The Edge of Tomorrow (16 page)

“And what of Detective Sergeant Tom Bristol? Is he an honest cop or a dishonest cop? He accepted four hundred shares of Culpepper Motors—a hundred for each of his children. He wants them to go to college, and they will. Miss Clementina Arden, possibly the finest decorator here or on Mars, charged us forty thousand dollars for her contribution to the decor. The price was reasonable. She is a hard-headed business woman, and if she does not look after herself, who will? Yet she has turned down other jobs. She didn't turn down this one—

“Well, my good friends, ladies and gentlemen—we will not meet again, ever. My father, a working man all his life, once said that perhaps if I opened a store, even a small store, I would no longer have my life subject to the crazy whim of this boss or that. Maybe he was right. Finally, with your good help, I opened three stores. The total cost, if you are interested, was twenty-one million dollars, more or less—and a shrewd investment, I don't mind saying. Culpepper Motors will add five times that sum to its profits over the next three months. And our three stores, I do believe, have accomplished a little something that wiser men have failed to do.

“That is all I have to say. Many of you may regret that no monuments will enshrine our work. I wish we could change that, but we can't. For myself, I feel that when a man's wealth reaches a certain point of large discomfort, he does better to remain out of the public's eye. So guard our secret—not because you will be believed if you reveal it, but because you will be laughed at …”

As time passed, the question arose as to the disposition of the one thing of value left by the “space merchants” as they came to be called—the solid gold letters. Finally, those from the Fifth Avenue shop were set in a glass display case at the United Nations. So visitors to the national museum of France or Japan—or to the United Nations, have always before them to remind them, in letters of gold:

MARS PRODUCTS

They were in orbit, and it was over. They had crossed the void, leaped all the gaps of time and imagination, and bridged the unbridgeable, and they had been through the seven fires of hell. They were sane, although they had touched all the fringes of insanity. They could smile, although they had known all the profound depths of grief and suicidal profession; and they were alive, although they had flirted with all the varieties of death that boundless space can concoct.

They had come through fear and terror indescribable, and now they could speak about it and to each other. There were seven of them, three women and four men, and they had been locked away in this starship for five interminable years. They were light years from the Planet Earth beyond calculation; they had leaped their ship across the strange curves and tricks of space, played havoc with all the calculus and geometry known to men, and had flung themselves over the void to where the stars clustered thick as grapes on the autumn vines. They had done what they were ordained to do, and what no people from the Planet Earth had ever done before. And now they were in silent, flowing orbit over a planet as blue and green and lovely as the one they had left behind them.

It was something to think about and to crow about. It gave them a sense of themselves that was understandable. It made them look at each other in a certain way as they sat together in the wardroom. They had done it.

For that reason, all words that could be said to the point were pointless; in five years, all the words had been said; all the reactions had been tested; all the tears had been wept. Now there remained only the fact, and the fact was the planet beneath them, bathed in sunshine, washed with air, and laced with rivers and lakes and lagoons. It was the proof of the universe, all they had ventured their lives and sanity to prove, that life was not limited to the Planet Earth and the Solar System, but was a part of the logic of the universe. The fact was a planet slightly larger than Earth, perhaps of somewhat less density, with a breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, well-watered and with abundant plant life. Its revolution upon its axis was thirty-two hours; its year, as well as they could calculate, was four hundred and fifteen days. Its sun was a Sol-type sun, somewhat better than 900,000 miles in diameter and at this moment 112,000,576 miles from the planet it warmed. There were eleven other planets in the system; first this one, the other ten could wait.

Their own orbit time was five hours and sixteen minutes, and since they had gone into orbit to study the planet, their starship had made eight revolutions. This was their final meeting in the wardroom for comparative discussion. It would be a short meeting, and then they would descend.

2

Briggs, the pilot and as much the captain as anyone was captain upon the starship, looked from face to face and said, “Not very much left to talk about, unless someone can come up with a reason not to go down?”

“All the reasons,” Frances Rhodes, the physician, nodded. “Bugs, germs, virus, radiation—and none of them hold water.” She smiled—and she was lovely then, as they all were in the radiance of their accomplishment. “We'd go down if it was a leper colony, wouldn't we?”

They would have gone down if it were boiling lava under them, because they had endured all the confinement that is endurable and had felt all the nakedness of empty space that men can feel and remain sane.

“I'm not worried about bugs,” Carrington, the agronomist, said. “Disease doesn't work that way. Not about radiation either. Something else.”

Gene Ling, second navigator and Nobel Prize winner, nodded. She was a slender, gentle half-Chinese from San Francisco. “Yes, something else,” she said. “No oceans.”

“No deserts either,” said Carrington.

“No lights in the cities at night,” said Gluckman, the engineer.

“If they are cities,” McCaffery, the navigator.

“The nights are full of starlight,” Briggs thought. “Perhaps they sleep at night. It must be different. Why do we forget how different it must be?”

“They must see us,” said Laura Shawn, the biologist. “Why don't they call to us, signal us, come up to us?”

“They?”

“In the scopes, it looks like fairyland,” Phillips, 2nd engineer, observed self-consciously. “I don't like that.”

“Where was your childhood, Phillips?”

“I don't like it.”

“Arms?” Gluckman wanted to know.

“I suppose so,” said Briggs uneasily. “Sidearms anyway.”

“In fairyland?” Laura Shawn smiled.

But it wasn't as light and pleasant as it seemed, and if it went on this way, Briggs realized, it could top a note of hysteria. They were clinging to reality with a thin hold, and the meeting was pointless and becoming too long.

“We go down now,” Briggs said. “Go to your stations.”

They were relieved, and they didn't want to talk about it. They went to their stations, and the starship slid down its electro-magnetic web until it rode its anti-gravatic tensors a foot above the planet's surface. Then they opened their airlocks and went out.

3

The air was sweet as honey. Where the sun shone, it was warm and beneficent and in the shade it was seventy degrees Fahrenheit. They had landed upon a broad meadow, half a thousand acres of meadow where the green grass was cropped an inch high; but when they examined it, they saw that it bent upon itself and controlled and conditioned itself. Through the meadow, winding lazily, a little river took its way, and the banks of the river were lined with a million flowers of red and blue and yellow and every other color. Bees hummed among the flowers and the air was full of their fragrance, and here and there about the meadow was a tree heavy with blue or golden fruit. About a half a mile down the river, a filigree bridge crossed it.

They had been five years in the starship, so at first they just stood and looked and breathed the air. Then some of them sat down on the grass. They all wept a little; that was to be expected. If they had faced danger or horror or the unbelievable, their reaction would have been different. It was the beauty and the peace, almost unendurable, that made them weep. They felt better when they had discharged some of their emotion.

They walked around a little, but mostly they sprawled on the grass and listened to the soft breeze blowing. No one said anything and no one wanted to say anything. A half hour went by, and Briggs said,

“We can't just stay here.”

“Why not?” Laura Shawn wanted to know.

They were all thinking, as Briggs also thought, that it was a dream or an illusion or that they were dead. It was a bubble that could burst, they were thinking; and Briggs said,

“Gluckman and Phillips—go into the ship and follow us!”

Then the other five set out on foot, with the great, shining starship sliding behind them on its magnetic web. They walked to the filigree bridge, which seemed to be made of crystal lace, and they crossed the river. A little road or pathway, full of dancing light and color, led up over the brow of a low hill. On the other side of the hill was a garden and in the center of the garden a building that was like a castle in fairyland or a dream, or the laughter of children, if a building can be like the laughter of children.

If the building was like the laughter of children, then the garden was like all the dreams that city children ever dreamed about a garden. It was about a mile square, and as Briggs led them on a winding path through it, it appeared to open endless arms of delight and wonder. There were the fountains. Golden water from one, pink water from another, green water from a third, a rainbow of colors from a fourth—and there were hundreds of fountains, ornamented with dancing, laughing children carved out of stone of as many different shades as the water showed. There were nooks and corners of secret delight. There were benches to rest on that were marvels of beauty and comfort. There were hedges of green and yellow and blue. There were beds of flowers and bold beautiful birds, and there were drinking fountains to quench the thirst of those who used the garden.

Gene Ling bent to drink at one of these. They watched her, but they didn't try to stop her.

“It's water,” she said. “Clean and cold.”

Then they all drank. They didn't care. Their defenses were crumbling too quickly.

Gluckman brought the starship to rest in front of the building, and all seven of them went inside together. As they entered, music began, and they stopped nervously.

“It's automatic,” McCaffery guessed. “Body relay or photo electric.”

Their momentary nerves could not contend against the music—an outpouring of sound that vibrated with welcome and assurance and sheer delight—that filled them with a sense of innocence and purity. Wherever they went in the building, the music was with them. They went into an auditorium large enough to hold a thousand people, but empty, and with a great silver screen at one end. They wandered along empty corridors, lined with colorful and masterful murals of naked children at play. They looked into rooms full of couches, where the music made them drowsy almost immediately, and there were other rooms that were dining rooms, play rooms, classrooms—all recognizable and all different. In each case, they sensed that this was how it should be, and in each case, the memories of earth which they used for comparison became crude and senseless and ugly.

They left the building and went back to the starship.

4

With its viewplates open, the starship moved across the planet's surface, a hundred feet above the ground. They saw gardens as beautiful and more beautiful than the one they had been in. They saw forests of old and splendid trees, with colored paths among the trees. They saw mighty amphitheatres that could seat a hundred thousand people and smaller ones too. Buildings of glass and alabaster, pink stone and violet stone, green crystal. They saw groups of buildings that reminded them of the Acropolis of ancient Athens, if the Athenians had but a thousand years more to work and plan for some ultimate beauty. They saw lakes where boats were moored to docks, ready for use, but small boats; pleasure boats. They saw bathing pavilions—or so they surmised—playing fields, arbors, bowers, every structure for beauty and delight that they had ever imagined and a thousand that they had never imagined.

But nowhere did they see a living man, woman or child.

5

After nightfall, after they had eaten, they sat and talked. Their talk went in circles, and it was full of fear and speculation. They had come too far; space had enveloped them, and although their starship hung a thousand feet in the air above a planet as large as the Planet Earth, they felt that they had passed across the edge of nowhere.

“Just suppose,” Carrington said, “that all our dreams had taken shape.”

“All the memories and wishes of our childhoods,” said Frances Rhodes.

“Taken shape,” Carrington repeated. “Who knows what the fabric of space is or what it does?”

“It does strange things,” Gene Ling, the physicist, agreed.