The Long Way Home

1

The spaceship flashed out of superdrive and hung in a darkness that blazed with stars. For a moment there was silence, then:

“Where’s the sun?”

Edward Langley swiveled his pilot’s chair around. It was very still in the cabin, only the whisper of ventilators had voice, and he heard his heart thutter with an unnatural loud-ness. Sweat prickled his ribs, the air was hot.

“I... don’t know,” he said finally. The words fell hard and empty. There were screens on the control panel which gave him a view of the whole sky, he saw Andromeda and the Southern Cross and the great sprawl of Orion, but nowhere in that crystal black was the dazzle he had expected.

Weightlessness was like an endless falling.

“We’re in the general region, all right,” he went on after a minute. “The constellations are the same, more or less. But—” His tones faded out.

Four pairs of eyes searched the screens with hunger. Finally Matsumoto spoke. “Over here... in Leo... brightest star visible. Do you see it?”

They stared at the brilliant yellow spark. “It’s got the right color, I think,” said Blaustein. “But it’s an awful long ways off.”

After another pause he grunted impatiently and leaned over in his seat toward the spectroscope. He focused it carefully on the star, slipped in a plate of the solar spectrum, and punched a button on the comparison unit. No red light flashed.

“The same, right down to the Fraunhofer lines,” he declared. “Same intensity of each line to within a few quanta. That’s either Sol or his twin brother.”

“But how far off?” whispered Matsumoto.

Blaustein tuned in the photoelectric analyzer, read the answer off a dial, and whipped a slide rule through his fingers. “About a third of a light-year,” he said. “Not too far.”

“Much too far,” grunted Matsumoto. “We should’a come out within one A. U. on the nose. Don’t tell me the engine’s gone haywire again.”

“Looks that way, don’t it?” murmured Langley. His hands moved toward the controls. “Shall I try jumping her in close?”

“No,” said Matsumoto. “If our positioning error is this bad, one more hop may land us right inside the sun.”

“Which’d be almost like landing in hell or Texas,” said Langley. He grinned, though there was an inward sickness at his throat. “O. K., boys, you might as well go aft and start overhauling that rattletrap. The sooner you find the trouble, the sooner we can get back home.”

They nodded, unbuckled themselves, and swung out of the pilot room. Langley sighed.

“Nothing you or I can do but wait, Saris,” he said.

The Holatan made no answer. He never spoke unnecessarily. His huge sleek-furred body was motionless in the acceleration couch they had jury-rigged for him, but the eyes were watchful. There was a faint odor about him, not unpleasing, a hint of warm sunlit grass within a broad horizon. He seemed out of place in this narrow metal coffin, he belonged under an open sky, near running water.

Langley’s thoughts strayed. A third of a light-year. It’s not too much. I’ll come back to you, Peggy, if I have to crawl all the way on my belly.

Setting the ship on automatic, against the unlikely event of a meteor, Langley freed himself from his chair. “It shouldn’t take them too long,” he said. “They’ve got it down to a science, dismantling that pile of junk. Meanwhile, care for some chess?”

Saris Hronna and Robert Matsumoto were the Explorer’s chess fiends, they had spent many hours hunched over the board, and it was a strange thing to watch them: a human whose ancestors had left Japan for America and a creature from a planet a thousand light-years distant, caught in the trap of some ages-dead Persian. More than the gaping emptinesses he had traversed, more than the suns and planets he had seen spinning through darkness and vacuum, it gave Langley a sense of the immensity and omnipotence of time.

“No, t’ank you.” The fangs gleamed white as mouth and throat formed a language they were never meant for. “I would rather this new and surprissing dewelopment consider.”

Langley shrugged. Even after weeks of association, he had not grown used to the Holatan character—the same beast of prey which had quivered nose to spoor down forest trails, sitting as hours went by with dreamy eyes and a head full of incomprehensible philosophy. But it no longer startled him.

“O. K., son,” he said. “I’ll write up the log, then.” He pushed against the wall with one foot and shot out the doorway and along a narrow hall. At the end, he caught himself by a practiced hand, swung around a post into a tiny room, and hooked his legs to a light chair bolted in front of a desk.

The log lay open, held by the magnetism of its thin iron backstrap. With an idleness that was a fight against his own furious impatience, the man leafed through it.

Title page: United States Department of Astronautics, I/S Explorer, experimental voyage begun 25 June 2047. Mission: development of the superdrive; secondary mission: gathering information about other stars and their hypothetical planets.

Crew:

Captain and pilot: Edward Langley, age 32, home address Laramie, Wyoming; graduate of Goddard Academy, rank of captain in the Astronautic Service, spaceman since his late teens. Long record as pilot of exploratory trips, including the Mercury run. Medal of Merit for heroism in Ares rescue. (Hell, somebody had to do it, and if they knew how scared I was at the time-)

Engineer and electronician: Robert Matsumoto, age 26, home address Honolulu, Hawaii, former space-force marine, present rank A/S lieutenant. Work on Luna, Mars, Venus; inventor of improved fuel injector and oxygen recycler.

Physicist: James Blaustein, age 27, home address Rochester, New York, civilian. Work on Luna for the A. E. C. Politically active. Major contributions to physical theory, creator of several experimental systems for testing same.

Biologist: Thomas Forelli—Well, Tom is dead. He died on that unknown planet we thought was safe, and nobody knows what he died of—disease, acute allergy, any of a thousand deaths that a billion years of alien evolution could prepare for creatures from Earth. We buried him there, committed his soul to a God who somehow seemed very far away from that green sky and talking red grass, and went on. It’s going to be hard to tell his people.

Langley’s eyes raised themselves to the photograph above the desk. The red-haired girl smiled at him across a mist of years and leagues. Peggy, darling, he thought, I’m coming home.

She would have grown thin, poor kid, and though she said nothing there would be an emptiness of long nights within her, and she would often hold their child—the child he had never seen—close to her. Spacemen had no right to get married. Still less did they have a right to venture beyond the sun, riding a witch’s broom of a ship whose engine no one really understood. But when the offer came to Langley, she had seen the enormous hunger in his eyes and told him to go. Pregnant and unsure, she had still given him to the high stars and herself to aloneness.

None but myself, he thought.

Well, this was the last time. He was getting too old for the work, his strength and speed imperceptibly lessened, and there was a lot of pay and bonuses saved up. He’d come home—incredibly, he would be home again!—and they’d settle down on the ranch and raise pure-bred horses, and at night he would look up to the wheeling constellations and smoke his pipe and trade a friendly wink with Arcturus.

His son would not own merely sterile Luna, frigid Mars, poisonous galling hell-hole of Venus. He would have the splendor and mystery of a whole galaxy for range, his metal horses would pasture between the stars.

Langley riffled through the logbook. It was only half a journal, the rest was page after page of data: engine performance, stellar locations, planetary orbital elements, planetary mass and temperature and atmospheric composition, a universe grasped in a few scribbled figures. Somehow, the dryness of it cheered him, brought the chill dark down to a thing he could handle.

Langley stuffed his pipe with the few remaining shreds in his tobacco pouch. There was a trick to lighting it and keeping it going in null-gravity. Thank heaven this ship had been equipped with everything available and a lot unknown before she was built; most boats, you couldn’t smoke at all, oxygen was too costly. But it had been understood that the Explorer would be heading for strange shores. Small though she was, she had the engines and reaction-mass tanks of a cruiser, she could land directly on any planet the size of Earth or less, could maneuver after a fashion in atmosphere, could support her crew for years, could run tests on every imaginable factor of environment. Designing her alone had been a six-year, ten-million-dollar job.

He reflected on the history of space travel. It was not very old. Most engineers had doubted that it would ever become very important. The space stations were useful, the Luna bases had military value, but aside from that the Solar System was a hostile barrenness whose only interest seemed to be scientific knowledge and, possibly, fissionable elements. Then the physics journals had carried an announcement from Paris.

LeFevre was only investigating electron-wave diffraction patterns to test certain aspects of the new unified-field theory. But he had been using a highly original hookup including a gyromagnetic element, and his results—blurred dark rings and splotches on a photographic plate, nothing spectacular at all—were totally unexpected. The only interpretation he could make was that the electron beam had gone from one point to another, instantaneously, without troubling to cross the intervening space.

At California they used the big accelerators to power a massive beam, almost a gram of matter, and confirmed the data. In Kerenskygrad, the theoretician Ivanov had gotten excited and come out with an explanation that fitted the observed facts: the continuum was not four-dimensional, there were no less than eight possible directions at right angles to each other—a modification of the old wave-mechanical hypothesis of one other universe co-existing with ours. The matter had gone through this “hyperspace’; as far as our universe was concerned, it had gone from point to point instantaneously.

Instantaneously! It meant that the stars and their uncounted planets were a wink away!

Ten years of development, and a shell loaded with instruments leaped from a space station near Earth almost to the orbit of Pluto. When it was found by its radiosonde, the instruments said that no time had been required for the passage, and the animals aboard were unharmed. There was only one trouble—it had emerged a good many millions of miles from the point where it was supposed to. Repeated experiments gave a huge percentage of error in the positioning controls, one which would add up hopelessly and dangerously in crossing light-years.

Ivanov and the engineers agreed that this was merely due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, whose effects were grossly magnified by the particular circuits used. It was simply an engineering problem to refine the circuits until a spaceship could be brought out almost exactly where she was wanted.

But such work required plenty of room, lest the error pile up the ship on a planet—or even more disastrously, inside one—and so that the instrument readings would be large enough to permit meaningful assays of the result of making changes in the circuits. The obvious answer was to send a laboratory ship out with a crew of experts, who would make improvements, test them with a long jump, and make still further alterations. The answer was known as the United States Interplanetary Ship Explorer.

Langley went through the record of the past year, the erratic leaps from star to star, cursing and sweating in a tangle of wires and tubes, blue flame over soldering irons, meters, slide rules, a slow battle slogging toward victory. One cut—and-try system after another, each a little better, and finally the leap from Holat back toward Earth. It had been the philosophers of Holat whose non-human minds, looking at the problem from an oddly different angle, had suggested the final, vital improvements; and now the Explorer was coining home to give mankind a universe.

Langley’s thoughts wandered again over worlds he had seen, wonder and beauty, grimness and death, always a high pulse of achieving. Then he turned to the last page and unclipped a pen and wrote:

“19 July 2048, hours 1630. Emerged an estimated 0. 3 light-year from Sol, error presumably due to some unforeseen complication in the engines. Attempts to correct same now being made. Position—” He swore at his forgetfulness and went back to the pilot room to take readings on the stars.

Blaustein’s long thin form jackknifed through the air as he finished; the gaunt sharp face was smeared with oil, and the hair more unkempt even than usual. “Can’t find a thing,” he reported. “We tested with everything from Wheatstone bridges to computer problems, opened the gyromagnetic cell, nothing looks wrong. Want we should tear down the whole beast?”

Langley considered. “No,” he said at last. “Let’s try it once more first.”

Matsumoto’s compact, stocky frame entered; he grinned around his eternal chewing gum and let out some competent profanity. “Could be she just got the collywobbles,” he said. “The more complicated a hookup gets, the more it acts like it had a mind of its own.”

“Yeah,” said Langley. “A brilliant mind devoted entirely to frustrating its builders.” He had his coordinates now; the ephemeris gave him the position of Earth, and he set up the superdrive controls to bring him there just outside the remaining margin of error. “Strap in and hang on to your hats, gents.”

There was no sensation as he pulled the main switch. How could there be, with no time involved? But suddenly the spark of Sol was a dull-purple disk as the screen polarized against its glare.

“Whoops!” said Matsumoto. “Honolulu, here I come!”

There was a coldness along Langley’s spine. “No,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Look at the solar disk. It’s not big enough. We should be just about one A. U. from it; actually we’re something like one and a third.”

“Well, I’ll be—” said Matsumoto.

Blaustein’s lips twitched nervously. “That’s not too bad,” he said. “We could get back on rockets from here.”

“It’s not good enough,” said Langley. “We had... we thought we had the control down to a point where the error of arrival was less than one per cent. We tested that inside the system of Holat’s sun. Why can’t we do as well in our own system?”

“I wonder—” Matsumoto’s cocky face turned thoughtful. “Are we approaching asymptotically?”

The idea of creeping through eternity, always getting nearer to Earth and never quite reaching it, was chilling. Langley thrust it off and took up his instruments, trying to locate himself.

They were in the ecliptic plane, and a telescopic sweep along the zodiac quickly identified Jupiter. Then the tables said Mars should be over there and Venus that way- Neither of them were.

After a while, Langley racked his things and looked around with a strained expression. “The planetary positions aren’t right,” he said. “I think I’ve spotted Mars... but it’s green.”

“Are you drunk?” asked Blaustein.

“No such luck,” said Langley. “See for yourself in the ’scope; that’s a planetary disk, and from our distance from the sun and its direction, it can only be in Mars’ orbit. But it’s not red, it’s green.”

They sat very still.

“Any ideas, Saris?” asked Blaustein in a small voice.

“I iss rather not say.” The deep voice was carefully expressionless, but the eyes had a glaze which meant thought.

“To hell with it!” Recklessly, Langley sent the ship quartering across her orbit. The sun-disk jumped in the screens.

“Earth!” whispered Blaustein. “I’d know her anywhere.”

The planet hung blue and shining against night, her moon like a drop of cool gold. Tears stung Langley’s eyes.

He bent over his instruments again, getting positions. They were still about half an Astronomical Unit from their goal. It was tempting to forget the engines and blast home on rockets—but that would take a long while, and Peggy was waiting. He set the controls for emergence at five thousand miles’ distance.

Jump!

“We’re a lot closer,” said Matsumoto, “but we haven’t made it yet.”

For a moment rage at the machine seethed in Langley. He bit it back and took up his instruments. Distance about forty-five thousand miles this time. Another calculation, this one quite finicking to allow for the planet’s orbital motion. As the clock reached the moment he had selected, he threw the switch.

“We did it!”

There she hung, a gigantic shield, belted with clouds, blazoned with continents, a single radiant star where the curving oceans focused sunlight. Langley’s fingers shook as he got a radar reading. The error this time was negligible.

Rockets spumed fire, pressing them back into their seats, as he drove the vessel forward. Peggy, Peggy, Peggy, it was a song within him.

Was it a boy or a girl? He remembered as if it were an hour ago, how they had tried to find a name, they weren’t going to be caught flatfooted when the man brought the birth certificate around. O Peggy! I miss you so much.

They entered the atmosphere, too eager to care about saving fuel with a braking ellipse, backing down on a jet of flame. The ship roared and thundered around them.

Presently they were gliding, on a long spiral which would take them halfway round the world before they landed. There was a dark whistle of cloven air outside.

Langley was too busy piloting to watch the view, but Blaustein, Matsumoto, and even Saris Hronna strained their eyes at the screens. It was the Holatan who spoke first: “Iss that the much by you talked of city New York?”

“No... we’re over the Near East, I think.” Blaustein looked down to the night-wrapped surface and a twinkling cluster of light. “Which is it, anyway?”

“Never saw any city in this area big enough to show this high up without a telescope,” said Matsumoto. “Ankara? There must be unusually clear seeing tonight.”

The minutes ticked by. “That’s the Alps,” said Blaustein. “See the moonlight on them? Bob, I know damn well there’s no town that size there!”

“Must be near as big as Chicago—” Matsumoto paused. When he spoke again, it was in a queer, strained tone: “Jim, did you get a close look at Earth as we came in?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Huh? Why... why—”

“Think back. Did you? We were too excited to notice details, but—I saw North America clear as I see you, and—I should have seen the arctic ice cap, I’ve seen it a million times from space, only there were just a few dark splotches there—islands, no snow at all—”

Silence. Then Blaustein said thickly: “Try the radio.”

They crossed Europe and nosed over the Atlantic, still slowing a velocity that made the cabin baking hot. Here and there, over the waste of waters, rose more jewels of light, floating cities where none had ever been.

Matsumoto turned the radio dials slowly. Words jumped at him, a gabble which made no sense at all. “What the devil?” he mumbled. “What language is that?”

“Not European, I can tell you,” said Blaustein. “Not even Russian, I know enough of that to identify—Oriental?”

“Not Chinese or Japanese. I’ll try another band.”

The ship slanted over North America with the sunrise. They saw how the coastline had shrunk. Now and then Langley manipulated gyroscopes and rockets for control. He felt a cold bitterness in his mouth.

The unknown speech crackled on all frequencies. Down below, the land was green, huge rolling tracts of field and forest. Where were the cities and villages and farms, where were the roads, where was the world?

Without landmarks, Langley tried to find the New Mexico spacefield which was his home base. He was still high enough to get a wide general view through drifting clouds, he saw the Mississippi and then, far off, thought he recognized the Platte, and oriented himself mechanically.

A city slid below, it was too remote to see in detail but it was not like any city he had ever known. The New Mexico desert was turned green, seamed with irrigation canals.

“What’s happened?” Blaustein said it like a man hit in the stomach. “What’s happened?”

Something entered the field of view, a long black cigar shape, matching their speed with impossible ease. There was no sign of jets or rockets or propellers or—anything. It swooped close, thrice the length of the Explorer, and Langley saw flat gun turrets on it.

He thought briefly and wildly of invasions from space, monsters from the stars overrunning and remaking Earth in a single year of horror. Then a brief blue-white explosion that hurt his eyes snapped in front of the ship, and he felt a shiver of concussion.

“They shot across the bows,” he said in a dead voice. “We’d better land.”

Down below was a sprawling complex of buildings and open spaces, it seemed to be of concrete. Black fliers swarmed over it, and there were high walls around. Langley tilted the Explorer and fought her down to the surface.

When he cut the rockets, there was a ringing silence. Then he unbuckled himself and stood up.

He was a tall man, and as he stood there he gave an impression of grayness, a gray uniform, gray eyes, black hair prematurely streaked with gray, a long hooknosed face burned dark by the light of strange suns. And when he spoke, there was grayness in his tone.

“Come on. We’ll have to go out and see what they want.”