Ticket to Anywhere

I

Richard Falk was a sane man. Up until three months ago he had been, so far as he could discover, the only sane man left in a world of lunatics.

Now he was a dead man.

He lay in a metal coffin twenty yards long by three wide, airless, soundless. Behind the faceplate of his helmet, under the rime of frozen air, his lips were bright blue, his cheeks, nose, forehead a lighter color, almost violet. The flesh was stiff as frozen leather. He did not move, breathe, or think: he was dead.

Beside him, strapped to the bulging torso of his suit, was a metal box labeled: SCATO HEART PROBE, SEE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE.

All around him, strapped tight to the walls by broad loops of webbing, were boxes, canisters, canvas bags, kegs. Cargo. His coffin was a freighter, going to Mars.

In his frozen brain the memories were neatly stacked, Just as he had left them. Not coupled now, each cell isolated, the entropy of his mind fallen to zero. But uppermost among them, waiting for the thaw that might never come, were the memories of his last few hours of life.

Once the ship was launched and free, he had had to wait until its dancing molecules had stilled, their heat all radiated away into space. Then to wait again, heater turned off, listening to the silence while his own life’s heat drained away: fingers and toes numb first, ears and nose following, then lips, cheeks, and all his flesh; shivering in an agony of cold, watching his breath fill the helmet with cloud, the cold drops beading on the colder faceplate.

Tricky, that, and a thing that demanded courage. Act too soon, and the last drop into stillness would be too slow - the freezing liquids in his body would crystallize, gashing his cells with a million tiny stabs. Wait too long, and the cold would steal his ability to act at all.

He had waited until the false warmth of the dying had crept over him, the subtle destroyer, cumbering his limbs not with harshness but with too much peace. Twisting then in the dead center where he floated, he had drawn himself into the lane between two looped bundles of cargo, forcing them aside, until he reached the naked hull. There, spread-eagled against the chill metal, embracing it as one who crucifies himself gladly, he had died.

The ship, stillest of sepulchers, hung fixed in the center of the starry globe. So it might have remained for time without end, changeless, knowing no time; for there was no time here, no “events” - the ship and all its contents - except its robot control, inactive now but warmed by a minute trickle of electrons - now being very nearly at zero Absolute.

But a relay clicked, communicating its tremor through support frame and girder and hull. Time had begun again. The radar assembly in the prow began to emit timed clusters of radiation; presently other relays snapped over, and then the engine awoke, whispered to itself an instant, and was silent. For an instant the ship had become once more a thing in motion, a pebble flung between the stars. Another such instant came, then another; then, at long last, the hull shuddered to the whip and carom of atmospheric molecules. Lightly it dipped into Martian air, out again, in again, making a great circuit of the globe. A final relay clicked, and Falk’s coffin hurled itself groundward, free of the skeletal ship whose rockets now flamed again, driving it back into the timeless deep.

A parachute opened as the cargo hull hurtled downward: a preposterous parasol that would not have held the weight a minute against Earth’s gravity, in Earth’s air; but here it slowed that plummeting fall until the box met Martian sand at not quite killing speed.

In the shell, Falk’s corpse slowly thawed.

His heart was beating. That was Falk’s first conscious realization, and he listened to the tiny sound thankfully. His chest was rising and falling in a deep, slow rhythm; he heard the hiss and whisper of breath in his nostrils and felt the veins twitch at his temples.

Then came a prickling, half pain, in his arms and legs; then he saw a ruddy haze of light on his closed lids.

Falk opened his eyes.

He saw a pale glow that turned Itself into a face. It went away briefly, then came back. Falk could see it a little better now. Young - about thirty - pale-skinned, with a blue beard shadow. Black straight hair, a little untidy. Black-rimmed spectacles. Ironic lines on either side of the thin mouth,

“All right now?” said the face.

Falk murmured, and the face bent closer. He tried again. “Think so.”

The young man nodded. He picked up something from the bed and began taking it apart, fitting the components into the cushioned troughs of a metal box. It was the heart probe, Falk saw: the bulky control box and the short, capillary-thin needle.

“Where did you get this?” the young man asked. “And what the devil were you doing aboard that freighter?”

“Stole the probe,” said Falk. “And the suit, and the rest of the stuff. Dumped enough cargo to match my weight. Wanted to get to Mars. Only way.”

The young man let his hands fall Into his lap. “You stole it,” he repeated incredulously, “Then you never had the analogue treatment?”

Falk smiled. “Had it, all right. Dozen times. Never took.” He felt very tired. “Let me rest a minute, will you?”

“Of course. Sorry,”

The young man went away, and Falk closed his eyes, returning to the slow surge of memory that moved in his mind. He went through those last hours, painful as they were, and then again. There was trauma there; mustn’t let it get buried to cause him trouble later. Accept it, know the fear, live with it.

After a while the young man came back, carrying broth that steamed in a cup, and Falk drank it gratefully. Then he fell unknowing into sleep.

When he awoke he was stronger. He tried to sit up, and found to his mild surprise that he could. The other, who had been sitting in an armchair across the room, put down his pipe and came to thrust pillows behind Falk’s back. Then he sat down again. The room was cluttered and had a stale odor. Floor, walls, and ceiling were enameled metal. There were books and rolls of tape, records, in shelves; more piled on the floor. A dirty shirt was hanging from the doorknob.

“Want to talk now?” the young man asked. “My name’s Wolfert.”

“Glad to know you. Mine’s Falk…You want to know about the analogue business first, I suppose.”

“And why you’re here.”

“It’s the same thing,” Falk told him. “I’m immune to analogue treatment. I didn’t know it for sure till I was ten, but I think I was born that way. From seven on, I remember the other kids talking about their Guardians, and me pretending I had one too. You know how kids are - anything to run with the mob.

“But for a long time, years, I wasn’t certain whether everyone else was pretending like me, or whether I really was the only one without an invisible Guardian to talk to. I was pretty sure the kids were lying when they said they could see theirs, but whether they were there at all or not was another question. I didn’t know; actually it didn’t bother me much.

“When I was ten, I stole something. It was a book I wanted that my father wouldn’t let me have. The clerk was looking the other way - I put it under my jacket. Funny, I was halfway through it before it struck me that I’d just proved I had no Guardian. By that time, you see, I’d decided that I’d just never seen mine because I’d never done anything bad. I was proud of that, a little prissy about it if you want the truth - only I wanted this book….

“I had sense enough, thank God, to burn that book after I’d finished it. If I hadn’t, I don’t suppose I would have lived to grow up.”

Wolfert grunted. “Should think not,” he said. His eyes were fixed on Falk, interested, alert, wary. “One man without any control could turn the whole applecart over. But I thought immunity was theoretically impossible?”

“I’ve thought about that a good deal. According to classic psychology, it is. I’m not unusually resistant to hypnotic drugs; I go under all right. But the censor mechanism just doesn’t respond. I’ve had the fanciful notion that I may be a mutation, developed in response to the analogue treatment as an anti-survival factor. But I don’t know. As far as I’ve ever been able to find out, there are no more like me.”

“Umm,” said Wolfert, puffing at his pipe. “Should think your next move would be to get married, have children, see if they were immune too.”

Falk stared at him soberly. “Wolfert - no offense, but can you imagine yourself settling down happily in a community of maniacs?”

The other’s face flushed slowly. He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked down at it. Finally he said, “All right, I know what you mean.”

“Maybe you don’t,” said Falk, thinking, I’ve offended him. Couldn’t kelp it. “You’ve been out here ten years, haven’t you?”

Wolfert nodded.

“Things are getting worse,” Falk told him. “I’ve taken the trouble to look up some statistics. They weren’t hard to find; the damned fools are proud of them. The number of persons in mental institutions has gone steadily down since 1980, when the world-wide analogue program got under way. Extension of analogue program, steadily up. The two curves cancel out perfectly.

“There are fewer and fewer people that have to be put away in madhouses - not because of any improvement in therapy, but because the analogue techniques are getting better and better. The guy who would have been hopelessly insane fifty years ago now has a little man inside his head, steering him around, making him act normal. On the outside he is normal; inside, he’s a raving madman. Worse still, the guy who would have been Just a little bit cracked fifty years ago - and gotten treatment for it - is now just as mad as the first guy. It doesn’t matter any more. We could all be maniacs, and the world would go on just as before.”

Wolfert grimaced wryly, “Well? It’s a peaceful world, anyhow.”

“Sure,” said Falk. “No war or possibility of war, no murders, no theft, no crime at all. That’s because every one of them has a policeman inside his skull. But action begets reaction, Wolfert, in psychiatry as well as physics. A prison is a place to get out of, if it takes you a lifetime. Push one plunger down, another will rise. Just a few years more, I think - ten or twenty, say - and you’ll see that madhouse curve rise again. Because there’s no escape from the repression of the Guardians except a further retreat into insanity. And eventually a point is reached where no amount of treatment can help. What are they going to do then?”

Wolfert tamped his pipe out slowly and stood up, sucking absently at the stem. “You say they,” he said, “meaning the psychiatrists who really govern Earth, I suppose. You’ve evidently figured out what you’re going to do.”

Falk smiled. “Yes. With your help - I’m going to the stars.”

The other stood frozen a moment. “So you know about that,” he said. “Well - Come into the next room. I’ll show it to you.”

Falk had known about the Doorway, but not that it looked like this. It was a cubicle of something that looked like slick brown glass. Ten feet high, six wide and deep. Inside, at waist level on the far wall, a lever - curiously shaped, like the head of an old-fashioned walking stick, the slightly curved bar of the L parallel to the wall. Nothing more than that. The floor of Wolfert’s hut had been assembled around it. It was the reason for the hut’s existence, for Wolfert’s dearly bought presence on Mars.

“So that’s it,” said Falk. He took a step toward it.

“Stay where you are,” Wolfert said sharply. “The area in front of the entrance is booby-trapped.”

Falk stopped and looked at Wolfert, then at the metal cabinets bolted to the floor on either side of the Doorway. Now that he looked at them closely, he could see the lenses of black-light beams and, above them, metal cones that he supposed were discharge points.

Wolfert confirmed it. “If anything ever comes out, the current is supposed to get him. If it doesn’t, I’m here.” He put his hand on the rapid-fire automatic at his belt.

Falk sat down slowly on a bench next to the wall. “Why?” he asked. “Why are they so afraid of whatever might come out of the Doorway?”

The other leaned awkwardly against the wall and began refilling his pipe. “You don’t know the whole story, then,” he said. “Tell me what you do know, and I’ll fill in the gaps.”

Falk said slowly, “I was able to find out that the Doorway existed - that the first Mars expedition, in ‘76, had found it here. Apparently it was known to be an interstellar transportation system, but as far as I could learn nobody had ever actually tried it out. I knew that a caretaker had been left here - your predecessor, I take it after the idea of colonizing Mars was abandoned. But I didn’t know any of the reasons.”

Wolfert grinned briefly and straightened away from the wall. As he talked, he paced back and forth across the room, glancing at Falk only occasionally. “It’s a transportation system, all right. Put an object in that cubicle, press the lever down - the object vanishes. So does most of the crowbar or whatever you use to work the lever. Ffft - gone.

“We don’t know how old it is and have no way of telling. The material it’s made of is harder than diamond. About half of it is underground. That was the way it was found - sitting perfectly level on the surface of the desert. I believe it must have some sort of self-leveling mechanism built into it so that it’s always available no matter what happens to the surface.

“Other ruins have been found on Mars, but, they’re all stone and quite primitive; nothing like this. The first expedition tried to get into its innards and find out what made it go, of course, but they couldn’t. You can see in, but there’s nothing to see.” He gave his quick, bitter smile. “It’s frustrating. Makes a physicist feel like a backward student in a kindergarten.

“We know that it’s part of an interstellar network. One man did try it out - a member of the first expedition, one of the group that found the Doorway in the first place. He saw the cubicle and the lever - stepped in and pressed it to find out what would happen. He found out, all right, but I don’t suppose the rest of us will ever know. The second expedition brought along a batch of powerful all-wave senders and sent them through. They picked up the first signal five years later, from the general direction of Regulus. Two more after seven years, then four during the thirteenth year, all from different directions. The other eight have yet to be heard from.”

He stopped pacing and looked at Falk. “Now do you understand? The thing has no selectivity - it’s completely random. We could walk through there and step out onto the planet of another star, all right - but it would take us a million years to find the way back by trial and error.” He knocked his pipe out against the heel of his hand, letting the dottle fall on the floor. “There it sits, the doorway to the stars. And we can’t use it.”

Falk leaned back against the wall, trying to absorb the idea. “Maybe there are only a dozen or so stars in the network,” he suggested.

Wolfert’s thin mouth drew down at the corners. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Would the race that could build that” - he gestured toward the cubicle - “stop at a dozen stars, or a thousand? The devil! They owned the galaxy!” Nervously he began to fill his pipe again. “Sixty billion stars,” he said. “And according to current theory, all the mainliners have planets.”

He pointed to the cubicle again. “Three hundred sixty cubic feet, about,” he said. “Enough for one man and supplies for a month, or fifteen people and supplies for a week. That’s the limit to the size of the colony we could send out. With no assurance,” he added bitterly, “that they’d land anywhere they could live for a minute.”

“Frustrating,” Falk agreed. “But I still don’t see why you’re here - with a gun. I can understand that if a member of the race that built that thing came through - and I must say it seems unlikely - that would be an important event. But why kill him when he steps out?”

“Dammit,” said Wolfert violently, “it isn’t my policy, Falk. I only work here.”

“I understand that,” Falk said. “But do you have any idea what’s behind the policy?”

“Fear,” said Wolfert promptly. “They’ve got too much at stake.” He leaned against the wall again, gesturing with his pipe-stem. “Do you realize,” he said, “that we could have interstellar colonization without this gadget, on our own? Certainly. Not now, but fifty, a hundred years from now - if we worked at it. Give us a fuel source efficient enough so that we can accelerate continuously for as long as eight months, and we could reach the stars well within a man’s lifetime. But do you know why we won’t?

“They’re afraid. They’re even afraid to plant colonies here on Mars, or on Jupiter’s moons, simply because transportation takes too long. Imagine a colony cut off from Earth by a five-or ten-year trip. Say something goes wrong - a man like yourself, naturally immune to analogue treatment. Or a man who somehow evades the treatment, then manages to take it over, change it. Say he cuts out the one directive, ‘You must do nothing against the policy or interests of Earth.’ Then you’ve got two communities again, not one. And then—?”

Falk nodded soberly. “War. I see now. They don’t dare take even the smallest chance of that.”

“It isn’t a question of daring; they can’t. That’s one of the directives in their own conditioning, Falk.”

“So we’ll never get to the stars.”

“Unless,” said Wolfert, “somebody walks out of that Doorway who understands how it works. The voltage is high, but not high enough to kill - we hope. He’s supposed to be stunned. If the current doesn’t stop him, and he tries to get back into the Doorway, I’m supposed to shoot to cripple. But at all events, he’s supposed to be stopped. He isn’t to be allowed to go back and warn others to stay away from this station. Because if we had that knowledge - how to alter the system so that it would be selective—”

“Then we’d have colonies, all right,” finished Falk. “Everyone just around the corner from Earth. All just alike. The loonies shall inherit the Universe…. I hope nobody ever comes through.”

“I don’t think you’re likely to be disappointed,” said Wolfert.