He stayed on now, really, only because the union to which he belonged was strong enough to insist that his seniority made it mandatory for Krino to keep him on. But once he quit, once he left—
“Then,” he said to Ruth, “the pigeon moves in. Okay, let it; we’re going across to Whale’s Mouth, and from then on I won’t be competing with birds.” Competing, he thought, and losing. Offering my employers the poorer showing. “And Krino will be glad,” he said, with misery.
“I just wish,” Ruth said, “that you had a particular job lined up over there at Newcolonizedland. I mean, they talk about ‘all the jobs,’ but you can’t take ‘all the jobs.’ What one job are you—” She hesitated. “Skilled for?” After all, he had worked for Krino Associates for ten years.
“I’m going to farm.”
She stared at him.
“They’ll give us twenty acres. We’ll buy sheep here, those black-faced ones. Suffolk. Take six across, five ewes and a ram, put up fences, build ourselves a house out of prefab sections—” He knew he could do it. Others had, as they had described—not in impersonal ads—but in letters vid-signaled back and then transcribed by the Vidphone Corporation and posted on the bulletin board of the conapt building.
“But if we don’t like it,” Ruth murmured apprehensively, “we won’t be able to come back; I mean, that seems so strange. Those teleportation machines . . . working one way only.”
“The extra-galactic nebulae,” he said patiently. “The recession of matter outward; the universe is exploding, growing; the Telpor relates your molecules as energy configurations in this outflow—”
“I don’t understand,” Ruth said. “But I do know this,” she said, and, from her purse, brought a leaflet.
Studying the leaflet, McElhatten scowled. “Cranks. This is hate literature, Ruth. Don’t accept it.” He began to crumple it up.
“They don’t call themselves by a hating name. ‘Friends of a United People.’ They’re a small group of worried, dedicated people, opposed to—”
“I know what they’re opposed to,” McElhatten said. Several of them worked at Krino Associates. “They say we Terrans should stay within the Sol system. Stick together. Listen.” He crumpled up the leaflet. “The history of man has been one vast migration. This to Whale’s Mouth; it’s the greatest yet—twenty-four light-years! We ought to be proud.” But naturally there’d be a few idiots and cranks opposing history.
Yes, it was history and he wanted to be part of it. First it had been New England, then Australia, Alaska, and then the try—and failure—on Luna, then on Mars and Venus, and now—success. At last. And if he waited too long he would be too old and there would be too many expatriates so free land would no longer be available; the government at Newcolonizedland might withdraw its land offer any time, because after all, every day people streamed over. The Telpor offices were swamped.
“You want me to go?” he asked Ruth. “Go first—and send a message back, once I have the land and am ready to begin building? And then you and the kids can come?”
Nervously, she said, “I hate to be parted from you.”
“Make up your mind.”
“I guess,” she said, “we should go together. If we go at all. But these—letters. They’re just impulses onto energy lines.”
“Like telephone or vidphone or telegraph or TV messages. Has been for one hundred years.”
“If only real letters came back.”
“You have,” he said, derisively, “a superstitious fear.”
“Maybe so,” Ruth admitted. But it was a real fear nonetheless. A deep and abiding fear of a one-way trip from which they could never return, except, she thought, eighteen years from now, when that ship reaches the Fomalhaut system.
She picked up the evening ‘pape, examined the article, jeering in tone, about this ship, the Omphalos. Capable of transporting five hundred, but this time carrying one sole man: the ship’s owner. And, the article said, he was fleeing to escape his creditors; that was his motive.
But, she thought, he can come back from Whale’s Mouth.
She envied—without understanding why—that man. Rachmael ben Applebaum, the ‘pape said. If we could cross over now with you, she thought, if we asked—
Her husband said quietly, “If you won’t go, Ruth, I’m going alone. I’m not going to sit there day after day at that quality-control station, feeling that pigeon breathing down the back of my neck.”
She sighed. And wandered into the common kitchen which they shared with their righthand neighbors, the Shorts, to see if there was anything left of their monthly ration of what the bill of lading called cof-bz. Synthetic coffee beans.
There was not. So, instead, she morosely fixed herself a cup of synthetic tea. Meanwhile, the Shorts—who were noisy—came and went, in and out of the kitchen. And, in her living room, her husband sat before the TV set, an enraptured child, listening to, following with devout and absorbed full attention the nightly report from Whale’s Mouth. Watching the new, the next, world.
I guess, she thought, he’s right.
But something deep and instinctive within her still objected. And she wondered queerly why. And she thought, then, once more of Rachmael ben Applebaum, who, the ‘pape said, was attempting the eighteen-year trip without deep-sleep equipment; he had tried and failed to obtain it, the ‘pape said gleefully; the guy was so marginal an operator, such a fly-by-nighter, that he had no credit, pos or otherwise. The poor man, she thought. Conscious and alone for eighteen whole years; couldn’t the company that makes those deep-sleep units donate the equipment he needs?
The TV set in the living room declared, “Remember, folks, it’s Old Mother Hubbard there on Terra, and the Old Woman who lived in a shoe; you’ve got so many children, folks, and just what do you plan to do?”
Emigrate, Ruth decided, without enthusiasm. Apparently.
And—soon.
5
Against Rachmael ben Applebaum’s tiny flapple the great hull of his one asset of economic value—and that attached through the courts—bumped in the darkness, and at once automatic mechanisms came into operation. A hatch whined open; inner locks shut and then retired as air passed into vacuum and replaced it, and, on his console, a green light lit. A good one.
He could safely pass from his meager rented flapple into the Omphalos, as it hung in powerless orbit around Mars at .003 astronomical units.
Directly he had crossed through the lock-series—without use of a pressure suit or oxygen gear—Al Dosker said to him, eying him and with laser pistol in hand, “I thought it might be a simulacrum, supplied by THL. But the EEG and EKG machines say you’re not.” He held out his hand; and Rachmael shook. “So you’re making the trip anyhow, without the deep-sleep components. And you think, after eighteen years, you’ll be sane? I wouldn’t be.” His dark, sharp-cut face was filled with compassion. “Can’t you induce some fray to come along? One other person, and what a difference, especially if she’s—”
“And quarrel,” Rachmael said, “and wind up with one corpse. I’m taking an enormous edu-tape library; by the time I reach Fomalhaut I’ll be speaking Attic Greek, Latin, Russian, Italian—I’ll be reading alchemical texts from the Middle Ages and Chinese classics in the original from the sixth century.” He smiled, but it was an empty, frozen smile; he was not fooling Dosker, who knew what it was like to try an inter-system run without deep-sleep. Because Dosker had made the three-year-trip to Proxima. And, on the journey back, had insisted, from his experience, on deep-sleep.
“What gets me,” Rachmael said, “is that THL has gotten to the blackmarket. That they’re even able to dry up illegal supplies of minned parts.” But—the chance had been missed in the restaurant; the components had been within reach, five thousand poscreds’ worth. And—that was that.
“You know,” Dosker said slowly, “that one of Lies Incorporated’s experienced field reps is crossing, using a regular Telpor terminal, like the average fella. So we may be contacting the Omphalos within the next week; you may be able to turn back; we may save you the eighteen years going, and, or have you forgotten, the eighteen years returning?”
“I’m not sure,” Rachmael said, “if I make it I’ll come back.” He was not fooling himself; after the trip to Fomalhaut he might be physically unable to start back—whatever conditions obtained at Whale’s Mouth he might stay there because he had to. The body had its limits. So did the mind.
Anyhow they now had more to go on. Not only the failure of the old time capsule ever to reach the Sol system—and conveniently forgotten by the media—but the Vidphone Corporation of Wes-Dem’s absolute refusal, under direct, legal request by Matson Glazer-Holliday, to reactivate its Prince Albert B-y satellite orbiting Fomalhaut. This one fact alone, Rachmael reflected, should have frightened the rational citizen. But—
The people did not know. The media had not reported it.