Methuselah's Children (21 page)

He waited. He struck a cigarette and smoked it. He walked up and down. He had no way to judge how long it would be; it seemed, in consequence, much longer than it was.

At last the doors slid back and natives crowded out through them. They seemed curiously worked up about something and none of them came near Lazarus. The press that still existed in the great doorway separated, formed an aisle, and a figure came running headlong through it and out into the open.

Lazarus recognized Ford.

Ford did not stop where Lazarus waited but plunged blindly on past. He tripped and fell down. Lazarus hurried to him.

Ford made, no effort to get up. He lay sprawled face down, his shoulders heaving violently, his frame shaking with sobs.

Lazarus knelt by him and shook him. "Slayton," he demanded, "what's happened? What's wrong with you?" Ford turned wet and horror-stricken eyes to him, checking his sobs momentarily. He did not speak but he seemed to recognize Lazarus. He flung himself on Lazarus, clung to him, wept more violently than before.

Lazarus wrenched himself free and slapped Ford hard. "Snap out of it!" he ordered. "Tell me what's the matter."

Ford jerked his head at the slap and stopped his outcries but he said nothing. His eyes looked dazed. A shadow fell across Lazarus' line of sight; he spun around, covering with his blaster. Kreel Sarloo stood a few feet away and did not come closer-not because of the weapon; he had never seen one before.

"You!" said Lazarus. "For the- What did you do to him?"

He checked himself and switched to speech that Sarloo could understand. "What has happened to my brother Ford?"

"Take him away," said Sarloo, his lips twitching. "This is a bad thing. This is a very bad thing."

"You're telling me!" said Lazarus. He did not bother to translate.

3

The same conference as before, minus its chairman, met as quickly as possible. Lazarus told his story, Shultz reported on Ford's condition. "The medical staff can't find anything wrong with him. All I can say with certainty is that the Administrator is suffering from an undiagnosed extreme psychosis. We can't get into communication with him."

"Won't he talk at all?" asked Barstow.

"A word or two, on subjects as simple as food or water. Any attempt to reach the cause of his trouble drives him into incoherent hysteria."

"No diagnosis?"

"Well, if you want an unprofessional guess in loose language, I'd say he was scared out of his wits. But," Schultz added, "I've seen fear syndromes before. Never anything like this."

"I have," Lazarus said suddenly.

"You have? Where? What were the circumstances?"

"Once," said Lazarus, "when I was a kid, a couple of hundred years back, I caught a grown coyote and penned him up. I had a notion I could train him to be a hunting dog. It didn't work.

"Ford acts just the way that coyote did."

An unpleasant silence followed. Schultz broke it with, "I don't quite see what you mean. What is the parallel?"

"Well," Lazarus answered slowly, "this is just my guess. Slayton is the only one who knows the true answer and he can't talk. But here's my opinion: we've had these Jockaira doped out all wrong from scratch. We made the mistake of thinking that because they looked like us, in a general way, and were about as civilized as we are, that they were
people.
But they aren't people at all. They are . . .
domestic animals.

"Wait a minute now!" he added. "Don't get in a rush. There are people on this planet, right enough. Real people. They lived in the temples and the Jockaira called them gods. They
are
gods!"

Lazarus pushed on before anyone could interrupt. "I know what you're thinking. Forget it. I'm not going metaphysical on you; I'm just putting it the best I can. I mean that there is something living in those temples and whatever it is, it is such heap big medicine that it can pinch-hit for gods, so you might as well call 'em that. Whatever they are, they are the true dominant race on this planet-its
people!
To them, the rest of us, Jocks or us, are just animals, wild or tame. We made the mistake of assuming that a local religion was merely superstition. It ain't."

Barstow said slowly, "And you think this accounts for what happened to Ford?"

"I do. He met one, the one called Kreel, and it drove him crazy."

"I take it," said Schultz, "that it is your theory that any man exposed to this . . . this
presence
. . . would become psychotic?"

"Not exactly," answered Lazarus. "What scares me a damn' sight more is the fear that I might
not
go crazy!"

That same day the Jockaira withdrew all contact with the Earthmen. It was well that they did so, else there would have been violence. Fear hung over the city, fear of horror worse than death, fear of some terrible nameless thing, the mere knowledge of which could turn a man into a broken mindless animal. The Jockaira no longer seemed harmless friends, rather clownish despite their scientific attainments, but puppets, decoys, bait for the unseen potent beings who lurked in the "temples."

There was no need to vote on it; with the single-mindedness of a crowd stampeding from a burning building the Earthmen wanted to leave this terrible place. Zaccur Barstow assumed command. "Get King on the screen. Tell him to send down every boat at once. We'll get out of here as fast as we can." He ran his fingers worriedly through his hair. "What's the most we can load each trip, Lazarus? How long will the evacuation take?"

Lazarus muttered.

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'It ain't a case of how long; it's a case of will we be let.' Those things in the temples may want more domestic animals-us!"

Lazarus was needed as a boat pilot but he was needed more urgently for his ability to manage a crowd. Zaccur Barstow was telling him to conscript a group of emergency police when Lazarus looked past Zaccur's shoulder and exclaimed, "Oh oh! Hold it, Zack-school's out."

Zaccur turned his head quickly and saw, approaching with stately dignity across the council hall, Kreel Sarloo. No one got in his way.

They soon found out why. Zaccur moved forward to greet him, found himself stopped about ten feet from the Jockaira. No clue to the cause; just that-stopped.

"I greet you, unhappy brother," Sarloo began.

"I greet you, Kreel Sarloo."

"The gods have spoken. Your kind can never be civilized (?). You and your brothers are to leave this world."

Lazarus let out a deep sigh of relief.

"We are leaving, Kreel Sarloo," Zaccur answered soberly.

"The gods require that you leave. Send your brother Libby to me."

Zaccur sent for Libby, then turned back to Sarloo. But the Jockaira had nothing more to say to them; he seemed indifferent to their presence. They waited.

Libby arrived. Sarloo held him in a long conversation. Barstow and Lazarus were both in easy earshot and could see their lips move, but heard nothing. Lazarus found the circumstance very disquieting. Damn my eyes, he thought, I could figure several ways to pull that trick with the right equipment but I'll bet none of 'em is the right answer-and I don't see any equipment.

The silent discussion ended, Sarloo stalked off without farewell. Libby turned to the others and spoke; now his voice could be heard. "Sarloo tells me," he began, brow wrinkled in puzzlement, "that we are to go to a planet, uh, over thirty-two light-years from here. The gods have decided it." He stopped and bit his lip.

"Don't fret about it." advised Lazarus. "Just be glad they want us to leave. My guess is that they could have squashed us flat just as easily. Once we're out in space we'll pick our own destination."

"I suppose so. But the thing that puzzles me is that he mentioned a time about three hours away as being our departure from this system."

"Why, that's utterly unreasonable," protested Barstow. "Impossible. We haven't the boats to do it."

Lazarus said nothing. He was ceasing to have opinions.

Zaccur changed his opinion quickly. Lazarus acquired one, born of experience. While urging his cousins toward the field where embarkation was proceeding, he found himself lifted up, free of the ground. He struggled, his arms and legs met no resistance but the ground dropped away. He closed his eyes, counted ten jets, opened them again. He was at least two miles in the air.

Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.

The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.

They were sucked into clusters around the open ports of the
New Frontiers
like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes.
Whew!
he sighed to himself, watch that first step-it's a honey!

Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo's message.

King seemed undecided. "I don't know," he said. "You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my passengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed,"

"I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir," Libby answered unhumorously. "Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I'm glad you had the ship's access ports open."

"I didn't," said King tersely. "They were opened for me."

They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. "This planet that Sarloo described to you," said King, "does it belong to a G-type star?"

"Yes," Libby confirmed, "an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away."

"So . . ." King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story.

With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the
New Frontiers
was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.

"I can't tell you much," admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. "I was able to determine, before we passed the speed of light-or appeared to-that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his gods. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astrogational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going."

"Loosen up, Andy," suggested Lazarus. "Make a guess."

"Well . . . if our world line is a smooth function-
if
it is, and I have no data-then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going."

"Rummph!" Lazarus turned to King. "Have you tried slowing down?"

"Yes," King said shortly. "The controls are dead."

"Mmmm . . . Andy, when do we get there?"

Libby shrugged helplessly. "I have no frame of reference. What is time without a space reference?"

Time and space, inseparable and one- Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the space framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship's time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physiochemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.

But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.

What
universe?

There was no universe. It was gone.

Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?

Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to
what?
thought Libby. Could it be that space held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded "ether" that the classic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that-had denied the very possibility of its existence?

-had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually passed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as passengers, going nowhere at no time?

But Libby itched between his shoulder blades and was forced to scratch; his left leg had gone to sleep; his stomach was beginning to speak insistently for food-if this was death, he decided, it did not seem materially different from life.

With renewed tranquility, he left the control room and headed for his favorite refectory, while starting to grapple with the problem of inventing a new mathematics which would include all the new phenomena. The mystery of how the hypothetical gods of the Jockaira had teleported the Families from ground to ship he discarded. There had been no opportunity to obtain significant data,
measured
data; the best that any honest scientist could do, with epistemological rigor, was to include a note that recorded the fact and stated that it was unexplained. It
was
a fact; here he was who shortly before had been on the planet; even now Schultz's assistants were overworked trying to administer depressant drugs to the thousands who had gone to pieces emotionally under the outrageous experience.

But Libby could not explain it and, lacking data, felt no urge to try. What he did want to do was to deal with world lines in a plenum, the basic problem of field physics.