“I know.”
“And that is my failure,” whispered Nakamura. “I look for an explanation. I do not want merely to be. No, that is not enough . . . out here, I find that I want to be justified.”
Maclaren stared into the cruelty of heaven. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I’m scared spitless.”
“What? But I thought—”
“Oh, I have enough flip retorts to camouflage it. But I’m as much afraid to die, I’m struggling as frantically and with as little dignity, as any trapped rat. And I’m slowly coming to see why, too. It’s because I haven’t got anything but my own life— my own minute meaningless life of much learning and no understanding, much doing and no accomplishing, many acquaintances and no friends—it shouldn’t be worth the trouble of salvaging, should it? And yet I’m unable to see any more in the entire universe than just that: a lot of scurrying small accidents of organic chemistry, on a lot of flyspeck planets. If things made even a little sense, if I could see there was anything at all more important than this bunch of mucous membranes labeled Terangi Maclaren . . . why, then there’d be no reason to fear my own termination. The things that mattered would go on.”
N
AKAMURA smoked in silence for a while. Maclaren finished his own cigarette in quick nervous puffs, fought temptation, swore to himself and lit another.
“I didn’t mean to turn you into a weeping post,” he said. And
he thought: The hell I didn’t. I fed you your psychological medicine right on schedule. Though perhaps I did make the dose larger than planned.
“I am unworthy,” said Nakamura. “But it is an honor.”
He stared outward, side by side with the other man. “I try to reassure myself with the thought that there must be beings more highly developed than we,” he said.
“Are you sure?” answered Maclaren, welcoming the chance to be impersonal. “We’ve never found any that were even comparable to us. In the brains department, at least. I’ll admit the Van Mannen’s abos are more beautiful, and the Old Thothians more reliable and sweet tempered.”
“How much do we know of the galaxy?”
“Um-m-m . . . yes.”
“I have lived in the hope of encountering a truly great race. Even if they are not like gods—they will have their own wise men. They will not look at the world just as we do. From each other, two such peoples could learn the unimaginable, just as the high epochs of Earth’s history came when different peoples interflowed. Yes-s-s. But this would be so much more, because the difference is greater. Less conflict. What reason would there be for it? And more to offer, a billion years of separate experience as life forms.”
“I can tell you this much,” said Maclaren, “the Protectorate would not like it. Our present civilization couldn’t survive such a transfusion of ideas.”
“Is our civilization anything so great?” asked Nakamura with an unwonted scornfulness.
“No. I suppose not.”
“We have a number of technical tricks. Doubtless we could learn more from such aliens as I am thinking of. But what we would really learn that mattered—for this era of human history lacks one—would be a philosophy.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in philosophies.”
“I used a wrong word. I meant a do—a way. A way of. . an attitude? That is what life is for, that is your ‘Why’—it is not a mechanical cause-and-effect thing, it is the spirit in which we live.”
Nakamura laughed again. “But hear the child correcting the master! I, who cannot even follow the known precepts of Zen,
ask for help from the unknown! Were it offered me, I would doubtless crawl into the nearest worm-hole.”
And suddenly the horror flared up agaiii. He grabbed Maclaren’s arm. It sent them both twisting around, so that their outraged senses of balance made the stars whirl in their skulls. Maclaren felt Nakamura’s grip like ice on his bare skin.
“I am afraid!” choked the pilot. “Help me! I am afraid!”
They regained their floating positions. Nakamura let go and took a fresh cigarette with shaking fingers. The silence grew thick.