Hugo awards the short st.., p.139
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 139
Lindy and I held hands for the first stage, programmed for ten light-years. I was nothing and she did not exist, yet somehow I knew that we were sitting in our quarters in the Stardust, and that we were holding hands. It seemed days and weeks, and yet it seemed only a minute or two. Our viewscreen showed an alien pattern of stars. My wife's hand was warm in mine. The starship barely had headway, perhaps no more than a thousand miles an hour. We were in pattern after the stage, orienting, checking, verifying. And the life of the ship went on as though it had not been interrupted. Which, indeed, perhaps it had not. We use Ultraspan, but we may never really understand it.
"There'll come a day," Lindy said, "when I won't want to tolerate that any more."
She got up and walked restlessly across the room. "It's painless," I said.
"Of course. It isn't that. It's—it's just that it seems to take me away from me! You dig? With all my problems solved, all my curiosities satisfied, all my challenges met, maybe sometime I won't want to come back. To go ten light-years in space without time lapse isn't for man. It's—it's ag'in nature!"
"Karma," I said. "Nirvana. Maybe we have found the way. And what, after all, is ag'in nature? What's nature?"
Lindy turned, and suddenly she smiled at me. It was the quick change of mood that all women show. Or I suppose they all do. I could see the strain go out of her face, the confidence return.
"You and me together! That's nature, friend. Pay me no attention, Roscoe. I go gloomy, but I'll always come back."
I rose and started for her. And our speaker rattled, cleared its throat, and the Music of the Spheres poured out of it.
It was different. There was more discord, more harshness, than in any broadcast before. It throbbed and pulsed and wailed. Where before only Lindy could detect urgency, now it seemed to me that anyone could. And I thought I knew why. We were closer. Whatever was impending, whatever motivated those calls to the galaxy, to whomever or whatever would listen—whatever it was, it was nearer. If we had stayed at our base near Earth, we wouldn't have heard this broadcast for ten years yet.
The signal was no stronger. It came in plainly, though, and here we were dependent on our own sensors. We didn't have the enormous backing of the Big Dish on the moon. As I listened, conviction grew. We were headed exactly right. We were on the beam.
After an Ultraspan stage, Rasmussen always activated a twenty-four-hour pattern. This gave time for a rest period, time for all data to be processed, time for all personnel to adjust. For the feel of one sector of space is not the feel of another. I can't explain that. But it's so.
We staged again, fourteen light-years. There was no star pattern on our viewscreens then. They were awash with brilliant light, all radiation screens were activated, and not twenty-five million miles away lay the awesome grandeur and tossing energy of a flaring sun. It was as close as we had ever come to a primary energy unit, but it was no mistake. We were where Moe Cheng intended we should be.
The broadcast came through. Fragmented by the roiling radiation, we still picked up most of it. And fourteen years had made a difference. There was panic in the music now, fear, desperation, and the first faint threads of despair. If anyone had doubted that our direction was right, they didn't any more.
Five stages later—five memorable stages—and the Stardust drifted at the edge of a spectacular star system. Not large, as such systems go, not as colorful as the red giants are, but with an attraction for us that I suppose was at least partly historical. Since man first had raised his eyes toward the heavens, he had known this little twinkling dot in space. It was a part of the complex by which travelers found their way. Ancients had used it as an eye test. For this was Mizar.
I don't have to instruct you. Any schoolboy knows the double-triple systems of this brighter one of the Alco-Mizar duo. But no schoolboy or anyone else of human origin had ever had our view of them. The first human visitation. And the last.
Our astronomers probed and measured and explored and verified, while we sat impatiently watching the viewscreens. They made it easy for us. The triple system of Mizar B, three bluish suns, moved slowly along the paths of their complex orbits around their common center in space. From Earth they simply melded to form a dim blue point. But it was Mizar A, the double, that had been our objective, though we had not known it. Here, somewhere here, was the point of origin of the Music of the Spheres.
The smaller component of Mizar A lay far in the distance across the system, a blue-white sun that glimmered cheerily and normally. Its relatively giant twin, a bright yellow on the charts, was no longer that. It hung in space before us, an ominous, shifting, sullen orange, a vast, savage celestial furnace, unstable and threatening. We knew its nature and its fate before the sounds came through once more, exactly on time.
You have listened to a requiem. You know the sounds of a dirge. The Music of the Spheres was still music, but there was in it no hope, no calls for help, no panic and no fear. The time was past for these. Whatever made the music was saying good-bye, was expressing thankfulness for having lived, for the wonders of having been sentient. There was even a gentle speculation that this was not the end after all—that somewhere, in an unimaginable future, there might be something more.
Now I'm not sensitive, as Lindy is. Certainly I have no touch of the mysticism that allowed Ursula Potts to feel crisis across the light-years. And Pegleg is worse. Yet all of us, sitting in the small lounge listening to that broadcast, all of us heard just what I've described. We felt it so plainly that we could put it into words, as I've done here. And there was one thing more we could detect. It was regret. Regret that before life ended it had not known other life, other beings that knew the joys of thought and achievement, beings that it believed existed, and to whom it had sent its music pulsing out among the stars.
Ursula Potts sat small and still in her chair as the broadcast ended, her strange eyes glowing. Tears flowed down Lindy's cheeks.
Pegleg twisted uncomfortably as he sat. Automatically he flexed his plastic knee joint. I got up and paced.
"All personnel, attention please!"
Dr. Johannes Rasmussen never speaks on intercom, but they were his cultured tones that came out of the speakers now.
"This is a summary, for your information. The sun Mizar A-l is in unstable condition, prenova. It will disintegrate in thirty-three hours. It has a single planet. Dr. Frost has recorded all vital physical data; so let it suffice to say that it is appreciably larger than Earth, has an atmosphere, and every evidence of varied and complex life. The music has originated there."
Johnny paused, and I could imagine him sitting, his face calm and apparently untroubled, reflecting on how to phrase his next sentence.
"We have time. We will proceed immediately to the planet, orbit and descend to the surface unless conditions make that impossible. Radiation is already high, many times human tolerance, but far less than the shielding capacities of our ship, or even our space-suits. Unless the music is mechanically produced, life still exists on the planet's surface. But probably you all detected finality in the last broadcast. Remarkable, really!"
Johnny seemed to be saying the last two words to himself.
"The planet is now on your screens. We will keep it there during approach. Please consider what part you would care to play in our brief reconnaissance. The brevity is occasion for regret, but it is fortunate that we have arrived before the system destroys itself. We will allow ourselves a safety margin of three hours, and we will stage thirty hours from this time. Thank you."
Nobody but Rasmussen could have made the most dramatic experience man had ever known sound as routine as a weather report.
The planet was a small bright dot on our screens as we flashed toward it and toward its glowering sun. It grew steadily, though. Cap'n Jules wasn't wasting time. Before long the dot was a sphere; shadows showed and drifted on its surface; colors glowed. Finally it hung before us in majestic blue-white splendor, suffused over all by the deepening orange light of the sullen sun. Doomed planet!
"What a pity!" Lindy murmured. "What a terrible, horrible, hard-to-understand, unbelievable fate! Roscoe, if I didn't remember Earth, that would be the grandest object we've ever seen from space!"
"Location, distance from its primary, rotation rate, revolution rate, light quality and intensity, all ideal," I said. "And there's plenty of water, an oxygen atmosphere, a deep and varied planetary crust. Just the kind of cradle life would have to have."
I had been running down Doug Frost's physical data tables. Like I said, everything was perfect. If you had set out to build a model planet, this was probably how it would have looked when you had finished. Then add countless eons of evolution! The results at least were life forms so sophisticated, so learned, that they could send complicated musical messages far into the galaxy. How far, we had no way of knowing.
And now the source of its life was sick, stricken with an incurable illness, a slowly progressing loss of balance in its atomic furnaces. In thirty-three hours the story would end. Thirty-one hours, now. We had taken two hours to approach the planet. For the life on that beautiful world out there, thirty-one hours until the end of time!
As we swept into high orbit, three thousand miles above the planet's surface, speakers came alive all over the ship. Johnny Rasmussen was calling the makers of music, and he wanted us all to hear. Every characteristic of the celestial broadcasts had long ago been analyzed. I could imagine the care with which Stony Price was matching element to element, intensity to intensity, frequency to frequency. But it was Rasmussen's voice that was going out. His message was simple. He knew that if it was detected it would not be understood, but his neat soul squirmed if all ends were not carefully tied.
"This is the starship Stardust, from the Sol system, eighty-eight light-years from your own. We have come in response to your messages. We see the condition of your sun. We will meet with you if it is possible. Please respond."
The speakers were silent. I probably held my breath for a full minute before I remembered to exhale. But nothing happened. After a brief time lapse Johnny repeated his message. Again nothing. Then he spoke to us, to the personnel of the Stardust.
"I had hoped that we might establish the location of the transmitting installations and home directly on them. It was a remote hope, at best. Some hours remain before the next scheduled broadcast, if in fact another ever will be made. A pity. As you may now see from the building complexes on your screens, life has indeed reached a high level here. We have not before encountered any forms so advanced."
He paused, doubtless rearranging his next sentence into a form that pleased him better. He never got a chance to use it.
The music came softly, hesitantly, wonderingly, as if its maker or makers didn't really believe. To our knowledge, they had been sending their calls out across the galaxy for nearly a hundred years. And now, when time had almost run out, they were answered! The tones deepened, strengthened. We could hear the exultant questions hi them: "Who are you? Where are you? Speak to us again!"
Pegleg was at our screen, adjusting for a better view, and we all could see the image whirl as the Stardust changed direction. Cap'n Jules had shifted course with the first pulse of sound.
"This is the Stardust," Rasmussen said. "We hear you. Speak again! Speak again! Speak again!"
The response poured from the speakers like a hymn of thanksgiving, like the sound of a choir in a great cathedral. I'm no musician, but any field man can sort out sounds. I could tell that that volume came from many sources. Then it died away into soft, happy whispers and only one tone remained, a clear, resonant soloist. That tone went up and down the scale, repeated and doubled back on itself in amazing patterns. And I knew, everybody knew, that it was speech.
The Stardust swept down into the atmosphere in a fluid, ever-decreasing glide. She knew where she was going, now. The computer had solved the location of the transmitter in seconds, for the unrelayed sound no longer lacked direction. Clouds briefly blurred the viewscreens. Then we were cruising smoothly and slowly over a landscape like nothing we had ever seen before. Still, it was familiar. All the elements of cultured, civilized occupancy were there. Only the forms were different.
It was not Earthlike. There were no trees, no grass, no flowers. Color was there, and variety, and I suppose I sorted things out pretty quickly. In the presence of proper stimuli I began to function automatically. If you put food before a hungry animal, it will salivate. Put an ecologist in a new ecosystem and he will start to analyze. Pavlovian. Inevitable.
All over the ship the same thing was going on. Johnny Rasmussen issued no orders. It wasn't necessary. Every researcher, every team, had gone into a structured behavior pattern, preparing, planning, anticipating. Each knew better than anyone else what his own part should be in this strange, brief, and tragic exploration. I was in my lab, without remembering how I got there. Lindy undoubtedly was scooping up samples, assaying the life in the atmosphere. Pegleg was readying to go out at first touchdown. And there was no doubt that Ursula's studio was extruded and that she was hard at work.
My viewscreen flickered as the scoutboats went out. Four swishes. Sixteen men. Geographers and meteorologists probably. They would range for hundreds of miles around the mother ship, their cameras recording everything from horizon to horizon, packing in raw data about this world that would be studied and analyzed long after the planet had ceased to be. We knew this. We all faced it. But there was no other thing we could do. Here life had evolved to high level—but all life must end sometime.
I changed into field gear. It wasn't much, just shorts, a jersey, sandals and a gear harness. Outside was going to be awkward and tricky, for we would be in spacesuits. The strange landscape looked tranquil and peaceful, but the radiation was lethal. We'd never worked under such conditions before. The suits anticipated them, though. We had a wide margin of safety.
"Shame about that blasted radiation." Pegleg read my mind. I hadn't even noticed him come into the lab. I was scooting my chair on its track back and forth along the row of sensor consoles that reported and recorded a variety of basic abiotic data. "As you can see, the air is sweet. More oxygen than we're used to."
"I've been checking the sources," I said. "Photosynthesis, as you'd expect from all the green. Funny thing, though. Everything seems to be photosynthesizing. Haven't picked up a flicker of what you might call animal life."
"Nothing looks like it either." Pegleg studied my screen. We were cruising at two thousand feet and at fifty miles an hour. First reconnaissance pattern. As eager as we were to contact the dominant life, the makers of music, still Johnny Rasmussen held to the pattern. We had time. We learned as we went. By now we all knew that the transmitter was a thousand miles away, but we'd spend an hour in this pattern, then flash to our destination in minutes. It was midmorning on the land below us, the last midmorning it would ever see.
"Animals are more sensitive to radiation," I suggested. "Could be they're already dead."
"The broadcast boys are still on the ball. Are you hinting that they're plants too?"
"We're shielded," I pointed out. "Why shouldn't they be? Somehow they haven't developed the know-how to escape their planet, but I predict that in many ways they'll be as advanced as we are. We couldn't have sent out the Music of the Spheres."
Pegleg's narrow face had its usual suspicious expression, as though he smelled a dead mouse.
"Smart enough, maybe, to take over the Stardust, and leave us here in their places to face Eternity in the morning?"
"This is a planet bigger than Earth," I said dryly. "The Stardust would be just a mite overloaded."
Pegleg snorted.
"Genghis Khan would only have picked a few passengers. Hitler wouldn't have taken everybody. Just a lady friend, maybe, and a few zealots to do the work. Don't be an ass, Roscoe. Even so-called kindly life forms want to keep on living. It's a pretty basic urge. The hand of brotherhood should be backed up by a club, just in case."
"If I know Johnny Rasmussen, it will be. He doesn't look or act as ornery as you do, but I do sometimes get the impression that he's sadly lacking in faith. Taking the Stardust would require a gambit we can't even imagine. You know that as well as I do."
"A comforting thought." Pegleg subsided, but he still grumbled. "Just the same, when we finally go, that'll be the reason. 'Love thy neighbor' is an impossible assignment. All it does is to leave the door unlocked so he can knock you on the head or steal you blind."
This was standard Pegleg philosophy, and how much of it he actually believed I suppose I'll never know. What I do know is that if and when I ever do get trapped in a last extremity, there's no man I'd rather have backing me up than Pegleg Williams.
We concentrated on the viewscreen. The ship was traversing a tremendously wide valley, and in length it seemed to go on and on. There were surfaced roads that swept in sinuous curves, water courses that undulated, and wherever road met river there was a gracefully arching bridge. Everything was curved. There wasn't an angle anywhere.
Nothing seemed to fit the specifications of a town. There were buildings, always in clusters, always piled masses of brightly colored domes. Too big for family dwellings, as we understand families, I still felt that they housed the builders and users of the roads and bridges. The green mounds arranged in orderly curved patterns over wide areas became plants in fields in my thinking. The green was chlorophyll. So the life pattern was below us, at least for this portion of the planet, but never a sign of the dominant forms, never a hint of movement. Either they were already dead from the radiation, or the Stardust had spooked them. If they were alive, they must have heard that their space broadcasts had been answered. So I reasoned, but nothing I could see gave much support to my speculations.
