05-A Gift From Earth (25 page)

Tau Ceti is a small cool-yellow G0 dwarf with four planets. Strictly speaking, none of the planets is habitable. Two are gas giants. The third inward has no air; the innermost has too much.

That innermost world is about the size of Venus. With no oversized moon to strip away most of its air, it has an atmosphere like Venus’s: thick and hot and corrosive. No human explorer would have marked it for colonization.

But the ramrobots were not human.

During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called “known space.” They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet.

Unfortunately they were programmed wrong.

The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrobot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, and other conditions. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat.

Unlike the ramrobots, the man-carrying slowboats could not use interstellar ramscoops. They had to carry their own fuel. It meant that the slowboats took a long time to get where they were going, and there were no round-trip tickets. The slowboats could not turn back.

So We Made It was colonized because a ramrobot elected to settle in spring. Had it landed in summer or winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation points through its primary, Procyon, it would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

So Jinx was colonized. Jinx, with a surface gravity of 1.78 and two habitable bands between the ocean, where there is too much air, and the Ends, where there is none at all. Jinx, the Easter Egg Planet, home of men and women who are five feet tall and five feet wide, the strongest bipeds in known space. But they die young, of heart trouble.

So Plateau was colonized. For the innermost world of Tau Ceti is like Venus in size and atmosphere, save for one mountain, flat straight-sided mountain is forty miles tall, and its nearly flat top is half the size of California. It rises out of the searing black calm at the planet’s surface to the transparent atmosphere above; and that air can be breathed. Snow covers the peaks near the center of the Plateau, and rivers run lower down-rivers that tumble off the void edges of the Plateau into the shining mist below. The ramrobot landed there. And founded a world.

Several centuries passed.

Up from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat came Douglas Hooker, rising like a star. He was the only occupant of a four-man exploration craft. Fifteen years ago he had stolen that ship from the UN, the government of Earth, and taken it to Plateau. He didn’t dare return it. The laws of Earth were far stricter than those of Plateau.

And he couldn’t stay on Plateau.

Plateau would not have complained. Hooker was a cured maniac, a guaranteed model citizen. An autodoc had adjusted the chemistry of his body, cancelling the biochemical cause of his insanity. Two years of psychoanalysis, hypnoanalysis, and conditioning had attacked his memories, altering them in some cases, reducing or enhancing their importance in others. Conditioning had seen to it that he would never remain far from an autodoc; his chemistry would never again have the chance to go haywire in that particular fashion.

But he’d done a terrible thing on Plateau. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t bear the thought of someday facing Greg Loeffler.

The world below changed from a vast white plain to a round white ball. Hooker’s fusion drive glowed hotter and bluer than any sun. He was using the hydrogen in his tank. Though his ship carried a model of mankind’s first “safe” ramscoop, he was not yet moving, fast enough to use interstellar hydrogen for fuel.

When Plateau was in danger of being lost against the stellar background, he turned the ship toward Wunderland. He’d decided on Wunderland months ago, when he really began to believe that he would be well someday. Wunderland was small, of light gravity; a nice world, but distant from Earth. Wunderland’s technology was always several decades behind the times. The Wunderlanders would appreciate an extra spaceship, especially one as modern as Hooker’s.

They might jail him—though he had served a term on Plateau, concurrently with his cure. But they wouldn’t kill him. And Hooker could wait out a jail sentence. His health was perfect. Though he was eighty-seven years old, he might have been twenty. Earth’s medical sciences had become very good indeed. Men and women walked the Earth in places they had trod three centuries earlier, and the medicine of their time was long obsolete.

(Yet… look again. Twenty? Never. He acts
scarred
. Neither years nor scars show in the flesh, nor around the eyes, nor in them. But behind the eyes there are scars. It takes decades to form scars so deeply in the crevices of the brain that they show through to the surface.)

Hooker turned toward Wunderland and set the autopilot. His motions were quicker and surer than they had been for a long time. He was leaving Plateau, and he left a weight behind. Now he could begin to forget.

Hours later a second star rose from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat. It turned slowly, questing, like a hound sniffing out a trail. Then it fixed on Wunderland and began to accelerate.

He took the news as if he’d expected it. He looked at the human doctor for a long moment after she had stopped talking; then he slumped, back and shoulders dropping, chin nearly touching his chest. He mumbled, “I always knew I was different.”

“Is that a crime, Doug?” Dr. Doris Hahn might have been any age beyond thirty. She was small and oriental, and she had had that look of great wisdom long before she acquired the wisdom itself.

“Seems it is,” said Doug Hooker. He was eighteen years old, thin, with blue eyes and straw-colored hair. “I can’t do anything about it, can I?”

“Sure you can! Why, you need never know you’ve got it, any time during the rest of your life. There are millions of potential paranoids walking this world and others. And diabetics, and epileptics, and schizophrenics. Nobody knows the difference.”

“
They
know.”

“Well, yes.”

Doug looked the doctor in the eye. “Why? If they need never know, why tell them? How will this affect me, Doctor? What am I supposed to do about it?”

She nodded. “You’re right, of course. It will affect you in two ways.

“First, the Fertility Board will probably not pass a potential paranoid. If you want to have a child, you’ll have to do something so spectacular that the Board itself must recognize you as a genius. Something like inventing hyperdrive.”

Doug smiled at that. Hyperdrive was “the moon on a platter.”

“Second,” she said, “you must never be out of reach of an autodoc for more than a month, for the rest of your life. Do you understand? Up to now your parents have had this responsibility. Now you’re an adult. You must get to a 'doc every month so that it can stabilize your metabolism. Your body is chemically unstable. Without antiparanoia substances you can go insane.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Best go every two weeks to give yourself some leeway.”

“I will,” said Doug. He wanted to leave. The news had been as bad as he had expected, and he’d expected it for years. He had been born into a paranoid body. It was a thing he couldn’t tell even to Greg. He wanted to leave, to hide somewhere, to lick his wounds. But…

“How bad is it, Doctor? I mean, what would happen to me if I missed six weeks instead of a month?”

“The first time, very little. Your thinking processes would change a little, not enough to notice. When the 'doc readjusted you, you wouldn’t notice that change either. But the second and third times would be worse. You see, Doug, a large part of being insane is having been insane. If you were paranoid for a year, a 'doc couldn’t cure you. Your year of insanity would have formed habits. The 'doc would change your metabolism without changing your paranoid habits of thinking. You’d need a human psychotherapist.”

Doug wet his lips. He thought the question:
What is it like to be paranoid? How does a paranoid think?

He didn’t want to know. He said, “'Bye, Doctor,” and he got up and left. He thought he heard Dr. Hahn call something after him, but he wasn’t sure.

At the age of thirty Douglas Hooker thought he knew himself pretty well. He had long known that he was a man of habits, so he had trained his habits. Each weekday he entered his office at just ten o’clock, and the first thing he did was to use the desk 'doc.

He came in that Thursday morning at just ten o’clock, still wearing the smile with which he had hailed his good mornings at the other employees of Skyhook Enterprises. He hadn’t seen Greg, but Greg was always early or late—usually early. Probably at work already. Doug sat, opened the panel in his desk, and inserted his hands.

There were twin pricks in the balls of his middle fingers. The 'doc was taking a blood sample. Doug waited until the green light came on, then removed his hands. His nails gleamed.

The desk 'doc was small; it’s repertoire was limited. It could not repair injuries or exercise small unused muscles, as could a full-sized drugstore 'doc. It could detect infections and fight them with wide-spectrum antibiotics; it could supply needed vitamins; it was a fine manicurist, it could stabilize Doug Hooker’s unusual metabolism, using two phials of biochemicals stored in its innards. If it ran out of something or if it sensed the presence of some medical anomaly that should be treated, it would flash a red light.

Doug frowned at the papers in his In basket, then sighed and went to work. There was no sound from beyond his office; there was nothing to distract him. Yet he worked slowly. He couldn’t concentrate. It was not spring fever; city men didn’t get spring fever, living in a world which was mostly city. It was the feel of something impending.

It came at noon, with Greg Loeffler’s voice in the intercom.

“Doug? It’s here. Drop whatever you’re doing and come over.”

Doug put down half a sandwich and went out, walking fast. The bright morning sunlight made him blink. He took one of the carts in front of Admin and drove it across to Design. He was about to park in front when his eye caught a shadowy bulk standing four stories tall around to the side. He drove over.

Greg stood waiting for him, leaning one-armed against the huge truncated cone, grinning like a proud papa. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

“No,” said Hooker, for it was not. “Will it work?”

“We’ll sue if it doesn’t. But we can’t test it here. We’ll have to ship it to the Moon.”

“And then?” Doug felt adrenalin flooding his veins. All the decisions had been made two years ago; yet here was the tangible result, four stories tall, a decision on the verge of proving itself. And an ancient dream.

The safe ramscoop.

For centuries the ramrobots had been exploring space at just less than the speed of light, fueled by hydrogen scooped from between stars in conical electromagnetic fields two hundred miles across. For centuries men had followed at a quarter of the speed of light, carrying their own fuel. A ramscoop’s magnetic field would kill any chordate organism within three hundred miles. No shield had ever been developed which would protect a chordate and still let the ramscoop work.

Until two years ago, when Moscow Motors had built this.

There was a “dead pocket,” a bubble in this generator’s ramscoop field. A ship could be built into that bubble, and that ship would go anywhere, with a limitless fuel supply.

Two years ago Skyhook Enterprises had bought the contract to build that ship. It was a UN project, with all the wealth of Earth behind it. Doug Hooker’s father was still president when that decision was made; only a year ago he had turned the company over to Doug and gone off to become a Belter. For a year the ramship had been Doug’s responsibility. He had given Greg Loeffler a free rein, not for the sake of a friendship fifteen years old, but because Greg was a genius at design.

“And then we fit the ramscoop to the ship and take her for a trip. The ship’s been ready for months… That’s what I was doing in April and May, Doug. On the Moon, examining the ship. It’s ready. All you have to do is get the ramscoop there.”

Doug nodded. For a moment he almost envied Greg. The ship was Skyhook’s project, Doug Hooker’s project, but it was Greg’s ship. Top to bottom. If it was successful, it would conquer all of nearby space.

He said, “How’s Joanna?”

Loeffler grinned proudly. “Out to here, and beautiful. Another month and she can go back to playing tennis. How’s Clarisse?”

“Fine, fine.”

“We haven’t gotten together in a while. How about dinner tonight? To celebrate the ramscoop.”

“Good. Where?”

“Our place. You haven’t seen our new house.”

“That’s true,” Hooker said vaguely. He was not at his best in a social situation. He was uncomfortable in crowds and with people he didn’t know. With Greg and Joanna he could relax; but not during work hours, not even with them.

“Doug?”

“Yah?”

“You and Clarisse were married long before I was. Why haven’t you had children yet? Waiting for Joanna and me to pioneer the field?”

Hooker was tempted to say,
Yah, why not let you take the risks first?
But then he’d be asked again. So he told the truth. “The Fertility Board turned me down.”