Third warning. Silence. A drawing-in, a throb, a quiver, and then a
leap....
"Trehearne? Trehearne, are you still there?"
"Yes--" _Crushed, weighted, stupefied, but it isn't so bad, it isn't
nearly so bad, not much worse than pulling out of a dive. And she's
going up, oh God she's going up!_
The air-shriek died. The soundlessness of space was wrapped around the
hull outside, and within there was the soft and mighty beating of that
pulse that Trehearne remembered, going faster, going higher. A sigh
escaped him, and his body relaxed. He smiled. He was where he wanted to
be.
The long haul out to Hercules was uneventful, and the others found it
dull. But for Trehearne, every minute of it was charged with magic. He
was called up once before the skipper, who looked hard at him and said,
"Joris told me to see that you worked. There's more to being a starman
than lounging around in your bunk, and you'll be wanting to take
examinations for some kind of a rating sooner or later. Here, study
these. And in your spare time, learn all you can about the ship."
"These" proved to be texts on the Vardda Trade Laws, manuals on the
rules and regulations governing relations with other races, and a
history in many microvolumes of the trans-galactic expansion of the
Vardda race in its thousand years of existence. He knew that Joris must
have supplied the books and he was glad to get them. The trade codes,
like laws anywhere, were pretty dull stuff and interesting only because
of the fantastically broad field they dealt with. The manuals were
better, because they were full of references to alien and frequently
non-human races, with fascinating glimpses, into the damndest customs
and psychologies Trehearne had ever heard of. But the history held him
spellbound.
It began with a foreword on what the Vardda had been like in the
millenniums before Orthis, when they were simply the people of Llyrdis.
It seemed to Trehearne that they were not too different from the people
of Earth. They had had their ages of barbarism and change and growth,
and their homogeneity had not been achieved without pain. However, they
had achieved it, and at an earlier period in their world-culture than
that in which his native planet now was. He thought perhaps the task
had been easier for the Llyrdians because there were fewer geographic
barriers to the free mingling of peoples in their nomadic phase.
The oceans were land-locked and the mountain ranges were broken by
traversable passes. No primitive tribe had grown to statehood in even
partial isolation, and the cultural streams had flowed strongly in
all directions, losing their narrow intensity and broadening out into
what eventually became one universal lake. It made for dulness in the
world picture, perhaps, because of a sameness in dress and language and
custom, but it was steady, and it led to a conception of the individual
as a world-citizen instead of a nationalist, which cut down rapidly
on wars. Scientific progress seemed to have gone on with only normal
hitches, without any Dark Ages to set it back, and at a time when the
people of Earth were sunk in their blackest pit of ignorance since the
Stone Age, Llyrdis had atomic power, an established commerce with her
neighbor planets, and was building and launching the first starship,
which brought the history to its initial chapter, and Orthis.
"_It is difficult for us now to realize what that first epic flight of
man between the suns was like._..."
Not as it was now, swift and easy, far outrunning the velocity of
light. Science had the techniques even then to build and power the fast
ships, but they were useless. Man could not survive the ultra-speeds.
They had to go as they went between the planets, slowly. Four
generations lived and died within the close confines of that first
feeble forerunner of the Vardda fleets, men and women dedicated in
themselves and their children to the conquest of the greatest barrier
humanity had ever crossed. And they crossed it. Slowly, painfully,
exposed to all the dangers of unknown radiations and unexplored,
uncharted wilderness in its most ultimate sense, exposed to the most
terrible loneliness and isolation that living beings had ever endured,
they toiled their way to a landing on the world of another star and
then--and this, to Trehearne, seemed the most incredible bravery of
all--they took off again for Llyrdis, which to this intermediate
generation was only a name and a tradition, and which they knew they
would never live to see. Orthis was born during this return voyage,
twenty-two years out from the planet he was taught to regard as home,
though he had no knowledge of planets, nor of any life except that of
the ship that moved apparently forever through the night of deep space.
His ears must have been attuned only to that outer silence, his sight
to the darkness and the far-off stars. To wind and rain, to sunlight
and warm grass, to beasts and birds and the faces of many people, he
was a stranger.
And a stranger he remained. "He could not endure to be planet-bound,
after living all his life in space. He built his laboratory ship and
worked in it, cruising where he wished and almost alone, for another
fifteen years. Then, when he was thirty-seven, he announced his
discovery--the birth of Galactic Man, the inception of the Vardda.
"Orthis refused to give to anyone the whole secret of his mutational
process, believing that it was too dangerous in inexpert hands. He
himself constructed the apparatus and used it, sowing with his own
hands the seed of the Vardda race that would flower in the next
generation. And at that time, he was revered by the people of Llyrdis
almost as a demigod. But within the next year the troubles arose that
almost split the Llyrdian State, and brought Orthis eventually into
disgrace. He had given his discovery first to his own people, and
now...."
Trehearne read with the most intense interest, trying to pry between
the stiff factual lines for whatever force it was that made men
like Edri fly in the face of their own best interests. Orthis had
no intention of limiting the Vardda race to his own world. He would
share his mutational process with the other planets of Aldebaran, and
eventually with the star-worlds the original expedition had visited,
and which were highly civilized. He wished them all to share in the
great new future of star-travel--they and all races that might be
discovered in the galaxy with sufficiently high culture-levels to be
worthy of it. But when this became known to the embryo Starmen it
started a most violent reaction. All sorts of objections were raised,
ranging from the selfish but, to Trehearne, quite sensible argument
that the Llyrdians had the best right to the mutation, having taken all
the chances and done all the work, and therefore they should keep it,
at least for a while, to the solemn threat of war on a galactic scale.
"Remember," said the President of the Council, "how we helped the more
backward worlds of our own solar system to achieve interplanetary
flight, and how they repaid us. Remember the wars we have already
fought! Let us take thought before we scatter this great power
broadcast among the stars."
They took thought, and in spite of the impassioned arguments of Orthis
and his followers they would not be hurried into a decision. The
situation became so tense that Orthis' laboratory ship was sealed and
impounded, and Orthis himself placed under virtual arrest. The battle
in the Council Hall dragged on for years, and from the accounts it
seemed to Trehearne that those fathers of the Vardda-to-be had not
acted entirely from a selfish desire to hang on to a good thing. They
were faced with a tremendous problem for which there was no precedent,
nothing to go on but their own thoughts and feelings. Some of the
Council members--the Llyrdian Congressmen--were obviously motivated
by sheer hard-headed self-interest. But there were others who tried
honestly to be just, and justice to their own people came first. They
were afraid to share the mutation, and the control of it, with anyone.
They were afraid to throw open all the unknown doors of space onto
Aldebaran. The Orthists were defeated.
Then came the end, the dramatic fireworks. The Orthist party arranged
an escape for their leader. They helped him get his ship away. They
saw him off into the dark void beyond the sky, and they thought that
after all he would be victorious. But by this time the new Vardda race
had begun to flourish, and some of them were old enough, just barely,
to fly. They went out after Orthis, believing intensely in their own
right, as he believed in his. Orthis himself was undoubtedly able to
endure ultra-speeds, for it was a long and bitter chase. The new young
Vardda partially disabled his ship, but even so he managed to elude
them. There was no ultra-wave radar or radio in those days, and after
all, the old man had cut his teeth on the stars. They lost him, and
that was the end, of Orthis and his ship--all except the message in the
drifting life-skiff that was picked up more than a century later. And
Trehearne thought, "Whether he was right or not, Orthis was the hell
and all of a man!"
He could understand why Orthis had hung on stubbornly all these
centuries. Certainly a more noble dream had never been dreamed. For
himself, though, he was rather glad it was only a dream. He liked being
a Vardda. He liked things the way they were. It had worked pretty well
for everybody, and looking back, he could think of an awful lot of
people he would have hated to see entrusted with the power to get at
their neighbors on other stars. Orthis, that solitary, space-born man,
had seen only the ideal, the abstraction. The Council had extrapolated
a reality.
He did not discuss the question with anybody. That night in the
pleasure-garden had impressed upon him the fact that the whole subject
was unhealthy, and especially for him. The thought of Kerrel arose
sometimes like a dark shadow in his mind, and linked with it was a
gnawing anxiety about Edri, whom he had not seen before he left--not
for any reasons of caution, which he would have been ashamed of, but
because Edri had gone away somewhere and was not to be reached. He had
sent Trehearne a brief message wishing him luck, and that was all.
About Shairn he thought as little as possible. He didn't want to know
what she was doing. He preferred to remember the two weeks he had spent
at the Silver Tower as ending against a blank wall.
He read on in the thundering saga of Vardda exploration, opening the
starways. He studied his laws and codes. And he studied the ship.
His bunkmates were more than willing to show off their knowledge to
a greenhorn, particularly one older than themselves. Perri explained
to him the inner workings of the purring metal giants that drove the
ships--adaptations of the cosmotron for use as a generator, with
centrifuges keyed to ultra-speeds that created the fifth-order
rays. Rohan let him punch keys on the computers that did astral
mathematics--he was not much interested in those--and Yann taught
him how to read the radar screens that functioned not by slow
electro-magnetic waves but by rays akin to those that powered the ship,
moving far faster than light. He listened in Communications to Vardda
ships talking across the galaxy in thin ghostly converse by those same
super-swift rays. The Skipper unbent briefly and allowed him--and this
was like realizing an impossible dream--to hold the controls of the
_Saarga_ in his hands.
Yann did a good bit of tolerant jeering. "You're just starting out, and
it's still fun. Wait till you're as old in the game as I am." He was
twenty-eight. "I've made nine voyages into the Cluster, and I'm tired
of it. All I want is my own ship, which I will let somebody else fly
while I sit comfortably on Llyrdis and catch up on my wine and women."
"Have you any chance of getting one?" asked Trehearne.
"This trip will do it."
Rohan let out a loud laugh. "Hark at him! Don't let him kid you,
Trehearne. We do well, but not that well."