The Last Starship From Earth (3 page)

He wheeled and pounded his fist into his palm. “Think what this could mean. Literature professors wouldn’t have to grade essays, just stick them in the old slot.”

Malcolm, seated on the edge of his bed, looked up at Haldane with genuine concern. “Haldane, there’s something frightening about you. A vagrant thought passes your mind, and, wham, it’s an obsession.

“By the infallible transistors of the pope, I swear you’re touched with madness. Methinks you’d disinter the bones of Shakespeare, reflesh them once again, and lead them through a new quadrille.”

Haldane was impressed by his name dropping. “You seem to know something about literature yourself.”

“Indeed. My mother was the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of a minnesinger. I wanted to be a wandering minstrel, but my father was a mathematician.”

“If I follow this idea up,” Haldane said, as if he were concentrating aloud, “I’ll have to spend my week-ends in San Francisco, at literary lectures. Dad will be a problem with his chess games. If only I had a place to be alone for a few hours.”

“You could use Ma and Pa’s apartment, if you’d dust it.”

“Dust it! I’d mop it.”

“It mops itself. It’s the
objets d’art
in the living room that the carriers of my genes wish protected.”

He walked over to his desk, pulled out a key, and handed it to Haldane who took it with feigned casualness.

Haldane III was grudgingly pleased that his son had decided to come home for week-ends. In the beginning, he asked no questions and Haldane volunteered no information. Sooner or later, the questions would come, Haldane knew, and it would make his actions seem more authentic if his father had to wheedle the information out of him.

He visited the quarters of Malcolm’s parents, a four-room apartment eight floors up with a view of the bay, and he memorized the movable contents of the living room using a crude mnemonics system. If the brocaded tiger on the backrest of the divan were to lunge three feet forward, it would strike the nose of an elongated roebuck, a lamp base, carved from wood.

With heavy furniture he did not concern himself. A policeman planting a microphone in the room wouldn’t take the effort to move it.

He thought the apartment ornate, but the view of the bay from its wide front window compensated for its flamboyance. After he completed his check, he stood idly gazing out on Alcatraz and the lulls beyond when a line from something she had said popped into his mind: “What mad pursuit? What pipes and timbrels?”

A very good question. What mad pursuit had led him here? What mystic pipes and timbrels had he heard to lure him on? It was not normal for a worldly lad of twenty to make such elaborate plans to experience what could only be a minor variation, at best, on an old and familiar theme.

Then the image of the girl’s face returned to his memory and he saw, again, the shadow of sadness behind the laughter in her eyes, heard her voice weaving around him the charms which had enchained him with their visions of other worlds and other times. Her memory triggered anew that chemical reaction in the blood which had confounded him, and he knew what pipes were calling… He heard, and he would follow, tripping lightly on his goat hoofs, the irresistible keening of the pipes of Pan.

Two sorties the first week-end, a lecture on modern art at the civic center and a students’ presentation of Oedipus Rex on the Golden Gate campus, produced only three typical A-7s. He was not disappointed. He was merely sniffing around to pick up the scent and not expecting to break the law of averages.

Back on campus, he squeezed every minute from his schedule to spend in the library reading the poetry and prose of the eighteenth century. He read rapidly with pinpoint concentration. Concepts fecundated in his mind like larvae in a fen, and one of the concepts on the periphery of his mire was the fear that he had undertaken to level Mount Everest with a spade.

John Keats died at 26, and that was the happiest event that ever occurred in the life of Haldane IV. If the poet had lived five more years, his works and the works written about his works would have meant two more libraries for Haldane to plow through.

To confound his confusion, he could not distinguish between the major works of minor poets and the minor works of major poets. As a result, he became the only undergraduate, internationally, who could quote long passages from Robert Browning’s
The Ring and the Book
. Unknowingly, he was the world’s exclusive authority on the works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. He had Felicia Dorothea Hemans down cold.

Long hours of boredom were relieved by minutes of hair-pulling as he attempted to grasp hidden meanings behind curtains of unintelligible phrases.

In San Francisco, he was equally frustrated. Week moved into week with no trace of the girl. His father, who eventually wheedled from him his cover story, so little respected his son’s activities that he resented their incursions into his chess games.

After six weeks, Haldane no longer needed the vision of that unworldly beauty to spur him on. He had become intrigued by the girl’s ability to break the law of averages. She was performing statistical legerdemain.

On campus, he tore great chunks from the body of English Lit. with a monomania which deprived him of workouts at the gym, social intercourse with students, or dalliance at Belle’s Place. Volume after volume fell behind him as husks behind the champion at a corn-husking. Librarians came to hold him in such awe that they gave him the private cubicle of a professor on sabbatical lest the rustle of paper by other students distract his fantastic concentration.

Finally, sodden with Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, with Felicia Dorothea Hemans oozing out of his pores, he collapsed across December 31, 1799, a long-distance runner making his final lunge at the tape. It was mid-afternoon on Friday when he closed his last book and stumbled out of the library into the wan sunlight of November.

He was vaguely surprised that it was November. October was his favorite month. Somewhere between Byron and Coleridge, he had lost October.

Bone tired, he drove home with a body that begged for rest, but the brain had scheduled a student concert at Golden Gate, and the body yielded. After checking 562 type A students, he found no Helix, but he stayed for the concert because his knowledge of music was weak. He discovered that Bach was somewhat easier to sleep by than Mozart.

On Saturday afternoon, he beat his father swiftly in three straight games of chess. During the fourth game, which the old man had acrimoniously insisted on and which Haldane had to win rapidly in order to get to a chamber-music recital he had planned, Haldane III looked up at his son and said, “How are your grades coming at school?”

“I’m still in the upper ten percent.”

“You don’t work at it.”

“I don’t have to. I inherited a splendid mind.”

“You’d better start thinking about applying it. Mathematics is a broad field, and to get across it you have to work fast.”

Haldane could sense a lecture paragraphs away, and he didn’t particularly care for parental advice, particularly not in his present state of mental fatigue. Deliberately, he diverted the lecture by inviting an argument. “I don’t think the field’s so broad.”

“My god, what arrogance!”

“I don’t. Dad. Fairweather made the ultimate breakthrough when he jumped the time warp; mathematicians have merely been polishing the pieces. I’ll prophesy that the next breakthrough in human progress will be by the psychologists.”

Lightning flickered in the old man’s eyes. “Psychologists! They don’t even work with measurable phenomena.”

Without being aware of his destination, Haldane launched himself into a sea of theory.

“It’s not always the measurable phenomena that counts. From the point of view of their literature, our ancestors seem to have done nothing but fight; yet they had something we have lost, the spirit to operate as individuals. They went out and met challenges without relying on directives from sixteen different committees. That aynrandistic independence of action was smothered under the Dewey-influenced reign of Soc Henry VIII, that antihomopapal, mechanodeistic, category-beheader!”

“If you’re deriding a state hero, watch your language, boy!”

“O.K., I withdraw the nominative modifiers. But, face it. Dad. On this best of all possible planets with the best of all possible social systems, we have nowhere to go but inward, and any renaissance of spirit will be an implosion triggered under the jurisdiction of the Department of Psychology.”

Haldane III, the chess game forgotten, roared into battle.

“I tell you, you would-be grammarian, if the Department of Psychology ever develops anything, it’ll be through an implant from the Department of Mathematics. Fairweather didn’t know cold on Hell about theology, but he moved into Church and built a truly infallible pope which put an end to mealy-mouthed bulls and submontane temporizing.”

“Yes, look at Fairweather,” Haldane counterattacked. “He gave us the starships, and what happened? A few ships lost on the first probes, or maybe they just kept going, a few crewmen returning with space madness, and the triumvirate calls off the probes. We’re socked in by Soc and psyched out by Psych!

“Where are those ships today? Two left, with their skeleton crews, and both are Hell ships. We’ve got the stars, and we haven’t got the guts to unwrap the package. Now, what contributions can a mathematician make?”

Taken aback by the explosive sincerity of his son, Haldane III dropped to a key of disgruntled sarcasm. “If you spent half as much time in the lab as you do in those art palaces, you might be able to make some contribution other than that inane sedimentation theory which should never have been accepted.”

Gently, Haldane asked, “Dad, did you have a contribution on your record before you were twenty?”

“You whelp,” his father said, paternal pride diluting his anger, “I’ve forgotten more math than you’ll ever know. Your move.”

Haldane glanced at his watch. Time was running short. He had to get ready for the recital, so he beat his father in four moves.

“Want to play another?” Haldane III asked. “We could make a little bet on the side.”

Their side bets were drinks, with the loser mixing and serving.

“Nothing doing, dad. I’m a chess player, not a sadist. But I’ll mix you one.”

It was more than a drink, it was a peace offering, and his father accepted it.

As Haldane mixed the drink, his father, who was storing the chess pieces, said to him, “Talking about Fairweather I, Greystone’s coming out next Saturday to lecture on the Fairweather Effect at the Civic Auditorium. Want to come along?”

“Sounds interesting,” Haldane said, squeezing a lime.

It was interesting. Greystone was Secretary of the Department of Mathematics and was reputedly one of the few mathematicians who understood the Simultaneity Theorem on which the starships operated. Also, he had a genius for simplifying concepts.

“I might go along.”

“This is not for publication, but I called Washington, yesterday, and talked to Greystone. He thinks he can get the alternate navigator for the ‘Styx’ and the ‘Charon’ to come along with him.”

Haldane set the drink on the table in front of his father and said, “If he can get one of those surly freaks to say anything, it’ll be a wonder.”

“Greystone can if anyone can.”

Despite his conventional remark about the spaceman, Haldane had a secret respect for the breed. From the original crews that manned the space probes over a hundred years ago, those who survived were the toughest of the tough.

On television he had often watched them arrive on the prison ships from Hell, surly, taciturn, the closest thing on earth to immortals because they aged only a few months, earth time, in each century. Broad-shouldered, heavy, more solidly built than their descendants, they were held to earth less by their own desire, Haldane sensed, than by the umbilical cord of their supply line.

“I’d like to go to the lecture,” Haldane said, “if something more important doesn’t come up.”

“What could be more important than a lecture by Greystone on Fairweather I?”

“Look, dad,” Haldane laid a casual arm across his father’s shoulder, “if you want me to go along as an interpreter, then say so. But I tell you now that understanding Fairweather is less a matter of knowledge than of intuition.”

“Instruct me, expert!”

Haldane went to the chamber-music recital that evening without much hope of seeing Helix, and he didn’t. From the primitive jam session he drove to a coffee house which poets frequented, the Mermaid Tavern.

There were a few A-7 students present, and he fell in with them. His coat concealed his tunic, and in the dim glow of the table lamps they mistook him for one of them.

One mentioned Browning, and he awed them by quoting at length from
The Ring and the Book
.

With their hands moving to accent their words, twisting their torsos forward to listen, squirming upright or sideways in affirmation or rebuttal, they reminded him of silverfish slithering around in some damp, dark corner. Yet their enthusiasm for a remembered phrase, quoted at times in the language of the writer, struck him with an impact similar to that he remembered when he had sat with Helix at Point Sur.

His disguise was ripped when one of them asked what he thought of the latest translation of Maria Rilke from the German.

With a fluting intonation, he answered, “I adore
her
in German, but Maria, in English, is blah!”

His questioner turned to a companion. “Did you hear the man, Philip? He adores her in German.”

“What are you, fellow? A police pigeon?”

“Maybe he’s a soc major out researching the peasantry.”

Haldane dropped the fluting, “When you call me a sociologist, boy bard, smile!”

“Move it, fellow, before we move it for you.”

He could have taken any three of them at one time, but there were five of them. He moved it. He didn’t want a dean’s reprimand at this stage.

Driving back to Berkeley, he was perplexed. In his two and a half months of searching for Helix, he had visited and revisited the places where she should have been. Many of the A-7 students he had seen several times, but there was no Helix. Something had gone wrong with the laws of probability.