Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

“You won’t be. They want to study you, see how you do what you do. You told me your thinkers back home have a pretty good idea of how it works.”

“Yes. Not’ing could from the gross anatomy of my brain be learned. I t’ink such a machine ass your... friendss... wish could eassily be built.” Saris hesitated, then: “Wery well, I musst take chancess, no matter what happenss. Let it be sso. You may all enter.”

When the lights picked him out, he stood tall and proud, waiting with the dignity of his race among the boxes of supplies which had been his only reliance. He took Langley’s hands between his and nuzzled the man’s cheek. “Iss good to see you again,” he said.

“I’m... sorry for what happened,” said Langley. “I didn’t know—”

“No. The uniwerse full of surprisses iss. No matter, if I can go home again.”

The spacemen accepted him almost casually, they were used to non-human intelligence. After binding Langley’s injury, they formed a cordon and returned. Valti raised ship as soon as all were aboard, and then conferred with them. “Is there anything you require, Saris Hronna?” he asked through the American.

“Yess. Two witaminss which seem to be lacking in Eart” chemistry.” Saris drew diagrams on a sheet of paper. “Thesse iss the structural formulass in Langley’ss symbology.”

The spaceman re-drew them in modern terms, and Valti nodded. “They should be easy to synthesize. I have a molecule maker in my hideaway.” He tugged at his beard. “We must go there first, to make preparations for departure. I have a light-speed cruiser in a secret orbit. You’ll be put aboard that and sent to our base in the Cygni system. That’s well outside the Solar and Centaurian spheres of influence. Then your abilities can be studied at leisure, sir, and your own payment rendered, Captain Langley.”

Saris spoke up. He had his own bargain to make. He would cooperate if he was afterward returned to Holat with a crew of technicians and ample supplies. His world lay too far off to be in direct danger from the stars of this region, but some party of wandering conquistadors might happen on it—and Holat had no defenses against bombardment from space. That situation must be rectified. Armed robot satellites would not stop a full-dress invasion fleet—nothing would do that except possibly another fleet—but would be able to dispose of the small marauding groups which were all that Holat really had to worry about.

Valti winced. “Captain, does he realize what the bonuses for a trip of that length are? Does he know how much it would cost to set up those stations? Has he no sympathy for a poor old man who must face an audit of his books?”

“Fraid not,” said Langley with a grin.

“Ah... what assurances does he want that we will keep our end of such an agreement?”

“He’ll have control over your development of the nullifier—you can’t make it without him, both his empirical evidence and his theoretical knowledge—so that part’s taken care of. When he sees the project nearing the end, he’ll want your ships prepared for him, ready to go. And he’ll want a bomb planted on the one carrying him, under his control; women and children will stay aboard while the work is being done for Holat, and at the first sign of treachery he’ll blow the whole thing up.”

“Dear me!” Valti shook a doleful head. “What a nasty suspicious mind he has, to be sure. I should think one look at my honest face- Well, well, so be it. But I shudder to think what the expense is going to do to our cost accounting.”

“Man, you can amortize that debt over two thousand years. Forget it. Now, where are we going first?”

“We maintain a small hideaway in the Himalayas: nothing palatial, our tastes are humble, but securely hidden. I must render a report to my chiefs on Earth, get their approval of the plan, and prepare documents for the Cygni office. It will only take a little while.”

Langley went off to the ship’s sick bay. He’d taken a nasty gash in his leg, but treatment was routine these days: a clamp to hold the edges of the wound together, a shot of artificial enzymes to stimulate regeneration. In a few hours, the most radical surgery could be completely and scarlessly healed.

He remarked on that to Valti as they sat over dinner. The ship was taking a wide ellipse through space before returning to Earth, to avoid possible detection. “I’m a little at sea about the notion of progress,” he confessed. “Offhand, it looks as if man hasn’t improved a bit; and then I see advances like you have in medicine, and think what a tremendous change for the better was made by innovations like agriculture and the machine. Maybe it’s just that I’m too impatient; maybe, given a few more millennia, man will do something about himself, change his own mind from animal to human.”

Valti took a noisy slurp of beer. “I cannot share your optimism, my friend,” he answered. “I was born more than six hundred years ago, by skipping across space and time I have seen much history, and it seems to me that civilization—any civilization, on any planet—is subject to a law of mortality. No matter how clever we get, we will never create mass-energy, grow nothing, never make heat flow of itself from a colder to a warmer body. There are limitations set by natural law. As ships and buildings are made bigger, more of their volume must go into passageways, until you reach a limit. You could not have an immortal man; even if biochemistry permitted, he has only so much brain space, so many cells which can record his experiences. Why, then, an immortal civilization, or a civilization embracing the entire universe?”

“And so there’ll always be rise, and decay, and fall -always war and suffering?”

“Either that, or the sort of thing the Technon wants: death disguised by a mechanical semblance of life. I think you look at it from the wrong angle. Is not this very change, this anguished toppling into doom, the stuff of life? There is a unity in the cosmos which is more important than any one world, any one race. I think life arose because the universe needs it, needs just those characteristics which hurt the living individual. No... I don’t believe in Father. There is no consciousness except in organic life. And yet an inanimate universe brought forth life and all its variety, because that was a necessary step in the evolution from a great cloud of gas to the final clinkered vacuum.” Valti wiped his nose and chuckled. “Pardon me. I meander in my old age. But if you had traveled across light-years all your days, you’d know that there is something operating which can’t be reduced to physical theory. I think the Society will last because of being divorced from space and time; but only it, and even its span is not eternal.”

He got up. “Excuse me. We’ll be landing soon.”

Langley found Marin in the amidships saloon. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “It won’t be long now,” he said. “I think we’ve done what’s best—removed Saris” power from the place where it could only cause destruction. Best thing for Sol, too. And now we’re bound on our own way.”

“Yes.” She didn’t look at him. Her face was white, and there was a strained expression on it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I... I don’t know, Edwy. Everything seems so odd, somehow, as if this were a dream.” She stared cloudily before her. “Is it? Am I sleeping somewhere and—”

“No. What is the trouble? Can’t you describe it?”

She shook her head. “It’s as if someone else were sharing my brain, sitting there and waiting. It came on me all of a sudden. The strain, I suppose. I’ll be all right.”

Langley scowled. Worry gnawed at him. If she took sick- Just why was she so important to him? Was he falling for her? It would be very easy to do. Quite apart from her looks, she was brave and intelligent and witty; he could see himself spending a contented lifetime with her.