From the Ocean from teh Stars (53 page)

the best of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the
universe; I was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.

This, I told myself, is IT—my big moment, the payoff for all the
lonely years I'd spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me
was another civilization—a race sufficiently advanced to possess hyper-
radio.

I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my
readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to
Base. If anything happened to me, the Survey would know where and
could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn't come home on schedule, my friends would be out here in force to pick up the
pieces.

Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed course for the small yellow star that was dead in line with the
beacon. No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they
had space travel themselves; I might be running into a culture as advanced
as my own—with all that implied.

I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully, with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction.
The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses, repeated over and over again. Even Max couldn't make anything of the message; it probably meant "Who the heck are you?"—which was not a
big enough sample for even the most intelligent of translating machines
to get its teeth into.

Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was
still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot the
same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my second
big surprise.

I had expected them—whoever or whatever they might be—to switch
to speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception. This was precisely what they did; what I had
not
expected was that their
voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one word
in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so badly
that I could not recognize them.

When the first words came over the loud-speaker, I guessed the truth.
This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and
perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I had
established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First Empire—
the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of interstellar
exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire collapsed, most of

these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back to barbarism. Here,
it seemed, was one that had survived.

I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could
muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any language
and no real communication was possible. They were clearly excited at the
contact—pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is not always the case;
some of the isolated cultures left over from the First Empire have become
violently xenophobic and react almost with hysteria to the knowledge
that they are not alone in space.

Our attempts to communicate were not making much progress, when
a new factor appeared—one that changed my outlook abruptly. A woman's voice started to come from the speaker.

It was the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard, and even without the
lonely weeks in space that lay behind me I think I would have fallen in love with it at once. Very deep, yet still completely feminine, it had a
warm, caressing quality that seemed to ravish all my senses. I was so stunned, in fact, that it was several minutes before I realized that I could
understand what my invisible enchantress was saying. She was speaking
English that was almost fifty per cent comprehensible.

To cut a short story shorter, it did not take me very long to learn
that her name was Liala, and that she was the only philologist on her planet to specialize in Primitive English. As soon as contact had been
made with my ship, she had been called in to do the translating. Luck, it seemed, was very much on my side; the interpreter could so easily
have been some ancient, white-bearded fossil.

As the hours ticked away and her sun grew ever larger in the sky
ahead of me, Liala and I became the best of friends. Because time was
short, I had to operate faster than I'd ever done before. The fact that no
one else could understand exactly what we were saying to each other
insured our privacy. Indeed, Liala's own knowledge of English was suf
ficiently imperfect for me to get away with some outrageous remarks;
there's no danger of going too far with a girl who'll give you the benefit
of the doubt by deciding you couldn't possibly have meant what she
thought you said. . . .

Need I say that I felt very, very happy? It looked as if my official
and personal interests were neatly coinciding. There was, however, just
one slight worry. So far, I had not seen Liala. What if she turned out to
be absolutely hideous?

My first chance of settling that important question came six hours
from planet-fall. Now I was near enough to pick up video transmissions,
and it took Max only a few seconds to analyze the incoming signals and

adjust the ship's receiver accordingly. At last I could have my first close-
ups of the approaching planet—and of Liala.

She was almost as beautiful as her voice. I stared at the screen, unable
to speak, for timeless seconds. Presently she broke the silence. "What's
the matter?" she asked. "Haven't you ever seen a girl before?"

I had to admit that I'd seen two or even three, but never one like her.
It was a great relief to find that her reaction to me was quite favorable, so
it seemed that nothing stood in the way of our future happiness—if we
could evade the army of scientists and politicians who would surround
me as soon as I landed. Our hopes of privacy were very slender; so much
so, in fact, that I felt tempted to break one of my most ironclad rules.
I'd even consider
marrying
Liala if that was the only way we could arrange
matters. (Yes, that two months in space had really put a strain on my
system. . . .)

Five thousand years of history—ten thousand, if you count mine as well—can't be condensed easily into a few hours. But with such a delightful tutor, I absorbed knowledge fast, and everything I missed, Max
got down in his inf allible memory circuits.

Arcady, as their planet was charmingly called, had been at the very
frontier of interstellar colonization; when the tide of empire had retreated,
it had been left high and dry. In the struggle to survive, the Arcadians
had lost much of their original scientific knowledge, including the secret
of the Star Drive. They could not escape from their own solar system,
but they had little incentive to do so. Arcady was a fertile world and the
low gravity—only a quarter of Earth's—had given the colonists the
physical strength they needed to make it live up to its name. Even allowing
for any natural bias on Liala's part, it sounded a very attractive place.

Arcady's little yellow sun was already showing a visible disk when I
had my brilliant idea. That reception committee had been worrying me,
and I suddenly realized how I could keep it at bay. The plan would need
Liala's co-operation, but by this time that was assured. If I may say so without sounding too immodest, I have always had a way with women,
and this was not my first courtship by TV.

So the Arcadians learned, about two hours before I was due to land,
that survey scouts were very shy and suspicious creatures. Owing to pre
vious sad experiences with unfriendly cultures, I politely refused to walk
like a fly into their parlor. As there was only one of me, I preferred to
meet only one of them, in some isolated spot to be mutually selected. If
that meeting went well, I would then fly to the capital city; if not—I'd
head back the way I came. I hoped that they would not think this behavior discourteous, but I was a lonely traveler a long way from home,

and as reasonable people, I was sure they'd see my point of view. . . .

They did. The choice of the emissary was obvious, and Liala promptly
became a world heroine by bravely volunteering to meet the monster
from space. She'd radio back, she told her anxious friends, within an hour
of coming aboard my ship. I tried to make it two hours, but she said that
might be overdoing it, and nasty-minded people might start to talk.

The ship was coming down through the Arcadian atmosphere when
I suddenly remembered my compromising pin-ups, and had to make a
rapid spring-cleaning. (Even so, one rather explicit masterpiece slipped
down behind a chart rack and caused me acute embarrassment when it
was discovered by the maintenance crew months later.) When I got back
to the control room, the vision screen showed the empty, open plain at
the very center of which Liala was waiting for me; in two minutes, I would hold her in my arms, be able to drink the fragrance of her hair,
feel her body yield in all the right places—

I didn't bother to watch the landing, for I could rely on Max to do his
usual flawless job. Instead, I hurried down to the air lock and waited with
what patience I could muster for the opening of the doors that barred me
from Liala.

It seemed an age before Max completed the routine air check and gave
the "Outer Door Opening" signal. I was through the exit before the metal
disk had finished moving, and stood at last on the rich soil of Arcady.

I remembered that I weighed only forty pounds here, so I moved
with caution despite my eagerness. Yet I'd forgotten, living in my fool's
paradise, what a fractional gravity could do to the human body in the
course of two hundred generations. On a small planet, evolution can do
a lot in five thousand years.

Liala was waiting for me, and she was as lovely as her picture. There
was, however, one trifling matter that the TV screen hadn't told me.

I've never liked big girls, and I like them even less now. If I'd still wanted to, I suppose I could have embraced Liala. But I'd have looked like such a fool, standing there on tiptoe with my arms wrapped around
her knees.

☆
THE STAR

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once,
I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed
that the heavens declared the glory of God's handiwork. Now I have
seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix
that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the
first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts
are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape
and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other
scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who
would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order
a bad name in the olden days.

The crew are already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will
take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they
will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that
private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which lasted all
the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophys
icist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it (why are medi
cal men such notorious atheists?). Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine
with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and
stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly
around us as the ship turned end over end with the residual spin we had
never bothered to correct.

"Well, Father," he would say at last, "it goes on forever and forever,
and perhaps
Something
made it. But how you can believe that Something
has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats
me." Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would