The Last Starship From Earth (4 page)

He did not go to the Fairweather lecture.

On Wednesday, he was dining in the student union when he saw a notice in the school paper. A Professor Moran was giving a lecture on the Golden Gate campus Friday evening on eighteenth-century romantic poetry. When he saw the item, he couldn’t finish his meal, but got up and walked out. If Helix didn’t go to this lecture, she’d never go to another on this earth.

On his way home he realized he had a weakness which could betray him—his nerves. He had geared himself to such a high pitch of expectancy that he might break.

He could see himself meeting her. But instead of a look of pleased surprise spreading over his face, he fell to the floor and crawled toward her, clutching her ankles and moaning hysterically in his relief and joy.

Regally she gazed down on the fallen lad in shock and disdain, kicked her ankles free, and walked over and away from him, forever.

He smiled at his own imagery as he climbed the stairs, but an insight gave his thoughts a graver tone. His immersion into literature had given an emotional cast and color to his thoughts. Strangely, the world seemed more vivid.

Haldane’s father was disappointed when Haldane told him that he could not go with him to the Greystone lecture. Seeing the disappointment on his father’s face, Haldane felt remorse.

“I’m sorry, Dad, but I can’t bring myself to miss the lecture on the romantic period. It falls exactly into the time period I’ve chosen to demonstrate my mathematical analysis of literary styles. Anyway, the Fairweather lecture is too advanced for a sophomore. In my sixth year, I’ll be up to my ears in Fairweather Mechanics, and if you can pick up a transcript of the lecture for my reserve notes, I’d appreciate it. This poetry reading has a valid relevance to my present purpose, and a beginner in literature can gain more from hearing verse than from reading it.”

His father shook his head. “I don’t know, son. Maybe what you are doing has value. You fooled me on the sedimentation theory, and you may fool me on this. Go. Your mind is made up. You’re a Haldane, and nothing I can do can change it.”

He came early to the lecture hall and seated himself on a back row to study the faces of arrivals. As he had surmised, fully eighty per cent of the students in attendance were A-7s, and practically all the full professionals, though without insignia, had the A-7 look, a preoccupied dreaminess; and long-handled cigarette holders were standard equipment for the smokers.

Most of the students came in clusters to the seats, and after the house lights had dimmed, there was an inrush of students from the lobby. He had not spotted Helix, but the bulk of the students came after the lights were dimmed and he was confident that she was among the shadowy figures.

When the light at the lectern came on and the lecturer walked out from the wings, Haldane turned his entire attention to the speaker, a diminutive, bald-headed man in his late sixties with ears that jutted from his head. He leaned back from the lectern and spoke with a voice surprisingly powerful for so small a man.

“My name is Moran. I’m a professor here. My field and my subject for tonight, is the romantic poets of England. As for myself, in the dim past my people came from Ireland. Our family history says that we were barred from the priesthood because a leprechaun got into the Moran cabbage patch. Do you believe that?”

The audience laughed agreement.

“So much for me. Now, for the poets. I will name them and let them speak for themselves.”

Moran did precisely what he said he would.

His readings, delivered in a clear, compelling voice, went beyond meanings and grasped moods and emotions in the lines. Haldane knew from the opening sentence of the first poem that the professor had him hooked.

Moran’s recitation leaped ravines no theory of aesthetics could ever bridge. Helix, in all her beauty and with all her enthusiasm, was only dawn’s glow compared to this man’s full sunrise.

Haldane heard the roar of the River Alph tumbling to a sunless sea, and he knew whom Coleridge had in mind when he wrote:

Weave a circle round him thrice

And close his eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the Milk of Paradise.

Lord Byron spoke to him personally.

He had thought himself fortunate that Keats had died young. In the darkened auditorium, he mourned, now, the death of a poet who could speak with such poignancy and describe with such sweet exactitude “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

Shelley sang to him. Wordsworth comforted him. His heart danced to the skirling Scottish pipes of Burns.

When the house lights went on and the crowd rose to leave, the mood lingered. There was no hum of voices and no applause. Haldane moved quickly to the lobby to await the exit of Helix.

Eyes that caught his own returned his gaze with gentle sadness, but the eyes of Helix were not among them.

He turned and walked out of the lobby and down the mall into the crisp evening, his feet crunching softly on the fallen leaves. He paused for a moment at the fountain near the center of the campus and said softly to himself:

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering

Though sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

He drew his cloak more tightly around him against the chill and turned the collar up, noticing his shadow sprawled over the granite flagstones surrounding the fountain.

It was a Byronesque shadow, and well it should be. He was one with Byron, with Keats, with Shelley. He had come to find his beloved and had found, instead, the living loves of dead men; yet he was alone.

Earth weary, companioned by poignancy, he turned and walked over the sere grass and beneath the stark limbs of trees that whispered in the winds of late November. He was a ghost drifting among ghosts, for he was no longer Haldane IV of the twentieth century. Helix had introduced him, and Moran had wedded him, to the immortal dead. Only his body trudged this desolate heath; his soul danced a minuet in an eighteenth-century drawing room.

He found his car and drove back to the apartment.

His father had not arrived. Remembering the disappointment he had caused the old man, Haldane went to the bureau and removed the chess pieces, setting them up for a game.

Greystone wasn’t one to talk forever. His father should be in early enough for a game. Haldane, in a spirit of repentance, knew in advance that his father would win tonight.

Haldane III entered, bringing the chill on his overcoat and rubbing his hands together. His eyes lighted when he saw the chess board. “Ready for a beating?”

“Ready to give you one.”

“Good. How was your lecture?”

“So-so,” Haldane said. “How was yours?”

“Excellent. I’ve got the Fairweather Effect down pat. How about mixing me a drink while I make room for it.”

Haldane went to the bar and poured two drinks.

His father, divested of his coat, returned and pulled up a chair to the chess table. “So, your lecture was only fair. Mine was good, very good.”

Well into the game, Haldane sat silent and moody until his father remarked, “I can’t understand why you young people all want to jump your categories.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was an art student at the lecture tonight. A girl. They introduced me as an honored guest before the lecture, and she came over and introduced herself. We sat and talked for quite a while, and she listened to me. More than I can say for my son.”

“Uh-huh. What’d she look like?… Check.”

“What difference does it make? A female’s a female.”

“I was just wondering if my old man still had an eye for a frail.”

“As you have often had the kindness to point out, son, I’m not too observant. But, as I remember, this girl had chestnut hair, hazel eyes, a rather broad face, and a determined chin. Her nose tilted slightly. Her breasts were high and wide apart. She walked with a slight sway to her hips that would have doubled her income if she had been a prostitute.”

He looked over at his son with a half-grin. “Do you want me to tell you about the mole under her left breast and the appendix scar about four inches below her navel?”

Haldane looked at him seriously, “Father, I’ve never before truly gauged the extent of your satyriasis.”

“She had beauty, a strange beauty. It seemed to be a quality of the mind as much as the body, and as I talked to her I had the impression I was talking to a much older woman. She was writing a paper on the poetry of Fairweather, and I told her about you.”

“She must have made an impression if you were willing to clank out the family skeleton.”

“She did. I invited her to dinner tomorrow night. She doesn’t have far to come. She’s a student at Golden Gate. I told her I would try to get you to join us if you weren’t away at some poetry lecture.”

“I’ll try to make it,” Haldane said.

She glittered as coldly as the Northern Lights, and the eyes which laughed for his father turned on him with immaculate propriety. “If your machine should work, citizen, all you would need do would be to reverse the input, and you would have an electronic poet. Such a device would destroy my category.

“Logically, the next step would be machines to create machines, and there would be no social need for human beings. Don’t you agree, sir?”

“Absolutely, Helix. I told him it was a foolish idea.”

Haldane had never found his father more quick to agree, had never seen him more charming or animated. The light from the old man’s eyes practically illuminated the table. Outflanked, Haldane withdrew into dessert and silence as his father launched a monologue.

“You’ve touched on an idea that we in the department have already taken under consideration, the inadvisability of removing the human element entirely from the manipulation of machinery. Once, an invention came before the board for review…”

Haldane noted the phrase, “we in the department.” His father was preening. Ordinarily he said merely “the department.”

When they were introduced in the living room, she had said, “Citizen, your father tells me you are interested in poetry.”

“Only by association.”

“One would expect you to attend only mathematics lectures.”

He had entered the dining room with a singing heart and his faith in the law of averages restored. She had been seeking him at the mathematics lectures while he was seeking her.

Now, as his father talked, Haldane’s thoughts vibrated between mathematics and analytics. She had about her a quality of freshness, half aetherial, half of earth, which reminded him of spring grass rising between patches of melting snow, and the vivacity of her thoughts were caught in the nuances of her face.

She was a logical impossibility. He knew that she must have liver and lungs and a thorax that functioned as those of any girl, but the whole was greater than the parts.

He leaned over and refilled his father’s wine glass.

Haldane III diverted his attention from the girl long enough to ask, “Are you trying to get me drunk in order to impress our guest with your wit and brilliance while I sleep?”

“Would you care for water instead?”

Haldane had offered alternatives to ensure a choice. He cared little what his father drank as long as he drank.

As his father watched him pour, Helix said, “If you’re determined to be a vivisectionist of poetry, citizen, perhaps you might be interested in its birth. As a class project, I’m writing a poem about Fairweather I, and I need help in translating his mathematics into words. Your father tells me you have an understanding of his works.”

“Indeed, citizen,” Haldane answered, “rather than destroy my father’s confidence, I’ll rush into the library after the meal and write a one paragraph explanation of his Simultaneity Theorem and draw a diagram demonstrating the Fairweather Effect. The last is simple, really. He merely uses quarks to jump the time warp.”

Haldane III interrupted. “I’d like to see us mathematicians get some of the adulation given to the sociologists and psychologists, but I hardly think Fairweather would make a good subject.”

“Why, Dad?”

“Among other things, he dealt with hardware, instruments and physical phenomena. He was somewhat of a manual worker, not entirely a pure theorist I wouldn’t advise Fairweather as a subject Would you excuse me a moment. Helix?”

As his father rose to leave, Haldane made a rapid decision. Of late his research had led him to believe more and more in the validity of his mathematics of aesthetics, but he had put too much effort in his search for the girl to be thwarted by his integrity. Before Haldane III had passed through the door, Haldane IV had conquered his principles.

He leaned forward. “I’ll help you.”

“I knew you would.”

“Listen, Helix. I’ve got to talk fast Something happened to me that day on Point Sur. Ever since, I’ve felt like a charged electrode without a negative pole. I’ve been unhappy and happy about it. Am I an atavistic poet or a Neanderthal mathematician? You’re an expert. You tell me.”

Her facile face revealed gentle understanding and gleeful amazement. “You’ve fallen in love with me!”

“I haven’t fallen anywhere! I’ve soared like an acidhead skylark. Shelley, Keats, Byron, I know how they felt. I’m a nova to their street lamps I’ve got the black belt!”

“Oh, no,” she shook her head. “The primitives knew all about what you have, and they called it ‘puppy love.’ But it’s merely a symptom. If the germ incubates properly it develops into what the primitives called ‘mature companionship,’ where the male and female enjoy being together.”

“Oh, no,” Haldane demurred, thinking there were gaps in her knowledge, “I know about that, but this is in my mind. I enjoy just looking at you, and touching you.”

He reached over and took her hand. “It’s fun just to hold your hand.”

“Unhand me,” she whispered, “before your father returns.”

He complied, noticing that she could have drawn her own hand back just as easily, but she had not. He slumped back in his chair. “I wanted to tell you something about my heart being like a singing bird, but it didn’t come out that way.”