ticket to anywhere

damon knight

Richard Falk was a sane man. Up until three months ago he had been, so far as he could discover, the only sane man left in a world of lunatics.

Now he was a dead man.

He lay in a metal coffin twenty yards long by three wide, airless, soundless. Behind the faceplate of his helmet, under the rime of frozen air, his lips were bright blue, his cheeks, nose, forehead a lighter color, almost violet. The flesh was stiff as frozen leather. He did not move, breathe, or think: he was dead.

Beside him, strapped to the bulging torso of his suit, was a metal box labeled: SCATO HEART PROBE, SEE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE.

All around him, strapped tight to the walls by broad loops of webbing, were boxes, canisters, canvas bags, kegs. Cargo. His coffin was a freighter, going to Mars.

In his frozen brain the memories were neatly stacked, Just as he had left them. Not coupled now, each cell isolated, the entropy of his mind fallen to zero. But uppermost among them, waiting for the thaw that might never come, were the memories of his last few hours of life.

Once the ship was launched and free, he had had to wait until its dancing molecules had stilled, their heat all radiated away into space. Then to wait again, heater turned off, listening to the silence while his own life’s heat drained away: fingers and toes numb first, ears and nose following, then lips, cheeks, and all his flesh; shivering in an agony of cold, watching his breath fill the helmet with cloud, the cold drops beading on the colder faceplate.

Tricky, that, and a thing that demanded courage. Act too soon, and the last drop into stillness would be too slow - the freezing liquids in his body would crystallize, gashing his cells with a million tiny stabs. Wait too long, and the cold would steal his ability to act at all.

He had waited until the false warmth of the dying had crept over him, the subtle destroyer, cumbering his limbs not with harshness but with too much peace. Twisting then in the dead center where he floated, he had drawn himself into the lane between two looped bundles of cargo, forcing them aside, until he reached the naked hull. There, spread-eagled against the chill metal, embracing it as one who crucifies himself gladly, he had died.

The ship, stillest of sepulchers, hung fixed in the center of the starry globe. So it might have remained for time without end, changeless, knowing no time; for there was no time here, no “events” - the ship and all its contents - except its robot control, inactive now but warmed by a minute trickle of electrons - now being very nearly at zero Absolute.

But a relay clicked, communicating its tremor through support frame and girder and hull. Time had begun again. The radar assembly in the prow began to emit timed clusters of radiation; presently other relays snapped over, and then the engine awoke, whispered to itself an instant, and was silent. For an instant the ship had become once more a thing in motion, a pebble flung between the stars. Another such instant came, then another; then, at long last, the hull shuddered to the whip and carom of atmospheric molecules. Lightly it dipped into Martian air, out again, in again, making a great circuit of the globe. A final relay clicked, and Falk’s coffin hurled itself groundward, free of the skeletal ship whose rockets now flamed again, driving it back into the timeless deep.

A parachute opened as the cargo hull hurtled downward: a preposterous parasol that would not have held the weight a minute against Earth’s gravity, in Earth’s air; but here it slowed that plummeting fall until the box met Martian sand at not quite killing speed.

In the shell, Falk’s corpse slowly thawed.

His heart was beating. That was Falk’s first conscious realization, and he listened to the tiny sound thankfully. His chest was rising and falling in a deep, slow rhythm; he heard the hiss and whisper of breath in his nostrils and felt the veins twitch at his temples.

Then came a prickling, half pain, in his arms and legs; then he saw a ruddy haze of light on his closed lids.

Falk opened his eyes.

He saw a pale glow that turned Itself into a face. It went away briefly, then came back. Falk could see it a little better now. Young - about thirty - pale-skinned, with a blue beard shadow. Black straight hair, a little untidy. Black-rimmed spectacles. Ironic lines on either side of the thin mouth,

“All right now?” said the face.

Falk murmured, and the face bent closer. He tried again. “Think so.”

The young man nodded. He picked up something from the bed and began taking it apart, fitting the components into the cushioned troughs of a metal box. It was the heart probe, Falk saw: the bulky control box and the short, capillary-thin needle.

“Where did you get this?” the young man asked. “And what the devil were you doing aboard that freighter?”

“Stole the probe,” said Falk. “And the suit, and the rest of the stuff. Dumped enough cargo to match my weight. Wanted to get to Mars. Only way.”

The young man let his hands fall Into his lap. “You stole it,” he repeated incredulously, “Then you never had the analogue treatment?”

Falk smiled. “Had it, all right. Dozen times. Never took.” He felt very tired. “Let me rest a minute, will you?”

“Of course. Sorry,”

The young man went away, and Falk closed his eyes, returning to the slow surge of memory that moved in his mind. He went through those last hours, painful as they were, and then again. There was trauma there; mustn’t let it get buried to cause him trouble later. Accept it, know the fear, live with it.

After a while the young man came back, carrying broth that steamed in a cup, and Falk drank it gratefully. Then he fell unknowing into sleep.

When he awoke he was stronger. He tried to sit up, and found to his mild surprise that he could. The other, who had been sitting in an armchair across the room, put down his pipe and came to thrust pillows behind Falk’s back. Then he sat down again. The room was cluttered and had a stale odor. Floor, walls, and ceiling were enameled metal. There were books and rolls of tape, records, in shelves; more piled on the floor. A dirty shirt was hanging from the doorknob.

“Want to talk now?” the young man asked. “My name’s Wolfert.”

“Glad to know you. Mine’s Falk…You want to know about the analogue business first, I suppose.”

“And why you’re here.”

“It’s the same thing,” Falk told him. “I’m immune to analogue treatment. I didn’t know it for sure till I was ten, but I think I was born that way. From seven on, I remember the other kids talking about their Guardians, and me pretending I had one too. You know how kids are - anything to run with the mob.

“But for a long time, years, I wasn’t certain whether everyone else was pretending like me, or whether I really was the only one without an invisible Guardian to talk to. I was pretty sure the kids were lying when they said they could see theirs, but whether they were there at all or not was another question. I didn’t know; actually it didn’t bother me much.

“When I was ten, I stole something. It was a book I wanted that my father wouldn’t let me have. The clerk was looking the other way - I put it under my jacket. Funny, I was halfway through it before it struck me that I’d just proved I had no Guardian. By that time, you see, I’d decided that I’d just never seen mine because I’d never done anything bad. I was proud of that, a little prissy about it if you want the truth - only I wanted this book….

“I had sense enough, thank God, to burn that book after I’d finished it. If I hadn’t, I don’t suppose I would have lived to grow up.”

Wolfert grunted. “Should think not,” he said. His eyes were fixed on Falk, interested, alert, wary. “One man without any control could turn the whole applecart over. But I thought immunity was theoretically impossible?”

“I’ve thought about that a good deal. According to classic psychology, it is. I’m not unusually resistant to hypnotic drugs; I go under all right. But the censor mechanism just doesn’t respond. I’ve had the fanciful notion that I may be a mutation, developed in response to the analogue treatment as an anti-survival factor. But I don’t know. As far as I’ve ever been able to find out, there are no more like me.”

“Umm,” said Wolfert, puffing at his pipe. “Should think your next move would be to get married, have children, see if they were immune too.”

Falk stared at him soberly. “Wolfert - no offense, but can you imagine yourself settling down happily in a community of maniacs?”

The other’s face flushed slowly. He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked down at it. Finally he said, “All right, I know what you mean.”

“Maybe you don’t,” said Falk, thinking, I’ve offended him. Couldn’t kelp it. “You’ve been out here ten years, haven’t you?”

Wolfert nodded.

“Things are getting worse,” Falk told him. “I’ve taken the trouble to look up some statistics. They weren’t hard to find; the damned fools are proud of them. The number of persons in mental institutions has gone steadily down since 1980, when the world-wide analogue program got under way. Extension of analogue program, steadily up. The two curves cancel out perfectly.

“There are fewer and fewer people that have to be put away in madhouses - not because of any improvement in therapy, but because the analogue techniques are getting better and better. The guy who would have been hopelessly insane fifty years ago now has a little man inside his head, steering him around, making him act normal. On the outside he is normal; inside, he’s a raving madman. Worse still, the guy who would have been Just a little bit cracked fifty years ago - and gotten treatment for it - is now just as mad as the first guy. It doesn’t matter any more. We could all be maniacs, and the world would go on just as before.”

Wolfert grimaced wryly, “Well? It’s a peaceful world, anyhow.”

“Sure,” said Falk. “No war or possibility of war, no murders, no theft, no crime at all. That’s because every one of them has a policeman inside his skull. But action begets reaction, Wolfert, in psychiatry as well as physics. A prison is a place to get out of, if it takes you a lifetime. Push one plunger down, another will rise. Just a few years more, I think - ten or twenty, say - and you’ll see that madhouse curve rise again. Because there’s no escape from the repression of the Guardians except a further retreat into insanity. And eventually a point is reached where no amount of treatment can help. What are they going to do then?”

Wolfert tamped his pipe out slowly and stood up, sucking absently at the stem. “You say they,” he said, “meaning the psychiatrists who really govern Earth, I suppose. You’ve evidently figured out what you’re going to do.”

Falk smiled. “Yes. With your help - I’m going to the stars.”

The other stood frozen a moment. “So you know about that,” he said. “Well - Come into the next room. I’ll show it to you.”

Falk had known about the Doorway, but not that it looked like this. It was a cubicle of something that looked like slick brown glass. Ten feet high, six wide and deep. Inside, at waist level on the far wall, a lever - curiously shaped, like the head of an old-fashioned walking stick, the slightly curved bar of the L parallel to the wall. Nothing more than that. The floor of Wolfert’s hut had been assembled around it. It was the reason for the hut’s existence, for Wolfert’s dearly bought presence on Mars.

“So that’s it,” said Falk. He took a step toward it.

“Stay where you are,” Wolfert said sharply. “The area in front of the entrance is booby-trapped.”

Falk stopped and looked at Wolfert, then at the metal cabinets bolted to the floor on either side of the Doorway. Now that he looked at them closely, he could see the lenses of black-light beams and, above them, metal cones that he supposed were discharge points.

Wolfert confirmed it. “If anything ever comes out, the current is supposed to get him. If it doesn’t, I’m here.” He put his hand on the rapid-fire automatic at his belt.

Falk sat down slowly on a bench next to the wall. “Why?” he asked. “Why are they so afraid of whatever might come out of the Doorway?”

The other leaned awkwardly against the wall and began refilling his pipe. “You don’t know the whole story, then,” he said. “Tell me what you do know, and I’ll fill in the gaps.”

Falk said slowly, “I was able to find out that the Doorway existed - that the first Mars expedition, in ‘76, had found it here. Apparently it was known to be an interstellar transportation system, but as far as I could learn nobody had ever actually tried it out. I knew that a caretaker had been left here - your predecessor, I take it after the idea of colonizing Mars was abandoned. But I didn’t know any of the reasons.”

Wolfert grinned briefly and straightened away from the wall. As he talked, he paced back and forth across the room, glancing at Falk only occasionally. “It’s a transportation system, all right. Put an object in that cubicle, press the lever down - the object vanishes. So does most of the crowbar or whatever you use to work the lever. Ffft - gone.

“We don’t know how old it is and have no way of telling. The material it’s made of is harder than diamond. About half of it is underground. That was the way it was found - sitting perfectly level on the surface of the desert. I believe it must have some sort of self-leveling mechanism built into it so that it’s always available no matter what happens to the surface.

“Other ruins have been found on Mars, but, they’re all stone and quite primitive; nothing like this. The first expedition tried to get into its innards and find out what made it go, of course, but they couldn’t. You can see in, but there’s nothing to see.” He gave his quick, bitter smile. “It’s frustrating. Makes a physicist feel like a backward student in a kindergarten.

“We know that it’s part of an interstellar network. One man did try it out - a member of the first expedition, one of the group that found the Doorway in the first place. He saw the cubicle and the lever - stepped in and pressed it to find out what would happen. He found out, all right, but I don’t suppose the rest of us will ever know. The second expedition brought along a batch of powerful all-wave senders and sent them through. They picked up the first signal five years later, from the general direction of Regulus. Two more after seven years, then four during the thirteenth year, all from different directions. The other eight have yet to be heard from.”

He stopped pacing and looked at Falk. “Now do you understand? The thing has no selectivity - it’s completely random. We could walk through there and step out onto the planet of another star, all right - but it would take us a million years to find the way back by trial and error.” He knocked his pipe out against the heel of his hand, letting the dottle fall on the floor. “There it sits, the doorway to the stars. And we can’t use it.”

Falk leaned back against the wall, trying to absorb the idea. “Maybe there are only a dozen or so stars in the network,” he suggested.

Wolfert’s thin mouth drew down at the corners. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Would the race that could build that” - he gestured toward the cubicle - “stop at a dozen stars, or a thousand? The devil! They owned the galaxy!” Nervously he began to fill his pipe again. “Sixty billion stars,” he said. “And according to current theory, all the mainliners have planets.”

He pointed to the cubicle again. “Three hundred sixty cubic feet, about,” he said. “Enough for one man and supplies for a month, or fifteen people and supplies for a week. That’s the limit to the size of the colony we could send out. With no assurance,” he added bitterly, “that they’d land anywhere they could live for a minute.”

“Frustrating,” Falk agreed. “But I still don’t see why you’re here - with a gun. I can understand that if a member of the race that built that thing came through - and I must say it seems unlikely - that would be an important event. But why kill him when he steps out?”

“Dammit,” said Wolfert violently, “it isn’t my policy, Falk. I only work here.”

“I understand that,” Falk said. “But do you have any idea what’s behind the policy?”

“Fear,” said Wolfert promptly. “They’ve got too much at stake.” He leaned against the wall again, gesturing with his pipe-stem. “Do you realize,” he said, “that we could have interstellar colonization without this gadget, on our own? Certainly. Not now, but fifty, a hundred years from now - if we worked at it. Give us a fuel source efficient enough so that we can accelerate continuously for as long as eight months, and we could reach the stars well within a man’s lifetime. But do you know why we won’t?

“They’re afraid. They’re even afraid to plant colonies here on Mars, or on Jupiter’s moons, simply because transportation takes too long. Imagine a colony cut off from Earth by a five-or ten-year trip. Say something goes wrong - a man like yourself, naturally immune to analogue treatment. Or a man who somehow evades the treatment, then manages to take it over, change it. Say he cuts out the one directive, ‘You must do nothing against the policy or interests of Earth.’ Then you’ve got two communities again, not one. And then—?”

Falk nodded soberly. “War. I see now. They don’t dare take even the smallest chance of that.”

“It isn’t a question of daring; they can’t. That’s one of the directives in their own conditioning, Falk.”

“So we’ll never get to the stars.”

“Unless,” said Wolfert, “somebody walks out of that Doorway who understands how it works. The voltage is high, but not high enough to kill - we hope. He’s supposed to be stunned. If the current doesn’t stop him, and he tries to get back into the Doorway, I’m supposed to shoot to cripple. But at all events, he’s supposed to be stopped. He isn’t to be allowed to go back and warn others to stay away from this station. Because if we had that knowledge - how to alter the system so that it would be selective—”

“Then we’d have colonies, all right,” finished Falk. “Everyone just around the corner from Earth. All just alike. The loonies shall inherit the Universe…. I hope nobody ever comes through.”

“I don’t think you’re likely to be disappointed,” said Wolfert.

II

He prowled the rest of the cabin with Wolfert, resting at intervals until his strength returned. There wasn’t much to see: the Doorway room, with a spyhole Falk had not noticed between it and the bedroom; the room that housed radio, radar, and the computer that controlled the grazing orbits of the supply rockets; the power plant, and the compressor that kept the cabin’s air at breathable pressure; kitchen, bathroom, and two storage chambers.

The radio room had a window, and Falk stood there a long time, looking out over the alien desert, violet now as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Stars glittered with unfamiliar brilliance in the near-black sky, and Falk found his gaze drawn to them even against the tug of that unearthly landscape.

In his mind he sketched hairlines of fire across the sky— a cat’s cradle of stars. The thought that tomorrow he would be standing on a planet of one of those suns was like an icy douche; the mind recoiled from it as from the thought of personal death. But at the same time it lured him. He felt like a boy standing on the edge of an unsounded pool whose black waters might hold treasure or death: he was afraid to dive, and yet he knew that he must.

How could a man feel otherwise, he wondered, knowing that the way was open, that he had only to step forward?

Wolfert said abruptly, “You haven’t asked me whether I reported to Earth when I found you in that freighter shell.”

Falk looked at him. “You did, of course,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone long before they can do anything about me. You’ll tell them that I overpowered you and escaped through the Doorway - they won’t be able to prove otherwise - unless you’re conditioned against lying?”

“No,” said Wolfert, “I’m not. That part’s all right, with one emendation: I’ll say I revived you, then shot and buried you. But what made you so sure that I’d be - sympathetic?”

“You’re here,” said Falk simply. “You’re a volunteer. They haven’t got to the stage of conditioning people to do jobs they don’t want to do, though I suppose they will eventually. And when I’d heard you speak, I knew you were intelligent. So - you’re a hermit. You don’t like the madhouse they’re making of Earth, any more than I do.”

“I don’t know,” said Wolfert slowly. “Perhaps you’re assuming too much similarity.” He looked down at his ever-present pipe, tamping the tobacco with a horny thumb. “I don’t feel as you do about the analogue system, or the present government. I’m adjusted, there. In my personal universe, it works. I can see that it will lead to disaster eventually, but that doesn’t bother me much. I’ll be dead.”

He looked at Falk earnestly. “But I want the stars,” he said.

“That’s an emotional thing with me…There are no slugs in these cartridges.” He indicated the gun at his hip. “Or in any of the ammunition I’ve got. They didn’t condition me against that.”

Falk stared at him. “Look,” he said abruptly, “you’ve got a directive against stepping through that Doorway, is that right?”

The other nodded.

“Well, but is there any reason why I couldn’t knock you over the head and drag you through?”

Wolfert smiled wryly, shaking his head slowly. “No good,” he said. “Somebody’s got to stay, this end.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a chance that you’ll find the secret out there, somewhere. That’s what you’re hoping, too, isn’t it? You’re not just looking for a place to hide - you could do that in a thousand places on Earth. You’re after knowledge, and in spite of what I’ve told you, you’re hoping you’ll be allowed to bring it back and make the Earth over.”

“It sounds a little quixotic,” said Falk, “but you’re right.”

Wolfert shrugged, letting his gaze drift away again. “Well, then… there’s got to be somebody here. Somebody with no slugs in his gun. If I went with you, they’d take good care to send a different sort of man next time.”

He met Falk’s eyes again briefly. “Don’t waste time feeling sorry for me,” he said. “You may not believe it, but I’m quite happy here. When I’m… alone, that is.”

Falk had been wondering why the government had not sent a married couple instead of a single man, who might go mad from sheer loneliness. Now it struck him that he had been stupid. Wolfert had a wife, undoubtedly; the best kind - one who suited him perfectly, who would never be fickle, or want to return to Earth; one who cost nothing to feed, consumed no air, and had not added an ounce of weight when Wolfert had been shipped out here. And on Mars it did not ordinarily matter that no one else could see her.

He felt an inward twinge of revulsion and instantly knew that Wolfert had seen and understood it. The man’s cheeks flushed, and he turned away to stare through the window, his lips thin and hard.

After a moment Falk said, “Wolfert, I like you better than any man I’ve ever met. I hope you’ll believe that.”

Wolfert hauled out a pipe cleaner, a complicated thing of many hinged stems, the free ends stamped into shovel shapes, tamper shapes, probes. He said, “I’m afraid I dislike you, Falk, but it’s nothing personal. I simply hate your guts a little, because you’ve got something I wasn’t lucky enough to be born with. You’re the master of your own mind.”

He turned and put out his hand, grinning. “Aside from that trifling matter, I entirely approve of you. If that’s good enough—?”

Falk gripped his hand. “I hope you’re here when I get back,” he said.

“I’ll be here,” said Wolfert, scraping his pipe, “for another thirty-odd years, barring accidents. If you’re not back by then, I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back at all.”

At Wolfert’s suggestion, Falk put on one of the other’s light Mars suits instead of the spacesuit he had worn in the freighter. The latter, designed for heavy-duty service in the orbital space station that circled Earth, was, as Wolfert pointed out, too clumsy for use on a planet’s surface. The lighter suit furnished adequate protection in thin atmosphere and was equipped with gadgetry that the other lacked: a head lamp, climbing gear, built-in compass, and traps for the occupant’s ingestion and excretion. It carried air tanks, but also had a compression outfit - which, given an atmosphere at least as oxygen-rich as that of Mars, would keep the wearer alive for as long as the batteries held out.

“You’ll have to find a place where you can live off the land, so to speak, anyhow,” said Wolfert. “If all the planets you hit should happen to be dead, so will you be, very shortly. But this suit will give you longer to look, at least, and the stuff in the knapsack will last you as long as you have air. I’d give you this gun, but it wouldn’t do you any good - all the ammunition’s buggered, as I told you.”

He disconnected the booby trap and stood aside as Falk moved to the entrance. Falk took one last look around at the bare metal room and at Wolfert’s spare figure and gloomy face. He stepped into the brown-glass cubicle and put his gloved hand on the lever.

“See you later,” he said.

Wolfert nodded soberly, almost indifferently. “So long, Falk,” he said, and put his pipe back in his mouth.

Falk turned on his helmet lamp, put his free hand near the control box at his belt - and pressed the lever down.

Wolfert vanished. An instant later Falk was aware that the lever was no longer beneath his hand. He turned, dazedly, and saw that it was back in its original position, above his hand.

Then he remembered the curious blank that had taken Wolfert’s place and he turned again to the entrance. He saw -nothing. A gray-white blankness, featureless, uncommunicative. Was this some kind of intermediary state - and if so, how long did it last? Falk felt a brief surge of panic as he realized they had only assumed the journey was instantaneous, and another as he recalled the eight transmitters that had never been heard from….

Then common sense took over, and he stepped forward to the entrance.

The gray-white shaded gradually, as his gaze traveled downward, into gray-blue and violet, and then a chaos of dim colors of which his eye made nothing. He gripped the edge of the Doorway and bent forward, looking downward and still downward. Then he saw the cliff, and all the rest of the scene fell into perspective.

He stood at the top of a sheer mountain - an impossible, ridiculous height. Down it went and again down, until whatever was at the bottom melted into a meaningless tapestry of grayed color. He looked to right and left and saw nothing else. No sound came through the diaphragm of his helmet. He had only the tactile and muscular responses of his own body, and the hard reality of the Doorway itself, to assure him that he was real and live.

The planet was dead; he felt irrationally sure of that. It felt dead; there was not even a whisper of wind: only the featureless blanket of gray cloud, the cliff, the meaningless colors below.

He looked at the kit slung to his belt: the pressure gauge, bottled litmus papers, matches. But there was no point in testing this atmosphere: even if it were breathable, there was clearly no way of getting out of the Doorway. The cliff began not more than an inch from the entrance.

Falk went back to the lever, pressed it down again.

This time he watched it as it reached the end of its stroke. There was no hint of transition: the lever was there, under his hand, and then it was back in the starting position - as if it had passed unfelt through the flesh of his hand.

He turned.

Deep blue night, blazing with stars. Underneath, a flat blue-green waste that ran straight away into the far distance.

Falk stepped out onto the icy plain and looked around him, then upward. The sky was so like the one he had known as a boy in Michigan that it struck him almost as a conviction that this terminus was on Earth - in the Antarctic, perhaps, near the Pole, where no explorer had ever happened across it. Then, as he looked automatically for the Dipper, Orion’s Belt, he knew that he was wrong.

He saw none of the familiar patterns. These were alien stars, in an alien sky. He reviewed what he could remember of the configurations of Earth’s southern hemisphere, but none of them fitted either.

Directly above him was a group of eight stars, two of them very brilliant - four arranged in a straight line, the rest spread out in an almost perfect semicircle. Falk knew that if he had ever seen that constellation before he would not have forgotten it.

Now he looked down toward the horizon, blacker than the sky. How could he know that light, warmth, safety, knowledge were not hiding just beyond the curve of the planet?

He turned back to the cubicle. He was here on sufferance, a man in a Mars suit, with weeks - or, with great luck, months or years - to live. He had to find what he sought within a pitifully small radius from the Doorway, or not at all.

Down went the lever again. Now it was still night - but when Falk went to the Doorway, he saw an avenue of great buildings under the stars.

Now the pressure gauge came out - low, but the compressor could handle it. The litmus papers - negative. The match burned - weakly, and only for an instant, but it burned.

Falk started the compressor and shut off the flow of air from the tanks slung at his back. Then he turned on his helmet light and marched off down the avenue.

The buildings were variations on a theme: pyramid, cone, and wedge shape, they sloped away as they rose, so that for all their enormous bulk they did not hide the sky. Falk looked up when he had taken a few steps, subconsciously expecting to see the half-circle constellation. But it was not there, and he realized with a shock that, for all he knew, he might be halfway across the galaxy from the spot where he had stood five minutes ago.

He drew a picture of the galaxy in his mind, an oval clot of mist against blackness. Near one focus of the ellipse he put a dot of brightness that stood for Sol. Then he made another dot and drew a shining line between them. Then another dot, and another line; then another. They made a sprawling letter N across the misty oval.

It was incomprehensible. A race that could span the galaxy, but could not choose one destination from another?

The only other alternative was: there was some function of the Doorways that men had failed to grasp, some method of selection that evaded them, as a savage might be bewildered in a modern tubeway system. But Falk’s mind rejected that. The mechanism was simple and clear. A cubicle and a lever. Function is expressed by shape; and the shape of the Doorway said “Go”; it did not say “Where?”

He looked again at the buildings. The upper quarter of them, he saw now, was badly eroded: layers inches deep had been eaten away. He glanced at the fine orange sand that paved the avenue and saw that it filled doorways almost to the top. Evidently this city had lain all but buried for many years, and in some recent time the shifting sands had uncovered it again.

The space between the sand and the tops of the doorways was narrow, but he thought he could squeeze through. He picked out one, centering it in the brilliant disk of his head lamp - and stood there, in the middle of the avenue, reluctant to move.

He glanced back at the cubicle, as if for reassurance. It was still there, comfortably clear and sharp-lined, timeless. Now he realized what was troubling him. This city was dead - dead as the planet of the cliff or the planet of ice. The buildings were stone; they had crumbled under the weather. Their makers were dust.

He had agreed with Wolfert when the other had suggested that he was on a quest for knowledge; that he hoped the Doorway would eventually take him back to Sol, armed with knowledge, ready to remake the world. But it wasn’t true. That had been his conscious idea, but it was a dream, a self-delusion - an excuse.

He had no love for Earth, or any conviction that humanity must be rescued from its own weakness. If that force had driven him, there would have been no logic in leaving Earth. He could have stayed, worked himself into the governing elite, organized a revolution from within. His chance of success would have been small, but there would have been some chance.

Yes, he might have done it - and for what? To remove the one control that kept humanity from destroying itself?

That coin had the same face on both sides. Uncontrolled, mankind was not fit to colonize. Controlled, it dared not take the risk. Human civilization was not ready, was a dead end, an aborted experiment. Mankind was a dirty beast, ravaging its planet, befouling itself - capable of any imaginable perversion, degradation, horror.

But there had been another civilization once - one that had been worthy of the stars. Falk did not believe it was dead. Stone crumbled; metal rusted; and the races that used them vanished and were not mourned. The Doorways still lived, still functioned, defying time.

That race was not here; it had left no trace of itself except the Doorway. Without another glance at the buildings around him, Falk turned and went back to the brown glass cubicle.

When he was three yards away from it, he saw the footprints.

There were five of them, lightly impressed into the sand near the Doorway’s entrance. Search as he might, Falk could not find any more. Two, apparently, pointed away from the cubicle; the other three were the returning trail, for one overlapped one of the previous set.

They were smaller than Falk’s booted prints, oval, slightly flattened along the sides. Falk stared at them as if the mere act of looking would make them give up more information; but they told him nothing.

They were not human; but what did that prove?

They had been made long since the time when the Doorways had been built; Falk did not know what winds swept this world, but it could only have been a few years, at most, since the sands had dropped to their present level. But even that train of logic led nowhere.

They could be the trace of a Doorway builder. Or they could have been made by a wanderer like himself, another barbarian venturing in the paths of his betters.

The bitterest thing of all was that, having found the trail, he could not follow it. For it led through the Doorway - to any one of sixty billion suns.

Falk stepped into the cubicle and pressed the lever down once more.

III

White light that sealed his eyes with pain, and a vicious torrent of heat. Gasping, Falk groped frantically for the lever.

The afterimage faded slowly. He saw night again, and the stars. That last one, he thought, must have been the planet of a nova. How many of those was he likely to run into?

He stepped to the doorway. A wasteland: not a stick, not a stone.

He went back to the lever. Light again, of bearable intensity, and a riot of color outside.

Falk stepped cautiously to the entrance. Slowly his mind adapted to the unfamiliar shapes and colors. He saw a bright landscape under a tropic sun - gray-violet mountains in the distance, half veiled by mist; nearer, tall stalks that bore heavy leaves and fronds of a startling blue-green; and directly ahead of him, a broad plaza that might have been cut from one monstrous boulder of jade. On either side were low, box-shaped structures of dark vitreous material: blue, brown, green, and red. And in the middle of the plaza stood a group of slender shapes that were unquestionably alive, sentient.

Falk’s heart was pounding. He stepped behind the shelter of the entrance wall and peered out. Curiously, it was not the cluster of live things that drew him, but the buildings on either side.

They were made of the same enduring, clean-edged substance as the Doorway. He had come, by blind chance, at last to the right place.

Now he stared at the creatures grouped in the middle of the plaza. For some reason they were disappointing. They were slender S-shapes, graceful enough in repose: lizard shapes, upright on two legs; pink of belly and umber of back. But in spite of the bandoliers slung from their narrow shoulders, in spite of their quick, patterned gestures as they spoke together, Falk could not convince himself that he had found the people he sought.

They were too manlike. One turned away while two others spoke; came back leaning at a passionate angle, thrust himself between the two, gesturing wildly. Shouted down, he again left and stalked a half circle around the group. He moved as a chicken moves, awkwardly, thrusting his long neck forward at each step.

Of the five others, two argued, two merely stood with drooping, attentive heads and watched; and the last stood a little apart, gazing around him disdainfully.

They were funny, as monkeys are funny - because they resemble men. We laughed at our mirrored selves. Even the races of man laugh at each other when they should weep.

They’re tourists, Falk thought. One wants to go to the Lido, another insists they see the Grand Canal first; the third is furious with both of them for wasting time, the next two are too timid to interfere, and the last one doesn’t care.

He couldn’t imagine what their reaction to him would be. Nothing welcome, at any rate; they might want to take him home as a souvenir. He wanted to get into those buildings, but he’d have to wait until they were out of sight.

While he waited, he got out the atmosphere-testing kit. The pressure gauge showed the merest trifle less than Earth normal; the litmus papers did not react; the match burned cheerfully, just as it would have on Earth. Falk turned off the oxygen, cracked the helmet valve cautiously, and sniffed.

After the stale air of the suit, the breath he inhaled was so good that it brought tears to his eyes. It was fresh, faintly warm, and sweet with flower fragrance. Falk opened the helmet seam, tipped the helmet back, and let the breeze wash over his face and hair.

He peered out, and saw to his dismay that the party was trooping directly toward him. Falk ducked his head back inside, glanced instinctively at the lever, then looked out again.

They were running now; they had seen him. They ran very clumsily, heads darting strenuously forward and back. The one in the lead was opening and shutting his triangular mouth, and Falk heard faint yawps. He leaped out of the cubicle, cut sharply to the right, and ran.

The nearest building with a visible opening, unfortunately, was some distance down the line, between Falk and the lizards. He glanced back when he was halfway there. The lizards were considerably strung out now, but the leader was only a few yards away.

They were faster than they looked. Falk put his head down and tried to make his heavy boots move to a quicker rhythm. Almost to the door, he looked back again. The lizard was one jump away, its grimy, ball-tipped fingers outspread.

Falk turned in desperation and, as the lizard came up, swung a knotted fist to the point of its snout. He heard its steam-whistle screech, saw it collapse, and then he was diving through the open door ahead.

The door closed gently behind him - a sheet of glassy substance, the same blue as the walls, gliding down to seal the opening.

Falk stared at it. Through its transparency he could see the dark shapes of the lizards crowding around, leaning to pry at the bottom of the door, gesticulating at each other. It was plain, at any rate, that the door was not going to open for them.

Whether it would open for him, when he wanted it to, was another matter.

He looked around him. The building was a single huge room, so long and deep that he could barely see the far walls. Scattered over the floor, patternless, were boxes, or chests, racks, shelves, little ambiguous mounds. Nearly all the objects Falk could see were fashioned of the same glass-like material.

There was no dust in the room; but now that Falk thought of it, he realized that there had been none in any of the Doorways, either How that was done he could not conjecture. He moved to the nearest object, a file, or rack formed apparently to take many things of divers shapes and sizes. It was a quarter empty now, and the remaining contents had a jumbled look.

He picked up an orange glass spindle, full of embedded threads, or flaws that looped in a curious pattern from one end to the other. He put it down, took a hollow sphere of opal. It was made in halves and seemed to be empty, but Falk could find no way to take it apart. He replaced it and took a brown object shaped like a double crescent, with a clear fracture plane running diagonally through it…..

Half an hour later he realized that he was not going to find any picture books or engineering manuals or any one thing that would unlock the mystery of the Doorway people for him. If there were any knowledge to be gained here, it would have to come from the building as a whole.

The lizards distracted him. He could see them through the walls of the building, pressing their snouts against the glass, staring with little round eyes, gesturing at him. But he learned things from them.

The group broke up finally, leaving only one to guard the exit; the others dispersed. Falk saw one go into the building directly across the plaza. The door closed behind him. A little later another one approached and pounded on the door; but it did not open until the first lizard came close to it inside. Some automatic mechanism, beyond Falk’s fathoming, evidently responded to the presence or absence of any living thing inside each building. When the last person left, the door stayed open; when another person entered, it shut and would not open for the next unless the first person allowed it.

That added one item to the description of the Doorway people that Falk was building in his mind. They were not property-conscious - not afraid that thieves would enter in their absence, for the doors stood open when they were gone - but they respected each other’s love of privacy.

Falk had previously thought of this building as a vast factory or laboratory or dormitory - a place designed to serve a large number of people, anyhow. Now he revised his opinion. Each building, he thought, was the private domain of one person - or, if they had family groups, only two or three. But how could one person use all this space, all these possessions?

He made the comparison that by now was becoming automatic. He asked himself what a cliff dweller would make of a millionaire’s triplex apartment in New York.

It helped, but not enough. The objects around him were all specialized tools; they would not function for him and so told him nothing about the Doorway builders. There was nothing that he could compare to a bed, to a table, to a shower bath. He could not see the people who had lived here.

With an effort, he forced himself to stop thinking in terms of men. The facts were important, not his prejudices. And then what had been a barrier became a road. There were no beds, tables, showers? Then the Doorway people did not sleep; they did not eat; they did not bathe.

Probably, thought Falk, they did not die.

They were fit to live among the stars…

The riddle of the deserted chamber mocked him. How, having built this city, would they leave it? How would they spread the network of the Doorways across the face of the galaxy, and then leave it unused?

The first question answered itself. Looking at the littered chamber, Falk thought of his comparison of the cliff dweller and the millionaire and humbly acknowledged his presumption. Not a millionaire’s triplex, he told himself… a tent.

Once there had been something of particular interest on this world. No telling what it had been, for that had been some millions of years ago when Mars was a living world. But the Doorway people, a few of them, had come here to observe it. When they were finished, they had gone away, leaving their tents behind, as a man might abandon a crude shelter of sticks and leaves.

And the other things they had left behind them? The cubes, cones, rods, odd shapes, each one beyond price to a man? Empty cans, thought Falk; toothpaste tubes, wrapping paper.

They had abandoned this city and the million things in it because they were of no value.

The sun was redder, nearer the horizon. Falk looked at the chronometer strapped to the wrist of his suit and found to his surprise that it was more than five hours since he had left Wolfert on Mars.

He had not eaten. He took food out of his pack and looked at the labels on the cans. But he was not hungry; he did not even feel tired.

He watched the lizards outside. They were scurrying around the plaza now, bringing armloads of junk from the building, packing them into big red boxes. As Falk watched, a curious construction floated into view down at the far end of the plaza. It was a kind of airboat, an open shell with two lizards riding it, supported by two winglike extensions with streamlined, down-pointing shapes at their ends.

It drifted slowly until it hovered over the pile of boxes the lizards had gathered. Then a hatch opened in its belly, and a hook emerged at the end of three cords. The lizards on the plaza began slinging loops of cord from their boxes to the hook.

Falk watched them idly. The hook began to rise, dragging the boxes after it, and at the last moment one of the lizards tossed another loop over it.

The new box was heavy; the hook stopped when it took up the slack, and the airboat dipped slightly. Then it rose again, and the hook rose too, until the whole load was ten feet off the ground.

Abruptly one of the three cords snapped; Falk saw it whip through the air, saw the load lurch ponderously to one side, and the airboat dip. Simultaneously the pilot sent the boat down to take up the strain on the remaining cords.

The lizards were scattering. The load struck heavily; and a moment later so did the airboat. It bounced, skidded wildly, and came to rest as the pilot shut off the power.

The lizards crowded around again, and the two in the airboat climbed down for an interminable conference. Eventually they got aboard again, and the boat rose a few feet while the lizards beneath disengaged the hook. Then there was another conference. Falk could see that the doors of the boat’s hatch were closed and had a crumpled look. Evidently they were jammed and could not be opened again.

Finally the boat came down once more, and with much argument and gesticulation the boxes were unpacked and some of their contents reloaded into two boxes, these being hoisted with much effort into the airboat’s cockpit. The rest was left strewn around the plaza.

The airboat lifted and went away, and most of the lizards followed it. One straggler came over for a last look at Falk; he peered and gestured through the wall for a while, then gave it up and followed the rest. The plaza was deserted.

Some time passed, and then Falk saw a pillar of white flame that lifted, with a glint of silver at its tip, somewhere beyond the city, and grew until it arched upward to the zenith, dwindled, and vanished.

So they had spaceships, the lizards. They did not dare use the Doorways, either. Not fit, not fit… too much like men.

Falk went out into the plaza and stood, letting the freshening breeze ruffle his hair. The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and the whole sky had turned ruddy, like a great crimson cape streaming out of the west. Falk watched, reluctant to leave, until the colors faded through violet to gray, and the first stars came out.

It was a good world. A man could stay here, probably, and live his life out in comfort and ease. No doubt there were exotic fruits to be had from those trees; certainly there was water; the climate was good; and Falk thought sardonically that there could be no dangerous wild beasts, or those twittering tourists would never have come here.

If all a man wanted was a hiding place, there could be no better world than this. For a moment Falk was strongly tempted. He thought of the cold dead worlds he had seen and wondered if he would ever find a place as fair as this again. Also, he knew now that if the Doorway builders still lived, they must long ago have drawn in their outposts. Perhaps they lived now on only one planet, out of all the billions. Falk would die before he found it.

He looked at the rubble the lizards had left in the middle of the plaza. One box was still filled, but burst open; that was the one that had caused all the trouble. Around it was a child’s litter of baubles - pretty glass toys, red, green, blue, yellow, white.

A lizard, abandoned here by his fellows, would no doubt be happy enough in the end.

With a sigh, Falk turned back to the building. The door opened before him, and he collected his belongings, fastened down his helmet, strapped on his knapsack again.

The sky was dark now, and Falk paused to look up at the familiar sweep of the Milky Way. Then he switched on his helmet light and turned toward the waiting Doorway.

The light fell across the burst box the lizards had left, and Falk saw a hard edge of something thrusting out. It was not the glassy adamant of the Doorway builders; it looked like stone, Falk stooped and tore the box aside.

He saw a slab of rock, roughly smoothed to the shape of a wedge. On its upper face, characters were incised. They were in English.

With blood pounding in his ears, Falk knelt by the stone and read what was written there.

THE DOORWAYS STOP THE AGING PROCESS. I WAS 32 WHEN I LEFT MARS, AM HARDLY OLDER NOW THOUGH I HAVE BEEN TRAVELING FROM STAR TO STAR FOR A TIME I BELIEVE CANNOT BE LESS THAN 20 YRS. BUT YOU MUST KEEP ON. I STOPPED HERE 2 YRS. FOUND MYSELF AGING. —HAVE OBSERVED THAT MILKY WAY LOOKS NEARLY THE SAME FROM ALL PLANETS SO FAR VISITED. THIS CANNOT BE COINCIDENCE. BELIEVE THAT DOORWAY TRAVEL IS RANDOM ONLY WITHIN CONCENTRIC BELTS OF STARS & THAT SOONER OR LATER YOU HIT DOORWAY WHICH GIVES ENTRY TO NEXT INNERMOST BELT. IF I AM RIGHT, FINAL DESTINATION IS CENTER OF GALAXY. I HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE.

JAMES E. TANNER

NATIVE OF EARTH.

Falk stood up, blinded by the glory of the vision that grew in his mind. He thought he understood now why the Doorways were not selective and why their makers no longer used them.

Once - a billion years ago, perhaps - they must have been uncontested owners of the galaxy. But many of their worlds were small planets like Mars - too small to keep their atmospheres and their water forever. Millions of years ago, they must have begun to fall back from these. And meanwhile, Falk thought, on the greater worlds just now cooling, the lesser breeds had arisen: the crawling, brawling things. The lizards. The men. Things not worthy of the stars.

But even a man could learn if he lived long enough, journeyed far enough. James Tanner had signed himself not “TERRAN SPACE CORPS” or “U.S.A.” but “NATIVE OF EARTH.”

So the way was made long, and the way was made hard; and the lesser breeds stayed on their planets. But for a man, or a lizard, who would give up all that he called “life” for knowledge, the way was open.

Falk turned off the beam of his head lamp and looked up at the diamond mist of the galaxy. Where would he be a thousand years from today? Standing on that mote of light, or that, or that… ?

Not dust, at any rate. Not dust, unmourned, unworthy. He would be a voyager with a destination, and perhaps half his journey would be done.

Wolfert would wait in vain for his return, but it would not matter; Wolfert was happy - if you called that happiness. And on Earth, the mountains would rise and fall long after the question of human survival had been forgotten.

Falk, by that time, perhaps, would be home.

Table of Contents

Start