Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

Dr. Cavaness listened—and in the final fastness of his heart he prayed. Voicelessly, in a despairing language without words, he prayed to a parochial God to make this all untrue, to wipe it out, to let his world remain as it had been. Oh, God, preserve these small peripheries against all things incomprehensible; I am my world; its limits limit me; allow the stretches of eternity, the darknesses, to stay unreal; oh, God, deny this living proof that life unthinkable teems in those depths and distance, that they exist—

“Look, Dr. Howie,” Froberg cried, “we don’t know what they use it for—perhaps in navigation, or to direct a weapon of some sort. But we’re certain of one thing—and that may be a little hard to take. It wasn’t made in any country here; it wasn’t even made on Mars or Jupiter. It’s from the stars.”

Here was the answer, stated and defined. Here was the looming nightmare made real. Here was the naked Universe. Dr. Cavaness saw it. He held it still at bay. For moments out of time, time ceased. His mind turned inward, clawing the substance of his dissolving world, trying to fabricate one last escape. He thought of the corrosion which had encased the Doorstop. He thought of Chinese bronzes, ancient urns, green with their many-centuried burial in the earth. The past had vanished; there was safety in the past—

“Well, anyhow,” said Dr. Cavaness, “I guess it’s been a long, long time since they were here—two or three thousand years. It takes that long to get a chunk of bronze all rusted up like that. At least that long, Ted, doesn’t it?”

Ted Froberg looked at him. “It isn’t bronze,” he said. “That’s why we have it in that bell jar there, pumped full of helium, sealed. Maybe corrosion would take all that time, back in their atmosphere. But not in ours. In ours, it took three weeks.”

And Dr. Cavaness sat silently; he stared straight ahead— facing the majesty of God, facing a new maturity for man, facing the open door.

It is not true that Algis Budrys uses forty-seven different pen names; nor is it correct to say that all the best stories in all the s-f magazines are his. Both these rumors are wild exaggerations, and this anthology stands in proof of it. With the exception of two authors, one of whom I am reasonably certain lives in Wales, Great Britain, and the other in Chicago, U.S.A. (Budrys is from Jersey), I can personally vouch for the independent existence of every other writer in this book.

The facts in the Budrys case are sufficiently sensational. Over the past two years, writing under four bylines (that I know of, including “Paul Janvier,” who wrote this story, and his twin brother, Ivan), he has filled an astonishing number of printed pages with on astonishing variety of material, ranging in quality from just-good to knockout.

THE FIRST STARSHIP was home.

At first, the sight of the Endeavor's massive bulk on his TV screen held Cable's eager attention. At his first glimpse of the starship's drift to its mooring, alongside a berthing satellite, he'd felt the intended impression of human grandeur; more than most viewers, for he had a precise idea of the scale of size.

But the first twitch of ambiguity came as he watched the crew come out and cross to the Albuquerque shuttle on their suit jets. He knew those men: Dugan, who'd be impatient to land, as he'd been impatient to depart; Frawley, whose white hair would be sparsely tousled over his tight pink scalp; Snell, who'd have run to fat on the voyage unless he'd exercised like the very devil and fasted like a hermit; young Tommy Penn, who'd be unable to restrain his self-conscious glances into the cameras.

It was exactly those thoughts which dulled his vicarious satisfaction. He stayed in front of the set, watching through the afternoon, while the four men took off their suits and grouped themselves briefly for the still photographers, while they got past the advance guard of reporters into the shuttle's after compartment, and refused to speak for the video coverage.

It made no essential difference that Snell was lean and graceful, or that all four of them, Frawley and Penn included, were perfectly poised and unruffled. Perhaps it was a little more irritating that they were.

Endeavor's crew was stepping gracefully into history.

The cameras and Cable followed the four men out of the shuttle and across the sun-drenched field at Albuquerque. Together they watched every trivial motion; Dugan's first cigarette in six months; Frawley's untied shoelace, which he repaired by casually stopping in the middle of the gangway and putting a leg up on the railing; Tommy Penn giving a letter to a guard to mail.

Together with a billion other inhabitants of what was no longer Man's only planet, Cable looked into the faces of the President of the United States, of the United Nations Secretary General, of Premier Sobieski, and Marshal Siemens. Less than others, because he had a professional's residual contempt for eulogies, he heard what they had to say.

By nine or nine-thirty that night he had gathered the essential facts about the solar system of Alpha Centaurus. There were five planets, two of them temperate and easily habitable, one of them showing strong hints of extensive heavy metal ores. The trip had been uneventful, the stay unmarked by extraordinary incident. There was no mention of inhabitants.

There was also no mention of anything going wrong with the braking system, and that, perhaps, intensified the crook that had begun to bend one corner of Cable's thin mouth.

"You're welcome," he couldn't help grunting as Frawley described the smoothness of the trip and the simplicity of landing. That decelerating an object of almost infinite mass within a definitely finite distance was at all complicated didn't seem to be worthy of mention.

More than anything, it was the four men's unshakable poise that began to grate against him.

"Happens every day," he grunted at them, simultaneously telling himself he'd turned into a crabby old man at thirty-four, muttering spitefully at his friends for doing what he no longer could.

But that flash of insight failed to reappear when his part in Endeavor's development was lumped in with the "hardworking, dedicated men whose courage and brilliance made our flight possible." Applied to an individual, phrases like that were meaningful. Used like this, they covered everyone from the mess hall attendants to the man in charge of keeping the armadillos from burrowing under the barrack footings.

He snapped the set off with a peevish gesture. Perhaps, if he stayed up, the program directors, running out of fresh material at last, might have their commentators fill in with feature stuff like "amazing stride forward in electronics," "unified field theory," "five years of arduous testing on practical application to spaceship propulsion," and the like. Eventually, if they didn't cut back to the regular network shows first, they might mention his name. Somebody might even think it important that Endeavor had cost the total destruction of one prototype and the near-fatal crash of another.

But suddenly he simply wanted to go to bed. He spun his chair away from the set, rolled into the bedroom, levered himself up and pulled his way onto the bed. Taking his legs in his callused hands, he put them under the blankets, turned off the lights, and lay staring up at the dark.

Which showed and told him nothing.

He shook his head at himself. It was only twenty miles to the field from here. If he was really that much of a gloryhound, he could have gone. He was a dramatic enough sight. And, in all truth, he hadn't for a minute been jealous while the Endeavor was actually gone. It was just that today's panegyrics had been a little too much for his vanity to stave off.