Ben Bova - End of Exile

They muttered. They shook their heads.

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Monel demanded. “Just because you say you’ve been with Jerlet, and you say you’ve been to the Ghost Place—”

Linc found that he had the welding laser in his hand. Its smooth grip felt good against his palm. His fingers tightened over it.

“This suit I got from Jerlet. None of you has ever seen anything like it, have you?”

A mumbled “No.”

“And this…” he held up the welder so that they could all see it, “I took from the bridge—the Ghost Place. Watch.”

He turned to one of the few ragged books left on the shelves and pulled the laser’s trigger. A pencil-thin beam of red light leaped out. The book burst into flames.

The people oohed.

Linc eased off the trigger. He waved the laser in the general direction of one of Monel’s guards. “Put the fire out before it causes some real damage,” he ordered. The fellow hesitated a moment, then went over and smothered the smoldering book with a rag he pulled from his pocket.

“I have been with Jerlet,” Linc repeated to the crowd. “I have been to the Ghost Place. Your fears are silly. It’s time for us to stop acting like children and start doing what’s needed to save ourselves and reach the new world.”

“No.”

Linc turned. It was Magda.

“You are wrong,” she said. “Misguided. You may honestly think that you’re doing Jerlet’s work, but you are wrong.”

“I lived with him!”

Magda’s face was a mask of steel. “There is no proof. You tell us that Jerlet is dead, yet will live again. You say that Jerlet spoke the words we heard from the screen, yet he didn’t show himself to us. You tell us to fix the machines, yet we have Jerlet’s own words warning us that we mustn’t touch the machines.”

And she pressed the yellow button on the pedestal where she sat.

The wall screen glowed again, and now Jerlet’s face appeared. Linc knew that it was the younger Jerlet, speaking to them when they had been only children.

“I’ve tried to set you kids up as well as possible,” the tape began as it always began.

Linc watched the screen in sullen rage as the old tape unwound its familiar message. How can I get it through their skulls? he fumed at himself. How can I make them see?

“Now remember,” Jerlet was saying, “all the rules I’ve set down. They’re for your own safety. Especially, don’t mess around with the machines…”

Magda turned from the wall screen to Linc. “That is Jerlet,” she said. “He still lives. He speaks to us when the priestess summons him.” Her mouth was tight and hard; her eyes burning with—what? Is it fear? Or pain? Or hate?

As Jerlet droned on, Magda raised a hand to point at Linc. “What you’ve told us is false!”

The laser was back in Linc’s hand. Without even thinking of it, he fired at the screen. It exploded in a shower of sparks and plastic shards. The crowd screamed.

“You’re wrong!” he shouted at them, waving the laser. “Superstitious idiots… Jerlet was right. Well, I’m going to the bridge. I’m going to repair those machines. By myself, if I have to. And don’t any of you try to stop me!”

No one moved as he stomped out of the meeting room. Either to stop him or to help him.

Linc slammed the welder on the desk top in fury.

He was standing in front of the bridge’s main data screen. The access panels of the computer behind the screen were open, and the computer’s complex innards stood bare and revealed to him. They were a heartbreakingly hopeless mess. Something had smashed the plastic circuit chips, melted the metal tracings of the circuit boards, vaporized the eyelash-small transistors.

Hopeless, Linc told himself.

Two servomechs stood impassively behind him, waist-high cubes of metal with little domes of sensors atop them and tiny silent wheels underneath. Their mechanical arms hung uselessly at their sides. They couldn’t handle this kind of work, although they had been invaluable to Linc on many other jobs.

He still remembered how everyone in the corridors had fled in terror when the first few servomechs came through the tube-tunnel hatch and into the main passageway, trundling quietly and purposefully toward the bridge, under Linc’s radio command.

Now I’ll have to send one of them all the way back to the hub for more spare parts. Linc told himself. In the past months, more than one servomech had failed to make it all the way through the tube-tunnels and back again.

Linc frowned. “Well,” he said to the nearest of the little machines, “you’re just going to have to try to get through. I hope there are enough replacement parts left in the storage bins.”

For months now Linc had had no one to talk to except the servomechs. They weren’t very good company.

He programmed the servomech and it obediently rolled out to the hatch, snaked a flexible arm up to the control button, and let itself out of the bridge.

Linc arched his back tiredly. The bridge’s main observation viewscreen was focused on Baryta. The yellow sun was no longer merely a bright star; it showed a discernible disk. Even through the filtered screen display, it was bright enough to hurt Linc’s eyes. Close beside hung a bluish star: Beryl itself was now visible.

But no one came from the people to tell him that they saw Beryl, and that they now believed him.

“Let them meditate and frighten themselves to death,” Linc muttered as he walked tiredly toward the room he had made the servomechs fix up for him. His voice sounded harsh and strained; he hadn’t used it too much lately.

Starting to sound as ragged as Jerlet, he said to himself.

He glanced at the airtight hatch that let to the passageway as he walked down the long, curving length of the bridge. Once in a while he thought he saw someone peering through the tiny window at him, watching him. “Imagination,” he snorted. “You want them to come to you, so you imagine seeing faces. Next thing you know, you’ll start imagining the ghosts are real.”

They had seen the ghosts, all right. When the servomechs, led by Linc, carried the long-dead crew to the deadlock, the people had watched, aghast. No one offered to help. After the first few shocked moments of watching, they had all run into their rooms and shut their doors tightly.

The window in the hatch was dark, as usual, when he looked at—

There was a face there!

Linc stopped in his tracks. He blinked. The face was there, staring at him. The window was too clouded to make out who it was. A hint of yellow hair, that’s all he could see.

After a moment’s hesitation, Linc stepped over to the hatch. The face didn’t go away.

He reached for the hatch’s lever and pulled it open. Jayna stood on the other side, an odd-shaped package in her hands.

“H … hello,” Linc said, his voice nearly cracking.

She stood wide-eyed, frightened looking. But she didn’t run away.

“I brought you some food.” Jayna’s voice was high and trembly.

She looks so scared. Linc Thought. Scared and little and helpless. And awfully pretty.

“Thanks,” he said, reaching out for the package.

“I’ve been here before, but you never noticed me.”

“You should have rapped on the hatch.”

“Oh no… I didn’t want to… to bother you,” she said.

“I would have welcomed some company. It’s been pretty lonesome in here all by myself. Nothing to talk to except machines, and they don’t talk back.”

“Oh.”

They stood awkwardly facing each other, on either side of the hatch’s metal lip.