We Have Fed Our Sea

15

The planet spun quickly about its axis, once in less than ten hours. There went never a day across its iron plains, but hunger and the stars counted time. There was no wind, no rain, no sea, but a man’s radio hissed with the thin dry talk of the stars.

When he stood at the pit’s edge and looked upward, Maclaren saw the sky sharp and black and of an absolute cold. It had a somehow three-dimensional effect; theory said all those crowding suns, blue-white or frosty gold or pale heartless red, were alike at optical infinity, but the mind sensed remoteness beyond remoteness, and whimpered. Nor was the ground underfoot a comfort, for it was almost as dark, starlit vision reached a few meters and was gulped down. A chopped-off Milky Way and a rising constellation — the one Maclaren had privately named Risus, the Sneer — told him that a horizon existed, but his animal instincts did not believe it.

He sighed, slapped a glare filter across his faceplate, and began cutting. The atomic hydrogen torch was lurid enough to look upon, but it jostled the stars out of his eyes. He cut rapidly, ten-kilo slabs which he kicked down into the pit so they wouldn’t fuse tight again. The hole itself had originally been blasted, but the Cross didn’t carry enough explosive for him to mine all his ore that way.

Ore, he reflected, was a joke. How would two men on foot prospect a sterilized world sealed into vacuum a hundred million years ago? And there would have been little point in it. This planet had boiled once, at least on the surface; and even the metallic core had been heated and churned, quite probably to melting, when crushed atoms expanded to normal dimensions. The entire globe must be nearly uniform, a one alloy lump. You took any piece, crushed it, gasified it, ionized it, put it through the electromagnetic isotope separator, and drew forth as much — or, rather, as minutely little — germanium as any other piece would have given you. From the known rate of extraction by such methods you could calculate when you would have four kilograms. The date lay weeks away.

Maclaren finished cutting, shut off his torch and hung it on its generator, and climbed into the bucket of the crane at the pit’s edge. His flash-beam threw puddles of light on its walls as he was lowered. At the bottom he moved painfully about, loaded the bucket, and rode back to the surface. A small electric truck waited, he spilled the bucket into its box. And then it was to do again, and still again, until he had a full load.

Thank God and her dead designers, the Cross was well equipped for work on airless surfaces, she carried machines to dig and build and transport. But, of course, she had to. It was her main purpose, to establish a new transceiver station on a new moon; everything else could then come straight from the Solar System.

It had been her purpose.

It still was.

Maclaren climbed wearily onto the truck seat. He and his spacesuit had a fourth again their Earth-weight here. His headlights picked out a line of paint leading toward the ship. It had been necessary to blast the pit some distance away, for fear of what ground vibrations might do to the web or the isotope separator. But then a trail had to be blazed, for nature had given no landmarks for guide, this ground was as bare as a skull.

Existence was like lead in Maclaren’s bones.

After a while he made out the Cross, a flattened sphere crowned with a skeleton and the Orion nebula. It was no fun having everything upside down within her; a whole day had gone merely to reinstall the essential items. Well, Seiichi, you did what seemed best, and your broken body lies honored with Chang Sverdlov’s, on the wide plains of iron.

Floodlights glared under the ship. Ryerson was just finishing the previous load, reducing stone to pebbles and thence to dust. Good timing. Maclaren halted his truck and climbed down. Ryerson turned toward him. The undiffused glow reached through his faceplate and picked a sunken, bearded face out of night, little more than nose and cheekbone and bristling jaw. In his unhuman armor, beneath that cavernous sky, he might have been a troll. Or I might, thought Maclaren. Humanity is far from us. We have stopped bathing, shaving, dressing, cooking… pretending; we work till our brains go blank, and then work some more, and crawl up the ladder into the ship for a few hours’ uneasy sleep, and are awakened by the clock, and fool our shriveled bellies with a liter of tea, and put a lump of food in our mouths and go out. For our time has grown thin.

“Hello, Nibelung,” said Ryerson.

Maclaren started. “Are you getting to be a telepath?”

“It’s possible,” said Ryerson. His voice had become a harsh whisper. His glance searched darkness. “Anything is possible here.”

“After we put this load through,” said Maclaren, evading the other thought, “we’d better move the slag out of the ship. That ninety-nine-plus per cent of material we don’t use piles up fast.”

Ryerson clumped heavily to the truck and began unloading. “And then out once more, cutting and loading and grinding and… merciful God, but I’m tired! Do you really imagine we can keep on doing heavy manual work like this, after the last food has been eaten?”

“We’ll have to,” said Maclaren. “And, of course, there is always—” He picked up a rock. Dizziness whirled through him. He dropped the stone and sank to his knees on the ground.

“Terangi!” Ryerson’s voice seemed to come from some Delphic deep, through mists. “Terangi, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” mumbled Maclaren. He pushed at the other man’s groping arms. “Lea’ me be… all right in a minute…” He relaxed against the stiffness of armor and let his weakness go through him in tides.

After a while, some strength returned. He looked up. Ryerson was just feeding the last rocks into the crusher. The machine ate them with a growl that Maclaren felt through the planet and his body. It vibrated his teeth together.

“I’m sorry, Dave,” he said.

“‘S all right. You should go up and bunk for a while.”

“Just a spell. Maybe we shouldn’t have cut our rations as short as we have.”

“You do seem to’ve been losing weight even faster than me,” said Ryerson. “Maybe you ought to have an extra ration.”

“Nah. It’s metabolic inefficiency, brought on by well-spent years of wine, women, and off-key song.”

Ryerson sat down beside him. “I’m a bit short of breath myself. Let’s both take a break while the stuff goes through the crusher.”

“Well,” said Maclaren, “if your tailbone insulators can stand it, I suppose mine can.”

They remained in silence for a while. The machine rumbled in their flesh and the stars muttered in their heads.

“How long do you think it will take to prepare the web?” asked Maclaren. “I mean, what’s your latest estimate?”

“Hitherto I’ve underestimated the time for everything,” said Ryerson. “Now, I just don’t know. First we’ll have to get our germanium. Then, to make the units… I don’t know. Two weeks, three? And then, once all the circuits are functioning, they’ll have to be tuned. Mostly by guesswork, since I don’t really know the critical constants. That will take x time, depending on how lucky we are.”

“We’ll open the last can of food soon,” said Maclaren. In itself it was a totally useless reminder, but it was leading up to something they had both avoided.

Ryerson continued to squirm: “They say tobacco helps kill appetite.”

“It does,” said Maclaren, “but I smoked the last butts months ago. Now I’ve even lost the addiction. Though of course I’ll happily rebuild same the moment we strike Earth.”

“When we come home—” Ryerson’s voice drifted off like a murmur in sleep. “We haven’t talked about our plans for a long time.”

“It got to be too predictable, what every man would say.”

“Yes. But is it now? I mean, do you still want to take that sailboat cruise around Earth, with… er… a female crew and a cargo of champagne?”

“I don’t know,” said Maclaren, faintly surprised to realize it. “I hadn’t thought — Do you remember once in space, we talked about our respective sailing experiences, and you told me the sea is the most inhuman thing on our planet?”

“Hm-m-m — yes. Of course, my sea was the North Atlantic. You might have had different impressions.”

“I did. Still, Dave, it has stuck in my mind, and I see now you are right. Any ocean is, is too — big, old, blind for us — too beautiful.” He sought the million suns of the Milky Way. “Even this black ocean we’re wrecked in.”

“That’s odd,” said Ryerson. “I thought it was your influence making me think more and more of the sea as a… not a friend, I suppose. But hope and life and, oh, I don’t know. I only know, I’d like to take that cruise with you.”

“By all means,” said Maclaren. “I didn’t mean I’d become afraid of the water, just that I’ve looked a little deeper into it. Maybe into everything. Hard to tell, but I’ve had a feeling now and then, out here, of what Seiichi used to call insight.”

“One does learn something in space,” agreed Ryerson. “I began to, myself, once I’d decided that God hadn’t cast me out here and God wasn’t going to bring me back, it wasn’t His part — Oh, about that cruise. I’d want to take my wife, but she’d understand about your, uh, companions.”

“Surely,” said Maclaren. “I’d expect that. You’ve told me so much about her, I feel like a family friend.”

I feel as if I loved her.

“Come around and be avuncular when we’ve settled — Damn, I forgot the quarantine. Well, come see our home on Rama in thirty years!”

No, no, I am being foolish. The sky has crushed me back toward child. Because she has gallant eyes and hair like a dark flower, it does not mean she is the one possible woman to fulfill that need I have tried for most of my life to drown out. It is only that she is the first woman since my mother’s death whom I realize is a human being.

And for that, Tamara, I have been slipping three-fourths of my ration back into the common share, so your man may innocently take half of that for his. It is little enough I can do, to repay what you who I never saw gave to me.

“Terangi! You are all right, aren’t you?”

“Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” Maclaren blinked at the other armored shape, shadowy beside him. “Sorry, old chap. My mind wandered off on some or other daisy-plucking expedition.”

“IT’S an odd thing,” said Ryerson. “I find myself thinking more and more frivolously. As this cruise of yours, for instance. I really mean to join you, if you’re still willing, and we’ll take that champagne along and stop at every sunny island and loaf about and have a hell of a good time. I wouldn’t have expected this… what has happened… to change me in that direction. Would you?”

“Why, no,” said Maclaren. “Uh, I thought actually you—”

“I know. Because God seemed to be scourging me, I believed the whole creation must lie under His wrath. And yet, well, I have been on the other side of Doomsday. Here, in nightmare land. And somehow, oh, I don’t know, but the same God who kindled that nova saw equally fit to… to make wine for the wedding at Cana.”

Maclaren wondered if the boy would regret so much self-revelation later. Perhaps not if it had been mutual. So he answered with care, “Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, my thinking has drifted in the other direction. I could never see any real reason to stay alive, except that it was more fun than being dead. Now I couldn’t begin to list all the reasons. To raise kids into the world, and learn something about the universe, and not compromise with someone’s version of justice, and — I’m afraid I’m not a convert or anything. I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or for dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself. I can’t say. But I expect to enjoy the world a lot more.”

Ryerson said in a thoughtful tone: “I believe we’ve learned to take life seriously. Both of us.”

The grinder chuted its last dust into the receptacle. The gasifier was inboard; and the cold, not far from absolute zero, was penetrating the suit insulators. Ryerson got up. Shadows lapped his feet. “Of course,” he said, his voice suddenly cracked, “that doesn’t help us a great deal if we starve to death out here.”

Maclaren rose with him. The floodlamps ridged both their faces against the huge hollow dark. Maclaren caught Ryerson’s eyes with his own. For a moment they struggled, not moving under theconstellations, but sweat sprang out upon Ryerson’s forehead.

“You realize,” said Maclaren, “that we actually can eat for quite a while longer. I’d say, at a guess, two more months.”

“No,” whispered Ryerson. “No, I won’t.”

“You will,” Maclaren told him.

He stood there another minute, to make certain of his victory, which he meant as a gift to Tamara. Then he turned on his heel and walked over to the machine. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get to work.”