Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years

Damn. I thought for a while that I was rid of Leroy Chang.

November 16? 17? 18? 2375

Somewhere in Ultraspace

A month has passed, I know, since I last fingered a message cube. Something about voyages in ultraspace discourages my impulse to communicate. I’m not even sure what day it is. There’s an Earthstyle calendar somewhere aboard, but I can’t bother to look for it.

We closed up shop on Higby V right on schedule, leaving the site sealed so that the next archaeologists to work it — hopefully, a less flighty bunch than we turned out to be — will find it intact. The cruiser arrived and picked us up on the twenty-first. We did not inform Galaxy Central that we’ve taken the globe with us. That makes us renegades of sort, but it’ll be months before the bureaucrats back home find that out, and by then, maybe, we’ll have some gaudy new find to calm them. As Mirrik learned after his boozy prance through the lab, any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough.

Our ship is a standard interstellar cruiser, making an upper quadrant run between Rigel and Aldebaran. The stop at GGC 1145591 is slightly out of the way, but not too much, and wasn’t hard to arrange. All it took was stash. Old Earthside proverb: Stash buys. We will have a rented planetship at our disposal so that we can search the GGC 1145591 system for our asteroid. It’s already on its way there from Aldebaran to await us. That took stash too. Dr. Schein overdrew our thumb account long ago, but he has a glib way with computers and is running on credit now; we’ll manage so long as Galaxy Central doesn’t find out. May the Almighty Proton protect us if we draw a blank on this expedition — if we have, to use the fine medieval expression, gone off to chase the wild duck.

Our quarters are comfortable, as before. Spacious cabins, good library, recreation facilities, decent food. The crewmen keep to themselves, we to ourselves. Time blurs strangely aboard an ultradrive trip, and I find myself doing without sleep for what may possibly be two or three days in a row, and then sleeping for days. Or so it seems.

Everybody is much keyed up, especially Drs. Schein and Horkkk. They walk around perpetually surprised that they ever found the slice to abandon Higby V for the present quest. Dr. Horkkk, you know, is hardly a charming romantic liberated adventurous type, and as near as I can read his expression, he seems to be saying, “How can this be me?” Dr. Schein looks equally baffled. Pilazinool, on the other hand, is quietly confident, rarely unlaces his limbs any more, seems to feel that we have been blessed by destiny. We’ll see.

My chief social accomplishment on the trip so far has been to push Jan back to her obsession with Saul Shahmoon.

I’m not sure how I managed that. I thought Jan and I were working on the same wavelength.

I don’t mean that anything very passionate had happened between us, or that we were about to apply even for temporary marriage status, or anything remotely like that. Our contacts have been surprisingly chaste. We’ve done a little quiet biologizing, yes, but nothing has occurred between us that would have been amiss even in a fairly puritanical era. Maybe I’m a spinless feeb for having been so restrained. We are adults. It says right here.

However, despite all this chastity, Jan and I did seem to be blending into a sort of team, and I don’t think anyone really minded it, Leroy Chang excepted. As the youngest and (let’s face it) most attractive Earthfolk in the group, Jan and I were drawing a kind of paternal approval from the others. They beamed at us a lot. I always feel put down when I’m beamed at, don’t you?

They don’t beam at us lately, because Jan’s been spending her time with Saul again. When I see her I get the freeze, right down to absolute zero.

I don’t know what I did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say that made her chill off on me. Maybe I started to bore her. I can be so terribly clean-cut and bright-eyed, sometimes — my worst fault, you’d agree.

Maybe she’s suddenly developed a terrific interest in philately.

Maybe she never was in tune with me at all, but just was using me to heat up some jealousy in Saul.

Who knows? Not I. Not a clue.

It’s been going on for ten, twelve days now. Not to sponge syllables about it, I’m upset. I don’t have any right to feel possessive toward Jan, considering that all that went on with us was a kind of glorified hand-holding, more or less. But I don’t enjoy seeing her disappear into Saul’s cabin for two and three hours at a stretch. With the door locked, too.

Having an imagination can be an awful burden sometimes.

One marginal benefit of this leg of the trip is that I’ve had a chance to get to know Kelly Watchman better. As you know, androids don’t turn me on a lot, and until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t said anything to Kelly, aside from shoptalk as we dug, but “Lousy weather, isn’t it?” and “Please pass the tingle tablets” and “Do you have the time?” and like that.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever really talked with an android before. I knew a few at college, but they stuck together and didn’t go out of their way to solicit the company of flesh-and-blooders, and I never tried to impose myself on them. And of course Dad has some androids working for him in fairly high-level jobs, but it didn’t occur to me to make friends with them, either. I’ve always been a bit edgy and withdrawn around minority people; it’s the well-known guilt feelings of the overprivileged classes that hold me back.

The night I first talked with Kelly was before Jan and I had started to drift apart. The reason I wasn’t with Jan that evening was that she’d been feeling headachy and cranky, and had gone off to use the ship’s nothing chamber in the hopes that a few hours cut off from all sensory stimuli would help her relax. Nobody else much was around, either; Dr. Schein and Dr. Horkkk were writing reports, Pilazinool and Mirrik were battling to the death over the chessboard, 408b had locked itself up for meditation, and so on. I was wandering around the ship, feeling left out and adrift, when Kelly came up to me in the library cabin and said, “May I sit with you a while, Tom?”

“I’d love it, Kelly,” I said grandly, hopping up to draw her a chair, making a big chivalrous gesture out of it — the overcompensation of guilt again.

We settled down facing each other across a glittering single-crystal table. I asked her if she’d like a drink and she said no — of course — but wouldn’t mind if I had one. I said I’d pass also. These genteel maneuvers occupied a couple of minutes.

Then in a low voice she said, “That man has been following me around all evening. How can I make him go away?”

I looked toward the cabin door and glimpsed Leroy Chang skulking in the corridor. Leroy is the only true skulker I’ve ever known. He glared at me really furiously, as though telling me how loathsome I was to keep getting between him and the women he was chasing. Then he stalked away, no doubt hissing a little and wishing he had a mustache to twirl.

“The poor quonker,” I said. “He’s got a sex problem, I guess.”

Kelly flashed a dazzling smile. “When will he learn that I have no interest in helping him solve it?”

I felt a pang of sympathy for skulking Leroy. The android sitting opposite me looked fantastically desirable. Kelly’s sparkling auburn hair tumbled almost to her shoulders; it gleamed and glowed with the sheen that comes only out of android creation vats. Her deep green eyes seemed like precious jewels; her flawless skin was not the skin of mere mortals; and in her careless way she had donned a clinging sprayon wrap that amounted to not much more than a bit of fluff up here and a bit more down there. She was a vision of seductiveness — a cruel joke played by the lab technicians who had put her together out of amino acids and electricity, because they hadn’t conditioned any sex into Kelly at all. I imagine she could have made Leroy Chang happy in a way, if she had wanted to, but she didn’t want to, and didn’t even want to want to, and couldn’t begin to understand what Leroy was looking for. The sweaty urges of humanity are as alien to her as the hunger of a Shilamakka to convert himself into machinery is to us.