Young Star Travelers Read online

  “They’re diamonds,” said Helen. “Like in the story. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Reach out and get one for me, Em, so I can hold it in my hand.”

  “I can’t,” said Em. “How far away do you think they are?” realizing even as she asked it that the question could have no meaning for them.

  But Helen was too excited to pursue that one. “Look,” she said. “Look at that great big cloud.”

  In the infinitely clear depths of infinite space it was like a cloud. It couldn’t have been anything but a cloud to a child who had never seen the skies of Earth. But the teacher in Em could not help saying, “That’s a nebula.”

  But Helen did not hear her. She danced up and down, clapping her hands. “That’s my cloud. I’m going to find a wonderful name for it. What about you, Paul? Do you want that big blue star and red star together?”

  But Paul had turned away puzzledly from the screen.

  “What is it, Paul?” Em asked.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said.

  “Wondering what?”

  “Why you had to keep this away from us all this time.”

  “Because ...” Em faltered. “Because I didn’t know whether you were ready for it.”

  “Ready?” he said, and though his voice asked a question, his tone held a strange confidence. “But why not?” Helen, too, turned away from the screen to look puzzled.

  Heavens, thought Em, had all those precautions been unnecessary, then? She had only been carrying out instructions as best she could. And her own reasoning had told her they were wise ones. But had they been? Perhaps she and the parents alike had overestimated the dangers. Perhaps because they had known what it was like to have a wide world under one’s feet, they had not understood that it would not be the same for children born in space. But no, she told herself. They don't know all of it yet.

  And then she told them.

  How this was the first starship and probably the last for a long, long time, because starships couldn’t be made every day of the week to launch into space. Nor could men and women be found so easily to volunteer for the years of journeying that it entailed—the years of journeying and possibly never arriving, possibly dying before reaching their goal, but having children before they died, so that the children would carry on.

  And how it had gone wrong. How they had died too soon. How the disease had struck the first generation before they were far out in interstellar space—too far out to return. How unknown radiations had produced an unknown germ that had stricken all the adults, attacking their nervous systems. How this had broken out not long before the two children had been born. And how Em helped as best she could at the births because there had been so few of the crew left by then, and those that were still alive had been stricken by the uncontrollable palsy that was the herald of death.

  And then the mothers had died, and the other remnants of the crew. And they died, not quite without hope now. Not quite.

  Em suddenly realized, in the middle of telling it, that talk of stars and starships could have little meaning for the children. So she digressed to explain something of what she knew of the Universe, of its vast depths and distances, of how great a venture it was to be crossing them.

  She explained that this was why she and Jay had to watch over them so carefully, why she and Jay had to teach them to read and understand the books, so that they would be able to carry on the great venture. Because one day the ship would have to be piloted down to a new world. She and Jay couldn’t do that unaided.

  Jay told them the original purpose for which they had been brought along—to navigate the ship under the stresses of landing—and the stresses of that first takeoff from Earth. That, and to explore any worlds that might be difficult for humans to explore. But they couldn’t do it without the help of humans to plan and direct.

  Jay was silent. Em also waited silently. That was too much to ask of the children all at once. So they just waited.

  Paul spoke first and his words seemed strangely irrelevant. He turned to Em. “Then you don’t die— you and Jay?”

  “Why, no,” she answered. “We go on looking after you and then after the children you will have. We just go on and on, like all good machines.” Now, she could admit the difference between them. It was better this way.

  “You’re not machines,” said Helen stoutly. “You’re too wise to be machines.”

  “Well, we’re wise machines, then,” Em said, and then, thinking they were getting off the subject, “so, you see, that’s why there aren’t any trees or cats or other children. They’re too far away, like the stars.”

  “Which one of those stars is Earth?” said Paul. The word sounded odd on his lips.

  “You can’t see Earth from here,” said Em. “It’s much too far away. Besides, it isn’t a star. It’s a planet going around a star.”

  “Which star?” said Paul, and Em realized that she didn’t know.

  “I’ll look it up in the charts,” she said hastily, hoping she could read them correctly, “and then I’ll point it out to you. How’s that?”

  “Could you see all this,” said Helen, “back on Earth?”

  “Oh, no, never like this. Half the time you couldn’t see it at all because the Sun was too bright.”

  Paul excitedly said, “But then it’s only just a long way away. Back on Earth there’s trees and cats and all those things. And—children just like us seeing them every day. Why, right now ...”

  “But there were other things,” Em said quickly. “Bad things as well. Things we’re free of here, thank goodness.”

  “What bad things?” said Helen. “Like being dizzy because of going around and around all the time?”

  “No,” said Em. “Nobody ever got dizzy from that. We're traveling at a great speed now, but we don’t get dizzy, do we? No, but believe Em, there were bad things—lots of them.” A sudden thought struck her. “Otherwise your parents and the others wouldn’t have wanted to leave Earth, would they?”

  “No,” admitted Paul, but he didn’t seem very convinced.

  It was Jay—Jay who had been silent most of the time for fear of upsetting things—who said impulsively, “Don’t you see? They just got tired of going around and around the same little star all the time. They didn’t get giddy, they just got tired of it, sick and tired. And they didn’t want that for their children.

  They wanted to give them a better life, a real start in life—”

  He stopped as abruptly as he had begun. He turned away as if fearing he had said the wrong thing.

  Em touched his square shoulder. One look at the children’s faces told her that he had said the right thing, the supremely right thing. Jay turned back and Em nodded, her hand still resting gratefully on his shoulder.

  Paul said, “And when we get to a new world, will there be trees and cats?”

  “There might be trees,” said Em. “There might be cats.” She had heard the humans discussing these things. “There might be—anything.”

  She felt a sudden pang of guilt. Was it right not to tell them the rest? She started to, then checked herself. No, the crisis had been met and surmounted. That was the important thing now.

  ‘Anything?” said Paul.

  “Giants, even?” said Helen, her eyes round with wonder. “Wizards? Fairy castles?”

  “Yes,” said Em, “there might be all of those and more. Nothing guaranteed, mind you, but anything is possible. Anything at all.”

  And so she did not add that it wouldn’t be for another hundred and twenty years. That could be told later.

  Big Sword

  by Pauline Ashwell

  When you’re less than six inches tall, and your weapon is a thornlike sword, how can you hope to defeat invading Earthmen?

  * * *

  He was taller than the tallest by nearly an inch, because the pod that hatched him had hung on the Tree more than twenty days longer than the rest, kept from ripening by all the arts at the People’s command. The flat spike sheathed
in his left thigh was, like the rest of him, abnormally large: but it was because he represented their last defense that they gave him the name, if a thought-sign can be called that, of “Big Sword.”

  He was a leader from his birth, because among the People intelligence was strictly proportional to size. They had two kinds of knowledge: Tree-knowledge, which they possessed from the moment they were born; and Learned-knowledge, the slow accumulation of facts passed on from one generation to another with the perfect accuracy of transmitted thought, which again was shared by all alike. The Learned-knowledge of the People covered all the necessities that they had previously experienced: but now they were faced with a wholly new danger and they needed somebody to acquire the Learned-knowledge to deal with it. So they made use of the long-known arts that could delay ripening of the pods on the Tree. These were not used often, because neighboring pods were liable to be stunted by the growth of an extra-large one, but now there was the greatest possible need for a leader. The Big Folk, after two years of harmlessness, had suddenly revealed themselves as an acute danger, one that threatened the life of the People altogether.

  Tree-knowledge Big Sword had, of course, from the moment of his hatching. The Learned-knowledge of the People was passed on to him by a succession of them sitting beside him in the tree-tops while his body swelled and hardened and absorbed the light. He would not grow any larger: the People made use of the stored energy of sunlight for their activities, but the substance of their bodies came from the Tree. For three revolutions of the planet he lay and absorbed energy and information. Then he knew all that they could pass on to him, and was ready to begin.

  A week later he was sitting on the edge of a clearing in the forest, watching the Big Folk at their incomprehensible tasks. The People had studied them a little when they first appeared in the forest, and had made some attempt to get in touch with them, but without success. The Big Folk used thought all right, but chaotically: instead of an ordered succession of symbols there would come a rush of patterns and half-patterns, switching suddenly into another set altogether and then returning to the first, and at any moment the whole thing might be wiped out altogether. Those first students of the People, two generations ago, had thought that there was some connection between the disappearance of thought and the vibrating wind which the Big Folk would suddenly emit from a split in their heads. Big Sword was now certain that they were right, but the knowledge did not help him much. After the failure of their first attempts at communication the People, not being given to profitless curiosity, had left the Big Folk alone. But now a totally unexpected danger had come to light. One of the Big Folk, lumbering about the forest, had cut a branch off the Tree.

  When they first arrived the Big Folk had chopped down a number of trees—ordinary trees—completely and used them for various peculiar constructions in the middle of the clearing, but that was a long time ago and the People had long since ceased to worry about it. Two generations had passed since it happened. But the attack on the Tree itself had terrified them. They had no idea why it had been made and there was no guarantee that it would not happen again. Twelve guardians had been posted round the Tree ready to do anything possible with thought or physical force to stave off another such attack, but they were no match for the Folk. The only safety lay in making contact with the Big Folk and telling them why they must leave the Tree of the People alone.

  Big Sword had been watching them for two days now and his plan was almost ready. He had come to the conclusion that a large part of the difficulty lay in the fact that the Big People were hardly ever alone. They seemed to go about in groups of two or three and thought would jump from one to another at times in a confusing way: then again you would get a group whose thoughts were all completely different and reached the observer in a chaotic pattern of interference. The thing to do, he had decided, was to isolate one of them. Obviously the one to tackle would be the most intelligent of the group, the leader, and it was clear which one filled that position: he stood out among his companions as plainly as Big Sword. There were one or two factors to be considered further, but that evening, Big Sword had decided, he would be ready to act.

  Meanwhile the Second Lambdan Exploratory Party had troubles of their own. Mostly these were the professional bothers that always accompany scientific expeditions; damaged equipment, interesting sidelines for which neither equipment nor workers happened to be available, not enough hours in the day. Apart from that there was the constant nag of the gravitation, twenty per cent higher than that of Earth, and the effect, depressing until you got used to it, of the monochromatic scenery, laid out in darker and lighter shades of black and gray. Only the red soil and red rocks varied that monotony, with an effect which to Terrestrial eyes was somewhat sinister. Nevertheless, the Expedition were having fewer troubles than they expected. Lambda, apparently, was a thoroughly safe planet. Whatever those gray-and-black jungles might look like, it appeared that they had nothing harmful in them.

  At thirty light-years away from Earth most personal troubles had got left behind. John James Jordan, however, the leader of the party, had brought his with him. His most urgent responsibility was in the next cabin, in bed and, it was to be hoped, asleep.

  There was no doubt about it, a man who made his career in space had no business to get married. Some men, of course, could take their wives with them: there were three married couples on the expedition, though they were with the first party at base on the coast. But for a spaceman to marry a woman and leave her at home didn’t make sense.

  He wondered, now, what he had thought he was doing. Marriage had been a part of that hectic interval between his first expedition and his second, when he had arrived home to find that space exploration was News and everybody wanted to know him. He had been just slightly homesick, that first time. The idea of having somebody to come back to had been attractive.

  The actual coming back, three years later, had not been so good. He had had time to realize that he scarcely knew Cora. Most of their married life seemed to have been spent at parties: he would arrive late, after working overtime, and find Cora already in the thick of it. He was going to have more responsibility preparing for the third expedition: he was going to have to spend most of his time on it. He wondered how Cora was going to take it. She had never complained when he wasn’t there, during the brief period of their married life: but somehow what he remembered wasn’t reassuring.

  Just the same, it was a shock to find that she had divorced him a year after his departure—one of the first of the so-called “space divorces.” It was a worse shock, though, to find that he now had a two-year-old son.

  The rule in a space divorce was that the divorced man had the right to claim custody of his children, providing that he could make adequate arrangements for them during his absence. That would have meant sending Ricky to some all-year-round school. There was no sense to that. Cora’s new husband was fond of him. Jordan agreed to leave Ricky with his mother. He even agreed, three years later on his next leave, not to see Ricky—Cora said that someone had told the little boy that her husband was not his real father and contact with somebody else claiming that position was likely to upset him.

  Once or twice during his Earth-leaves—usually so crammed with duties that they made full-time exploration look like a holiday—Jordan got news of Cora. Apparently she was a rising star in the social world. He realized gradually, that she had married him because for a brief time he had been News, and could take her where she wanted to be. He was vaguely relieved that she had got something out of their marriage: it was nice that somebody did. He was prepared to grant her doings the respect due to the incomprehensible. Nevertheless he was worried, for a moment, when he heard that she had been divorced yet again and remarried—to a prominent industrialist this time. He wondered how Ricky had taken it.

  His first actual contact with Cora in about seven years came in the form of a request from her lawyer that he should put his signature to an application for entrance to
a school. Merely a formality. The insistence on that point roused his suspicions and he made some inquiries about the school in question.

  Half an hour after getting answers he had found Cora’s present address, booked a passage on the Trans-equatorial Flight and canceled his engagements for the next twenty-four hours.

  He was just in time to get aboard the flier. He had taken a bundle of urgent papers with him and he had three hours of flight in which to study them, but he hardly tried to do so. His conscience felt like a Lothomian cactus-bird trying to break out of the egg.

  Why on Earth, why in Space, why in the Universe hadn’t he taken some sort of care of his son?

  He had never visited Antarctica City before and he found it depressing. With great ingenuity somebody had excavated a building-space in the eternal ice and filled it with a city which was an exact copy of all the other cities. He wondered why anybody had thought it worthwhile.

  Cora’s house seemed less a house than an animated set for a stereo on The Life of the Wealthy Classes. It had been decorated in the very latest style—he recognized one of two motifs which had been suggested by the finds of the First Lambdan Expedition, mingled with the usual transparent furniture and electrified drapes. He was contemplating a curious decorative motif, composed of a hooked object which he recognized vaguely as some primitive agricultural implement and what looked like a pileman’s drudge—but of course that particular mallet-shape had passed through innumerable uses—when Cora came in.

  Her welcome was technically perfect: it combined a warm greeting with just a faint suggestion that it was still open to her to have him thrown out by the mech-man if it seemed like a good idea. He decided to get the business over as soon as possible.

  ‘What’s the matter with Ricky, Cora? Why do you want to get rid of him?”

  Cora’s sparkle-crusted brows rose delicately.

  “Why, Threejay, what a thing to say.”