Уильям Макгиверн - Collected Fiction - 1940-1963

Ramsey came awake all at once, springing to his feet fully dressed and flinging aside his cloak, which he’d used as a blanket. “Margot!” he called.

“She’s gone,” the Vegan girl repeated. “When I awoke she wasn’t here. The door—”

Ramsey ran to the door. It was a heavy plastic irising door. It was locked and naturally would not respond to the whorl patterns of Ramsey’s thumb.

“So now we’re prisoners,” Ramsey said. “I don’t get it.”

“At least there’s food in the kitchen.”

“All right. Let’s eat.”

There were two windows in the room, but when Ramsey looked out he saw they were at least four stories up. They’d just have to wait for Margot Dennison.

It took the Vegan girl some time to prepare the unfamiliar Earth-style food with which Margot Dennison’s kitchen was stocked. Ramsey used the time to prowl around the apartment. It was furnished in Sirian-archaic, a mode of furniture too feminine to suit Ramsey’s tastes. But then, the uni-sexual Sirians, of course, often catered to their own feminine taste.

Ramsey found nothing in Margot Dennison’s apartment which indicated she had done any acting on Irwadi, and that surprised him, for he’d assumed she had plied her trade here as elsewhere. He felt a little guilty about his snooping, then changed his mind when he remembered that Margot had locked them in.

In one of the slide compartments of what passed for a bureau in Sirian-archaic, he found a letter. Since it was the only piece of correspondence in the apartment, it might be important to Margot Dennison, thought Ramsey. And if it were important to her...

Ramsey opened the letter and read it. Dated five Earth months before, it ran:

My darling Margot: By the time you read this I shall be dead. Ironical, isn’t it? Coming so close — with death in the form of an incurable cancer intervening.

As you know, Margot, I always wished for a son but never had one. You’ll have to play that role, I’m afraid, as you always have. Here is the information I told you I would write down. Naturally, if you intend to do anything about it, you’ll guard it with your life.

Apparently the hyper-space pattern from Irwadi to Earth is the one I was looking for. The proto-men, if I may be bold enough to call them that, first left hyper-space at that point, perhaps a million, perhaps five million, Earth years ago. I don’t have to tell you what this means, my child. I’ve already indicated it to you previously. It suffices to remind you that, in what science has regarded as the most amazing coincidence in the history of the galaxy, humanoid types sprang up on some three thousand stellar worlds simultaneously between one and five million years ago. I say simultaneously although there is the possibility of a four million year lag: indications are, however, that one date would do quite well for all the worlds.

Proto-man was tremendously ahead of us in certain sciences, naturally. For example, each humanoid type admirably fits the evolutionary pattern on its particular planet. The important point, Margot, is the simultaneity of the events: it means that proto-man left hyper-space, his birth-place, and peopled the man-habitable worlds of the galaxy at a single absolute instance in time. This would clearly be impossible if the thousands of journeys involved any duration. Therefore, it can only be concluded that they were journeys which somehow negated the temporal dimension. In other words, instant travel across the length and breadth of the galaxy!

Whoever re-discovers proto-man’s secret, needless to say, will be the most influential, the most powerful, man in the galaxy. Margot, I thought that man would be me. It won’t be now.

But it can be you, Margot. It is my dying wish that you continue my work. Let nothing stop you. Nothing. Remember this, though: I cannot tell you what to expect when you reach the original home of proto-man. In all probability the whole race has perished, or we’d have heard of them since. But I can’t be sure of that. I can’t be sure of anything. Perhaps proto-man, like some deistic god, became disinterested in the Milky Way Galaxy for reasons we’ll never understand. Perhaps he still exists, in hyper-space.

Finally, Margot, remember this. If you presented this letter to the evolutionary scientists on any of the worlds, they’d laugh at you. It is as if unbelief of the proto-man legend were ingrained in all the planetary people, perhaps somehow fantastically carried from generation to generation in their genes because proto-man a million years ago decided that each stellar world must work out its own destiny independently of the others and independent of their common heritage. But in my own case, there are apparently two unique factors at work. In the first place, as you know, I deciphered — after discovering it quite by accident — what was probably a proto-man’s dying message to his children, left a million years ago in the ruins on Arcturus II. In the second place, isn’t it quite possible that my genes have changed, that I have mutated and therefore do not have as an essential part of my make-up the unbelief of the proto-man legend?

Good luck to you, Margot. I hope you’re willing to give up your career to carry out your dying father’s wish. If you do, and if you succeed, more power will be yours than a human being has ever before had in the galaxy. I won’t presume to tell you how to use it.

Oh, yes. One more thing. Since Earth and Alpha Centauri are on a direct line from Irwadi, Centauri will do quite well as your outbound destination if for some reason you can’t make Earth. Again, good luck, my child.

With all my love,

Ramsey frowned at the letter. He did not know what to make of it. As far as he knew, there was no such thing as a proto-man myth in wide currency around the galaxy. He had never heard of proto-man. Unless, he thought suddenly, the dying man could have simply meant all the myths of human creation, hypothecating a first man who, somehow, had developed independently of the beasts of the field although he seemed to fit their evolutionary pattern...

But what the devil would hyper-space have to do with such a myth? Proto-man, whatever proto-man was, couldn’t have lived in hyper-space. Not in that bleak, ugly, faceless infinity...

Unless, Ramsey thought, more perplexed than ever, it was the very bleak, ugly, faceless infinity which made proto-man leave.

“Breakfast!” the Vegan girl called. Ramsey joined her in the kitchen, and they ate without talking. When they were drinking their coffee, an Earth-style beverage which the Vegan girl admitted liking, the apartment door irised and Margot Dennison came in.

Ramsey, who had replaced the letter where he’d found it, said: “Just what the devil did you think you were doing, locking us in?”

“For your own protection, silly,” Margot told him smoothly. “I always lock my door when I go out, so I locked it today. Naturally, we won’t have a chance to apply for a new lock. Besides, why arouse suspicion?”

“Where’d you go?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“Believe it or not,” Ramsey said caustically, “I’ve seen a thousand credits before. I’ve turned down a thousand credits before, in jobs I didn’t like. As for being stranded here on Irwadi, it’s all the same to me whether I’m on Irwadi or elsewhere.”

“What does all that mean, Captain Ramsey?”

“It means keep us informed. It means don’t get uppity.”

Margot laughed and dropped a vidcast tape on the table in front of Ramsey. He read it and did not look up. There was a description of himself, a description of the Vegan girl, and a wanted bulletin issued on them. For assaulting the Chief of Irwadi Security, the bulletin said. For assaulting a drunken fool, Ramsey thought.