Into the Slave Nebula (6 page)

H
E ATE
sitting alone on the long central lounge which ran from end to end of the house, his back to the transparent wall fronting the garden, as though the world beyond held too many problems for him to feel comfortable looking at it. His appetite was long ago sated, and he had called on Rowl for several more drinks, before the hours of waiting were over and the peace of the house was shattered by the irruption of his sister Via at the head of a score of shrieking teenagers, with his mother’s elderly cousin Leadora vainly struggling to quiet them.

The moment she saw her brother, Via rushed forward with a cry. “Derry, you beast! You’ve lost my bet for me!”

“What bet?” Horn said crossly.

“Oh, I told Sampidge that you’d enjoy carnival so much better on your own that you wouldn’t come back until you absolutely had to. And he said you would come home early because it’s much more fun to spend carnival with people you know, and here you are back already so I’ll have to let hm do all kinds of awful things to me and you’re a beast! You’re an absolute and utter
beast!
”

“You ought to be more careful who you make bets with, then,” Horn snapped, pushing her aside as she made to pummel him and rising to his feet. “But don’t worry—your bet’s a washout, anyhow. I haven’t come back to spend the rest of carnival with people I know. I’ve just come to pick up some cash so I can buy a flight to Newholme.”

“Where’s that?” Via said foggily. “Is it far?”

At that moment there was a lull in the chatter and laughter which had filled the room, and Horn’s harsh reply was loud enough to be heard by everyone.

“Far? It’s a pretty long way from Earth, but it’s hardly far enough!”

Heads turned on all sides to look at him. A boy of about eighteen with a scholarly manner detached himself from the group of young people he had been talking to and approached Horn—Sampidge, who had made the bet with Via.

“Did I hear you say you were leaving Earth? Isn’t the middle of carnival an odd time to get the pioneering spirit?”

Horn scowled at him. He had no idea what Via’s bet with Sampidge had involved, but on a brief acquaintance he had conceived an acute dislike for him and was prepared to make some cynical guesses.

“Pioneering spirit has nothing to do with it,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve finally figured out it would be easier to book one passage on a starship than rid this planet of all the people like you who make it unbearable!”

“Hoity-toity!” Sampidge began, bridling, but at that moment someone in the background, already bored with the distraction offered by Horn’s outburst, picked up a fat cushion from the long lounge and threw it at Sampidge. It missed and hit Via, who hurled it back with a shriek, and in another few seconds there was a first-class mock fight in progress, from which Horn gratefully withdrew into a corner, reflecting sourly on the all-too-real fight he had himself become involved in exactly one day ago.

Then a rasping voice cut through the racket. “What the hell is all this? Rowl, clear these young ruffians out of here!”

Silence fell instantly, like night on an airless world. Shamefacedly, the teenagers abandoned the cushions
they were flinging around, muttered, “Good morning, sir!” like so many androids, and made themselves scarce, Via and Sampidge along with the rest.

As they passed him in the doorway, Grandad Horn favored each of them with a scowl. The same look was still on his face when he finally spotted his grandson at the side of the room.

“Derry? What the hell are you doing here? I thought you’d taken it into your empty head that our company wasn’t good enough for you this carnival—what are you doing back so soon? Rowl, get me a drink!”

He marched forward and carefully folded his aged legs on the edge of the long lounge.

“I’ve decided this kind of company isn’t good enough for me—period!” Horn said, the anger he would have directed at Sampidge and his sister making the words fiercer than he had intended. “I want the fare to leave Earth!”

Rowl appeared with the drink Grandad Horn had requested—the old man had long ago conceded that when it came to personal service none of his robots could match their android butler—and was waved aside.

“Derry, you’re either out of your head, or … ah-hah! I get it!” The old man leaned back, chuckling. “Who was she? Must have been quite a dish to take away your taste for carnival!”

“I’m not mooning over a woman!” Horn blazed. “I’m just fed up with Earth, and—and I have something to do out there behind the sky!”

His grandfather’s near-century of age sat lightly on him. He had often taken advantage of that to attempt brotherly confidences with his grandson. Now, in spite of all the previous disasters this habit had led to, he tried again. Patting the cushion beside him, he said, “Come and sit down, Derry. Never let it be said I don’t have time to solve my family’s problems for them.”

The arrogance of that made Horn angrier still. He remained defiantly where he was.

“Very well!” His grandfather finally reached for the drink Rowl had brought him and took a swig of it. “But at least tell me what’s happened!”

“Well, last night I killed someone,” Horn began. “A lawforce superintendent named Coolin—”

But his grandfather had leapt ahead of him. “That’s not good, young fellow—not good at all! A lawforce superintendent! What did he do, pick on you unjustly in a crowd or something?”

“Sure he picked on me. Forced me to a dueling hall. He—”

“You beat him in a regular duel? Hell, boy, that’s not something to be ashamed of—it’s something to be
proud
of! And everyone’s equal during carnival, no matter who they are for the rest of the year!” Mentally the old man was slapping shut the well-filled pocketbook he would have had to draw on otherwise.

From outside there came the noise of a heli descending. The old man cocked his head on one side. “Rowl! Who’s that turning up here at this time of night?”

“Mr. Derry senior, sir,” the butler said. “At least I presume so—it’s the model of heli which he uses.”

“Good, good! Now you look here, young man! You get Rowl to give you a drink and hang on until your father comes in, and we’ll see if we can straighten out this crazy notion of yours.”

But his father came in staggering under his load of euphorics, in no condition to talk sense. Snorting with annoyance the old man sent Rowl for antidotes and ice.

“Now you get your head clear, and fast!” he exclaimed. “When are you going to latch on to the fact that you have responsibilities, Derry? Here’s this boy of yours full of some crackbrain plan to run away from Earth, and you’re so piped you can barely walk!”

“He’s what?” His father turned a bulbous glare on Horn. “He’s got a plan to
what?
”

“That’s better,” the old man said sharply. “At least you’re paying attention now. Well, boy, tell us the whole story and we’ll see about it.”

Horn complied. He hadn’t intended to explain, but only to demand the money he needed and march out, leaving his relatives to ask one another what they had done to drive him away. Somehow, though, once he started talking he couldn’t stop, and all kinds of things which he knew even before he mentioned them his listeners would not understand came tumbling out.

“So because your carnival week was spoiled by some off-planet character getting himself stuck with a knife,” said his father at last, “you want to renege on all your family obligations and hide your head on some backward ball of mud like the one he probably came from!”

“Family obligations!” flared Horn. “That’s good, coming from you! I never saw you do anything with family obligations except off-load them on to Grandad’s back! Do you know where your wife is right now?”

“Why, you foul-mouthed little—!” For an instant it looked as though his father was going to jump up and take a swing at him. Then his grandfather’s curt voice broke in.

“Sit down, Derry. Control yourself. There’s nothing wrong with the boy which a whipping would help, and anyhow he’s too old to be treated that way by now. Or should be. If it hadn’t been for this android at the hotel stuffing his ears with all kinds of nonsense about the man who got killed—”

“It isn’t nonsense!” Horn stamped his foot.

“No, you must take it pretty seriously,” his grandfather agreed sarcastically. “Asking a hundred thousand to help you run off and—and become a citizen of the galaxy or rescue a fair maiden from a man-eating tree or something
equally absurd. But you can’t expect anyone
else
to take it seriously.”

“Well, hell, make it fifty thousand, enough for a one-way trip instead of a round one! Or—no, forget I asked for anything! I still have practically all my carnival allowance, and there must be a cheaper way of getting off Earth than shipping in a luxury liner!” Horn started for the door.

“Dad,” said his father, plucking at the old man’s sleeve. “Dad, I think he really means it.”

“Yes, of course he does. Right this minute he means every word of it. But you know the next we’ll hear of him if he does walk out, don’t you? There’ll be a signal from some benighted mudball out in the wide black yonder saying to send him his fare and he’ll come home and be a good little boy again!”

“Come home? To what? A life as rigidly programmed as one of your robots’—only they’re lucky.
They
aren’t designed with the capacity to resent it.” Horn had to clench his fists to stop his hands from trembling.

A dangerous glint showed in his grandfather’s eyes; he had never allowed anyone to voice criticism of his robots within the four walls of his home. Still he remained relatively calm, and spoke in a reasonable tone.

“Now, boy, think it through again, just to please me. I can well understand how the idea of all this romantic knight-errantry must appeal to you, but do look at it in perspective. Remember you were told all this by an android—weren’t you? And it’s notorious that when they’re under exceptional strain androids sometimes come up with the wildest notions, isn’t it?”

“I’m beginning to wonder whether androids aren’t better off than I am! At least when they’re trained they’re given a useful job of work to do, and that’s more than I can ever look forward to if I stay here!”

There was an awful icy silence, during which Horn
knew sickly that he had overstepped the limits of his grandfather’s already tenuous patience. It was like waiting for the skies to fall.

“Very well,” the old man said at last. “Very well. If that’s how you feel about the advantages I’ve provided for you, I guess you had better leave Earth. And the sooner the better. Rowl! Have a heli brought out and program it for Faraway Field! Since you think androids do more useful work than I or your father, you young devil, I’m going to let you
do
an android’s work for a while! There’s a ship loading a consignment of robots on the field this minute—it’s from Newholme and its crew don’t observe carnival. I was intending to ship an android as supercargo. I’ll send you instead. Don’t interrupt!” he thundered at his son, who was feebly protesting. “If you’d raised the kid better it would never have come to this! He’s going to have to learn the hard way what decent folk think of fools who prefer androids to their own kith and kin!”

So angry he could barely speak, he pointed a quivering arm towards the door.

“Out!” he said thickly. “And
stay
out!”

“H
ERE’S WHERE
the supercargo bunks,” said Dize, the brawny first mate of the interstellar freighter. He pointed through a door so narrow it was barely more than a hatchway. “Stow your duffle and get back to number one hold to check the cargo manifest. You got twenty-five minutes.”

Obediently, struggling with the one large bag his grandfather had permitted him to bring and finding it almost too large to squeeze through the opening, Horn complied. His face fell as he saw the cramped cabin he had been assigned.

“Don’t look so sour!” Dize grunted. “Android quarters—what do you expect? And you got more room than on some ships I could name. We’ve had ’em in there head and shoulders taller than you, and glad of so much space to stretch out in! Okay—number one hold in twenty-five minutes from now.”

His footsteps receded down the corridor. Horn dumped his bag on the bunk, sat down beside it and buried his face in his hands.

Well, that was that. For better or worse, he was on his own. At least he’d got what he’d asked for, and that was something of an achievement in itself. Few people could boast of having got something out of Grandfather Horn which he’d not at first been willing to concede. He clung to that slender consolation, lowered his hands and surveyed the cabin. It held the bunk he was sitting on—nearly as hard as the bench in Berl’s heli; a locker containing a standard android poncho of coarse burlap and a pair of issue sandals much too small for him; a washbowl
with a pressure tap aimed squarely at the open drain. And nothing.

Realizing with a start that five of his precious minutes had been lost in mooning, he set about stowing his gear as best he could. The locker was full almost at once, and he had to leave the bulk of what he’d brought in the case, which he contrived to slide underneath the bunk. He was still wearing a gaudy carnival rig because he’d taken nothing else away from home with him; he stripped it off and changed into more practical garb.

Over the washbowl there were a few square inches of mirror. Catching sight of himself, he noted that he ought to have a shave; black stubble was disfiguring his cheeks and chin. But in his haste he had picked up a jar of depilatory with only a smear left at the bottom, instead of the full one next to it. Annoyed at his mistake, he took a second look at himself and wondered whether he might try letting his beard grow. Sure, why not? He tossed the jar into the disposal chute.

Abruptly he remembered that he still had to find his way to the hold where Dize was expecting him, and had no idea even which end of the ship it was. He scrambled out of the cabin, stared both ways along the corridor, and set off at random down a maze of passages in which he shortly became hopelessly lost. It was more by luck than judgment that he ultimately reached the right place and found Dize fuming with impatience.

“Where the hell have you been, Horn? I can see this trip’s going to be a rough one! Shipping with a human supercargo—whoever heard of anything so stupid? Androids at least do as they’re told!”

Cheeks burning, Horn accepted the cargo manifest Dize thrust at him and began laboriously to check it.

Crate after crate of robots, lying passive in their plastic coffins, awaiting their personal dawn on Newholme. Incomprehensible identity codes which he had to ask to
have explained to him; even when he’d got the hang of the markings he had trouble, because some of the crates had been stowed upside-down to make the most of the hold-space, and he had to clamber and crane and peer down gaps to find their codes. At the end he seemed to have several crates left over. With wordless contempt Dize showed where he had turned over two pages of the manifest at once.

“All right,” he said at long last. “Back to quarters with you. Chow’s in a quarter-hour, and we lift two hours after that Don’t know what we’re doing about feeding you—guess we can’t fill you up with android staple, seeing you’re human. Anyway, I suppose you ought to show at the mess, be introduced to Captain Larrow. Think you can find your way?”

But when Horn diffidently slid back the door of the mess to discover Larrow already at table, he was met with a frosty glare and a bellow.

“Are you Horn? Well then, what in hell are you doing here?”

“I told him to come, captain,” Dize said from the opposite end of the dining-table.

“Then you damned well shouldn’t have. Old man Horn gave strict explicit orders that the boy was to be treated exactly like the regular kind of supercargo. In my book that means he eats android food—and I’ve half a mind to have him put on an android poncho, too, but I guess that rig he’s in will be a bit more practical.” He was a red-faced man with bristling eyebrows like a battery of miniature guns, and they waggled up and down as he spoke, raking Horn from head to foot. “Mr. Arglewain!”

“Sir?”—from another crewman sitting next to Dize.

“Go and issue him a measure of android staple. And get this, Horn! Mr. Arglewain’s the steward. You’re to report to him five minutes before every chow-time from now on and collect your rations, understood? If you’re
not prompt you don’t eat. You probably won’t care for the staple after your fancy diet on Earth, but it’s what you’ll be getting so you’d best learn to appreciate it. I’ve lived on it for days together myself, and it never did me any harm.”

The android staple was a mushy grey-green goo—some kind of algae emulsified and fortified, Horn guessed. Experimentally, although he was not in fact hungry, he choked a little of it down in the seclusion of his cabin. It came right back up again twenty minutes after the ship had lifted.

“You’ll get over it,” said Dize unsympathetically when he looked in an hour or so later. “In fact, you’ll damned well have to get over it, and inside eight hours, at that. A supercargo is kept pretty busy aboard a tub like this. Well, catch some sleep if you can, and I’ll rout you out at the beginning of your watch.”

He turned to leave. Horn called feebly after him. “Say—just a moment, Mr. Dize!”

“What is it?”

“You’re from Newholme, aren’t you?”

“Of course. This is a Newholmer ship you’re flying with.”

“What’s it like on Newholme? I mean, what’s it
really
like? What makes it a different kind of place to live from Earth?” Horn was struggling to sit up, his face almost the color of the undigested android staple he had thrown up.

“That’s kind of a funny question,” Dize said slowly. “Don’t they teach galactography in Earthside schools?”

Horn made a vague gesture. “That’s not what I want to know, the kind of thing they teach in schools. You can’t find out about what interests me—whatever it is that marks off the people of one world from those of another. I don’t mean the clothes they wear or the food they like
to eat. I don’t mean anything you can make lists or take solidos of. That’s why I told my grandfather I wanted to get off Earth, because I suddenly needed to know things which no one could tell me back there.”

“Is that the truth you’re telling me—that you
wanted
to come off Earth? It wasn’t just what I heard talk of, a row with your grandfather?” Dize cocked his head suspiciously.

“My asking for the money to leave Earth with was what started the row.”

“Ah-hah,” Dize nodded.
“I
get. Might have guessed, come to that. I never met your grandfather, but we specialize in shipping his robots out for him, and I always pictured him as the kind of guy who thinks Earth is the whole of the universe.”

“I promise you I’m not,” Horn said weakly.

“All right, I believe you. But you look pretty sick right now. You stretch out and catch some sleep like I told you. Later on you’ll have all the time in the galaxy to answer that question of yours.”

After that, things weren’t nearly as bad as he’d expected; Dize’s affectation of gruffness gradually gave way to a sort of rough, rather patronizing, friendliness, and the process accelerated as he discovered that Horn was genuinely anxious not to be a nuisance and to do his best. Every now and then a trace of weary contempt for soft-handed Earthmen who were used to having everything done for them by machinery did still climax in a bout of vivid cursing, but this was invariably followed by a quick, economical and easily understood lesson in whatever technique Horn was finding troublesome, so that there was never a second recurrence of the same problem.

“Well, I can say this for you, Horn,” he admitted
grudgingly three days out from Earth. “You’re not stupid. Just ignorant is all. And I guess you can’t help that, can you?”

Horn felt himself flushing. Under Dize’s guidance he was carrying out a check of the hull plates to make sure they were screening free-space radiation properly; heavy cosmics could play merry hell with the delicate electronic balance in a robot brain. He said, “Well—ah—this sort of job doesn’t turn up too much on Earth these days.”

“You mean you’d turn the whole thing over to automatics and just monitor them from a central instrument board?” Dize suggested.

“Yes, I guess that’s what I’d have expected,” Horn nodded.

“It’s exactly what they do do aboard Earth’s luxury liners. And we could certainly do the same—after all, we build our own ships, and automatic radiation detectors are kid stuff compared to interstellar engines. But I wouldn’t like it. And there’s the start of an answer to that question you put to me just after we lifted.”

Horn looked briefly blank, then caught himself. “Oh! I was asking how Newholmers differed from—from Earth-siders, wasn’t I?”

“Right.” Dize perched on a handy crate and began to stuff a large foul-smelling pipe with some herbal mixture whose scent Horn had at first found pungent and irritating, but was growing adjusted to. “Why wouldn’t we like it? Well, what would we do with our time during the trip?”

Horn recalled Dordy’s sour remark about sitting in an android barracks and reading the classics of literature. He nodded slowly.

“It’s different aboard a liner,” Dize said. “You can rely on any given bunch of passengers to keep the crew continually on the hop between takeoff and touchdown. A
cargo of unactivated robots you’d just sit and stare at. You’d get bored. You’d get irritable. Me especially—I was born with a quick temper, as you’ve probably noticed.”

Horn gave a wry grin.

“And what would you be doing right now? I mean if I wasn’t chasing you to do hull-checks and air-monitoring and the rest of it? You’d be sitting on your backside in your cabin wondering if you’d been a complete idiot and what your chances were of signaling your grandfather to have the ship turned around and take you home. True?”

“You’re damned right,” Horn said. “It certainly stops me brooding.”

“So there you are.” Dize checked his watch. “Ah, almost chow-time. You can break off now.”

And, ten minutes later, he reappeared at the door of Horn’s cabin to find him spooning the drab staple into his mouth. “Come on!” he said, beckoning, and hurried him down the corridor to the mess. Astonished, Horn hesitated in the entrance as Larrow looked up frostily.

But his next response was to gesture at an unoccupied place between Dize’s and Arglewain’s. “Join us, Mr. Horn,” he invited. “Mr. Dize tells me he thinks you would be an asset to our company.”

Three days further out they took the Big Step around the intervening light-years—the step which, for some reason no one understood, one ship in a million flights never completed—and began their braking run into the Newholme system. But Horn’s own personal Big Step had already taken place.

When they had put down and cleared their holds, and he had had his first glmpse of another world (a disappointing one, for spaceports on every planet were much the same), he went back to his cabin and gathered his belongings prior to signing off the complement. Dize
found him there testing a comb on the beard he had sprouted during the twelve days in space, which was already nearly long enough to look neat.

“Got something for you, Horn,” he said. “Here!”

He held out a small envelope which Horn, puzzled, took and opened. Inside was a wad of what he instantly recognized as currency notes, though the design and color were unfamiliar and the bold lettering on each bill identified the issuing authority as the Planetary Republic of Newholme.

‘What’s this for?” he demanded.

“It’s the going rate for the number of hours’ work you put in,” Dize grunted, seeming oddly embarrassed. “You see, we thought we ought to draw the line somewhere—about treating you like an android—and since your grandfather sort of kicked you off Earth without the polite goodbyes, well …”

“Oh, I’m not broke!” Horn exclaimed. “I still have the allowance he gave me for carnival week, and I guess Earthside currency can be changed easily enough.”

He made to give it back, but Dize waved it aside, sitting down on the bunk and lighting his pipe again.

“No, you earned it—you keep it. Larrow’s a martinet, but he’s dogmatic about his men having what they deserve. And—ah—speaking for myself, at least, any time you decide you want to work your passage back home, you just hang around this port until we show up, and you’ll have got yourself the job you need.”

Feeling absurdly flattered, Horn shrugged and slipped the Newholme money into his billfold. “By the way,” he said, “I just realized! I never asked what you ship the other way—to Earth. You don’t go back empty, presumably.”

“No, of course not. We carry androids.”

“What!”
Horn was so startled he dropped his comb into the washbowl. “In the same holds as the robots?”

“Sure. Except the one we pick for supercargo. He gets to use this cabin. We fix up sort of collapsible bunks instead of the crate-racks, and they make out pretty well.”

Horn stared at him for a long moment, then gave a forced laugh. “Remind me not to take up your offer of a working trip home, then,” he said. “Crated robots sound a lot easier to handle.”

“Oh, androids aren’t troublesome. Can’t be! They’re conditioned out of it.” Dize sucked on his pipe and emitted dense clouds of aromatic smoke.

Horn pondered for a while. “Hmmm! I guess you can fit a good few androids into those holds of yours, then. Funny! I always had this impression that most of the androids on Earth were made right there.”