From the Ocean from teh Stars (33 page)

work, while the annoying voice in his ear grew ever more insistent. He could stop it, he realized, by throwing away his face mask and the irritating little speaker it contained. For a moment he toyed with this idea, but discovered that he was not strong enough to undo the straps holding the mask in place. It was too bad; perhaps the voice would shut up if he did what it told him to.

Unfortunately, he had no idea which was the right way out of the maze in which he was now comfortably ensconced. The light and noise were very confusing; when he moved in any direction, he sooner or later banged into something and had to turn back. This annoyed but did not alarm him, for he was quite happy where he was.

But the voice would not give him any peace. It was no longer at all friendly and helpful; he dimly realized that it was being downright rude, and was ordering him about in a manner in which—though he could not remember why—people did not usually speak to him. He was being given careful and detailed instructions which were repeated over and over again, with increasing emphasis, until he sluggishly obeyed them. He was too tired to answer back, but he wept a little at the indignity to which he was being subjected. He had never been called such things in his life, and it was very seldom indeed that he had heard such shocking language as was now coming through his speaker. Who on earth would yell at him this way? "Not that way, you goddammed fool, sir! To the left—
left!
That's fine—now forward a bit more—don't stop there! Christ, he's gone to sleep again,
wake up
—
snap out of it or I'll knock your bloody block off!!
That's a good boy—you're nearly there—just another couple of feet. . ." and so on endlessly, and some of it with very much worse language than that.

Then, quite to his surprise, there was no longer twisted metal around him. He was swimming slowly in the open, but he was not swimming for Ions:. Metal fingers closed upon him, none too gently, and he was lifted into the roaring night.

From far away he heard four short, muffled explosions, and something deep down in his mind told him that for two of these he was responsible. But he saw nothing of the swift drama a hundred feet below as the radio fuses detonated and the great derrick snapped in two. The section lying across the trapped submarine was still too heavy to be lifted clear by the buoyancy tanks, but now that it was free to move it teetered for a moment like a giant seesaw, then slipped aside and crashed onto the sea bed.

The big sub, all restraint removed, began to move upward with increasing speed; Franklin felt the wash of its close passage, but was too bemused to realize what it meant. He was still struggling back into hazy

consciousness; around eight hundred feet, quite abruptly, he started to react to Henson's bullying ministrations, and, to the commander's vast
relief, began to answer him back in kind. He cursed wildly for about a
hundred feet, then became fully aware of his surroundings and ground to an embarrassed halt. Only then did he realize that his mission had
been successful and that the men he had set out to rescue were already
far above him on their way back to the surface.

Franklin could make no such speed. A decompression chamber was
waiting for him at the three-hundred-foot level, and in its cramped confines he was to fly back to Brisbane and spend eighteen tedious hours before all the absorbed gas had escaped from his body. And by the time
the doctors let him out of their clutches, it was far too late to suppress the
tape recording that had circulated throughout the entire bureau. He was
a hero to the whole world, but if he ever grew conceited he need only
remind himself that all his staff had listened gleefully to every word of Commander Henson's fluently profane cajoling of their director.

☆
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

P
eter never looked back as he walked up the gangplank
into the projectile from which, in little more than half an hour, he would
have his first view of the receding Earth. Franklin could understand why
his son kept his head averted; young men of eighteen do not cry in public.
Nor, for that matter, he told himself fiercely, do middle-aged directors of
important bureaus.

Anne had no such inhibitions; she was weeping steadily despite all that Indra could do to comfort her. Not until the doors of the spaceship
had finally sealed and the thirty-minute warning siren had drowned all
other noises did she subside into an intermittent sniffling.

The tide of spectators, of friends and relatives, of cameramen and
Space Department officials, began to retreat before the moving barriers.
Clasping hands with his wife and daughter, Franklin let himself be swept
along with the flood of humanity. What hopes and fears, sorrows and joys
surrounded him now! He tried to remember his emotions at his first takeoff; it must have been one of the great moments of his life—yet all rec
ollection of it had gone, obliterated by thirty years of later experience.

And now Peter was setting out on the road his father had traveled
half a lifetime before. May you have better luck among the stars than I did, Franklin prayed. He wished he could be there at Port Lowell when

Irene greeted the boy who might have been her son, and wondered how
Roy and Rupert would receive their half-brother. He was sure that they
would be glad to meet him; Peter would not be as lonely on Mars as
Ensign Walter Franklin had once been.

They waited in silence while the long minutes wore away. By this time,
Peter would be so interested in the strange and exciting world that was to
be his home for the next week that he would already have forgotten the
pain of parting. He could not be blamed if his eyes were fixed on the new
life which lay before him in all its unknown promise.

And what of his own life? Franklin asked himself. Now that he had launched his son into the future, could he say that he had been a success? It was a question he found very hard to answer honestly. So many things
that he had attempted had ended in failure or even in disaster. He knew
now that he was unlikely to rise any farther in the service of the state; he
might be a hero, but he had upset too many people when he became the
surprised and somewhat reluctant ally of the Maha Thero. Certainly he
had no hope of promotion—nor did he desire it—during the five or ten
years which would be needed to complete the reorganization of the Bu
reau of Whales. He had been told in as many words that since he was partly responsible for the situation—the mess, it was generally called—
he could sort it out himself.

One thing he would never know. If fate had not brought him public admiration and the even more valuable—because less fickle—friendship
of Senator Chamberlain, would he have had the courage of his new
found convictions? It had been easy, as the latest hero that the world
had taken to its heart but would forget tomorrow, to stand up in the
witness box and state his beliefs. His superiors could fume and fret, but
there was nothing they could do but accept his defection with the best grace they could muster. There were times when he almost wished that
the accident of fame had not come to his rescue. And had his evidence, after all, been decisive? He suspected that it had. The result of the ref
erendum had been close, and the Maha Thero might not have carried the day without his help.

The three sharp blasts of the siren broke into his reverie. In that
awe-inspiring silence which still seemed so uncanny to those who remem
bered the age of rockets, the great ship sloughed away its hundred thou
sand tons of weight and began the climb back to its natural element. Half
a mile above the plain, its own gravity field took over completely, so that
it was no longer concerned with terrestrial ideas of "up" or "down." It
lifted its prow toward the zenith, and hung poised for a moment like a
metal obelisk miraculously supported among the clouds. Then, in that

same awful silence, it blurred itself into a line—and the sky was empty.

The tension broke. There were a few stifled sobs, but many more
laughs and jokes, perhaps a little too high-pitched to be altogether con
vincing. Franklin put his arms around Anne and Indra, and began to
shepherd them toward the exit.

To his son, he willingly bequeathed the shoreless seas of space. For himself, the oceans of this world were sufficient. Therein dwelt all his
subjects, from the moving mountain of Leviathan to the newborn dolphin
that had not yet learned to suckle under water.

He would guard them to the best of his knowledge and ability. Al
ready he could see clearly the future role of the bureau, when its wardens
would be in truth the protectors of all the creatures moving in the sea. All? No—that, of course, was absurd; nothing could change or even greatly alleviate the incessant cruelty and slaughter that raged through
all the oceans of the world. But with the great mammals who were his
kindred, man could make a start, imposing his truce upon the battlefield
of Nature.

What might come of that in the ages ahead, no one could guess. Even
Lundquist's daring and still unproved plan for taming the killer whales
might no more than hint of what the next few decades would bring. They
might even bring the answer to the mystery which haunted him still, and
which he had so nearly solved when that submarine earthquake robbed
him of his best friend.

A chapter—perhaps the best chapter—of his life was closing. The future would have many problems, but he did not believe that ever again
would he have to face such challenges as he had met in the past. In a
sense, his work was done, even though the details were merely beginning.

He looked once more at the empty sky, and the words that the
Mahanayake Thero had spoken to him as they flew back from the Green
land station rose up out of memory like a ground swell on the sea. He
would never forget that chilling thought:
"When that time comes, the
treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the
way he has behaved toward the other creatures of his own world"

Perhaps he was a fool to let such phantasms of a remote and unknowable future have any influence upon his thoughts and acts, but he had no regrets for what he had done. As he stared into the blue infinity
that had swallowed his son, the stars seemed suddenly very close. "Give
us another hundred years," he whispered, "and we'll face you with clean
hands and hearts—whatever shape you be."

"Come along, dear," said Indra, her voice still a little unsteady. "You

haven't much time. The office asked me to remmd you—the Committee
on Interdepartmental Standardization meets in half an hour."

"I know," said Franklin, blowing his nose firmly and finally. "I wouldn't dream of keeping it waiting."

THE
OTHER S
IDE
OF THE SKY

☆
THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD

T
his is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wag
ner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know,
it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with
an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I
should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use
for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"

"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. "Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical opera
tion involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested
in
letters,
not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the
machine will be printing words, not columns of figures."

"I don't quite understand. . . ."

"This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien
to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while
I explain it."

"Naturally."

"It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall
contain all the possible names of God."

"I beg your pardon?"

"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably,
"that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an
alphabet we have devised."

"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"

"Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to
complete the task."

"Oh," Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you