the Dark Light Years Read online

  Think how many primitive rites are still with us in a thin disguise: vivisection, giving in marriage, cosmetics, hunting, wars, circumcision - no, I don't want to think of any more. When we do make an advance, it's in a ghastly false direction - like the synth food fad, inspired by last century's dietary madnesses and thrombosis scares. It's time I retired, Gussie, got away while I'm not too aged, moved to some simpler clime where the sun shines. I've always believed that the amount of thought that goes on inside a man's head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sunshine that goes on out-side it.”

  The door globe chimed.

  "I'm expecting nobody," Pasztor said, with an irritability he rarely showed. "Go and see who it is for me, Gussie, and shoo them away. I want to hear all about Macao from you.”

  Phipps disappeared, to return with Enid Ainson, weeping.

  Nipping with momentary savagery on the end of his glucose teat, Pasztor jacked himself into a less relaxed position and stuck a leg out of the therapad.

  "It's Bruce, Mihaly!" Enid cried. "Bruce has disappeared. I'm sure he's drowned himself. Oh Mihaly, he's been so difficult! What can I do?”

  "When did you last see him?”

  "He couldn't stand the disgrace of being turned down for the Gansas. I know he's drowned himself.

  He often threatened he would.”

  "When did you last see him, Enid?”

  "Whatever shall I do? I must let poor Aylmer know!”

  Pasztor climbed out of the pad. He gripped Phipps' elbow as he moved towards the technivision.

  "We'll have to hear about Macao some other time, Gussie," he said.

  He began to technical the police, while Enid wept in a businesslike way behind him.

  Bruce Ainson was already a fair distance beyond the reach of Earth police.

  On the day after the Gansas was ejected into space, a much less publicized flight began. Blasting from a small operational spaceport on the east coast of England, a systemship started its long haul across the ecliptic. System-ships were an altogether different sort of spaceship from the starships. They carried no TP drive. They fuelled on ions, consuming most of their bulk as they travelled. They were built for duties within the solar system only, and most of them that left Britain nowadays were military craft.

  The 7.5. Brunner was no exception. It was a trooper, packed to the hull with reinforcements for the Anglo-Brazilian war on Charon. Among those reinforcements was an ageing and troubled nonentity named B. Ainson, who had been mustered as a clerk.

  That sullen outcast of the solar family, Charon, known generally to soldiers as the Deep Freeze Planet, had been discovered telescopically by the Wilkins-Pressman Lunar Observatory almost two decades before it was visited by man. The First Charon Expedition (on which was a brilliant young Hungarian dramatist and biologist named Mihaly Pasztor) discovered it to be the father of all billiard balls, a globe some three hundred miles in diameter (307'558 miles, according to the latest edition of the Brazilian Military Manual, 309'567 miles according to its British equivalent). This globe was without feature, its surface smooth in texture, white in color, slippery and almost without chemical properties. It was hard, but not extremely hard. It could be bored into with high-speed drills.

  To say that Charon had no atmosphere was inaccurate. The smooth white surface was the atmosphere, frozen out over the long and unspeakably tedious eons during which Charon, a travelling morgue without benefit of bones, trundled its bulk about its orbit, connected by what hardly seemed more than coincidence with a first magnitude star called Sol. When the atmosphere was dug and analyzed, it was found to consist of a mixture of inert gasses packed together into a form unknown to, and un-reproducible in, Earth's laboratories. Somewhere below this surface, seismographic reports indicated, was the real Charon: a rocky and pulseless heart two hundred miles across.

  The Deep Freeze Planet was an ideal place on which to hold wars.

  Despite their excellent effect on trade, wars have a deleterious effect on the human body; so they became, during the second decade of the twenty-first century, codified, regulated, umpired, as much subject to skill as a baseball game or to law as a judge's table talk. Because Earth was very crowded, wars were banished to Charon. There, the globe had been marked out with tremendous lines of latitude and longitude, like a celestial draughts board.

  Earth was by no means peacefully inclined. In con-sequence, there were frequently waiting lists for space on Charon, the lists consisting mainly of belligerent nations who wished to book regions about the equator, where the light for fighting was slightly better. The Anglo-Brazilian war occupied Sectors 159-260, adjacent to the current Javanese-Guinean conflict, and had been dragging on since the year 1999. A Contained Conflict it was called.

  The rules of Contained Conflict were many and involved. For instance, the weapons of destruction were rigidly defined. And certain highly qualified social ranks -who might bring their side unfair advantages - were for-bidden on Charon. Penalties for breaking such rules were very high. And, for all the precautions that were taken, casualties among combatants were also high.

  In consequence, the flower of English youth, to say nothing of blooms of a blowsier age, were needed on Charon; Bruce Ainson had taken advantage of that fact to enlist as a man without social rank and to slip quietly out of the public eye. A century earlier, he would probably have joined the Foreign Legion.

  As the little ion-driven trooper carried him now over the ten light hours that separated Earth and Charon, he might, had he known of it, have reflected with contempt on Sir Mihaly's glib remark that the amount of thought in a man's head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sun outside it. He might have so reflected, if only the Brunner permitted reflection among the men packed between its decks head to tail; but Ainson, together with all his companions, went out to the Deep Freeze Planet in deep freeze.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One of the ways - if you were an intellectual - of proving you were not an intellectual was to stroll up and down the Scanning Deck with the sleeves of your tunic rolled un-tidily to the elbow. You put one of the big new corky mescahales between your lips, and you strolled up and down laughing heartily at your own jokes or at those of your companion. That way, the ratings who came up here for a gaze at the universe could see for themselves that you were human.

  The faulty ingredient in this prescription, Lattimore thought, was his current companion, Marcel Gleet, the Second Navigation Officer. It would have constituted a major solecism, almost a solar solecism, to have laughed at what Gleet said. Gleet was wedded to seriousness, and the marriage was much like a funeral.

  "... would seem a substantial possibility," he was saying, "that the star cluster, the co-ordinates of which I have just mentioned, may be the home of our alien species. There are six stars in the cluster having between them some fifteen orbiting planets. I was talking with Mellor of Geocred last watch, and he infers that as many as six of them are likely to prove Earth-type.”

  One certainly couldn't laugh at that, Lattimore thought, though there were several crew about on the deck, not a few of them laughing - mainly at Mrs. Warhoon's notice, which was pinned conspicuously to the main notice board.

  "Since all of these six Earth-type bodies," Gleet continued, "are within two to three light years of Clementina, they would seem to constitute a reasonable area in which to pursue our search. A further advantage is that the six bodies are all within light days of each other, an immense help with regard to flight promptitude.”

  At least a chuckle of agreement might be inserted there.

  Gleet continued his discourse, but the chime of a watch bell reminded him of the reason for his coming up to the Scanning Deck, and he moved away in the direction of the Navigation Bay. Lattimore turned to one of the deep oval ports, and gazed out through the hull of the ship while he listened to the comments of a group of three men behind him.

  " 'Contribution to the future of mankind!' That I like!" one of them exclaimed, reading from
the announcement.

  "Yes, but you notice that after that appeal to your better nature, they cover themselves by offering you a pension for life," said one of his companions.

  "It would have to be higher stakes than that to get me to maroon myself on an alien planet for five years," the third said.

  "I'd chip in too, just to get rid of you," said the first Lattimore nodded to his ghostly reflection as the ancient form of badinage by insult ran its predictable course. He often wondered at that accepted method of verbal assault which passed for wit; no doubt it was a way of sublimating a man's hatred for his fellows; what else could it be? He was not at all perturbed at the comments passed on Mrs. Warhoon's notice; frigid she might be, but he thought she had a good idea there; because there were many varieties of men, her notice would eventually bear fruit.

  He stared at the universe which the Gansas, in a Buzzardian way, was currently surrounding. Against a uterine blackness stood a number of close and fuzzy bars of light. It was like a drunken fly's close-up view of a comb, lacking definition and forming an affront to the optic nerve.

  But, as the scientists pointed out, the human optic nerve was not adjusted to reality. Because the true nature of the universe could only be glimpsed through the transponential equations, it followed that this fuzzy grill (which made one feel, come to think of it, like a minor crustacean with the baleen of a blue whale grinning down at one) was what the stars "really" looked like. Plato, reflected Lattimore, thou shouldst be living at this hour! He swung away and contrived to turn his thoughts similarly away towards the thought of food.

  Say what you liked, there was nothing like a good synthetic stew for calling armistice between a man and his universe.

  "But, Mihaly," Enid Ainson was saying, "Mihaly, for years - since Bruce first introduced me to you, I've thought you were secretly attracted to me. I mean the way you looked at me. And when you consented to be Aylmer's godfather - I mean you've always led me to think. ..." She pressed her hands together. "And you were only amusing yourself....”

  He was drawn up very formally, a cliff against the tide "of her pathos.

  "Perhaps I have a naturally chivalrous attitude to ladies, Enid, but you have read too much into it. What can I do but thank you deeply for your flattering suggestion, but really....”

  Suddenly she jerked her head up. She had eaten enough at the apple of humiliation; it was time to let anger have its turn. Imperiously she gestured at him.

  "You need say no more. I will tell you only that the thought of you and your imagined fondness - how often I foolishly imagined that it was only your friendship with Bruce that kept you from making advances towards me! -your hollow fondness has been the only factor keeping me sane over these last few impossible years.”

  "Come, I am certain you exaggerate -”

  "I am talking! I see now that all your airs and graces, all this phony Hungarian glamour you put on, they ah* mean nothing. You are just a false front, Mihaly, a romantic who dislikes romances, a - a ladies' man who is afraid of ladies. Good-bye to you, Mihaly, and damn you! Through you I have lost both my husband and my son.”

  The door slammed behind her.

  They had been talking in the hall. Mihaly put his hands up to his burning cheeks. He was shaking. He averted his eyes from the sight of himself in the mirror.

  The terrible thing was, that without having the least interest in Enid physically, he had admired her spirit and, knowing what a difficult man Bruce was behind the scenes, he had indeed encouraged her with warm glances and occasional pressures of the hand - purely to illustrate to her that someone was capable of seeing her virtues. Ah, beware, indeed beware of pity!

  "Darling, has she gone?”

  He heard the tiny summoning voice of his mistress from the living room. Doubtless she would have eavesdropped on the scene with Enid. Without eagerness, he went to hear what she had to say about it all. There was no doubt that the charming Ah Chi, after her painting holiday in the Persian Gulf or wherever she had been, would be horribly inquisitive over the whole incident.

  It was only a watch after Bryant Lattimore had felt like a minor crustacean that Mrs. Warhoon got a volunteer. The discovery sent her in a flutter into the heart of the molybdenum crystal belt. Lattimore quickly took the chance to seize her by her fleshy upper arms.

  "Steady now, Hilary! I hate to see a pretty cosmoclectician in a tizzy. So you wanted a volunteer, so you've got him; now go ahead and give him the pitch.”

  Mrs. Warhoon freed herself, though not without getting appetizingly disarranged. What strong brutes men were! Heaven alone knew what this one would be like when he got metaphorically east of Suez at next planetfall. Well, at least a woman had her own defenses: she could always give in.

  "This volunteer is rather special, Mr. Lattimore. Does the name Samuel Melmoth mean anything to you?”

  "Not a thing. No, wait! Ye gods and little fishes! It's Ainson's son! You mean he's volunteered?”

  "He has managed to make himself rather unpopular down on the messdeck, and in consequence feels rather anti-social. A friend of his called Quilter gave him a black eye.'1 "Quilter again, eh? Likely leader material there; I must speak to the captain about him.”

  "I’d like you to come and stand by me while I brief this young Ainson, if you aren't too busy.”

  "Hilary, I'd stand by you at any time.”

  The Ur-Organic style (like all art movement labels, the name was inaccurate to the point of meaninglessness) had perpetrated a nasty whimsy in Mrs. Warhoon's office. She and Lattimore stepped into a popinjay's heart. Under a magnification of 200,000, the fibrous tissue ran and knotted in bas-relief over ceiling and floor as well as walls. In the middle of it, lonely, green about one eye, sat Aylmer Ainson, his head indistinct against a galaxy of striated aortal muscle. He stood when Mrs. Warhoon and Lattimore entered.

  Poor little devil, thought Lattimore. The lady here is somewhat up a gum tree in concluding that it was any-thing so simple as a black eye that led this boy to want to maroon himself on a strange planet. His whole history -and his parents' history, and so their parents' history, and so back to those first deluded dimwits who decided that animal life wasn't good enough for them - everything has led to this act of his; the black eye was just a clincher. And who would say, who could be a fly-sized god and see it all, that the clincher was accidental? Maybe the poor kid had to provoke the assault to reassure himself that the outside world was the aggressor.

  Somewhere, Lattimore thought (but with as much complacency as trepidation, as he realized) my upbringing took the wrong turning, or I would not diagnose so much meaning from the hangdog-proud way this kiddie stood up for us.

  "Sit down, Mr. Melmoth," Mrs. Warhoon said, in a pleasant voice Lattimore found unpleasant. "This is the Flight Advisor, Mr. Lattimore. He knows as well as any-one the communication problems you will be up against, and can give you pointers on the subject.”

  "How do you do, sir," young Ainson said, smiling round his puffy eye.

  "Firstly, the larger programme," said Mrs. Warhoon, and chose a military phrase with winsome self-consciousness, "just to put you in the picture, as they say. When we come out of TP flight, we shall be in a star cluster that contains at least fifteen planets, of which six, to judge by a remote technivisual survey conducted by the Mariestopes, have Earth-type atmospheres. Our aliens, as you know, were found beside a space vehicle - whether it belonged to them or to an allied species, we hope to deter-mine soon. But its suggests that we may find space flight established in this cluster. In that case we shall need to survey all inhabited planets. It was planned before we left Earth that on the first such planet we should deposit an unmanned observation post. Since then, however, I have had a further idea, which Captain Pestalozzi has agreed to let me carry out.

  "My idea is simply to leave a volunteer with the observation post Since we could furnish him with provisions and food synthesizers, and the natives, as we know by our captive specimens, will not be hostile, such a
volunteer would be quite secure from danger. As we now see, you have consented to be that volunteer.”

  Safe in the blown-up popinjay heart, they all smiled at each other.

  But does he detect, Lattimore asked himself, the lie in Mrs. Warhoon's words? Who knows yet what hells these rhinomen may create on their home ground, who knows if there isn't some man-devouring form of fanner who uses the rhinomen as greedily as we use the Improved Danish Landrace pig? And of course the old Lattimoronic question, who knows what hells this latter day Saint Anthony will create for himself in his alien wilderness? That ill wind cannot be sheltered from, but the others can.

  "And, naturally, we will see you are well-armed," he said, aware by Mrs. Warhoon's glance that she saw the remark as a minor betrayal.

  Compressing her lips, she turned back to Ainson.

  "Now to what we expect you to do. We expect you to learn to communicate with the aliens.”

  "But the experts couldn't do that on Earth. How do you expect me -”

  "We shall train you, Mr. Melmoth. There are nine whole ship's days before we break out of TP, and much can be learnt in that time. On Earth, it may have been that an impossible task was attempted; on the aliens' home planet, when we can see them in their own context, the task will be much lighter. Indeed, the aliens should be very much more communicative in their own environment. We think that probably the wonders of Earth, the size of our starships, and so on, may have partly paralyzed their responses.

  "As you may know, we had six alien bodies on which thorough dissections were performed. Our specimens were of different ages, some young, some old. From analysis of their bone tissue, we think they may attain ages of some hundreds of years; their insusceptibility to pain tends to support this theory.

  If this is so, then it should follow that they would have protracted childhoods.