"What a cockeyed world," said Alaric Arkalion Sr. to his son. "You
certainly can't plan on anything, even if you do have more money than
you'll ever possibly need in a lifetime."
"Don't feel like that," said young Alaric. "I'm not in prison any
longer, am I?"
"No. But you're not free of the Nowhere Journey, either. There is an
unheralded special trip to Nowhere, two weeks from today, I have been
informed."
"Oh?"
"Yes, oh. I have also been informed that you will be on it. You didn't
escape after all, Alaric."
"Oh. Oh!"
"What bothers me most is that scoundrel Smith somehow managed to
escape. They haven't found him yet, I have also been informed. And
since my contract with him calls for ten million dollars 'for services
rendered,' I'll have to pay."
"But he didn't prevent me from--"
"I can't air this thing, Alaric! But listen, son: when you go where you
are going, you're liable to find another Alaric Arkalion, your double.
Of course, that would be Smith. If you can get him to cut his price in
half because of what has happened, I would be delighted. If you could
somehow manage to wring his neck, I would be even more delighted. Ten
million dollars--for nothing."
"I'm so excited," murmured Mrs. Draper. Stephanie watched her on one of
the new televiewers, recently installed in place of the telephone.
"What is it?"
"Our bill has been passed by a landslide majority in both houses of
Congress!"
"Ooo!" cried Stephanie.
"Not very coherent, my dear, but those are my sentiments exactly. In
two weeks there will be a Journey to Nowhere, a special one which will
include, among its passengers, a woman."
"But the study which had to be made--?"
"It's already been made. From what I gather, they can't take it very
far. Most of their conclusions had to be based on supposition. The
important thing, though, is this: a woman _will_ be sent. The way the
C.E.L. figures it, my dear, is that a woman falling in the twenty-one
to twenty-six age group should be chosen, a woman who meets all the
requirements placed upon the young men."
"Yes," said Stephanie. "Of course. And I was just thinking that I would
be--"
"Remember those chickens!" cautioned Mrs. Draper. "We already have one
hundred seventy-seven volunteers who'd claw each other to pieces for a
chance to go."
"Wrong," Stephanie said, smiling. "You now have one hundred
seventy-eight."
"Room for only one, my dear. Only one, you know."
"Then cross the others off your list. I'm already packing my bag."
* * * * *
When Temple regained consciousness, it was with the feeling that no
more than a split second of time had elapsed. So much had happened so
rapidly that, until now, he hadn't had time to consider it.
Arkalion had vanished.
Vanished--he could use no other word. He was there, standing in the
booth--and then he wasn't. Simple as that. Now you see it, now you
don't. And goodbye, Arkalion.
But goodbye Temple, too. For hadn't Temple entered the same booth,
waiting but a second until Arkalion activated the mechanism at the
other end? And certainly Temple wasn't in the booth now. He smiled at
the ridiculously simple logic of his thoughts. He stood in an open
field, the blades of grass rising to his knees, as much brilliant
purple as they were green. Waves of the grass, stirred like tide by
the gentle wind, and hills rolling off toward the horizon in whichever
direction he turned. Far away, the undulating hills lifted to a half
soft mauve sky. A somber red sun with twice Sol's apparent disc but
half its brightness hung mid-way between zenith and horizon completing
the picture of peaceful other-worldliness.
Wherever this was, it wasn't Earth--or Mars.
Nowhere?
Temple shrugged, started walking. He chose his direction at random,
crushing an easily discernible path behind him in the surprisingly
brittle grass. The warm sun baked his back comfortably, the
soft-stirring wind caressed his cheeks. Of Arkalion he found not a
trace.
Two hours later Temple reached the hills and started climbing their
gentle slopes. It was then that he saw the figure approaching on the
run. It took him fully half a minute to realize that the runner was not
human.
* * * * *
After months of weightless inactivity, things started to happen for
Sophia. The feeling of weight returned, but weight as she never had
felt it before. It was as if someone was sitting on every inch of her
body, crushing her down. It made her gasp, forced her eyes shut and,
although she could not see it, contorted her face horribly. She lost
consciousness, coming to some time later with a dreadful feeling of
loginess. Someone swam into her vision dimly, stung her arm briefly
with a needle. She slept.
She was on a table, stretched out, with lights glaring down at her. She
heard voices.
"The new system is far better than testing, comrade."
"Far more efficient, far more objective. Yes."
"The brain emits electromagnetic vibration. Strange, is it not, that no
one before ever imagined it could tell a story. A completely accurate
story two years of testing could not give us."
"In Russia we have gone far with the biological, psychological
sciences. The West flies high with physics. Give them Mars; bah, they
can have Mars."
"True, Comrade. The journey to Jupiter is greater, the time consumed
is longer, the cost, more expensive. But here on Jupiter we can do
something they cannot do on Mars."
"I know."
"We can make supermen. Supermen, comrade. A wedding of Nietzsche and
Marx."
"Careful. Those are dangerous thoughts."
"Merely an allusion, comrade. Merely a harmless allusion. But you
take an ordinary human being and train him on Jupiter, speeding his
time-sense and metabolic rate tremendously with certain endocrine
secretions so that one day is as a month to him. You take him and
subject him to big Jupiter's pull of gravity, more than twice
Earth's--and in three weeks you have, yes--you have a superman."
"The woman wakes."
"Shh. Do not frighten her."
Sophia stretched, every muscle in her body aching. Slowly, as in a
dream, she sat up. It required strength, the mere act of pulling her
torso upright!
"What have you done to me?" she cried, focusing her still-dim vision on
the two men.
"Nothing, comrade. Relax."
Sophia turned slowly on the table, got one long shapely leg draped over
its edge.
"Careful, comrade."
What were they warning her about? She merely wanted to get up and
stretch; perhaps then she would feel better. Her toe touched the floor,
she swung her other leg over, aware of but ignoring her nakedness.
"A good specimen."
"Oh, yes, comrade. So this time they send a woman among the others.
Well, we shall do our work. Look--see the way she is formed, so lithe,
loose-limbed, agile. See the toning of the muscles? Her beauty will
remain, comrade, but Jupiter shall make an amazon of her."
Sophia had both feet on the floor now. She was breathing hard, felt
suddenly sick to her stomach. Placing both her hands on the table edge,
she pushed off and staggered for two or three paces. She crumpled,
buckling first at the knees then the waist and fell in a writhing heap.
"Pick her up."
Hands under her arms, tugging. She came off the floor easily, dimly
aware that someone carried her hundred and thirty pounds effortlessly.
"Put me down!" she cried. "I want to try again. I am crippled,
crippled! You have crippled me...."
"Nothing of the sort, comrade. You are tired, weak, and Jupiter's
gravity field is still too strong for you. Little by little, though,
your muscles will strengthen to Jupiter's demands. Gravity will keep
them from bulging, expanding; but every muscle fibre in you will have
twice, three times its original strength. Are you excited?"
"I am tired and sick. I want to sleep. What is Jupiter?"
"Jupiter is a planet circling the sun at--never mind, comrade. You have
much to learn, but you can assimilate it with much less trouble in your
sleep. Go ahead, sleep."
Sophia retched, was sick. It had been years since she cried. But
naked, afraid, bewildered, she cried herself to sleep.
Things happened while she slept, many things. Certain endocrine
extracts accelerated her metabolism astonishingly. Within half an hour
her heart was pumping blood through her body two hundred beats per
minute. An hour later it reached its full rate, almost one thousand
contractions every sixty seconds. All her other metabolic functions
increased accordingly, and Sophia slept deeply for a week of subjective
time--in hours. The same machine which had gleaned everything from
her mind far more accurately than a battery of tests, a refinement of
the electro-encephalogram, was now played in reverse, giving back to
Sophia everything it had taken plus electrospool after electrospool of
science, mathematics, logic, economics, history (Marxian, these last
two), languages (including English), semantics and certain specialized
knowledge she would need later on the Stalintrek.
Still sleeping, Sophia was bathed in a warm whirlpool of soothing
liquid; rubbed, massaged, her muscle-toning begun while she rested and
regained her strength. Three hours later, objective time, she awoke
with a headache and with more thoughts spinning around madly inside
her brain than she ever knew existed. Gingerly, she tried standing
again, lifting herself nude and dripping wet from a tub of steaming
amber stuff. She stood, stretched, permitted her fright to vanish
with a quick wave of vertigo which engulfed her. She had been fed
intravenously, but a tremendous hunger possessed her. Before eating,
however, she was to find herself in a gymnasium, the air close and
stifling. She was massaged again, told to do certain exercises which
seemed simple but which she found extremely difficult, forced to run
until she thought she would collapse, with her legs, dragging like lead.
She understood, now. Somehow she knew she was on Jupiter, the fifth
and largest planet, where the force of gravity is so much greater than
on Earth that it is an effort even to walk. She also knew that her
metabolic rate had been accelerated beyond all comprehension and that
in a comparatively short time--objective time--she would have thrice
her original strength. All this she knew without knowing how she knew,
and that was the most staggering fact of all. She did what her curt
instructors bid, then dragged her aching muscles and her headache into
a dining room where tired, forlorn-looking men sat around eating. Well
the food at least was good. Sophia attacked it ravenously.
* * * * *
It did not take Temple long to realize that the creature running
downhill at him, leaving a crushed and broken wake in the purple and
green grass, was not human. At first Temple toyed with the idea of a
man on horseback, for the creature ran on four limbs and had two left
over as arms. Temple gaped.
The whole thing was one piece!
Centaur?
Hardly. Too small, for one thing. No bigger than a man, despite the
three pairs of limbs. And then Temple had time to gape no longer, for
the creature, whatever it was, flashed past him at what he now had to
consider a gallop.
More followed. Different. Temple stared and stared. One could have been
a great, sentient hoop, rolling downhill and gathering momentum. If he
carried the wheel analogy further, a huge eye stared at him from where
the hub would have been. Something else followed with kangaroo leaps.
One thick-thewed leg propelled it in tremendous, fifteen-foot strides
while its small, flapper-like arms beat the air prodigiously.
Legions of creatures. All fantastically different. _I'm going crazy_,
Temple thought, then said it aloud. "I'm going crazy."
Theorizing thus, he heard a whir overhead, whirled, looked up.
Something was poised a dozen feet off the ground, a large, box-like
object seven or eight feet across, rotors spinning above it. That, at
least, he could understand. A helicopter.
"I'm lowering a ladder, Kit. Swing aboard."
Arkalion's voice.
Stunned enough to accept anything he saw, Temple waited for the rope
ladder to drop, grasped its end, climbed. He swung his legs over a
sill, found himself in a neat little cabin with Arkalion, who hauled
the ladder in and did something to the controls. They sped away.
Temple had one quick moment of lucid thought before everything which
had happened in the last few moments shoved logic aside. What he had
observed looked for all the world like a foot-race.
"Where the hell _are_ we?" Temple demanded breathlessly.
Arkalion smiled. "Where do you think? Journey's end. Welcome to
Nowhere, Kit. Welcome to the place where all your questions can be
answered because there's no going back. Sorry I set you down in that
field by mistake, incidentally. Those things sometimes happen."
"Can I just throw the questions at you?"
"If you wish. It isn't really necessary, for you will be indoctrinated
when we get you over to Earth city where you belong."
"What do you mean, there's no going back? I thought they had a rotation
system which for one reason or another wasn't practical at the moment.
That doesn't sound like no going back, ever."
Arkalion grunted, shrugged. "Have it your way. I _know_."
"Sorry. Shoot."
"Just how far do you think you have come?"
"Search me. Some other star system, maybe?"
"Maybe. Clean across the galaxy, Kit."
Temple whistled softly. "It isn't something you can grasp just by
hearing it. Across the galaxy...."
"That isn't too important just now. How long did you think the journey
took?"
Temple nodded eagerly. "That's what gets me. It was amazing, Alaric.
Really amazing. The whole trip couldn't have taken more than a moment
or two. I don't get it. Did we slip out of normal space into some
other--uh, continuum, and speed across the length of the galaxy like
that?"
"The answer to your questions is yes. But your statement is way off.
The journey did not take seconds, Kit."
"No? Instantaneous?"
"Far more than seconds. To reach here from Earth you traveled five
thousand years."
"What?"
"More correctly, it was five thousand years ago that you left Mars.
You would need a time machine to return, and there is no such thing.
The Earth you know is the length of the galaxy and five thousand years
behind you."