“None.”
“Unusual coloration of any life-supports?”
“None.” Though it was hard to judge under these luminants, selected not so much because they were known to perform well in low pressure and zero gravity as because they tolerated their own wastes in a closed environment.
“We copy automatic reports confirming subjective assessment. All set for release. Clasp your branch!”
There was of course no branch. Yull was trying to sound sociable. Karg couched his answer in equally light tones.
“The next signal you receive will be from our outside broadcast unit. A very long way outside!”
“It’s a big universe,” came the dry response. “Very well; as of the mark, you’re on your own. Ready?”—to someone else. “Confirm! And mark!”
“Now I’m just a passenger,” said Karg, and waited for the sky to let him through.
To make this voyage possible scores-of-scores-of-scores of folk at Slah and in its hinterland had gone without for generations … though never without food, for the effects of starvation, voluntary or not, were much too horrible. Rather, they had resigned themselves and their budlings to less than their share of the wonders of the modern world: houses that thought, scudders and floaters, falqon-mail that flew from continent to continent where pitchens had only skimmed, communications that no longer called for nervograps, recordimals offering faithful transcriptions of the greatest thinkers and entertainers, newsimals and scentimals and haulimals, and the rest.
It was the tradition of their ancestors, and they were proud to keep it up.
Elsewhere the pattern had been otherwise. But that was the greatest source of conflict in the world today.
Nothing at all, however, could have prevented the citizens from gathering to marvel at the outcome of their self-denial. As a result of their efforts, gas-globes sprawled not just across the valley whence the launch took place, but over hill and dale and out to artificial islands in the nearest bay, wherever pumplekins might root to fill them with wetgas so light it bore up them, and their tethers, and a burden eloquent of eventual salvation.
Thanks to their hard work, too, Karg was promised survival and return. It had been their forebudders who devised means to break out into the vacuum of space; then they had found themselves short of essential raw materials. Ashamed to cheat their ignorant cousins on Glewm, the southern continent, out of what they did not so far know the worth of, they had resorted to their ancestors’ domain, reinventing means to keep mind and pith together in mid-ocean, to locate themselves beneath dense cloud a season’s trip from home, and ultimately to visit the sea-bed and supervise the work their creatures were undertaking there on their behalf. All the live tools they had bred to aid them in this venture had been exploited by the scientists who now were offering up Karg as a challenge to the stars.
The moon sparkled whether full or new. Comets were common; one had devastated Swiftyouth. Other rocks from out of nowhere had struck Stolidchurl and Steadyman, their impact sometimes bright enough to see without a telescope. Pure chance so far had saved the folk from another such disaster as created Slah.
All this they fervently believed. Whereas the inhabitants of other lands, not beneficiaries of what had been learned by digging Slah’s foundations, reserved the right to doubt, and—almost as though they still accepted crazy Aglabec’s ideas—acted as if their planet could endure forever.
That, though, the universe did not permit. The folk of Slah bore the fact in mind as they waited for Karg to take leave of this petty orb.
First on the smooth mirror of the water they cut loose the initial score of bladders. Up they went! A five-score bunch came next, and hoisted far into the clear blue autumn morning. Each batch was larger than the one before, and as the mass of them gathered it seemed that land and sea were uttering messages of hope about the future. Across the beach, across the nearer hills, then across the valley of the launch site, the sequence flowed without a flaw. This was the hugest skein of gas-globes ever lofted, almost a padlonglaq in total height.
At last they stirred the metal cylinder that held not only Karg but the drivers which would blast him beyond the atmosphere, along with creatures designed to keep him alive and in touch, navigate him to his rendezvous, assist his work and bring him back a moonlong hence.