to?” I asked, ungrammatically.
“That’s your problem,” he retorted. That’s how you get to be director—you have to know how to delegate. I forgave him for sounding tough. After all, he was stuck on Sule while we were about to set forth on the Great Adventure.
“Come on, friend,” I said to Zeno as I stood up, “the cause of civilization needs us. We are the conquistadores of the new Earth.” I glanced back at Schumann, and said: “They really must think we’re good, if they picked us out of all the men available.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the director, smoothing back the few grey hairs he had left. “Maybe they just think you’re expendable.”
I laughed. I really thought it was a joke!
CHAPTER TWO
We got back to the lab, and sat down facing one another beside the main bench.
“What we have to do,” said Zeno, “is to decide which projects we can simply terminate, and which we should reallocate. It would be easier, of course, if our writing-up were up to date. There are half a dozen things we should have put into the bulletin before now. Anything which has to be taken over by someone else has to be brought up to date, and really needs supplementary annotation.”
“Zee,” I said, “you have a distorted sense of priorities. Do you really think any of this can possibly matter now?”
“Of course it matters,” he said.
“It’s junk,” I told him. “Slime from some ugly ball of rock. It’s an aborted life-system. Evolutionary ABC. Little bags of chemicals. Sure they have nucleic acids swilling around in their microscopic cells. They have their mutations and their viruses and all the other nasty little shocks that flesh is heir to, but it’s just marking time. Nobody cares about it. If the entire life-system were to be wiped out by a nova, no one would shed a tear. It’s a finger-exercise, Zee—it’s allowed us to practice for the real thing, to sharpen our techniques and sharpen our wits. But it has nothing to offer—it doesn’t even pose a threat to us, even if some of the lousy viruses have found a hook to hang themselves on in Scarlatti’s lousy mice. Forget it!”
He heard me out, politely, then he picked up the phone. “I’m calling Tom Thorpe,” he said. “He can take my stuff on until they replace us. I suppose they will replace us?”
I shook my head, but not in answer to his question. I listened while he apologized to Tom for troubling him on a holiday, and asking him politely if he could please spare the time to drop in at the lab. Tom would spare the time, all right. Like everyone else—including me—he was hung up on his work. Single-mindedness was an essential characteristic in those so close to the top of their profession that they could swing an assignment like Sule. It costs a lot to hoist a man out of a gravity well like Earth’s and ship him all the way to Mars-orbit; they always make sure they’re getting value for money.
Zeno was right, of course, but I still wanted to take time out to think about it all. This was the kind of thing that we all dreamed about...except, of course, when we were busy having nightmares.
“Lee,” said Zeno softly (my name’s Leander—Lee and Zee for the purposes of the double act), “you don’t know that they’ve found a habitable world—or even a world at all. For all you know, the Ariadne may have lit the Hyper-Space Beacon just to call for help. It might be some kind of shipboard problem—nothing to do with a new planet.”
“And for that they need a physiologist and two geneticists who specialize in alien life-systems?”
“Who knows?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “The ship’s been invaded by froglike monsters—monsters even more froglike than you. Or long exposure to cosmic rays has engendered some frightful new life-form in the egg factory which has started to feed on the frozen flesh of the off-duty crewmen. Then again....”
“Then again,” conceded Zeno, “they may have found a new world, with a life-system that’s a little weird. Something their own biologists can’t cope with, because they’re three hundred and fifty years behind the times. I concede—Occam’s razor cuts your way.”
This is how great partnerships work.
Tom Thorpe came into the lab, and eyed us suspiciously. “Hello Zeno,” he said. “You too, Lee—where did you disappear to last night?”
That was just about number one on my top ten list of embarrassing questions.
“Oh...you know,” I said, hoping that he didn’t. Thirty-six hours, I’d be away, and it wouldn’t matter anymore.
“Sometimes,” said Tom, “I get the feeling that you’re anti-social. What’s up?”
I told him what was up, at great length. Anything to make him forget the small talk. With Tom’s help, we began to work out a plan for shifting most of the work we’d been doing into somebody else’s area of responsibility. We gave some to Biochemistry, some to Physiology and some (bending the rules a little) to Pathology. It was all a matter of changing definitions. As Zeno had pointed out, though, that still left the spadework to do. If the point of what we’d been working on wasn’t to be lost—whether our lines of work were continuing or not—we had a hell of a lot of writing up to do. I cheated, and got out the dictaphone. Typing was never my strong suit.
In the afternoon, I tried to get clearance to send a telegram to my mother, but the application was overruled. They call it “information control” these days, but what they mean is censorship. Space Agency is sensitive about its affairs. They always tell the Soviets, but never the free press. Marsbase is an independent political domain in all but name, and by no means a republic. Not even the ghost of democracy. There are reasons for that, of course. There always are. I took time out to write her a letter instead. Bits of it would probably be deleted and there would be “unavoidable” delays in transmission, but enough would get through to let her know that I’d been moved, and that she needn’t worry if she didn’t hear from me in a while. She wouldn’t like it—somehow, during the last couple of years, she’d convinced herself that Sule was just around the corner really, and we got to see one another’s faces on telecast occasionally. She wouldn’t feel the same way about a jump through hyperspace, and who could blame her? It wasn’t easy for her—my father was killed when I was three years old, and for fifteen years I’d been her sole companion, Losing me to space was bad enough. Losing me to hyperspace was the next best thing to receiving news of my death.
I made it a long letter, and promised that every FTL ship that came back from the new beacon would bring a message from me along with it. She’d grown used to my absence by degrees—first there was university, then assignment in America, then Sule. I did wonder, though, as I signed the letter, whether I’d ever make landfall on Earth again, or whether she’d live to see the day if I did. It was an awkward thought, reminding me of a kind of loneliness that I could never quite put behind me.
I ate all my meals in my room or in the lab; I couldn’t face the common room, even though I knew there’d be something special on the menu. Usually, any change from the customary diet of synthetic pabulum was an opportunity too good to think of missing, but the circumstances were special. I had the Great Adventure lurking a few hours in my future, and I didn’t want anyone else inquiring where I’d been during the crucial hour. Someone, I supposed, must know—but I didn’t want to meet them any more than I want to meet inquiring minds which might get too curious about my state of mental health.
When I finally went to bed, I had no difficulty in getting to sleep, and if I dreamed the dreams are mercifully beyond the reach of my memory.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day dragged as the business of tidying up the loose ends of our work grew more and more tedious and the bits we were picking over grew steadily more trivial and more troublesome. When it got to the stage where I was picking petty quarrels with Zeno in order to have some way of venting my frustration, I decided that it was time to pack up and isolate myself.
I