Fred Hoyle - Element 79

It was easy for Pev to make a blunder on purpose, to set the motors firing for a sweep-out from orbit. He had acquired a reputation for mistakes of all kinds. Nobody would suspect him of anything more than another stupidity. The others felt the growing acceleration. A glance at the controls made the situation clear to the captain, made it clear there would barely be enough time for them to strap themselves down before the big drive came on. The controls had gotten preset, there was no stopping it now.

Pev saw the rest of the crew safe before stowing himself away. The drive hit him harder than he ever remembered it. For the first time in his life he passed out completely. When it was all over they cursed him good and proper. He’d ruined their last chance of getting to grips with the Thing. They’d give him hell all the way home, they promised him that. Pev didn’t care. He felt curiously lightheaded, he’d felt that way from the moment he became conscious again after the blackout. He felt it didn’t matter, not one jot or tittle, what the other members of the crew thought about him.

Soon they got him to do a navigational fix. The mood lasted. He did it in a carefree fashion, taking the measurements quickly and stabbing down the numbers as he thought the numbers should go. Then he handed his data and his reduction sheets to the captain. Deliberately the captain ignored them—they wanted to keep him on the hook as long as possible. Somehow Pev didn’t care. He knew he wouldn’t care even if they laughed themselves sick about it. Sensing this, and seeing him pretty relaxed, the captain at last began to examine the papers. The others crowded around. To begin with, they all had silly grins on their faces. Then the grins were wiped clean away as they thumbed their way through Pev’s reductions. At last the captain looked up and said, “Hell, I never believed that old story about the monkey typing out Shakespeare. But it’s happened. It’s right, the whole bloody fix, it’s one hundred percent right.”

The dinner had been elegantly cooked. The three who had eaten it formed an elegant trio, a handsome man in his early forties, a perhaps still more handsome woman in her middle thirties, and a girl of twenty. The girl was fair with long hair the color of ripe corn. The woman was dark with a finely chiseled nose and large, arresting eyes.

“Coffee, I think,” murmured the woman.

“Excellent, my dear,” said the man, “coffee would be exactly right. I had no idea you were so splendid a cook.”

“I do most things well. When I have a mind to.”

The girl was on her feet. “I’ll fetch it.”

“Let me. It would be the least I could do,” offered the man.

“It would indeed be the least you could do. But let Cynthia go.”

The girl with hair the color of ripe corn left the man and woman together. Nothing was said while the girl was absent. The woman seated herself against one end of a long couch, placing her well-shaped legs along the length of the couch. She was still adjusting the cushions behind her back when Cynthia returned with the coffee. It was in a fashioned silver pot. The cups were of delicate china. The girl poured the coffee and served the man and woman. Then she seated herself comfortably, the three of them forming a triangle facing each other.

The woman tasted the coffee. “Mm, almost right, a touch of salt perhaps was needed.”

She sipped again reflectively, and then announced in a loud firm voice, “John, darling, you are a lousy sod.”

“Not literally, I can assure you.”

“Not literally, I would agree. Figuratively, shall we say?”

“You have every reason to be annoyed, I suppose.”

“Darling, annoyed is scarcely the word for it. Bloody furious is much more the way I feel.”

“My dear, we can’t put the clock back. ‘The moving finger writes,’ and all that sort of thing.”

“If the moving finger had confined itself to writing, we’d hardly be in this very murky situation, would we?”

“I mean, we’ve got to face up to things, like rational human beings.”

“I fully intend to face up to things. Very rationally, my dear John, as you will presently discover. But facing up to things still doesn’t stop me from being bloody furious.”

“Helen,” said the girl, “I just don’t see how getting mad about it is going to help.”

“What is going to help?” asked the woman.

“Nothing really, I suppose,” admitted the girl.

“Time, perhaps? Is that the view you would both like me to take?”

“Oh, come now, Helen. It’s not as bad as all that.”

“It’s happened before. It’s not the end of the world.”

The woman turned from the girl toward the man. She threw back her head and laughed, “Of course it’s not the end of the world. I never said it was. I’m complaining much more about the way it was done than about what was done.”

“You goaded me for long enough.”

“Goad or no goad, there is a certain well-defined moral level below which a man in your position is not expected to stoop.”

“A great deal depends on the direction from which you look at it.”

“No doubt.”

“I mean, you can’t possibly blame me for everything.”

“I blame the crucial moment on you. So I’m going to make you suffer for it, darling.”

The girl fidgeted and shook her head. “I can’t see any one of us being particularly to blame. We’re all to blame. I asked for it and I got it.”

The woman laughed again. “I didn’t ask for it, yet I’ve got it, too, my dear.”

There was a short silence. Then the woman shuffled along the couch to where she could stare directly into the man’s face.

“Well, are you satisfied with what you’ve done to both of us, you bloody great bull?”

“Very well satisfied.”

“I wonder what your academic colleagues are going to say when it all comes out? You’ll smirk on the other side of your face when they chuck you out.”

“Nonsense, these are private matters, outside the university’s competence. If everybody were thrown out for this sort of thing, every faculty in every university in the world would be decimated tomorrow.”

“There’s one thing you forget. Cynthia was your student. The university won’t take kindly to that, my dear John. It’s morally equivalent to incest, seducing a student. They’ll bounce you good and hard for it.”

“But I didn’t seduce Cynthia! Damn it all, there wasn’t the smallest question of seduction.”

The man lifted his hands toward the girl. “I said I’d look after things but you said you’d see to it.”

“I said I would but I never intended to.”

“In heaven’s name, why not?”

“Because I wanted it to happen. I wanted you to give me a child. So it would commit me. So it would commit both of us.”

“Marriage would commit both of us.”

“Marriage isn’t possible, not now.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Helen.”

“Look, Helen isn’t that sort, the marrying sort. She’s played the game her way. Well, she’s lost for once, that’s all.”

“Don’t be so sure,” interposed the woman calmly, “the game isn’t played out yet.”

“You’d wanted to make Helen for a long time, hadn’t you?” the girl asked the man.

“I suppose so,” he admitted.

“For how long, ten years?”

“Perhaps, a long time, certainly.”

“But she’s the other kind, so you didn’t get anywhere at all until I came along.”

The girl stopped and looked to the woman. “He still doesn’t understand the way it is.”

“He soon will,” smiled the woman. With evident pleasure, she leaned across to the man and put a hand on his knee. “Don’t you see? She’s the other kind, too, my kind. Cynthia is my kind. When she tricked you into making her pregnant she was trying to break it. She knew you’d have to marry her, being her teacher. She knew she’d got you in the sensitive places.”