_He was walking in the pine grove, with the resinous smell of the
trees in his nostrils. Once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far
away from Earth._ Forget about that, _a voice said in his mind, but
he would never forget_.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Everything in the old house seemed just the same as it had been before
he went to space.
It was incredible, thought Hugh Kellard, standing in the front hall and
looking around the silent, sunlit rooms, how little it had changed. The
life was gone out of it now, all the people and voices and the comings
and goings when his grandfather still lived and he had visited here.
But that had been long ago, and he was amazed that so much remained
still untouched.
"Like travelling into the past," thought Kellard, "to come back to this
part of Earth."
He was tired, in body and mind and nerve, and he stood for a while,
just staring. The agent who cared for the old place had let him
in and gone away, and there was not a sound in the house. He walked
into the living-room where his grandfather's desk still stood beneath
a window, and looked out. The window faced northward, along the
California coastal cliffs that run north along Morro Bay to Big
Sur. The Pacific foamed and surged against the huge broken stones
beneath the cliffs, and the hills, somber now with a tinge of autumn,
shouldered massively up toward the east from the cliff road. It all
looked as lonely as ever, no other houses in sight but this gray,
weatherbeaten house that had faced the sea-wind and the sea-fog for
over a hundred years.
Kellard walked back along the hall. On its walls still hung the
ornately framed family photographs which his grandfather had stubbornly
kept in place. His great-grandfather, and his great-aunt something, and
all the rest of them, on back into the shadows. They were all there,
they had not been touched, nothing in the house had been touched, just
as his grandfather's will had enjoined. Keep the old house, he had
said. Some of the family will be back some day.
The old man had been right, he thought. One of the family had come back
at last, one who had roamed farther than almost anybody on Earth.
"But that's all done with," he told himself. "Here I am, and here I
stay. I'm through with space."
* * * * *
He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and
air. The furniture was faded and old-fashioned, but the place was not
dusty, the agent had seen that it was kept in shape. Kellard picked one
of the big upstairs bedrooms for himself, and brought in the blankets
and cartons and luggage from the car. He went into the utility room and
turned on the power-unit, remembering as he did so how his grandfather
had disliked and distrusted the unit, how he had refused to have one
until the electric wires were all gone and there was no other way to
get power. He checked the stove and freezer, shoved his cartons of food
into the latter, and then looked around and wondered what to do next.
Standing in the silent house, he wondered suddenly if he had been
foolish to quit everything and come back to Earth and this old place?
No, he thought heavily. Mercury ended it for me. I made my decision and
that is that. Forget it.
He strode abruptly out of the house and started walking. And after a
little while the dark weight in his mind, the somber knowledge, faded
and receded in the new-found, old-remembered interest of the things
about him.
His way took him across the road, past the shabby barns and up sloping
pastures where once his grandfather had kept the fine horses he bred.
Then he was in among the pines, climbing more steeply, with the
resinous smell of the trees strong in his nostrils. That smell he had
never forgotten, and once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far away
from Earth--
_Forget all that, Kellard._
The trees took him in and he walked through a dapple of sun and
shadows. A deer slipped away through the pines ahead of him, and quail
burst up from almost under his feet. He remembered a grove of bigger
pines farther up the slope, and an old man and a boy walking up to
them. How long ago was that? He had been fifteen--and he was thirty-two
now. Seventeen years. Still, he thought he could find the place.
He found it. The big pines were still there, for people did not use
wood much any more. The rough dark giants stood at dignified intervals
from each other, and he sat down with his back against the massive
trunk of the biggest.
Funny, he thought. When I was a boy sitting here dreaming about the
future and what I was going to do, I never once imagined that some
things would stay much the same. The whole world would somehow be
miraculously transformed--but it wasn't. This tree was here when men
first reached the Moon, and Mars, and Venus and the rest, but it didn't
know about that, it didn't change because of it.
* * * * *
Kellard sat for a long time, still wrapped in a gray weariness, his
emotions in a numb trance. He sat listening to the distant, uneasy
murmur of the sea, until the sunset light shafting through the trees
dazzled his eyes, and then he got up and went back down to the house.
He heated food, ate it, and then went out to the porch in front of the
house and sat watching the sun sink toward the vast golden sheet of the
Pacific. He thought of the little dot close to the sun that he could
not see, the little world and the strange, terrible place upon it where
Morse and Binetti had died.
The telephone rang.
Kellard did not stir, and it rang and rang again.
Go ahead and ring your head off, he thought. You're not getting me
back. I told you. I've had it.
The ringing stopped. The sun sank and darkness came with the hosts of
wheeling stars, and there was no sound but the vast voices rolling in
from sea, as Kellard sat staring and drinking.
He finally got up, as the fog started coming in. He moved with gravity,
feeling much better. He went in and turned on the lights, and then
looked at the faces that stared from the long row of framed photographs.
He raised the bottle to them in a gesture of salutation.
"You see, Kellards, that your prodigal son--or great-grandson--has come
home again from space."
He gravely drank, and continued to stand looking along the faded faces.
"You were lucky--you know that? Back in your time, there were hopes,
and dreams, and man's road would go on forever, from triumph to triumph
everlasting. But that road was a blind alley, all the time, even if I'm
the only one who knows it."
The faces looked back at him, unchanging, but he read reproach in their
steady gaze, their lined features.
"I'm sorry," said Kellard. "You had your own troubles, I know. I
apologize, Kellards. I am very tired and a little drunk, and I am going
to bed."
* * * * *
The next morning he was making coffee when there came a banging of the
old-fashioned knocker on the front door. A certain tightness came into
Kellard's face. He had expected them to send some one.
He had not expected the man who stood at the door. He was not in Survey
uniform, although he was the highest brass there was. He was a big,
slow-moving man with a heavy face and blue eyes that seemed mild if you
didn't know him.
"Well," said Kellard. And after a moment, "Come on in."
Halfrich came in. He sat down and looked interestedly around at the old
room and furniture.
"Nice," he murmured. Then he looked at Kellard and said, "All right,
let's have it. Why did you quit?"
Kellard shrugged. "It was all in my letter of resignation. I'm getting
a bit old and tired for Survey, I--"
"Bull," said Halfrich. "It was something about that crack-up on
Sunside, wasn't it?"
Kellard said slowly, "Yes. The deaths of Binetti and Morse, and the
after-effects of that shock, made me feel I didn't have it any more."
Halfrich looked at him. "You've had crack-ups before. You've seen men
die. You've had almost as many years in Survey as I have, and you've
taken as many jolts. You're lying, Kellard."
Kellard got up, and walked a few steps and swung around again.
"So I'm lying. I want out, and what difference does it make why?"
"It makes a difference," Halfrich said grimly. "I remember from away
back at Academy, even though you were two years after me. You were the
space-craziest cadet there was. You spouted the glories of the conquest
of space until we were all sick of it. You haven't changed in all the
years in Survey--until now. I want to know what can change a man like
that."
Kellard said nothing. He went to the window and looked out at the long
rollers coming endlessly in and crashing against the rocks.
"What did you see on Sunside, Kellard?"
He turned around sharply at that.
"What do you mean? What would there be to see there, but hot rocks and
volcanoes and a cross-section of hell generally? It's all in my report."
Halfrich sat like a judge, and spoke like one pronouncing sentence.
"You saw something, you _met_ something there. You covered by tearing
out the film of the automatic sweep-camera. Whatever it had recorded,
you didn't want us to see, did you?"
Kellard came toward him and spoke angrily and rapidly. "Do you realize
that we flamed out and crashed there? A crash like that can do
damage. It killed Binetti and mortally injured Morse, and smashed the
sweep-camera."
Halfrich nodded. "That's what we thought, at first. But the
radar-sweep had an automatic recorder too. It was something new.
Binetti knew about it, as communications officer, but I guess he hadn't
told you, or you'd have smashed it too. Its record shows something."
* * * * *
A cold feeling came over Kellard. He had thought that he had covered
everything, but he had calculated from insufficient data.
He kept his nerve. A radar record was not like a photograph, they
couldn't prove much from that, they certainly couldn't guess the truth
from it. They _must_ not guess the truth.
He laughed mirthlessly. "A radar record made on Sunside isn't worth the
paper it's on. The storms of radiation there make radar practically
unreliable."
Halfrich was watching him keenly. "But not entirely. And over and above
the static and the fake bogies, the record shows quite clearly that you
went outside the ship after the crash, that you walked about a thousand
yards, and that you were approached by some things that register
vaguely but unmistakably."
He paused and then he asked, "Who--or what--did you meet there,
Kellard?"
Kellard was cold inside, but all the same he made a disgusted sound
that he hoped was convincing.
"Who would I meet on Sunside? Beautiful lightly-clad maidens? After
all, you know, it's only four hundred degrees Centigrade there, and
practically no atmosphere, and nothing much else but solar radiation
and hot rock and volcanoes. I tell you, the radar record is worthless."
Halfrich was studying him with that mild estimating look that Kellard
knew well, and didn't like at all. It was the look that came into
Halfrich's face when friendship didn't matter and the good of the
Survey did.
"You're still lying," he said. "You met or saw something there. And it
did something to you--something that made you resign. Something that's
taken all the life and eagerness out of you."
"Oh, hell, be reasonable!" said Kellard angrily. "You know no kind of
life can exist on Sunside. My mission was the second time even Survey
has landed there. Pavlik's mission, the first, didn't see anything.
Neither did I. Quit dreaming it up. Go back to Mojave and your job, and
leave me be."
* * * * *
Halfrich rose. "All right," he said. "I'll go back to the base. And
you're going with me."
"Oh, no," said Kellard. "I'm through, quit, resigned."
"Your resignation has not been accepted," Halfrich told him. "You're
still liable to Survey discipline. You'll obey orders just as you
always did, or you'll go up before a court-martial."
"So that's it," said Kellard.
Halfrich nodded. "That is it. I don't like to do this. You're an old
friend. But--"
"But the Survey comes first," Kellard said, between his teeth.
"The Survey," said Halfrich, "comes first. It has to. It's why we've
got stations on Venus and Mars and Ganymede, not to say the Moon. It's
why we'll someday be able to hit for deep space and the starworlds. And
when one of my best officers suddenly goes off the deep end and won't
say why, I'll damn well wring it out of him. Whatever you found on
Mercury doesn't belong to you, it belongs to us, and we'll have it."
Kellard looked at him and started to say something and didn't, and then
turned his back on Halfrich and looked out the window at the sea. In a
low voice he said,
"Let it be, John. I'm telling you now, you'll be sorry if you don't."
There was no answer to that at all, and the silence was his answer. He
turned back around.
"All right, you have a rope around my neck. I'll go back to base with
you. I'll tell you not one thing more than here."
"In which case," Halfrich said, "we'll go on out to Sunside, and
you'll go right along with us."
A rage born of desperation came to Kellard. He had tried to spare
people this--Halfrich, the Survey, the whole human race. But they would
not let it be so. Damn them, he thought, if they must do this, they
have it coming to them.
"All right," he said flatly. "I'll get my jacket. I take it that you
have a flier waiting."
* * * * *
The fast flier, less than an hour later, whizzed down over the gaunt
mountains and across the desert, and the glitter and splendor of Mojave
Base sprang up to meet them. The tall ships shone like silver, and
something about them, something about the feel of the place, made you
think that this bit of desert did not belong to Earth at all but was
part of space, a way-station, the first way-station of all, to the
stars.
That, thought Kellard, was what he had thought when he had first
come here, years ago. And it had not been just a youngster's passing
enthusiasm, it had deepened and strengthened through all the years of
work and danger--until Sunside. And oh God, he thought, why did I have
to go there, at that place, at that moment. I could have lived my whole
life and done my work, all of us could have, without ever dreaming the
truth.
He knew now that he had no choice. He must go back to Sunside with
them. For even if he told them the truth, they would not believe, they
would insist on going to see for themselves. He would keep silent, and
that was all he could do now.
* * * * *
Four days later a Y-90 experimental cruiser, outfitted for space
research and with full anti-heater equipment, took off from Mojave.
Kellard had kept silent. And still silent he sat in his recoil-harness
and took the jolts, and heard Halfrich grunting beside him, and
viciously hoped that that he was not liking it.
Halfrich had brought along a consulting biophysicist, a keen-faced
man of middle age named Morgenson, who did not look as though he was
enjoying the mission either. But the three-man crew of the little Y-90
were young men in their twenties. They spoke to Halfrich and to Kellard
as though they were heroes out of legend, for in the Survey twelve to
fifteen years of space-missions was an age.
It was only after they had gone a long way and a long time through the
sunwashed spaces that one of the three, Shay, the navigator, ventured
to put a question to Kellard.
"You were with the first mission to Ganymede, sir, weren't you?"