said, getting up to lead the way from the dining-room. "This
transmission you're going to hear doesn't have anything to do with the
ordinary 21.12-centimeter neutral-hydrogen radiation; but of course you
realize that our big paraboloid bowls can catch anything from hydrogen
hiss to low-flying bats. Remember the Christmas celebration at New
Caanan that was telecast to earth a couple years back? That show was
caught by the six-hundred-foot receiver at Green Bank, West Virginia,
and rebroadcast by C.B.S."
* * * * *
We entered the Big Tank's common room, where a few of our colleagues
sat reading or writing notes for tomorrow's classes--talking; playing
chess or bridge; or sitting behind the closed glass doors of the TV
alcove watching the picture through stereo spectacles. We entered the
alcove at the other end of the room, where the record-player and music
library were, and closed the door.
Dorsey took a three-inch spool of magnetic thread from his shirt
pocket and fit it to the playback head of the machine.
"I'm interested in your uninstructed reaction, John," he said. "So
don't ask me any questions till you've heard the whole sequence."
"Spin it, professor," I said.
The Australian thread had a noisy background, sounding like
a dozen rashers of bacon tossed into a too-hot skillet.
Over this hissing, the code began to sound. "DIT ... DIT ...
DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT ...
DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT...."
I dutifully entered my count of each burst of DIT's in my pocket
notebook. The sequence went: 1, 1; 2, 4; 3, 9; 4, 16; 5, 25; 6, 36;
then 5, 2, 49; 8, 64. There the count stopped climbing and commenced
again with the pair of ones, to repeat the whole set again.
Dorsey cut off the machine. "I've got four hours of the same thing
on this thread," he said. "Want to hear it all, or have you got it
already?"
"It's obvious, up to a point," I asked. "It's a table of the first
eight natural integers and their squares, except for the number seven,
which for some reason is split in two."
"It took me quite a while to recognize what happened to that seven,"
Dorsey said. "Listen to it again." He spooled the thread back and
I listened again to the fractured seven: "DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ...
DIT-DIT." Then again the forty-nine clicks, seven-squared. Dorsey
switched off the player.
"Let's have the distillate of your cerebrations now, Brother Bogardus,"
he said, dropping into the deep, red-leather easy chair beside the
thread-player.
"It's syncopation, Brother Dorsey," I said.
"I'd never have given my own modest observations so high-flown a
title," Dorsey said. "I'd simply have called it, country boy at heart
that I am, 'Shave-and-a-Haircut, two-bits!'"
"So it is," I said. "Now we've deciphered that broadcast, and listened
to the singing commercial. But I'm still puzzled, Bud. We don't have
the sponsor's name and address; and I'm not at all sure I caught the
name of his product. What's he advertising?"
"His presence," Dorsey said. "I interpret the message as a simple CQ."
"Seek you?" I asked.
"Yes. Radio-ham code for, I'm lonely--will somebody please talk to me?'"
* * * * *
"I'll accept that interpretation only till I can think of one even more
fantastic," I said.
"O.K., John," Dorsey said. "Getting the address of the station was a
simple exercise, thanks to my Digger confreres in Adelaide and the
men at Harvard's South African radio observatory. We first heard the
message two years ago. It's still being broadcast, unchanged. The fist
on the key that sent out our arithmetic message belongs to someone in
the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri."
"Hot damn!" I said. "But why didn't I know about this? I read _Time_,
and all. Why wasn't this headlined?"
"Because it's guesswork," Dorsey explained. "This may be the result of
some cosmic coincidence as unrelated to intelligent planning as Bode's
Law."
"You'll have to explain that to this groundsman," I said.
"Bode's law, too, looks like an intelligently devised code of some
sort," Dorsey said. "Take the series: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192. Add
4 to each number, and divide by ten. The result will be, when you take
the asteroid belt into consideration and fudge a little, very nearly
the proportional distance from the sun of the first seven planets.
Accident, or evidence of intelligent planning? Turned out there are
excellent physical reasons for this relationship, reasons old Johann
Elert Bode couldn't possibly have guessed. Things like this make
astronomers leary of teleology. Make them avoid the splendid guess."
"Go ahead, make a splendid guess," I said. "I won't report you to the
Astronomers Union."
"Sure," Dorsey said. "Alpha Centauri, as the U. Cal's five-meter Luna
'scope demonstrated several years ago, has a system of at least three
planets. We don't know much about those planets except their time of
revolution."
"And that one of them has a citizen clever enough to calculate natural
squares and build a radio transmitter...."
"... one hell of a transmitter!" Dorsey said.
"... and whistle, 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,'" I went on; "which
musical interlude argues for a certain degree of conviviality on the
part of our Centaurian. This thing of his message, though. Do you think
he was just looking for other hams to talk with?"
* * * * *
"Then he's awfully patient, sending out the same 'CQ' for two solid
years," Dorsey said. "It's hardly practical to communicate between
stars, John. Broadcasting from here to Alpha C. and back, it would take
more than nine years just to ask how's the wife and kids.
"The way it looks to me, our friend out there got the duty of cutting
an educational recording to be broadcast automatically to the rest of
the galaxy. Kind of a lighthouse, to help his race get in touch with
any relatives it might have. That same recording has been played over
and over again ever since, sending To Whom It Might Concern its dual
message. Simple math--and the most persistent rhythmical cliche known
to man."
"What's being done about it?" I asked.
"We've answered," Dorsey said. "A big radio noise on the moon is
broadcasting the same message, minus the syncopation, and adding the
next two terms; all this beamed toward Alpha Centauri. And two years
ago, the Defense Department cut other programs to the bone to start
construction of _Orion Zeta_, the sixth of the big nuclear-pulse ships.
She's up in von Weizsäcker Crater on the back of the moon now, John,
nearly finished. She's not meant to call at solar-system ports."
"The government thinks, and you think, that our operator four and a
half light-years from here was human," I said.
"I can't speak for the government. But that's what I think. Isn't it
human to toss notes out to sea in bottles? What's more human than
dropping a joke into an arithmetical table?"
"All we've got to do to prove your splendid guess is to highjack a
germ-free spaceship," I said. "You and me and any of the other Lapins
who feel as we do. We'll go shake the hand--or other prehensile member,
if he's not human after all--of our Centaurian thread-jockey. What's
to keep our feet in the mud, when our heads are 'way the hell out in a
southern constellation?"
"I gather, Herr Doktor, that you jest," Dorsey said. "If you were
serious, I'd point out one minor flaw in your blueprint for adventure.
It would take our little band of pirates one hundred twenty-five years
to get to Alpha Centauri, after we'd stolen the ship. That's with the
gas-pedal to the floor."
"I was joking," I said. "I was pretending to be the hero of one of
those TV space-operas we used to watch.... But if I were serious, I
don't think a mere century and a quarter would faze me. We couldn't
reach our goal in person, Bud; but we could send our children's
children. All we'd need to make the trip, if I were serious about my
suggestion, would be a few more volunteers. A proper proportion of
those volunteers had best be philoprogenitive females."
* * * * *
"Do you think the BICUSPID brass will be happy to see its expensive
guinea-pigs taking off into space?" Dorsey asked. "Since '29, John,
there's been eighty million bucks poured into gnotobiotics here at
Central University. We're the payoff. We can hardly expect Dr. McQueen
to stand on the launching-pad, tossing roses and shouting Bon Voyage as
we blast off forever."
"I think they could be persuaded to be, if not enthusiastic, at least
resigned to our departure," I said.
"It does prisoners good to plot escape-plans, even when they're as
obviously fantastic as this one," Dorsey said. "Go on, John."
"As you say, our purpose in this adventure would be to escape," I said.
"There's no place on earth that can take us, so we're forced to escape
into space. We'll have to talk this up around the Big Tank to see
how many want to break out with us. What the sex-distribution of the
volunteers is, whether we've got the right range of specialists to man
a spaceship. Right, Bud?"
"It's your dream," Dorsey said.
"O.K. Immermann Man appears to have been germ-free," I said. "Perhaps
his culture had been gnotobiotic for so long that they'd forgotten
the existence of micro-organisms. Landing on other planets, they'd
not rediscover the danger of infectious disease till it was too late.
Suddenly they'd start falling, dying of illnesses as mysterious to
them as the plague was to men of the Renaissance. This may have been
the manner in which the original owner of the Immermann skull died, on
Mars. We have a reasonable suspicion that there was germ-free human
life in our corner of the galaxy twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps,
as you suggested, these visitors were members of an exploration party.
From Alpha Centauri? Is our ham who hammered out the table-of-squares a
member of that gnotobiotic race? Is he our brother in purity?"
"Go on, Johnny," Dorsey said. "You ain't even winded, yet."
"The _Orion Zeta_ is being built for deep space," I went on. "Some
group from earth is certain to set out in her on the four-generation
hop to Alpha Centauri. Would it be morally right to allow this group
of ambassadors to be made up of 'normal,' contaminated humans? To
carry to a possibly defenceless population a mixed bag of goodies like
_Micrococcus ureae_, _Bacillus vulgaris_, _Staphylococcus aureus_,
_Mycobacterium tuberculosis_--a whole spectrum of benign and malignant
bacteria? Remember, Bud, bugs that are benign or only mildly pernicious
on earth might prove to be killers away from home."
"Lots of maybes," Dorsey said. "Lots of perhapses."
* * * * *
"I've got one more shaft in the quiver," I said. "This one's got a
poisoned point, and it carries the names of our keepers. It's dirty,
Bud. It's hardly fair to Dr. McQueen to use such blackmail."
"Blackmail sounds like just what we need," Dorsey said.
"O.K. Thirty of us were born into the Big Tank," I said. "One has
already died as a result of his mental state, caused by imprisonment.
Another is certain to die within the next few days. Had they been
entirely sane, Mike Bohrman and Mary deWitte wouldn't have shed their
sterility-suits outside the Tank. Without purpose to their lives, they
cracked up.
"Two of us dead in the first twenty-six years of the human studies
at BICUSPID," I went on. "Two, out of an original thirty. An
attrition-rate of six and seven-tenths percent. How many more Lapins
will wander out to commit innocent suicide in the snow, their minds
messed up by the frustration and hopelessness of the guinea-pig way
of life? How many more of us will escape from the Big Tank into the
morgue? The _Orion Zeta_ could be our salvation, Bud. It could give us
the sort of purpose human beings must have in order to live."
Dorsey shook his head. "The Defense Department set up its young
Clydeside in von Weizsäcker Crater just to build, test, and launch one
ship: the _Zeta_. Two years of round-the-chronometer work have been
poured into her," he said. "She's cost four billion dollars so far,
Johnny; and they haven't bought the living-room furniture yet. I hardly
think the generals will volunteer the result of all this effort to
serve as psychotherapy for twenty-eight neurotic Hoosiers."
"You miss the point, Bud," I said. "We Lapins were born to crew
the _Zeta_. Where else could you find a crew that's already spent
twenty-odd years or so inside a box, living together in close quarters,
being conditioned against claustrophobia? This Big Tank of ours could
be a grounded spaceship, Bud! It's airtight, armored against outside
dangers, even has the formaldehyde sump to serve us for airlock.
What's a sterility-suit, anyway, but a special breed of space suit?
Could you find a better crew than us twenty-eight, skilled in two dozen
professions, young, sound of wind and limb, and willing as hell to
take on the job? None of whom will ever have appendicitis, halitosis,
toothache, barber's itch, or athlete's foot? Any one of whom can, in
case of accident, first-aid his wounds with a spit-damp handkerchief,
and heal wholesome? Man, we're what those generals have been dreaming
of! Once we've been trained to aim that big ship and kick her off
the back of the moon, we'll be the finest extra-solar crew that ever
blasted free of the system!"
"One question," Dorsey said. "Where do I sign Ship's Articles?"
* * * * *
Dr. McQueen was in Chicago for three days before he found Mary Lofting,
née deWitte. She had wakened that morning suffering from a headache,
a stiff neck, and four degrees of fever. Her husband had called an
ambulance to take her to Michael Reese Hospital. There, just before
she'd lost consciousness, Mary had asked a nurse to call BICUSPID. The
C.U. authorities had in turn called Dr. McQueen in Chicago.
She came home on a stretcher, a bottle of fructose solution dripping
into her veins. Mary had already been loaded with a double-barreled
shotgun-blast of every antibiotic she could safely take. Dr. McQueen
rode back to the University in the ambulance with her, and with her
husband. Lofting, holding the girl's hand, explained time after time
that she'd never told him about the likely consequence of her removing
her chastity-suit in an un-chaste world. The basketball player said
he'd never forgive himself if she didn't recover.
Mary was taken to the C.U. hospital. Wearing a sterility-suit, I
attended her examination, which was conducted by my chief-of-service,
the staff pathologist, as well as the hospital's internist and
neurologist. I took a few cc's of Mary's cerebrospinal fluid back
with me to the BICUSPID contaminated labs. There, to anticipate a few
days' deliberate bacterial growth in media, her meningoencephalitis
was discovered to have been caused by _Erysipelothrix monocytogenes_,
an organism whose more usual victims are rabbits. Mary's husband could
explain her coming in contact with so exotic a pathogen only by the
fact that they'd visited the Brookfield Zoo on the second, and last,
day of their honeymoon.
By the time these technical details were known they were academic. The
epidemiological problem had become secondary to the pathological. Mary
Lofting had died.
I was asked to assist Dr. McQueen and the senior pathologist at
autopsy--I was, after all, a resident in pathology, and had besides a
special interest in this case--but I found the job more than I could
take. Mary had been a sister to me for twenty-three years. In tears, I
left the morgue during the classic cruciform incision.
* * * * *
I found the Firebird in the library. I recognized her through the
anonymity of her chastity-suit by the characteristic pose of her head
and arms as she sat reading: elbow braced on the table-top, her right
fist blocked stubbornly against the plastic cheek of her helmet, her
left arm curved around the book as though to be a break-water against
distraction. I sat beside her, and said, "Dorothy."
Without a word she closed her book, stood, and replaced it on the
shelf. We walked hand in hand out into the autumn campus.
"Last year," I said, "it was Mike Bohrman, walking through snow-drifts
in his suit-shorts, wanting for once in his life to feel the real world
against his skin. So _he_ died. Five days ago, Mary deWitte married the
man she loved. So she died," I said.
"Our life isn't generally as hopeless as that," the Firebird said.
"No," I said. "We're fed and entertained. We're being educated at
one of the finest universities in the world--for us, she's been a
genuine, homogenized-milk Alma Momma. She even gives us an allowance
to buy airmail stamps for our collection, or bar-bells, or gas for
our sports-car. She's given us everything we need for happiness.
Everything, Firebird, but purpose. That's why we're all going nuts--why
Mike went barefoot in the snow and Mary used love for a suicide-weapon.
That's why we've got to break free."
"Free?" she asked. "You mean, free to step outside the Big Tank, shed
our sterility-suits, turn septic--and die?"
"I mean free to step off earth."
We sat by mutual consent on a bench beneath a sugar maple, brushing
aside half an inch of multicolored leaves. I told the Firebird of the
broadcast from a southern star, and about the Immermann skull. I told
her all I knew about the Orion rockets, the nuclear-pulse ships that
had gone through five prototypes to reach the _Zeta_. "She's built to
travel light-years," I said. "I'm going with her when she leaves."
"Of course, I'm going with you," she said. "Your spacemen will need a
dietitian to make metabolic sense out of algal soups and hydroponic
salads for the first couple of generations, and to teach the youngsters
to take over the kitchen once they're on their own."
"Firebird," I said, "I'm happy to welcome you aboard. Now we've got to
get that ship."
"We'll get it," she said. "Understand, Johnny, it's not the
professional challenge that makes me want to blast off for Alpha
Centauri with four generations to feed. I've got no special urge to
tame frontiers. The reason I'm going--forgive me for mentioning it
again, and cold sober--is to stay near you."
I stood up, drawing her up after me, and was struck again by the
aptness of the nickname, "chastity-suit."
"Perhaps I've overestimated the effectiveness of a certain taboo," I
said. "Come on, sweet Firebird. Let's get back to the Tank to help Bud
recruit the rest of our crew."
* * * * *
Colonel Barrett was young for eagles. My fellow volunteers-designate
and I, all twenty-eight of us, were gathered in the lounge of English
Hall, creaking and wheezing in our sterility-suits, looking very ready
for hard space.
The colonel wore crisp blues. His tunic was decorated by a triple row
of medals-for-merit. It was not his fault that he wore no battle-stars.
Barrett had graduated from the Air Academy into our seemingly endless
_Pax Desperandum_. He'd never had a chance to see a roentgen radiated
in anger. The Marsman Badge at the center of his left breast pocket
was one rarely seen: the circle-with-arrow symbol of Mars had within
it a "III," signifying that its wearer had been a member of the Third
Mars Expedition, back in the days when a flight to Mars had been
something more than a teamster's run. The Marsman Badge was balanced by
the star-topped, laurel-wreathed--and anachronistic--silver wings of a
Command Pilot.
As I shook hands with Colonel Barrett I found it difficult to
conceal the envy that writhed in me. He'd seen the continents spread
cloud-flecked on the receding, curving earth, the stars shining beside
the sun against the black sky. He'd splashed across the dust-carpet of
the moon, tasted water melted from the polar cap of Mars. As a member
of Expedition Three, he'd been with the crew of the _Orion Gamma_ when
Immermann discovered the twenty-thousand-year-old skull at the base of
Roosevelt Ridge.
Colonel Barrett addressed his remarks to me. "Central University," he
said, "will lose the results of an eighty-million-dollar investment if
you people leave. They'll be getting off cheap, compared to us. The
Defense Department has been requested to turn over to you twenty-eight
untrained grounds-men the greatest spaceship yet built, the first of
the interstellar ships. The _Zeta_ cost the taxpayers four dollars a
pound to build. She weighs five hundred thousand tons, Dr. Bogardus."
"You're mistaken, Colonel, when you say that the University's
investments in gnotobiotic research over the past eighty years will be
lost if we Lapins end our part of the experiment. That's not true. That
investment has been repaid many times over. More has been learned of
human physiology, nutrition, and disease processes in the twenty-six
years' study of germ-free humans than was learned concerning these
subjects during any similar period in medical history.
"And, Colonel," I went on, "we're not untrained. Bud Dorsey, to your
right, is an astrophysicist who worked with the Agassiz Observatory
team in mapping the interstellar anti-matter dust clouds. Dr. Keto
Hannamuri is a pediatrician. Dorothy Damien, our Firebird, is a
dietitian. Fizz Ewell is a nuclear engineer. Karl Fyrmeister's degree
is in chem engineering, as is Janie Bohrman's. Gloria Moss is working
on her doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, Colonel, deals with the
social dynamics of small human groups such as ours. Alfred MacCoy,
standing behind you, has written three symphonies and an oratorio
so far; and R.C.A. Victor has threaded them all with the New York
Philharmonic. Lucy Cashdollar has had her works of sculpture displayed
in the National Gallery and at London's Tate. There are some few
resources here, Colonel."
"I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments,
Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're
impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that
you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that
none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry,
much less the techniques required to lift half a million tons on a
nuclear-pulse thrust."
"We can learn," I said.
"I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach
you."
* * * * *
"We're in?" Bud Dorsey demanded.
"You're in," Colonel Barrett said. "The decision in the Pentagon went
against my recommendation that professionals in rocketry be recruited
for the Alpha Centauri flight. The generals liked your argument, Dr.
Bogardus, that we should send a germ-free ship and a germ-free crew to
a possibly germ-free planet. In a sense, this is tradition. Back in
the '50s, moon-missiles were sponged down with Lysol before launching,
just in case they got where they were aimed at. Our people didn't
want to contaminate the moon's surface with earthly micro-organisms,
cluttering up the picture for the bacteriologists who were scheduled
to arrive later. The Chief of Staff said that if there is a germ-free
population on one of the Centaurus planets, we must not initiate our
contact with them by handing out the sort of prizes Cook's crew brought
to the South Seas--measles, tuberculosis, smallpox. We can't know that
even innocuous bacteria might not be fatal to a gnotobiotic, alien
population. So you go."
"Colonel," I said, "I'm sure that Washington didn't give up the _Zeta_
to us out of sheer altruism. What's their real reason?"
"Where else could we get a crew of twenty-eight men and women who've
given proof they can live together for a long period of time,
peaceably, retaining a fair degree of sanity? Miss Moss's studies in
group dynamics were most interesting to the Chief of Staff. Doubtless
they did much to influence his decision in your favor."
"There's one thing I don't understand, Colonel Barrett."
"What's that, Miss Damien?" he asked.
"Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as the
_Zeta's_ crew?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty
of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important
assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?"