Ben Bova - Exiled from Earth

He nodded, his face frozen into a bitter mask. “I understand.”

He left his office, walked around the computer building, and picked up Bonnie They walked across the lab complex in silence Overhead the trees filtered an unbelievable sunset sky of pink and saffron and soft violet Through the boles of the trees, off at the edge of the reddened sea, the sun was huge and distended as it touched the horizon.

If Bonnie and Lou had little to say to each other, Anton Kori more than filled their silence The moment they stepped through the door into his cluttered laboratory/workroom, he started chattering.

“It’s fantastic, you’ll never believe it, it’s like something out of the cinema.”

He bustled around the big room, dragging a table loaded with complex electronic gear across the floor and positioning it near the door.

“Lou, would you turn on the switch for the laser?”

Kori pointed to the wall over his workbench “No, not that one! The next one, on your left. Yes.”

Lou flicked the switch. He saw nothing in the room that looked like a laser, but there was a hum of electrical power coming from someplace.

“Wait ’til you see this. Bonnie, the lights, please. Behind you.”

With a slightly amused smile, Bonnie turned off the overhead lights. In the darkened room, Kori’s bony face was eerily lit by the glow of the equipment on his table.

“Now just a minute while I use this old slide for focusing…” he muttered.

Lou found a rolling chair and pushed it over toward Bonnie. She sat, and he stood beside her, facing the slightly luminescent viewscreen at the far end of the room. A slide came on, some sort of graph, with many colored curves weaving across it.

“Now the focus,” Kori mumbled. The graph suddenly became three-dimensional. The curves seemed to stand in the middle of the room. Lou felt he could walk around them and look at them from the other side.

“Okay, good.” Kori said, so excited that his English had a decided Slavic edge to it. “Now we see what no man has ever seen before—except me.”

The room went totally dark for an instant, and then it was filled with stars. Lou heard Bonnie gasp. It was like being out in space, stars as far as the eye could see: white, yellow, orange, red, blue—unblinking points of fire in the black depths of space. In the distance, the nebulous haze of the Milky Way glowed softly.

“Wide angle view, looking aft,” Kori explained matter-of-factly. “That bright yellow star in the center is—the sun.”

“These are the tapes from the Starfarer? ” Lou asked, and immediately felt sheepish because it was such a needless question.

He sensed Kori nodding in the darkness, “It took the ship more than thirty years to reach the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. And it took more than four years just for the laser beam to carry this information back to us.”

Another moment of darkness and then another picture of stars.

“Wide view forward,” Kori said.

There was still a bright yellow star in the center of the field of view. Kori flicked through several more holograms. The yellow star grew brighter, closer. Soon, Lou could see that it was two stars.

“Alpha Centauri,” Kori said in an awed voice, as if anything louder might shatter the pictures. “Proxima is so distant and faint from its two big brothers that I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet. It’s out among those background stars someplace. We need an astronomer here!”

Lou shared Kori’s awe. “Alpha Centauri,” he echoed.

“You were right, Anton,” said Bonnie. “This is fantastic… so beautiful.”

“Wait,” Kori answered. “You haven’t seen the best yet.”

He flicked through another dozen holograms. The double star grew larger. Lou could see that one of the stars was smaller and redder than the big yellow sun.

“What are those two flecks, near the yellow star?” Lou asked.

Kori giggled excitedly. “Flecks? Flecks indeed! Those are planets! Two planets orbiting around Alpha Centauri!”

Lou had no words. He simply stared at the screen as Kori flicked on several more holograms, closer and closer, of the two worlds. On the very last slide only the second-most planet was in view. It looked like a fat round ball, yellowish-green, streaked with white clouds.

“I haven’t had a chance to analyze the spectroscopic data,” Kori said, “but those clouds look like water vapor to me. It’s a bigger planet than Earth, probably a heavier gravity. But if there’s water, there could be life!”

It was very late when Bonnie and Lou walked with Kori back to the dormitory. None of them had eaten dinner. In their excitement over the star pictures they had simply forgotten all about it.

Kori stopped in the middle of the road, at a spot where the trees didn’t overhang, and threw his head back.

“Look at them!” he shouted. “Millions and billions of stars. And millions and billions of planets. Some of them must be just like this Earth, waiting for us to reach them. And we can! We can reach them, and we will!” He laughed loudly, and then gave a shattering shrill whistle as he swung his long arms up toward the sky.

“Hey, easy… you sound like you’re high,” Lou said.

“I am high,” Kori answered happily. “I’m drunk with joy and knowledge and power. We can reach out to new Earths. That’s enough to make any man drunk.”

Lou shook his head in the moonless dark. “Maybe we’ll need new Earths. We’ve certainly fouled up this one.”

Kori laughed. He wasn’t in the mood for seriousness. “Wait until the people of the world see these pictures. Wait until they realize what it means…”

“I thought the government wasn’t going to let the news out,” Bonnie said.

Lou answered, “Marcus and Minister Bernard will get the pictures out to the newsmen somehow, I’ll bet.”

Her voice was quiet but firm. “Will they? Do you really think that they intend to let the world know about this? Or about genetic engineering, when we get it to work right?”

Lou stopped and looked at her. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

For a moment Bonnie didn’t reply. Then, “I’m not sure… I could be wrong. There’s nothing definite, but I’ve just got a… well, a feeling, sort of…”

“Go on.”

“Well… why do they have Anton working on nuclear explosives? What guarantees do we have that our work will be made public? Why are the biochemists working on cortical suppressors…?”

“Suppressors?”

“Uh-huh. I just found out this afternoon,” Bonnie said. “That’s what they need the computer time for: to select the chemical suppressor that does the best job of degrading cortical activity—permanently.”

“But that would destroy a person’s intelligence,” Lou said.

“I know,” Bonnie answered. “And I think they’re planning to use Big George as a guinea pig.”

Lou felt a hot bomb go off in his guts. “No, they wouldn’t… if this is true, then…”

“Then we’ve been tricked into working for a group of people who’re planning to overthrow the government and turn half the world’s people into mindless zombies,” Bonnie said.

There was a long, long silence, broken only by the night sounds of insects from the trees and brush, and the distant sound of the surf. Finally, Kori’s voice floated ruefully through the darkness:

“Well, at least I don’t feel drunk anymore.”

It took Lou nearly a week to convince himself that Bonnie was right.

He used Ramo as his source of information and his teacher. He didn’t know very much about the work the biochemists were doing. So he followed their progress by. checking Ramo’s programs and memory bank every evening,’ after his own work was finished. Within his vast memory Ramo stored most of the world’s knowledge of biochemistry. So the computer became Lou’s teacher, and explained patiently and with machinelike thoroughness exactly what Marcus’ biochemists were trying to do.