Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Someone pulled back a curtain to expose the recumbent, thawing, steamy form of His Exhalted Excellency R’thagna Bar.

“Why’s he undressed?” Hansen asked.

“Funny, now that you mention it,” Fromer said, puzzled, “why is he undressed?”

“Fascinating! Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Candle said.

“What’s so fascinating?” Fromer asked suspiciously, moving closer.

“His belly. Never saw anything like it. Those black squares keep appearing and disappearing. If I’ve ever seen a truly random pattern—”

“It started right after they froze him the first time,” Fromer said disconsolately.

“Fascinating, by Heaven,” said Candle, who was now down on his hands and knees. “Look at that top sequence! Random, yet physiological. I’ve got a friend on Bridan III who’d trade anything for some photos of this. Get me some photo equipment, will you?”

Captain Fromer ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “Get him some photo equipment,” he said to no one in particular, “and somebody make a truce with that idiot doctor long enough to get me a sedative.” About this time the ship turned upsidedown.

“But there’s no reason for it!” the chief engineer said, running alongside Hansen and Candle. “The ship can’t turn upsidedown. Everything is functioning perfectly!”

“Really not interested,” said Candle, running down the corridor’s mile-long ceiling. “Figure something out for yourself for a change.”

“But what I can’t understand,” said Hansen, dutifully trotting alongside, “is how you knew with such certainty how the door mechanism was made. Even if submarines were built like that, you’d have no way of knowing. There haven’t been any submarines in centuries.”

“The hell you say,” said Candle, increasing his pace, “I built one five years ago.”

“Built one! What for?”

“For the hell of it, and it was a damned good outfit, too. I found plans in an old museum, and had the good sense not to improve on ’em. Always remember, boy, that something that really works can’t be improved. That’s why the submarine mechanism was adopted—not adapted—for space. The so-called ’better way’ they’re building ’em today is simply a disguise for the fact that most of the gas is gone from our technology.”

“What happened to the submarine?”

“Oh, I traded it to a friend for some falcons. You interested in falconry by any chance?”

“Er, no. Can’t say that I am.”

“You will be,” Candle said prophetically, “you’ll succumb to every enthusiasm man has ever been deviled with. You’re the type. It’s a disease, boy, and the big symptom isn’t just curiosity, but the kind of intense curiosity that turns you inside out, devours you and ruins you for orthodoxy.”

Hansen had stopped listening. He was absorbed in trying to recall the pattern he had pressed on his radio belt—a pattern never taught to him—when the ship had suddenly turned upsidedown. Hesitantly, he played with the notion that he had been thinking of the ship traveling upsidedown at the time he impressed the novel pattern on the belt. Now, could that have possibly…?

The man and the boy disappeared down the ceiling, running at top speed to catch up as the rapidly vanishing form of R’thagna Bar was dragged and pulled relentlessly toward the refrigerator in a tug of war between the ship’s wild, divided crew.

“Fascinating!” said Candle. His eyes, glittering with their own peculiar madness, remained riveted on the distant imperial belly. “Never saw anything like it!”

Hugh McCann took the last of the photographic plates out of the developer and laid them on the table beside the others. Then he picked up the old star charts—Volume 1, Number 1—maps of space from various planetary systems within a hundred light years of Sol. He looked around the observation room at the others.

“We might as well start checking.”

The men and women around the table nodded. None of them said anything. Even the muffled conversation from the corridor beyond the observation room ceased as the people stopped to listen.

McCann set the charts down and opened them at the first sheet—the composite map of the stars as seen from Earth. “Don’t be too disappointed if we’re wrong,” he said.

Amos Carhill’s fists clenched. He leaned across the table. “You still don’t believe we’re near Sol, do you? You’re getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position as well as anybody.”

“I know the math,” Hugh said quietly. “But remember, a lot of our basics have already proved themselves false this trip. We can’t be sure of anything. Besides, I think I’d remember this planet we’re on if we’d ever been here before. We visited every planetary system within a hundred light years of Sol the first year.”

Carhill laughed. “What’s there to remember about this hunk of rock? Tiny, airless, mountainless—the most monotonous piece of matter we’ve landed on in years.”

Hugh shrugged and turned to the next chart. The others clustered around him, checking, comparing the chart with the photographic plates of their position, finding nothing familiar in the star pattern.

“I still think we would have remembered this planet,” Hugh said. “Just because it is so monotonous. After all, what have we been looking for, all these years? Life. Other worlds with living forms, other types of evolution, types adapted to different environments. This particular planet is less capable of supporting life than our own Moon.”

Martha Carhill looked up from the charts. Her face was as tense and strained as her husband’s, and the lines about her mouth deeply etched. “We’ve got to be near Earth. We’ve just got to. We’ve got to find people again.” Her voice broke. “We’ve been looking for so long—”

Hugh McCann sighed. The worry that had been growing in him ever since they first left the rim of the galaxy and turned homeward deepened into a nagging fear. He didn’t know why he was afraid. He too hoped that they were near Earth. He almost believed that they would soon be home. But the others, their reactions—He shook his head.

They no longer merely hoped. With them, especially with the older, ones, it was faith, a blind, unreasoning, fanatic faith that their journey was almost over and they would be on Earth again and pick up the lives they had left behind fifty-three years before.

“Look,” Amos Carhill said. “Here are our reference points. Here’s Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky Way.” He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. “Now we can check some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts.”

Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting. Carhill was probably right. He’d find Sol soon enough.

It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest, especially a hopeless one. For fifty-three years they had scouted the galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. A check on diverging evolutions, they had called it—uncounted thousands of suns without planets, bypassed. Thousands of planetary systems, explored, or merely looked at and rejected. Heavy, cold worlds with methane atmospheres and lifeless rocks without atmospheres and even earth-sized, earth-type planets, with oceans and oxygen and warmth. But no life. No life anywhere.

That was one of the basics they had lost, years ago—their belief that life would arise on any planet capable of supporting it.

“We could take a spectrographic analysis of some of those high magnitude stars,” Carhill said. Then abruptly he straightened, eyes alight, his hand on the last chart. “We don’t need it after all. Look! There’s Sirius, and here it is on the plates. That means Alpha Centauri must be—”