Launch Pad (31 page)

“Yes.”

“Learning about relativity.”

“Right. So?”

“Do you see the connection?”

I didn’t want to, but it was obvious. “Eclipse I. The first manned space flight at relativistic speeds.”

“It’s only natural for that memory to come back to you at this time. But what does it mean?”

“Ah … I’m afraid of relativity?”

“Are you?”

“That’s ridiculous! This is just like any other flight, only faster. Hell, the whole thing is nothing more than a glorified speed run. We’re not going anywhere, just out and back again. And the ship’s clock will be two minutes behind Mission Control’s when we get back. Two minutes. Are you trying to tell me I’m afraid of that?”

He shook his head. “I’m not telling you anything. But don’t downplay the importance of this flight. It’s more than a speed run, and you know it. Mankind is finally coming up against the limits of the physical world. Everyone from Earth to Mars is on edge over it, me included. So why shouldn’t you be?”

“Because I’m the captain, damn it! I have to be above all this if I’m to perform my job.”

“Yet, by your own admission, you’d have to be a fool not to be afraid in a situation like this.” The calm in his voice cut through my anger, quelling it. “I happen to agree with you,” he said. “The question is, did this fear cause you to freeze? If it did—”

“If it did, I’m finished.”

I sat with downcast eyes, striving to restore calm to a raging inner sea. Through it all, he sat there, watching me, waiting.

At last I looked up. “What can I do?”

“Sleep on it tonight. I don’t think we’ll be able to accomplish any more here today. And when I say sleep, I mean it. I don’t want you awake all night, torturing yourself. You’ll never find it that way.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Is there anything you can do? Can’t your mnemonograph tell you something? Anything?”

“I’ll look at your memory print again. Maybe I missed something the first time.”

I got up to leave. “Wish me luck with my soul-searching.”

He smiled, perhaps a little too widely. “You don’t need luck. You’ll get it.”

Somehow, I wasn’t convinced.

O O O

Don’t downplay the importance of this flight.

His words came back to me as I lay on a formfoam bed in the station’s itinerant housing section and thought about the memory.

Mel had left me a message on my personal unit. I had played it back as soon as I’d returned from Dr. Wells’s office.

“Hey, partner,” she said as her imaged coalesced before me. “Just checking in to see how those sessions are going. I really hope you’re making some progress. You have to get back to the launch cradle as soon as you can. Whether the ISC believes it or not, we need you on that ship.”

Her mouth drew tight; lines creased her forehead.

“I’m worried about you, Mike. Don’t let that damned zapper fry your brain, okay?” Her image faded and disappeared.

The importance of this flight.

Mankind is finally coming up against the limits of the physical world.

Pretty heady, maybe, but it was true. But there was more to it than that. Dr. Wells probably wasn’t aware of it, but anyone who worked for the ISC knew it all too well.

The Titan flight, for all the publicity it had received, had been a failure, as had been all the Jupiter flights. All the money and effort put into those projects could only show us what we already knew: the outer planets were too cold and too impossibly remote to serve as viable bases for human colonies. Shortly after I had returned from Titan, the whispers began. The Space Age, they said, was drawing to close. The only thing that stood between us and that inevitable end was the Eclipse project.

The importance of this flight.

I was suddenly angry with the whole thing. What right did they have to make me into a hero? What did I owe them, anyway?

And then another voice inside me spoke up, saying, Are you doing this for them or for yourself, Schaeffer?

My flash of anger subsided, leaving me merely morose. None of this was getting me any closer to figuring out what had paralyzed me during the test firing. I had to know, damn it, but that dark place remained dark, stubbornly defying the light I kept trying to shine into it, sucking it up worse than any black hole.

It was there. I could feel it inside me, lying dormant and undisturbed, despite all my attempts at nudging it awake. Somehow I knew it had been there for a long, long time, and I had been blissfully unaware of it. But now that I had discovered it, nothing would progress until I had dragged it into daylight, where I could look on its face and know its purpose.

I cursed silently, knowing that despite what Dr. Wells had said, sleep would not come soon.

O O O

“It’s no use. I can’t get it.”

He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was good at keeping a neutral expression on his face—I would hate to play poker with him—but I was getting to know him. He was disappointed.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Positive. What about you? Did you have any luck?”

He remained silent, and that was answer enough for me. “Can you plug me back into the original memory?” I asked.

“I can. Do you think it would help?”

I considered, then shook my head. “I guess not. I’ve seen enough.”

Silence fell again.

“What’s the next step?”

His gaze seemed riveted on one of the landscape stills hanging on the wall. He blinked and shook himself. “Pardon me?”

“I said, what’s next? What do we do now?”

“Back to the sessions, I suppose.”

“We don’t have time for that. Isn’t there anything else?”

He shifted in his chair. His fingers repeatedly tapped his knee.

I peered at him. “What’s going on here? What’s the matter with you?”

After several moments of studying his face, I said, “You found something, didn’t you? Something in my memory print.”

He stilled his tapping fingers and nodded.

“And you weren’t going to tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure if I should.”

“Damn it, doc, I don’t have time to play around here. You talk to me.”

He cleared his throat. “There is a complex pattern stored in your memory. An old pattern. Portions of it match almost exactly with your Eclipse experience, as well as your Academy memory. Parts of it show up repeatedly in almost every memory you have.”

“How in the hell did you miss it the first time?”

He winced. “I didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“I could be wrong, but judging from the context, I believe … I think it’s a core memory.”

“What’s that?”

He stood and walked over to his desk. With his back to me, he said, “Neither of us has the time to go through eight years’ worth of medical training. I’ll try to give you the basics.

“Even with all of our new technology, there’s a lot we’ve yet to learn about the brain. New hypotheses spring up weekly, it seems.” He faced me. “The existence of core memories was first postulated by the founders of mnemonology. Until recently, though, there has been no evidence to support it. We didn’t know what to look for, really. And the technology is still being refined. There is a considerable amount of debate on the topic.

“The term core memory refers not to a memory’s location, but to its significance. You see, certain events shape our perceptions of the world, our outlook. The memory of such an event, the argument goes, imprints our minds with an indelible stamp, and becomes a natural part of our thought processes.”

He paused, fixing me with a serious stare. “All of our thought processes, no matter how trivial. Do you see now? Core memories frame our drives, our desires. Even our dreams. Amnesia victims retain their core memories, the research suggests. It’s what enables most of them to recover.

“As I said, it’s still controversial, but the research I’ve seen seems pretty solid.”

“So why didn’t you tell me about it? What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that core memories are probably traumatic—the death of a loved one, for example. At the very least, it can be argued that core memories impact the brain in a special way. The person may not even be aware of it at the time. The research suggests that the conscious mind shuts it out as a reflex action. Core memories may even be the source of the subconscious.”

“And what happens when you plug into them?”

“No one knows. It’s never been done.”

“Why not?”

He glared. “Haven’t you been listening? The brain shields us from our core memories for a reason! Are you really so anxious to find out what that reason is?”

“What are you saying?” My voice rose to match his. “I won’t come back?”

“Maybe not. Plugging you in might cripple you mentally. The brain may be able to take such a blow only once.”

“There are a lot of mights and maybes in this theory of yours.”

He crossed his arms. “I won’t do it.”

“What?”

“I refuse to be the man who turned an interplanetary hero into a vegetable. Mnemonology is under enough scrutiny as it is without that kind of publicity.”

“It’s my mind. Don’t I have a say in this?”

“It’s too dangerous. That’s my professional opinion. If you want to have this procedure done, then find another zapper to do it.”

“I can’t believe this. After taking me this far, you’re just going to leave me hanging?”

The question seemed to deflate him. “I guess I’m trying to impress on you the nature of what you propose. The risks … we aren’t even sure what they are.”

“I’ve been in that kind of situation before.”

“You’ve never done anything like this before. Believe me.”

Softly, I said, “Please, doc. I can’t back down now. I have to know.”

He studied me for what felt like several minutes. Finally, he said, “Yes. I guess you do.”

Before we went any further, he made me sign a form that released him from all responsibility for whatever happened. Of course, that would mean nothing in the face of public opinion if the machine turned me into a zombie, but at least he would avoid the legal hassles. I didn’t mind.

I sat in the chair and put on the headset. He said not a word as he switched on his handheld and began calling up my mnemonogram from the files. His face was stony as he worked the controls. He avoided my eyes.

As for me, I felt a curious sort of calm expectation, the way I sometimes did just before a launch. And yes, there was a small pit of nervousness in my stomach. It made me hyper-alert; the details of the examining room all stood out in clear relief. I took that as a good sign.

He looked up from the display. “All right,” he said in a monotone.

I had no idea what to say. I felt it should be something important, but all I could think of was, “Wish me luck.”

He shook his head. “Luck has nothing to do with it. If I detect any signs of trauma, I’m pulling you out.”

“Fair enough.”

He pushed some buttons.

O O O

Another classroom.

Schaeffer’s watcher-self was amused, but not really surprised. This classroom was definitely not the Academy, though. It was older, darker, and the children around him were—

Children!

Schaeffer-that-watched felt a dull amazement. He was back in elementary school, on Earth. The class was Science, and the teacher was a sweet lady named Mrs. Malloy. Schaeffer wondered at the memory’s perfect preservation, right down to the drafty windows next to which the memory-child sat.

The room was dark because they were watching a film. The picture was fuzzy and blotchy, but serviceable enough to make out the hulking locomotive shooting down the rails, shrill horn blaring. The horn touched off strange associations for Schaeffer; dimly, he remembered the echo of a train whistle from another memory, one yet to come for the child.

“Listen to the horn,” Mrs. Malloy said.

Schaeffer listened. As the train neared, the horn blared louder. The train whizzed by, and the horn dropped in pitch. The Schaeffer-child’s eyes widened. The trains had stopped running long before he was born. Surprised and puzzled murmurings rippled through the classroom.

The film stopped and the lights came back up. “That,” Mrs. Malloy said, “was a common example of a kind of Doppler shift. From where we stood as we watched the train, the sound waves approaching seemed shorter, so the whistle sounded higher. When the train passed us, the waves grew longer, and the horn sounded lower.”

“Why?” a boy behind Schaeffer asked.

Mrs. Malloy smiled. “Because of where we were standing. The engineer on the train would only have heard a long, continuous whistle, since the sound waves approaching him never seemed to change in length. So the sound you hear depends on where you stand.” She paused, her eyes sparkling. “You’re going to find out that a lot of things depend on where you stand.”

Of course such an oblique reference had no meaning for the children, but Schaeffer-who-watched knew what she was talking about. And so, amazingly enough, did the child Schaeffer once was. Or at least, he had a child’s grasp of it, an understanding that was perhaps instinctual. Certainly none of the careful grooming from parents, siblings, and teachers could prepare a child for the truth that not all things followed the rules.…

There it was. This time, he could see it clearly. So did the child. Inner and outer eyes widened in wonder as realization came in a vision of space and stars and immeasurable gulfs. The child could not know, but the watcher-self understood. No rules, no absolutes, a vast, seething, chaotic mass—for just a moment, the child had glimpsed the universe as the strange and terrible place it really was, not as the neat and orderly clockwork machinery he had been taught since earliest memory. The child gasped.

It was terrible for Schaeffer-who-watched as well. The vision hung there in his mind, intractable, commanding his attention. He cringed from it, and from the dark place inside him now filled with light. He tried to shut his eyes, but of course he had no eyes to shut, and he could not look away. Too late, the warnings from Dr. Wells clanged in his mind; too late, he realized that he could not take it after all—

And the child who would one day be Schaeffer looked upon the vision … and smiled.