Robert Silverberg - His Brother's Weeper

The Deserializing Room at Cincinnati Spaceport was, Peter Martlett thought, a little on the bleak side. It was no more than twenty feet square, illuminated by a single hooded fluorobulb, and was bare of all ornament. In the center of the floorspace stood the awesome bulk of the Henderson Deserializer. Two white-smocked technicians flanked staring eagerly at Martlett, who had just entered. Behind him sounded the noisy hum of the waiting room he had quitted. There was a lot of deserializing going on today.

“Mr. Martlett?”

Martlett nodded tensely. He was more than a little leery of submitting himself to the Deserializer, especially after what had happened to his brother Michael. But the travel-agency people had assured him that that had been a fluke, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion—

“May we have your passport?” said the thinner and more efficient looking of the two technicians. Martlett surrendered it, along with his accident claim waiver, his identification ticket, his departure permit, and the pre-stamped entrance visa that would allow him to visit Marathon, where his brother had gone to a hideous death the month before.

Heads almost touching, the pair of them riffled quickly through Martlett’s papers, nodded in agreement, and gestured for him to take a seat in the Deserializer. One of the technicians produced a dark enameled square bn a foot on each side and proceeded to attach Martlett’s documents to it with stickons. Moistening his lips, Martlett watched. In a very few minutes, he knew, he himself would be inside the box.

The other deserializing technician strapped Martlett firmly into the Deserializer and lowered a metal cone over his head. In a soothing voice he said, “Of course you understand the approximate nature of the Deserializei, sir—”

“Yes, I—”

Ignoring the outburst, the technician continued what was obviously a memorized speech delivered before each departure. “The Henderson Deserializer makes possible instantaneous traffic between stars. The deserializing field induces distortion of the four coordinate axes of your worldline, removing you temporarily from contact with the temporal axis and—for convenience in storage—somewhat compressing you along the three spatial axes.”

“You mean I’ll be put in that little box?”

“Exactly, sir. You and your luggage will enter this container and you will be placed aboard a spaceship bound for the planet of your destination. Ah—Marathon, I believe. Although the journey to Marathon requires two hundred eighty-three objective years, for you it will be a matter of seconds—since, of course, on your arrival you will enter another deserializing field that will restore you to your temporal axis at a point only seconds after you had left t on Earth!”

“In short,” the other technician chimed in, “you enter a box here, are shipped to Marathon, and are unpacked there—total elapsed time, ten seconds. If you choose to return to Earth immediately on arrival, you could do that. If you felt like it, you could make nearly thirty round trips a minute, eighteen hundred an hour—”

“If I could afford it,” Martlett said dryly. The round trip fare was nine hundred units, and it was making a considerable dent in his savings. But, of course, the Colonial Government of Marathon had asked him to make the trip, to settle his brother’s unfinished affairs. And the shock of Michael’s tragic death had been such that he had agreed at once to make the trip.

“Heh heh,” chuckled the technician. “To be sure, eighteen hundred round trips would be on the costly side! Heh heh heh—”

The two technicians chuckled harmoniously, all the while bustling round Martlett and making adjustments in the complex network of dials and levers that hemmed him in on all sides. He was just beginning to get annoyed at all the laughter when—

Whick!

—he found himself lying on a plush, well-padded couch in a room walled mostly with curving glass. The sun was in his eyes—bluish-purple sunlight. Green-tinted clouds drifted lazily in the auburn sky. Two smiling technicians in sheen-gray coveralls were nodding at him in smug satisfaction.

“Welcome to Marathon, Mr. Martlett.”

Martlett licked his lips. “I’m here?”

“You are. Transshipped from Cincinnati Spaceport, Earth, aboard the good ship Venus. Today is the 11th of April, 2209, Galactic Standard Time.”

“The same day I left Earth!”

“Of course, Mr. Martlett, of course! The Henderson Deserializer—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Martlett interjected hastily, forestalling yet another rendition of the Information for Travelers Speech. “I fully understand the process.” He looked around. “I’m here on request of your Secretary for Internal Affairs, Mr. Jansen. It’s about my brother—”

The word was ill-chosen. It triggered a strong reaction in the two deserializer men. They coughed and reddened and glanced obliquely over Martlett’s head as if they were very embarrassed. Martlett pressed on undisturbed. “My brother Michael, who was a colonist here until his unfortunate death in a Deserializer accident last month. Do you know where I can find the secre—”

“He’s waiting outside to see you,” said the short technician with the swerving nose.

“And we wish to assure you that this office has been cleared of all responsibility in the matter of your brother’s—ah—disappearance,” put in the tall one with the unconvincing yellow toupee.

Martlett stared at them sourly. “I’m not here to press charges,” he said. “Just to settle my late brother’s affairs.”

He rose, feeling a bit stiff around the knees. Not surprising, he thought, considering he had just spent two hundred eighty-three objective years in an enameled box one foot square. Gathering up his papers, he stepped out into the antechamber, discovering as he walked that Marathon’s gravity was only about two-thirds that of Earth. It was all he could do to keep himself from skipping. Skipping, he thought, would hardly look decorous on a man whose beloved brother had gone to an untimely death only five Galactic Standard Weeks before.

The Marathonian Secretary for Internal Affairs introduced himself as Octavian Jansen, a fact Martlett already knew. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man of dignified appearance and middle age. His office, he said, was within walking distance of the Arrivals Center, and so they walked there. Martlett enjoyed the springy sensation of walking at two-thirds gray. He threw his head back, breathing in the clean, fresh air. Overhead, colorful birds wheeled and screeched playfully. Swaying palmoid trees lined the streets. Marathon, Michael had often written to him, was nothing more or less than a paradise. Fertile soil, extravagantly satisfactory climate, no native carnivorous life forms bigger than caninoids and felinoids, and the women!

Yes, the women! Michael had always had a good eye for the women, Martlett reflected.

Jansen’s office was handsomely furnished. A brace of hunting trophies loomed on one wall, great lowering massive purple-skinned trihorned heads: Marathon’s largest life form, the ponderous, herbivorous, harmless hippopotamoids. Sleek freeform chairs faced the freeform onyx-topped desk. Martlett pulled one up.

Jansen said, “May I remark that you look astonishingly like your late brother, Mr. Martlett?”

“Many people thought we were twins.”

“You are the older brother?”

“By three years. I’m 30. Michael is—was—27.”

For a moment Jansen’s eyes dropped respectfully. “Your brother was very popular here, Mr. Martlett. From the day he joined our colony two years ago, he was a leader of the community. And I needn’t tell you how much we admired his music! Only next month our local symphony orchestra was to have presented an all-Martlett concert: the Second Symphony, the Theremin Concerto, and a piece for strings and synthesizer called simply Amor.”