The Last Starship From Earth (2 page)

As the car dipped into a grove and the long shadows of the redwoods flicked their latticework beneath him, Haldane savored the bittersweetness of farewell. He was twenty, and it was twilight, and he had said ‘good-by’ forever to a girl who had come to him as a Deirdre had come to Irishmen of old, in such beauty and with such grace that flowers had leaned toward her as she walked. Then she had left him, and the winds of September rustling past his speeding car sang ballads of times when men had walked the earth as kings, of times three hundred years removed from this year of Our Lord… His red warning light snapped him out of the reverie.

They were always working on those magnetic bands, tearing them out and laying them back in. Well, he consoled himself, as he took the wheel for manual steering, he could use a little exercise.

When Haldane entered the room he shared with Malcolm VI, his roommate was working at his desk with a row of figures projecting a probability curve for the occurrence of blue-beaked parakeets over a given number of generations and commencing with a given number of progenitors.

“Hey, Malcolm, guess what!”

“What?”

“I met a lady on Point Sur, full beautiful, a fairie child. Her stride was long, and her eyes were bright, and her words were wild. She was a poet. Ever meet that category?”

“There’s a clutch of them over at the Golden Gate. Fell in with a brood, once, whilst on a mild drunk along the Barbary Coast. Listening to their talk is quaffing beakers of moonshine. By the holy feedback, they’re weird sisters, pale brothers, all.”

“This one was vive la different.”

Haldane threw himself on his bunk, rolled to his back, and cupped his head in his clasped palms. “Yea, holy brother, her field is primitive poetry, and she’s picked up a lot of information that wasn’t in that history book I read.

“When she quotes that love poetry, you can hear the old dulcimers melting them pleasure domes of ice, and damsels start wailing for demon lovers.”

“Sounds like she’s doing research for Belle’s Place.”

“With her, it’s antiquarianism, so it’s legal. Say, did you know our boy, Fairweather, wrote a poem?”

“Do you jest?”

“I jest not.”

“By the overheated tubes of the pope, Haldane, I think you’re touched. You’d better take a quick trip down to Belle’s and purge yourself of subversive thoughts. Besides, I’m in need of assistance.”

“You still on that chromosome chart?”

“Yes.”

Haldane rose, walked over, and looked down at the equations Malcolm had scrawled beside the chart and then at the chart. Various lines of symbols diverged from a base, and at intervals along the lines a blue
X
marked the occurrence of blue-beaked parakeets. A few of the symbols were circled with
O
and the line stopped.

In Denver, Washington, Atlanta, geneticists worked over such charts, but for a far different purpose than that inherent in Malcolm’s exercise. Once Haldane had taken an elective in genetics and had seen the human charts on professional dynasties. Occasionally there would be blank areas where no births occurred, and, infrequently, the blank areas followed a red
X
with the notation
S.O.S
.—Sterilized by Order of the State.

Looking down at Malcolm’s chart, Haldane did not think of these things, but they were a part of his memory. What he thought, he voiced. “Talk about poets talking moonshine! You’ve been given a problem with the answer inherent in the proposition. Don’t figure it step by step. Just solve for the blue
X
, and let the rest follow… this way…”

“But I’m supposed to kill off random samplings of parakeets, at least one dead for every twenty. What happens if an eagle swoops down and eats this parakeet here?”

“That’s your choice. You’re the eagle. But remember, a blank means a crumpled little mass of feathers that will wing no more through the golden sunlight.”

Malcolm looked up at his roommate. “You’d better go down there, boy. One afternoon with a poet and you have subconsciously considered dalliance outside your category which is miscegenation; you’ve implicitly questioned the policies of the state, which is deviationism; and you’ve made light of your own profession which reflects on your
esprit de corps
.”

“Instead of advice,” Haldane suggested, “why don’t you put your talents to figuring the statistical possibilities of two persons meeting twice by accident in a city of eight million people?”

“Take your problems to the pope.”

“What a wonderful world you live in, Malcolm, where every problem can be solved by the pope or a prostitute.”

Malcolm jutted his second finger up from his palm.

Haldane walked out onto the balcony and looked across the bay where the glow of San Francisco was growing brighter in the deepening dusk. Mentally he lined his sight on the campus of Golden Gate University.

She would be at her desk now, in her dormitory room, bent over a book, her left arm crooked around it, and the light from her desk lamp would glow on the down of her arms. She would have been to the shower and be clean-smelling of soap with the highlights glinting in her hair.

Suddenly it occurred to Haldane that he was thinking in imagery. No doubt poets thought like this, because, for a moment, more than his brain had been involved. For a moment he had smelled the fragrance of her hair, and he had felt again that peculiar upsurge of pleasure which he had gained from her company.

Helix would be happy to know that he could think like a poet, but she never would know.

If he wished, he could pull his telephone from his pocket, dial her genetic number, and bounce his words and image directly to her. He even had a reason for calling, to check the Dewey decimal reference to a volume by Sir Lancelot.

Her answer would come in precise, measured tones giving him the number and a choice of titles. And that would be the end of Haldane IV, for sure.

She would know beyond cavil that his question was a blind thrown over his primitive yearnings, for that girl studied atavism as a prerequisite to Limerick-writing I.

A casual conversation with a boy on a sunny afternoon was no more than a slight pleasantry, but a second conversation, deliberately sought, would indicate danger. Their meeting would have to seem an accident so natural that her defenses would not be alerted.

He did not know at what point his thoughts resolved into a decision, but he knew that he had made it, despite the peril. The reward was worth the risk.

Out across the bay a sprite of a lass was poring over tomes of old romance. He would cloak his eighteenth-century romanticism under a patina of twentieth-century social realism and come a-calling. He might have to memorize a few poems to create the right atmosphere, but with his memory it should be no problem. Little did the lass know that soon, very soon, romance would be incarnate in her life, that the gossamer, many-hued fabric of her dreaming would be given solid substance by the magic wand of Haldane IV.

At Berkeley, four years before, a student professional in mathematics had brought about the ruin of a home economics major. Both had been S.O.S.-ed and declassed, and the mathematician had gone on to become famous as a quarterback for the Forty-niners. In campus slang, it would never be said of Haldane IV that he was “quarterbacking for the Forty-niners.” But there was a risk, and standing on the balcony, he accepted it.

As a whisper in his memory, lines she had quoted came back to him, and he voiced them, slightly altered, into the deepening night.

The church and state can go to hell

And I’ll go to my Helix.

During the following school week, Haldane plotted his second meeting with the girl on graph paper, using only variables, and he cursed a field of study which led a student to art lectures, concerts, recitals, and museums, and into low cafés and bars in San Francisco. Where to search was the easiest of his three problems, but surveying that one area convinced him that people were taking this art stuff too seriously.

Because the Golden Gate University was there, his base of operations would have to be in San Francisco. That meant he would have to work out of the ancestral apartment, because he couldn’t afford to rent a room for weekends without asking his father for help. His father presented problems enough as it was: the old man was a member of the Department of Mathematics, as such he was an officer of the state, and his natural, unaroused suspicions would demand a verbal adroitness from Haldane easily equal to his mathematical talents.

He would need a solid reason to explain his association with art students to his father and his friends.

Science majors regarded the arty crowd as strictly back-of-the-bus society. Writers flaunted tams, painters wore tunics an inch longer than standard, and the musicians never moved their lips when they talked. All of them affected long-handled, water-cooled cigarette holders, and when they smoked they flicked ashes with a swish. Despite public acceptance of their product, they were socially relegated to a few cheap bars and cafés around San Francisco, to Southern California, and to France.

No mathematician would sully his thinking with the privately defined symbols they used in conversations which were designed not for communication but for “expression.” In his brief encounters with those people, Haldane had never before in the history of his social relations heard so many say so much about so little.

Personally, he tolerated them as long as they kept in their place. Their lank-haired frails slunk along instead of walking and were, with the overpowering exception of Helix, as hipless as the males were shoulderless.

Haldane avoided making generalities about groups, but generalities could be made: colored peoples were usually colored, Fiji Islanders ate less blubber than Eskimos, and mathematicians were more precise thinkers than artists.

Yet, his feelings toward them were not entirely condemnatory. They testified to the variety and versatility of life forms on the planet, and as such they were a tribute to the magnanimity of the Creator.

Haldane’s father, a statistician, was not so liberal. In fact, he was bigoted. He felt that all nonmathematicians were second-class citizens, and he refused to integrate. His attitude amused Haldane, a theoretical mathematician who considered statisticians on a par with hod-carriers, but this statistician was a department member whose spoken command had the force of law. He would be perturbed by his son’s attending art lectures. His perturbation would be in extremis if he suspected his son intended to commit miscegenation, and with an art female.

Sooner or later, Haldane would have to give the reason. The old man was inquisitive, argumentative, and dictatorial. Worse, he was an inveterate chess player. Haldane had begun to beat him consistently when he was sixteen, and the psychic trauma resulting had left his father convinced that his defeats—and he lost ninety per cent of the time—were flukes.

Haldane III would hardly be impressed by his son’s presence on week-ends; he would be suspicious. Haldane averaged a week-end a month at home, and some months he forgot. His attitude toward his father had always been one of detached affection that was more affectionate the more detached it was.

Then, his meeting with the girl after he found her would have to be casual and easily explained. If she suspected him, she would be off like a starship in overdrive. After ingratiating himself, he would need a room to take her to in a most casual and logical manner without seeming to lure her. Thereafter, the Haldane charm would become the vehicle of dalliance.

Luck guided him to a trysting place.

Malcolm’s parents owned an apartment in San Francisco. They had left four months ago for a year’s trip to New Zealand to teach Maori priests theological cybernetics for their papal communiques. Haldane knew about the apartment, for Malcolm went over occasionally to check it and dust the furniture. Haldane would have never taken his roommate into his confidence and asked for the key. Basically, he didn’t trust Malcolm. Malcolm didn’t smoke, drank very little, and went to church regularly.

On Thursday, Malcolm entered the room waving a paper. “Haldane, I have failed to flunk. Thank you, mattress master.”

Haldane, from flat on his back, recognized the chart on blue-beaked parakeets and could see it was marked with a
B
+.

He was irked. “Why was it marked down from
A
?”

“The prof graded it and penalized me for lack of neatness.”

“He shouldn’t use subjective criteria for an objective test.”

“He figured it was subjective, since I was the eagle, so he didn’t run it through the grading machine… When I ate the parakeet, some of the feathers dropped on my plate.”

Out of the talent of Haldane, sired by his long contemplation, the colt of inspiration was foaled at a full gallop.

“You know, Malcolm, if Fairweather I could reduce moral laws to mathematical equivalents and store them in a memory bank to create the pope, why couldn’t I break down the components of a sentence, give each unit a mathematical weight, and design a machine for scanning and grading written essays?”

Malcolm thought a moment.

“For you, I think it would be a simple task except for two reasons: you’re not a grammarian, and you’re not Fairweather.”

“Yes, and I don’t know anything about literature, but I read fast.”

“What you propose is beyond the limit of things ascertainable. If I recall correctly, and I don’t have a photographic memory, Fairweather I had 312 gradations of the meaning of a single term, murder, ranging all the way from murder for profit to state euthanasia for undesirable proletarians. You would have to analyze every figure of speech in the language.”

“He didn’t analyze every gradation,” Haldane objected. “He took two extremes and worked toward the middle.”

“I wouldn’t know that.”

“Listen, this idea might be a contribution!” He got up and paced the room, partly for dramatic affect and partly from genuine enthusiasm. “I can see the title page of the publication, now. There it is, in 14-point Bodoni bold: A MATHEMATICAL EVALUATION OF AESTHETIC FACTORS IN LITERATURE, by Haldane IV… No, I’ll use Garamond.”