Gregory Benford is a physicist who writes science fiction on the side; his first novel, DEEPER THAN THE DARKNESS, was published by Ace Books in 1970. Gordon Eklund has been working full-time as a writer for about a year, and his first novel, THE ECLIPSE OF DAWN, was an Ace Science Fiction Special earlier this year. Both live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they’re friends, which made it natural that they should collaborate on a story. Collaborations are strange affairs: most of the time the product is less than the sum of the parts. West Wind, Falling is one of the exceptions, I think.
Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund
He rested: floating.
Zephyr lay ahead—a black dot in Sol’s eye, haloed by the soft light of the coma: red, methane orange, divine. The tail was only beginning to stream and twist now—they had crossed the orbit of Mars—but no one on Zephyr would see the threads of ionized gas dance as they poured from the head of the comet, their pace quickening as the sun neared; Zephyr was too close. The comet tail furled out for half a million miles, directly behind the rock in which Paul had lived all his days, and to be properly studied a comet must be seen from the side. Earth would get a fine view. If they cared.
His shuttle clicked, murmured, shifted under him; the mass sensors had locked on Zephyr and were dutifully considering the tumbling rock as a source of new metals. Any zinc, for ion exchange plates? No. Copper? —good conductors are always useful. No, none.
“Idiot machine,” Paul said, and thumbed the controls over from automatic.
The sensors found nothing because the outer two miles were ice: water hydrates of ammonia, methane and sundry impurities (and ah, but the impurities tell the tale, add the zest). A snowball with a rock at the center: home. Zephyr.
The west wind; so said the dictionary when, at nine, Paul looked it up. Or: something light, airy, or unsubstantial, a second definition. (Why have more than one meaning for each word? he had thought. It seemed inefficient. But he was only nine.) Yes, the second definition fit it better now. Comets are unsubstantial; Zephyr was a lukewarm scarf of gas clinging to a jet black stone, all falling into the grinning sun.
Now it fit, that is. Twenty-seven years ago, when Paul was born, the billowing gas was dead ice drifting in company with the stone, exploring utter blackness beyond Pluto. It had been cold then even deep inside Zephyr, but Paul could not remember it.
His search was over. He nudged the shuttle into synchronization with Zephyr’s rotation, found the main entrance tube and slipped the craft down it. The tube walls were rigid plastaform that transmitted some of the watery light of the ice mantle. The two miles passed quickly. He guided the shuttle into its berth, helped a lock attendant secure the pouch of metallic chunks he had found, and cycled through the lock.
The attendant came through after him. “Hey,” the man said. “See it?”
“What?”
“Earth.”
“Well? What’s it like?”
“Beautiful. White, mostly. Couldn’t see Luna.”
The older man nodded enthusiastically. Paul could see he wanted to hear more, but there just wasn’t more to say. Earth was a bright point, nothing more. The attendant looked sixty at least; Paul thought he recognized him as the elder Resnick. To a man that old, Earth meant something. To Paul, born in Zephyr, Earth was a dull, disembodied voice which gave frequent orders and occasional help.
* * * *
“That’s all,” Paul said, and turned away.
A corridor clock told him it was time for the meeting. Feh—more diatribes. He had been hearing them from all sides lately. Everybody had turned into a political theorist. Still, his position in the first family more or less required him to put in an appearance. And at the very least, Elias was worth a few laughs.
Down chilly passages with a low coasting gait; murmur of distant conversations; oily air—filtration sacs saturated (My God, was he going to have to speak to those dopes again?) and faint tang of cooking; slight lessening of apparent gravity as he trotted up three levels (inward, toward Zephyr’s center); smile from passing friend; quickening pace; and he arrived at the meeting five minutes late.
Paul found an empty chair in the front row and flopped down in it. He looked around the room. There they were—the third generation—nearly fifty men, all younger than forty, and an almost equal number of women. Elias stood at the front, wrapped in his own dignity, and he smiled at Paul.
“We may begin now,” Elias said, looking up. “Paul is here, and we all know how essential he is to our cause.”
Huh, Paul thought, his attention drifting. He glanced idly at the girl who sat next to him. She was petite, with incredibly red hair—who in the second generation carried those genes?—and freckles that danced across her pale cheeks. Fitting a hand to his mouth, he whispered, “Aren’t you Melinda Aurten?”
The girl nodded at him and he smelled his tenseness. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen and he’d never spoken to her before. As he leaned over to say something more he felt a twinge of conscience. One more time, eh? For practice. Being an important man always had its advantages, whether one deserved them or not.
“I say we must make our demands now,” Elias was saying, his voice a shade too shrill. “And they must be met. We are the third generation. We have the most to lose, the longest to live. The first is too old—most of the best of them are dead. The fourth is too young.”
To Melinda, Paul whispered: “Why haven’t I seen you before? Is my luck always this bad?”
“I’ve been here,” she said. “You just haven’t . . . looked.”
A girl’s voice from the back of the room said, “Can we not wait to—”
“Wait,” Elias said scornfully. “Wait? The ships from Luna will reach us within a month. One month.”
“Why?” said the voice. “Did Randall tell you that?”
“I’m afraid he didn’t have the time,” Elias said with mock wryness. He glanced quickly down at Paul, who smiled back at him and reached over to clasp Melinda’s hand.
“But there has to be some reason we’re to be picked up on the inward slope of the orbit, instead of the outward as was planned,” the girl said. Paul knew her— Zanzee, a brown-skinned girl he’d shared a room with seven years before. He remembered the bubbling way she laughed. Um. But then, there was Melinda.
“Randall says it was an administrative decision on Earth. They want our detailed data tapes for the whole seventy-three year orbit. Randall says rendezvous on this side of the orbit is slightly cheaper, too. Can anyone check that?”
“I have,” Paul said, his eyes still fixed on Melinda. She gave him an up-from-under look, using the eyelashes. “Ran it through, just pure ballistics. It’s cheaper, but not by much.”
“So it’s a blind,” Elias said. “They want to get us away from Zephyr before we, the third generation, have time to organize. Randall knows our feelings better than we do.”
Paul leaned close to Melinda, lips against ear, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Now? But-”
“Now,” he said.
Elias’s voice had shifted to a warmer, more confident tone. “We have no alternatives. The question is really quite simple. Do we stay in this world which is ours, or do we go to our so-called mother world? I have my own answer to this question, but I cannot speak it for you. What do you say?”
Paul got to his feet, dragging Melinda up with him. A hundred pairs of eyes blinked and flashed.
“Paul?’ said Elias. “Where are . . . You can’t—”
Laughter.
“I’m tired,” Paul said, turning and grinning. “Like an old log. Got to get to bed.”
More laughter, and Elias blushed, dropping his eyes to the cold floor. As Paul moved up the corridor, right arm warm against Melinda’s thin waist, he heard: “Stay. Stay. Stay.” And he thought: Elias owns the mob; too bad he’s such a plimb.
Within an interval which lasted one hour, twenty-six minutes:
“Do you have the measles?”
“No. Silly. You know.”
“But they run all the way . . . down to . . . here.”
“Ye- Ah.”
A pause, and
“Why don’t you lie back down? Or are you...through?”
“No. Little nervous—”
“About us? I mean.”
“Uh. Not likely. It has happened before, you understand.”
“Well.”
“No, relax.”
“I wonder what Elias was planning to do?”
“Him? Nothing. He can’t get his shoes on without a guide book.”
“His speeches are—”
“A cataract of lies and omissions, as some poet said.”
“I think he—”
“Let’s see, this arm goes here; a leg there, and . . .”
* * * *
For a while he wandered, corridors moving like slow glaciers, passing the viewing rooms; on impulse, he paused to watch. The mammoth 3D mounted on one wall had been scrounged out of spare parts several years after the Zephyr expedition was launched. Paul had spent hours here, watching Neptune sweep majestically by, or simply studying the stars. Now he looked instead at the void, letting its black hands clutch at his stilled senses.
This was the only way to see the void without going out in a shuttle. The life of the expedition depended upon the layer of methane and ammonia snow that sealed them into the rock. The snow itself was covered with a flexible plastaform coat that prevented most gas from escaping. The society inside the rock core melted the snow for raw materials—nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen—that fed the hydroponics farms and fueled the fusion reactors. We live off the west wind itself, Paul thought. And the void feeds on us.
Paul turned to the image of Earth. Thick white clouds; past them, brilliant blue seas and glimpses of brown, barren land. Seeing it, he failed to understand. It was lovely, beautiful, shining with human life. But the 3D tapes he’d seen: people jammed together like dogs in a kennel; food rationed; wars and riots; shades of bleak, shades of gray.
Most of the people in the 3D room were first generation, and they looked at the screen with something that approached hunger. Paul watched them stare. Then he left.
Remembering corners and turns in the warren men had carved from rock. Places where he’d studied—friends made and lost—sweaty games with a first young girl. And hadn’t she trembled when he’d touched her? And hadn’t he trembled, too?
And here—yes—where Randall had faced down a mob of rebels, angry over the numbing hours required when the hydroponics tanks went sour.
The old days. As he lightly walked the corridors, he remembered them.
He rapped at the door and heard Randall’s crisp voice answer. He stepped into the large room (reproductions of the twisted hells of Bosch; green wallpaper with red tulips) and closed the door quietly behind him.
Randall was seated at a large desk, speaking slowly into a hooded microphone. When he finished, he turned, smiling, mass of white hair, eyebrows like fur, and said, “I think I remember you. Aren’t you my grandson?”
Paul nodded carefully, grin concealed, and said, “And aren’t you some sort of wheel?”
Randall laughed. “Where you been keeping yourself lately?”
“Here and there,” said Paul. “You know how it is.”
“I know,” Randall said. “Or did, once.” He reached inside a vest pocket and removed a damp, yellowed sheet of paper. He unfolded it tenderly. “Let’s see what sort of mistakes you’ve been making.”
“Snooping again?” Paul knew the paper was blank, but he was used to the game.
Randall smiled. “Why do you think I’m the First? So I can read about things in the news sheet, a month late?”
Randall scanned the paper, frowning, the rigid lines cutting deep into the rolls of fat in his cheeks. “According to this, you seem as popular as ever in some quarters. You do not often sleep alone. Tut.”
“And you object?”
“Not if you continue to learn your duties as well as you have. You would have made a fine First. If I hadn’t hung around this long, taking up space, you would be First already. But your training will count, even back on Earth.” Randall smiled. The wrinkles of his skin almost concealed its paleness.
“Huh? Look.” Paul took a ballpoint pen from the desk and let go six feet from the floor. It fell, tumbling slightly.
“Five seconds. On Earth it would be less than one second. There’s not much spin on Zephyr, grandfather— our apparent gravity is about one twentieth Earth’s.”
“Well-”
“We can’t live there. We probably couldn’t walk down to collect our disability checks.”
“I wasn’t thinking of living on Earth—”
“So do I get a job as janitor in one of their orbiting labs?”
“Nonsense.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Paul said. “Nobody in the third generation wants to go back to Earth.”
“You?”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“You never have.”
“And probably never will. Not—”
“Not while there are better things to do? Right. Politics is just a shouting contest, anyway. Wish your father hadn’t misplaced a wire getting that booster ready for the tenth planet probe—he was a born talker. He could handle Elias and his Lib friends right now, and I could rest.”
“Libs?”
“Sure.” Randall raised his eyebrows over the coffee cup, looking at Paul. “You don’t recognize it, do you? Same kind of yammering. Bunch of anarchists.” He paused a moment. “Say, you don’t suppose they’ve been transmitting to Earth, do you?”
“Not likely. Why?”
“Maybe they think there are still Liberationists back on Earth.”
“After the Purge Year? Elias has seen the tapes, just like everybody. He knows.”
“Well, I wonder. There was a lot of Lib talk when we were assembling the expedition—hell, the Libs even had a majority in some countries. Lot of gabble about breaking all functions down to the simplest level, no unified direction. It was just plain luck that I got the position of First in the expedition, despite all the Libs could do.” Randall’s voice pitched higher as he became more excited.
Randall waved a hand in dismissal. He got slowly to his feet, walked to a wall cabinet and opened the top door.
“Look,” Paul said, “you decided to expend most of our probes on the tenth planet, when we came so close. And you dropped the programmed study of Saturn, even though it had been planned from the beginning. You had freedom to do things like that. Where am I going to get a job with that kind of elbow room in it?”
“You will adapt,” Randall said mildly. “Coffee?”
Paul shook his head.
“You should cultivate a few bad habits. They can sometimes be very pleasant companions.” Randall stood for a moment, staring blankly at the stained cup in his hand. A timer buzzed and he filled the cup with a brown, oily liquid.
“What’s all this talk, Paul? It sounds like—say, were you at that kids’ tea party of Elias’s?”
“For a while.” Paul unconsciously began to tap his knee with a forefinger.
Randall laughed. His skin wrinkled even more. He had a way of turning a laugh into a series of harsh barks that irritated Paul after a few moments.
“It’s funny?” said Paul.
“Of course. My God, Elias must be the twentieth fool I’ve had to handle on this trip. On the way out, there were fifteen at least. Boredom, Paul, that’s what does it. The only solution is to keep everybody hustling, keep their hands busy, so they don’t have time to listen to idiots like Elias.”
He laughed to himself once more and sipped some coffee.
“This trans-Pluto shot was the only good thing the Libs ever did—God knows why. Probably wanted to draw attention away from their regime; it was running into trouble even then. So we matched velocities with this comet, hollowed out living space in the core, set up converters for methane and ammonia—all that while the Libs were being sandbagged with problems they didn’t have a prayer of understanding, the fools. And just when we got started out on the 67-year orbit, back on Earth the Libs lost their shirts. Ha!”
Randall slapped the coffee cup decisively on the table top, slopping some over the side to form a pool at the base. He stood there for a moment, staring into space, reliving dead victories—and then sat down.
“Probably a lot of Libs left in this rock, too. Passed the same garbage on to their sons, waiting to—well, doesn’t matter. They haven’t got any choice.”
“No choice?” Paul said. He had heard the song and dance about the Libs before; it didn’t even register.
“The tenth planet, boy,” Randall said with a grin.
“Omega.”
“Yes, Omega, end point—but that’s not official, just a name we slapped on it. Have to let Earth do that.”
“We found it, we name it.”
“Maybe. It was just blind luck that we came so close to it. Too close, though, as it works out.”
“Huh?”
“We lost orbital velocity when we passed through Omega’s gravitational field. Zephyr isn’t on its original ellipse any more. When we approach the sun this time, we’re not going to make the turn out at Venus’s orbit. We’ll zip right in, past the orbit of Mercury. We’ll be so close to the sun our ice mantle will boil away in one go.”
Paul leaped to his feet—and then, wonderingly, sat down again. He had felt a sudden, desperate loss, and for the life of him he could not understand why.
“Quite a change in the orbit,” Randall went on.
“No moon,” Paul said.
“Right, Omega had no moon, so there was no way to get a precise measurement of its mass. Without that, we couldn’t estimate the angular momentum we’d lost with respect to the sun. It wasn’t until we got a good referent on the Jupiter-Earth-sun triangle that we knew for sure.”
“We’ll fry,” Paul said.
“Certainly. If we stayed.” In the silence that followed Randall drained his cup, not noticing the rigid set of Paul’s face. After a moment Paul relaxed and shrugged and said:
“So it goes. I guess I’d better sweep the corridors tonight. I’ll need the experience.”
“I’ve got good contacts on Earth, old friends. I’ll get you a decent position. I’ve started looking into it already. The rest of the expedition might not do so well, but my own grandson will—”
“Yes, what about the rest of them? Why hasn’t this been announced?”
“I don’t want a panic. It’s easier to deal with Elias and his crowd than it is to handle this rock when it’s full of jittery people.”
“Maybe so,” Paul said. “I think I’ll have some of that coffee now. And a cigarette, too—might as well pile it on.” There was a note of tension in his voice. Randall, smiling, did not catch it.
* * * *
Central Computing: three levels in, sensor heart, pulse-taker of a west wind.
Paul asked: define m, catalog submatrix, sum rule for parameter range zero point three to one four point five, call subroutines alpha overgroup thine, plot hemispherically, display, execute, charge: able baker charlie.
The first time, he made an error. The silicon-germanium-tellurium gestalt cogitated, conjured, went back to his instructions to verify. Yes; wrong. The light green screen displayed, in typewriter script, swive thee.
Paul corrected the programming fault, entered it again. The question now read in English: “What is the mass of the solid, usable material within practical distance of Zephyr? Time average required for next month over all known orbits. Display the result as an integrated sum over a range of geometrical surfaces.”
The machine pondered, collected; the result came. Paul watched the neat hemisphere form and made a few notes. He logged the information and began to set up a complex rate equation, using the data already acquired.
“My, at work as well as play,” Zanzee said. She walked down the narrow aisle between computer readout stations. (The room was among the first bitten out of the rock, done in a hurry, and thus crowded.) Her chocolate-colored skin looked freshly scrubbed. “Where do you find the time?”
Paul waited for a set of numbers to be punched out. He sat on a stool, legs awkwardly crossed. With elaborate casualness he looked up. “Haven’t seen you for a while. How’s it going?”
“As usual. Your own work?”—pointing and reaching— “or more—”
“Private,” said Paul, scooping up the notes. “Self-education.”
“All.” She arched an eyebrow. “A grandson of the First takes time for research?”
“Not research. Amusement.”
Paul moved to tilt against the console behind him— not a hard operation in low gravity, even on the sticklike furniture—and watched her. Her hips were even fuller than he remembered. No freckles, a real sister, but, yes, very fine.
“Want to share a room again?” he said. “I’m free.” It was direct, but what the hell—
“I’m sure you are. I’m not.” She looked away, at the next console booth.
“Get free.”
“I’m getting pregnant.”
“Dumb. You’ll have enough trouble readjusting to Earth without a kid; your first, at that.”
She turned abruptly, black hair swirling out and slowly falling back into place. Paul had always liked that hair; he had even liked the frown she made—it looked like a child’s impression of an adult getting angry.
“We’re not going back. You’d know that if—”
“Yeah, maybe we’re not,” Paul said languidly.
“You—” She stalled for a moment, the edge of her attack blunted. He had always enjoyed playing such games with her. “You’d care about it if you ever grew up. You weren’t planning to settle here, ever. So you don’t mind if we go back to Earth. It just means more territory for your—”
“Uh huh.”
“Oh! Compared to you, Elias is a prince. He acts; he’s not afraid.”
“So Elias is going to be the father?”
“No!”
“Pity. That’s just what Earth needs, more like Elias.”
“But we aren’t going—”
“Oh yes. Forgot.”
“Paul.” Zanzee’s mood suddenly changed; the fire left her eyes. “We know each other.”
“To say the least.”
“No, I mean . . . emotionally, not the other.”
He nodded, wondering why women—no, girls—never liked precise nouns.
“Your support would mean—”
Paul stood up, righting the stool. “Why, Zanzee”— he did a little two-step shuffle, waving his hands—”you know I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout politics.” He made a flourish, folded his notes and tapped them into his right breast pocket, and was gone.
Paul slept alone that night. And dreamed, so:
A corridor, endless. Above, it is raining. The rain slaps against the roof of the corridor, beating out little tunes, and the corridor leaks, and the rain deftly drips inside. There are buckets to catch it, but they are out of place, and the rain falls unimpeded to the floor.
His nose to the floor, wet and muddy, the black ghost prowls the corridor, sniffing. The ghost is thin, tall; a black veil covers his face and his hands are actually paws, like an African monkey seen in a frozen 3D scan, or a large ape.
The black ghost ripples, and looks for an end to the corridor. He has searched for many decades (perhaps seven), but the corridor is endless, as is the rain.
The corridor is saturated. Paint peels. Flakes of gray cling to the robes of the black ghost, and he breathes heavily.
The corridor ends.
Below is nothing; ahead, above: nothing. Warm comfort of the corridor behind. The ghost faces the void, staring, shivers. Rubs his eyes; Paul’s eyes; back to ghost eyes, wet from the rain.
A red halo-
Central Computing—
For man can rhyme
The tick of time.
Black ghost, white ghost: grapple, tear gobbets from each other’s bodies. Shriek in the tumbling darkness. Aged white ghost, spinning madly away with arms wrapped—
* * * *
Opening his eyes, Paul rolled over. He faced Elias.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Paul, are you alone?”
“No, I’m playing cards with five Chinamen.”
“I—”
“Well?”
“Your grandfather—he’s called Earth. The ships are on their way and they have added boosters. They’ll arrive in weeks, two weeks.”
Paul rolled out of bed. His room was bare, naked; walls of slate gray, a single shelf of microfilm canisters the only decoration. The first three volumes on the shelf were: Being and Nothingness, Soul on Ice, Swann’s Way.
Paul said, “And?” with a touch of weariness.
“We’ve got to stop him. This’ll be the end of everything. He must’ve heard of our plans. Did you tell him? Not deliberately, I mean, just let it slip out.”
“I didn’t have to.”
“Oh. Uh . . . well, we can’t go back to Earth. We’ll be nothing there.”
“I will. Even Randall will, but he doesn’t know it. They’ll probably grant you a priesthood.”
“Can’t we forget—?” Elias held out his hands, and Paul was surprised to see they were quivering. “We have to-”
“What are your plans?” Paul picked up a box of dried apricots from the end of the shelf, sat down on the bed and began eating them. (A dream: had it been about brown, soft Zanzee? Probably not. Too old for that kind of dream.)
“I’m going to position my men around. We’ll take the main points, the shuttle tube, hydroponics, internal maintenance, communications, computing. When the ships get here, they will have no choice. Either leave us alone, or wait for us to surrender. They can’t get through a mile of ice.”
“And only a few at a time can come up the tube,” Paul said.
“Right,” Elias said, forcing a harsh note into his voice.
“You’ll kill my grandfather?”
“No, never! There’s no need for that. We’ll only, well, hold him. Until things are safe.”
“Until he dies?” (About Melinda? Brown freckles, red hair?)
“No. Just until Earth decides to leave us alone.”
“If you free him, you’re a fool. Randall is still the First and he has a lot of support. The older people like him, and they want to go back. Hell, I like him myself. He’d make two of you. At least.”
“Together, we can handle him.”
Paul laughed then. He’d been saving it since he woke up, and now he laughed directly in Elias’s face.
After a moment Paul said: “Randall asked me to keep this secret from you, but I guess I can’t any more. We can’t stay here. I know you don’t understand things like orbital dynamics, but—well, Zephyr will come closer to the sun this time than before. The layer of ice will boil away. We’ll have no more raw materials for our hydroponics tanks, no more fusion fuel, and we’ll fry.”
“Are you . . . sure?”
“Positive.” (White ghost? Black ghost?) “I checked it myself.”
“Then...”
“Then you’d better pack your bags.”
Was Elias going to sob? The great prophets of the past had wept frequently.
Elias said, “It’s not right. I—”
“Shut up,” Paul said. (The white ghost held the key—)
“If you had helped—”
“Forget that.” Thoughts swirled in his head. Jesus, analyzing dreams, am I? It’ll be Tarot cards next. “Listen, follow through on what you planned. Send your men out. Put a lot at the tube.”
“I don’t-”
“Move.” Paul stood up, rubbed his eyes and began dressing. “What time is it?” He found his wrist watch. “Oh, middle of the night. Fine.” Elias shuffled his feet, started to say something and then left.
Paul waited a moment, mechanically planning. The dream still bothered him—which was in itself unusual— but he was beginning to feel confident again. The white ghost was Randall. But then, he knew that anyway.
* * * *
“Grandfather,” Paul said softly.
“Uh?” A soft neon clicked on. Randall was stretched diagonally across the bed, eyes clouded from sleep.
“Get up. Elias has made his move.”
“What?”
“He’s got most of the important points already. Come on.” He helped the old man out of bed and into a pullover. Randall took a long time to awaken.
Paul kept him moving with a stream of explanation and prodding, detailing the probable situation. Randall moved slowly, fumbling with his boots, stumbling, unable to believe what was happening.
“A coded signal,” he mumbled, tying shoelaces. “I sent it to Earth, asking for a step-up in the rendezvous. They agreed; knew I could still think clear. Elias might do something, cause some trouble. But I never—”
“It’s not over yet,” Paul said. He’d never seen his grandfather like this—so weak and so old. “The picture isn’t as bad as I’ve painted it. But we’ve got to move.”
They moved, down Randall’s personal elevator, silence clinging to both. Randall chewed his lips, muttering, waving hands awkwardly in the air. Paul used his mind, running over moves, checking, estimating the timing. The elevator stopped.
“Why here?” Randall said. His eyes darted fearfully. A small room; confined. Hard to breathe.
“We’re close to the tube lock. And your suit is kept” —the door slid open—”here. Get into it. Where’s a standard issue?”
Randall motioned at a paneled case on the other side of the room. He cracked the seal on his own suit case and began to pull it on. Paul took the standard suit and began adjusting it to fit his height and size. His personal suit was in a storage vault near the air lock. After a moment, he stopped.
“I can’t do much in a suit like this. I’ll—”
As he started to turn, Randall dropped a hand on his arm. “What’s the point of all this?”
Paul looked down at his grandfather, seeing age shiver inside tired eyes. Guilt erupted inside him, but he fought it. The universe was too large to encompass emotions. “We’re going to decompress the rooms with Elias’s men in them.”
“That’s . . . murder.”
“Only if they refuse to give up. We’ll take the pressure down very low, but they’ll live. I’d never kill anybody. You ought to know that.”
“I ought to,” Randall said. He paused. “But couldn’t I talk to them? I’ve always been able to control them before.”
“No,” Paul said. “It’s never been this bad before.”
Randall nodded. “But why suits for us?”
“Somebody’s got to go in and get them, even if they give up. That’ll be me. If anything goes wrong, I’ll signal over radio, and you can pull the cork on the room. I’ll live. If necessary, you can come in to get me.”
“That’s a good plan,” Randall said. “I wish I’d—”
“Hurry!”
“Yes, right.” Randall fitted the suit yoke over his shoulders.
“I’m going out to the lock,” Paul said. “I’ll get my suit and be back. Stay here.”
“But-”
The closing door sliced off Randall’s protest. Paul propelled himself down the corridor, scarcely touching the walls in a long, loping run. Once, he looked behind him, certain that he’d heard an awkward step tracing his own. But the corridor was empty.
He stopped at the entrance to the lock area. Had Elias’s men moved into position yet? There was only one way to find out. He’d have to walk right in.
Opening the hatch, he poked his head through the hole and looked around. Two short-muzzled pistols were being pointed at him by men he recognized from the meeting yesterday. He grinned. The men stared at him a long moment, then lowered their weapons.
“Got some cord?” Paul said. The two men looked at each other. They clearly didn’t work around the lock. “Never mind.” Paul bounced over to a temporary storage chest, rummaged around, and found some nylon securing threads.
“Be back. Don’t shoot me.” He went back to Randall’s private suiting room.
He opened the door to the room, keeping the cord out of sight, and found Randall looking at him through the view slot of his suit. Randall said something, and then realized Paul could not hear him. He reached for his decompression valve. Paul kicked away from the wall and slammed into Randall’s side, throwing the old man against the wall.
Before Randall could regain his feet, stumbling awkwardly, unaccustomed to a suit after all this time inside, Paul was behind him and had pinned the clamp locks in the suit’s wrists to each other. Randall could free them from inside if he remembered how, but Paul counted on his not remembering immediately.
He was right. Randall struggled to bring his arms around, but they were bound together behind his back. Paul slipped the nylon threads around Randall’s arms. He criss-crossed them through Randall’s legs, shouldering the man about as though he were a large toy, and in a moment had him completely bound.
There was no time for niceties. He scooped up Randall and thrust him out into the corridor. The old man must be getting a hell of a banging, Paul thought, but the suit would keep him from breaking any bones.
He propelled them both down the curving gray hall, breathing rapidly. White ghost. Black ghost. Grappling. The walls of the corridor seemed to close in upon him, and he moved faster, nearly stumbling in his haste. This is my grandfather who lies like a wet sack over my shoulder, he thought. My flesh; my blood. The man who raised me from nothing and made me into the kind of animal who could turn on his own. Mad laughter caught in his throat, and he slammed into the hatch.
He paused for a moment, catching his breath, counting to ten and reciting some Greek. Then he entered the room.
The two men stared at the bundle he carried; even through the view slot, they could see it was Randall.
“How—?” one of them said.
“Shut up,” Paul said. “And hold this for me.” He handed Randall to the men. He had to hurry; Elias would probably be here in a few moments. There wasn’t any time to waste, but . . . Forget that, he told himself. He’s just a man. You owe him nothing; it’s his life or yours. He’s old; you’re young.
He had no trouble finding his personal suit. He slipped into it, and headed back to the central receiving area. Elias was waiting for him, standing over Randall.
“Elias,” Paul said. “Send those men for a cradle of oxy bottles.” Elias had brought two more men with him; Paul wanted them out of the way. “Now.”
“What do you—?”
“Now!”
“Well, all right. Zabronski, Kanyen, do like he says.”
The two trotted off. Elias pointed at Randall. “What—?”
“He’s too much of a symbol. The older people will follow him anywhere. You don’t want that, do you?”
“No. I-”
“Good. Then we’re going to put him out of reach. I’ll take him out with air and food and leave him on the surface of the ice. I’ll hide him in a little valley somewhere, bound, with enough freedom of movement to replace his bottles and feed himself.”
Elias frowned uncertainly. “This seems a bit drastic. Couldn’t we—?”
“Are you afraid?”
“No.” Elias shrugged. “He’s your grandfather.”
And that, Paul thought, was the key. “Open Randall’s suit. I want him to hear us.”
Elias did as directed. Randall’s suit was orange-red, and he looked like a fat, grotesque lobster lying in the main bay of the airlock.
“Paul,” he said, his voice soft, muffled.
“Randall, I-”
“Listen to my instructions,” Elias said. “I am about to cast—”
“I don’t have to listen to you.” Seeing Elias had brought back Randall’s strength. “If you kill me, you’ll let anarchy loose on this world.”
“Anarchy,” Paul said. “And what’s wrong with that?” The two men returned, wheeling a rolling cradle of bottles. They’d been listening: a case of food and water squeeze bottles rode on top.
Randall was glaring at Paul. “I don’t understand,” he began. “My own grandson. Paul, we could have—”
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “But it was meant to happen this way. I think you knew that all along.”
Randall started to speak, but only nodded lamely.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why you were chosen to be First on Zephyr when the Libs had a majority?” Paul said.
Elias looked strangely at Paul, and Randall again nodded. The other men stood silently, not following a word of the conversation.
“I think I know,” Paul continued. “They had to throw a sop to the planners and bureaucrats and pencil-pushers, and you were it. But they knew you wouldn’t matter, because they were right, in their way, about politics.”
“They were criminals,” Randall said, his voice far away, as if speaking from another time. “All of them.”
“Probably so, before it was finished. By now, I’m a criminal, too. All men of action are criminals to somebody. The Libs wanted this trans-Pluto shot, but not for science or glory. They thought you’d be dead; they didn’t reckon with low-gee and how long it can prolong life. They did know that freedom of the kind they dreamed about couldn’t continue in that sardine can Earth was getting to be.”
“Ah,” said Elias. Paul glanced at him. Perhaps he’s smarter than he seems, Paul thought. I’d better hurry this. A man who is dying deserves to know the truth.
“The Libs sent Zephyr out, a small community, independent of Earth. They knew we wouldn’t want to come back after the trip was over. As long as Zephyr was out beyond range of Earth’s fast carriers, she was free. When she runs dry of nitrogen and oxygen, we’ll find another comet out there, beyond the tenth planet. We saw enough on our first pass—next time we’ll know what to look for. And as long as Zephyr is free, somewhere, men are free.”
“If Earth should destroy itself,” Elias said slowly, “we can go back to replenish it.”
Paul could see Elias already working out a role for himself in this new, unplanned drama. He would polish it, get the lines down right, and pretty soon believe it had been his idea all along. And convince the others, too.
But Randall didn’t see it that way. Lying on the floor, his eyes closed, he began to laugh softly.
“What’s funny?” Elias said, irritation flooding his face.
“You are,” Randall said. “And Paul. You and your splendid plans. Going to replenish the Earth, are you? Well, haven’t you forgotten something? You’re not going to be in any position to replenish anything. After Zephyr passes the sun, neither of you will be anything more than a burnt corpse.”
Fear replaced the anger on Elias’s face. He turned on Paul. “What-?”
Paul shook his head. “It’s no problem. I catalogued the solids cruising in the same orbit as Zephyr, the junk that’s followed us all the way around our ellipse. If we use every shuttle and work them constantly, we can collect enough to make a shield of rock. There might even be time to polish the surface, just to be sure we’re safe. A hemisphere a few meters thick should do it.”
Randall laughed again, a bitter laugh. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“Just about,” Paul said. He looked at his grandfather for a long moment, eyes meeting eyes, then turned to Elias. “Seal Randall’s suit,” he said. “We’ve wasted enough time.”
* * * *
He waited: floating.
“Can you reach the bottles and make the attachment?” Paul called down to Randall. They were connected by a talk pipe of metal that carried sounds between suits.
“I can.”
“Well, let’s hope Earth doesn’t take too long to turn her ships back.”
There was a pause. Then Randall said, “It’s cold out here, Paul.” His voice throbbed with the pain of antiquity. “So cold.”
“You have extra power packs,” Paul said. “Use them.”
The milky light of early dawn on Zephyr’s surface was filtering through the ice, refracted around the edge of the mantle and surfacing here. There was a somber orange to it that made Randall’s suit stand out even more in the shallow hollow Paul had found for him. Down there, resting, the old man looked fragile, and very much alone. Like mankind in the universe, Paul thought. A tiny speck in the dark hollow.
“I’ll die,” Randall said. “You know I’ll die. Look at me and say you don’t know it.”
Paul looked at his grandfather. “I know it’s probable.”
The void stood poised above them both, a vast empty devouring cloud.
“You’re murdering me,” Randall said. “And for what? For a cause. For a stupid, silly pointless cause.”
“Not for a cause,” Paul said, for there were no causes in his life. “For me. For my freedom.”
Above, hard stars twisting in the void, shrouded by the brightness of the coma, turned slowly. In a moment, Earth would be visible, bright beacon of Man.
It calls not to me, Paul thought. Let it call to Randall.
“Paul-! Please-!”
I loved him once, Paul thought, and I’ve never loved anyone else. I worshipped his feet, kissed his every word. And now I’ve killed him.
Paul lifted the talk pipe away from Randall and attached it to the side of the shuttle. He stared down at the lone figure on the ice for a moment, then started the shuttle’s jet. He did not wave. He did not look back.
The hollow that held Randall was twenty-five kilometers from the tube, but the trip was short. He flew over raw knives of dark ice, into the dawn. Paul clicked on his suit radio and called the lock.
“All secured,” Paul said, his tone controlled. “Coming in.”
There was a brief reply, from Elias.
Everything, from the start, had depended upon rushing Elias, keeping him moving, not letting him think. Randall wasn’t the major obstacle, but he could have been if he’d stayed in Zephyr. It was Elias who would decide it all.
Paul moved the shuttle and dropped down the tube. The light around him dimmed and wavered, casting pale replicas of the shuttle’s shadow. Black ghost, falling.
Paul remembered one line from the babble Randall had shouted on the trip out:
Do you really want to live under Elias?
Elias was the key. Once Paul gave him the idea of putting Randall in cold storage on the surface, what was more natural than the next step? Paul hadn’t given a damn about the kindergarten politics Elias had played . . . but now things were different. And Paul was the only rival Elias had. Now, like it or not, he had to play the game.
He eased back on the jets and braked. The running lights had come on automatically and he maneuvered the shuttle into its berth. He felt a bit giddy in free fall; not enough breakfast. And what would he be doing now, Paul wondered, if Zanzee had slept with him last night, and he’d thrown Elias out when he’d come with the message? Paul grinned to himself, then laughed aloud. He didn’t know. Events made the man. (And the murderer?)
He kicked off and approached the personnel air lock. The operational lights were normal; everything looked the same.
But if Elias seized his chance, he could seal Paul out forever, make him, too, a prisoner. In a moment, Paul saw it: he and Randall together and dying, with madness approaching, and hunger and thirst, and the terrible cold.
For an instant he cursed himself and his irrationality. He had done the job himself because—at last, he thought, are you going to admit it to yourself?—because Randall was his own blood. He could not send one of his own down that last dark path, alone. The act, in finality, had to be his.
Paul could have assigned this to another. He should be—now—with Elias, waiting for some lieutenant to return from the cold.
He should, said logic. But he knew that he could not, beyond all logics and all systems. To save any thread of dignity, the blade should come to Randall from one of his own.
Before he could catch it, some small voice in the turmoil of his mind asked:
And is that all? You did not know that a lieutenant, having done a general’s job, will never truly be a lieutenant again? Are you sure there was no calculation?
Paul felt himself go rigid for a moment, blocking the thought. This, he thought, was what he had not expected. Once you begin to play the game and count the points, once that, things are not so clear. He would never really know for sure.
“I’m secured out here,” Paul called over his radio. “Cycle the lock.”
There was a pause. Paul put his hand on the lock hatch and waited. Seconds slipped slowly past.
Then it happened: A tremor, ever so slight, and the hatch came free.
Paul stepped through.
The gamble had worked. Elias hadn’t thought quite fast enough. Paul was a free man. Once inside, he knew he could face down Elias and any of the men Elias had with him.
Paul breathed deeply of the oily air of the suit. It reeked with tension, death, and fear.
Do you really want to live under Elias?
No. He didn’t intend to.
But why, he thought, why am I crying?