Horizons
“Hello, Harker,” she said.
“Come on in.”
“How are things?”
“Same as always. Damn awful.”
She grinned faintly. Not because it was a funny line — it was a standard, incorporated into a private ritual, but it was a very old standard. She hadn’t heard it in quite some time. She grinned because we weren’t back then, but here and now instead. I’ve never been able to master this business of greeting and parting which demands such hollowness from its participants. She knew.
“Sit down,” I told her. “I’ll make some coffee.” I seem to remember somehow that conversations always begin with coffee. Mind you, I’ve been out of circulation for a long time. Still, a cup in your hand and a cigarette in your mouth enable you to be doing something even when the talk threatens to lapse. And it does — all the time. I can only really talk to people when they’re not there. The legacy of Block C. Sometimes it doesn’t show in the dialogue, but it always shows in the fingers. Without a cup of coffee and a cigarette I have at least two hands too many for talking to friends.
They’d given me a fine apartment. It was small — everything in the fake town was three-quarter-sized, to emphasize the fact that it was lurking in a crater in a desert — but it was complete and self-contained. A nine-by-six bedroom and a closet-sized kitchen didn’t bother me much. I’m no claustrophobe: I like walls, and low ceilings, and compactness. Empty space, particularly wasted space, is beautiful and good for the eyes, but better at a distance.
“Well,” I said, handing her the cup without having to ask about white or black or how much sugar (when you haven’t so many memories they’re easy to keep), “what have the years done to you?”
“Disfigured me for life,” she answered.
“It doesn’t show.”
“You don’t look in the same kind of mirrors that I do.”
“Mirrors, hell,” I said. “You look just like you always did.”
“The years haven’t done a lot for you,” she said.
“My troubles have aged me.”
She paused, just long enough to consign the pointless exchange of gay banter to the realms of outer darkness, then she repeated the remark.
“The years haven’t done you any good, have they?” Her voice was quite gentle.
“What do you expect?”
“Once now and again,” she said, “I saw letters. But you only write letters when you’re in a strange kind of a mood, don’t you?”
“I write letters all the time,” I said. “I’m in a strange kind of a mood all the time. The letters that get through are the ones that have nothing to tell you. They stop the others.”
“Your letters don’t read like you,” she said. “Like a weird caricature of you.”
“I am a weird caricature of me,” I said. No flip talk, no silly chatter. I meant that.
“Self-portrait with exaggerated color scheme and big nose,” she said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my nose.”
“You could have put more into the letters.”
“Don’t talk like a shrink. You know the censorship system as well as I do. If you’d wanted, you could have got a look at damn near anything, on the grounds of being my psychiatrist. Letters I couldn’t send, even private notebooks.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Not until the decision was taken to bring you here.”
“But you’ve seen them now?”
“I’m looking through them.”
For a moment, I was almost afraid. Afraid of what might be in those notebooks that I wrote for me in the privacy of my cell. But nothing’s sacred — they photocopy everything, and all Security has to do is ask. The mountains move, let alone pieces of paper.
“Find anything interesting?” I asked.
“I won’t,” she said. “I know you. If anyone finds anything it’ll be someone who doesn’t know you.”
“Well, you don’t have to bother anyway,” I said. “You can read my mind.”
“That’s right,” she said. “We can read your mind. We can read a lot of minds, but it isn’t doing us any good. We can’t decipher them fast enough, and they don’t make sense when we do.”
Business at last.
“I forgot to ask,” I said. “How’s titan?”
“There’s nobody else you’d rather hear about before titan?” She meant Mike.
“In time,” I said. “In time.”
“Titan’s as well as can be expected,” she said. “A technological miracle. In human terms, pretty close to being a total disaster.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” I lamented. “So you’re desperate.”
“Ever since six they’ve been wheeling out the physicists in threes and hauling in psychiatrists to replace them. The whole base is a mindblower’s nightmare now. Theater of the absurd.”
“So you all decided that the time had come to put away your petty human talents and call upon the worn-out, pig-sick, security-smeared, maniac-murderer whose secret identity is Captain Magnificent?”
“That’s about it.”
“Yeah, great,” I said. “But don’t you think it could be a good idea to tell me exactly how I stand? Is the army so tired of wasting the flower of American youth that it decided to stock all future titans with totally expendable lifers from the condemned cell, or is there some incredible chain of twisted logic by which some budding genius has actually worked out that I might stand a cat in hell’s chance where the nine lives of the flower of American youth seem to have simultaneously gone up in smoke?”
“We think you can go out and come back.”
“The others who went out didn’t?”
“All dead except one. Lindquist. The last. He’s alive, but terminal schizophrenia has him.”
“I see the logic,” I said. “Space drives men mad. Hence send a madman. What harm can it do him?”
“Crudely put,” she said, “that’s about it.”
“The others are all dead,” I pointed out.
“Under suspicious circumstances. In locked rooms.”
“I’m not the man I used to be,” I told her. “I wasn’t kidding when I said my troubles had aged me. I’ve been away a long time, kid. I might not be up to it. I really am dog tired from doing nothing but wasting. There’s no use pretending. I might shit out faster than the military boys, sooner and further. You’re going to have to do some very fast thinking if you’re going to find me in some kind of shape to ride a titan.”
It was fear talking through my own mouth. Some kind of thing like that is always wrecking my reunions. Within half a mile of a friendly face or a familiar ear I always retreat and some other damn thing grabs me. Self-inflicted wounds. You can lose a lot of friends that way. Also, you can talk yourself back into the jug. But some people are just downright patient. Or long-suffering.
“We can shape you up,” she said. I knew I was in for hard labor.
“Okay.” I shrugged, and lit a new cigarette off the butt of the old one. They wouldn’t trust me with a lighter.
“Mike Sobieski’s dying,” she said, pulling it right out of the blue.
“We all die,” I said.
“Cancer of the prostate gland,” she said.
“People don’t die of that. They can operate.”
“Not on him,” she said. “He’s an old man. Prostate inflammation — even cancer — isn’t uncommon at his age, but he’s not as strong as most. Complications. He’s always had asthma. He’s got bronchitis. They couldn’t operate, or they’d kill him.”
“Even in this climate, he gets bronchitis?” I queried.
“Not so bad. But he’s had a lifetime of it. It’s weakened him badly. Every little cough is a killer now. And the cancer is spreading. It’s affecting his bladder. Pretty soon it’ll be his gut, his kidneys. He can’t last the year.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Pretty much. They didn’t want me to tell him. But he knew. I told him just the way I told you.”
“I’ll bet he loves you.”
“He was grateful.”
“It must have broken his heart.”
“His heart was already broken. He isn’t a fool, Harker, and if he isn’t quite the orator he was when you knew him, it’s only because he’s old, not because he’s any less of a man. He was bluffing the doctors while they were trying to bluff him. I opened the whole thing up. It’s easier for everyone.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m all in favor of honesty.”
“He’s been director ever since titan four,” she said. “The old director lost his head in the flood of bad publicity after the first disaster. Mike stepped up into his shoes. But Mike’s been on the Project since it was only a gleam in a few pairs of eyes. You know what Mike used to be like when he was in college. He was probably just the same when he was a kid. He was probably on this Project from the moment he read his first science fiction magazine. He was always full up with space fuel. And he’s not burned out yet. He still wants to go. Inside his head. Even though his body’s giving out.
“The assistant director runs things now, in effect, but he remains AD in name. Mike’s bedridden — has been for a month — but he won’t hand in his resignation and the man who’d have to take it doesn’t want it. Sure, there are murmurs in high political places, but there are too many fingers in this pie for any one axman to grab the whole of the ax. Titan is Mike’s child. The dead men — and the live wreck — are on his conscience. If titan nine comes back, it’s his victory. Everybody knows that.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Everybody has hearts, these days. I thought hearts went out with paper roses. Even the military, hey?”
“Henneker has a heart. He’d be a general if he hadn’t. Maybe president. He’s a hard man and all Army with a capital A. But he and Mike have been hand in glove all the way. They’re just about all that’s supporting one another.”
“If I were a taxpayer,” I said, “I’d scream like hell about the way this Project is being run.”
“You’re not a taxpayer. You never were.”
“True,” I conceded. “But how do you get away with it?”
“We get away with it because people think we can do it. And just for once, in all history, we need to do it so badly that people are prepared to care more about doing it than about the way it’s done. I don’t say there isn’t a kiloton weight up there in the sky just waiting to drop on us the moment the string burns through, but for now we hold the stage.”
“And you’re pinning your last hopes on little old me.”
“That’s right.”
“You have to be crazy.”
“You have to be crazy. That’s all we need.”
“Whose big idea was I? Yours?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve come a long way since the old mind-bending days.”
“That’s right.”
“We need titan nine to bring home a live cargo,” she said. “Mike needs it. Henneker needs it. I need it. The Project needs it — so far it’s cost seven men and two ships, but it would still be operating if it had cost seventy men and twenty ships. The losses aren’t important. What’s important is politics.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I said, unsurprised.
“You’ve been away a long time,” she said. “It’s getting worse every year out in the good old world. The cities, the people. The conditions are getting to the point where they’re intolerable. When there are too many people, people die. That can be handled. There might not be much left of America the Beautiful, but that can be handled, too. We’ve had contingency plans for years. But what the men at the top need desperately, need more than all the guns and the plagues, is a flag to wave. You know and I know that faster-than-light travel is no kind of solution to any kind of human problem. It’s not an instant answer to the population problem or to the resource problem. But it is God’s gift to the political problem, and that’s the one by which the Earth moves. If we can give the president just one successful Proxima loop, we can give him a weapon to keep the people controlled for years. And that’s what he needs — time to implement the contingency plans under full control. Time to kill the people discreetly. Time to save himself. The people are just beginning to realize that the world is a cage, and that they’re imprisoned here. All they can see around them is darkness. They have to be shown a way out of that cage of darkness. If we can show them a road to the stars, we can make them all the promises they want. titan nine is the bribe to buy off the world, Harker. We can’t afford another army hot-shot cookie-chewing toothpaste-ad hero. We need a survivor. We need the ultimate survivor — a man who’s spent the best years of his life practicing nothing but survival. We want a man who can live with schizophrenia, because that’s what deep space is. We want, above all else, a man whose mind we can read, because if this one goes wrong we absolutely must know what went wrong, so that titan ten is a sure thing.”
“You paint a pretty rosy picture,” I said. “We’re doing all this for the president, hey? He needs the publicity.”
“It’s the only game we get to play,” she said. “Any kick and they wheel us out and a new team in. Who d’you want to work for? The good of humanity? Freedom and justice? The American Dream? Not you, Harker. You prefer a dirty game, if there’s one available. You wouldn’t do it for the human race, and I wouldn’t ask you. Do it for yourself, Harker. Do it because it gives you the laugh on the people. That’s you, Harker.”
“Quite honestly,” I said, “I don’t think I’m that bad. I’m tempted to tell you where you can put titan nine. And one of your sweet army flyboys with it.”
“But you won’t.”
“How can I?”
“Precisely.”
“But it’s a hell of a dirty game for you to be up to your neck in. And cynical about it, too. What happened to the nice, sweet, dedicated person that deciphered my mind way back when?”
“Her troubles have aged her. What am I supposed to do, become a nun?”
“Good idea.”
“Well, there you go.”
“There, as you so correctly state, I go. Up, up, and away. Out into the far wastes of galactic space at fifty parsecs a minute. To S Doradus and back before the kettle boils. And why? Because if I don’t you’ll stick me back in my cell. And why? Because you ask me to go? And why? Because you’re as mad as I am and figure that only a lunatic can do it. What happens when I come back, little girl? Do you announce to the world that a homicidal maniac has opened up the road to the stars — to other homicidal maniacs?”
“You’re not going to get any credit, either,” she said.
“A stand-in does the press conferences and shakes hands with the prexy, hey? Yes, boys, while I was out there in the mighty deep I occupied myself with readin’ holy words an’ writin’ home to my de-ah old ma, who has the cookies all a-bubblin’ on the stove. Do cookies bubble?”
“There are compensations,” she said.
“Name three.”
“If you bring titan nine back, you get to go out again on titan ten.”
“I could die laughing. Also pigs might fly. That’s a real fine offer.”
“It is,” she said. “It makes you the only man in the world capable of taking wings and flying out of the cage — not just the cage you’ve spent your life in, but the cage we’ve spent our lives in as well. We’re offering you freedom, Harker. More freedom than any of us is ever likely to share with you. We’re offering you the one thing that means more to you than anything else.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s not for you.”
“Who is it for? Fuck that stuff about the president and the politics and the publicity. You tell me, from your point of view. Who is it for? Mike? The greater good of humanity?”
“It’s for me.”
“You. Just you. Stars in your eyes, too. What did they do? Give you rocket ships instead of dolls? Give you Doc Smith to read instead of Little Women?”
“Just about.”
“You have the wrong crew, you know,” I told her. “Mike should be the brave old captain, with you his stalwart friend and second in command. You’d look well with pointed ears. And Henneker, too? Henneker the cabin boy? There’s no room for me, except maybe as Fu Manchu the stowaway. What the hell game is this? Old Maid? It sure as hell isn’t poker.”
“If I were you, Harker,” she said, “I wouldn’t worry about anybody’s motives but your own. I wouldn’t trouble yourself to get bitter about our little game because everyone involved in the Project is involved with it as well. Just concentrate on your end. Just go and come back. You’ll only torture yourself worrying about other people.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
“I am. I’ve been away for a long time. I don’t know how people think — not out here. I don’t know how the world works out here. I wouldn’t know an honest motive if you gave it to me on a silver plate.”
“I know.”
“You honestly think I can do it?”
“Yes.”
“You honestly think I’m a logical choice?”
“Yes.”
The shrinking, sinking, stinking feeling inside me wouldn’t go away. I was a mess. She had to be right — where else could I get a second opinion? But it was all set wrong anyway. All going wrong. I wished that I loved her.
“Good night,” she said.
“Those prison documents,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I exaggerate.”
“I know,” she said. “Good night.”