The Last Starship From Earth (19 page)

Her farewell galvanized his mind.

The deputies had thought he was in danger from the mob, but their thought had been a conditioned reflex. Was it possible that it was the deputies in danger from the mob, not he?

The more he thought of the solitary woman, the more convinced he became that the gathering of the people had been no threat to him. The woman had waved because that was all she knew how to do. In olden times, they might have thrown stones at the deputies or set up barricades to stop the cars, but such reactions had been trained out of them. A crowd could not rally to the barricades if the crowd did not know where the barricades were.

As he was processed into the prison, as his gray guards were changed to blue guards and he walked interminable corridors, he clung to the hope, as a talisman against despair, that the final, forlorn wave of the woman had been a symbol assuring him that the vision of a free people which had driven Fairweather II to Hell had not been a vision in vain.

In the next days, he needed a talisman against despair, for despair beat against his mind as the waves of an ocean, and he succumbed. In a dark midnight of the mind, he lay on a bunk for days, weeks, he did not know, aware only that he was fed intravenously.

In the final, bitter days before his departure, he heard a sound like the whisper of a sibyl come keening into his consciousness with prophecy and promise, arousing him.

He was in a large, high-ceilinged room, surrounded by a balcony where guards patroled. On the floor of the room were individual cells walled and ceilinged by bars that permitted the guards to look down on the occupants. Haldane was in a cell by himself.

Across a corridor twelve feet wide was a large cell housing several prisoners, prols he assumed. He would have ignored them except for the singing which drifted through the vastness of the prison like the keening for a dead soul.

It was a prol song accompanied by a guitar.

The despair which had almost destroyed him acted as a shock treatment, and the brain that listened to the crude singing was as receptive and as uncritical as a child awakened by bird song. The words of the song gave it a hope beyond beauty.

Let the rains come,

Let the winds blow,

Let the snow fall.

Come the frost.

But there always

Comes fair weather.

There will always

Be fair weather.

In fair weather,

I’m the boss.

Before the song ended, Haldane was on his feet, looking across the corridor at the tank. He saw a huge black man lounging on a bunk and cuddling a guitar in hands that dwarfed the instrument.

“Black man,” he yelled, “do you know what you’re singing? Do you know who Fairweather was?”

“White man, you mean what fair weather is.”

“I mean who Fairweather was!”

“Listen to the thinker. He wants to know from me who Fairweather was.”

From another tank, a voice shouted, “Why does a thinker have to ask a prol?”

“Fair weather is sunlight, white man.”

There was again laughter, scornful, derisive, as if the laughers shared a knowledge so obvious that even to ask about it was ridiculous to the point of humor.

They were a motley aggregation, ranging in size from a pale dwarf to the black giant, who must have stood seven feet. Some were marked with the yellow of Venus and some fish-pale from the mines of Pluto. If he had seen them chained together on the streets of San Francisco, he would have dismissed them as the scum of the interplanetary working force, but now they were part of his own habitat and he looked on them as individuals.

“You can tell me about Fairweather,” he called, “because I’m a felon sentenced to Hell.”

“Man, you got it rough,” the black answered him. “Us in this tank’s just got to smell a little cyanide gas.”

They dismissed him, and he sensed the logic in then: dismissal. Why share a cherished secret, if there was a secret, with a doomed man; and if the man was not doomed, then he was a spy.

That night, as the glow from the sleeping lamps blanketed the prison in a blue luminescence, he lay on his bunk staring upward when a paper glider sailed into his cell and landed beside him. He took it, smoothed it out, and moved it over into the light of his sleeping lamp.

We think he was a man like J. Christ or A. Linkun or I. W. Wobbly. Some clame to no more. My muther told me he was a good man. TARE THIS UP.

He had established contact, but his mind was troubled.

He tore the paper into shreds, and leaning close to the night lamp so the men in the cell across the corridor could see, he chewed the shreds and swallowed them.

It was obvious to him now that the fair weather song was a song about sunlight. How could it be otherwise when these men, in their illiteracy, had placed Fairweather on the same plane as I. W. Wobbly, who was not a person at all but the initials of an ancient labor union of wine-tasters. He could not blame the men, but illiterates could neither tap nor preserve their history in writing.

Thinking thus, Haldane made his peace with the world, and his peace was a disavowal. Helix was gone, his father was dead, the professionals were sheep, and the prols were insensate brutes.

God was a computing machine.

He thought that he had ceased to feel, until three days before they came to take him away. And, then, he felt with the keenest poignancy his life had ever known.

“Hey, thinker!”

It was the black, yelling across the corridor, standing near the bars with his guitar draped around his neck by a dirty thong.

“Got a new song, thinker. Felon just brought it in from the outside. You want to hear it?”

There was insolence about the Negro. His broad smile, verging on the nonsubservient, aroused Haldane’s old professional standards. “When you speak to me, pork-chopper, wipe that watermelon-eating grin off your face!”

“You can’t insult me, thinker. I’m a Mobile Black. I been worked over by all them ologists… You gonna hear it, whether you want to or not.”

The man was right. During the Starvation, when Negro flesh was considered a delicacy, the Mobile Blacks had escaped extinction by the insularity of their little island off the coast of Alabama. Afterward, anthropologists had kept the race pure, and the Mobile Blacks had been the subject of endless and derogatory monographs by social scientists.

He strummed a few bars and sang:

There was a man who loved a frail.

He knocked her up, got throwed in jail.

The judge he says, “Deny this woman.”

Man says “No, ’cause I’m a human.”

Hold up your head, poor Haldane.

Hold up your head, don’t cry.

Hold up your head, poor Haldane.

Poor boy, you’ll never die.

Before the song was over, Haldane was on his feet, clinging to the bars of the cell.

He had undersold the brutes. Their songs were their history. In one crude stanza, the balladeer had revealed his trial, and in another he had used it to keep hope alive in the minds of men.

The fair weather song was the Fairweather Song.

Three days later they came and dressed him in a gray shroud and led him down the long corridors to the loading ramp where a black car waited to carry him to the launching pad of the Hell ship.

He walked impassively, but his head was held high, and the prisoners crowded close to the bars lining the corridor.

As the crowds had stood along Market Street, they stood and watched woodenly as he was led away, but their lips were moving, almost invisibly, and their voices joined in the final chorus of the words a felon had composed to the tune of an old song which Helix had sang to him once, on a long ago day of sunlight, under the name of “Tom Dooley.”

It was easy to hold up his head. The second task came harder.

Officially, Haldane IV was a corpse.

He was unconscious when the Gray Brothers earned him aboard the Styx on a litter. In the food or water he had taken, he had been given a drug to slow the Me processes of his body.

So he did not see the line of cowled figures carrying their burdens up the long ramp and chanting liturgies for the dead. He did not hear the ports clang shut or the beginning whine of the rockets. He felt neither the initially slow ascension nor the final whiplash of motion as toe great ship tore itself from the pull of the earth, and he did not feel the slight jolt as the rockets were dropped and the laser jets took over, booting the ship with a soundless clang into the iron grooves of space.

Silent, bodiless, immune from the hurtling detritus of space, they moved into a realm where all light, save the light inside the ship, vanished as sound vanishes to ears above Mach 1. They were light, riding a wave of simultaneity that would have sent them hurtling through the core of the sun unscathed.

For three earth months, Haldane slept, and every minute on the ship’s clocks reversed a day on earth.

He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up at the coarse-browed, heavy features of a spaceman whose unsmiling face was illuminated by a battle lamp attached to the bulkhead.

“Wake up, corpse. Wriggle your arms and legs, like a beetle on its back That’s right Got to give you a little pill, a little oxygen booster.”

He had been unstrapped from a bunk in a cell, and all he could see in the pale light, besides the face of the spaceman, was a ladder leading upward through the metal overhead.

He went through the motions suggested and felt his muscles respond with a strength and resilience that surprised him.

“Enough,” the man said. “You can sit up.”

“How long we been away?”

“About three months, our time. Here, take this.”

Haldane accepted the proffered tube of water and pill, remembering there were only two starships. There was a fifty-fifty chance that this man had been on the ship taking Fairweather to Hell.

“Tell me,” Haldane asked. “Do you remember a corpse called Fairweather who rode these ships?”

“Everybody on board knew him. Back then, we didn’t put them to sleep. They rode awake, all the way. He and the other corpses messed with the crew.

“Lord bless me, I never could figure out why they kicked that man off the earth. He was the most gentle person I ever met. If a fly had landed on his plate, he wouldn’t have brushed it off. Like as not, he’d have just said, ‘Let it eat. It’s hungry too.’ But his wasn’t a weak gentleness. He was strong.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall, skinny, auburn-haired. He didn’t look like much but when he got to talking, people listened. But I’m not saying he talked a lot. He didn’t. We liked him as much for his silence, I reckon, as for his talk.”

The spaceman paused for a moment. “Funny thing, you know. You ask me about a man, and I’ll say, ’Old Joe’s a good old boy. He hits the bottle a little hard and shoots off at the mouth, but he’ll give you his last dollar.’ That kind of answer pretty well tells you about old Joe, but you can’t do that with Fairweather.”

“Try for me, will you?” Haldane pleaded. “It’s important.”

It was important. Haldane felt—suddenly as a worshiper of Jesus might feel on meeting an apostle, and he was burning with an eagerness for the unrecorded details.

“I’ll try, but you’ll be going back to sleep pretty soon.”

“Did he laugh?” Haldane offered a hook for the man to hang his memory on.

“He smiled a lot, but I never heard him laugh. It wasn’t his smile, though. It was those silences and the way he talked when he did talk. He would think about what he was going to say before he said it, so that when he said something, it seemed significant.

“Not that he lectured us, mind you. God knows he could have. He seemed to know more about the history of earth than any man I ever talked to, but he wasn’t stuck-up about it.

“I guess he was sad. Sometimes there’d come a look in his eyes that made you want to walk over and pat him on the head, but he never complained.

“He wasn’t prissy, either. Sometimes he’d say dirty things that managed not to be dirty at all when you thought about what he’d said. Once I remember him telling me, ‘Sam, in that aborted crotch of yours are seeds of a better generation than you’ll be getting.’

“That sounds dirty, but looking at the younger generation, I think I see what he meant.

“I remember once when I had the watch on the navigator’s bridge, he came in and talked to me. He asked about the instruments, how you read them, and whether I liked being a spaceman or not. I told him anybody would enjoy being a hero, and then he said something I’ve always remembered, and he said it in sort of an offhand way, like he wasn’t even thinking about it. ‘It won’t be roses, roses all the way. I fear you’re seeing the last of the roses.’

“You know, he was right! We get three days on earth after each trip, and for most of us it’s two days too many. It doesn’t make a man feel good to go into a bar and have the fellow on the next stool move down three or four places.

“But you want to hear about Fairweather.

“He had a way of listening. You’d sit and talk with him, and he’d fix you with those young-old eyes of his, and next thing you’d be telling him everything ever happened to you. He’d make an engine room mech seem as important as. the captain.

“Reserved, I reckon you’d call him, but he had a lot in reserve, understanding, sympathy, maybe you’d call it love.

“It was like—” The spaceman was groping for words, and Haldane wanted to yell to him to hurry because the fog was drifting in, and his voice was fading. Haldane hung on to wakefulness long enough to hear, “—having Jesus riding the forecastle.”

When Haldane awakened the second time, there was a different voice in his ears, shouting down through the hatchway, “Rise and shine, corpse. Rise and shine. Shake a leg. Up the ladder, and stand by the passageway.”

Slowly, fighting the receding waves of sleep, Haldane sat up. Someone had loosened his belt, and he felt the pull of centrifugal force holding him to the bunk.

With the light in his eyes from above and the voice urging him on, he crawled out of the bunk and scrambled up the ladder.