No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (24 page)

“You bothered me,” said Allen, “because you wanted someone in to help you finish up that bottle.”

Thomas reached for the bottle. “Let’s be about it, then.”

7

“If you had to invent a universe,” asked Mary Kay, “if you really had to, I mean; if it was your job and you had to do it, what kind of universe would you invent?”

“A universe that went on and on,” said Martin. “A universe with no beginning and no end. Hoyle’s kind of universe. Where there’d be the time and space for everything that possibly could happen, to happen.”

“That entropy thing really got to you, didn’t it. A voice out of the void saying it was all coming to an end.”

Martin crinkled his forehead. “More now than it did to start with. Now that I’ve had time to think it over. Christ, think of it. We’ve been sitting here, us and all the people before us, thinking that there was no end, ever. Telling ourselves we had all the time there is. Not considering our own mortality, that is. Thinking racially, not of ourselves alone. Not ourselves, but all the people who come after us. An expanding universe, we told ourselves. And maybe now it isn’t. Maybe, right this minute, it is a contracting universe. Rushing back, all the old dead matter, all the played-out energy.”

“It has no real bearing on us,” said Mary Kay. “No physical effect. We won’t be caught in the crunch, not right away at least. Our agony is intellectual. It does violence to our concept of the universe. That’s what hurts. That a thing so big, so beautiful—the only thing we really know—is coming to an end.”

“They could have been wrong,” he said. “They might have miscalculated. Their observations might have been faulty. And it might not really be the end. There might still be another universe. Once everything retreated back as far as it could go, there might be another cosmic explosion and another universe.”

“But it wouldn’t be the same,” she said. “It would be a different universe. Not our universe. It would give rise to different kinds of life, new kinds of intellect. Or maybe no life or intellect at all. Just the matter and the energy. Stars burning for themselves. No one to see them and to wonder. That, Jay, is what has made our universe so wonderful. Little blobs of life that held the capacity to wonder.”

“Not only the wonder,” Jay told her, “but the audacity to probe beyond the wonder. The grief in that warning was not that the universe was coming to an end, but that it was doing so before someone could find out what it was.”

“Jay, I’ve been wondering …”

“You’re always wondering. What is it this time?”

“It’s silly. All my wondering is silly. But, do you suppose that we can experience things in time, reach things in time as well as in space?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it.”

“You know this place I’ve found. So quiet. So wonderful. So happy and so holy. Have you any idea of what it might be?”

“Let’s not get into that right now,” said Jay. “You’ll just upset yourself. Everyone else has left. Maybe we should be leaving, too.”

He looked around the empty lounge, made a motion to get up. She reached for his arm and held him there.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’ve been wondering if this place of mine is what is left after everything is gone. When the universe is gone. The few good things left over, the worthwhile things left over. The things we have never valued enough. We or any of the others out there. The peace, the love, the holiness. These are the things, I think, that will survive.”

“I don’t know, Mary. God, how could I know.”

“I hope it is,” she said. “I so hope it is. I have a feeling that it is. I go so much on feeling. In the place I found, you have to depend on what you feel. There is nothing else. Just the feeling. Do you ever depend on feeling, Jay?”

“No, I don’t,” he told her. He got to his feet, put out a hand to help her up. “Do you know,” he said, “that you are beautiful and crazy.”

Suddenly he bent double, getting the handkerchief to his face barely in time to catch the sneeze.

“Poor Jay,” she said. “You still have your allergy.”

8

Martin settled himself before the console, shoved the helmet more comfortably into place. The helmet was a nuisance, but he had to wear it, for it was the mechanism that fed the information into the data banks.

—Einstein, are you there? he asked.

—I am here, said Einstein, ready to begin. You have your allergy again. Are you ingesting chemicals?

—Yes. And they don’t help a lot.

—We sorrow for you greatly.

—I thank you very much, said Martin.

—When last we quit, we were discussing …

—A moment, Einstein. I have a question.

—Ask.

—It has nothing to do with what we were discussing. It’s a question I long have wanted to ask and never had the courage.

—Ask.

—For a long time, we have been talking about faster-than-light and I am not understanding. You’ve been patient with me. You overlook my stupidity. Still willing to keep on, when at times it must seem hopeless to you. I want to ask you why. Why are you willing to keep on?

—Simple, Einstein said. You help us. We help you.

—But I haven’t helped you.

—Yes, you have. You recall occasion first we took notice of your allergy?

—That was a long time ago.

—We asked you can you do anything to help it. And you say a term at the time we do not know.

—Medicine?

—That was it. We asked you, medicine? And you explain. Chemicals you say. Chemicals we know.

—Yes, I guess I did say that.

—Medicine-chemicals entirely new to us. Never heard of them. Never thought of them.

—You mean you had no idea of medicine?

—Correct. Affirmative. Had no idea, ever.

—But, you never asked me about it. I would have been willing to tell you.

—We did ask. Now and then we asked. Very briefly, very carefully. So you would not know.

—Why? Why briefly? Why carefully?

—So great a thing. Too big to share with others. Now I see we misjudge you. I am very sorry.

—You should be, Martin said. I thought you were my friend.

—Friend, of course, but even among friends …

—You were willing to tell of faster-than-light.

—No great thing. Many others have it. Very simple, once you catch it.

—I’m glad to hear you say so. How are you doing on medicine?

—Slowly, but some progress. Things we need to know.

—So go ahead and ask, said Martin.

9

Thomas looked questioningly across the desk at Martin.

“You mean to tell me, Jay, that Einstein’s people had never thought of medicine. That they know chemistry and had never thought of medicine?”

“Well, it’s not quite that simple,” said Martin. “They have a hang-up. Their bodies are sacred. Temples of their souls. Einstein didn’t actually say that; it is my interpretation of what he said. But, anyhow, their bodies are sacred and they don’t tamper with them.”

“In that case, they’ll have a hell of a time selling medicine to their public.”

“I suppose so. But with Einstein and some of his fellows, that’s different. An elite clique, I gather, standing above the general public, perhaps a bit contemptuous of the public, not sharing all the superstitions the general public holds. Willing, even anxious, to pick up what might be considered iconoclastic ideas. Willing, at least, to have a try at them. With the forces of the old beliefs and prejudices bearing on them, however, it’s not to be wondered at that they never thought of medicine.”

“They’re willing to let you tell them about it?”

“Anxious. Strangely excited about it—a sort of nervous excitement. As if they know they’re doing wrong, but are going to do it anyhow. All I can give them, of course, is the basic thinking on medicine. They’ll have to work out the details themselves, adapting them to their situation. I gave them what I could today. I’ll have to bone up on the theory of medicine to give them much more. There should be material in the library.”

“I’m sure there is,” said Thomas.

“I thought for a while I’d lost Einstein. I told him that to develop medicine they’d have to know about their bodies …”

“And since their bodies are sacred …”

Martin nodded. “That’s the idea, exactly. Einstein asked how they’d get to know about their bodies and I said dissection. I told him what dissection was and that was when I thought I’d blown it. He was getting more than he asked for, more than he really wanted, and a lot of it he didn’t like. But he was a man about it; he gulped and gagged somewhat and finally came to terms with it. It appears he is a devoted soul. Once he gets his teeth into something, he hangs onto it.”

“You think he and the rest of his clique will go ahead with it?”

“I’m not sure, Paul. I think so. He tended to wax a bit philosophical about it. Trying to talk himself more firmly into the idea of going ahead with it. And while he was doing this, I was wondering how many similar hang-ups we may have that makes it hard or impossible to use some of the ideas we may get. Here is this advanced culture, a forward-looking society, and yet an old obsession that probably dates back to primordial times has made it impossible for them to come up with the concept of medicine.”

“Our own history of medicine,” said Thomas, “is not too dissimilar. We had to sweep away a lot of superstition and wrong thinking before we could get even a decent start in the healing art.”

“I suppose so,” said Martin. “But, dammit, the whole thing makes me feel good. If Einstein goes ahead with it, and I think he will, it means we’ve been of some use. Like I said last night, we may be beginning to pay our dues. We aren’t just Cub Scouts any longer. I had no idea, you see, of what was going on. The sneaky son-of-a-bitch was trying to steal the idea of medicine from me, bit by tiny bit.”

“I’d suspect we may be doing much the same thing on our part,” said Thomas. “We’re handling some of those jokers out there far too gently, more than likely, than there is any need to. Going easy on them, afraid of doing something wrong and scaring them off. I would suspect this is because of our inferiority complex, brought about by the kind of company we’re keeping. Get a few more deals like your medicine show under our belts and we’ll no longer have it. We’ll be right up there with the rest of them.”

“I hesitated to ask him,” said Martin, “about why he was sticking with me. Like you say, I probably was afraid of scaring him off. But it bugged me, it had bugged me for a long time. So I thought, why not? why not be honest with him? And once I was honest with him, he decided to be honest with me. It does beat hell how things sometimes turn out.”

“I don’t suppose you had much time to talk about FTL today. That’s all right. Maybe a few days off may help. And now you’ll feel less guilty at the time Einstein spends on it. You can bear down a little harder on him.”

“No time on FTL today at all,” said Martin. “But you may be right. I’ve been doing some thinking about it. I talked with Mary Kay last night and she asked me if I stuck to hard fact all the time or if I paid some attention to my feelings, how I felt about it. I suppose she was trying to say hunches and not quite making it. I told her my feelings played no part in it. I’ve never let them play a part. I’ve tried to stick to the pure science of it—if, in fact, there is any science in it. This afternoon I got to thinking about it and maybe I was wrong …”

“And?”

“You know, Paul, I may finally have a handle on this FTL business. Not for certain, but maybe. A new way to go. For the last several weeks, I’ve been telling myself time could be the key factor and that I should be paying more attention to it. Has this project ever held any talk with some of our aliens about time?”

“I think so. Ten or fifteen years ago. We still have the record. It was fairly inconclusive, but we have stacks of data.”

“Except in a superficial way,” said Martin, “time can’t play too much of a part in any equation, although in many problems it can be a fairly critical factor. If we knew more about time, I told myself, not as a physical, but as a mental factor in FTL, we might turn the trick. Tying a mental concept of time into the equation …”

“You think it might work?”

“Not now. Not any more. I have a hunch that time may be a variable, that it runs differently in different sectors of the universe, or differently in the minds of different intelligences. But there is something that would be a constant. Eternity would be a constant factor. It wouldn’t vary; it would be the same everywhere.”

“My God, Jay, you aren’t talking about …”

“Not about arriving at an understanding of it, but I think we might work out a way it could be used as a constant. I’m going to take a shot at it. With it in mind, some of the other factors may come clear.”

“But eternity, Jay. This business about the universe coming to an end.”

“Mary Kay told me something else last night. Her hunch of what might be left when the universe is gone.”

“I know. She was in just a while ago. She spilled it all on me.”

“And what did you say?”

“Christ, Jay, what could I say? I patted her on the shoulder and told her to stay in there pitching.”

“But if she’s right, there’d be something beyond the end of the universe. There’d still be eternity. Maybe still infinity. Two constants. And room for something else to happen.”

“You’re getting me in beyond my depth, Jay.”

“Maybe I’m beyond my depth, too. But it’s a new approach. Maybe it can be handled. Tell Russell and Brown, when they start hassling you again, that we’re going at it from a fresh angle.”

Thomas sat a long time at the desk after Martin had left.

Last night, he thought, Allen had been no help when he’d talked with him. All the same old platitudes: don’t worry, sit on it, hang in there tight, make a decision only when you have to. And this afternoon he, himself, had been no help when Jay and Mary Kay had sat across the desk from him. Stay in there pitching, he’d told Mary Kay.

These are special people, he had told Allen. He had been right, of course. They were special, but how special? How far beyond the ordinary run of mankind? Dime store clerks and car hops and raw farm boys. But what happened to them when they ventured out among the stars and made contacts with the intelligences who dwelt on planets orbiting distant suns? Allen had said, or had it been he? That all that came through from the star-flung party line was not recorded in the memory banks—the pain, the sorrow, the doubt, the hope, the fear, the prejudices, the biases, and what else? Something beyond all human experience? Something that was soaked up, that was absorbed into the fiber and the fabric of the human telepaths who listened, who chatted and gossiped with their neighbors strung across the galaxies. A factor, or factors, that made them slightly more than human or, perhaps, a great deal more than human.