In Deep (16 page)

He stopped pacing and looked at Falk. “Now do you understand? The thing has no selectivity—it’s completely random. We could walk through here and step out onto the planet of another star, all right—but it would take us a million years to find the way back by trial and error.” He knocked his pipe out against the heel of his hand, letting the dottle fall on the floor. “There it sits, the doorway to the stars. And we can’t use it.”

Falk leaned back against the wall, trying to absorb the idea. “Maybe there are only a dozen or so stars in the network,” he suggested.

Wolfert’s thin mouth drew down at the corners. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Would the race that could build
that
”—he gestured toward the cubicle—“stop at a dozen stars, or a thousand? The devil! They owned the galaxy!” Nervously he began to fill his pipe again. “Sixty billion stars,” he said. “And according to current theory, all the mainliners have planets.”

He pointed to the cubicle again. “Three hundred sixty cubic feet, about,” he said. “Enough for one man and supplies for a month, or fifteen people and supplies for a week. That’s the limit of the size of the colony we could send out. With no assurance,” he added bitterly, “that they’d land anywhere they could live for a minute.”

“Frustrating,” Falk agreed. “But I still don’t see why you’re here—with a gun. I can understand that if a member of the race that built that thing came through—and I must say it seems unlikely—that would be an important event. But why kill him when he steps out?”

“Dammit,” said Wolfert violently, “it isn’t my policy, Falk. I only work here.”

“I understand that,” Falk said. “But do you have any idea what’s behind the policy?”

“Fear,” said Wolfert promptly. “They’ve “got too much at stake.” He leaned against the wall again, gesturing with his pipestem. “Do you realise,” he said, “that we could have interstellar colonisation
without
this gadget, on our own? Certainly. Not now, but fifty, a hundred years from now—if we worked at it. Give us a fuel source efficient enough so that we can accelerate continuously for as long as eight months, and we could reach the stars well within a man’s lifetime. But do you know why we won’t?

“They’re afraid. They’re even afraid to plant colonies here on Mars, or on Jupiter’s moons, simply because transportation takes too long. Imagine a colony cut off from Earth by a five- or ten-year trip. Say something goes wrong—a man like yourself, naturally immune to analogue treatment. Or a man who somehow evades the treatment, then manages to take it over, change it. Say he cuts out the one directive, ‘You must do nothing against the policy or interests of Earth.’ Then you’ve got two communities again, not one. And then—?”

Falk nodded soberly. “War. I see now. They don’t dare take even the smallest chance of that.”

“It isn’t a question of daring, they
can’t
. That’s one of the directives in their own conditioning, Falk.”

“So we’ll never get to the stars.”

“Unless,” said Wolfert, “somebody walks out of that Doorway who understands how it works. The voltage is high, but not high enough to kill—we hope. He’s supposed to be stunned. If the current doesn’t stop him, and he tries to get back into the Doorway, I’m supposed to shoot to cripple. But at all events, he’s supposed to be stopped. He isn’t to be allowed to go back and warn others to stay away from this station. Because if we had that knowledge—how to alter the system so that it would be selective—”—“Then we’d have colonies, all right,” finished Falk. “Everyone just around the corner from Earth. All just alike. The loonies shall inherit the Universe… I hope nobody ever comes through.”

“I don’t think you’re likely to be disappointed,” said Wolfert.

He prowled the rest of the cabin with Wolfert, resting at intervals until his strength returned. There wasn’t much to see: the Doorway room, with a spyhole Falk had not noticed between it and the bedroom; the room that housed radio, radar and the computer that controlled the grazing orbits of supply rockets; the power plant, and the compressor that the cabin’s air at breathable pressure; kitchen, bathroom, two storage chambers.

The radio room had a window, and Falk stood there a long looking out over the alien desert, violet now as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Stars glittered with unfamiliar brilliance in the near-black sky, and Falk found his gaze drawn them even against the tug of that unearthly landscape.

In his mind he sketched hairlines of fire across the sky—a cradle of stars. The thought that tomorrow he would be standing on a planet of one of those suns was like an icy douche; the mind recoiled from it as from the thought of personal death. But at the same time it lured him. He felt like a boy standing on the edge of an unsounded pool whose black might hold treasure or death: he was afraid to dive, and yet he knew that he must.

How could a man feel otherwise, he wondered, knowing that the way was open, that he had only to step forward?

Wolfert said abruptly, “You haven’t asked me whether I reported to Earth when I found you in that freighter shell.”

Falk looked at him. “You did, of course,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone long before they can do anything about me. You’ll tell them that I overpowered you and escaped through the Doorway—they won’t be able to prove otherwise—unless you’re conditioned against lying?”

“No,” said Wolfert, “I’m not. That part’s all right, with one emendation: I’ll say I revived you, then shot and buried you. what made you so sure that I’d be—sympathetic?”

“You’re here,” said Falk simply. “You’re a volunteer. They haven’t got to the stage of conditioning people to do jobs they don’t want to do, though I suppose they will eventually. And when I’d heard you speak, I knew you were intelligent. So—you’re a hermit. You don’t like the madhouse they’re making out of Earth, any more than I do.”

. “I don’t know,” said Wolfert slowly. “Perhaps you’re assuming too much similarity.” He looked down at his ever-present pipe, tamping the tobacco with a horny thumb: “I don’t feel as you do about the analogue system, or the present government. I’m—adjusted, there. In my personal universe, it works. I can see that it will lead to disaster eventually, but that doesn’t bother me much. I’ll be dead.”

He looked at Falk earnestly. “But I want the stars,” he said. “That’s an emotional thing with me… There are no slugs in these cartridges.” He indicated the gun at his hip. “Or in any of the ammunition I’ve got. They didn’t condition me against that.”

Falk stared at him. “Look,” he said abruptly, “you’ve got a directive against stepping through that Doorway, is that right?”

The other nodded.

“Well, but is there any reason why I couldn’t knock you over the head and drag you through?”

Wolfert smiled wryly, shaking his head slowly. “No good,” he said. “Somebody’s got to stay, this end.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a chance that you’ll find the secret out there, somewhere. That’s what you’re hoping, too, isn’t it? You’re not just looking for a place to hide—you could do that in a thousand places on Earth. You’re after knowledge, and in spite of what I’ve told you, you’re hoping you’ll be able to bring it back and make the Earth over.”

“It sounds a little quixotic,” said Falk, “but you’re right.”

Wolfert shrugged, letting his gaze drift away again. “Well, then… there’s got to be somebody here. Somebody with no slugs in his gun. If I went with you, they’d take good care to send a different sort of man next time.”

He met Falk’s eyes briefly. “Don’t waste time feeling sorry for me,” he said. “You may not believe it, but I’m quite happy here. When I’m… alone, that is.”

Falk had been wondering why the government had not sent a married couple instead of a single man, who might go mad from sheer loneliness. Now it struck him that he had been stupid. Wolfert had a wife, undoubtedly; the best kind—one who suited him perfectly, who would never be fickle, or want to return to Earth; one who cost nothing to feed, consumed no air, and had not added an ounce of weight when Wolfert had been shipped out here. And on Mars it did not ordinarily matter that no one else could see her.

He felt an inward twinge of revulsion and instantly knew that Wolfert had seen and understood it. The man’s cheeks flushed, and he turned away to stare through the window, his lips thin and hard.

After a moment Falk said, “Wolfert, I like you better than any man I’ve ever met. I hope you’ll believe that.”

Wolfert hauled out a pipe cleaner, a complicated thing of many hinged stems, the free ends stamped into shovel shapes, tamper, shapes, probes. He said, “I’m afraid I dislike you, Falk, but it’s nothing personal. I simply hate your guts a little, because you’ve got something I wasn’t lucky enough to be born with. You’re the master of your own mind.”

He turned and put out his hand, grinning. “Aside from that trifling matter, I entirely approve of you. If that’s good enough—?”

Falk gripped his hand. “I hope you’re here when I get back,” said.

“I’ll be here,” said Wolfert, scraping his pipe, “for another thirty-odd years, barring accidents. If you’re not back by then, I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back at all.”

At Wolfert’s suggestion, Falk put on one of the other’s light suits instead of the spacesuit he had worn in the freighter. The latter, designed for heavy-duty service in the space station that circled Earth, was, as Wolfert out, too clumsy for use on a planet’s surface. The suit furnished adequate protection in thin atmosphere was equipped with gadgetry that the other lacked: a head lamp, climbing gear, built-in compasses, and traps for the occupant’s ingestion and excretion. It carried air tanks, but also had a compression outfit—which, given an atmosphere at least as oxygen-rich as that of Mars, would keep the wearer alive for as long as the batteries held out.

“You’ll have to find a place where you can live off the land, to speak, anyhow,” said Wolfert. “If all the planets you hit should happen to be dead, so will you be, very shortly. But this suit will give you longer to look, at least, and the stuff in the knapsack will last you as long as you have air. I’d give you this gun, but it wouldn’t do you any good—all the ammunition’s dud, as I told you.”

He disconnected the booby trap and stood aside as Falk moved to the entrance. Falk took one last look around at the bare metal room and at Wolfert’s spare figure and gloomy face. He stepped into the brown-glass cubicle and put his gloved hand on the lever.

“See you later,” he said.

Wolfert nodded soberly, almost indifferently. “So long, Falk,” he said, and put his pipe back in his mouth.

Falk turned on his helmet lamp, put his free hand near the control box at his belt—and pressed the lever down.

Wolfert vanished. An instant later Falk was aware that the lever was no longer beneath his hand. He turned, dazedly, and saw that it was back in its original position, above his hand.

Then he remembered the curious blank that had taken Wolfert’s place and he turned again to the entrance. He saw nothing. A gray-white blankness, featureless, uncommunicative. Was this some kind of intermediary state—and if so, how long did it last? Falk felt a brief surge of panic as he realised they had only assumed the journey was instantaneous, and another as he recalled the eight transmitters that had never been heard from…

Then common sense took over, and he stepped forward to the entrance.

The gray-white shaded gradually, as his gaze traveled downward, into gray-blue and violet, and then a chaos of dim colors of which his eye made nothing. He gripped the edge of the Doorway and bent forward, looking downward and still downward. Then he saw the cliff, and all the rest of the scene fell into perspective.

He stood at the top of a sheer mountain—an impossible, ridiculous height. Down it went and again down, until whatever was at the bottom melted into a meaningless tapestry of grayed color. He looked to right and left and saw nothing else. No sound came through the diaphragm of his helmet. He had only the tactile and muscular responses of his own body, and the hard reality of the Doorway itself, to assure him that he was real and live.

The planet was dead; he felt irrationally sure of that. It
felt
dead; there was not even a whisper of wind: only the featureless blanket of gray cloud, the cliff, the meaningless colors below.

He looked at the kit slung to his belt: the pressure gauge, bottled litmus papers, matches. But there was no point in testing this atmosphere: even if it were breathable, there was clearly no way of getting out of the Doorway. The cliff began more than an inch from the entrance.

Falk went back to the lever, pressed it down again.

This time he watched it as it reached the end of its stroke. There was no hint of a transition: the lever was there, under his hand, and then it was back in the starting position—as if it had passed unfelt through the flesh of his hand.

He turned.

Deep blue night, blazing with stars. Underneath, a flat blue-green waste that ran straight away into the far distance.

Falk stepped out onto the icy plain and looked around him, upward. The sky was so like the one he had known as a boy in Michigan that it struck him almost as a conviction that this terminus was on Earth—in the Antarctic, perhaps, near the pole, where no explorer had ever happened across it. Then, as he looked automatically for the Dipper, Orion’s Belt, he knew that he was wrong;

He saw none of the familiar patterns. These were alien stars, in an alien sky. He reviewed what he could remember of the configurations of Earth’s southern hemisphere, but none of them fitted either.

Directly above him was a group of eight stars, two of them very brilliant—out four arranged in a straight line, the rest spread in an almost perfect semicircle. Falk knew that if he had seen that constellation before he would not have forgotten it.

Now he looked down toward the horizon, blacker than the sky. How could he know that light, warmth, safety, knowledge were not hiding just beyond the curve of the planet?

He turned back to the cubicle. He was here on sufferance, a man in a Mars suit, with weeks—or, with great luck, months or years—to live. He had to find what he sought within a pitifully small radius from the Doorway, or not at all.