The Long Way Home

3

Langley sat up with a gasp and looked around him. He was alone.

For a moment, then, he sat very still, allowing memory and thought to enter him in a trickle. The whole pattern was too shatteringly big to be grasped at once.

Earth, altered almost beyond recognition: no more polar caps, the seas encroaching miles on every shore, unknown cities, unknown language, unknown men—there was only one answer, but he thrust it from him in a near panic.

There had been the landing, Saris Hronna’s stunningly swift escape (why?), and then he and his companions had been separated. There were men in blue who spoke to him in a room full of enigmatic machines that whirred and clicked and blinked. One of those had been switched on and darkness had followed. Beyond that, there was only a dreamlike confusion of half-recalled voices. And now he was awake again, and naked, and alone.

Slowly, he looked at the cell. It was small, bare save for the couch and washstand which seemed to grow out of the green-tinted, soft and rubbery floor. There was a little ventilator grille in the wall, but no door that he could see.

He felt himself shaking, and fought for control. He wanted to weep, but there was a dry hollowness in him.

Peggy, he thought. They could at least have left me your picture. It’s all I’ll ever have, now.

A crack appeared in the farther wall, dilated until it was a doorway, and three men stepped through. The jerk which brought Langley erect told him how strained his nerves were.

He crouched back, trying to grasp the details of appearance on these strangers. It was hard, somehow. They were of another civilization, clothes and bodies and the very expressions were something new, a total gestalt was lacking for him.

Two of them were giants, nearly seven feet tall, their muscled bodies clad in a tight-fitting black uniform, their heads shaven. It took a little while to realize that the wide brown faces were identical. Twins?

The third was a little below average height, lithe and graceful. He wore a white tunic, deep-blue cloak, soft buskins on his feet, and little else; but the insigne on his breast, a sunburst with an eye, was the same as that of the two huge men behind him. He shared their smooth tawny skin, high cheekbones, faintly slanted eyes; but straight black hair was sleeked over the round head, and the face was handsome—broad low forehead, brilliant dark eyes, snub nose, strong chin, a wide full mouth, overall a nervous mobility.

All three bore holstered sidearms.

Langley had a sense of helplessness and degradation in standing nude before them. He tried for a poker face and an easy stance, but doubted that it was coming off. There was a thick lump as of unshed tears in his throat.

The leader inclined his head slightly. “Captain Edward Langley,” he said, pronouncing it with a heavy accent. His voice was low, resonant, a superbly controlled instrument.

“Yes.”

“I take it that means sya.” The stranger was speaking the foreign tongue, and Langley understood it as if it had been his own. It was a clipped, rather high-pitched language, inflectional but with a simple and logical grammar. Among so much else, Langley felt only a vague surprise at his own knowledge, a certain relief at not having to study. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Minister Chanthavar Tang vo Lurin, chief field operative of the Solar militechnic intelligence corps and, I hope, your friend.”

Langley’s brain felt thick, but he tried to analyze what had been said, calling on his new linguistic training. There were three forms of address, toward superiors, inferiors, and equals; Chanthavar was using the last, a courteous noncommittal gesture. His family name would be ‘vo Lurin’, the prefix a sign of aristocratic birth as von and de had once been in Langley’s world; however, only the lower ranks of the nobility were addressed by their surnames, the upper crust went by the given ones like ancient kings.

“Thank you, sir,” he answered stiffly.

“You must pardon such impoliteness as we may have shown you,” said Chanthavar with an oddly winning smile. “Your comrades are safe, and you will soon rejoin them. However, as a spaceman you realize that we could not take chances with a complete stranger.”

He gestured to one of the guards, who laid a suit of clothes on the couch: similar to Chanthavar’s, though lacking the military symbol and the jeweled star which he bore. “If you will put these on, captain, it is the standard dress of the freeborn, and I’m afraid you’d feel too conspicuous in your own.”

Langley obeyed. The material was soft and comfortable. Chanthavar showed him how to close the fastenings, which seemed to be a kind of modified zipper. Then he sat down companionably on the bed, waving Langley to join him. The guards remained rigid by the door.

“Do you know what has happened to you?” he asked.

“I... think so,” said Langley dully.

“I’m sorry to tell you this.” Chanthavar’s voice was gentle. “Your log has been translated, so I know you didn’t realize how the superdrive actually operates. Curious that you shouldn’t, if you could build one.”

“There was an adequate theory,” said Langley. “According to it, the ship warped through hyperspace.”

“There’s no such animal. (Chanthavar’s expression was literally: ‘That engine is drained.’) Your theory was wrong, as must have been discovered very soon. Actually, a ship is projected as a wave pattern, re-forming at the point of destination; it’s a matter of setting up harmonics in the electronic wave trains such that they reconstitute the original relationship at another point of space-time. Or so the specialists tell me, I don’t pretend to understand the mathematics. Anyhow, there’s no time of passage for those aboard, but according to an external observer, the trip is still made only at the speed of light. No better system has ever been found, and I doubt that it ever will. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is still nearly four and a half years away.”

“We’d have known that,” said Langley bitterly, “except for the trouble with the space positioning. Because of that, it took us so long to find our test rockets that we had no way of observing that a finite time of passage had gone by. On my own voyage, the time lag was lost in the uncertainty of exact stellar positions. No wonder we had such trouble approaching Earth as we come home—it was moving in its own orbit, so was the sun, and we didn’t know that-Home!” he exploded, with a stinging in his eyes. “We crossed a total of some five thousand light-years. So it must be that many years later we came back.”

Chanthavar nodded.

“I don’t suppose—” Langley had little hope, but: “I don’t suppose you have a way to send us back—into the past?”

“I’m sorry, no,” said Chanthavar. “Time travel isn’t even a theoretical possibility. We’ve done things which I believe were unknown in your time: gravity control, genetic engineering, making Mars and Venus and the Jovian moons habitable, oh, a great deal no doubt; but that is one art nobody will ever master.”

You can’t go home again.

Langley asked wearily: “What’s happened in all that time?”

Chanthavar shrugged. “The usual. Overpopulation, vanishing natural resources, war, famine, pestilence, depopulation, collapse, and then the resumption of the cycle. I don’t think you’ll find people very different today.”

“Couldn’t you have taught me-?”

“Like the language? Not very well. That was a routine hypnotic process, quite automatic and not involving the higher centers of the brain. You were interrogated in that state too, but as for your more complex learning, it’s best done gradually.”

There was a deadness in Langley, a stricken indifference, and he twisted away from it by trying to focus his mind on detail. Anything, just so it was impersonal enough. “What kind of world is it now? And what can I do in it?”

Chanthavar leaned forward, elbows on knees, cocking a sidewise eye at the other. Langley forced himself to pay attention. “Let’s see. Interstellar emigration began about your time—not too extensive at first, because of the limitations of the superdrive and the relative scarcity of habitable planets. During later periods of trouble, there were successive waves of such outward movement, but most of these were malcontents and refugees who went far from Sol lest they be found later, and have been lost track of. We presume there are many of these lost colonies, scattered throughout the galaxy, and that some of them must have evolved into very different civilizations; but the universe we actually know something about and have even an indirect contact with, only reaches a couple of hundred light-years. Who would have any reason to explore farther?

The... let’s see, I think it was the twenty-eighth world war which reduced the Solar System almost to barbarism and wiped out the colonies on the nearest stars. Reconstruction took a long time, but about two thousand years ago the Solar System was unified under the Technate, and this has endured so far. Colonization was resumed, with the idea of keeping the colonists fairly close to home and thus under control, while the emigration would be a safety valve for getting rid of those who didn’t adjust well to the new arrangements.

“Of course, it didn’t work. Distances are still too great; different environments inevitably produce different civilizations, other ways of living and thinking. About a thousand years ago, the colonies broke loose, and after a war we had to recognize their independence. There are about a dozen such states now with which we have fairly close contact—the League of Alpha Centauri is much the most powerful of them.

“If you want to know more about outer-space conditions, you can talk to a member of the Commercial Society. At present, though, I wouldn’t bother, not till you’re better up on modern Earth.”

“Yes, how about that?” said Langley. “What is this Technate system, anyway?”

“The Technon is merely a giant sociomathematical computer which is fed all available data continuously, by all agencies, and makes basic policy decisions in view of them. A machine is less fallible, less selfish, less bribeable, than a man.” Chanthavar grinned. “Also, it saves men the trouble of thinking for themselves.”

“I get the impression of an aristocracy—”

“Oh, well, if you want to call it that, somebody has to take responsibility for executing the Technon’s policies and making the small daily decisions. The class of Ministers exists for that purpose. Under them are the Commoners. It’s hereditary, but not so rigid that occasional recruits from the Commons don’t get elevated to the Ministry.”

“Where I come from,” said Langley slowly, “we’d learned better than to leave leadership to chance—and heredity is mighty chancy.”

“Not enough to matter nowadays. I told you we had genetic engineering.” Chanthavar laid a hand on his, squeezing slightly: it was not a feminine gesture, Langley realized, only a custom different from his. “Look here, captain, I don’t give a damn what you say, but some people get rather stuffy about it. Just a hint.”

“What can we... my friends and I... do?” Langley felt a dim annoyance at the strain in his voice.

“Your status is a bit unusual, isn’t it? I’m appointing myself your patron, and you’ll have a sort of quasi-Ministerial rank with funds of your own for the time being. Not charity, by the way; the Technate does have a special cash-box for unforeseen details, and you are hereby classified as an unforeseen detail. Eventually we’ll work out something, but don’t worry about getting sent to the commons. If nothing else, your knowledge of the past is going to make you the pet of the historians for the rest of your lives.”

Langley nodded. It didn’t seem to matter much, one way or another. Peggy was dead.

Peggy was dead. For five thousand years she had been dust, darkness in her eyes and mold in her mouth, for five thousand years she had not been so much as a memory. He had held back the realization, desperately focusing himself on the unimportant details of survival, but it was entering him now like a knife.

He would never see her again.

And the child was dust, and his friends were dust, and his nation was dust; a world of living and laughter, proud buildings, song and tears and dreams, had sunk to a few ashen pages in some forgotten archive. And this was how it felt to be a ghost.

He bowed his head and wanted to weep, but there were eyes on him.

“It’s no fun,” said Chanthavar sympathetically. After a moment: “Take my advice and concentrate on immediate things for a while. That ought to help.”

“Yes,” said Langley, not looking at him.

“You’ll strike roots here, too.”

“I wonder.”

“Well, you’re better off if you don’t, anyway.” An odd, bitter note there. “Enjoy yourself. I’ll show you some interesting dives.”

Langley stared at the floor.

“There’s one thing you can help me with right now,” said Chanthavar. “It’s the reason I came here to see you, instead of having you sent to my office. More privacy.”

Langley touched his lips, remembering how Peggy’s had brushed them and then clung to them, fifty centuries ago.

“It’s about that alien you had along—Saris Hronna, was that the name you recorded for him?”

“More or less. What about him?”

“He escaped, you know. We haven’t found him yet. Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t think so, unless he gets too annoyed. His people do have a keen hunting instinct, but they’re peaceable otherwise, treated us with great friendliness. Saris came along to see Earth, and as a kind of ambassador. I think he only broke away till he could get some idea of the situation. He must have dreaded the possibility of being caged.”

“He can control electronic and magnetronic currents. You know that?”

“Of course. It surprised us, too, at first. His race isn’t telepathic in the usual sense, but they’re sensitive to neural currents—especially emotions—and can project the same. I ... I really don’t know whether he can read a human mind or not.”

“We have to find him,” said Chanthavar. “Have you any idea where he might go, what he might do?”

“I’d... have to think about it. But I’m sure he isn’t dangerous.” Langley wondered, inside himself. He knew so little about the Holatan mind. It wasn’t human. How would Saris Hronna react when he learned?

“You note their planet as being some thousand light-years from Sol. It’s unknown to us, of course. We don’t intend this being any harm, but we have to locate him.”

Langley glanced up. Under the mobile, smiling mask of his face, Chanthavar seemed almost feverish. There was a hunter’s gleam in his eyes. “What’s the hurry?” asked the spaceman.

“Several things. Chiefly, the possibility that he may carry some germ to which man has no immunity. We’ve had plagues like that before.”

“We were on Holat a couple of months. I’ve never been healthier in my life.”

“Nevertheless, it has to be checked. Furthermore, how’s he going to live except by robbery? Can’t have that, either. Haven’t you any idea where he might have gone?”

Langley shook his head. “I’ll think hard about it,” he said cautiously. “Maybe I’ll figure out an answer, but I can’t promise anything.”

“Well,” said Chanthavar wryly, “that’ll have to do for now. Come on, let’s get some dinner.”

He rose, Langley followed him out, and the two guards fell into step behind. The spaceman paid little attention to the halls and the anti-gravity rise-shafts along which he went. He was wrapped in his own desolation.

O my darling, I never came back. You waited, and you grew old, and you died, and I never came back to you. I... I’m sorry, dearest of all, I’m sorry. Forgive me, O dust.

And down underneath, sharp and cold, a thought of wariness and suspicion: Chanthavar seemed pleasant enough. But he was top brass. Why should he take personal charge of the hunt for Saris? His reasons were thin—somewhere the real one lay hidden.

And what should I do about it?