The Outward Urge (21 page)

‘It keeps on growing,’ I admitted, ‘but Nature would always prevent you from confusing it with anywhere else.’

We went on chatting. The bouillabaisse arrived; and excellent it was. There were hunks of first-class bread, too, cut from those long loaves you see in pictures in old European books. I began to feel, with the help of the local wine, that a lot could be said for the twentieth-century way of living.

In the course of our talk it emerged that George had been a rocket pilot, but was grounded now - not, one would judge, for reasons of health, so I did not inquire further....

The second course was an excellent coupe of fruits I had never heard of, and, overall, iced passion-fruit juice. It was when the coffee came that he said, rather wistfully I thought:

‘I had hoped you might be able to help me, Mr Myford, but it now seems to me that you are not a man of faith.’

‘Surely everyone has to be very much a man of faith,’ I protested. ‘For everything a man cannot do for himself he has to have faith in others.’

‘True,’ he conceded. ‘I should have said ‘‘spiritual faith”. You do not speak as one who is interested in the nature and destiny of his soul - or of anyone else’s soul - I fear?’

I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However if he was interested in saving my soul he had at least begun the operation by looking after my bodily needs with a generously good meal.

‘When I was young,’ I told him, ‘I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.’

‘There is also vanity in thinking oneself self-sufficient,’ he said.

‘Certainly,’ I agreed. ‘It is chiefly with the conception of the soul as a separate entity that I find myself out of sympathy. For me it is a manifestation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modified by the external environment, and influenced more directly by the glands.’

He looked saddened, and shook his head reprovingly. ‘You are so wrong - so very wrong. Some are always conscious of their souls, others, like yourself, are unaware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he understands its value.’

It was not an observation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us continue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embarrassment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, however, showed no embarrassment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beautifully laundered handkerchief, and dealt with them.

‘I hope you will never learn what a dreadful thing it is to have no soul,’ he told me, with a shake of his head. ‘It is to hold the emptiness of space in one’s heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one’s life.’

Lamely I said:

‘I’m afraid this is out of my range. I don’t understand.’

‘Of course you don’t. No one understands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come somebody who does understand and can help.’

‘But the soul is a manifestation of the self,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how that can be lost - it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost.’

’Mine is,’ he said, still looking up into the vast blue. ‘Lost - adrift somewhere out there. Without it I am a sham. A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing - nothing - nothing....

‘Perhaps a psychiatrist - ‘ I started to suggest, uncertainly. That stirred him, and checked the tears.

‘Psychiatrist!‘ he exclaimed scornfully. ‘Damned frauds! Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche! - why they even deny its existence ...!’

There was a pause.

‘I wish I could help ...’ I said, rather vaguely.

‘There was a chance. You
might
have been one who could. There’s always the chance....’ he said consolingly, though whether he was consoling himself or me seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host’s mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

‘I have to go now,’ he told me. ‘I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.’

I watched him make his way along the place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit, and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently unconcerned about payment.

The dusky waitress arrived by my table, and stood looking after him.

‘
O le pauvre monsieur Georges
,’ she said sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the remnant of his fruit, and remove his hat to enter. ‘
Il va faire la prière,
’ she explained. ‘
Tous les jours
‘e make pray for ‘is soul. In ze morning, in ze afternoon.
C’est si triste
.’

I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I misjudged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

‘
Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous etes convive. C’est d’accord. Alors, monsieur Georges
‘e sign bill tomorrow.
S’arrange. C’est okay
,’ she insisted, and stuck to it.

The elderly man whom I had noticed before broke in: ‘It’s all right - quite in order,’ he assured me. Then he added: ‘Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?’ There seemed to be a fine open-handedness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

‘I’m afraid no one can have briefed you about poor George,’ he said.

I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

‘Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. We don’t like that.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I told him. ‘His state strikes me as very far from funny.’

‘It is indeed,’ he agreed. ‘But he’s improving. I doubt whether he knows it himself, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole
dejeuner
. Rather depressing until one got used to it.’

‘He lives here in Lahua, then?’ I asked.

‘He exists. He spends most of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand-daughter’s place. She sees that he’s decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.’

I thought I must have misheard.

‘His grand-daughter!’ I exclaimed. ‘But he’s a young man. He can’t be much over thirty...

He looked at me.

‘You’ll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn’t the sort of thing the family likes to publicize, but there’s no secret about it.’

The cafe-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:

About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger asteroids - the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the
Celestis
, working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accommodation forward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the outward journeys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assignment was simply to pick up a load of uranium ore - Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was necessary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course - but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of out-fliers of all sizes that you couldn’t hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objective as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velocity, and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands - hundreds of thousands, maybe - of miles. Fellows get bored and inattentive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don’t know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course-deflector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there’s so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensitive enough to react to it you’d have your ship shying off everything the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mechanism with only a limited range of operation - say, a hundred miles - but no one does. So, as I say, it’s tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they’ve lost half a dozen ships in there and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all ... On the other hand, uranium is uranium....

Gerald’s a good lad though. He has the authentic Troon yen for space without being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn’t too far from the inner rim of the orbit - not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance -.what’s more, he’d done it several times before.

Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he’d got a bit careless by then; in any case he’d not be expecting to find anything in orbit around the asteroid. But that’s just what he did find - the hard way....

There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enormous bell. It’s about the nastiest - and very likely to be the last - sound a spaceman can ever hear. This time, however, their luck was in. It wasn’t too bad. They discovered that as they crowded to watch the indicator dials. It was soon evident that nothing vital had been hit, and they were able to release their breath.

Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled space-suits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on to spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the air-lock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.

One can’t say just what they expected to find - probably an embedded hunk of rock, or maybe just a gash in the side of the hold - anyway it was certainly not what they did find, which was half of a small space-ship projecting out of their own hull.

One thing was evident right away - that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn’t have to conserve warmth, or contain air, or resist the friction of an atmosphere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravitational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the complexities necessary to sustain life.

Another thing, which was immediately clear, was that this was not the only misadventure that had befallen the small ship. Something had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hopelessly disabled.

Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its airlock must lie forward, somewhere inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke through his helmet-radio to the operator in the
Celestis
’s living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:

‘Can you raise the Moon-Station just now, Jake? I’d better make a report.’

‘Strong and clear, Cap’n,’ Jake told him.

’Good. Tell them to put me on to the Duty Officer, will you.’

He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and re-crossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice:

‘Hullo,
Celestis
! Hullo
Celestis
! Moon-Station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over!’

Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. Radio waves are some of the things that can’t be hurried. In due course another voice spoke.

‘Hullo,
Celestis
! Moon-Station Duty Officer speaking. Give your location and go ahead.’

‘Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from
Celestis
now in orbit about Psyche. Approximately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel.
Not
repeat
not
in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage He went on to give particulars, and concluded: ‘I am about to investigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over! ‘

The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold’s entrance-port. Gerald took the key, placed it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the purchase to wind it.

The moon man’s voice came again.

‘Hullo, Ticker. Understand no immediate danger. But don’t go taking any chances, boy. Can you identify the derelict?’

‘Repeat no danger,’ Troon told him. ‘Plumb lucky. If she’d hit six feet farther forward we’d have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the forepart of the derelict. Will try to identify it.’

The cavernous darkness of the hold made it necessary for them to switch on their helmet lights. They could now see the front part of the derelict; it took up about half the space there was. The ship had punched through the wall, turning back the tough alloy in curled petals, as though it had been tinplate. She had come to rest with her nose a bare couple of feet short of the opposite side. The two of them surveyed her for some moments. Steve pointed to a ragged hole, some five or six inches across, about half-way along the embedded section. It had a nasty significance that caused Gerald to nod sombrely.