The Long Way Home

13

It had felt good to shed his over-colorful pajamas for a spaceman’s coverall, boots, helmet, a gun—Langley had never quite realized how much clothes make the man. But walking through a hollow immensity of darkness, feeling the underground chill and hearing a mockery of echoes, he knew again the helplessness and self-doubt which had been strangling him.

There were light-tubes strung throughout miles of the caverns, but a sneak expedition could not turn them on; they served only to indicate regions where Saris would surely not be. Half a dozen men walked beside Langley, the reflected glow of flashbeams limning their faces ghostly against shadow. They were all crewmen, strangers to him; Valti had declared himself too old and cowardly to enter the tunnels, Marin had wanted to come but been refused permission.

A tumbled fantasy of limestone, great rough pillars and snags, leaped from the gloom as beams flashed around. This place couldn’t have changed much, thought Langley. In five thousand years, the slow drip and evaporation of cold water would have added a bit here and there, but Earth was old and patient. He felt that time itself lay buried somewhere in these reaching leagues.

The man who carried the neural tracker looked up. “Not a flicker yet,” he said. Unconsciously, his voice was hushed, as if the stillness lay heavy on it. “How far down have we come? A long ways—and there are so many branches -Even if he is here, we may never find him.”

Langley went on. There was nothing else he could do. He didn’t think Saris would have gone farther underground than necessary; the Holatans weren’t exactly claustrophobic, but they were creatures of open land and sky, it went against their instincts to remain long enclosed. The alien would be after an easily defensible site with at least a couple of emergency boltholes: say a small cave having two or three tunnels out from it to the surface. But that could be any of a hundred places down here, and no map of the system was available.

Logic helped somewhat. Saris hadn’t had a map of the caves either. He’d have slipped in through the main entrance, like his present followers, because he wouldn’t have known where any other approach was. Then he would look for a room to live in, with exits and a water supply. Langley turned to the man with the dowsing unit. “Isn’t there a pool or river somewhere near?”

“Yes—water over in that direction. Shall we try?”

“Uh-huh.” Langley groped toward the nearest tunnel. Beyond, the passage narrowed rapidly until he had to crawl.

“This may be it,” he said. Echoes shivered around his words. “Saris could easily slip through, he can go four-footed anytime he wants, but it’s a hard approach for a man.”

“Wait.,. here, you take the tracker, captain,” said someone behind him. “I think it kicked over, but all these people ahead of me make too much interference.”

Langley squirmed around to grasp the box. Focusing it, he squinted at the green-glowing dial. It was responsive to the short-range impulses emitted by a nervous system and -yes, the needle was quivering more than it should!

Excited, he crawled farther, the harsh damp wall scraping his back. His flashbeam was a single white lance thrust into blindness. His breathing was a loud rasp in his throat.

He came suddenly to the end and almost went over. The tunnel must open several feet or yards above the floor. “Saris!” he called. The echoes flew about, this was a good-sized room. Somewhere he heard running water. “Saris Hronna! Are you there?”

A blaster bolt smashed after him. He saw the dazzle of it, there were spots dancing before his eyes for minutes afterward, and the radiation stung his face. He snapped off the light and jumped, hoping wildly that it wasn’t too far to the ground. Something raked his leg, the jolting impact rattled his teeth, and he fell to an invisible floor.

Another beam flamed toward the tunnel mouth. Langley felt blood hot and sticky on his calf. The Holatan knew just where the opening was, he could ricochet his bolts and fry the men within. “Saris! It’s me—Edward Langley—I’m your friend!”

The echoes laughed at him, dancing through an enormous night. Friend, friend, friend, friend. The underground stream talked with a cold frantic voice. If the outlaw had gone mad with fear and loneliness, or if he had decided in bleak sanity to kill any human who ventured here, Langley was done. The incandescent sword of an energy beam, or the sudden closing of jaws in his throat, would be the last thing he ever felt. It had to be tried. Langley dug himself flat against the rock. “Saris! I’ve come to get you out of here! I’ve come to take you home!”

The answer rumbled out of blackness, impossible to locate through the echoes: “Iss you? What do you want?”

“I’ve made arrangements... you can get back to Holat—” Langley was shouting in English, their only common language; the Holatan dialects were too unlike man’s for him to have learned more than a few phrases. “We’re your friends, the only friends you’ve got.”

“Sso.” He could not read any expression into the tone. He thought he could feel the vibrations of a heavy body, flitting through the dark on padded feet. “I can not be sure. Pleasse to the present situation wit” honesty describe.”

Langley put it into a few words. The stone under his belly was wet and chill. He sneezed, snuffled, and reflected on the old definition of adventure as somebody else having a tough time a thousand miles away. “It’s the only chance for all of us,” he finished. “If you don’t agree, you’ll stay here till you die or are dragged out.”

There was a silence, then: “You I trust, I know you. But iss it not that thesse otherss you hawe deceiwed possible?”

“I... what? Oh. You mean maybe the Society is playing me for a sucker, too? Yes. It could be. But I don’t think so.”

“I hawe no dessire for dissection,” said the one who waited.

“You won’t be. They want to study you, see how you do what you do. You told me your thinkers back home have a pretty good idea of how it works.”

“Yes. Not’ing could from the gross anatomy of my brain be learned. I t’ink such a machine ass your... friendss... wish could eassily be built.” Saris hesitated, then: “Wery well, I musst take chancess, no matter what happenss. Let it be sso. You may all enter.”

When the lights picked him out, he stood tall and proud, waiting with the dignity of his race among the boxes of supplies which had been his only reliance. He took Langley’s hands between his and nuzzled the man’s cheek. “Iss good to see you again,” he said.

“I’m... sorry for what happened,” said Langley. “I didn’t know—”

“No. The uniwerse full of surprisses iss. No matter, if I can go home again.”

The spacemen accepted him almost casually, they were used to non-human intelligence. After binding Langley’s injury, they formed a cordon and returned. Valti raised ship as soon as all were aboard, and then conferred with them. “Is there anything you require, Saris Hronna?” he asked through the American.

“Yess. Two witaminss which seem to be lacking in Eart” chemistry.” Saris drew diagrams on a sheet of paper. “Thesse iss the structural formulass in Langley’ss symbology.”

The spaceman re-drew them in modern terms, and Valti nodded. “They should be easy to synthesize. I have a molecule maker in my hideaway.” He tugged at his beard. “We must go there first, to make preparations for departure. I have a light-speed cruiser in a secret orbit. You’ll be put aboard that and sent to our base in the Cygni system. That’s well outside the Solar and Centaurian spheres of influence. Then your abilities can be studied at leisure, sir, and your own payment rendered, Captain Langley.”

Saris spoke up. He had his own bargain to make. He would cooperate if he was afterward returned to Holat with a crew of technicians and ample supplies. His world lay too far off to be in direct danger from the stars of this region, but some party of wandering conquistadors might happen on it—and Holat had no defenses against bombardment from space. That situation must be rectified. Armed robot satellites would not stop a full-dress invasion fleet—nothing would do that except possibly another fleet—but would be able to dispose of the small marauding groups which were all that Holat really had to worry about.

Valti winced. “Captain, does he realize what the bonuses for a trip of that length are? Does he know how much it would cost to set up those stations? Has he no sympathy for a poor old man who must face an audit of his books?”

“Fraid not,” said Langley with a grin.

“Ah... what assurances does he want that we will keep our end of such an agreement?”

“He’ll have control over your development of the nullifier—you can’t make it without him, both his empirical evidence and his theoretical knowledge—so that part’s taken care of. When he sees the project nearing the end, he’ll want your ships prepared for him, ready to go. And he’ll want a bomb planted on the one carrying him, under his control; women and children will stay aboard while the work is being done for Holat, and at the first sign of treachery he’ll blow the whole thing up.”

“Dear me!” Valti shook a doleful head. “What a nasty suspicious mind he has, to be sure. I should think one look at my honest face- Well, well, so be it. But I shudder to think what the expense is going to do to our cost accounting.”

“Man, you can amortize that debt over two thousand years. Forget it. Now, where are we going first?”

“We maintain a small hideaway in the Himalayas: nothing palatial, our tastes are humble, but securely hidden. I must render a report to my chiefs on Earth, get their approval of the plan, and prepare documents for the Cygni office. It will only take a little while.”

Langley went off to the ship’s sick bay. He’d taken a nasty gash in his leg, but treatment was routine these days: a clamp to hold the edges of the wound together, a shot of artificial enzymes to stimulate regeneration. In a few hours, the most radical surgery could be completely and scarlessly healed.

He remarked on that to Valti as they sat over dinner. The ship was taking a wide ellipse through space before returning to Earth, to avoid possible detection. “I’m a little at sea about the notion of progress,” he confessed. “Offhand, it looks as if man hasn’t improved a bit; and then I see advances like you have in medicine, and think what a tremendous change for the better was made by innovations like agriculture and the machine. Maybe it’s just that I’m too impatient; maybe, given a few more millennia, man will do something about himself, change his own mind from animal to human.”

Valti took a noisy slurp of beer. “I cannot share your optimism, my friend,” he answered. “I was born more than six hundred years ago, by skipping across space and time I have seen much history, and it seems to me that civilization—any civilization, on any planet—is subject to a law of mortality. No matter how clever we get, we will never create mass-energy, grow nothing, never make heat flow of itself from a colder to a warmer body. There are limitations set by natural law. As ships and buildings are made bigger, more of their volume must go into passageways, until you reach a limit. You could not have an immortal man; even if biochemistry permitted, he has only so much brain space, so many cells which can record his experiences. Why, then, an immortal civilization, or a civilization embracing the entire universe?”

“And so there’ll always be rise, and decay, and fall -always war and suffering?”

“Either that, or the sort of thing the Technon wants: death disguised by a mechanical semblance of life. I think you look at it from the wrong angle. Is not this very change, this anguished toppling into doom, the stuff of life? There is a unity in the cosmos which is more important than any one world, any one race. I think life arose because the universe needs it, needs just those characteristics which hurt the living individual. No... I don’t believe in Father. There is no consciousness except in organic life. And yet an inanimate universe brought forth life and all its variety, because that was a necessary step in the evolution from a great cloud of gas to the final clinkered vacuum.” Valti wiped his nose and chuckled. “Pardon me. I meander in my old age. But if you had traveled across light-years all your days, you’d know that there is something operating which can’t be reduced to physical theory. I think the Society will last because of being divorced from space and time; but only it, and even its span is not eternal.”

He got up. “Excuse me. We’ll be landing soon.”

Langley found Marin in the amidships saloon. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “It won’t be long now,” he said. “I think we’ve done what’s best—removed Saris” power from the place where it could only cause destruction. Best thing for Sol, too. And now we’re bound on our own way.”

“Yes.” She didn’t look at him. Her face was white, and there was a strained expression on it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I... I don’t know, Edwy. Everything seems so odd, somehow, as if this were a dream.” She stared cloudily before her. “Is it? Am I sleeping somewhere and—”

“No. What is the trouble? Can’t you describe it?”

She shook her head. “It’s as if someone else were sharing my brain, sitting there and waiting. It came on me all of a sudden. The strain, I suppose. I’ll be all right.”

Langley scowled. Worry gnawed at him. If she took sick- Just why was she so important to him? Was he falling for her? It would be very easy to do. Quite apart from her looks, she was brave and intelligent and witty; he could see himself spending a contented lifetime with her.

Peggy, Jim, Bob—No, not her, too. Not again!

There was a small jarring shock, and the engine drone died. Saris Hronna stuck his whiskered snout through the door. “We iss landed,” he announced. “Come out.”

The ship lay cradled in a brightly-lit cave; behind her was a huge concrete door which must lead to the mountain slope. It would be a high, wild land, there were probably snowfields and glaciers left here on the roof of the world -cold, windy, empty, a place where men could hide for years.

“Have you any defenses?” asked Langley as Valti led the way past the hull.

“No. Why should we? They would only add more metal to be detected from above. As it is, every possible thing here is made of plastic or stone. I am a peaceful man, captain. I rely more on my cerebral cortex than my guns. In five decades, this lair has been unsuspected.”

They entered a hall off which several doors opened. Langley saw what must be a radio room, presumably for emergency use only. Valti’s men wandered off toward their own quarters; they spoke little, the Society people seemed to frown on idle chatter between themselves, but they seemed quite relaxed. Why not? They were safe now. The fight was over.

Marin jerked, and her eyes widened. “What’s the matter?” asked Langley. His voice sounded hoarse and cracked.

“I... I don’t know.” She was trying not to cry. “I feel so strange.” Her eyes were unfocused, he saw, and she moved like a sleepwalker.

“Valti! What’s wrong with her?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, captain. Probably just reaction; it’s been a trying time for a person not used to conflict and suspense. Let’s put her to bed and I’ll get the ship’s doctor to take a look at her.”

That officer admitted to puzzlement. “Psychology is out of my field,” he explained. “Society personnel rarely have trouble with their minds, so we have no good psychiatrists among us. I gave her a sedative. If she isn’t better tomorrow, we can get a specialist.” He smiled sourly. “Too much knowledge. Too damn much knowledge. One head can’t hold it all. I can set a broken bone or cure a germ-caused disease, but when the mind goes out of kilter all I can do is mutter a few half-forgotten technical terms.”

Langley’s victory crumbled in his hands.

“Come, captain,” said Valti, taking his arm, “let’s go make up Saris Hronna’s vitamin pills, and after that you could probably use some sleep yourself. In twenty-four hours you’ll be out of the Solar System. Think of that.”

They were working in the laboratory when Saris stiffened. “She goess by,” he said. “She iss walking been around and her mind feelss wery strange.”

Langley ran out into the corridor. Marin stood looking at him with clearing eyes. “Where am I?” she said weakly.

“Come on,” he answered. “Back to bed with you.”

“I feel better,” she told him. “There was a pressing in my brain, everything went dark, and now I am standing here —but I feel like myself again.”

The drugged glass stood untouched by her bunk. “Get that down,” said Langley. She obeyed, smiled at him, and went to sleep. He resisted a desire to kiss her.

Returning, he found Saris putting a flask of pills into a pouch hung about his neck. Valti had gone to do his paperwork, they were alone among the machines.

“I feeled her mind clearing ewen ass I... listened,” said Saris. “Hass your race often such failingss?”

“Now and then,” said Langley. “Gears slip. I’m afraid we aren’t as carefully designed as your people.”

“You could be so. We kill the weaklingss young.”

“It’s been done by my race, now and then, but the custom never lasted long. Something in our nature seems to forbid it.”

“And yet you can desstroy a world for your own ambitions. I shall newer undersstand you.”

“I doubt we’ll ever understand ourselves.” Langley rubbed his neck, thinking. “Could it be that because we’re non-telepaths, each of us isolated from all the others, every individual develops in his own way? Your people have their emotional empathy; the Thrymans, I’ve read, share thoughts directly. In cases like that, the individual is, in a way, under the control of the whole race. But in man, each of us is always alone, we have to find our own separate ways and we grow apart.”

“It may be. I am astonished at what I hawe learned of your diwersity. I sometimess t’ink your folk iss the despair and the hope of the uniwerse.”

Langley yawned. He ached with weariness, now that the stimulant had worn off. “To hell with it. I’m for some sack time.”

He was wakened hours later by the crash of an explosion. As he sat up, he heard blasters going off.