1,000-Year Voyage (13 page)

Exodus compressed his lips, struggling hard to comprehend the fact that, next to himself, he had lost the one life he valued most. Exodus himself had heard nothing of all this for in the insulation of his spacesuit he had been unable to pick up any sound—and for that matter no sound could have reached him anyway since there existed a complete vacuum—all the air, save for the little remaining in the few bedrooms, having by now been sucked out into the inexorable vacuum of outer space.

Indeed, things had happened so fast that Exodus hardly knew what to do next. It was only by degrees that it dawned upon him that he was the only living being aboard the vessel. And, individual person though he was, the thought of it gave him just a little fear for the moment, as the immense aloneness slowly filtered into his mind.

He was the one living being in the uncharted depths of infinity, and as such, the only living person who could ever bring the great scheme of vengeance to a successful conclusion. Somehow the idea of vengeance seemed infinitely far away at the moment. His immediate predicament was the one thing that demanded consideration.

Finally, after careful consideration of the situation, Exodus made his first moves. To begin with there were the various bodies to dispose of and these presented no problem since he had only to take them to the ejection chamber and so project them into the depths of space. After this he was indeed alone and he spent a couple of hours carefully examining the battered ship from end to end and determining which parts remained intact.

Altogether the damage was not so severe as he had at first suspected. The main source of trouble seemed to be in the control room, but otherwise most of the vital instruments, and particularly the machine tool equipment, were more or less in perfect condition. So, also, to his intense relief, was the life-energy equipment. The biggest trouble was the great rent torn in the mass of the vessel and before the ship could be considered void-worthy again that gap had got to be repaired—which of course it could easily be since the machine tool equipment was undamaged.

Of necessity he was still compelled to work in his spacesuit, which, mainly owing to the clumsiness of his gloves, slowed him up considerably in his efforts. Nevertheless he set about his task with a vigorous determination and at the end of eight hours continuous work he had completely rewelded a new section of plating across the gap and thoroughly tested it to prove that it was airtight. This done, he was able at last to turn on the air pressure tanks and finally as the gauges showed the normal 14 pounds to the square inch, he was able to clamber from the stuffy enveloping folds of his spacesuit.

His next concern was to obey the demands of Nature and have a meal and then a rest. For a moment or two when he finally awoke he found it almost impossible to realise that there was nobody else aboard the vessel. Never again, perhaps, throughout the whole of his more or less eternal life, would he be able to speak to anybody nor would anybody speak to him. A more absolute solitary confinement could hardly be imagined nor one more ironical.

Around him and the space machine loomed all the incredible endless vastness of infinity, yet he was one person alone with not a soul to speak to, with nothing to keep him company except his own thoughts. It was a situation which, but for the ceaselessly burning fire of revenge, might easily have driven him insane by its stark, staring loneliness. As it was, he was not disturbed, as yet. He was a man dedicated to a purpose and because of that purpose the frozen hand of loneliness did not descend too heavily upon him.

He prepared a meal for himself, ate it, and then considered his next moves. Finally he decided upon the entirely ordinary task of repairing the final damage in the control room—the reconstruction of the broken stanchions and the replacement, where possible, of the smaller shattered instruments.

Though these tasks were not immense in themselves they occupied him for several days of time and when they were done he was back again to his starting point: what must he do next?

Revenge—that was the issue. He had no idea how far his mother's plans had progressed but in the main he had left all preparations of that vengeance entirely to her. With her departed it was now his task to devise some formula of his own to wreak the most deadly retaliation possible upon the descendants of the Earthlings who had brought about this position. He found himself blaming the people of Earth for the fact that he was now alone, not into the least taking into account that cosmic disaster and nothing else was responsible for the fact that he alone was left out of all those who had been aboard the spaceship. Everything he thought of, everything he did, was incessantly concentrated upon that one relentless objective— vengeance.

“And I still maintain,” he muttered, as he stood alone by the control room porthole looking out on to the void, “that the most satisfactory way of ensuring that that vengeance is complete in every detail is to have the cosmic generator made to produce the absolute maximum of cosmic radiation. At the moment, as I designed it, there can be enough power to destroy half the world in one blow. I shall go further…. I shall go on developing that apparatus through the years until I am satisfied that it can encompass the whole eight thousand mile diameter of Earth simultaneously. In that way two onslaughts from the cosmic projector will be sufficient to reduce every living being upon the planet to ashes. One blow upon the western hemisphere of the world and one blow on the Eastern hemisphere and nothing can survive. That, then, shall be my ideal—a generator which can encompass the world.”

He mused over this for quite a while, smiling harshly to himself and then he turned his mind to other things. There was the second problem—how to get access to the life energy machine, and to restore it to working order.

It was this thought which got him on the move again from the control room until he came to the compartment which had constituted his mother's secret bedroom.

In here, even as she had said, were the various radio and television instruments by which she had been able to view every part of the ship, usually through the adoption of infrared radiation. He also quickly located the controls for the electrical barrier his mother had placed around the life-energy machine when not using it herself. Smiling grimly, he switched it off, then crossed to the metal cabinet against the wall and quickly set to work to destroy the strong lock by which it was fastened. Within it he found many stacks of papers, some of them making a certain amount of sense and others entirely incomprehensible since they were a jumble of mathematical equations. In the main they constituted designs and sketches for death-dealing weapons, some of which had already appeared in the laboratory to his knowledge and others that had apparently been abandoned through inability to finish them completely.

He also discovered that which he really sought—the vital crystalline bars, which needed to be restored to the life energy machine to make it operative.

Two vitally important matters then were ahead of him—the building up of his cosmic energy projector to double its output and the devising of a velocity formula for the return to Earth in a much quicker time. When he was not dealing with the one he could deal with the other, for they would be counter-balanced by the one being a manual job and the other mental, and thereby he could keep himself constantly occupied.

In this way, he told himself that all would be well and that he was absolutely self-sufficient and needed no company whatever. The very fact that he had to admit this to himself was, in a sense, a proof that loneliness was to a certain extent the one thing of which he was afraid.

Before he did anything definite he injected into himself a given quota of life-energy and, thus refreshed, he set to work with his cosmic ray generator. To double the amount of its power was something that he found upon analysis to be impossible. So, with dogged determination he set to work to build a second generator, an exact replica of the first one, and just as it had taken him many years to build the first one, so this second one occupied him for an almost similar length of time. He spent most of his working hours at it, only desisting when he found himself making mistakes. It was at these times that he abandoned the manual side of his activities and returned to the control room, there to concentrate upon the problem of returning to Earth.

He indeed faced a profound mental complexity because of the physical fact that 186,000 miles per second was the absolute velocity beyond which no object in the universe, including his space machine, could travel.

At the moment, although it was travelling at stupendous speed, it was only a mere fraction of the speed of light, and so it was going to take a thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri travelling at that constant velocity. Therefore, logically, it must demand a continuous
acceleration
until the speed of light was approached. Only then could the engine be switched off, and then he could coast at his optimum speed, almost the speed of light. A year at this speed, and he would cover almost a light year of distance, and since Alpha Centauri was just over four light years from Earth, it was clearly possible to get back to Earth within a reasonable time. The problem was in the time it would take to build up to that ultimate speed. Even though the ship was fitted with artificial gravity and acceleration nullifiers, they were not completely effective at higher accelerations. If he were not to kill himself under the strain of too great a constant acceleration, his rate of acceleration would have to be carefully calculated. And exactly the same factors would have to be taken into account in the matter of deceleration, otherwise he might overshoot the Earth solar system, and continue plunging through space.

At a rough estimate, the return trip would take the best part of another thirty years, but on board the ship—such were the vagaries of Relativity—that to Exodus, much less time would appear to pass.

Even at that some one thousand and thirty years would have passed since the departure from Earth. Civilisations would have undergone vast and almost unimaginable changes. Just the same he did not fear that any of the civilisations would have devised weapons so diabolically scientific that they would be able to counteract the stupendous blast of cosmic radiation that he had planned.

Accordingly, the only thing for him to do was to carry the problem as far as he could with his own equations and then feed them to the electronic brains, which were in the laboratory solely for the purpose of dealing with such profoundly complicated problems.

So, by this division of mental and manual energy, he managed somehow to strike an even balance. He was so constantly absorbed with either one or the other that the lack of company never troubled him. He even began to sense a certain god-like condition in his floating thus alone in the void, the ship now back on its original course and still hurtling with inconceivable velocity towards Alpha Centauri.

Even yet, despite the years that had passed, the binary star appeared no larger so stupendously far away was it in the cosmos. There was indeed something fantastic in this lone man consumed entirely with a longing for revenge. His desire for revenge was even more remarkable in that he had not been the direct recipient of the injustice of Earth people.

He was only the child of the recipient, but so thoroughly had Merva instilled her own invective into him, he was as profoundly resolved as she had been to bring the plan to a successful conclusion. The thought of perhaps returning to Earth and establishing communication, and perhaps even seeking a pardon and a possible return to the people of his mother world, never even occurred to him, even though it would certainly have been the sanest course. For by the time he finally arrived back on Earth it was quite possible that the original banishment into the void would have been completely forgotten. It would purely be a matter of interest to historians and certainly not to the then existent society of Earth. However, Exodus had made his decision, a decision that had been nurtured since boyhood and he refused to allow anything to divert him.

Ever and again as the months fled by he would take a long observation of the void through the rear windows of the machine, there to behold the bloated ashen corpses of those who had been ejected from the ship in the course of its journey. Rigilus, Vilnia, Drando, Hazalet, they were all there together with the various children, moving at the same velocity as the ship itself separated from it by only a few feet, chained eternally by its gravitation.

The sight of them made Exodus pause and wonder. Were they happier now than they had been? Were they still possessed of bodies somewhere in this enormous infinity: had they been recreated perhaps in fleshly form upon some far distant world? Had they still the thoughts of vengeance in their minds as he had?

These were the thoughts of a man alone in space and they were thoughts that lacked a certain coherence. With only himself to think about and with only revenge as his motivating power Exodus was slowly and relentlessly changing into a very strange being indeed.

And the ship sped on….

CHAPTER SEVEN

JOURNEY'S END

IN the course of another five years Exodus had his second cosmic generator half completed. Throughout that five years he had loomed amid the cascading cosmic energies like some creation from Dante's
Inferno
, clothed in his huge insulated and protective suit with the immense gauntlets and cowl-like helmet. At other times he had not been so cautious, particularly when the manipulation of some delicate and sensitive parts of the apparatus had demanded that his hands be absolutely unencumbered. Whether or not the cosmic radiation in which he had been exposed during these periods had done him any harm he did not know. Certainly he felt no worse physically, so he assumed that all was well.

During these five years he had also made tests of his bodily energy and had found that the life energy absorption that he gave himself at regular intervals were apparently keeping him at a more or less constant level. There was little if any breakdown of cellular material that would have proclaimed advancing age. He was, as near as he could tell, living at a permanent twenty three to twenty four years of age.

There was indeed only one thing which troubled him, and this only slightly, and that was sudden but very infrequent lapses of memory. He noticed it most when working with the cosmic ray generator, for on examining his notes he found several mathematical postulations which he had set down which he could not properly remember when he came to study them again.

To him it was a mystery, but he put it down to one of those quirks of mental computation that do happen even to the healthiest and most balanced of people.

It was also after the expiration of this five years that he discovered the electronic computers had at last produced an answer for the journey back to Earth, basing their conclusions upon the original figures that he had fed into them. In order to keep the accelerative strain to a tolerable level, it would take some fifteen years before the speed of light could be reached, and the engines switched off. Thereafter the vessel would coast a constant velocity for another three years, followed by an equal fifteen-year period of deceleration.

Added to this finding was given the profoundly complicated formula by which the atomic generator would have to be stepped up in stages to create the necessary power imperative for such a sustained acceleration. They also showed again in equations how it would be possible to change the general design of the atomic power plant to make it capable of dealing with this stupendous load.

To all these details Exodus gave profound attention, knowing as he did that there was more than enough fuel to make the journey, as very little had been used on the outward voyage.

So then he had another task added to the one upon which he was already engaged and both of them now were manual and therefore made no demands whatever upon his mental capacities.

Yet again then, he plunged into the maw of years dividing his time between the final construction of the second cosmic generator and making the necessary modifications to the power plant. And ever and again he still experienced those odd moments when he forgot a vital point and for the life of him could not remember it.

Naturally he wondered about it but he made no particular effort to solve it. Altogether it took him yet another five years to completely reconstruct the power plant and finish his cosmic ray generator. The matter of the power plant occasioned no difficulty since it was not operating, nor had it done so since the departure from Earth, except for the brief period of course correction following the cosmic collision. The vessel still maintained the velocity that it had reached at the highest point of acceleration when the power plant itself had automatically cut out. The dismantling of it had nothing to do with the electronic brain controlling the switchboard and therefore it had been possible for him to strip it right down and rebuild it to the pattern prescribed by the infallible computer.

But now these tasks were done, and through the advance porthole Alpha Centauri and its now faintly visible Proxima Centauri were slightly larger, which proved that the awful abyss of space was indeed being covered slowly and inevitably.

Even so there were hundreds of years that must go by before the goal would be reached and the switchboard would be unlocked from the mathematical monster that controlled it. More than once Exodus had played around with the idea of taking the risk of trying to dismantle that radio switchboard but always he had remembered his mother's warning, the warning which had been given to her by the original People's Prosecutor of Earth.

He had said that the removal of one part of the electronic brain on the switchboard would mean that that part would never be replaced and that the vessel would become entirely uncontrollable, finally crashing upon the nearest gravitational object. It was probably the truth and it certainly served as a powerful deterrent as far as Exodus was concerned.

In the end he decided against any dismantling. He would let the switchboard run its course. How then to bridge the hundreds of years which loomed before him and in which there was nothing particular for him to do, everything having been accomplished?

He had the cosmic ray generators ready for action when the time came, which he was convinced would be thoroughly efficacious, and he also had the means of returning to Earth infinitely faster than he had left it.

There was only himself to consider now and in its way this was probably one of the biggest problems of all. If he did not find a quick way to bridge the terrible gap between this point of space and the end of the journey he felt that his mind might become so overwhelmed with the vastness of the void that he might become unbalanced and so lose everything that he had so relentlessly and assiduously built up.

When the answer to this problem came to him it made him smile ironically. The solution presented itself when he was engaged in one of those rare observations to the rear of the ship by which means he viewed the space-ridden corpses of those who had long since been ejected.

Except for their bloated appearance, which had happened at the moment that air had been expelled from their bodies, they were as preserved as waxen figures by the vacuum of the interstellar void. The corpses could be thus preserved without any signs of decomposition, so surely could a living being?

And from this sprang Exodus' conception of a deep freeze system by which he ought to be able to refrigerate himself and yet return to life hundreds of years later. Such methods had been used in the anaesthetic field on Earth, or so his mother had told him, so there seemed no reason why he could not develop that process himself. Further, and it was this which made him smile so ironically, it would mean that if he existed at such a low level he would be expending hardly any energy whatever.

Certainly not enough to need any of the life energy that was still stored in the apparatus. Had his mother been alive now, and had both of them put themselves in a deep freeze, the energy would have lasted out for both of them— However, that was in the past and it was the future that he had to deal with.

So immediately he set about the task of devising a deep freeze system and from it, once again helped by the electronic brains, he worked out how to convert one of the many spare chambers in the space machine into a suspended animation compartment. The system was reasonably simple and more or less automatic in that reliable thermostatic controls would gradually expel almost all the air from the compartment and allow the deadly vacuum of the void to seep in. For this purpose a special apparatus was required which after two years of experiment he finally managed to perfect. It meant that when the room was completely sealed he would gradually sink into a sub-zero state—a deep sleep on the edge of death itself. The final point was the linking to the electronic brain which governed the control board of an extension, so arranged that it would cause the thermostatic controls within the deep freeze chamber to cease their activity when the space machine was at last within range of Alpha Centauri.

This was a matter again calling for a considerable amount of concentration and over a year of work, but finally Exodus mastered it and was reasonably sure that once he placed himself within the deep sleep he would be aroused within a few hours of the electronic brain releasing its hold upon the control switchboard. By this manner, then, he could skip the hundreds of years that still intervened before the end of the journey and still be sure of awakening in time.

With methodical calm he went to work to make his final arrangements, locking everything up in all directions, though for what reason he did not really know, unless it was that he was taking precautions against the possibility of the ship again colliding with something, which would mean that if the various articles were locked up they would not be scattered in all directions.

Whether or not he himself would be awakened if such an alarm arose he did not know: that was the unknown risk he had to take. Perhaps in putting himself to sleep he might also be putting himself to death—he just had to accept this as one of the unpredictable elements.

So finally he settled down on the airbed and switched on the thermostatic controls, afterwards composing himself for the gradual descent into the deep sleep that would inevitably follow. Everything worked exactly as he had planned it would, and there was no painful sensation in his gradual descent into drowsiness, and finally sleep.

Indeed it was no more unusual in its development than the normal transition from the waking to the sleeping world. It seemed to him distinctly strange that at one moment he could feel himself sliding into unconsciousness and the next he seemed to be awakening again.

In between there appeared to be no gap, no consciousness of dreaming. No sensation, no anything. It even made him wonder if the apparatus had failed in any way and if he had come back to consciousness. Then when he glanced up at the subsidiary time clock on the wall and saw that the liquid crystal display showed that the thousand-year deadline had been reached, he knew that he had indeed slept over the hundreds of years and that this was the awakening as he had planned it

The moment had arrived evidently when the electronic brain was at last going to release the switchboard and make the vessel governable.

Exodus struggled up from the bed and by degrees managed to get enough strength together to open the clamped door and stumble outside into the long passageway. Still extremely dazed, and remarking to himself on the incredible amount of dust that had collected upon everything in the interval, he made his way into the control room. There, before doing anything else, he gave himself a good meal and then gazed at himself in the mirror upon the magnificent wealth of beard he had grown in the interval.

Since his energy expenditure had been so low his beard was not commensurate with having slept for hundreds of years, but nevertheless it was a magnificent crop. In the space of ten minutes, he had entirely rid himself of it and freshened up. Mentally alert, he turned to the switchboard and studied it.

Upon the top of the electronic brain control a red lamp was now glowing, showing that its influence was beginning to wane. Exodus pondered it for a while and then turned to the main porthole giving a start as he beheld the now quite near Alpha Centauri.

It loomed as a titanic blinding star whilst close beside it was the smaller Proxima so close to the main giant that it appeared to be almost part of it. The stupendous journey across the light years was nearly at an end and the moment was not far distant when Exodus could at last put his plans into action.

There was nothing that he could do now except wait for the electronic brain to give up its control of the switchboard, so he sat down and prepared as best he could to compose himself for that supreme moment.

Silently he reviewed the position to himself, thinking back over the years to the plans he had made before putting himself in the deep sleep.

Yet here was the strange thing. When it came to the time when he ought to remember what it was he ought to do, and in what order he ought to do them, he found himself mentally stumbling. As far as he could recall he must wait for the electronic brain to release the switchboard, then he must switch on the power plant, and then after that he must adjust the controls of the space machine so that.... So that, what?

He put finger and thumb to his eyes and frowned, endeavouring to try and recall the exact scheme that he had in mind, and the trouble was that he had not made any notes, so supremely confident had he been about having everything perfectly clear in his mind.

The cosmic ray generators? Had there been something that he was going to do with them? No, it couldn't have been the generators which came next on the list for he would be able to absorb the necessary cosmic radiation at any time on the journey back to Earth. It did not need to be done now.

What then was it that he had been going to do? He sat scowling, pondering and thinking, until a sudden sharp click and a whirring note made him glance up quickly. The red light on the electronic brain was now glowing with full vigour. At the same moment he beheld the controls on the switchboard jumping and leaping as though controlled by invisible hands.

With a cry of delight he hurried across to them and found each one entirely manageable under his grasp. The machine was free at last for him to do with exactly as he wished.

“This is the moment!” he breathed, his eyes bright. “For a thousand years I have waited for this second. What would you not do now, mother, were you here?”

He reached out his right hand for the main switch of the power plant and drove it home. Immediately the long silent power plant took up the load and then with automatic easy stages began to increase the power with every second. Exodus waited, his eyes on the meters, holding back until the moment when the voltage would be at absolute maximum and he could transfer it to the firing jets of the spaceship.

In between times he glanced out of the window at the colossal blazing bulk of Alpha Centauri and began to wonder anxiously if the voltage would build up quickly enough to enable him to turn the vessel aside in its still hurtling onrush.