out a plan for shifting most of the work we’d been doing into somebody else’s area of responsibility. We gave some to Biochemistry, some to Physiology and some (bending the rules a little) to Pathology. It was all a matter of changing definitions. As Zeno had pointed out, though, that still left the spadework to do. If the point of what we’d been working on wasn’t to be lost—whether our lines of work were continuing or not—we had a hell of a lot of writing up to do. I cheated, and got out the dictaphone. Typing was never my strong suit.
In the afternoon, I tried to get clearance to send a telegram to my mother, but the application was overruled. They call it “information control” these days, but what they mean is censorship. Space Agency is sensitive about its affairs. They always tell the Soviets, but never the free press. Marsbase is an independent political domain in all but name, and by no means a republic. Not even the ghost of democracy. There are reasons for that, of course. There always are. I took time out to write her a letter instead. Bits of it would probably be deleted and there would be “unavoidable” delays in transmission, but enough would get through to let her know that I’d been moved, and that she needn’t worry if she didn’t hear from me in a while. She wouldn’t like it—somehow, during the last couple of years, she’d convinced herself that Sule was just around the corner really, and we got to see one another’s faces on telecast occasionally. She wouldn’t feel the same way about a jump through hyperspace, and who could blame her? It wasn’t easy for her—my father was killed when I was three years old, and for fifteen years I’d been her sole companion, Losing me to space was bad enough. Losing me to hyperspace was the next best thing to receiving news of my death.
I made it a long letter, and promised that every FTL ship that came back from the new beacon would bring a message from me along with it. She’d grown used to my absence by degrees—first there was university, then assignment in America, then Sule. I did wonder, though, as I signed the letter, whether I’d ever make landfall on Earth again, or whether she’d live to see the day if I did. It was an awkward thought, reminding me of a kind of loneliness that I could never quite put behind me.
I ate all my meals in my room or in the lab; I couldn’t face the common room, even though I knew there’d be something special on the menu. Usually, any change from the customary diet of synthetic pabulum was an opportunity too good to think of missing, but the circumstances were special. I had the Great Adventure lurking a few hours in my future, and I didn’t want anyone else inquiring where I’d been during the crucial hour. Someone, I supposed, must know—but I didn’t want to meet them any more than I want to meet inquiring minds which might get too curious about my state of mental health.
When I finally went to bed, I had no difficulty in getting to sleep, and if I dreamed the dreams are mercifully beyond the reach of my memory.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day dragged as the business of tidying up the loose ends of our work grew more and more tedious and the bits we were picking over grew steadily more trivial and more troublesome. When it got to the stage where I was picking petty quarrels with Zeno in order to have some way of venting my frustration, I decided that it was time to pack up and isolate myself.
I set off along one of the spoke-shafts, climbing the stairways to the upper decks until there was only the ladder to go. I was moving toward the hub of the station, and as I went the gravity declined along with the angular velocity. I always liked that feeling of slowly decreasing weight when I was feeling a little uptight. Lessening the burden of your body always seems to be taking a load off your mind.
The transfer from the spinning station to the “stationary” spindle made me feel a little giddy, and I had to pause at the portal to settle down. Because the spindle was a zero-g environment it no longer made sense to think in terms of up and down, but in my private thoughts I always imagined the docking bays to be “downward” and the observation tower to be “upward,” on the grounds that a place where you could look at the naked stars just had to be beneath the sky; to contemplate the awful star-strewn infinity you have to think of yourself as looking up, if only because up, in metaphorical terms, is the right way to Heaven.
The boys in Astronomy were back at work, it being January the second by our Earth-imitation reckoning, and no longer a holiday. They didn’t pay any attention to me, though. They didn’t use the observation balcony much themselves; star-gazing and astronomy, they assure me, are two very different things.
I floated over to the rail, and anchored myself so I could look straight out into Sagittarius, where the center of the galaxy hid behind its curtain of interstellar dust.
The configuration of bright stars that had somehow suggested itself to the ancients as the figure of a centaur archer was lost in a starfoam sea, whose light dazzled the eyes and startled the mind. It was a sight you had to get used to—some people found it too much to bear, and it made them sick. In all probability, half of the station staff had been up here no more than once, and some might serve a five-year stretch without ever once seeing the naked stars. Some claimed that the sight made them feel as if they were in the presence of God; others that it made them feel so tiny that they were haunted by humility. They had to work hard, though, to cultivate feelings as specific and articulate as that. For me, it was a sensation that didn’t translate into any kind of awestruck silliness. It was an experience unique in itself, that didn’t need to be compared with some kind of imaginary transcendental nonsense.
There was a tiny spider working its way along the rail, plainly unimpressed by the grandeur beyond the wall, for all that it had so many eyes to see it with. It was an Earthly spider, of course. The main work of the station was to do with alien biology, but we didn’t let the specimens run around loose. Plague-paranoia forbade such recklessness, except insofar as Zeno was concerned (the Calicoi had long since served out their period of quarantine). Anyhow, only Earth and Calicos had life-systems sufficiently well-developed to have produced organisms as high on the evolutionary scale as spiders. So far.
I blew the spider off its perch, knowing that it would float around, spinning a string of invisible silk until it caught on something solid. It looked as if it had had a lot of practice in dealing with a no-g environment. It might be the hundredth generation to be born here. I wondered what kind of changes might have been made at the biochemical level by natural selection operating in zero g, and wondered briefly whether I ought to start hunting spiders to prepare for a long-term study. Then I remembered that there wasn’t time, and made a mental note to put the idea on the dictaphone. Come to think of it, spiders implied flies—some prey species, at least, maybe feeding on bits of human skin and other debris that collected here. Maybe, I thought, there was a full-blown zero-g ecosystem here, waiting to be investigated.
I looked out at the blazing panorama, wondering where the star might be that would be the sun warming Earth Three. It would be a visible star, I presumed, if it was a G-type less than two hundred light-years away, but it would be insignificant within the multitude.
All the stars I could see were within easy reach of Mars-orbit, through hyperspace, but we had managed to find the way to a mere handful of them. The rest beckoned us with light that left them hundreds or thousands of years before, but in hyperspace they were invisible. All leaps in hyperspace, save those to human-built beacons, were leaps in the dark; and darkness, in accordance with the calculus of probability, was where all such leaps came out. Our FTL ships had jumped into the spaces between stars far too remote to be seen from Earth, and had even ventured into the intergalactic gulf beyond our spiral arm, knowing they could get home again by tracking the glimmer of the HSBs in Mars-orbit. But finding other star systems—trying by random leaps to wind up within a few million kilometers of an alien star—was far, far more difficult than trying to locate half a dozen needles in a haystack.
Maybe God, I thought, is trying to tell us something. Or maybe he just doesn’t like to make things too easy.
Everyone has occasional
