The space swimmers, p.7
The Space Swimmers, page 7
“The same man?” said Johnny. “Why bother to check on that?”
“Because. . .” Stuve’s whisper laughed in the shadow of the arbor, “if you still are the same man, you’ll do better making a deal with me than with Ebberly.”
“Who says I want to make a deal with anyone?” asked Johnny.
"You know you have to now . . ." murmured Stuve.
“. . . The Beaches of Lukannon—” rang the voice of Pat up on the platform, “—the winter wheat so tall—
“The dripping, crinkled lichens and the sea-fog drenching all!
“The platforms of our playground, all shining smooth and worn!
“The Beaches of Lukannon—the home where we were born!”
“I wasn’t sent here by the sea-People,” said Johnny, “to make a deal with you.”
“Who’s talking about the sea-People?” asked Stuve. “It’s you I want, not them.”
“That’s even further off the mark,” said Johnny. “I’ve no reason to make any deal for myself alone.”
“You’d better,” said Stuve. “You took yourself out of leadership of the sea-People to protect your son, once, didn’t you? —Never mind how I know. You told them you’d never lead them again, but here you are. And why?”
“Because I’m one of them.”
“No, no. . . ” Stuve laughed again, softly, “you’re not one of them—any more than Ebberly, or I, am like these blunder-headed fools ashore. You’re a leader, Johnny Joya. And you must lead—it’s a compulsion. You may fool yourself about why you do it, but you do it, anyway. And what that leading leads to is a final arrangement, two against one. There are three of us in the world, Johnny—you, me, and Ebberly. And only room for two on one side. Right now you’ve got the choice of me or Ebberly ; but you may not have it a little later...”
He moved backward into the shadows until he was almost lost in their darkness.
“I’ll be waiting,” he murmured, so low-voiced under Pat’s singing that for all Johnny’s sea-trained ears the words were hardly distinguishable. “Think about it, Johnny. The world’s going smash—on land and sea, alike. Not even Ebberly knows that. Only you and I know it. And none of us can stop it. But you and I, Johnny, controlling Land and Sea in partnership could put if off a little while—for the length of our own lives, maybe. That’s all I want—peace in my time. We can have that if we work together, you and I, because only you and I know about the pattern there is to things. A pattern like woven thread in a piece of cloth; and how you pull those threads is how the pattern goes. Only no one can stop the weaving. Think about that, Johnny. No one can stop it. But together, you and I could hold up the finishing of the pattern for a little while. So think about it. . . but not too long. I don’t want to have to nudge you . . .”
There was a rustle among the leaves and the darkness at the far end of the shadowed arbor was empty. Johnny sat staring at it.
—While, up on the platform, Pat was drawing the wild, sad anthem of the sea to it’s ringing finis ...
"... I met my mates in the morning, a broken, scattered band.
“Men shoot us in the water and club us on the land;
“Men drive us to the Salt House like silly sheep and tame,
"And still we sing Lukannon—before the sealers came.
“Wheel down, wheel down to southward! Oh, Goover-ooska go!
"And tell the Deep-Sea Viceroys the story of our woe;
"Ere, empty as the shark’s egg the tempest flings ashore,
"The Beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!"
8
A little later, Pat came to collect Johnny from the arbor where he was sitting; they went by walkway to the Estate’s private rocket pad some five miles away, and the Entertainment rocket waiting there lifted them for Australia. Lifting high above the curve of the earth they caught up with the dawn and flew into morning. It was three o’clock of a bright Down-Under afternoon when they landed at Entertainment Estates South, north of Sydney, below the bulge of Australia’s eastern coast.
Pat, who had been sitting up near the nose of the rocket with Mila Jhan, collected Johnny from a seat near the rear and led him out of the rocket, off the pad, and onto a walkway. A ducted-fan flyer was picking up Mila Jhan. The walkway ran between lines of eucalyptus trees in which koala
bears browsed on the leathery limp-hanging leaves, their teddy-bear snouts poking incuriously among the branches, in the process of making their livings, animal-fashion. Otherwise this place was very like the Transportation Estates North, except that the air smelled woody and dry—and also of the salt sea, which bordered one side of the Estates here.
Pat jogged Johnny’s elbow and pointed ahead up the walkway. “Look there, now.”
Johnny looked and saw one of the round platforms that were terminal points for joining of the walkways.
“When we get there we’ll stop for a second,” said Pat. “I’ve got something to show you.”
They reached the platform and stepped off onto its unmoving surface a few seconds later. Pat turned to face one of the three walkways branching onward from it and running toward a lofty screen of the enormous king eucalyptus trees, big as the giant California sequoias. The giants at which Johnny looked now towered over three hundred feet in the air.
“Watch,” said Pat. “Over the trees—now!”
For a moment as Johnny looked there was only the blue Down-Under sky and the sun approaching mid-afternoon. Then, sweeping suddenly into view above the great treetops, looming over them, blotting out sky and sun at once, flashed the crimson, half-mile-wide shape of a Space Swimmer.
At once it was above them. The day was darkened. The koalas paused. The pleasant trees and grass and grounds were all abruptly alike, dyed dark, blood-red, about them—
—And then, it was gone.
It had disappeared, as if the enormous, fantastic, red-rippling shape had never been.
Johnny lowered his eyes slowly from the once more sunlit and empty sky. He looked at Pat.
Pat smiled.
“This way,” he said, stepping down onto the walkway that ran toward the trees. Johnny followed.
“It wasn’t real then?” Johnny said curiously to Pat, as he caught up and stood beside his cousin. Pat nodded.
“It was real,” he answered. “It’s just that it wasn’t here.” He looked steadily at Johnny. “Come and see...”
The walkway carried them on between the trees, their trunks like the stringy-barked arms of enormous giants, upthrust through the earth to hold a clenched fist of leaves at the sun. Beyond was a small belt of flowering shrubs, and then they had passed through these to come upon a small, oval salt-water lagoon separated from the blue sea by a small, miniature hill-line of tree and grass.
The dome-shape of what Johnny took to be either an observatory of some sort, or a small, circular auditorium, projected above the water in the center of the lagoon. And the walkway went above the water out to it from the shore.
Pat and Johnny rode out and stepped through the entrance of the domed structure. Within, it was artificially lighted, a depressed circle of seats surrounding a small theater-in-the-round. Behind the top circle of seats was a rim of hallway, and on this, just inside the door, a slim, incredibly beautiful, dark-haired woman was waiting for them. She was Mila Jhan, Baroness of the Entertainment Group. Her flyer had evidently gotten her here before them.
“Johnny,” she said, smiling at him when Pat introduced her. “I know you almost as well as Pat now—through what he’s told me.” She did not offer to shake hands in Lander fashion, and Johnny wondered whether this was through some understanding of her own, or whether Pat had taught her it was a custom almost forgotten by the sea-People. She was tall, dark—almost fragile looking in the smallness and perfection of her boning. Her beauty seemed not so much to be a matter of face or figure, but of some inner light shining through the dark lantern of her.
“Did that Space Swimmer belong to you?” asked Johnny. She shook her head, and her dark hair moved about the long, olive oval of her face.
“This is all Pat’s doing,” she said. “I only gave him what help, influence, facilities, and credit could give. He’ll tell you about it.” She put her hand gently, tenderly, for a moment on Pat’s arm. The gesture was not lost on Johnny.
“This way,” said Pat. He turned and led the way around the rim of hall until he stopped at a section of back row seats ending on an aisle. At a touch of his hand four of these swung aside over the polished flooring of the hall rim to reveal a two-way escalator ramp leading downwards. They stepped onto the down side of the ramp and the seats swung back above them as they descended. They were carried down until Johnny’s sense of position told him they must be below the lowest level of the theater area above, and well below the surface of the lagoon.
They stepped off at last into a ring of working areas encircling a large tank apparently filled with the dark water of the lagoon. There were several people working around various pieces of equipment connected with the tank. One of these, a long-nosed, balding young man, approached them.
“This is Leif Gurdom, Johnny,” said Pat. “Leif, this is my cousin, Johnny Joya, whom I told you about.” He turned to Johnny. “Leif's in charge here.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Leif, offering his hand. He had large, healthy-looking, brown eyes in a long, smiling face. “You’re going in the tank, then?”
“Yes, he is,” said Pat, before Johnny could speak. “I want him to talk to a Space Swimmer for himself.” He turned to the scientist. “You’ve got one for him haven’t you, Leif?”
It was not so much a question as it was a statement. For the first time, Johnny heard in Pat’s voice the hard ring of command.
9
Leif nodded.
“We’ve locked on to one of the big blues right now,” said Leif, “and we’ve got several more in range of the master unit if that one passes over on us. —This way.”
He led them through the mazes of equipment encircling the transparent window of the tank to a waterlock with a double magnetic envelope iris and a pressure chamber between. The envelope faces shimmered like two circles cut from a fresh rainbow. He pointed through the transparent wall beside the waterlock.
“Watch the tank now,” he said to Johnny. “Ready!” he called over his shoulder, then turned to face the tank himself. Johnny watched with him.
Before Johnny’s eyes the shadowed darkness of the water changed to give way to the star-blazed darkness of space. Johnny felt stirring in him an echo of that original twinge of beckoning excitement that had led him ten years before, with others of the third generation of sea-born, to answer the call of Ebberly’s Space Academy ashore.
Now, however, the old excitement touched him lightly. From where he stood outside the tank it was like looking into a globe-shaped cavern of darkness with lights of all colors far off about its walls. A cavern with a distant—very distant—small, circular, brilliant doorway to daylight, which was the sun shrunk to the size of a quarter. Within this cavern, something stirred. It occulted the lights on a portion of the cavern well. Swooping, growing larger, it seemed to approach like a bat-winged shape of blackness and to swell fantastically until it took on color and lay stirring and folding beyond the transparent window. A great, blue field of energized gas, living gas in appearance something between gossamer cloth and that impalpable phosphorescence that glitters, under proper conditions, on the breaking waves of the nighttime sea.
It brought back another memory—a memory of being crammed with five hundred other Cadets in the Space Academy training ship out beyond the orbit of Mars. They had watched the space-sleds with their instructor-operators spreading the net of magnetic fields about another Swimmer as large as this one. That had been more than six years ago.
He had not seen that other Swimmer so close. But he remembered now with sudden inner pain how it had curled up, had shriveled and darkened and died when at last it tried to pass the net and found the charges enclosing it on all sides. He remembered how something inside him had protested and wept, seeing it die this way—how something had reacted inside all of the sea-born aboard the rocket. So that when they got back to the Space Academy on Earth, he had led them easily to the decision to leave the Academy. —A leaving that had ended in war with the Land.
Johnny stiffened a little now—half-expecting in spite of his better knowledge to see the Swimmer before him shrivel and die. But it hung untouched, rippling, but seemingly not progressing, except that the shifting lamps of the stars on the walls of the black cavern around it betrayed its passage.
Johnny felt something small thrust into the palm of his right hand. Brought back with a jerk to the bright laboratory space around him, he lifted the hand and saw in it what looked like a tiny metal moth with two thin, hexagonal wings raised at a forty-five degree angle from the lead-colored, football-shaped body.
“We’ve got an automated Master Unit out beyond Mars,” said Leif beside him. “It sends out, recovers, and services little transceivers like the one you’re holding. One just like that is keeping pace with the Swimmer you see imaged there in the tank now. The transceivers use a short-term ion drive which is exhausted at usual Swimmer speeds in half an hour or so. But then another transceiver takes over for it. It receives the Swimmer image and transmits it back to the Master Unit. And it can project images around itself—like the image of the Swimmer you saw projected by a unit flying over the king eucalyptuses, on your way here—and the ones that have appeared over cities ashore here, occasionally. From the Master Unit, transmitted Swimmer images are retransmitted to a Mars orbital relay, to an Earth orbital relay, and to us here.”
Johnny gazed at the Swimmer Unit.
“How much of a time lag in transmission is there?” he asked. “How long ago was that Swimmer doing what I see him doing now?”
“About five seconds ago,” said the voice of Leif, behind him. “—You were thinking of the delay in terms of hours, weren’t you? But the transmission links are laser beams. The information travels along those tight beams of light at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. When you go into the tank now, the Swimmer will see your image in space beside him, five seconds after you’re in the water.”
“Put this on,” said Pat, alongside Johnny. Johnny turned to see Pat handing him a small copper skull cap with what looked like a foam-rubber rim. Toward its front edges a ruby-colored crystal glowed.
“This,” said Leif, tapping the crystal with a spatulate forefinger, “is something recent in crystallography. It replaces the old model control caps that were developed from the devices used in the original animal telemetry experiments, like W.H. Marshall’s Grousar Project in 1960. The crystal replaces the control cap wires that used to have to be surgically inserted into the specific brain areas. It beams the information to, and picks up the electrical impulses from, the motor areas of your brain; and relays them through our transmitter here to the Master Unit controlling the transceiver pacing the Swimmer. And the transceiver obeys your sub-activity motor impulses to move you closer to, away from, above, or below the Swimmer.”
Johnny lifted the cap and put it on his head. The foam-rubber-like edge seemed to grip him adhesively around the skull and at the temples of his forehead.
“Here’s a waterlung and fins,” said Pat. “And a magnetic envelope.”
A few seconds later Johnny penetrated the inner of the double magnetic irises. He knew that the sudden pressure of something like twenty feet underwater—twice atmospheric pressure—was suddenly closed about him, but inside the magnetic envelope this force was bent around him at right angles to the surface of his body. He felt nothing but the cool, wet stroking of the water against his skin.
For a second or two he swam in water in which the Swimmer was not visible. Then, abruptly, he was no longer swimming, but swooping through the cave of blackness, star-lights, and sun- entrance he had seen from outside the tank. He turned his head and saw the half-mile-wide waving blue field of the Swimmer ahead and apparently a little beneath him.
He turned to swim towards the Swimmer as he would have approached anything in the sea. But before his swimming body muscles could respond he found himself driving toward the great, gauzy, shimmering figure. Without warning he was right above it and it seemed to him the vast, blue body covered half of all space below him.
A strange feeling was growing in him. At. first he thought it was that all this reminded him of swimming in the sea—the freedom of movement in all different ways, up, down, and in any planar direction. And this was true—but what he was feeling was something more. Familiar in a way he could not put his finger on. Familiar but . . . better. He looked around for an explanation in the surroundings, but these told him nothing. He moved on impulse, it seemed, on the drive of thought alone. He skimmed the apparent, endless emptiness of the void and only by the star-lights beyond the undulating back of his great, silent, blue companion could he recognize the fact that they were both in motion.
How fast or how slow was that motion, he wondered? There was no way of telling by the moving star-lights. When he was once more outside the tank Leif might be able to tell him. But he found that he was not interested in asking now, even if he had been equipped with a device to let him do so.
He felt no urge to remember those watching. The strange feeling had grown to a living thing within him. The people outside the tank had dwindled in importance in his mind’s eye. They were off there, somewhere, forgotten. —In some awkward, unnatural, alien place of weights and pressures, and constant struggle to exist. While he was here—in the unending reaches of natural freedom.
He had his back to the small and distant sun now and he and the Swimmer fled outward together from it. He moved a little closer above that enormous carpet of undulating blue, strangely visible in the weak, far-off light of the sun behind them. For a moment, in fact for little more than four seconds, he hung looking at it and then suddenly he saw the speck of a shadow on that part of it directly under him. A tiny shadow with a football-shaped body and barely visible wings.
