World without Stars Read online

  We came back to the ’fresher room. “Sorry to poke in like that,” Valland said. “Maybe you should’ve curbed me.”

  “No.” Lute’s eyes glowed. “I’ve never seen anyone do anything better.”

  “Thanks. I’m a childish type myself, so—Hoy, meant to tell you before, this is one gorgeous piece of steak.”

  We went on to brandy and soda. Valland’s capacity was epical. I suppose Lute and I were rather drunk toward the end, though we wouldn’t have regretted it next day if our idea had been workable. We exchanged a glance, she nodded, and we offered our guest our total hospitality.

  He hadn’t shown much effect of alcohol, beyond merriment. Yet now he actually blushed. “No,” he said. “Thanks a million, but I got me a berth in dock country. Better get down there.”

  Lute wasn’t quite pleased. She has her human share of vanity. He saw that too. Rising, he took her hand and bowed above it.

  “You see,” he explained with great gentleness, “I’m from way back. The antithanatic was developed in my lifetime—yes, that long ago; I shipped on the first star craft. So I have medieval habits. What other people do, fine, that’s their business. But I’ve only got one girl, and she’s on Earth.”

  “Oh,” Lute said. “Haven’t you been gone from her for quite a time, then?”

  He smiled. “Sure have. Why do you think I want to return?”

  “I don’t understand why you left in the first place.”

  Valland took no offense. “Earth’s no place for a live man to live any more. Fine for Mary, not for me. It’s not unfair to either of us. We get together often enough, considerin’ that we’ll never grow old. Between whiles, I can remember …. But goodnight now, and thanks again.”

  His attitude still seemed peculiar to me. I’d have to check most carefully with his present captain. You can’t take an unbalanced man out between the galaxies.

  On the other hand, we’re each a bit eccentric, one way or another. That goes along with being immortal. Sometimes we’re a bit crazy, even. We don’t have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Like my own case—but no matter.

  One thing we have all gained in our centuries is patience. Could be that Hugh Valland simply had a bit more than most.

  III

  WE WERE nine aboard the Meteor, specialists whose skills overlapped. That was not many, to rattle around in so huge a hull. But you need room and privacy on a long trip, and of course as a rule we hauled a lot of cargo.

  “Probably not this time, however,” I explained to Valland and Yo Rorn. They were the only ones who hadn’t shipped with me before; I’d hastily recruited them at Landomar when two vacancies developed for reasons that aren’t relevant here. To make up the delay, I hadn’t briefed them in detail before we started. But now I must. They’d need days of Study to master what little we knew about our goal.

  We sat in my com chamber, we three, with coffee and smokes. A steady one gee of acceleration gave weight, and that soft engine-pulse which goes on and on until finally it enters your bones. A viewscreen showed us Landomar’s sun, already dwindled, and the galaxy filling half the sky with clots and sprawls of glow. That was to starboard; the vector we wanted to build up ran almost parallel to the rim. Portward yawned emptiness, here and there the dim spindles of Other stellar continents.

  “Mmm, yeah, don’t look like we could find a lot of useful Stuff on a planet where they breathe hydrogen and drink liquid ammonia,” Valland nodded. “I never did, anyway.”

  “Then why are we going?” Rorn asked. He was a lean, darky saturnine man who kept to himself, hadn’t so much as told us where in the cosmos he was born. His psychograph indicated a tightly checked instability. But the readings also said he was a good electronician, and he had recommendations from past service. He stubbed out his cigaret and lit another. “Someone from a similar planet would be logical to deal with the—what did you say their name was?”

  “I can’t pronounce it either,” I replied. “Let’s just call them Yonderfolk.”

  Rorn scowled. “That could mean any extragalactic race.”

  “We know what we mean,” said Valland mildly. “Ever meet the natives of Carstor’s Planet?”

  “Heard of them,” I said. “Tall, thin, very ancient culture, unbearably dignified. Right?”

  “Uh-huh. When I was there, we called ’em Squidgies.”

  “Business, please,” Rorn barked.

  “Very well,” I said. “What we hope to get from our Yonderfolk is, mainly, knowledge. Insights, ideas, art forms, possibly something new in physics or chemistry or some other science. You never can tell. If nothing else, they know about the intergalactic stars, so maybe they can steer us onto planets that will be profitable for humans. In fact, judging from what they’ve revealed so far, there’s one such planet right in their home system.”

  Valland looked for a while into the blackness to port. “They must be different from anybody we’ve met before,” he murmured. “We can’t imagine how different.”

  “Right,” I said. “Consider what that could mean in terms of what they know.”

  I cleared my throat. “Brace yourself, Yo,” said Valland. “The Old Man’s shiftin’ into lecture gear.” Rorn looked blank, then resentful. I didn’t mind.

  “The galaxies were formed by the condensation of monstrous hydrogen clouds. But there wasn’t an absolute vacuum between them. Especially not in the beginning, when the universe hadn’t yet expanded very far. So between the proto-galaxies there must have been smaller condensations of gas, which became star clusters. Giant stars in those clusters soon went supernova, enriching the interstellar medium. Some second and third generation suns got born.

  “But then the clusters broke up. Gravitational effect of the galaxies, you see. The dispersal of matter became too great for star formation to go on. The bright ones burned themselves out. But the red dwarfs are still around. A type M, far instance, stays fifty billion years on the main sequence.”

  “Please,” Rorn said, irritated. “Valland and I do know elementary astrophysics.” To the gunner: “Don’t you?”

  “But I begin to see what it means,” Valland said low. Excitement coursed over his face. He clenched his pipe in one fist. “Stars so far apart that you can’t find one from another without a big telescope. Metal poor, because the supernova enrichment stopped early. And old—old.”

  “Right,” I said. “Planets, too. Almost without iron or copper or uranium, anything that made it so easy for us to become industrialized. But the lighter elements exist. So does life. So does intelligence.

  “I don’t know how those Yonderfoik we’re going to visit went beyond the Stone Age. That’s one of the things we have to find out. I can guess. They could experiment with electrostatics, with voltaic piles, with ceramics. Finally they could get to the point of electrodynamics—oh, let’s say by using ceramic tubes filled with electrolytic solution for conductors. And so, finally, they’d extract light metals like aluminum and magnesium from ores. But they may have needed millions of years of civilization to get that far, and beyond.”

  “What’d they learn along the way?” Valland wondered. “Yeah, I see why we’ve got to go there.”

  “Even after they developed the space jump, they steered clear of the galaxies,” I said. “They can’t take the radiation. Where they live, there are no natural radioactives worth mentioning, except perhaps a few things like K-40. Their sun doesn’t spit out many charged particles. There’s no galactic magnetic field to accelerate cosmic rays. No supernovae either.”

  “Why, maybe they have natural immortality,” Valland suggested.

  “Mmm, I doubt that,” I said. “True, we’re saddled with more radiation. But ordinary quantum processes will mutate cells too. Or viruses, or chemicals, or Q factor, or—or whatever else they may have on Yonder.”

  “Have they developed an antithanatic, then?” Rorn asked.
r />   “I don’t know,” I said. “If not, that’s one valuable thing we have to offer. I hope.”

  I saw in the brief twist of Valland’s mouth that he understood me. Spacemen don’t talk about it much, but there are races, as intelligent and as able to suffer as we ourselves, for whom nobody has figured out an aging preventive. The job is hard enough in most cases: develop a synthetic virus which, rather than attacking normal cells, destroys any that do not quite conform to the host’s genetic code. When the biochemistry is too different from what we know— Mostly, we leave such planets alone.

  I said in haste: “But let’s keep to facts. The Yonderfolk did at last venture to the galactic rim, with heavy radiation screening. It so happened that the first world they came on which was in contact with our civilization was Zara. Our own company had a factor there.”

  We didn’t yet know how many suns they visited first. Our one galaxy holds more than a hundred billion, most of which have attendants. I doubt if we’ll ever see them all. There could be any number of civilizations as great as ours, that close to home, unbeknownst to us. And yet we go hopping off to Andromeda!

  (I made that remark to Hugh Valland, later in the voyage. “Sure,” he said. “Always happens that way. The Spanish were settlin’ the Philippines before they knew the coastal outline of America. People were on the moon before they’d got to the bottom of the Mindanao Deep.” At the time I didn’t quite follow him, but since then I’ve read a little about the history of Manhome.)

  “Zara.” Rorn frowned. “I don’t quite place—”

  “Why should you?” Valland replied. “More planets around than you could shake a stick at. Though I really can’t see why anybody’d want to shake a stick at a planet that never did him any harm.”

  “It’s the same type as the Yonderfolk’s home,” I said. “Zara, that is. Cold, hydrogen-helium atmosphere, et cetera. They made contact with our factor because he was sitting in the only obviously machine-culture complex on the surface. They went through the usual linguistic problems, and finally got to conversing. Here’s a picture.”

  I activated my projector and rotated the image of a being. It was no more inhuman than many who had been my friends: squat, scaly, head like a complicated sponge; one of several hands carried something which sparkled.

  “Actually,” I said, “the language barrier was higher than Ordinary. To be expected, no doubt, when they came from such an alien environment. So we don’t have a lot of information, and a good deal of what we do have must be garbled. Still, we’re reasonably sure they aren’t foolish enough to be hostile, and do want to develop this new relationship. Within the galaxy, they’re badly handicapped by having to stay behind their rad screens. So they asked us to come to them. Our factor notified the company, the company’s interested … and that, sirs, is why we’re here.”

  “Mmm. They gave location data for their home system?” Valland asked.

  “Apparently so,” I said. “Space coordinates, velocity vector, orbital elements and data for each planet of the star.”

  “Must’ve been a bitch, transforming from their math to ours.”

  “Probably. The factor’s report gives few details, so I can’t be sure. He was in too big a hurry to notify headquarters and send the Yonderfolk back—before the competition heard about them. But he promised we’d soon dispatch an expedition. That’s us.”

  “A private company, instead of an official delegation?” Rorn bridled.

  “Oh, come off it,” Valland said. “Exactly which government out of a million would you choose to act? This is too damn big a cosmos for anything but individuals to deal with it.”

  “There’ll be others,” I said fast. A certain amount of argument on a cruise is good, passes the time and keeps men alert; but you have to head off the kind which can fester. “We couldn’t keep the secret for long, even if we wanted to. Meanwhile, we do represent the Universarium of Nordamerik, as well as a commercial interest.

  “Now, here are the tapes and data sheets ….

  IV

  THE SHIP DROVE OUTWARD.

  We had a large relative velocity to match. The days crawled past, and Landomar’s sun shrank to a star, and still you couldn’t see any change in the galaxy. Once we’d shaken down, we had little to do—the mechs operated everything for us. We talked, read, exercised, pursued our various hobbies, threw small parties. Most of us had lived a sufficient number of years in space that we didn’t mind the monotony. It’s only external, anyhow. After a century or three of life, you have plenty to think about, and a cruise is a good opportunity.

  I fretted a little over Yo Rorn. He was always so glum, and apt to be a bit nasty when he spoke. Still, nothing serious developed.

  Enver Smeth, our chemist, gave me some concern too. He was barely thirty years old, and had spent twenty-five of them under the warm wing of his parents on Arwy, which is a bucolic patriarchal settlement like Landomar. Then he broke free and went to the space academy on Iron—but that’s another tight little existence. I was his first captain and this was his first really long trip. You have to start sometime, though, and he was shaping up well.

  Very soon he became Hugh Valland’s worshiper. I could see why. Here the boy encountered a big, gusty, tough but good-natured man who’d been everywhere and done everything—and was close to three thousand years old, could speak of nations on Manhome that are like myth to the rest of us, had shipped with none less than Janosek—and to top the deal off, was the kind of balladeer that Smeth only dreamed of being. Valland took the situation well, refrained from exploiting or patronizing, and managed to slip him bits of sound advice.

  Then came the Captain’s Brawl. In twenty-four hours we would be making the jump. You can’t help feeling a certain tension. The custom is good, that the crew have a final blast where almost anything goes.

  We ate a gourmet dinner, and made the traditional toasts, and settled down to serious drinking. After a while the saloon roared. Alen Galmer, Chu Bren, Gait Urduga, and, yes, Yo Rorn crouched over a flying pair of dice in one corner. The rest of us stamped out a hooraw dance on the deck, Valland giving us the measure with ringing omnisonor and bawdy words, until the sweat rivered across our skins and even that mummy-ancient line, “Why the deuce aren’t you a beautiful woman?” became funny once more.

  “—So let’s hope other ladies

  Are just as kind as Alixy,

  For, spaceman, it’s your duty

  To populate the galaxy!”

  “Yow-ee!” we shouted, grabbed for our glasses, drank deep and breathed hard.

  Smeth flung himself onto the same bench as Valland. “Never heard that song before,” he panted.

  “You will,” Valland drawled. “An oldtimer.” He paused. “To tell the truth, I made it up myself, ’bout five hundred years back.”

  “I never knew that,” I said. “I believe you, though.”

  “Sure.” Smeth attempted a worldly grin. “With the experience you must’ve had in those lines by now. Eh, Hugh?”

  “Uh … well—” The humor departed from Valland. He emptied his goblet with a sudden, almost violent gesture.

  Smeth was in a lickerish mood. “Womanizing memories, that’s the kind you never edit out,” he said.

  Valland got up and poured himself a refill.

  I recalled that episode at Lute’s, and decided I’d better divert the lad from my gunner. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “those are among the most dispensable ones you’ll have.”

  “You’re joking!” Smeth protested.

  “I am not,” I said. “The really fine times, the girls you’ve really cared for, yes, of course you’ll keep those. But after a thousand casual romps, the thousand and first is nothing special.”

  “How about that, Hugh?” Smeth called. “You’re the oldest man aboard. Maybe the oldest man alive. What do you say?”

  Valland shrugged and returned to us. “The skipper’s right,” he answered shortly. He sat down and stared at what we couldn’t see.
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  I had to talk lest there be trouble, and wasn’t able to think of anything but banalities. “Look, Enver,” I told Smeth, “it isn’t possible to carry around every experience you’ll accumulate in, oh, just a century or two. You’d swamp in the mass of data. It’d be the kind of insanity that there’s no cure for. So, every once in a while, you go under the machine, and concentrate on the blocs of memory you’ve decided you can do without, and those particular RNA molecules are neutralized. But if you aren’t careful, you’ll make big, personality-destroying gaps. You have to preserve the overall pattern of your past, and the important details. At the same time, you have to be ruthless with some things, or you can saddle yourself with the damnedest complexes. So you do not keep trivia. And you do not overemphasize any one type of experience, idea, or what have you. Understand?”

  “Maybe,” Smeth grumbled. “I think I’ll go join the dice game.”

  Valland continued to sit by himself, drinking hard. I wondered about him. Being a little tired and muzzy, I stayed on the same bench. Abruptly he shook his big frame, leaned over toward me, and said, low under the racket:

  “No, skipper, I’m neither impotent nor homosexual. Matter’s very simple. I fell in love once for all, when I was young. And she loves me. We’re enough for each other. We don’t want more. You see?”

  He hadn’t shown it before, but he was plainly pretty drunk. “I suppose I see,” I told him with care. “Wouldn’t be honest to claim I feel what you mean.”

  “Reckon you don’t,” he said. “Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything. Not necessarily for the worse. I pass no judgments on anybody.” He pondered. “Could be,” he said, “if I’d stayed on Earth, Mary and I would’ve grown apart too. Could be. But this wanderin’ keeps me, well, fresh. Then I come home and tell her everything that happened.”

  He picked up his omnisonor again, strummed a few bars, and murmured those lyrics I had heard when first we met.