Tak Hallus - Homage [ss]

Jacob had been sick during the entire trip back. First it was the mumps, swelling the undersides of his jaw until he could take only liquids and swallowing took an effort of will. At the height of the mumps, he got the measles, peppering his face like that of an adolescent candy taster. Just as the measles retreated, their garnet speckles fading to an inflamed rose color, they seemed to reassert themselves with renewed vitality, but it turned out to be chicken pox and Jacob spent two days in delirium, muttering about stampeding totenpferds circling around and around and around the white walls of the ship's sickbay, their poisonous tails flicking out just inches before his eyes and their hooves thundering and deafening him even when he clapped his hands over his ears and screamed to drown the pounding.

When Jacob regained his senses, he realized the incongruity of the image. The wild totenpferds on Xenos IV, the planet he had left only a month ago after seventeen years of life there, were silent in spite of their horny hooves and deadly. The waist-high "horses" crept up on a man and with a bullwhip flick of their tails would cut through any fabric short of metal weave, scratching the skin of their victim and depositing a poison that paralyzed the skeletal muscles, leaving the prey still alive when a pack of "horses" began eating.

Only the domesticated totenpferd was shod and made noise and the domesticated ones had their tails cropped, a precaution more against potential lacerations by the tail than the poison since all of Xenos's human colony had developed a tolerance to it through a mandatory series of innoculations.

But now, as the ship dropped out of hyperspace and the solar system appeared in the ports, Jacob had a sense of coming home, a sense of exhilaration and excitement that momentarily suppressed his remaining symptoms.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Jacob looked around from the viewport at Dr. Hurley. The ship's surgeon, a man about Jacob's age but unlike Jacob, who looked ten years older than he was, Dr. Hurley looked younger, except for the pattern of wrinkles splaying out from the corners of his eyes and the forehead that was making its way through his hairline.

"Yes," answered Jacob and turned back to the viewport. They had appeared in normal space about 500 million miles from Earth and the position of the moon, a half-moon from their angle, made it appear the same size as Earth. But there was no mistaking which was which. The moon was precisely divided into bright white and a black whose only contrast with the space around it was an absence of stars, while Earth - Earth, thought Jacob - was a swirl of greens from jade to emerald and blues as pale and watery in some spots as they were rich and deep in others. It was Earth and Jacob felt an unexpected surge of emotion warm his cheeks as he watched.

"You know, Doctor, I haven't been back in seventeen years, since I left at fourteen," said Jacob, still staring out the viewport, but sensing the other man's presence and attention. "What's it like?"

"The same."

"The same?" asked Jacob, turning his head to look at Dr. Hurley. "Only more so."

Jacob looked back at Earth. When he spoke, it was in an abstracted way, as if more to himself than the doctor.

"Me, too."

"I know what you mean, Jacob," said Dr. Hurley behind him. Jacob could see the doctor's reflection in the viewport, staring past him at Earth. "Six months is about the longest I'm gone, but even then I feel a certain elation during this part of any trip. I look out at Earth and see that it's still there, unchanged, the same as ever, a constant reference point and say, `Hurley, how have you changed since you saw it last?' "

Jacob looked away from the viewport and nodded down the corridor in the direction of the ship's lounge.

"Coffee?"

The doctor smiled and Jacob realized Hurley had discovered his one passion, coffee. It wouldn't grow on Xenos and the few ships that passed seldom carried enough for the colony. They began walking toward the lounge.

"What kind of answers do you get, Doctor?"

"To what?"

"When you ask how you've changed."

"Oh, sometimes I get answers, sometimes not. It depends on the trip. The point was that an approach to Earth is somehow conducive to that kind of reflection. If there are any answers, that's the time they come out."

The lounge door slid open ahead of them and they walked in. It was a small room, empty at this hour of the crew's workcycle, with a half dozen tables and one wall that dispensed the galley's food from behind panels. Jacob gestured for Dr. Hurley to sit down and walked to the wall, plucking two cups from the dispenser and filling them under a shiny faucet. Steam rose from the cups and fogged the tap.

"How have you changed, Jacob?" asked the doctor after Jacob put the cups on the table and sat down.

"I can't really say. It's been so long I feel like I'm a completely different person and at the same time I'm the same. Except for my childhood on Earth, I grew up on Xenos."

"How do you feel?"

"Excited, anxious, I can't put my finger on it exactly."

"No, I mean physically."

"The doctor in you is asking." "Yes."

"Weak, I suppose. This trip has taken a lot out of me. By the way, I think I'm coming down with a cold. Do you have anything for it?"

The doctor thought a moment.

"Frankly, we've pumped you so lull of antibiotics the last few weeks that it would be better if you just took two aspirins - "

"And went to bed."

"Yes. I wanted to talk to you about that, Jacob."

"About what?"

"Your illnesses. When we get in orbit, I'd like to do a few tests and have them sent down to Earth for analysis before you go down."

Jacob had expected something like this and as his illnesses had become more complicated, he had begun to dread it.

"And if I flunk your tests?"

"We don't have to worry about that now. The tests are for your own benefit and safety. They won't delay you. The information will be back before the first shuttle reaches our air lock."

"What do you expect to find?" "I hope nothing, Jacob."

Six hours later the ship was in orbit around Earth, sweeping over continents every few minutes while the crew readied it for the shuttles. Jacob was in his cabin, packing the few things he had brought on the journey: a depthphoto of his family, Barbara, Jimmy and Peter; a manuscript on Xenosian ecological cycles he had promised to deposit with publishers on Earth as a favor to his employer, Dr. Sherman, who wanted to avoid the possible delay of a year if he waited for one of the slow-moving Federation mail packets to make its circuit past Xenos; and a carving of a totenpferd, caught in a moment of anger with its wooden tail lashing out and its fierce head turned back baring its teeth. It was made of Native Xenosian wood and Jacob planned to give it to his older sister, a woman now in her early forties who had remained behind with her husband after Jacob's parents decided to leave.

"Jacob," said Dr. Hurley, smiling out of the visiphone with the familiar walls of the sickbay behind him. "I just wanted to let you know that I sent those tissue and blood samples down with a supply shuttle. They should have them analyzed before the first personnel boat gets here."

Jacob felt a momentary irritation with the doctor, with this potential threat to his long awaited visit.

"What I want to know, Hurley," said Jacob, shaking the wooden totenpferd vigorously at the screen, "is why no one thought of this sooner!"

"Jacob, they - "

"Why did they let me get this far just to throw up another barrier?"

"Jacob, please. I know it's difficult, but your people on Xenos cleared you. They thought since you grew up on Earth, you would have retained the normal immunities you developed in childhood and there would be no danger in letting you return. We've been over all this before, the first time you became ill. It's the reason you were allowed to come but your wife and children had to stay behind. They had spent too much of their lives on Xenos. Your people cleared you and we naturally assumed - "

"You should have had an independent procedure. My people were wrong."

"Look, Jacob, Xenos is our first experience with this kind of thing. It's the first colony to be completely out of physical contact with Earth for almost a generation. I'm sure in the future there will be procedures - "

"That doesn't help me."

"... And we don't know your people were wrong yet, Jacob."

Jacob turned back to his open suitcase and continued packing, positioning the wooden horse among his clothes to avoid any chance of its breaking, but left the visiphone on. When he spoke, his voice was soft but with a definite edge of controlled anger.

"Don't we, Doctor."

"Not until the tests are completed."

"If you're so sure I'll pass your tests, Doctor, how do you explain the fact that I've had every Earthbound disease in the book since I came in contact with this crew? Anything they'd been exposed to, I got."

"If you're so sure you'll flunk - " said Dr. Hurley. He paused for a moment and Jacob looked up at the screen to see the cause of the interruption. The blue sleeved arm of an Earth shuttle crewman was handing Dr. Hurley a manifest which he glanced over briefly, signed and returned to the hand extended into view of the visiphone. He looked up at Jacob. "If you're so sure you'll flunk, why are you packing?"

Jacob glanced down at the half-filled suitcase and his anger broke, his intense expression dissolving into a self-conscious smile.

"All right, so the tests are still out."

The doctor nodded.

"How about some coffee in the lounge?" asked Jacob.

"Why not the forward observation room?" suggested Dr. Hurley. "No one uses it while we're in orbit and you get an excellent view of Earth." The doctor reached toward the screen as if preparing to touci it off, then looked up at Jacob. "I'll bring the coffee."

"I may just stay on this ship," said Jacob, "with service like that."

Dr. Hurley said nothing, his face blank as if the appropriately glib response had been edited somewhere between the sickbay and the screen in Jacob's cabin.

"A half hour, then," said the doctor at last.

"Fine," answered Jacob and the screen went blank.

The Earth, its dark side below them as they sat in the contour chairs of the dimly lit observation room, seemed to hang just outside the observation port, more like an ebony marble suspended in some thick transparent liquid than a planet in space. Occasionally a red spark became visible and grew as a shuttle cut up through the atmosphere to service either their ship or one of the others Jacob knew were in orbit. The coffee cup in his hand was still warm.

"I didn't start missing it until I was about twenty," Jacob was saying. "Even then I didn't miss it much. I had my studies. But after Barbara and I were married and Jimmy was born, I started looking at Xenos. It isn't a place to raise children."

"One place is as good as another," said Dr. Hurley, his face heavily shadowed in the dim light. "To them it's home. Earth would probably be as strange to them as Xenos was when you first arrived there with your parents."

"I don't think so. I've tried to teach them about Earth, its history and heritage. They would know more about it than I did about Xenos."

"Ancient Greece."

"Pardon me?"

"It's Ancient Greece to them," said Dr. Hurley, without looking away from Earth. A thin slice of reflected sunlight was appearing on one edge of the planet as the ship caught up with dawn somewhere on Earth. "Something to be admired, even honored on proper occasions, but it's not life for them."

Jacob looked past Earth, as if better to compare it in his mind with Xenos, his children's world.

"Perhaps you're right, Doctor."

They were silent a few minutes, each sipping his coffee and following his own thoughts. Finally Dr. Hurley gestured at Earth with his coffee cup.

"Who do you know down there, Jacob?"

"My sister. She stayed behind with her husband."

"Anyone else?"

"The people I went to school with."

"Have they changed as much as you have?"

"I suppose so. I can't really say. If you're trying to soften the blow, that isn't the way to do it. I didn't really come to see friends."

The doctor continued looking at the Earth, now a quarter-Earth with distinguishable features beginning to show. Jacob recognized Suez and Saudi Arabia, comparing them with the maps he had studied before the trip.

"Why did you come, Jacob?" Jacob thought a moment before answering.

"I'm an Earthman and I had to know Earth once as an adult. What I am has developed here over the last million years. It's the only planet in the universe where a naked man can stand on the soil and feel at home."

"I've known men from a dozen worlds who felt at home off Earth."

"But I'll never," said Jacob before sipping the last of his coffee.

The doctor smiled. "No, I suppose not. What do you do on Xenos?"

"Echo team."

"Do you like it?"

"Sure, most of the time. I'm outside a lot, mapping the ecological systems of an area before a community moves in. The only part of it that's dull is converting our data into a usufructuary scheme."

"A what?"

"Regulations on land use to keep the balance. Did you see that carving I'm taking to my sister? It's a good example."

"The horse?"

Jacob nodded. "It's sort of the jackal of Xenos. When the colony was first set up, they tried to wipe out the totenpferd as a menace to human existence, or to domesticate it. The result was a plague of Xenosian rabbits, little two-legged creatures that can run as fast as a totenpferd but not quite as far. What we wound up doing was innoculating everyone with totenpferd poison in small dosages until they built up a tolerance. We had to adapt the people to the planet, not the other way around."

"I'm sure that didn't make the horses harmless," said Dr. Hurley.

"No, not harmless, but not lethal either, and the balance was maintained. Anyway, that's what I do. It takes several years to map an area properly."

"A frontiersman."

"In a way."

The doctor stood up, crushing his cup and dropping it into a chute next to the observation chair.

"I'll let you know," said Dr. Hurley, nodding toward the Earth, "when they send up the results."

"Thank you."

Dr. Hurley left and Jacob sat alone for a while, watching the Earth. When he finally rose, the planet was completely in sunlight. He could make out Africa below, though he could distinguish none of its tribally balkanized nations. It was simply Earth, man's home, but perhaps not his. Had Xenos been below him, he would have seen the variety and diversity of human life in his mind's eye, superimposed on the planet: The upland settlements with their hardy mountain men; the Xenos City population, a city that would only be a backwater town on Earth but was the only city on Xenos; a backwater world - all of the subtle differences that had developed in the planet's twenty-year human history in spite of the homogeneous nature of the original group, differences that would probably be as indistinguishable to Dr. Hurley as the nations of Africa were to Jacob. But it was Earth below him and the gift of its past to Xenos was the reason he had come.

Several hours later, after the purser made a general visiphone call to inform all passengers that the first personnel boat had lifted off from Earth and that they were to report to the transfer lock, Jacob went instead to sickbay.

Dr. Hurley was at his desk, reading a report which he held up by one corner when Jacob entered to indicate that it was the laboratory analysis they had requested. Jacob paid no attention to it, but scrutinized Dr. Hurley's face instead. It was impossible to interpret the doctor's impassive expression.

"Sit down, Jacob."

Jacob sat down in the chair next to Dr. Hurley's desk.

"Is it yes or no?"

"Let me tell you about the report first."

"Just tell me whether I should finish packing or not. We can talk about the report after that."

"I can't tell you that," said Dr. Hurley, his expression more like that of the Dr. Hurley who had first treated Jacob than the friend he had come to know on the trip. "The decision is yours. All I can do is give you the information to base it on."

Jacob gave an exasperated smile and pointed assertively at the report on Dr. Hurley's desk.

"You know perfectly well that what's in that report and what you tell me will control my decision. You can't push it off onto me. I made a decision to go to Earth over a year ago."

"It isn't that simple," said Dr. Hurley, still with the same professional impassivity. "And I'm not trying to evade any responsibility. The report says that the immunities you developed as a child are either gone or minimal. According to the blood tests, the reason for it is the immunities you developed on Xenos, both natural and induced. They were antithetical to the immunities you brought from Earth. In order to survive on Xenos - and you did survive - your system had to make a choice of sorts. Were you sick much when you first arrived there?"

"Almost constantly for the first year or so. Everyone was."

"Did anyone die?"

"Some did. Older people mostly. My parents."

"Their systems couldn't adjust," said Dr. Hurley, "Yours did."

"So that's that," said Jacob. "I stay on the ship."

Jacob felt none of the relief he had expected. They had the answers they had waited for, but somehow Dr. Hurley's presentation had no ring of finality to it.

"Not exactly, Jacob. If you went down to the surface and started playing tourist, I can almost guarantee you would be dead within a month. I can't say of what, but it would happen. On the other hand, there are drugs, immunizations, that sort of thing. After a series of treatments and careful observation, your natural immunities would develop. You were born on Earth, so the diseases you would be exposed to would not be completely hostile."

"And Xenos?"

"As you said yourself, the older people died. That might not happen in your case, but we don't know."

Jacob glanced down at the report, then back up at Dr. Hurley. To see Earth again and walk on it had been a dream that had grown over the years, grown until Jacob decided he had to go before he was too old. When he was told Barbara and the children must stay behind, he considered calling it off, but Barbara, knowing what Earth meant to him, had convinced him to go. At last Jacob smiled. There wasn't really any decision to make.

"I hope you haven't taken on any new crewmen."

"Why?"

"I think I've had everything this crew brought with them. I'd rather not be sick when I get back to Xenos."

"I'll tell the purser," said Dr. Hurley.

A week later the big ship broke orbit and headed away from the sun, preparing to shift into hyper-space. Jacob and Dr. Hurley, whose duties during this part of a journey were minimal, stood at a viewport, looking back toward Earth. The moon was out of sight behind it and they were unable to see the sun from where they stood. The Earth hung in space as if alone, obscured by cloud cover on its light side and with its continents hidden, seeming like any of a thousand anonymous worlds.

Jacob's first feelings of disappointment had passed, but as he made arrangements to send the carving and manuscript down without him, he noticed that he still felt the tension he associated with waiting for the laboratory analysis, as if something were still unresolved. He thought of the call he had made to his sister that had died out after five minutes for lack of anything to say, and the fact that she had failed to recognize him when she answered. Yet that wasn't the source of his uneasiness. It was something about himself, something he was unable to put his finger on.

"I suppose the choice was made before I left Xenos," said Jacob quite casually.

Dr. Hurley was quiet several seconds before he responded.

"If it's any consolation, Jacob, I sent in a report on what happened with recommendations for back up procedures to catch this kind of thing."

Jacob was silent, examining himself for any feelings of regret, or loss, as he watched the clouded planet recede. The ship's bulkhead trembled slightly as the hyperspace drive locked in phase. Outside the viewport, the Earth began to fade. As it disappeared, Jacob thought of his wife and family, of his work and the new area of Xenos he would begin mapping when he returned, of Xenos itself, not only his children's world, but his own. He wondered whether there was one day at sometime during the past seventeen years when he had ceased

to be an Earthman in anything but spirit. He turned from the empty viewport to Dr. Hurley.

"Ancient Greece, Doctor." "Pardon me?"

"Nothing. How about some coffee? I have to get my fill before I get home."