Gift From The Stars (11 page)

The Chairman moved his magical hand and the sun disappeared to be replaced by a screen segmented into four. In each segment was a differ
ent person: a slender Asian woman in a silk gown, a plump white male in a business suit, a youthful-looking man with a brown face, wearing a casual white jacket, and a middle-aged woman in gray slacks and blazer.

“These are the other Chairs,” the Chairman said. He did not offer to introduce them, and it was an indication of their anonymity in this uneventful world that Frances knew none of them. She knew only that, like the Chair for Africa, they occupied sites on the tops of mountains, where atmospheric losses of power beamed from satellites were minimal and terrestrial broadcast was easiest.

“Ask them about the aliens,” the Asian woman said again.

“Are aliens behind these events?” the Chairman asked.

“That wouldn’t make sense,” Adrian said. “Why would they send us designs for a spaceship if they were already here?”

“To deceive us?” the man with the brown face suggested.

“And give us a power system that could fuel a ship to the stars—or a world to peace and plenty?” Adrian said. He shook his head.

“Beware of aliens bearing gifts,” said the plump man in the white suit.

“Maybe they’re acting from a distance,” the woman in slacks and blazer suggested.

“At the distance of the stars, even the nearest of them?” Frances said. “No way they could find out what was going on here, much less act in time to be effective.”

“Agents?” the Asian woman suggested.

Jessie spoke for the first time. “They do have agents,” she said. Everyone turned toward her in surprise. Even the faces on the wall seemed to look in her direction. “They’re the agents of an idea, and the idea is spaceflight. Freedom. Answering the call. There’s nothing as transforming as an idea.”

“She’s right,” Adrian said. “What you have is what seems to be a single phenomenon with multiple causes. One of them is the space community that wants to build a spaceship and find out what the aliens want. Another is the restless element of society that can’t stand good times. There may be others. The spaceflight group deleted evidence of my existence. Another group is behind the power outages, probably by computer viruses.”

“But there is a solution,” Frances said.

The faces turned back in her direction.

“You can ride it out,” Frances said, “and maybe that is the least risky option. The space-nuts will get old and die off. The malcontents can be
rooted out and punished. But the final result may be a species that has lost its soul.”

“Humanity can’t go to the stars when it can’t afford it,” Adrian said, “and when it can afford it, humanity has no incentive to go. The apparent paradise on Earth may actually be a dead end. The malcontents may be the true spirit of humanity—always looking for something they haven’t got.”

“The other option?” the Chairman asked.

“Let them go!” Jessie said.

Adrian looked at her, and said with growing enthusiasm, “She’s right. Give the space-nuts the resources to build a ship and offer the malcontents an opportunity to sign on. That’s always worked for humanity, as long as there was another world to discover, another frontier to pioneer.”

“It wouldn’t cost you much,” Frances said. “The energy moths are self-replicating and by the time construction on the spaceship gets going you won’t know what to do with all the excess energy.”

“Materials can be mined in space,” Adrian said. “Asteroids. Comets. Hydrogen from Jupiter for reaction mass, if that is needed.”

“Let us go,” Jessie said.

“Us?” Frances echoed.

“I want to go, too.”

“But what about the aliens?” the oriental woman asked.

“We’ll never know, will we?” Frances said. “Until we go.”

“Do we risk something by going?” Adrian continued. “The people who go risk a lot. The people who stay behind risk a bit less, but still enough to concern them. Maybe the designs are a trick, some nefarious plot to trap humanity. But they’ve made us stronger; they’ve unified us by removing the inequalities that kept us apart. So not going is a bigger risk.”

The faces on the wall seemed to exchange glances with the Chairman before he waved his hand and they disappeared to be replaced by the image of the sun. “The one function we have,” the Chairman said, “is to transmit power. We have decided that you should have it.” He held up his hand as they started to speak. “Your argument about ridding ourselves of the malcontents was persuasive. We have no desire to contact aliens, no aspirations for the transcendental. We are content to be no more than we are, the transmitters of power to those who need it, the conservators of human happiness.”

“You have conserved our happiness,” Frances said.

The Chairman waved his hand once more at the wall, and once more
it responded with the sun girdled by energy-absorbing black moths. And when the design for the spaceship ghosted across the screen, it seemed to those who watched that it was already transforming itself into something substantial enough to carry humanity to the stars.

Shape has no shape, nor will your thinking shape it;

Space has no confines; and no borders time.

And yet, to think the abyss is to escape it.

C
ONRAD
A
IKEN
, S
ONNET
XXVI

Part Three

THE ABYSS

JESSICA BUHLER LOOKED UP FROM THE SEAM on the cigar-shaped spaceship whose far end, like the horizon, hid what lay beyond. A hand-held electronic weld-checker, secured by a safety cord, dangled from the glove of her spacesuit. The ship had been put together from oddly shaped pieces of metal, like a child’s puzzle, and the job of checking thousands of seams might never be done. The devices that sealed the seams checked welds as they were made, but when survival depended on every part and every person functioning perfectly, Adrian believed in checking and rechecking. That was his nature, Jessica knew, but it also was a measure of his commitment to the mission he had chosen. Before she was born, she amended. It was important to keep matters in perspective.

Beneath her was the long hull of the spaceship, apparently complete but as yet untested against the forces of acceleration. Frances Farmstead would have identified the genre as 1930s science fiction. She could tell, she would have said, because the ship looked as if it had been lifted from the cover of
Astounding Stories
, maybe the first installment of
The Skylark of Valeron
. Images that endure, she said, characterize situations better than rational analysis. They encapsulated the wisdom of the species.

Some of the crew laughed at Frances and her genres. “How’d them
aliens get hold of a copy of
Astounding
?” they’d say. But Frances was unperturbed. “If you don’t identify the situation, you won’t know what to do when it comes times to act,” she said, and she was so sure of herself that some of them began to wonder if she might be right.

But building the ship hadn’t been as easy as the stories made it sound. There was none of this “they all pitched in and by working hard they put the ship together in a few weeks,” or “they built the ship in an empty barn by working after school and on weekends.”

Jessica was attached to the smooth metal surface by magnetic grapples as she moved, with her machine, from seam to seam. When she raised her head she could see the blue, cloud-strewn globe of the Earth disturbingly above, and then, in a gut-wrenching transformation, like some inescapable abyss yawning below. She closed her eyes and mentally readjusted her relationship to the universe. It was an exercise in which they all had grown skillful—all except Frances who, in spite of her experience in identifying situations according to the genre models that came to her so readily, had been space-sick until the chemists and physicians found a medicine that worked. Even then Frances had never been able to labor outside where the need to invent one’s own orientation had left her dizzy and disturbed.

Past the far end of the ship Jessica could see the skeleton of the old space station, half its parts scavenged for structural elements and hull plates. Like the Kennedy Space Center from which they had boosted into orbit, the space station had been abandoned in place. At first the construction workers who would become the crew had lived in the quarters that once had housed astronauts and experiments. As soon as they had settled in, the station itself, trembling in all its fragile connections, had been raised from its degraded orbit by rocket motors carefully placed to minimize stress. Only afterwards, as people considered the difficulty of constructing the ship that would house the alien-designed equipment and of boosting into orbit the necessary parts, did someone suggest supplementing what had to be manufactured below with materials already available. The first part of the spaceship built, then, was the crew’s living quarters. In the alien designs those spaces had been left blank, as if the aliens had understood that creatures who received their message were likely to come in many shapes and sizes. It was an issue frequently discussed over the mess table and in late night bull-sessions: what did it mean that the aliens made no assumptions about the physiology of sentience?

Nobody wept over the deconstruction of the space station except a few sentimentalists who had pinned their hopes for space on this step
ping-stone to the stars. That would once have included Jessica and the head of the project, Adrian Mast, and the ageless Frances, his adviser and co-conspirator. But that had been twenty-five years earlier, when all this started in a book found by Adrian on a UFO remainder table. Five years earlier the Energy Board had given them the power, but that left the would-be space-travelers dependent upon their own manpower and the construction workers they could recruit. The number of volunteers had surprised them, but all this, and their training, had taken a year, and the construction itself, another four years.

Part of the resources allotted to them was the space station. In another form it might, indeed, reach the stars. If the alien designs worked. That was the immediate concern. What would happen when the button was pushed? Would the containment vessel work or would the ship simply disappear in a titanic union of matter and antimatter? Would the ship disintegrate under acceleration? If it moved, would it move at interstellar speeds? Could they control it? Could their bodies endure it? If everything worked properly, where would they go and how long would the voyage take?

Those were the questions that worried Adrian, even if he didn’t show it. They worried Cavendish, who fretted about it all the time until everybody told him to shut up. And it worried Frances most of all, although she concealed it from Adrian and everybody else. She couldn’t conceal it from Jessica, however; nothing can be concealed between two women who love the same man, and everything is obscure to the man who is so wrapped up in his job that he has no time for personal relationships.

All this passed through Jessica’s mind in the fleeting moment of relaxation and attitude adjustment before the terrible realization hit her that the ship had begun to tremble beneath her feet.

“What’s going on?” she said into the suit radio she had activated with her chin. The receiver only crackled as if someone had leaned against the on-switch. By that time Jessica had slipped the seam-checker into magnetic catches on her suit and was running across the outer hull, breaking one magnetic grapple free and swinging it ahead, and then the other, in an unconscious coordination of movements that she had perfected over the past years. “What’s happening?” she asked again. Unfortunately, she was almost as far as she could get from the nearest open hatch. By the time she was halfway there, her body had tightened with the notion that the ship had begun to move. She looked back over her shoulder. It was a contortion in the airtight suit made possible only by
her slender athleticism. The skeleton of the space station seemed farther away. It was all subjective, she told herself, and then she was at the hatch and pulling herself into it, locking the hatch door in place with another athletic contortion, and waiting for the air pressure to build to the point where the inner door could be unlocked.