulled out a pajama zip-on. It was then that the carved bar of soap caught his eye. “What you riggin', shipmate?”

“Nothing,” said Chris, as tiredly as before, but watching like a lynx.

“Sculptin' soap. I heard of it. Often wondered.” He bent over the work and, suddenly, laughed. That laugh. “Hey, high time we got a new hobby. This ain't bad for a beginner.” He rocked the desk lamp back and forth to get shadows. “Think I'll square it away a bit for you. It's okay, isn't it, Chris?”

“I was going to fin—”

“That's all right, don't let it worry you. You won't know I touched it.” He had stopped listening to Chris while Chris spoke, stopped listening to himself before he himself finished. He leaned over and flicked the carving with the point of the knife, then again. He bent
closer, considering. Abruptly he sat down, got his elbows solidly planted on the desk, pulled the light closer and went to work.

Behind him, Chris nodded once, then smiled himself into his thoughts, level on lower level—the very first being the knowledge of who did start (and usually complete) things—until he slept.

It was Mr. Magruder's habit to take no breakfast at home, but to mount his stately and ludicrous old three-tone Buick and drive into town, where he would have tea sent up to the office. He did these things at such an unbearably early hour that his tacit offer of transportation to any who wanted it was almost always refused.

But this was an exception. Miz Binns greeted the change with polite protests but inner satisfaction; Billy was sleeping late, having been doing something up in the room until all hours, and now she would be able to take her time and compose a really fabulous tray for him. And Chris, looking uncharacteristically bright and cheerful for that hour, held Gerda Stein's elbow for her as she negotiated the front steps, and opened the ancient Buick's chrome-slashed door for her.

As soon as they were away from the curb, Chris took a deep breath and said, “I'm sure you won't be needing Miss Stein today at all, Mr. Magruder.”

The old man said nothing and did nothing but continue to drive at his less-than-lawful and undeviating rate.

Gerda Stein turned expressionless and watchful eyes to Chris's face. Nobody said anything for a two-block interval.

“Also,” said Chris firmly, “I'd appreciate it if you'd have someone in your office call my plant around 9:15 and tell them I won't be in today. I could do it myself, but I want it off my mind right now.”

Mr. Magruder took his foot off the accelerator and let the car glide to a stop at the curb before applying the brakes. It took a long silent time. Chris opened the door and handed Gerda Stein out. He shut the door. “Thank you, Mr. Magruder.”

As soon as the car was out of sight, Chris Binns began to laugh like a fool. Gerda Stein held on to him, or sturdily held him up, and after a time laughed, too.

“What was that for?” she asked when she could.

Chris wiped his eyes. “Damn if I know. Too much of … too much all at once, I guess.” Impulsively he reached out and ran his hand gently from her temple to the hinge of her jaw, not quite cupping her chin.

She held quite still while he did this, and when he dropped his hand, she said, “Well, hello.”

He wished he had something like it to say, but after two trials all he could utter was, “B-breakfast,” so they laughed together again and strode off, Chris holding her hand tight to the inside of his elbow. She walked well with him, long steady paces. “Can you dance in a spaceship?” he asked.

“With slow rolls,” she twinkled.

They had waffles with cherry syrup and the best coffee in the world. He watched his thoughts and smiled, and she watched his face. When they had finished and fresh coffee arrived, he said, “Now, questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“You say the colony ship was wrecked here about twenty-five thousand years ago. How do you account for Swanscombe and Pekin and Australopithecus and all?”

“They're indigenous.”

She touched his hand for emphasis. “Chris, if you'll think on galactic terms, or larger, you'll be quite satisfied. When one of those seeking mechanisms is set for a planet of this type, it isn't satisfied with an
almost
. And in multi-galactic terms, there's plenty of choice. Homo sap, or something very like him, grows on many of those planets, if not most. In Earth's case, they have even interbred. We're not sure, but there have been cases. Whether or not, though, Spaceman's presence here was no boon to the other races. He's a pretty nice fellow in his own element, but he makes for a fairly critical mass when you let him pile up.”

“All right. Now a little more about this neurosis business. Why should Spaceman be so out of kilter on a planet? I'd think of him as pretty adaptable.”

“He certainly is! He survived for twenty-five thousand years here,
didn't he? But about these neuroses—they're easy enough to account for, once you understand the basic drives. Look: