Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

A set of lights moved slowly through the sky. “Oh,” his father said. “Well, people have had a lot of strange ideas. History is full of dead gods and formulas to make gold and notions that the world was about to end.” He adjusted the lamp, and opened to the contents page. His gray eyes ran down the list, and a faint smile played about his lips. “The truth of it, Will, is that the stars are a pleasant dream, but no one’s ever going out to them.”

“Why not?” Will was puzzled at the sound of irritation in his own voice. He was happy to see that his father appeared not to have noticed.

“They’re too far . They’re just too far.” He looked up through the plexidome at the splinters of light. “These people, Greenberg and Asimov: they lived, what, a thousand years ago?”

“Twentieth, twenty-first century. Somewhere in there.”

“You know that new ship they’re using in the outer System? The Explorer ?”

“Fusion engines,” said the boy.

“Yes. Do you know what its top recorded speed is?”

“About two hundred thousand kilometers an hour.”

“Much faster than anything this Greenberg ever saw. Anyhow, if they’d launched an Explorer to Alpha Centauri at the time these stories were written, at that speed, do you know how much of the distance they would have covered by now?”

Will had no idea. He would have thought they’d have arrived long ago, but he could see that wasn’t going to be the answer. His father produced a minicomp, pushed a few buttons, and smiled. “About five percent. The Explorer would need another nineteen thousand years to get there.”

“Long ride,” said Will, grudgingly.

“You’d want to take a good book.”

The boy was silent.

“It’s not as if we haven’t tried, Will. There’s an artificial world, half-built, out beyond Mars someplace. They were going to send out a complete colony, people, farm animals, lakes, forest, everything.”

“What happened?”

“It’s too far . Hell, Will, life is good here. People are happy. There’s plenty of real estate in the solar system if folks want to move. In the end, there weren’t enough volunteers for the world-ship. I mean, what’s the point ? The people who go would be depriving their kids of any kind of normal life. How would you feel about living inside a tube for a lifetime? No beaches. Not real ones anyhow. No sunlight. No new places to explore. And for what? The payoff is so far down the road that, in reality, there is no payoff.”

“In the stories,” Will said, “the ships are very fast.”

“I’m sure. But even if you traveled on a light beam, the stars are very far apart. And a ship can’t achieve an appreciable fraction of that kind of velocity because it isn’t traveling through a vacuum. At, say, a tenth of the speed of light, even a few atoms straying in front of it would blow the thing apart.”

Outside, the Christmas lights were blue on the snow. “They’d have been disappointed,” the boy said, “at how things came out.”

“Who would have?”

“Benford. Robinson. Sheffield.”

The father looked again at the table of contents. “Oh,” he said. He riffled idly through the pages. “Maybe not. It’s hard to tell, of course, with people you don’t know. But we’ve eliminated war, population problems, ecological crises, boundary disputes, racial strife. Everybody eats pretty well now, and for the only time in its history, the human family stands united. I suspect if someone had been able to corner, say—” he flipped some pages, “—Jack Vance, and ask him whether he would have settled for this kind of world, he’d have been delighted. Any sensible person would. He’d have said to hell with the stars! ”

“No!” The boy’s eyes blazed. “He wouldn’t have been satisfied. None of them would.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it matters. Physical law is what it is, and it doesn’t take much account of whether we approve or not. Will, if these ideas hadn’t become dated, and absurd, this kind of book wouldn’t have disappeared. I mean, we wouldn’t even know about Great Tales of the Space Age if someone hadn’t dropped a copy of the thing into the time capsule. That should tell you something.” He got up. “Gotta go, kid. Can’t ignore the guests.”

“But,” said the boy, “you can’t really be sure of that. Maybe the time was never right before. Maybe they ran out of money. Maybe it takes all of us working together to do it.” He slid back into the pillows. His father held up his hands, palms out, in the old gesture of surrender he always used when a game was going against him. “We could do that now , Dad,” Will continued. “There’s a way to build a Space Beagle . Somehow .”

“Let me know if you figure it out, son.” The lights died, and the door opened. “You’ll have to do it yourself, though. Nobody else is giving it any thought. Nobody has for centuries.”

The snow did not come. And while Will Cutler stared through the plexidome at the faraway stars, thousands of others were also discovering Willis and Swanwick and Tiptree and Sturgeon. They lived in a dozen cities across Will’s native Venus. And they played on the cool green hills of Earth and farmed the rich Martian lowlands; they clung to remote shelters among the asteroids, and watched the skies from silver towers beneath the great crystal hemispheres of Io and Titan and Miranda.

The ancient summons flickered across the worlds, insubstantial, seductive, irresistible. The old dreamers were bound, once again, for the stars.

They were looking down on a dust storm racing across the Martian surface when the transmission came in. “ Venture , we are losing control of the situation here. The plague is everywhere. I don’t know how much longer we can keep the station open. Abort and return.”

Status lamps blinked in the darkened cockpit. Alice looked at him, her eyes sad, but for a long time nobody said anything.

“Tommy.” The distant voice lost its impersonal tone. “We’ll try to stay with this—.” And the transmission exploded in a burst of static.

Tommy glanced around at the others. “What do you think?” he asked.

Frank stared at the radio. “Make the landing. We can’t go back without making the landing.”

Alice nodded. “Yes.” Her eyes gleamed in the light thrown off by the instruments. “Do it.”

Tommy took a deep breath. Below them the storm swirled across the lower latitudes.

“It came in over the river, out of the east. Right over there, Tommy, just beyond Harpie’s place. And it came right past where we’re standing now and touched ground maybe there , near the barn. It kept going, of course, because it was going hell-bent, fastest thing I ever saw, all lit up.

“You never saw an airplane, I guess, did you? Well, they’re really something, especially at night. And especially this one because it wasn’t really an airplane at all. It was somethin’ they kept up on the station, it was in orbit, and when the Mars mission came back it was the only way they could get home.”

“Because,” said Tommy, “everything was shut down by then.”

“That’s right. The Death had been running eight months and there just wasn’t nobody left.”

Tommy looked the length of the plain, tracing the glide path from the woods on the east past Harpie’s, past the crumbling hangars and maintenance buildings that everybody said were haunted, past the place where they sat on their horses. On into the night. The sky was cold and damp and threatening.