the Dark Light Years (15 page)

"The Stone Age men used the same argument, I dare-say, to whoever started cooking their food. But we live in the Buzzardian universe now, and must think accordingly. You must see, Uncle, that we've come too far for us to be able to argue any longer about what is 'natural' and what isn't.”

"Oh? Why then are you disgusted about my eating 'bits of animal'?”

"Because that is inherently ... well, it's just disgusting.”

"
You'd better go, Aylmer, I have the business of handing over my two aliens to the vivisectors.
I wish you well.”

"Cheer up, Uncle, we'll be bringing you lots more to experiment on!"
And with that thoughtless word of encouragement, Aylmer Ainson was stuffing the documents into his pocket, waving, leaving.

CHAPTER TEN

Viewed from space on an accelerated time scale, Earth and its peoples might have been taken for one organism. Occasionally the organism would have a convulsion. Moving like microbes down arteries, the human specks would slide down their traffic lanes and converge on various points on the globe until those points began to look like sores on the cuticle of the sphere.

The inflammation would grow, would seem to be a mere diseased confusion, until a change took place. The specks would draw back from a central object, producing a semblance of orderliness. This central object would stand out like a pustule, a stormhead of infection. Then it would burst, or appear to burst, and fly outwards. As if some intolerable pressure had thus been relieved, the people that resembled specks to the cosmic observer would now
disperse
, possibly to reassemble later at another seat of
infection
. Meanwhile, the ejected blob of matter hurtled out-wards - making the cosmic eye duck out of the way and attend to its own business.

This particular blob of ejected matter bore the name 5.5. Gansas
engraved in
glucinated beryllium letters three yards tall on her bows. Once clear of the platter of the solar system, however, the name became scarcely legible even to the most hypothetical observer, for the ship entered TP flight.

Transponential is one of those ideas that have hung on the fringes of man's mind since he first found tongue to express himself, and probably before; almost certainly before, since it is the least puissant who dream most
fervently
of omnipotence.
For, expressed semantically, transponential flight reveals itself as the very opposite of travel; it causes the ship to stand still and the universe to move in the desired direction.

Or perhaps it was explained more accurately by Dr. Chosissy in his World Congress Lecture of 2033, when he said, "However surprising it may seem to those of us brought up in the
cozy
certainty of Einsteinian physics, the variable factor in the new Buzzardian equations proves to be the universe.

Distance may be said to be annihilated. We recognize at last that distance is only a mathematical concept having no real existence in the Buzzardian universe. During TP flight, it is no longer possible to say that the universe surrounds the starship. More accurately, we should say that the starship surrounds the universe." The ancient dreams of power had been realized, and the mountain came obediently to Mahommet.

Cheerfully unaware of the unfair advantage he had over the universe, Hank Quilter was trading tales of his last leave with his new messmates.

"You certainly have all the luck, Hank," said a man whose permanent sugary grin had earned him the name of Honeybunch. "I'd really envy you that girl if I didn't think you were making up half those stories about her.”

"If you won't take my word, I'm quite prepared to beat you up till you do," Quilter said.

"Truth through violence!" someone laughed.

"Show me a better way," Quilter said, grinning in turn. Since what he had told them contained very little
exaggeration
, he was content to have them doubt
his
word; had he been lying, it would have been a different matter.

"Tell you another funny thing happened to me," he said. "Day before I got to the ship, I got a letter from a guy who messed with me on the Mariestopes, nice enough guy called Walthamstone, a Britisher.

His first night earth-side, he got drunk and did a spot of housebreaking. The cops caught him at it and sent him down for a term. The way he put it, it sounds he was a bit psychotic at the time.

Anyhow, in the jug he meets a pansy, and this pansy turns old Walthamstone the same way - works on him, you know, and turns him the same way! So when they're released,
Wal
goes to live with this queen in Ghettoville. Now it seems they're good as married!”

Quilter burst into laughter at the thought of it.

A bearded youngster who had not spoken yet, name of Samuel Melmoth, said quietly, "That doesn't seem very funny to me. We all need love of some sort, as your earlier stories prove. I should have thought your friend deserved some pity.”

Quilter stopped laughing and looked at Melmoth. He wiped his mouth on his hand.

"What are you trying to give me, Mac?
I'm only laughing at the odd things that happen to people.
And why should Wally need your goddamned pity? He had a free choice, didn't he? He could do what he liked when he came out of jug, couldn't he?”

Melmoth began to look as stubborn and hurt as his father who bore a different name.

"By what you say, he was seduced.”

"Okay, okay, he was seduced. Now you tell me if we aren't all seduced at some time or other in some way or other. That's when our principles are betrayed, isn't it? But if our principles were stronger, then we wouldn't give in, would we? So what happens to
Wal
is his own look out.”

"But if he'd had some friends -”

"It's got nothing to do with friends or seducers or enemies or anything else. That's what I'm saying. It's
Wal's
own look out. Anything that happens to us is our own responsibility.”

"Ah, now, that's a load of garbage," Honeybunch protested.

"You're all sick, that's your trouble," Quilter said.

"Honeybunch is right," Melmoth said. "We all start out in life with more trouble than we can sort out all our days.”

"Look, feller, nobody asked your opinion in the first place. Speak for yourself," Quilter said.

"I am.”

"Well, kindly refrain from opening your gob on my behalf. I bear my own woes on my own back, and further-more I believe man possesses free will. I do what I want to do, see?”

At that moment, the speaker system crunched into life: "Attention. Will Rating Hank Quilter, Mess No.

307. Hank

Quilter. Mess No. 307, proceed at once to the Flight Advisor's Office on the Scanning Deck, Flight Advisor's Office .on the Scanning Deck. That is all.”

Grumbling, Quilter moved to obey.

Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did not like his office on the Scanning Deck. It was decorated in the modern so.
called Ur-Organic style, with walls, floor and ceiling continuously patterned with bas-relief plastic of varied tones.
The pattern represented surface crystals of molybdenum oxide under a magnification of 75,000. It was designed to put him in harmony with the Buzzardian universe.

Flight Advisor Bryant Lattimore did like his job.

When the knock came at his door, and Rating Quilter entered, Lattimore nodded him amiably to a chair.

"Quilter, you know why we are hitting vacuum. We intend to discover the home planet of the aliens that I believe are popularly known as rhinomen. My particular task is to formulate in advance some of the lines of approach we can use when we have uncovered this planet. Now I happened to flip through the crew lists and came on your name. You were on the Mariestopes, were you not, when this first group of rhinomen was discovered?”

"Sir, I was in the Exploration Corps then, sir. I was one of the men who actually came across the creatures. I shot three or four of them as they charged me. You see -”

"This is very interesting, Quilter, but may we just have this a little more slowly?”

Quilter told his story in elaborate and elaborated detail, while Lattimore listened and gazed at the molybdenum crystals in which he was imprisoned and nodded his head and intermittently loosened a speck of dried mucas from inside one of his nostrils.

"You're certain these creatures attacked you?" he asked, removing his spectacles to stare at Quilter.

Quilter hesitated, weighed Lattimore up, and decided on the truth as he saw it.

"Let's say they came towards us, sir. So we let 'em have it without going into committee first.”

Lattimore smiled and resumed his spectacles.

When he had dismissed the rating, he pressed a bell and Mrs. Hilary Warhoon appeared. She looked very smart in a flared mock-male with recessed carnation paltroons; the glint in her eyes showed how delighted she was to be loose in the Buzzardian universe.

"Had Quilter anything of interest to say?" she asked, sitting down at the table next to Lattimore.

"Only inadvertently. He's read his newscasts and his poppers, and on the surface his attitude is the civilized one: that we don't know much about the rhinomen, as he calls them, and that we give them the benefit of the doubt until we find whether or not they are glorified hogs.
Underneath, and not very far underneath, he knows the critters are just big game, and to be shot like big game, because he has shot them like big game.
You know, even if it does turn out that they are brilliant thinkers and all that, our relationship with them is going to be precious damn difficult.”

"Yes. Because if they are brilliant thinkers, their thought is going to be remarkably different from our thought.”

"Check. And not that only. Philosophers who live in mud are not going to cut much ice with Earth; the masses have always been a deal more impressed by mud than by philosophers.”

"Fortunately, what the masses think won't affect us out here.”

"You think not? Heck, you're the cosmoclectic, Hilary, but I've been in TP before, and I know a strange psycho-logy rules on shipboard. It's like an exaggerated version of Kipling's 'East of Suez ...', how's it go now? 'Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no Ten Commandments....' The best are very like the worst when you step on a planet lying under another sun, Hilary. And you feel that - well, it's a sort of irresponsibility - you feel that you can do anything you like because nobody on Earth will judge you for it: while at the same tune, 'just what you like' is naturally part of what the masses of Earth would like to do, had they the
license
.”

Mrs. Warhoon tapped four pliant fingers on the table.

"You make it sound very sinister.”

"Hell, the irrational drives of man are sinister! Don't think I'm generalizing. I've seen this mood come over a man too often. It was probably that that undid Ainson. And I feel it in myself.”

"Now I'm afraid I don't see what you mean.”

"Don't look so offended. I could feel that your Quilter really enjoyed shooting our friends. The thrill of the chase! If I saw a bunch of 'em nipping over the veldt. I wouldn't mind a shot myself.”

Mrs. Warhoon's voice was slightly chilled.

"What do you intend to do if we find the ETA home planet?”

"You know what I intend to do: act according to logic and reason. This outfit is for business, not pleasure. But I'm also aware that there's a part of me saying; Lattimore, these creatures don't feel pain; how can anything have a spirit or a soul or be intelligent or appreciate some un-imaginable equivalent of Byron's poems or Borodin's Second Symphony if it does not suffer? And I say to my-self, whatever gifts it has, if it has not pain, then it is for ever beyond the reach of my comprehension.”

"But that is just the challenge, that is why we are having to try to comprehend, that -" She looked attractive with her fists clenched.

"I know all that. But you are talking to me in the voice of intellect," Lattimore said, leaning back in his chair. It was pleasurable shooting Hilary this all-male line. "I'm also hearing a sort of Quilter-voice, a vox populi, a cry not only from the heart but from the bowels. It says that whatever talents these critters may have, they are less than buffaloes or zebras or tigers, and the primitive urge comes up in me just as it did in Quilter, and I want to shoot them.”

She had eight ruby-tipped fingers drumming on the table now, but she managed to look into his face and laugh.

"You are playing an intellectual game with yourself, Bryant. I'm sure that even the base Quilter offered excuses for his actions. Therefore even he feels guilt for his actions; you, being more intelligent, can
savor
your guilt beforehand, and so control yourself.”

"East of Suez, an intelligent man can find more excuses for himself than a cretin can.”

Seeing vexation on her face, he relented.

"As you say, I'm probably playing a game with myself. Or with you.”