Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

Jon nodded. “I found the purpose of the Ship. And the destination. He found me out. He was going to denounce me. I— I—”

“You killed him.”

“I thought: One life or all? I took only one life. He would have taken all.”

They stood for a long moment, facing one another.

The old man said: “It is not right to take a life. It is not right nor proper.”

He stood there, stumpy and stolid, against the background of the engines, but there was something vital in him, some driving force within him as there was in the engines.

“Nor is it right,” he said, “to condemn the Folk to a fate that was not intended. It is not right to let a purpose go by default and ignorance.”

He asked. “The purpose of the Ship? It is a good purpose?”

“I do not know,” said Jon. “I can’t be sure. But at least it is a purpose. A purpose, any purpose, is better than none at all.”

He raised his head and brushed back his hair, plastered down with sweat across his brow.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go along with you. I’ve taken one life. I’ll not take any more.”

Joshua spoke slowly, gently. “No, lad. I am the one who goes along with you.”

To see the great depth of the emptiness in which the stars blazed like tiny, eternal watch fires, was bad enough when one looked out a blister port. To see it from the control room, where the great glass plate opened out into the very jaws of space, was something else again.

You could look down and down and there was no bottom, and you could look up or out and there was no stopping, and one moment you would swear that a certain star could be reached out for and plucked and the next moment it was so far away that your brain spun with the very thought of distance.

The stars were far.

All but one of them.

And that one blazed, a flaming sun, off toward the left.

Jon Hoff flicked a glance at Joshua, and the old man’s face was frozen in a mask that was disbelief and fear and something touching horror.

And, he thought, I knew. I knew what it might be like. I had some idea. But he had none at all.

He pulled his eyes from the vision plate and saw the banks of instruments and his stomach seemed to turn over and his fingers were all thumbs.

No time to live with the ship, he told himself. No time to get to know it as it really is. What must be done he must do by intellect alone, by the sketchy knowledge impressed upon his brain—a brain that was not trained or ready, that it might take many years to make trained and ready.

“What are we to do?” Joshua whispered. “Lad, what are we to do?”

And Jon Hoff thought: What are we to do?

He walked slowly forward and mounted the steps to the chair that said NAVIGATOR on the back of it.

Slowly he hoisted himself into the chair and it seemed that he sat on the edge of space itself, that he sat upon a precipice from which at any moment he might slip off and tumble into space.

He put his hands down carefully and gripped the chair’s arms and hung on tight and fought to orient himself, to know that he sat in a navigator’s chair and that in front of him were trips and buttons that he could press or trip and that the pressing and the tripping of them would send signals to the pulsing engine room.

“That star,” said Joshua. “That big one off to the left. The burning one…”

“All the stars are burning.”

“But that one. The big one…”

“That’s the one we headed for a thousand years ago,” said Jon.

And he hoped it was. He wished he could be certain that it was the one.

Even as he thought it, bells of alarm were ringing in his brain.

There was something wrong.

Something very wrong.

He tried to think, but space was too close to think, space was too big and empty and there was no use of thinking. One could not outwit space. One could not fight space. It was too big and cruel. Space did not care. It had no mercy in it. It did not care what happened to the ship or the people in it.

The only ones who had ever cared had been the people back on Earth who had launched the ship, and, for a little while, the Folk who rode the Ship. And finally, he and one old man. They two against all space.

The only ones who cared.

“It’s bigger than the others,” said Joshua. “We are closer to it.”

That was what was wrong!

That was what had rung the alarm within his mind.

The star was far too close.

It shouldn’t be that close!

He wrenched his eyes from space and looked down at the control board and all he saw was a meaningless mass of trips and levers, banks of buttons, rows of dials.

He watched the board and slowly his mind began to sort it out, to make some sense of it, the knowledge the machine had pounded into him beginning to take over.

He read the dials and he got some knowledge from them. He located certain controls that he had to know about.

Mathematics rose unbidden in his brain and did a nightmare dance.

It was useless, he told himself. It had been a good idea, but it hadn’t worked. You couldn’t educate a man by a machine.

You couldn’t pound into him the knowledge necessary to navigate a ship.

“I can’t do it, Joshua,” he cried. “It’s impossible to do it.”

Where were the planets? he wondered. How could he find the planets? And when he found them, if he found them, what would he do then?

The ship was falling toward the sun.

He didn’t know where to look for planets.

And they were going too fast—they were going far too fast.

Sweat burst out upon him, beading his brow and running down his face, dripping from his armpits.

“Take it easy, lad. Take it easy now.”

He tried to take it easy, but it didn’t work.

He reached down and slid open the tiny drawer beneath the control panel. There was paper there and pencils. He took out a sheet of paper and a pencil. He jotted down the readings on the dials.

Absolute velocity.

Increase of velocity.

Distance from the star.

Angular approach to the star.

There were other readings, but those were the essential ones, those were the ones that counted.

And one thought rose in his brain, one thought that had been impressed upon it time after time:

To navigate a ship is not a matter of driving it toward a certain point, but of knowing where it will be at any time within the immediate future.

He made his calculations, the mathematics struggling upward into his consciousness.

He made the calculations and he made a graph and then reached out and pushed a control lever forward two notches and hoped that he was right.

“You are making it out?” Joshua asked.

Jon shook his head.

“We’ll know—an hour from now we’ll know.”

A slight increase in thrust to keep the ship from plunging too close toward the sun. Skirting the sun and curving back, under the attraction of the sun, making a long wide loop out into space, and then back toward the sun again.

That was the way it worked—that was the way he hoped it worked.

That was the way the machine had told him it might work.

He sat there limp, wondering about the strange machine, wondering how much reliance you could put in tape running on a spool and a cap clamped on your head.

“We’ll be here a long time,” said Joshua.

Jon nodded. “I am afraid so, Joshua. It will take a long time.”

“Then,” the old man said, “I’ll go and get some food.”

He started toward the door, then turned back.

“Mary?” he asked.

Jon shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s leave them in peace. If we fail…”

“We won’t fail.”

Jon spoke sharply. “If we do, it’s best they never know.”