Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“That was a dream,” her father said coldly. “Reality is that we cannot do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not just a matter of the contract,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “We are saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising! We will be persons of great power!”

“No, Pop,” Janine said, “listen to me. You’ve all been talking about our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make their lives better. Well, aren’t we going to do our duty?”

He turned on her furiously. “Little minx, what do you know about duty? Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare check! We must think of ourselves as well!”

She would have replied, but Wan’s wide-eyed, frightened stare made her stop. “I hate this!” she announced. “Wan and I are going to go for a walk to get away from the lot of you!”

“He is not really a bad person,” she told Wan, once they were beyond the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.

Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue wall. “This is a place for water,” he said, “but it is a dead one. There are dozens of them, but almost all dead.”

Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. “You said one of them still works, but the water isn’t drinkable?”

“Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?”

“Well, I guess so.” She added, “Really, don’t let them get to you. They just get excited.”

“Yes, Janine.” But he was not in a talkative mood.

She said, “When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but if I wasn’t he’d bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That’s what I used to call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal.” He was listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not respond. “Then my mother died,” she said, “and Paul and Lurvy got married and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn’t so bad, really. He came to see me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“No,” he said. “What’s Santa Claus?”

“Oh, Wan!”

So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began to smile; and curiously, as Wan’s mood improved Janine’s grew worse. Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there? Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical. Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?

She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not tell that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special kind-less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying before he cashed in on his courage.

And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest. Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan’s complications were merely not the same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it for a toilet. Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. “I had to go somewhere,” he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the ship’s sanitary like everybody else.

“Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were sick, don’t you see? She’s always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff.”

“There ought to be some other way.”

“Well, there is.” There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny samples from each of them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan, once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer, and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to do so, a little late. “What’s the matter?”

He was acting uncomfortable. “When the Dead Men give me a medical check they stick things in me. I don’t like that.”

‘It’s for your own good, Wan,” she said severely. “Hey! That’s an idea. Let’s go talk to the Dead Men.”

And there was Janine’s own complicatedness. She didn’t really want to talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan’s dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. “Wan,” she said, “I want to try the couch.”

He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his long nose. “Lurvy told me not to do that any more,” he stated.

“I know she did. How do I get in?”

“First you tell me I must do what you all say,” he complained, “then you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing.”

She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. ‘Do I just pull the top down over me?”

“Oh,” he said, shrugging, “if you’ve made up your mind-yes. It snaps shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just push.”

She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at his petulant, concerned face. “Does it-hurt?”

“Hurt? No! What an idea!”

“Well, what does it feel like?”

“Janine,” he said severely, “you are very childish. Why do you ask questions when you can see for yourself?” And he pushed down on the shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and locked. “It is best if you go to sleep,” he called down to her, through the shining blue network of wire.

“But I’m not sleepy,” she objected reasonably. “I’m not anything. I don’t feel a thing. . . .”

And then she did.

It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when she opened her eyes, and these other-souls?-were not at all as real or as immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were comforting.