The Rediscovery of Man Read online

  She sent a second repair robot. That had no effect either.

  She sent a third, the last. Three bright lights, “Does not conform,” stared at her. She moved the servo-robots to the other side of the sails and pulled hard.

  The sail was still not at the right angle.

  She stood there wearied and lost in space, and she prayed: “Not for me, God, I am running away from a life that I did not want. But for this ship’s souls and for the poor foolish people that I am taking who are brave enough to want to worship their own way and need the light of another star, I ask you, God, help me now.” She thought she had prayed very fervently and she hoped that she would get an answer to her prayer.

  It did not work out that way. She was bewildered, alone.

  There was no sun. There was nothing, except the tiny cabin and herself more alone than any woman had ever been before.

  She sensed the thrill and ripple of her muscles as they went through days of adjustment while her mind noticed only the matter of minutes. She leaned forward, forced herself not to relax, and finally she remembered that one of the official busybodies had included a weapon.

  What she would use a weapon for she did not know, It pointed. It had a range of two hundred thousand miles. The target could be selected automatically.

  She got down on her knees trailing the abdominal tube and the feeding tube and the catheter tubes and the helmet wires, each one running back to the panel. She crawled underneath the panel for the servo-robots and she pulled out a written manual.

  She finally found the right frequency for the weapon’s controls.

  She set the weapon up and went to the window.

  At the last moment she thought, “Perhaps the fools are going to make me shoot the window out. It ought to have been designed to shoot through the window without hurting it. That’s the way they should have done it.”

  She wondered about the matter for a week or two.

  Just before she fired it she turned and there, next to her, stood her sailor, the sailor from the stars, Mr. Grey-no-more. He said: “It won’t work that way.”

  He stood clear and handsome, the way she had seen him in New Madrid. He had no tubes, he did not tremble, she could see the normal rise and fall of his chest as he took one breath every hour or so. One part of her mind knew that he was a hallucination. Another part of her mind believed that he was real.

  She was mad, and she was very happy to be mad at this time, and she let the hallucination give her advice. She re-set the gun so that it would fire through the cabin wall, and it fired a low charge at the repair mechanism out beyond the distorted and immovable sail.

  The low charge did the trick. The interference had been something beyond all technical anticipation. The weapon had cleaned out the forever-unidentifiable obstruction, leaving the servo-robots free to attack their tasks like a tribe of maddened ants. They worked again. They had had defenses built in against the minor impediments of space. All of them scurried and skipped about.

  With a sense of bewilderment close to religion, she perceived the wind of starlight blowing against the immense sails. The sails snapped into position. She got a momentary touch of gravity as she sensed a little weight. The Soul was back on her course.

  “It’s a girl,” they said to him on New Earth.

  “It’s a girl. She must have been eighteen herself.”

  Mr. Grey-no-more did not believe it.

  But he went to the hospital and there in the hospital he saw Helen America.

  “Here I am, sailor,” said she.

  “I sailed too.” Her face was white as chalk, her expression was that of a girl of about twenty. Her body was that of a well-preserved woman of sixty.

  As for him, he had not changed again, since he had returned home inside a pod.

  He looked at her. His eyes narrowed, and then, in a sudden reversal of roles, it was he who was kneeling beside her bed and covering her hands with his tears.

  Half-coherently, he babbled at her: “I ran away from you because I loved you so. I came back here where you would never follow, or if you did follow, you’d still be a young woman, and I’d still be too old. But you have sailed The Soul in here and you wanted me.”

  The nurse of New Earth did not know about the rules which should be of Man applied to the sailors from the stars. Very quietly she went out of the room, smiling in tenderness and human pity at the love which she had seen. But she was a practical woman and she had a sense of her own advancement. She called a friend others at the news service and said: “I think I have got the biggest romance in history. If you get here soon enough you can get the first telling of the story of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. They just met like that. I guess they’d seen each other somewhere. They just met like that and fell in love.”

  The nurse did not know that they had forsworn a love on Earth. The nurse did not know that Helen America had made a lonely trip with an icy purpose, and the nurse did not know that the crazy image of Mr. Grey-no-more, the sailor himself, had stood beside Helen twenty years out from nothing-at-all in the depth and blackness of space between the stars.

  The little girl had grown up, had married, and now had a little girl of her own. The mother was unchanged, but the spiel tier was very, very old. It had outlived all its marvelous tricks of adaptability, and for some years had stayed frozen in the role of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed girl doll. Out of sentimental sense of the fitness of things, she had dressed the spiel tier in a bright blue jumper with matching panties. The little animal crept softly across the floor on its tiny human hands, using its knees for hind feet. The mock-human face looked up blindly and squeaked for milk.

  The young mother said, “Mom, you ought to get rid of that thing. It’s all used up and it looks horrible with your nice period furniture.”

  “I thought you loved it,” said the older woman.

  “Of course,” said the daughter.

  “It was cute, when I was a child. But I’m not a child any more, and it doesn’t even work.”

  The spiel tier had struggled to its feet and clutched its mistress’s ankle. The older woman took it away gently, and put down a saucer of milk and a cup the size of a thimble. The spiel tier tried to curtsey, as it had been motivated to do at the beginning, slipped, fell, and whimpered. The mother righted it and the little old animal-toy began dipping milk with its thimble and sucking the milk into its tiny toothless old mouth.

  “You remember. Mom ” said the younger woman and stopped.

  “Remember what, dear?”

  ” You told me about Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more when that was brand new.”

  “Yes, darling, maybe I did.”

  ” You didn’t tell me everything,” said the younger woman accusingly.

  “Of course not. You were a child. ”

  “But it was awful. Those messy people, and the horrible way sailors lived. I don’t see how you idealised it and called it a romance ” “But it was. It is,” insisted the other.

  “Romance, my foot,” said the daughter.

  “It’s as bad as you and the worn-out spiel tier She pointed at the tiny, living, aged doll who had fallen asleep beside its milk.

  “I think it’s horrible.

  You ought to get rid of it. And the world ought to get rid of sailors. ” “Don’t be harsh, darling, ” said the mother.

  “Don’t be a sentimental old slob, ” said the daughter.

  “Perhaps we are,” said the mother with a loving sort of laugh. Unobtrusively she put the sleeping spiel tier on a padded chair where it would not be stepped on or hurt.

  Outsiders never knew the real end of the story.

  More than a century after their wedding, Helen lay dying: she was dying happily, because her beloved sailor was beside her. She believed that if they could conquer space, they might conquer death as well.

  Her loving, happy, weary dying mind blurred over and she picked up an argument they hadn’t touched upon for decades.

  “You did so
come to The Soul,” she said.

  “You did so stand beside me when I was lost and did not know how to handle the weapon.”

  “If I came then, darling, I’ll come again, wherever you are.

  You’re my darling, my heart, my own true love. You’re my bravest of ladies, my boldest of people. You’re my own. You sailed for me. You’re my lady who sailed The Soul.”

  His voice broke, but his features stayed calm. He had never before seen anyone die so confident and so happy.

  The Game of Rat and Dragon

  I. The Table

  Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underbill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn’t make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn’t appreciate what you did.

  He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest, and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.

  As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.

  “Meow.” That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife.

  What did she think he was a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn’t she know that for every half-hour of pin lighting he got a minimum of two months’ recuperation in the hospital?

  By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of space around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.

  As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him.

  Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel.

  Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.

  Nothing ever moved in on the solar system. He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man of Man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and burning against his living mind.

  Woodley came in.

  “Same old ticking world,” said Underhill.

  “Nothing to report.

  No wonder they didn’t develop the pin-set until they began to plano form Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning.

  It’s nice and sharp and compact. It’s sort of like sitting around home.”

  Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy.

  Undeterred, Underhill went on, “It must have been pretty good to have been an ancient man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war. They didn’t have to plano form They didn’t have to go out to earn their livings among the stars. They didn’t have to dodge the Rats or play the Game. They couldn’t have invented pin lighting because they didn’t have any need of it, did they, Woodley?”

  Woodley grunted, “Uh-huh.” Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pin lighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them, and thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose.

  Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the Partners. None of the Partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners on occasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint in articulate form, the other pin lighters and the Chiefs of the Instrumentality left him alone.

  Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he babbled on, “What does happen to us when we plano form Do you think it’s sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul pulled out?”

  “Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it,” said Woodley.

  “After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not.”

  “But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he came apart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky as if it were bleeding and it went out of him and you know what they did to Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital where you and I never go way up at the top part where the others are, where the others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of the Up-and-Out have gotten them.”

  Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning something called tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made him look very dashing and adventurous.

  “Look here, youngster. You don’t have to worry about that stuff.

  Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The Partners are getting better. I’ve seen them pin light two Rats forty-six million miles apart in one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to work the pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with a minimum of four-hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set a pin light we wouldn’t light the Rats up fast enough to protect our plano forming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they get going, they’re faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it’s not easy, letting a Partner share your mind ” “It’s not easy for them, either,” said Underhill.

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re not human. Let them take care of themselves. I’ve seen more pin lighters go crazy from monkeying around with Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats.

  How many of them do you actually know of that got grabbed by Rats?”

  Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple in the vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships. The thumb for the Andromeda, lost with crew and passengers, the index finger and the middle finger for Release Ships 43 and 56, found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and child on board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and the thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to the Rats lost as people realized that there was something out there underneath space itself which was alive, capricious, and malevolent.

  Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like Like nothing much.

  Like the twinge of a mild electric shock. Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time. Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes. Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off.

  At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar solar system ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

  Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons of Man Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of plano forming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

  But to the tele paths they were Dragons.

  In the fraction of a second between the tele paths awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a feroci
ous, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the tele paths had sensed entities something like the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin, tenuous matter between the stars.

  It took a surviving ship to bring back the news a ship in which, by sheer chance, a tele path had a light-beam ready, turning it out at the innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragon dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves non-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own immediate deaths had been averted.

  From then on, it was easy almost.

  Planoforming ships always carried tele paths Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.

  The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it.

  Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star.

  The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind’s favor.

  This was not enough. The tele paths were trained to become ultra sensitive trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than a millisecond.

  But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in just under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind to activate the light beams.

  Attempts had been made to sheathe the ships in light at all times.

  This defense wore out.

  As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragons learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

  Intense light was needed, light of sun like intensity. This could be provided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

  Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature photo-nuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium isotope into pure visible radiance.