Sunday was a clear, brilliant day, the air suddenly sharp and clean after almost three weeks of fog, fog so thick that if you held your hand out you could feel the droplets of moisture, and anyone walking even a few blocks was almost as wet as though it were actually raining. But on Sunday it was hard to believe that the fog had ever been, and spirits that had been weighted down by the heavy, humid atmosphere suddenly soared again.
Just as Robert Stephens was ready to leave the house to go to the hospital to see his wife and infant daughter, there was a knock on the door. He knew what it would be. And he knew that Ginnie, waking in the hospital to a clear shining dawn instead of the oppressive fog, would be expecting it, too. At least the fog had given them the extra weeks so that he would be with her to take her to the hospital when her pains started, could hold his newborn child, could show Ginnie his love and his pride.
He opened the door to the uniformed messenger, and thanked him.
Yes. Tomorrow. Tomorrow at dawn.
Then he walked the three miles to the hospital, leaving his little bug of a car in the garage. It was no surprise, the pale blue envelope. His call might have come any time during the past six weeks, and if it hadn’t been for the fog it would certainly have come sooner. Nevertheless, now that it had actually arrived he felt extraordinarily as though someone had kicked him in the belly, hard.
At the hospital he went first to the nursery. There were about twenty babies there, an unusually large number for any one time. His was in a crib close to the big double glass window, and he could stand there and look down at her as she lay sleeping. It was her unutterable perfection that brought a catch to his throat. In spite of the fact that the doctor had reassured them time and again that there was nothing to fear, and had given them double sets of genetic and radiological tests, they had feared. In the early months of Ginnie’s pregnancy, her older sister had given birth to an imperfect baby, small and shrunken of body, huge and bloated of head. But when the baby had died after a few days and Rob had remarked that it was a blessing the infant would not have to join the swelling hopeless ranks in the state nurseries, Ginnie had burst into sobs so vehement and uncontrollable that it had taken him over an hour to calm her down. But now—now she had a baby of her own, lying there in the white crib in the hospital nursery, tiny fists clenched close to her face, a small scratch on her nose which she had given herself, swiping at her face with those incredibly small pink fingers. The hair that lay damply against her head was in soft ringlets, and there was a distinct touch of red to it. She had Rob’s hair, and it was much better hair for a girl than a boy. He kept his hair in a butch, but even so, about three days after he’d been to the barber it would begin to curl. However, on a girl, instead of being a pain in the neck—or rather on the head—it would be highly satisfactory. Everything would be highly satisfactory if, as usual, he hadn’t gotten his timing all wrong. Or had he? For the past months, how often had he and Ginnie said that if only the baby came and was all right, then everything would be all right?
He moved on down the corridor to Ginnie’s room. As he pushed open the door he could hear a voice reading, and he knew that Matt MacDonald, their closest friend, was there before him. Matt was spending a good deal of time with Ginnie now, trying to help, the way sometimes someone on the outside can help better than two people who are too close to each other.
Rob stood just inside the door for a moment, listening and looking. Ginnie’s bed was cranked up and she sat there, listening to Matt, her eyes closed. Her gentle, intelligent face was almost devoid of expression, and this composure, Rob knew, was deliberate, a resignation to the inevitable which they both knew would come with the change in the weather.
Matt was reading from a small green book, his head bent over the words, a tuft of fair hair sticking up from the crown of his head, so that suddenly to Rob he looked as vulnerable as little Ginnie. Matt, who always seemed a tower of strength, was short and robust with enormous strength of arm and leg, and with his mop of tawny hair and beard he usually reminded Rob of a young lion, so that this glimpse of almost childish innocence came as a shock.
“‘I have bene accompanyed with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickenes, and peril.’” Matt read, looked up, and saw Rob. He grinned and said, “Listen to this, Rob: ‘It was impossible either to ford the river or to swim it, both by reason of the swiftnesse and also for that the borders were so pestred with fast woods as neither boat nor man could find place, either to land or to imbarke: for such is the fury of the current, and there are so many trees and woods overflowne, as if any boat but touch upon any tree or stake, it is impossible to save any person therein. Besides our vessels were no other than whirries, one little barge, a small cockboat, and a bad Galiota, which we framed in hast for the purpose at Trinidad. I have consumed much time, and many crownes, and I had no other respect or desire then to serve her Majestie and my country thereby.’” He looked up and grinned again. “That was Sir Walter Raleigh. Rather a favorite of mine, by the way. Voyages of discovery were pretty tremendous in his day, too.”
“Matt,” Ginnie said, “if you think you’re going to make me happier by belittling what Rob has to do, you’re mistaken.”
Matt looked at her in shocked surprise. “I’m not belittling Rob or anything about him, Ginnie! I’m just sort of pointing out that he’s in company, and good company, too. And think of some of the things Walter Raleigh had to fight that Rob won’t: Many of Raleigh’s men believed that the world was flat like a tray. They were quite literally terrified that their flimsy little ships might fall off the edge. And they believed, too, in the most horrendous kinds of sea monsters, huge enough to swallow a whole fleet of ships in one gulp.”
Ginnie’s lips quivered ever so slightly. “Rob’s ship seems very flimsy to me for where it’s going, Matt. I’m afraid of its falling off the edge, too, and I believe in monsters who can swallow it in one gulp.” She smiled a watery smile.
“But this is the age of reason,” Matt said, an unusual edge of bitterness in his voice. “Everything can be explained in a scientific manner.”
“If I fall off the edge it won’t be an imaginary edge, at any rate,” Rob said. “It will be a real, comprehensible, and scientific one. Somebody will be able to tell you exactly why the ship fell and what the edge is and where it drops to. This isn’t the Age of Reason. That was back in the eighteenth century, wasn’t it, Matt? This is the Age of Reasons. Two different things.”
“Very comforting, both of you,” Ginnie said.
“Darling, I didn’t mean to sound off,” Rob said quickly. “I’m not going to fall off any edge. It’s going to be a tremendous adventure, the most tremendous adventure anybody’s ever had, and I’ll be back to tell you all about it. Just hold the good thought.”
Matt was leafing through his book again. “Hey, Rob, there was a fellow in your field on one of Sir Robert Dudley’s expeditions. Here’s a whole list of words he made in Trinidad. ‘Guttemock’: a man. ‘Tabairo’: the hair of one’s head. ‘Dessine’: the forehead. Here’s a good one: ‘Cattie’: the moon. Maybe they were contemplating space travel even back in those days. Once you’ve climbed a mountain or crossed a river nothing seems impossible.” He sighed then, and an expression of pain and sadness momentarily flickered across his face, to be replaced almost immediately with his usual confident, serene smile. But Ginnie had seen, and asked, “Matt, you aren’t yourself today. What’s wrong? Has something happened?”
For a moment he looked down at the book. Then he said, “I hadn’t meant to tell you. You have enough problems of your own right now without my burdening you with mine.”
“Matt, you know your problems are ours just as ours have always been yours. Out with it.”
Matt did not look up from the book. “My church is being closed,” he said. “As a matter of fact it’s going to be turned into a state nursery. Heaven knows nurseries are needed, but so are churches. Only nobody realizes it. The government can issue reasons why nurseries are needed, but not churches. They won’t go so far as actually to outlaw churches, but it is being done subtly, nevertheless. God is not reasonable. Nurseries are. Faith is not reasonable. Radioactive wastelands are. As far as closing my church goes they had reasons if not reason. There were three people in it last Sunday.” His voice was bitter. “It’s a funny thing, kids. After the war the scientists and the men of God got it alike. The scientists were to blame for the war and because three-fifths of the surface of the Earth won’t be habitable for at least another hundred years. And the men of God were to blame because they—and their God—hadn’t done anything to stop it. But the scientists are back in grace because without them we’d be back in the caves, and the men of God are still in disgrace because only a handful of people realize that to all intents and purposes we are back in the caves.”
“Will you get another church, Matt?” Ginnie asked gently.
“Maybe. I don’t know. All I do know is that no matter how often I fail I have to keep on trying. If it weren’t for a handful of people like you two, to give me hope…and your baby. I have to keep on trying for the kind of world I would want your baby to grow up in. Well,” he said, looking down at the little book again, changing the subject, “Here’s something Lawrence Keymis said, around 1596, about his ‘beleefe we need no farther assurances, then we already haue to perswade our selues that it hath pleased our God of his infinit goodnesse, in his will and purpose to appoint and reserue this Empire for vs.’ So there’s a nice prejudiced and on-our-side God for you. Tell me in all honesty, Rob, how about this little jaunt of yours? Is there absolutely no idea of conquest, of the possibility of resettling some of our population? Aren’t we kind of hoping, in spite of all our noble talk of the cosmic rays suddenly falling into a pattern, indicating that there may be a highly civilized race there signaling us, aren’t we still kind of hoping that if there’s any population at all it will be a backwards one and we can move in, just as the English did back in the sixteenth century?”
Rob shrugged. “All that kind of thing is top top secret.”
“But you’ve been working on those patterns of rays?”
“Yes. And getting nowhere. It may be a pattern, but so far it seems to be a meaningless one. It might be caused by the rotation of the planet’s moons. After all, the pattern only became apparent with the new instruments, so it could quite easily indicate nothing at all.”
“In other words,” Ginnie said, “Matt’s right, and it’s nothing but an excuse.” Suddenly she began to cry, and both Matt and Rob looked stricken, realizing that they had forgotten, in the easiness of their relationship, that nothing was easy at this point for Ginnie. “And Rob has to be caught up in it, and why, Rob? There are plenty of other cryptologists.”
Rob tried to grin, to make a joke of it. “Because I’m a little runt,” he said.
“You’re not!” She defended him quickly, automatically. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“It has a lot to do with it,” he said. “I’m small boned and wiry and strong and I don’t take up much room or add much weight. That has a lot to do with it. There are plenty of other cryptographers.”
“Not as good as you are.”
“Two that I can think of off-hand who are better. But one is six foot seven and plays basketball as well as he decodes, and the other weighs three hundred-odd pounds. No matter what their other qualifications, their physical size eliminated them before they even started. And they both applied. They told me they’re green with envy.”
“And I bet,” Ginnie said, “their wives are getting down on their knees every night to thank God. If they believe in him.”
“Ginnie, do you believe in him?” Matt asked.
“You know I do,” she said.
“Then live your faith. I know you’re worried about Rob. I suppose Sir Walter Raleigh’s wife was pretty upset about some of his trips. Excuse me if I keep harping on him, but he was quite a guy, and his faith saw him through some pretty dark spots. How he would have loved to be along with Rob! A brand-new world to explore, and how many worlds opening up. And if there’s anyone to communicate with, Rob will be the one to make the communication.”
“If I could just go partway with him,” she said. “If I could just go with him to the moon and see him take off.”
“To the moon,” Matt said. “See how easily you said that. The moon was a lot further away to our grandparents than the planets are to us.”
“Matt,” Ginnie broke in desperately, “faith in the infinite by the finite is such a precarious thing. Maybe if we went back to idols the way some people have, if we had something tangible to worship, to believe in—”
“Go ahead,” Matt said gently. “If you can believe in one of the idols, if it will give you any comfort.”
“You know it won’t. It’s just that sometimes trust in a God we know we’re too puny ever to begin to comprehend seems a pretty tall order. Pray with us, Matt, will you please?” She bowed her head, clasped her hands, and after a moment Matt and Rob followed suit. They sat in silence until the tenseness began to leave the room. When at last Matt spoke it was not words of his own devising, but words that were familiar to them all:
O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!, who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
He stopped and much of the pain seemed to have eased from his own eyes. Rob stood up and went slowly to the window, the jerkiness gone from his movements. Evening was falling and lights were beginning to come on in various wings of the hospital. Across the lawn came two nurses in white uniforms and dark capes. At the horizon the sky was suffused with rose, and against the rose began the greenish night flickering of the radioactive wastelands. They were used to it, they took it for granted, but familiarity did not make it cease to be sinister, and it contradicted the comforting colors of the sunset and the words of the psalms. Rob turned from the window, and as he did, Ginnie said, “Your orders came today, didn’t they?”
* * *
Ginnie did not cry when he left the hospital. He felt that he himself was the nearer to tears, so determined was she to be brave and not make it harder for him. He paused for a moment at the nursery, looking down at his baby. Then he set out for home, again taking the long walk. He would be exhausted by morning, but perhaps that was just as well. There would not be a great deal for anyone to do on the trip out; certainly many of the old shipboard mutinies came from the boredom of the voyage and the uncertainty of the sailors to their eventual arrival, and the monotony of this trip through the uncharted seas of space would not be dissimilar to that of the old ships alone in the unknown enormity of ocean.
After the fog, the air had turned cold as well as clear and he walked briskly. He passed by Matt’s church, small and dark, and he knew what the loss of it meant. Officially the state did not believe in God, but it permitted the various religions that had been springing up, in much the same way that, a century and a half before, the Soviet state had winked at the onion-domed churches to which the people continued to flock on Sundays. And there was the same infinite variety of religious belief—no, even greater variety—than there had been back in the mid-war days. Only two blocks after Matt’s austere white building was the imposing stone structure of the Sacred Heart. This was tied up, Matt had explained, with the old pre-war Christianity, but had not much to do with the Jesus who was one of Matt’s favorite teachers. Once a year, though this was definitely frowned on, there was an actual sacrifice in front of the altar, with the bleeding heart extracted from the still warm and twitching victim. Then there was the flourishing sect of the Golden Lamb, and the Society of Warlocks, all colorful, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) sadistic organizations. Matt’s group, searching, groping, never presuming, called contemptuously the Godders by the more wealthy and highly organized groups, was the only one which had wakened a response in Rob and Ginnie. It was certainly the least successful of the religious groups, perhaps because it demanded the most of its members. No one going to Matt’s church could throw his responsibilities onto the shoulders of bishop or priest; no one was given easy answers, or told that truth was tangible and God immanent and comprehensible. It was not an easy religion, but nothing worth anything, Rob thought, was easy, and wanting religion to be all cozy and comfortable was like trying to get back in the womb again.
Rob stopped suddenly on the quiet night street. The sky that had been sullen with fog now stretched to infinity. If he looked directly upwards he could no longer see the green flickering, only the dark chasm of sky and the pulses of stars and the steady glow of planets. O God, if you are, he begged silently, care for us, be great enough to comprehend the small, do not forget thy sparrows.
* * *
Then there was the journey, cramped in the small dark cabins of the ship, and at least Raleigh’s sailors had had the open deck to walk upon, the sight of ocean stretching out to the horizon on all sides, the stars at night. Was it more fearful to be allowed to see infinity than to have it shut out by cabin walls? Two of the men on the crew panicked to such an extent that they had to be heavily sedated by the ship’s doctor. This was a dark-skinned man, Bill Hayes, who became Rob’s only close friend on the voyage out. He and Rob played chess, read, talked, helped separate two young lieutenants who got into a fistfight and had a hard time with the artificial gravity. One struck his head against the ceiling and got a mild concussion and had to be put to bed in the tiny sick bay. Bill in a way reminded Rob of Matt, in spite of the fact that physically and intellectually they seemed to be diametrically opposite. It was Bill’s quiet way with the men when they were in trouble, the unassuming strength and compassion, Rob finally decided, that made him feel a similarity. Bill had no illusion about the reasons for the voyage. “Of course we’re looking for a place where we can expand and settle, and we want to do it before anyone else does. You Godders are always so hopeful that people are doing things for the right reasons. If you’d only accept the fact that people always do things for the wrong reasons, everything’d be much simpler for you.”
“We don’t need to colonize yet,” Rob argued. “With only one woman in ten able to conceive, with two-fifths of the babies having to be put in state nurseries for their few sad little years, the population isn’t growing rapidly enough to make us feel any desperate need for expansion.”
“But it will,” Bill said. They had switched from chess to cribbage and he put his cards down. At the other end of the mess table a poker game was in progress. “The eastern nations who’ve always spawned more rapidly than we have are already beginning to feel the pinch. That’s why we’ve got to get in first, before anybody else does. Maybe we know enough to share. They don’t.”
“And suppose the patterns do mean something? Suppose there’s a race more cultured and advanced than our own who have no idea of being exploited and colonized?”
“That’s a risk we have to take, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“And tell me honestly, Rob, have you found any meaning to the patterns? Has anybody?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And in spite of popular superstition,” Bill continued, “official opinion is that it’s a meaningless accident, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” Rob picked up the peg board and studied it as though there he might find the answers.
“So why the hell do you think we’re sitting in this—this artificial womb, waiting to be spawned on an unknown planet? Expansion and colonization. And why not? What’s so wrong with it? Why shouldn’t we get there first? What’s so selfish about it? After this, the possibilities are unlimited. If we make it, of course.”
The captain, who had seemed to be immersed in poker, raised his head. “We’ll make it.”
“Captain,” another officer asked, “aren’t we running behind according to calculations?”
The captain nodded imperturbably. “Right. So did Columbus, I believe. The ocean was larger than he’d anticipated, and he didn’t get to where he expected, but as far as history’s concerned, where he did get to was much more important.” There was a twinkle in his eye. “So let’s just take the historical point of view, men.”
“My wife prefers her history in the form of fiction,” one of the men said.
But the captain turned back to the cards. “My deal, I believe.”
When the ship was three weeks overdue, the men began to get restless. They had seen all the movies twice, they were bored with poker, with sleeping, with playing tricks with the artificial gravity. Although at this stage of the journey, moving through the dark wastes of space, they were using practically no fuel, the captain eyed the fuel gauges speculatively. All through the small, pressurized cabins of the great ship there were murmurs. Bill Hayes tried to get a laugh by calling the captain “Chris.” The laugh was feeble, but the name stuck.
“Sir. Captain Columbus, sir.”
“Yes. What is it?”
“I have a petition, sir, signed by all the men of the crew, sir. We want to turn back.”
“We don’t have enough fuel to get back,” the captain said. “Bear with me, men. To turn back means death to us all. Our only hope is to push on.”
Irrationally, the men still wanted to turn back. If they were to die, they wanted to die heading towards home instead of the unknown. Bill spent a great deal of time with the crew, giving a kind word and a joke wherever possible, medication when necessary. One morning he arrived in the crew’s quarters to find a table made into a crude altar and one of the men stretched out on it. The knife had already cut into his skin when Bill, suddenly and for the first time on the voyage losing his temper, punched his way through the men and knocked down the sailor who was acting as priest. Then he overturned the table and turned, white with rage, to face the men.
The sailor who was acting as priest said, “Don’t be so angry, Doc. You know how the men are. Just a little ceremony to propitiate the gods; the man was perfectly willing to be offered up as a sacrifice.”
Bill still shook with anger as he took the man to sick bay to dress his wound, and met Rob waiting for him.
“You goddamn Godders,” he said. “What kind of a God is this of yours?”
“My God?” Rob asked. “Ever hear of Moses, Bill?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember the golden lamb? This isn’t my God or anybody’s God. It’s an idol.”
“So? What’s the difference?”
There was no assurance or calmness in Rob as he looked at Bill, his usually rather florid face still mottled with rage.
“Okay, tell me,” he demanded, not wanting to know, wanting only in his fury to hurt Rob. And all Rob could do was to try not to let his own confusions show as he spoke fumblingly, trying to think what Matt might have said.
“Idolatry is turning away from God, turning inwards instead of outwards. Most people say that we Godders have no faith because we don’t try to make God understandable, but we have to make the biggest leap of faith of all.”
“Can’t be a very satisfactory sort of god, can it?” came a voice from behind him, and he turned to see the captain.
“Oh. Good morning, sir.”
“At this point I’m inclined to sympathize with the men and their sacrificial offering. How can this incomprehensible God of yours give you any comfort?”
“My friend Matt believes that there are signs along the way.”
“We could do with a sign right now,” the captain said bitterly. “Frankly, boys, if I believed in God I’d be saying my prayers.”
“Well, sir,” Rob said, “Bill and his idol-smashing reminded me of Moses and the golden lamb, and after Moses had demolished the lamb and been furious at his men, he asked God for a sign.”
“So did God give him one?”
“Well, Moses was on a journey, remember, just about as impossible as ours, and he said to God, ‘Show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight… For wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have found grace in thy sight? Is it not in that thou goest with us?’”
The captain smiled. “So what did God say?”
“God said, ‘My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.’ But Moses, like most of us, wasn’t satisfied. He said, ‘I beseech thee, show me thy glory!’ And God said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee… But thou canst not see my face: for no man shall see me, and live.’” Rob looked at the captain apologetically. “My wife thought idols would be easier, too, but if I have to make my faith comprehensible I’d rather go along with the state and worship science.”
“Want to make a bet, Rob?” Bill asked suddenly.
“What?”
“When we reach our promised land, if we find that the patterns have after all been sent, if there is a rational race there, I’ll bet that you’ll give up your God. Let’s put it this way: If there is a God he’ll send you—or us—a sign. No sign, and you give him up.”
“Okay,” said Rob rather grimly. “At this point I’m willing to bet on that.”
“Let me know who wins,” the captain said. “By the way, I want to see all the officers in the mess in ten minutes. We’re going to have a full-size mutiny on our hands if we don’t do something, and do it quickly.”
The men had just gathered around the mess table when there was a shout from the crew member at the instrument board. “Captain Columbus, there’s a blip! There’s a blip!”
With a sudden loss of discipline by mutual consent, everyone crowded to the door of the instrument room. The captain pushed his way in, looked at the screen, and turned triumphantly to the men. “Every man to his post. We are nearing our destination.”
Now at last through the screen there was more than darkness and distant stars. The planet approached rapidly, became the size of Earth’s moon. It became the size of the sun. Now the murmuring and games of poker and petitions stopped. There was silence throughout the ship. The planet grew. It was suddenly enormous, hurling itself at them. They felt the tremendous impact of atmosphere and deceleration. They were there. They had not fallen over the edge.
It was dawn and they had landed on a desert not unlike the one from which they had taken off, though the instruments showed them that the temperature was some fifty degrees lower. And here there was no green glow on the horizon, visible even in the daytime as a faint miasma. The atmosphere here was thin and the visibility tremendous. Taking turns at the screen, they felt as though they had all been given new spectacles which enabled them to see better than they had ever seen in their lives, as though a long-term myopia had been suddenly and dramatically corrected. The captain, out for a brief reconnoiter, reported that the atmosphere was just over the border of being too light, but was otherwise pure. They would need helmets, but could probably breathe for a brief period without them in an emergency. He had seen no sign of life, but they would send out their signals at once. Rob, in charge of this, went to his board and pressed the buttons and pulled the switches that would send out signals both visual and audible, signals that could be caught by ear, eye, instrument, or nervous system attuned to any kind of vibration. He felt unaccountably nervous, like an actor making his first appearance and afraid that his audience may not hear or understand him, or that he might get the words wrong. And any misunderstanding at this point could have far more drastic potentialities than any of them could understand.
They all sat watching the instrument board for a while, but when there was no response of any kind, the captain chose a small party to go back out with him. Rob looked after them longingly. His job was by the message center but his every instinct was to don a space suit and follow the others out, the first men ever to step on an alien planet. He sat in the instrument chamber restlessly, moving from the complicated wall of the message center to the viewer and back. The men in their cumbersome space suits seemed to move easily in the thin clear air, and he looked at them eagerly. From the viewer he could see great stretches of sand, and in the distance trees of an extraordinarily clear and shimmering green, some of which had rosy blossoms. There was nothing tropical about their look, however; the green was the pale green, touched with yellow, of early spring, and the flowers, in spite of their hue, had nothing lush about them. They were exquisite, but cool.
Rob finally in lonely desperation sent a message to Bill Hayes: “If you see anything unusual, for heaven’s sake tell me. I’m going bats here all alone. Please tune in to me.”
There was a click from Bill’s set, and he relayed back, “Okay,” and after that, from time to time he made comments in his laconic manner: “Insect life; a rather large grasshopperlike thing, but all pale yellow. Beautiful. Wonder if it’s destructive. Ah. Have him in my jar for Benson. Hey, a kind of praying mantis bug. Wonder who he’s praying to on this planet. Maybe he’s just thumbing his nose at us. Don’t forget your bet, old boy. Small yellow flowers. Sticky. Yellow seems to be the predominant color here. Wonder if it always is or if this is spring. Everything seems tender and young. Tracks. Small rodent-like animal, I’d guess. Ah. Nest. Could be bird, could be rodent. Definitely animal life as well as plant. Good Lord, bird tracks, enormous. My God, Rob, those birds must be man-size. Hope they aren’t predatory. Could easily swoop up a man, even in a heavy space suit, in those claws. Better let the captain in on this. Signing off for now.”
Rob waited impatiently at the silence. Then a message, urgent: OPEN THE HATCHES! QUICK! A garble of too many voices coming to him at once, Bill’s loud and angry: “Don’t shout, you fool!”
The sound of machinery groaning as the doors to the outer chamber opened, shut, then the doors to the inner chamber. A scramble of men into the ship. The call for a general meeting in the mess, men and crew.
And suddenly Rob’s instrument board was alive, lights flashing on and off, dit-dits sounding. Two minutes of it. Then complete silence.
“You’re excused from the meeting,” the captain told Rob. “Stay and work on your decoding. And quick.”
“What’s up, Captain?”
“The last we saw of Bill Hayes he was being flown off in the claws of an enormous bird,” the captain said grimly. “One of the men lost his head and fired after them. The idiot. Fortunately he missed his mark. A fine way to start a friendly relationship all round. Get at your decoding, man. It may mean Bill’s life.”
In fifteen minutes the captain was back. “What do you make of it?”
Rob shook his head. “Nothing. Not as far as understanding what it means. I do think, though, it seems to bear some kind of relationship to the patterns in the cosmic rays. There’s a pattern, all right, but I can’t make head or tail of it.”
“Send return messages in every medium at your disposal, explaining that we have received their messages but we cannot decode them.”
“Right, sir.”
The captain stood by him, waiting. When Rob had finished, he said, “Okay. We’ll wait half an hour for a return of some kind of response. If we receive none I’m going out again with two volunteers.”
“Count me in, sir,” Rob said quickly.
The captain shook his head. “No, Rob. If we establish any kind of communication it has to be through you. We can’t risk your going.”
“But why not, sir? If one of the same birds comes after me that flew off with Bill maybe I can manage to figure out a way we can talk. They may not be unfriendly, sir.”
“Hold it,” the captain said, and looked at the board.
A message began to sound out, very slowly, in a code so old Rob didn’t recognize it at first. Then he realized that it was Morse.
“Can you understand me? Can you understand me?”
“Fire ahead,” Rob tapped back.
“Learned this as a gag when I was a kid. Never realized it would come in so handy.”
“Who are you?” Rob tapped, puzzled.
“Bill, you idiot.”
Suddenly the code began to come quickly, professionally. “We have mastered your code,” it said rapidly. “Welcome to our planet. Your representative has given us a brief picture of your culture and assures us that you are not unfriendly. We will be glad to entertain you and show you anything that you wish to see. Your representative mentioned your need for expansion. You would find our planet completely unsuited to your purposes. However, we may be able to help you in finding other areas for colonization provided we have some assurance that you will not misuse them. You will be called upon in two hours by three of our representatives, who will escort you to our president’s house, where you will be quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered—and where we will try to answer your questions. We are in the meanwhile returning your representative.”
“Can you decode this one?” the captain asked Rob.
“Yes, sir. It’s an old code and an easy one. Bill evidently learned it as a scout or something and those birds—those birds is right—picked it up from him in no time flat, including our language, even to being able to pun in it. This is no backwards civilization, Captain!” He handed the captain the decoded message.
“Six of us will go,” the captain said. “And six stay with the ship.” He smiled at Rob. “Count yourself in.”
The ingress bell rang and the captain bent quickly to the screen. “It’s Bill,” he said. He and Rob ran quickly to the inner hatch and were standing there when Bill emerged, red in the face and rather ruffled. He grinned at them and tried to look nonchalant.
“I think you’ve lost your bet,” he said to Rob. “Captain Chris, sir, they picked my mind. They communicate by a kind of telepathy that’s in shorthand. What takes us half an hour to think takes them half a minute. I’ll bet you the reason we couldn’t decode any of their messages is that their shorthand’s too damned short for us.” He spoke breathlessly, as though he had been running. “They made me think faster than I’ve ever thought in my life,” he explained. “My mind is reeling. I suspect I might catch on to it eventually, not thinking as fast as they do, but thinking a lot faster than I’m used to. You know how fast you can run if something’s after you and your life depends on your speed? Much faster than you can under any normal circumstances. That’s what my mind was doing. May I have some water, sir? There is water on the planet and it’s pure, or at any rate they said they could purify it for us so we could replenish our tanks, so if it’s all right, sir, I’d like a pitcher.”
“Calm down, Bill. Come along, let’s sit down. I’ll order the water.”
“Sir, I don’t mean to be difficult, but could it be just with you and young Rob here for a few minutes? I seem to be rather exhausted.”
“Would you like to rest?”
“No, sir, I’d like to talk. But at this point I don’t know what’s going to spill out or how, and until I get my mind organized again, I’d rather keep it semi-private at any rate.”
They went to the tiny hole that was the captain’s cabin. Bill thirstily drank glass after glass of water, offering it to the captain and Rob, then drinking it himself. “They’re about two billion years beyond us,” he said. “They’ve evolved in the form of birds, rather like enormous sparrows, but they have highly developed hands as well as wings. No houses. Just strange, indescribable things, very beautiful, with sort of perches. Of course birds, even civilized ones, wouldn’t be comfortable in chairs or beds, would they? A great interest in the mind. My God, with minds like that I should think they would, but they explained that their minds evolving to such a point has only been in the last million years. Wonderful schools they have, and libraries, and theatres and concert halls. Their libraries seem to be the things they’re proudest of, though. A complete recording of everything that’s been written for the past two billion years. Two billion, sir. The library I saw was tremendous, and yet almost everything is in this terrific shorthand. Some of the earlier books aren’t. Their earliest books, they said, are in a language that moved at about the speed of ours. No churches, Rob. I asked them. They didn’t seem to understand what a church was.”
There was a knock and a young lieutenant said, “There’s a message coming in at the communications center, sir.”
“Go get it, Rob,” the captain ordered.
The message was again in Morse code. “Perhaps it would be of interest to you to see if you can decode some of our earlier languages which are more in tempo with yours. We still have one book in current use today—it is, in fact, our most used book—which dates back to the older languages and which, therefore, you may be able to decode. If you will have your representative wait outside your ship, we will send a messenger with a copy. In this book are many of the precepts by which we live and it may aid you in an understanding of our culture. It is very tiring to us to go back to archaic forms of communication, so a small amount of pre-knowledge on your part may prove helpful to us all.”
It was a large book that Bill brought him, carrying it gingerly, and in a kind of hieroglyphic-like bird trackings that at first made absolutely no sense to him. Finally he began to find a pattern in the strange markings, and with a sense of excitement realized that it was written in a language that, while it was completely unknown, was no more alien to his own than Chinese or Russian.
Bill came in and leaned over his shoulder.
“Go away,” Rob muttered. “I’m getting it.”
“You’re sweating,” Bill said. “Take a five-minute breather. That’s doctor’s orders.”
Rob raised his head and realized that he was indeed sweating and that his hands were shaking. “Something about this language,” he said. “It seems to make my mind work faster. Or maybe that’s just because you put it into my head that I’m getting it, Bill. I’m getting letters and words.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Give me time, man! Give me time!”
Bill looked at the strange markings. “A book they’ve been using for billions of years. Quite a thing. By the way, Rob, sorry about your bet.”
“I haven’t lost it yet,” Rob said stubbornly.
“No? A race as highly developed as theirs and no churches and you’re still a Godder. Where’s your sign, Rob? You were supposed to receive a sign.”
“Five minutes is up,” Rob said. “Let me get back to work.”
“Five minutes is not up. But go ahead. Like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, I would. Good and strong. I work better on tea than coffee.” He bent over the pages again. He was chewing his pencil, making occasional excited markings, when Bill himself came in with the cup of tea. Not even saying thank you, Rob drank half of it, then began to write rapidly. Suddenly he let out a shout.
“Got it?” Bill asked eagerly.
And Rob read, “‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.’”