The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (48 page)

That, Jimmy was sure, was quite untrue. But something warned him not to pursue the matter any further, and before he could reply Gibson was questioning him again.

It was all done in such a friendly spirit of apparently genuine interest that Jimmy couldn’t avoid feeling flattered, couldn’t help talking freely and easily. Somehow it didn’t matter if Gibson was indeed studying him as disinterestedly and as clinically as a biologist watching the reactions of one of his laboratory animals. Jimmy felt like talking, and he preferred to give Gibson’s motives the benefit of the doubt.

He talked of his childhood and early life, and presently Gibson understood the occasional clouds that sometimes seemed to overlie the lad’s normally cheerful disposition. It was an old story— one of the oldest. Jimmy’s mother had died when he was a little more than a baby, and his father had left him in the charge of a married sister. Jimmy’s aunt had been kind to him, but he had never felt at home among his cousins, had always been an outsider. Nor had his father been a great deal of help, for he was seldom in England, and had died when Jimmy was about ten years old. He appeared to have left very little impression on his son, who, strangely enough, seemed to have clearer memories of the mother whom he could scarcely have known.

Once the barriers were down, Jimmy talked without reticence, as if glad to unburden his mind. Sometimes Gibson asked questions to prompt him, but the questions grew further and further apart and presently came no more.

“I don’t think my parents were really very much in love,” said Jimmy. “From what Aunt Ellen told me, it was all rather a mistake. There was another man first, but that fell through. My father was the next best thing. Oh, I know this sounds rather heartless, but please remember it all happened such a long time ago, and doesn’t mean much to me now.”

“I understand,” said Gibson quietly; and it seemed as if he really did. “Tell me more about your mother.”

“Her father— my granddad, that is— was one of the professors at the university. I think Mother spent all her life in Cambridge. When she was old enough she went to college for her degree— she was studying history. Oh, all this can’t possibly interest you!”

“It really does,” said Gibson earnestly. “Go on.”

So Jimmy talked. Everything he told must have been learned from hearsay, but the picture he gave Gibson was surprisingly clear and detailed. His listener guessed that Aunt Ellen must have been very talkative, and Jimmy a very attentive small boy.

It was one of those innumerable college romances that briefly flower and wither during that handful of years which seems a microcosm of life itself. But this one had been more serious than most. During her last term Jimmy’s mother— he still hadn’t told Gibson her name— had fallen in love with a young engineering student who was halfway through his college career. It had been a whirlwind romance, and the match was an ideal one despite the fact that the girl was several years older than the boy. Indeed, it had almost reached the stage of an engagement when— Jimmy wasn’t quite sure what had happened. The young man had been taken seriously ill, or had had a nervous breakdown, and had never come back to Cambridge.

“My mother never really got over it,” said Jimmy, with a grave assumption of wisdom which somehow did not seem completely incongruous. “But another student was very much in love with her, and so she married him. I sometimes feel rather sorry for my father, for he must have known all about the other affair. I never say much of him because— why, Mr. Gibson, don’t you feel well?”

Gibson forced a smile.

“It’s nothing— just a touch of space-sickness. I get it now and then— it will pass in a minute.”

He only wished that the words were true. All these weeks, in total ignorance and believing himself secure against all the shocks of time and chance, he had been steering a collision course with Fate. And now the moment of impact had come; the twenty years that lay behind had vanished like a dream, and he was face to face once more with the ghosts of his own forgotten past.

“There’s something wrong with Martin,” said Bradley, signing the signals log with a flourish. “It can’t be any news he’s had from Earth— I’ve read it all. Do you suppose he’s getting homesick?”

“He’s left it a little late in the day, if that’s the explanation,” replied Norden. “After all, we’ll be on Mars in a fortnight. But you do rather fancy yourself as an amateur psychologist, don’t you?”

“Well, who doesn’t?”

“
I
don’t for one,” began Norden pontifically. “Prying into other people’s affairs isn’t one of my——”

An anticipatory gleam in Bradley’s eyes warned him just in time, and to the other’s evident disappointment he checked himself in mid-sentence. Martin Gibson, complete with notebook and looking like a cub reporter attending his first press conference, had hurried into the office.

“Well, Owen, what was it you wanted to show me?” he asked eagerly.

Bradley moved to the main communication rack.

“It isn’t really very impressive,” he said, “but it means that we’ve passed another milestone and always gives me a bit of a kick. Listen to this.”

He pressed the speaker switch and slowly brought up the volume control. The room was flooded with the hiss and crackle of radio noise, like the sound of a thousand frying pans at the point of imminent ignition. It was a sound that Gibson had heard often enough in the signals cabin and, for all its unvarying monotony, it never failed to fill him with a sense of wonder. He was listening, he knew, to the voices of the stars and nebulae, to radiations that had set out upon their journey before the birth of Man. And buried far down in the depths of that crackling, whispering chaos there might be— there
must
be— the sounds of alien civilizations talking to one another in the deeps of space. But, alas, their voices were lost beyond recall in the welter of cosmic interference which Nature herself had made.

This, however, was certainly not what Bradley had called him to hear. Very delicately, the signals officer made some vernier adjustments, frowning a little as he did so.

“I had it on the nose a minute ago— hope it hasn’t drifted off— ah, here it is!”

At first Gibson could detect no alteration in the barrage of noise. Then he noticed that Bradley was silently marking time with his hand— rather quickly, at the rate of some two beats every second. With this to guide him, Gibson presently detected the infinitely faint undulating whistle that was breaking through the cosmic storm.

“What is it?” he asked, already half guessing the answer.

“It’s the radio beacon on Deimos. There’s one on Phobos as well, but it’s not so powerful and we can’t pick it up yet. When we get nearer Mars, we’ll be able to fix ourselves within a few hundred kilometers by using them. We’re at ten times the usable range now, but it’s nice to know.”

Yes, thought Gibson, it is nice to know. Of course, these radio aids weren’t essential when one could see one’s destination all the time, but they simplified some of the navigational problems. As he listened with half-closed eyes to that faint pulsing, sometimes almost drowned by the cosmic barrage, he knew how the mariners of old must have felt when they caught the first glimpse of the harbor lights from far out at sea.

“I think that’s enough,” said Bradley, switching off the speaker and restoring silence. “Anyway, it should give you something new to write about— things have been pretty quiet lately, haven’t they?”

He was watching Gibson intently as he said this, but the author never responded. He merely jotted a few words in his notebook, thanked Bradley with absent-minded and unaccustomed politeness, and departed to his cabin.

“You’re quite right,” said Norden when he had gone. “Something’s certainly happened to Martin. I’d better have a word with Doc.”

“I shouldn’t bother,” replied Bradley. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s anything you can handle with pills. Better leave Martin to work it out his own way.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Norden grudgingly. “But I hope he doesn’t take too long over it!”

He had now taken almost a week. The initial shock of discovering that Jimmy Spencer was Kathleen Morgan’s son had already worn off, but the secondary effects were beginning to make themselves felt. Among these was a feeling of resentment that anything like this should have happened to
him.
It was such an outrageous violation of the laws of probability— the sort of thing that would never have happened in one of Gibson’s own novels. But life was so inartistic and there was really nothing one could do about it.

This mood of childish petulance was now passing, to be replaced by a deeper sense of discomfort. All the emotions he had thought safely buried beneath twenty years of feverish activity were now rising to the surface again, like deep-sea creatures slain in some submarine eruption. On Earth, he could have escaped by losing himself once more in the crowd, but here he was trapped, with nowhere to flee.

It was useless to pretend that nothing had really changed, to say: “Of course I knew that Kathleen and Gerald had a son: what difference does that make now?” It made a great deal of difference. Every time he saw Jimmy he would be reminded of the past and— what was worse— of the future that might have been. The most urgent problem now was to face the facts squarely, and to come to grips with the new situation. Gibson knew well enough that there was only one way in which this could be done, and the opportunity would arise soon enough.

Jimmy had been down to the Southern Hemisphere and was making his way along the equatorial observation deck when he saw Gibson sitting at one of the windows, staring out into space. For a moment he thought the other had not seen him and had decided not to intrude upon his thoughts when Gibson called out: “Hello, Jimmy. Have you got a moment to spare?”

As it happened, Jimmy was rather busy. But he knew that there had been something wrong with Gibson, and realized that the older man needed his presence. So he came and sat on the bench recessed into the observation port, and presently he knew as much of the truth as Gibson thought good for either of them.

“I’m going to tell you something, Jimmy,” Gibson began, “which is known to only a handful of people. Don’t interrupt me and don’t ask any questions— not until I’ve finished, at any rate.

“When I was rather younger than you, I wanted to be an engineer. I was quite a bright kid in those days and had no difficulty in getting into college through the usual examinations. As I wasn’t sure what I intended to do, I took the five-year course in general engineering physics, which was quite a new thing in those days. In my first year I did fairly well— well enough to encourage me to work harder next time. In my second year I did— not brilliantly, but a lot better than average. And in the third year I fell in love. It wasn’t exactly for the first time, but I knew it was the real thing at last.

“Now falling in love while you’re at college may or may not be a good thing for you; it all depends on circumstances. If it’s only a mild flirtation, it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. But if it’s really serious, there are two possibilities.

“It may act as a stimulus— it may make you determined to do your best, to show that you’re better than the other fellows. On the other hand, you may get so emotionally involved in the affair that nothing else seems to matter, and your studies go to pieces. That is what happened in my case.”

Gibson fell into a brooding silence, and Jimmy stole a glance at him as he sat in the darkness a few feet away. They were on the night side of the ship, and the corridor lights had been dimmed so that the stars could be seen in their unchallenged glory. The constellation of Leo was directly ahead, and there in its heart was the brilliant ruby gem that was their goal. Next to the Sun itself, Mars was by far the brightest of all celestial bodies, and already its disc was just visible to the naked eye. The brilliant crimson light playing full on his face gave Gibson a healthy, even a cheerful appearance quite out of keeping with his feelings.

Was it true, Gibson wondered, that one never really forgot anything? It seemed now as it if might be. He could still see, as clearly as he had twenty years ago, that message pinned on the faculty noticeboard: “The Dean of Engineering wishes to see M. Gibson in his office at 3.00.” He had had to wait, of course, until 3.15, and that hadn’t helped. Nor would it have been so bad if the Dean had been sarcastic, or icily aloof, or even if he had lost his temper. Gibson could still picture that inhumanly tidy room, with its neat files and careful rows of books, could remember the Dean’s secretary padding away on her typewriter in the corner, pretending not to listen.

(Perhaps, now he came to think of it, she wasn’t pretending after all. The experience wouldn’t have been so novel to her as it was to him.)

Gibson had liked and respected the Dean, for all the old man’s finicky ways and meticulous pedantry, and now he had let him down, which made his failure doubly hard to bear. The Dean had rubbed it in with his “more in sorrow than in anger” technique, which had been more effective than he knew or intended. He had given Gibson another chance, but he was never to take it.