Читать книгу The Florians - Brian Stableford - Страница 3

PROLOGUE

It was late September, the trees shedding their useless leaves, stripping down for the winter with the aid of a hurried, anxious wind. A man and a boy were walking along the river bank. The river was dark and turbid, and despite the waves fluttering its surface it seemed heavy and sluggish. The banks on either side, where the frail trees still eked out their lives despite the shadows which hid them from the sun for most of the day, were flanked with high, smooth faces of concrete. The living city, where windowed buildings blossomed from the roofs of the labyrinthine catacombs, was high in the sky. Its sounds filtered down into the deep crack where the river ran, but they were distant, muted. The place where the man walked with his son was part of an older, forgotten world: a world where privacy remained.

The man wore a coat, and his hands were buried in his pockets as he cowered from the chilly gusts. His head was held at an angle, turned away from the dust which the wind picked up and threatened to hurl into his eyes. The boy was more lightly dressed, but he seemed accustomed to the wind, oblivious to its hostilities. He walked with a lighter step, but slowly—as though uncertain of his direction.

The man had just passed forty, the age at which—by the tradition of common parlance—life may begin again, changing direction and entering a new phase. The boy was stranded in the ambiguous years between youth and maturity—perhaps seventeen, or a year to either side. They were both tall, lanky, dark haired. The man wore a heavy tan—the legacy of time recently spent in the tropics, which had not had time to fade. The boy, beside him, seemed unnaturally pale of skin.

They were talking, one to another, but an interested observer might have noted the way that their eyes flickered from side to side, and the fact that they always walked slightly apart. Despite their blood relationship, they seemed to be strangers, lost in the desert of their conversation, unable to meet and exchange any real confidence. They did not know what to say, or how.

“I’m sorry there isn’t more time,” said the man. His name was Alexis Alexander. His son’s name was Peter. “The schedule is tight. And the operation...well, it isn’t exactly secret, but there’s to be no publicity. The political situation you know better than I...it’s delicate.”

“Slipping quietly away into the depths of space,” said the boy. “Behind the nation’s back.”

“It’s nothing to do with the nation,” said the man. “It’s the whole world.”

“Behind all the nations’ backs,” amended the boy.

They said more with the manner of their speaking than with the words they used. The man was reluctantly defensive. He chose his words carefully, not because he was undecided in his thoughts, but because he knew that what he said was offensive to the boy. The boy was doubtful and unhappy. He was also resentful—determined to place the responsibility for his doubt and unhappiness on his father’s shoulders.

“You know that I believe in this,” said the man. “I’ve worked for it all my life. I believe that this is something which must be done, for historical as well as moral reasons. All my life I’ve wanted the chance I have now. Please try to understand that.”

“I don’t understand,” said the boy. “I can’t understand how anyone can condone—let alone participate in—such a criminal waste of effort, of resources, of money. What’s the purpose of history if we can’t and won’t learn from our mistakes? When the last starship carried colonists into space seventy-five years ago the Earth was in ruins. Seven billion people were left with the wreck of a world which had used up everything it had to send seven million people to alien planets. For every man that went out, a thousand were left behind. And for every dollar spent on the men who stayed, a thousand were spent on the ones who left. And yet it took years of fighting, civil war endemic over ninety percent of the globe, to get the lunacy stopped. Now you—and people like you—want to start it all again. You want to bring back the space age. You want to bring back the world where people’s needs were met with hopeless dreams. Even in seventy-five years, we haven’t begun to sort out the problems which the human race faces here on Earth, and you want to put the clock back, to forget all the real problems and put all our efforts into denying a thousand men so that one can take a crazy chance in space. What’s the use of a new world—a hundred new worlds—when we can’t even look after the one we’ve got?”

The man picked up a loose stone from the earth beside the towpath, held it crooked between thumb and forefinger, and then sent it spinning out across the wave-flecked surface. It skipped once, twice, and then disappeared a foot or two short of the opposite bank. The waves scurrying upstream against the current hungrily absorbed the ripples which spread out from each point of contact.

“There’ll always be problems on Earth,” said the man simply. He didn’t want to argue.

“But we don’t always have to turn our backs on them.”

“We can’t wait for Utopia,” said the man. “It’s like tomorrow—forever in the future.”

The boy resented the lightness of the remark, but he relaxed nevertheless. He let a few seconds pass by, while the wind drained the tension from the air. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Where did the money come from?”

The man almost smiled. He made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. “It came in. Covertly. We didn’t get any vast handouts. No government voted us a share of its gross national product. But the UN has some first-class beggars. It was borrowed, stolen, extorted...whatever you care to call it. I don’t know how it shows up in the books when governments publish their accounts. Long-term investment, research, contribution to international project work—there are a million euphemisms to excuse the way taxpayers’ money is spent. It took years, mind you, to get the Daedalus fitted out, and more years while it sat idle until they could pay for its first run. There were scandals, but over the years these things get forgotten. There was no big splash when the ship came back after the first run, and there’ll be no big splash when she takes off again. It’s not secret—it’s just that the story’s been dragged out so long people are past caring.”

“That’s not true,” said the boy, with a bitterness in his voice which made it clear that it was true. “There are people who care. There are people who’d like to blow that ship to kingdom come if they could only get to it. You know what they call you...the men who ride that ship? Rat-catchers. That’s what they say you are—interplanetary rat-catchers.”

The man smiled bleakly.

“I know,” he replied. “And it’s true. We’re rat-catchers. Only I don’t take the word as an insult. It needn’t be said in a derisory way. There are nicer ways of describing our mission, but rat-catcher is good enough for me. Do you know why they call us rat-catchers?”

“Because that’s what you do,” said the boy. “You contact all the old colonies—the ones that were set up a couple of hundred years ago. And you clear out their vermin. Because that’s all that you can do.”

The man nodded. “That’s the trouble with a no-publicity policy,” he said. “You can’t keep secrets, so people get to know anyhow, but they get the vulgarized version. Well...OK. We recontact the colonies, we offer them help, and the only help that’s easy to offer is know-how. Scientific know-how. We ask them what sort of problems they have, and we try to help them solve the problems. If they have problems with vermin, we find them a way to exterminate the vermin. So we’re rat-catchers.

“But you have to realize that that’s the kind of problems the colonies do have. You have to remember that the old colony ships were built for the purpose of transporting as many people as possible from point A to point B. The ships were giant tin cans, with humans packed into them like sardines. The colonies started with virtually nothing in the way of resources. No continual contact with Earth was possible—it’s easy and cheap to build big ships that lift once and land once, but it’s next to impossible to finance ships like Daedalus which can go in and out of gravity holes more or less at will. The colonies we’re recontacting now have been out of touch with Earth for at least a century; some of them were never contacted at all, but just left to get on with things. The colony worlds had been passed as habitable, the colonists were given the barest elements of a civilization, and that was it. They had to start in on their new worlds with very little else but bare hands. Now, three or four or seven generations later, we go back to them. What’s the most important thing we can take them? What’s the thing that they need most?

“We can no more send them equipment now than we could when they first went out. We can’t take them anything material at all. So we take them the means to find answers to their problems. Individual colonies have individual problems, but we know damn well that they all have one general class of problems to face, and that’s the class of problems of co-adaptation.

“A colony is one life-system invading another. It’s the seed of Earth trying to implant itself in alien soil. Sure, the worlds have been surveyed, the life-systems inspected, and the whole venture certified practical by men who are trained to guess and guess right. But it’s not as simple as that. When a life-system in balance is invaded by another there are bound to be ecological repercussions, both short-term and long-term. The colonists have no way of analyzing the ecological effects of their invasion, let alone any capacity to mount a long-range scientific program to deal with them. Most problems can be dealt with at a superficial level—treatment of the symptoms, as you might say—but over a period of time there are bound to be permanent antagonisms developed between the two life-systems. The invasion will cause permanent changes in both systems, as they react to one another and—in the long term—adapt to one another.

“The Daedalus was designed to recontact colonies. It was built with the assumption that such colonies would, by now, be established to a certain degree. They would be technologically primitive even with a large reservoir of knowledge and information to draw upon. And they would be engaged in a constant battle with the alien life-system: a battle which had, itself, become a way of life. The purpose of the Daedalus is to help such colonies win such battles. It’s a flying laboratory, fitted out for the specific tasks of genetic analysis and genetic engineering. Its job is to help resolve the antagonisms which inevitably develop between the life-systems. At a crude level, the means which the alien life-system evolves to attack the invading life-system have to be neutralized, and that’s what the recontact mission is for. According to the vulgar metaphor, it’s a matter of catching alien rats. Fair enough—the rats have to be caught.”

“I see,” said the boy flatly.

“It’s necessary,” said the man, trying very hard to make his point. “Without such help, colonies may die. You complain about the waste of effort putting them there. But wouldn’t the real waste be leaving them to die? Even if it was wrong to send the colony ships out—and I can’t agree even with that—surely it can’t be wrong to do what we have to in order to give them a reasonable chance of success. We’re committed now. We have to be.”

The boy stared steadfastly forward, watching the river as it flowed into the narrow crack that was the faraway horizon of the concrete walls. Though parallel, the walls did not appear to meet at infinity. There was a thin sliver of sky, out beyond the city’s boundary.

“You don’t have to convince me,” said the boy. “It’s nothing to do with me. You’ve never pretended to be any different. You’re an ecologist...all your life you’ve been involved in experiments with alien plants brought to Earth in the old days...that and trying to figure out how to help Earth’s life-system survive the rape that the human race has subjected it to these last few hundred years. This Daedalus thing is made for you. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to use your ability and your training. You don’t need to justify yourself to me.”

“But you hate me for it,” said the man, the words slipping from momentarily unguarded lips.

“No,” said the boy. “Why should I?”

The man could find nothing to say for a few moments. When he began again it was a return to safer ground.

“The first run proved the thinking right,” he said, in a low, patient voice. “Of the five worlds contacted, four had the kind of problem the Daedalus personnel could attack in the lab. The rats were caught—and you can’t underestimate the significance of that. Those colonies were helped.”

“And what about the fifth?”

The man looked away, his gaze flickering across the water to the far bank, and on up the concrete face to the heights where the grimy windows gleamed with reflected light. He continued to scan the arrays of glass panes, as though trying to imagine the myriad private lives concealed behind them.

“The fifth colony had already failed,” the boy accused.

“The ship was too late,” said the man. “The political climate didn’t improve fast enough for them. Mother Earth spent too long searching her pockets for the loose change.”

“Thousands of people,” said the boy. “They shipped out with promises of a garden of Eden. Out of the cesspit into the grave. A children’s crusade. In pursuit of a crazy dream. Was it really worth it?”

“They could have succeeded.”

“Could they?”

“If help had come sooner.”

“And what about the people here?” asked the boy. “Billions of people. Facing the third great plague. Facing starvation. Facing foul water and poisoned air. Who’d have helped them if all the money was spent on flying laboratories to help the colonies? Your ship may save thousands of lives. You and your mission may work wonders out there in space. But how many lives could the same money save right here? Even in this country—this city—where, by the grace of God, things are supposed to be going just great...what was yesterday’s death toll, incidentally?”

The man would only shake his head.

Again, the argument died. Again, the anger and the anguish blew away with the dust. They both let it go. Neither wanted to spend the minutes that were ticking away in accusations, in recriminations, in ideological squabbling. They both knew that there could be no possible gain. But they seemed to find little that they held in common save for the mutual antagonism.

It was all more in sorrow than in anger. But they could find no way out of the trap.

“You have your dreams all mixed up with your idea of reality,” said the boy.

“Don’t we all?” the man replied.

“It seems to me,” said the boy, “that you have something of a problem in co-adaptation right there.”

There was no laughter.

“The mission will solve it,” declared the man.

“And suppose it doesn’t?”

The man shrugged the question away. It seemed nonsensical. But his son repeated it.

“Visiting the colonies isn’t going to change my mind,” said the man. “How could it?”

“I don’t know,” said the other, “but where there’s life, there’s hope.”

“If you want to trade platitudes,” said the man, “how about: ‘We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’?”

“Great,” said the boy. “Trouble is, the stars are all that you see. Look down here occasionally, and take a good look at the gutter we’re in. Looking at the stars doesn’t help to get it cleaned up.”

The man flinched from a blast of wind.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked baldly.

The boy chose his words very carefully. “I don’t think I really care,” he said. It was a plain statement, unalleviated by any hint of doubt in the tone. But the silence that fell obviously embarrassed him. He felt the need to supplement the declaration with some kind of explanation—some kind of excuse.

“Your sense of values is upside down,” he said. “All your life you’ve been more interested in the Extraterrestrial than the Terrestrial. You’ve never been off the Earth but you’ve never really lived on it, either. You’ve worked for the UN on ecological problems right here—projects on which millions of lives might depend—but I’ve never seen you emotionally involved with a single one. You treat them all as purely theoretical exercises. In your letters you talk about experiments and observations as things in themselves, devoid of any meaning in human terms. You don’t seem to realize what a wreck of a world this is.

“In three thousand years of human history we’ve destroyed our planet. We haven’t conquered disease or starvation or misery with our ongoing technological revolution...in fact, we haven’t got anything in return for the destruction and the devastation. And yet we talk about second chances for humanity, about the conquest of the star-worlds. Why? What’s the second chance for except to do it all over again, to wreck more worlds, to fill more open sewers with miserable humanity?”

The man stopped to skim another stone. It skipped three times and made it onto the path which ran along the far bank.

“You think in slogans,” he said. “I know you’re young, and you see things in extremes, but what you’ve said isn’t anything like the truth, and you must know it. Of course we don’t have Utopia, and we don’t look forward to making or finding Utopia. People do starve, and die, and we don’t have control over our use of the world’s resources because demand is far, far greater than the poor old Earth can supply. All the platitudes which you apply to the situation have emotional power: Let’s put our own house in order; Let’s solve our problems at home instead of exporting them to the universe; Let’s conquer one world before we ruin a hundred more. But that’s not the whole story. It doesn’t even begin to put things in focus. It’s too narrow-minded.”

“What we need,” said the boy, “is narrower minds. Minds that aren’t full of crap about the conquest of space and man’s role in the universe and all the fantasies where people like to live because they can’t stand it here.”

But the man wasn’t listening now.

“It’s really the wrong way around,” he mused. “It should be the young who look ahead, into the future, and see possibilities instead of threats. It’s the old who are orientated backward in time, wondering about mistakes, trying to validate the past by maintaining the status quo. You should see the future in the stars instead of in the soil. You should believe in the colonies. If it were only a personal rebellion, it might be easier to figure, but you’re the voice of your generation. Why? What have you got against dreams? But there’s the ship, too, named for Daedalus when it was Icarus who wanted to fly at high as possible.”

“Icarus was punished for his presumption,” interrupted the boy.

“But our wings aren’t made of wax and feathers,” said the man—still to himself rather than to his son. “And in any case, the name has nothing to do with that particular myth. It’s another classical joke. Daedalus was the first genetic engineer—the man who made the Minotaur...another exercise in co-adaptation, you see....”

“Forget it,” said the boy. “Just forget it.” His weariness was deliberate, overacted.

The man wanted to find a way back to the beginning, thinking that if he could only start again it might somehow turn out a little better, a little easier. He hadn’t come to argue, but to say good-bye. But there seemed no way it could be said without resentment, without rancor. He was going away, for six—perhaps seven—years. It was nothing new—he had been away for the greater part of the boy’s life, but there is a profound difference between miles and light-years. Even seven years isn’t forever, but it would be a far greater slice out of the boy’s life than his own. And so the meeting...and the parting...were important, and difficult.

“They’ll make a part of my salary available to you,” said the man. “No strings. If you need it, take it.”

The boy was on the point of shaking his head, but apparently thought better of it. There was no point in refusing, to provoke more shallow and pointless argument. It was better to wait.

They reached a slit in the concrete face, where a long staircase ascended toward the living city. They began to climb. It was no longer possible to walk side by side. The boy went first. When they reached the top, the car was waiting.

“Can we give you a lift?” asked the man.

“No,” said the boy. “It’d take you out of your way.”

It was on the tip of the man’s tongue to insist, but he too let the moment pass. For once, they exchanged a lingering glance. There was a hint of guilt about it, on both sides. Neither could escape the suspicion that at some time in the indeterminate future they might regret that this parting had passed so emptily, without any real feeling on either side—a formality.

In truth, they were being honest now in revealing no depths of emotion, maintaining an easy distance from one another. It would be in the future, with the creeping regrets and the notions of what ought to have been, that hypocrisy would cover up the reality.

They had nothing in common. In spite of heredity, it is often the way.

They shook hands, mouthed meaningless sounds, and parted. The son, consumed by the affairs of life and immediate circumstance, walked away into the city. The father, in getting into the car, cut himself out from that complex pattern, and headed for the stars.

* * * * * * *

“It was difficult?” said Pietrasante.

“He doesn’t understand,” Alexander replied. “He hasn’t much sympathy with viewpoints other than his own.”

“He’s a neo-Christian, isn’t he?”

Alexander, who had let the acceleration of the car ease him back into the soft seat, felt a sudden tightness in his muscles.

“It’s not illegal,” he said.

Pietrasante smiled. “No need to be so touchy, Alex,” he purred. “No need at all. I approve of the things the neo-Christians stand for: the refusal to yield to violence...the utter rejection of violence as a means of human intercourse...turning the other cheek. Of course, the violence they abhor is sometimes the violence of the establishment. They clash with authority...but we need the kind of determination the neo-Christians show. There are too many people who find violence too easy to tolerate.”

“They’re Monadists as well as Christians,” said Alexander. “They don’t want the space age back. If they found out where the Daedalus is they’d be lying underneath her daring us to take off over their dead bodies. As far as Peter is concerned, that’s what I’m doing...going to the stars over his dead body. He wouldn’t lift a finger to stop me, of course, because he’s a neo-Christian. But that’s what he thinks.”

“That’s the strength of the movement,” said Pietrasante. “They don’t stop anyone doing anything. They stand before the barrel of the gun, and they say ‘Shoot.’ And people don’t...sometimes. Most men with guns need an excuse to shoot, inside themselves. Even a petty criminal shooting an unarmed man in order to rob him needs to see his victim as an enemy, and himself as a potential victim. The neo-Christians, by attacking that assumption, are making the first constructive move against the socialization of violence that our poor little planet has seen in many years.”

“And a lot of them get shot,” said Alexander quietly. “Martyrs to the cause. Maybe the guys who kill them feel guilty as hell about it afterward, but they’re still dead. Dying for all mankind, they reckon, like Christ himself. But dying.”

“You think that may happen to your son?”

“Yes. I’m afraid that when I come back, in six or seven or ten years, I’m going to find Peter six feet under, because he stood in front of a gun and expressed his willingness to be shot...I don’t have the same confidence in the conscience of gunmen that you seem to have.”

“Would it make any difference,” asked the UN man quietly, “if you were here when it happened?”

“No,” said Alexander. “None at all.”

Pietrasante allowed a few minutes to pass, while he stared over the shoulder of the driver at the road ahead. Alexander looked sideways, his eyes not really focusing, letting the world become a blur as it whipped past the fast-moving car.

When the two men looked at one another again, they were ready to change gear, to turn their attention to problems of an entirely different order.

Pietrasante was carrying a number of files, which the other man had returned to him before the meeting with his son. Now he tapped the files with a stout forefinger, and said, “What do you think of Dr. Kilner’s observations?”

“How is Kilner?” countered Alexander.

“Still active,” said Pietrasante smoothly. “He wasn’t drummed out of the service. He’s in charge of a reclamation project.”

“The Sahara?”

“Farther east.” Pietrasante flashed a tiny smile as he said it. Alexander did not return it.

“You couldn’t expect him to be pleased by what he found,” said Alexander. “Five colonies—four making a somewhat precarious living, one dead. Kilner believed in the colonies. He went out looking to find healthy societies, expanding populations, happy people. Instead, he found people ready to spit in his face because they thought they’d been deserted, left to rot. He couldn’t live with the fact that they’d lost faith—that the contacts didn’t renew their hope and revitalize the dreams the original colonists set out with. He had a hard time. And he despaired. Lost his own faith...became a convert to the antis. I think I understand—but I also think he was wrong. He did help those colonies. He did renew their hope, in a practical sense. He shouldn’t have let their lack of gratitude get under his skin. It was no part of his job to be a hero. I still think he might have been all right if it hadn’t been for the dead world. But that’s what really knocked him down...it was too much, on top of everything else.”

“Suppose it had happened to you,” said Pietrasante.

Alexander looked the UN man full in the face, without any hesitancy in his manner. It was something he had not been able to do to his son. “It may yet happen,” he said. “I’m not going out wearing rose-tinted spectacles. If that’s what Kilner found, that’s what we’ll find. I’m not going out there with the same optimism that he carried. I’m not searching for a new Arcadia. But I won’t lose faith because I find the colonies struggling desperately to keep going and hating Earth because Earth has spent the best part of a century in a historical twilight zone when the whole space program died. We have to start again, now. We have to look to the future.”

Pietrasante met the steady gaze with an expression of infinite calm. There was not the least sign of approval in his manner.

“Setting aside Kilner’s personal reactions,” he said, “what do you deduce from his reports on the individual worlds? Why were the colonies failing? In the beginning, each one was set up under the assumption that it would succeed even without further contact with Earth. All the volunteers were warned that no meaningful support might be possible for many years—even the two hundred years which have elapsed in the most extreme cases. The colonies were expected to survive in spite of that. Where did our thinking go wrong? Why were the colonies not the way Kilner expected to find them?”

Alexander, slightly resentful of the interrogation, turned away briefly. “There was no single reason,” he said. “Even in the case of the colony that failed, there was no single thing that we could point to and say, ‘This was the cause. This is what we had not anticipated.’ It’s the whole class of problems—problems of co-adaptation between the life-systems. But these are problems which were bound to arise. And it’s in the period of time which had elapsed in the recontacted colonies that we might have expected these problems to emerge and reach a critical point. I can’t agree that the colonies Kilner helped would have failed utterly without him. They could have got past the crises on their own...things wouldn’t have continued to get worse. Kilner saved lives and he saved time, but I believe that some of the colonies, at least, were viable in any case.”

“I’m not at all sure that I agree with you,” said Pietrasante. “But my viewpoint is rather different from your own. Your interest is scientific, mine—I fear—has to be political as well. You see, these reports raise a good many questions with respect to the Daedalus project, and thus to the future of any new space program. It is not simply a matter of deciding whether any new colonies are to be set up, or even what needs to be done about those already in existence...though these decisions have to be made, and Kilner’s reports will be a powerful factor in influencing the decisions. There are more basic questions to be asked. Chief among them is this: Is the success or failure of any colony on an alien world primarily determined by biological factors or by social ones?

“As a biologist you are inclined to see the whole issue in terms of biological problems—the class of problems which you call co-adaptation. Here, as you say, Kilner helped the colonists...and, as you have also said, perhaps such problems would not have been insuperable even without expert help. But I am a diplomat, and I find in these reports evidence of another set of problems altogether: the problems experienced by human beings extracted from one set of historical circumstances and introduced into another which is totally alien—and you’ll appreciate, I’m sure, that I use the word ‘alien’ here in a rather different sense. The question I must ask is this: Can men environmentally adapted to the kind of society we have today—or had a hundred or two hundred years ago—readapt themselves and their social precepts to the kind of circumstances which they find on the colony worlds? You talk about biological adaptation, Alex, but I am thinking more of social adaptation. It is possible that in the ancient world there were many human societies which could have provided colonists capable of surviving on an alien world...the Cro-Magnons, the Kalahari bushmen, the pygmies of the Ituri forest...these people possessed cultures adapted to the business of survival without technology, without material possessions. But such cultures no longer exist. There is no man on Earth who lives now in a society without wealth and without the produce of technology. In making these men into colonists, are we not trying to turn back the cultural clock? Is this practical...and if not, how can we make it practical? Do you see what I mean?”

“I see,” said Alexander.

“In the future,” said Pietrasante, “the whole philosophy of colonization may have to change. We may have to think very seriously about training colonists in a much more extreme sense than the last project did. But first, we must look much more closely at the present colonies, and find out why they are as they are. We must redefine our concepts of possible and impossible, in this area. We must ask questions that have not been asked before.”

“It isn’t my field,” said the biologist.

“Of course not,” said the UN man hastily. “I’m not trying to redefine your job, at this late stage. The role which you have to play will be the same role that Kilner played...except for one thing.”

“What you’re trying to tell me is that I won’t be in charge. You’re demoting me.”

“It’s not a matter of demotion, Alex. You will be in charge of your own side of the mission. But there will be another side. You must see how necessary it is. In view of Kilner’s reports we simply can’t restrict the scope of the Daedalus missions to biology...to rat-catching, if you’ll forgive the use of the vulgar term. You’ll be the sole authority in your own field, and your status will remain the same. The only difference is that your lab staff will be cut to two. The man in charge of the sociological study will take over the diplomatic functions which Kilner handled so badly. His name is Nathan Parrick—he’s a historian and a social anthropologist.”

“But if we’re jointly in charge,” objected Alexander, “who makes the ultimate decisions? Divided authority can lead to problems.”

“Authority would be divided in any case,” Pietrasante pointed out. “In all matters pertaining to the conduct of the ship itself the captain is the final authority. You and Nathan will be engaged in tasks which are somewhat different in nature, but your interests should be very similar. There should be no difficulties in coming to an agreement over any question which concerns you both. If any deadlock does arise, Captain Rolving will arbitrate.”

Alexander stared out of the window for a moment or two, turning the matter over in his mind.

“Who are the staff I have left?” he asked finally.

“Conrad Silvian—he was with Kilner and his experience should be invaluable. We couldn’t even consider leaving him out. The other berth went to Linda Beck. Did you meet her?”

Alexander nodded.

“I’m sure they’ll be adequate to any task which you have to face.”

“I’m sure they will,” said the biologist. “Qualitatively speaking. But why only two? If there are two crew members and Parrick, that leaves one berth unaccounted for, doesn’t it? Or does Parrick have an assistant?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Pietrasante. “The seventh member of the expedition will, in fact, be under his authority. But she is not exactly an assistant. Her name is Mariel Valory. She’s a talent.”

“What kind of talent?”

“It’s what they call in common parlance ‘the gift of tongues.’ She is extraordinarily adept with languages. She is, of course, very young, and the idea of giving her a place on the expedition was opposed by some members of our team. I myself was doubtful of the wisdom of including her. But in view of the questions raised by Kilner’s reports it seemed most important that we should provide the second expedition with better information-collecting facilities. We want to provide as broad a base to the areas of intellectual inquiry as possible. It is obvious that Kilner completely failed to open up any constructive areas of communication with the colonists which he contacted. He arrived to find them hostile, and despite the help he gave them he never overcame that hostility. We hope that Mariel will help to offset this difficulty.

“In addition, there is another compelling reason. You are scheduled to recontact six colonies. Two of these colonies were established on worlds where the reports of the survey teams suggested that there were already intelligent life-forms. Although these species had no discernible culture or civilization, it was suggested that they had language and a certain degree of social organization. The framework within which the survey teams operated did not permit further investigation of these lines of inquiry, but the colonists dispatched to these worlds were instructed to make all possible attempts to open channels of communication with these life-forms. On these two worlds, if nowhere else, Mariel’s talent may prove to be of crucial importance.”

“How old is she?” asked Alexander.

“Fourteen. I know that it’s very young, Alex, but she’s advanced for her age in the intellectual sense. And fourteen is not only above the age of consent but above the age of majority in a great many countries. Talents burn out, Alex and if we want to use them we have to use them young.”

After a pause, Alexander said, “You’re certainly hitting me with everything at once, aren’t you? I’ve been in on this project for months, and this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. Oh, I know that I joined when plans were still in a very fluid state, and that my ideas don’t count for much in the planning because I’m only the poor bastard that has to go out there, and not one of the UN execs with a career in politics to think about...but, Nico, this is the eleventh hour! Only now do you show me Kilner’s reports. Only now do you tell me my staff’s been cut, that I’m now only joint leader of the expedition with your pet diplomat, and that there’s a child on the strength as well. Do you think that’s fair? Suppose I were to turn around now and tell you that if this is the way things are going to be you can count me out?”

“You won’t do that,” said Pietrasante.

“No,” said the other. “I won’t. You know damn well I won’t. But you’re sure as hell trespassing on my good nature.”

“Nathan Parrick is a good man,” said the UN man. “And he’s not a pet diplomat. He is a diplomat...but he’s also a brilliant social scientist. You have a good deal in common. And a lot of the work he’ll take off your shoulders is work you wouldn’t want to be bothered with in any case. You’re a scientist, not a politician. You don’t want to get bogged down in petty disputes with the colonists, in negotiations and recriminations. You want to get on with your job. If only Kilner had been allowed to get on with his job instead of being involved in constant hassles with the people he was trying to help...This is all for the best, Alex. I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you sooner, but you don’t realize the amount of backstage argument that has gone into this. The UN is run by committees—the whole world is run by committees—and nothing ever gets done or decided until the eleventh hour. You know the way things are.”

“Oh sure,” said Alexander wearily. “I know exactly how things are. It’s a wonder the whole damn world doesn’t grind to a halt.”

“It has,” said Pietrasante. “That’s part of the problem. Perhaps the most desperate part of all.”

Outside the car, night was gathering. Very slowly, darkness consumed the daylight. But the stars never came out, for the sky never lost the ruddy glow that was the reflection of the lights of sprawling civilization. Over the cities, the air was always hazy. Only the moon occasionally shone through.

There were no horizons in the sky, but from the city streets there was no glimpse of infinity either.