Starburst

23

EIGHT WENT OUT TO ALPHA CENTAURI AND EIGHT CAME back, but they were by no means the same eight. The pilot's name was Quittyyx, which signified, among other odd things, that he was of the tenth cohort, and therefore only six years old when they left Alpha-Aleph. That wasn't so bad. His deputy, Jeromolo Bill, was not quite two.

Of course, tiny Bill would not be trusted with the guidance of the interstellar vessel Shef had designed for them until he was at least four, but there was not really a whole hell of a lot to do in the first half of the trip. Turnover was the time that counted. All the universe concentrated into a single terrifying starburst of light, watching the very act of Creation, and no other signposts were in the skies. By then Jeromolo Bill was able to take his turn with his elder. They both had what none of the others had, what none of the Original Eight had had, a genetic, built-in capacity to handle relativistic computations in their heads. They were not smarter than anyone else, simply hard-wired to match and measure the asymptotic slopes of mass and velocity and time and convert them into direction.

The long voyage home took all of four years, but at that less than half as long as it had taken Constitution on the way out. The reason was that they were in a better vessel than Constitution. They were in Sheffield Jackman's masterpiece, built like a basketball and filled with Flo's genetics, Jim's optics, Ski's communications, and, in lieu of any contribution from their researches. Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost themselves in the flesh—or, in Will Becklund's case, whatever it was he was in rather than flesh. It was a darling souped-up speedster of a ship, all right, and apart from the fact that they had power to burn there was a valuable purpose in burning it. Acceleration was good for them. It was even necessary. Every one of the voyagers needed to accommodate his body to the crushing weight they had to look forward to on Earth.

So the ship started off slowly—relatively slowly, no more than a quarter G. Even so, most of them crept around in walkers. When they fell, not infrequently, there was a rich harvest of fractures and sprains. But the bodies toughened. The muscles swelled. The porous bones grew denser and stronger. Every one of them (Uncle Ghost always excepted) drank from Flo's nauseating sap of harvested calcium-salts solution every morning and every night; and they were at half a G, three-quarters, as much as a gravity and a half of acceleration toward the end, and the ship fairly flew, and Jeron was its captain. He said so himself. Even so, it was a long, long trip.

For the six young ones in the crew, the voyage was a sort of class trip to an exciting freak show. They bled Aunt Mommy dry of every scrap of geography she could remember, and pestered Uncle Ghost, when they could find him, for stories and sidelights and gossip. When those ran out, they quarreled with each other for amusement; and the long trip grew longer.

Although they never said so, Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost shared a certain purpose. The first part was clear. The climax less so. It was to find Dirty Dieter, if he still lived, and—and—and do something, though what that something was was the unclear part. Even Jeron carried that unwritten purpose in a corner of his heart—even the younger ones, sometimes—for their childhood lessons had taken. Diabolical Dieterl Kneffie the ineluctably badl Thinking of him as they drifted off to sleep, the little ones sometimes growled in their throats, and when they realized how terminally tedious the long voyage was, it was Dieter von Knefhausen they blamed. When Jeromolo Bill was three years old—old enough to be worth persecuting—the other children invented the game of "Do It to Dieter" and made Bill their quarry in long whooping chases all around the ship. Even Jeron sometimes joined in, out of boredom, while Uncle Ghost retreated to invisibility and Aunt Eve to her latest crop of malt-nuts. They consoled themselves by thinking that the exercise, at least, was good for the young muscles.

Hopes of revenge could carry one just so far. Dreams of curiosity satisfied, not much farther; the concept of delayed gratification takes long to learn, and longer to be felt as real. The voyage was far too long for tiny tots. The good part of that was that, out of boredom, they were willing to learn anything that anyone was willing to teach, and so on good days Aunt Eve sobered up and demonstrated knitting and plant husbandry, and lectured on the subject of The Good Old Days on Earth. Uncle Will Becklund could not demonstrate much of anything, but he explained the casting of the bones for the I Ching and taught the true meaning of The Moon in Water. It was not enough. Shef had designed the ship for speed and efficiency, not for pleasure. It was a golden globe a hundred yards through, with two smaller globes bulging from its poles like snowball ears on a snowman's face for landing craft; inside half of it was for living, and storage of the dormant seeds they were bringing to Earth as gifts, and for machinery; and the other half bare floors as big as skating rinks.

When they were only local commuting distance from Earth—the Sun no longer a star but a Sun; the biggest planets now visible with disks—there was work to do at last. So they fed Aunt Eve coffee and kept her sober for a few weeks, while Molomy lashed the littler kids into pulling out the first lots of seeds and cuttings and planting them in the tanks on what had been bare floors. But then it was back to the malt nuts for Eve, not so much from boredom anymore as from fear. The closer Earth got, the scarier the idea of returning there became.

By the end of the trip even the youngest, Jeromolo Bill, was six years old. It was notable that no children had been born on all the long voyage. Partly it was prudence. No one wanted a squalling brat to tie him down when they embarked on the heart-stopping adventure of exploring old Earth. It was also for earthier reasons. In the close quarters of Shef's speedster for four long years they couldn't even stand themselves, much less each other. Their sexual contacts were short, infrequent, and without issue. For Aunt Eve there was no sex at all in the four-year trip, because with the children she wouldn't and with Uncle Ghost she really couldn't, and therefore the malt-nuts. She spent most of her time in her flowered sleeping sack. It took a great deal to get her out of it.

What did it, just as they were about to round the Sun for final deceleration, was a ninety-decibel shout.

It didn't just wake Eve. It woke everyone who was asleep, and pierced the ears of everyone who was awake. Jeron came running into Eve's cubicle, and it was several seconds before either of them realized that the yell was a message from Uncle Ski. "What's he saying?" Eve cried in terror.

"Attenuate it, Eve! Hold your hands over your ears like this!" And when she followed her son's orders, she could make out the words. It was a kind of shopping list!

"—fly agaric, henbane, bladderwort, belladonna, parsley, parsnips—"

"Can't you turn it down?" she yelled over the noise, and Jeron yelled back grimly: "fie installed it himself—I don't know how. That message has been chasing us for four years."

It went on for minutes: "—Venus fly-trap, madder, yucca, Jack-in-the-pulpit, skunk cabbage—"

Eve moaned, shrugged a shoulder up to an ear to release one hand, and reached for another malt-nut. She popped it open with the dagger that lay beside her bed and took a long drink of the milky fluid. Jeron scowled impartially at the malt-nut and the yelling, and then he had an idea. Wincing, he took his hands away from his ears long enough to pull blossoms from Eve's bower bed. He rolled them into fingertip-sized balls, did something with two of them, then reached for Eve's head while holding two more. She ducked away; he snarled at her, and she perceived what he intended, and allowed him to insert the cool, moist plugs in her ears. Thus diluted, the roar from the communicator was merely loud, and she was able to identify, the voice. It wasn't Ski, or Shef or Jim; of course it wasn't, for that much plain English prose would have tied any one of them up in knots for hours. The voice cataloguing plants, flowers, and even lichens and ocean plankton belonged to a fifth-cohort son of Ann and Shef named Araduk.

At last it ended: "Under no circumstances," it howled, "are you to fail to return viable samples of all the foregoing!" There was no good-bye; it just stopped.

Cautiously Eve pulled the plug out of her ear, and Jeron stood up, flexing his knees in the pull of the 1.5 gravity. "I suppose you're going to drink yourself back to sleep now," he said.

"Is there any reason not?"

He shrugged. "Sightseeing," he said disdainfully. "We're about to scoot around the Sun."

"For me," she said, reaching for the malt-nut, "that's just a rerun. I caught it first time around."

But she did not mean it, did not mean most of the things she said to Jeron when he took that contemptuous, cold tone to her, any more than, she hoped, he meant it to her.

Shef had built their ship with many eyes and, though most of them were hooded for the perihelion approach, through the multiply filtered smallest of them the entire chip's crew gazed wonderingly at the immense sea of flame below.

The ship whipped around the Sun, shedding velocity, and eased back to Earth's orbit from the inside. Quittyyx and Jeromolo Bill were relieved of their responsibilities for a time—the ship was no longer relativistic, and had not yet begun orbiting maneuvers. Jeron took command. Since they had done their job well, he had little to do. The ship crept toward the point in Earth's orbit where Earth would be when they got there; and there it was, old green Terra, the mottled blue and white marble with its honey-colored child spinning beside it.

By the time they were half a million miles away—only twice as far as the Moon—their speed had dropped to two hundred miles a second. They were well within the safety margins for the ballistic program. They entered a low-Earth orbit, killed the rest of their surplus velocity, and shut down the drive.

All Shef's built-in eyes were open now. The most powerful of them, visible from outside only as a slotted patch on the gleaming gold sphere, gave them magnification enough to make out surface objects only a few hundred yards across. The difficulty was that most of the objects were usually covered by clouds. All of them had heard of "clouds." None but Eve and the late Will Becklund had ever seen them; in the habitat, moisture was leached out of the air by con­densation and rain rarely fell.

They clustered around the narrow magnifying port. "All right," piped Jeromolo Bill, standing on tiptoes to see what the taller, older ones could see without effort, "so where do we go, dad?"

Jeron quelled him with a look. Jeron was fully a man now, especially in his own opinion. He had attained his six thousandth day just a week or so before, and besides he was captain of this vessel. Having put by such childish things as the nasty sniping ridicule in Jeromolo Bill's voice, he snapped, "Shut up, kid," squared his shoulders, and prepared to issue commands.

For this he was well qualified, since he had been secretly studying stories about ship's captains out of the tapes transmitted by open-time communicators from Earth long ago. "Um, hum," he said thoughtfully, out of Horatio Horn-blower, and, "Is the crew assembled?" out of Nicholas Monsarrat. But the crew was long since assembled, even fumbly, blowsy Aunt Eve, and he really hadn't a clue. Damn clouds! How could you make a plan when you couldn't see what you were looking at?

Of course, there were the maps.

They were good maps. They had been assembled out of the-recollections of the Original Eight, but their memories were good and some days of shrill bickering had mediated their differences. Unfortunately the maps lied. They pretended that there were differences in color between sea and land, and even between one nation's land and another, and Jeron could see none.

Gradually, however, he began to realize that those sections of the globe with visible shadows and folds could not be sea, and therefore must be land. Then he began to perceive shores and peninsulas— that one, no doubt, was Yucatan, protruding into the Gulf of Mexico. But where was Florida? Where, in fact, was the Atlantic Ocean?

At that point he realized he was looking at it the wrong way up. The maps always presented themselves with north at the top. The planet itself was not so obliging. That peninsula just disappearing over the horizon was half a world away from the Yucatan. "Ah, yes," he said, nodding sagely, "you see, that is Italy just going out of sight; of course, you must have recognized the Mediterranean Sea?"

"I think I see the Pyramids," Aunt Eve said, hiccoughing slightly. And it was true. Although there were clouds over the eastern Mediterranean, farther south the skies were transparent. Those sharp-angled blocks were unmistakable.

It was time for action. "Molomy," he ordered, "see that our first batch of gifts is in the landing craft. Bill! You will navigate us to a landing. I advise that you get some sleep first, so go take a little nap."

Jeromolo Bill whistled scornfully but, after waiting enough of a second to indicate that he was doing it because he thought it was worth doing, not because he was told to, he turned and headed for his cubicle, leaving Jeron to study the slowly turning globe. Molomy reappeared and drafted the rest of the children to help her stow the landing craft. Aunt Eve, with a malt-nut in her hand but no longer drinking, stared apprehensively over his shoulder; and Uncle Ghost, thrilled and uneasy as any of them, allowed himself to be seen beside them.

"The Horn of Africa," he whispered, and Eve shuddered. The field of view shifted ever westward as the ship orbited, the Indian subcontinent with the pearl of Ceylon hanging from its tip; a muddle of islands; then the broad Pacific. Australia was clear enough, and the smudge just at the southern rim of the Earth might easily be New Zealand . . . but what, Jeron wondered, was this astonishing sprinkling of white? Could they be ships? Ocean liners? Immense ones?

He said nonchalantly to Aunt Eve, "I did not believe so much technology had survived until I saw the cruise ships."

She gazed blearily at the sea, and shook her head. "Don't see them. Hard to pick them out among all those icebergs, I guess."

Jeron kept his face masklike as he nodded, but he was thrilled. Icebergsl It was as though she had said, ah, yes, dragons. "But icebergs are not the question, Aunt Eve. We must decide on where to land."

Aunt Eve sighed. The prospect of meeting von Knefhausen and all those others down there was pressing heavily on her. "Well," she said doubtfully, "pretty soon you'll see a sort of twisty thing up there, I think, and that'll be the Isthmus of Panama. Pretty much straight up north from there is where we ought to go."

"Oh, yes," he said, nodding wisely, "Florida."

"No! Who wants to go to Florida? But once we find Florida then we just go up the coast to Chesapeake Bay, I think I'll know that when I see it, and then it's just up the Potomac River to Washington. Where dirty old Dieter lives. Lived. Whatever. But," she added, "I think I will make myself presentable before we land."

"Next orbit!" Jeron called after her back. "Ninety minutes! See you're ready! And then"—he swallowed—"we're going to be there."

When an early spacecraft came back to Earth, an Apollo or a Salyut or a Shuttle, the timing had to be precise and the entry window was tiny. Great banks of computers in Houston or some Russian town took the readouts from a thousand sensors and converted them into simple yes-no instructions: "Burn." "Stop burning." "Burn for 1.3 seconds." "Burn yaw thruster." "Pray."

The returnees from Alpha-Aleph had no such ground support going for them. They had only two things, though either was enough. First they had the landing craft itself, with Jim's power plant and Ski's plasma, and so they could have come down like an elevator if they chose. And they also had Jeromolo Bill.

The six-year-old was in his full power now. His genes had been edited for mathematics, and not merely the relativistic phase-shifting of the high-speed voyage itself. As a matter of pride he plotted a course. It required him to take into consideration the shuttle's geocentric position vector, the gravitational parameter of the Earth, the gravitational force due to the Earth's nonsymmetric mass distribution and the time-varying contributions from tides, the perturbing force due to the effects of the Sun and Moon, the force due to the effects of atmospheric resistance, and the force due to solar radiation pressure. Since he had no data on many of these, he had to deduce them as he went along, from the perturbations observed in the very ship he was flying. He did it in his head. He was able to feel the responses of the sensors and convert them into attitude and thrust instructions as well as any IBM or Cray-1 monster in old Texas, and it did not even raise a sweat.

The difficulties were quite other than that. The difficulties included the fact that the world did not look the way it was supposed to.

There wasn't any Florida, for instance. Where there should have been a peninsula, there was only a string of tiny islets. All up and down the coast, and all to the west, there were broad, ragged bays where there should have been river mouths and deltas. Clearly the world's water level had risen. The question was, was there still a Washington, D.C.?

As they felt the first gentle shaking that told them their shuttle, for the first time in its life, had an atmosphere around it. Eve appeared and buckled herself in. She was sober, clean, and dressed in her best clothes.

Jeron was captain, Bill was pilot, but Eve was Aunt Mommy. She leaned forward to gaze at the approaching globe, and the others waited on her word.

There was a thunderstorm over the Virginia shore and a line of squalls all the way up into Pennsylvania. It was no real problem for the landing craft that Shef had designed, but the fact that the integrity of the ship was assured did nothing for the integrity of the stomachs of the crew. None of them had been exposed to that sort of lurching, staggering motion for a quarter of a century; most never had. Eve did not seem to notice the turbulence. Through a break in the clouds she saw the river, grossly swollen, an island with a marble monument, a hillside covered with grave stones, a bridge nearly awash, and from them recognized the marsh that had been Washington National Airport. She placed a finger on the port. "There, Bill," she said.

By the time they landed the inside of the shuttle was thick with the smell of airsickness, and six-year-old Jeromolo Bill was sickest of all. But he got them there.

Aunt Eve pulled herself together and stood up.

"We're going out now," Jeron guessed, watching her face.

Eve looked around at her corps of hardened adventurers — average age, nine; average height, not much over four feet. She smiled and shook her head.

"Not just yet," she said. "We're going to be good guests. We're going to stay right here in the lander until something happens outside, to give our hosts time to get ready for us."