We Have Fed Our Sea

16

Maclaren woke up of himself. For a moment he did not remember where he was. He had been in some place of trees, where water flashed bright beneath a hill. Someone had been with him, but her name and face would not come back. There was a lingering warmth on his lips.

He blinked at the table fastened to the ceiling. He was lying on a mattress — Yes. The Southern Cross, a chilly knowledge. But why had he wakened early? Sleep was the last hiding place left to him and Dave. They stood watch and watch at the web controls, and came back to their upside-down bunkroom and ate sleep. Life had shrunken to that.

Maclaren yawned and rolled over. The alarm clock caught his eye. Had the stupid thing stopped? He looked at the second hand for a while, decided that it was indeed moving. But then he had slept for holy shark-toothed sea gods, for thirteen hours!

He sat up with a gasp. Bloodlessness went through his head. He clung to his blankets and waited for strength to come back. How long a time had it been, while his tissues consumed themselves for lack of all other nourishment? He had stopped counting hours. But the ribs and joints stuck out on him so he sometimes listened for a rattle when he walked. Had it been a month? At least it was a time spent inboard, with little physical exertion; that fact alone kept him alive.

Slowly, like a sick creature, he climbed to his feet. If Dave hadn’t called him, Dave might have passed out, or died, or proven to have been only a starving man’s whim. With a host of furious fancies — Maclaren shambled across to the shaftway. The transceiver rooms were aft of the gyros, they had been meant to be “down” with respect to the observation deck whenever there was acceleration and now they were up above. Fortunately, the ship had been designed in the knowledge she would be in free fall most of her life. Maclaren gripped a rung with both hands. I could use a little free fall right now, he reflected through the dizziness. He put one foot on the next rung, used that leg and both hands to pull the next foot up beside it; now, repeat; once more; one for Father and one for Mother and one for Nurse and one for the cat and so it goes until here we are, shaking with exhaustion.

Ryerson sat at the control panel outside the receiving and transmitting chambers. It had been necessary to spotweld a chair, with attached ladder, to the wall and, of course, learn how to operate an upside-down control panel. The face that turned toward Maclaren was bleached and hairy and caved-in; but the voice seemed almost cheerful. “So you’re awake.”

“The alarm didn’t call me,” said Maclaren. He panted for air. “Why didn’t you come rouse me?”

“Because I turned off the alarm in the first place.”

“What?” Maclaren sat down on what had been the ceiling and stared upward.

“You’ll fall apart if you don’t get more rest,” said Ryerson. “You’ve been in worse shape than me for weeks, even before the… the food gave out. I can sit here and twiddle knobs without having to break off every eight hours.”

“Well, maybe.” Maclaren felt too tired to argue.

“Any luck?” he asked after a while.

“Not yet. I’m trying a new sequence now. Don’t worry, we’re bound to hit resonance soon.”

Maclaren considered the problem for a while. Lately his mind seemed to have lost as much ability to hold things as his fingers. Painfully, he reconstructed the theory and practice of gravitic mattercasting. Everything followed with simple logic from the fact that it was possible at all.

The signals necessarily used a pulse code, with amplitude and duration as the variables; there were tricky ways to include a little more information through the number of pulses per millisecond, if you set an upper limit to the duration of each. It all took place so rapidly that engineers could speak in wave terms without too gross an approximation. Each transceiver identified itself by a “carrier” pattern, of which the actual mattercasting signal was a modulation. The process only took place if contact had been established, that is, if the transmitter was emitting the carrier pattern of a functioning receiver: the “resonance” or “awareness” effect which beat the inverse-square law, a development of Einstein’s great truth that the entire cosmos is shaped by what momentarily happens to each of its material parts.

The ’caster itself, by the very act of scanning, generated the signals which recreated the object transmitted. But first the ‘caster must be tuned in on the desired receiving station. The manual aboard ship gave the call pattern of every established transceiver: but, naturally, gave it in terms of the standardized and tested web originally built into the ship. Thus, to reach Sol, the book said, blend its pattern with that of Rashid’s Star, the initial relay station in this particular case. Your signal will be automatically bucked on, through several worlds, till it reaches Earth’s Moon. Here are the respective voltages, oscillator frequencies, et cetera, involved; add them up and use the resultant.

Ryerson’s handmade web was not standardized. He could put a known pattern into it, electronically, but the gravitics would emit an unknown one, the call signal of a station not to be built for the next thousand years. He lacked instruments to measure the relationship, so he could not recalculate the appropriate settings. It was cut and try, with a literal infinity of choices and only a few jackleg estimates to rule out some of the possibilities.

Maclaren sighed. A long time had passed while he sat thinking. Or so his watch claimed. He hadn’t noticed it go by, himself.

“You know something, Dave?” he said.

“Hm-m-m?” Ryerson turned a knob, slid a vernier one notch, and punched along a row of buttons.

“We are out on the far edge of no place. I forgot how far to the nearest station, but a devil of a long ways. This haywire rig of ours may not have the power to reach it.”

“I knew that all the time,” said Ryerson. He slapped the main switch. Needles wavered on dials, oscilloscope tracings glowed elthill green, it whined in the air. “I think our apparatus is husky enough, though. Remember, this ship has left Sol farther behind than any other ever did. They knew she would — a straight-line course would just naturally outrun the three-dimensional expansion of our territory — so they built the transceiver with capacity to spare. Even in its present battered state, it might reach Sol directly, if conditions were just right.”

“Think we will? That would be fun.”

Ryerson shrugged. “I doubt it, frankly. Just on a statistical basis. There are so many other stations by now — Hey!”

Maclaren found himself on his feet, shaking. “What is it?” he got out. “What is it? For the love of heaven, Dave, what is it?”

Ryerson’s mouth opened and closed, but no sounds emerged. He pointed with one bony arm. It shook.

Below him — it was meant to be above, like a star — a light glowed red.

“Contact,” said Maclaren.

The word echoed through his skull as if spoken by a creator, across a universe still black and empty.

Ryerson began to weep, silently, his lips working. “Tamara,” he said. “Tamara, I’m coming home.”

Maclaren thought: If Chang and Seiichi had been by me now, what a high and proud moment.

“Go on, Terangi,” chattered Ryerson. His hands shook so he could not touch the controls. “Go on through.”

Maclaren did not really understand it. Not yet. It was too swift a breaking. But the wariness of a race which had evolved among snakes and war spoke for him:

“Wait, Dave. Wait a minute. Just to be certain. Put a signal through. A teletype, I mean; we’ve no voice microphone, have we? You can do it right at that keyboard.”

“What for?” screamed Ryerson. “What for? If you won’t go through, I will!”

“Just wait, is all.” Suddenly Maclaren was begging. All the craziness of months between stars that burned his eyes woke up; he felt in a dim way that man must live under conditions and walk in awe, but this is one of the prides in being a man. He raised powerless hands and cried — it was not much above a whisper — “There could be some distortion, you know. Accidents do happen, once in a great while, and this web was made by hand, half of it from memory — Send a message. Ask for a test transmission back to us. It won’t take long and — My God, Dave, what kind of thing could you send home to Tamara if the signal was wrong?”

Ryerson’s chin quivered in its beard, but he punched the typer keys with hard angry strokes. Maclaren sat back down, breathing quickly and shallowly. So it was to become real after all. So he would again walk beneath the tall summer clouds of Earth.

No, he thought. I never will. Terangi Maclaren died in an orbit around the black sun, and on the steel planet where it is always winter. The I that am may go home, but never the I that was.

Ryerson bent over so he could look into the screen which gave him an image of the receiving chamber.

Maclaren waited. A long while passed.

“Nothing,” said Ryerson. “They haven’t sent a thing.”

Maclaren could still not talk.

“A colonial station, of course,” said Ryerson. “Probably one of the outpost jobs with two men for a staff… or, another spaceship. Yes, that’s likeliest, we’re in touch with an interstellar. Only one man on watch and—”

“And there should be a bell to call him, shouldn’t there?” asked Maclaren, very slowly.

“You know how they get on the long haul,” said Ryerson. He smote his chair arm with a fist that was all knobs. “The man is sleeping too hard to hear a thing. Or—”

“Wait,” said Maclaren. “We’ve waited long enough. We can afford a few more minutes, to make certain.”

Ryerson blazed at him, as if he were an enemy. “Wait? Wait, by jumping hell! No!”

He set the control timer for transmission in five minutes and crept from his seat and down the ladder. Under the soiled tunic, he seemed all spidery arms and legs, and one yellow shock of hair.

Maclaren stood up again and stumbled toward him. “No,” he croaked. “Listen, I realize how you feel, but I realize it’s space lunacy too, and I forbid you, I forbid—”

Ryerson smiled. “How do you propose to stop me?” he asked.

“I… but can’t you wait, wait and see and—”

“Look here,” said Ryerson, “let’s assume there is a freak in the signal. A test transmission comes through. At best, the standard object is merely distorted… at worse, it won’t be recreated at all, and we’ll get an explosion. The second case will destroy us. In the first case, we haven’t time to do much more work. I doubt if I could climb around on the web outside any more. I know you could not, my friend! We’ve no choice but to go through. Now!”

“If it’s a ship at the other end, and you cause an explosion,” whispered Maclaren, “you’ve murdered one more man.”

Drearily, and as if from far away, he recognized the hardness which congealed the other face. Hope had made David Ryerson young again. “It won’t blow up,” said the boy, and was wholly unable to imagine such a happening.

“Well… probably not… but there’s still the chance of molecular distortion or—” Maclaren sighed. Almost experimentally, he pushed at Ryerson’s chest. Nothing happened; he was so much more starved that he could not move the lank body before him.

“All right,” said Maclaren. “You win. I’ll go through.”

Ryerson shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he answered. “I changed my mind.” With a lilt of laughter: “I stand behind my own work, Terangi!”

“No, wait! Let me … I mean … think of your wife, at least … please—”

“I’ll see you there,” cried Ryerson. The blue glance which he threw over his shoulder was warm. He opened the transmitter room door, went through, it clashed shut upon him. Maclaren wrestled weakly with the knob. No use, it had an automatic lock.

Which of us is the fool? I will never be certain, whatever may come of this. The chances are all for him, of course… in human terms, reckoned from what we know… but could he not learn with me how big this universe is, and how full of darkness?

Maclaren stumbled back toward the ladder to the chair. He would gain wrath, but a few more minutes, by climbing up and turning off the controls. And in those minutes, the strangely terrifying negligent operator at the other end might read the teletype message and send a test object. And then Ryerson would know. Both of them would know. Maclaren put his feet on the rungs. He had only two meters to climb. But his hands would not lift him. His legs began to shake. He was halfway to the panel when its main switch clicked down and the transmitting engine skirled.

He crept on up. Now I know what it means to be old, he thought.

His heart fluttered feebly and wildly as he got into the chair. For a while he could not see the vision screens, through the night that spumed in his head. Then his universe steadied a little. The transmitter room was quite empty. The red light still showed contact. So at least there had been no destruction wrought in the receiving place. Except maybe on Dave; it didn’t take much molecular warping to kill a man. But I am being timid in my weakness. I should not be afraid to die. Least of all to die. So let me also go on through and be done.

He reached for the timer. His watch caught his eye. Half an hour since Dave left? Already? Had it taken half an hour for him to creep this far and think a few sentences? But surely Dave would have roused even the sleepiest operator. They should have sent a teletype to the Cross: “Come on, Terangi. Come on home with me.” What was wrong?

Maclaren stared at the blank walls enclosing him. Here he could not see the stars, but he knew how they crowded the outside sky, and he had begun to understand, really understand what an illusion that was and how hideously lonely each of those suns dwelt.

One thing more I have learned, in this last moment, he thought. I know what it is to need mercy.

Decision came. He set the timer for ten minutes — his progress to the transmitter room would be very slow — and started down the ladder.

A bell buzzed.

His heart sprang. He crawled back, feeling dimly that there were tears on his own face now, and stared into the screen.

A being stood in the receiving chamber. It wore some kind of armor, so he could not make out the shape very well, but though it stood on two legs the shape was not a man’s. Through a transparent bubble of a helmet, where the air within bore a yellowish tinge, Maclaren saw its face. Not fish, nor frog, nor mammal, it was so other a face that his mind would not wholly register it. Afterward he recalled only blurred features, there were tendrils and great red eyes.

Strangely, beyond reason, even in that first look he read compassion on the face.

The creature bore David Ryerson’s body in its arms.