Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars

The view was unusual, for although the darkness, cut by street lights, had enveloped the whole area, the upper levels of the Terminal still gleamed like snow-covered Alpine peaks.

It was crowded in the park. Many new species of trees, especially palms, blossoming cacti without spines; in a corner far from the main promenades I was able to find a chestnut tree that must have been two hundred years old. Three men of my size could not have encircled its trunk. I sat on a small bench and looked at the sky for some time. How harmless, how friendly the stars seemed, twinkling, shimmering in the invisible currents of the atmosphere that shielded Earth from them. I thought of them as “little stars” for the first time in years. Up there, no one would have spoken in such a way — we would have thought him crazy. Little stars, yes, hungry little stars. Above the trees, which were now completely dark, fireworks exploded in the distance, and suddenly, with astounding reality, I saw Arcturus, the mountains of fire over which I had flown, teeth chattering from the cold, while the frost of the cooling equipment, melting, ran red with rust down my suit. I was collecting samples with a corona siphon, one ear cocked for the whistle of the compressors, in case of any loss of rotation, because a breakdown of a single second, their jamming, would have turned my armor, my equipment, and myself into an invisible puff of steam. A drop of water falling on a red-hot plate does not vanish so quickly as a man evaporates then.

The chestnut tree was nearly out of bloom. I had never cared for the smell of its flowers, but now it reminded me of long ago. Above the hedges the glare of fireworks came and went in waves, a noise swelled, orchestras mingling, and every few seconds, carried by the wind, returned the choral cry of participants in some show, perhaps of passengers in a cable car. My little corner, however, remained undisturbed.

Then a tall, dark figure emerged from a side path. The greenery was not completely gray, and I saw the face of this person only when, walking extremely slowly, a step at a time, barely lifting his feet off the ground, he stopped a few meters away. His hands were thrust into funnellike swellings from which extended two slender rods that ended in black bulbs. He leaned on these, not like a paralytic, but like someone in an extremely weakened state. He did not look at me, or at anything else — the laughter, the shouting, the music, the fireworks seemed not to exist for him. He stood for perhaps a minute, breathing with great effort, and I saw his face off and on in the flashes of light from the fireworks, a face so old that the years had wiped all expression from it, it was only skin on bone. When he was about to resume his walk, putting forward those peculiar crutches or artificial limbs, one of them slipped; I jumped up from the bench to support him, but he had already regained his balance. He was a head shorter than I, though still tall for a man of the time; he looked at me with shining eyes.

“Excuse me,” I muttered. I wanted to leave, but stayed: in his eyes was something commanding.

“I’ve seen you somewhere. But where?” he said in a surprisingly strong voice.

“I doubt it,” I replied, shaking my head. “I returned only yesterday… from a very long voyage.”

“From… ?”

“From Fomalhaut.”

His eyes lit up.

“Arder! Tom Arder!”

“No,” I said. “But I was with him.”

“And he?”

“He died.”

He was breathing hard.

“Help me… sit down.”

I took his arm. Under the slippery black material were only bones. I eased him down gently onto the bench. I stood over him.

“Have… a seat.”

I sat. He was still wheezing, his eyes half closed.

“It’s nothing… the excitement,” he whispered. After a while he lifted his lids. “I am Roemer,” he said simply.

This took my breath away.

“What? Is it possible… you… you… ? How old… ?”

“A hundred and thirty-four,” he said dryly. “Then, I was… seven.”

I remembered him. He had visited us with his father, the brilliant mathematician who worked under Geonides — the creator of the theory behind our flight. Arder had shown the boy the huge testing room, the centrifuges. That was how he remained in my memory, as lively as a flame, seven years old, with his father’s dark eyes; Arder had held him up in the air so the little one could see from close up the inside of the gravitation chamber, where I was sitting.

We were both silent. There was something uncanny about this meeting. I looked through the darkness with a kind of eager, painful greed at his terribly old face, and felt a tightness in my throat. I wanted to take a cigarette from my pocket but could not get to it, my fingers fumbled so much.

“What happened to Arder?” he asked.

I told him.

“You recovered — nothing?”

“Nothing there is ever recovered… you know.”

“I mistook you for him…”

“I understand. My height and so forth,” I said.

“Yes. How old are you now, biologically?”

“Forty.”

“I could have…” he murmured.

I understood what he was thinking.

“Do not regret it,” I said firmly. “You should not regret it. You should not regret a thing, do you understand?”

For the first time he lifted his gaze to my face.

“Why?”

“Because there is nothing for me to do here,” I said. “No one needs me. And I… no one.”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

“What is your name?”

“Bregg. Hal Bregg.”

“Bregg,” he repeated. “Bregg… No, I don’t remember. Were you there?”

“Yes. At Apprenous, when your father came with the corrections Geonides made in the final month before takeoff… It turned out that the coefficients of refraction for the dark dusts had been too low… Does that mean anything to you?” I broke off uncertainly.

“It does. Of course,” he replied with special emphasis. “My father. Of course. At Apprenous? But what were you doing there? Where were you?”

“In the gravitation chamber, at Janssen’s. You were there then, Arder brought you in, you stood high up, on the platform, and watched while they gave me forty g’s. When I climbed out, my nose was bleeding. You gave me your handkerchief.”

“Ah! That was you?”

“Yes.”

“But that person in the chamber had dark hair, I thought.”

“Yes. My hair isn’t light. It’s gray. It’s just that you can’t see well now.”

There was a silence, longer than before.

“You are a professor, I suppose?” I said, to say something.

“I was. Now… nothing. For twenty-three years. Nothing.” And once more, very quietly, he repeated, “Nothing.”

“I bought some books today, and among them was Roemer’s topology. Is that you or your father?”

“I. You are a mathematician?”

He stared at me, as if with renewed interest.

“No,” I said, “but I had a great deal of time… there. Each of us did what he wanted. I found mathematics helpful.”

“How did you understand it?”

“We had an enormous number of microfilms: fiction, novels, whatever you like. Do you know that we had three hundred thousand titles? Your father helped Arder compile the mathematical part.”

“I know about that.”

“At first, we treated it as… a diversion. To kill time. But then, after a few months, when we had completely lost contact with Earth and were hanging there — seemingly motionless in relation to the stars — then, you see, to read that some Peter nervously puffed his cigarette and was worried about whether or not Lucy would come, and that she walked in and twisted her gloves, well, first you began to laugh at this like an idiot, and then you simply saw red. In other words, no one would touch it.”