The Last Starship From Earth Read online

  “I think we’re lucky that there was a conception. Otherwise, you’d have been psychoanalyzed for sure, and something tells me that psychoanalysis would have meant Pluto for you. Now that primitivism is an established fact, we can present our picture rather than let the psychologists present theirs. Incidentally, have you ever undergone civilian analysis?”

  “Once, when I was a child.”

  “What for?”

  “Aggressions. I shoved some flower pots off a window sill and almost hit a pedestrian. My mother had fallen out of the window while watering the pots, and I blamed them.”

  Flaxon clapped his hands and flashed a broad grin. “That’ll take care of the microphone!”

  “How?”

  “When you threw that microphone out of the window you were regressing to compulsive infantile behavior. Helix was your mother substitute. The microphone which destroyed her was the flower pots which destroyed your mother. You were reliving an old trauma.”

  “That theory sounds farfetched to me.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. Listen,” Flaxon leaned forward, his intensity compelling attention, “when the psychologist comes in, you say conversationally, ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve met your profession.’

  “Naturally, he’s going to ask for details, and you give them. Let him draw his own conclusions. You and I will have nothing to do with those conclusions.”

  He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Whew, I was worried about that microphone.”

  Haldane knew that Flaxon had been truly worried, and it moved him that a man whom he had known for less than an hour could become so involved in his problems. He was aware that lawyers were expected to defend their clients, but he was grateful that the state had assigned him a man so completely committed to his cause that he had called Malcolm a rat for fulfilling his duties as a citizen.

  “Now, the sociologist is the jury foreman,” Flaxon continued. “His duties are administrative, which means the other jurors make the decisions and he gets credit. Frequently he’ll come up with a minor idea phrased in major language. His sentences will be so long that you’ll forget the subject before he reaches the predicate, but pay him close attention, and I mean close.

  “If you think he’s trying to be witty, smile. If you know he’s trying to be witty, laugh. He’s a member of the ranking department, so curry his favor.

  “In general, remember you’re a professional and you’ll be treated as one until you’re sentenced. Be friendly, be casual, be frank, but don’t volunteer any information. They’ve got facts enough to work on without our contributions.”

  Flaxon walked over to the window and looking out, said, “We’ve got some things going for us. You’re intelligent, personable, and the affair started during an extreme emotional crisis. We’ve got to convince them that your delinquency did not spring from atavism.”

  He turned back and looked at Haldane, almost accusingly. “Frankly, from your interest in the girl, I think maybe you are a throwback, but that’s all right with me.” He grinned. “I’ve got a few atavistic tendencies myself.

  “Get cracking on those notes. I’ll be back in the morning to pick up what you’ve written. Remember, the more facts you can give me, the easier it will be for us to pick out the truths we can use in projecting an image of you as a noble, law-abiding lad.”

  There was a quick extension of the hand, a rapid shake, and Flaxon was slamming the door behind him.

  Haldane shuffled the sheets of paper together as he turned to his task. He was constantly being surprised to find acute intelligences in mediocre professions. Within the limits of social orthodoxy, Flaxon had a mind that flashed and sparkled, was capable of profound insights, and was backed by human sympathies.

  He liked the man. All during the interview, Flaxon had smiled, frowned, or grown pensive. Not once had he worn the mask.

  Haldane began to write in straight, chronological order all the incidents that had occurred between the meeting at Point Sur and his arrest. He was writing at lunch time and writing when they brought supper. When he ran out of paper, he went to bed.

  In the morning, he greeted Flaxon with, “Counselor, I need more paper.”

  Flaxon had come prepared. He pulled a sheaf from his briefcase, commented on the legibility of Haldane’s handwriting, and left with the completed portion of the manuscript.

  Fully committed to his task, Haldane relived every moment of his life with Helix. His principle aim ill the composition was clarity, but he found that when he was describing his remembered passions, somehow a shadow of his emotion fretted through his words. As the work progressed, he knew he was writing for an audience of one the last love story on earth.

  Flaxon must have spent more time analyzing the notes than Haldane did writing them. In the morning he would arrive haggard and tired, although his appearance was belied by his driving energy.

  “About the epic poem of Fairweather,” he would remark, “don’t tell the priest you dropped it because you figured you couldn’t get it published. Tell him you stopped the project after you found out the biography was proscribed. That is exactly what happened, and he will assume the religious motivation.”

  Then he might say, in one of those purely personal asides that endeared him to Haldane, “Don’t go into details about your mathematics of aesthetics with the mathematician. For all I know, the idea is valid and you might want to work on it as a prol. Tip him on the idea, and twenty years from now you might find someone else’s name appended to your theory.”

  He would badger the same idea from different angles. “Tell the sociologist about your theory. He’d like the social thinking behind your attempt to absorb an art category.

  “Hit the psychologist with it, too. He’ll be convinced that if you were working that kind of a deal with the girl, your relationship had to be on the plane of the superego. Your id slipped in when you weren’t looking.”

  Flaxon’s mind was constantly probing the material he got from the manuscript. “Don’t let the sociologist know that you never feared the Hell ships. Those boys have spent time, energy, and credits conditioning you to feel terror. They don’t take kindly to defeat.”

  Once he dropped a personal remark that spread ripples through Haldane’s mind. “With your knowledge of Fairweather mechanics, you’d make a good engine room mechanic on a starship. There wouldn’t be any competition for the job.”

  Despite the growing friendship between them, Flaxon would make no inquiries about Helix. “If I asked, they’d know where the inquiry came from, and you’d be prejudiced. Besides, her punishment will be gauged to yours, only lighter. Females are never regarded as aggressors in miscegenation cases, the point of law being that she has no point.”

  Each day, for two hours, Flaxon would go over the notes he had prepared from Haldane’s manuscript, coaching his client.

  “Now, about the girl. In reading about her, I was touched. No doubt your portrait of her is true. It is certainly beautiful, it may be prejudiced, and it’s atavistic. You’ve succeeded in doing with her in my eyes what I hope to do with you in the jury’s eyes.

  “So, I’ll warn you. Never hint to the jury that you felt for her anything more than transient desire. This they will understand. More than this they will understand, too, but not to our benefit.”

  Flaxon was giving to empty nothing the habitation and name of Haldane IV.

  Without altering the basic facts, Flaxon was sculpting an image that would make Haldane appear to the priest as a young man of strong religious convictions, to the mathematician a brilliant but orthodox mathematician, to the sociologist a socially alive young fellow who had wished to eliminate a troublesome category, and to the psychologist a normal superego that had toppled before a superb libido.

  At the end of five days, he and Flaxon agreed, after rehearsals, that the leading man was ready for his entrance.

  “Tomorrow, you’ll be interviewed,” Flaxon said. “I’ll burn your manuscript tonight and
check with you tomorrow afternoon to see how the interviews came out. You take care of the jury, and I’ll take care of the judge. Mine’s the easy part.”

  They shook hands, and later, stretched on his bunk, Haldane felt the first feeling of confidence he had known for months. Whatever degree of clemency was granted him, he knew that Flaxon would get the highest for him that any lawyer could get, and he was not seeking the highest level of clemency; he intended to choose the lowest job on the priority scale.

  In that First Ice Age of his discontent, he had discerned the incompleteness of Fairweather’s Simultaneity Formula, 2(LV) = S. But he had shoved that discovery behind him for his mortal affairs were pressing, and he knew that no laboratory on earth could offer him facilities to test the Haldane Theory, LV2 = (−T). But there was a laboratory, not of tills earth, now available.

  He might have believed that some divinity had shaped him to this end, had he not come to the conclusion that the mills which ground were not the gods’.

  LV2 = (−T) would remove the stain of his father’s blood, wipe out the damned spot which condemned him, and topple the Weird Sisters!

  The Church was going to be gratified to receive into its arms the most penitent miscegenationist since the founding of the Holy Israel Empire, and the campus friends of Haldane O, née IV, were going to be dumbfounded to discover that the erstwhile Paul Bunyan of the recreational parlors had chosen the celibate life of an engine room mechanic in the laser room of a starship.

  Chapter Eight

  As an aftermath of Haldane’s slugging match with nineteenth-century literature, he had acquired a taste for tales of lust and violence, which he was satisfying the next morning when a knock came on the door. Turning to the Sermon on the Mount, he left the Bible open and went to answer the knock.

  An elderly man, in the neighborhood of eighty, stood in the corridor, a diffident look on his face. “Are you Haldane IV?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you. My name’s Gurlick V, M-5, and I was told to come over and talk to you. May I come in?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  Haldane ushered him in and offered him the chair. He sat on the edge of the bunk while the old man creaked onto the chair, saying, “This is the first time I’ve drawn jury duty in ten years. By the way, I know your dad. He and I worked on a project about three years ago.”

  “He died last January,” Haldane said.

  “Ah, yes. That’s too bad. He was a good man.” The old man looked off into space in a conspicuous effort to gather his thoughts. “They tell me you were involved with a young lady in another category.”

  “Yes, sir. She knew Dad, too.”

  Looking at the old man, Haldane figured there was no, point in concealing any theories from Gurlick. At best, Gurlick had only ten years left, and in those ten years he would be concerned mostly with his physical functions.

  “The name Gurlick sounds familiar, sir. Did you ever teach at Cal?”

  “Yes. I’ve taught theoretical math.”

  “Probably I’ve seen your name in the catalogue.”

  “Ah, yes. When I learned I was to be on your jury, I called up Dean Brack. He tells me you’re a wizard in both theoretical and empirical math. Most I ever did in the other line was to figure out a system for winning at tic-tac-toe.

  “Tell me something, son.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you ken the Fairweather Effect?”

  Haldane’s first reaction to the lowered, humble question was almost tears. Here a mathematician, far older than his father had been, was petitioning for information that his father had been too proud to request. He wanted to hug the old man for the bravery in his humility.

  It occured to Haldane that the old man could be feeding him a loaded question, one designed to determine his work category. Very well. If this were a classification question, he wanted to be classified as high as possible.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “What did he mean by ‘minus time’?”

  “Time in excess of simultaneity.”

  “Define!” The pedagogue in the old mathematician was alerted, and his voice cracked as he almost shrieked the command.

  “The so-called time barrier prevents a speed faster than simultaneity because one solid cannot occupy two places simultaneously. You cannot leave New York and be in San Francisco an hour before you leave, except in earth-relative time, because you would be in San Francisco at the same time you were in New York. You cannot occupy two places at once.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  “My understanding isn’t intelligence,” Haldane modesty admitted. “You understand Fairweather by a trick of he mind. You have to think in nonhuman concepts, Fairweather explicitly points out the nature of this understanding in his Jumping the Time Warp; yet some mathematicians still aren’t able to grasp his ideas.”

  “How could he apply nonhuman concepts to mechanical things, like the Hell ships? Tell me that, young one.”

  “He didn’t,” Haldane said. “Starships operate on Newton’s statement that every action has a reaction. He contrived a pod of lasers where light converged at a single point to give a push before the beams diverged. The actual principle is the same as that used in primitive jet aircraft.”

  “Well, I’ll be darned. There’s no new thing under the sun. I just wish I could live a little bit longer to find out what they’ll do next.”

  “If I had the gift of prophesy…” Haldane started to speak, and precautionary signals flashed in his mind.

  He was skirting the periphery of a concept that had come to him, like an aurora borealis, in this deepest winter of his mind, and this particular man was less a juror than a judge.

  Strangely, the old man did not look for him to finish the sentence. Instead, Gurlick turned his watery blue eyes toward the window and in a most lovable and absurdly human manner scratched himself. The frail veined hands, fluttering about the dessicated crotch, aroused Haldane’s compassion. If this old professor was tricking a student, then Haldane was his own grandmother.

  “Ah, yes. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my kidneys lately. I don’t reckon I’m long for this world, but I just can’t help wondering what they’ll do next.”

  He was balanced so precariously on the edge of eternity that Haldane feared for him. Yet, within that skull encompassed by its parchment skin burned still the naive curiosity of a child or a mathematician.

  “I’m a lousy prophet, sir, but maybe they can break the light barrier. You can’t be in San Francisco before you leave New York, but then you don’t have to be in New York.”

  “People are always rushing… Son, I was supposed to find out what your feelings were about people, whether you’d rather work with a group or whether you’d rather work alone, but I’ve got to go. If this trial comes out badly for you, have you got any job in mind you’d like to do?”

  “I don’t mind working with a small group, and I like to work with laser beams.”

  “Ah, yes. You’re pragmatic. I’ll remember that… Well, I don’t want to keep you. I’ll be getting along.”

  He got up slowly and stuck out his hand. “Thanks for inviting me in. I’ve enjoyed talking with you. Could you direct me to the lavatory, son?”

  Haldane helped him to the door and showed him the lavatory across the corridor. As he walked hurriedly away, Gurlick called back, “Give my regards to your father, son.”

  Turning back into his cell, Haldane was saddened by the decline of a mind which apologized for keeping him, forgetting he was a prisoner, and sent regards to a man who had been dead for more than three months.

  Haldane’s melancholy evaporated with the arrival of his second interviewer.

  Father Kelly XXXX had an impossible dynastic number, the result of an internecine battle for status between the Jews and the Irish in the Church. A group of Irishmen in the clergy had arrogated unto themselves numbers reaching back long before the Starvation, basing their numbering system on thei
r known ancestors who were priests. The Jews countered with their ancestors reaching back, possibly, to Jesus. Apparently, Father Kelly XXXX had decided to include ancestors who were Druid priests.

  Father Kelly’s impossible number suited his personality. He was incredible.

  Across the board, win, place, and show, Haldane had never seen a more handsome man. His long, black tunic fitted his tall, broad-shouldered body with military precision. His lustrous black hair and brows were balanced by the high gloss of his white collar. His thin, slightly tilted nose looked so sensitive that Haldane expected it to quiver. His lips were thin, his jaw was square with a cleft in the center, and his skin had a pallor that on another might have appeared unwholesome, but on Father Kelly XXXX it was the perfect background for the dark hair and eyes.

  His eyes, deep-set and piercing, were so brown the irises were almost lost. They focused with the power of a hypnotist or a fanatic, and they were at the same time the most unattractive and the most compelling feature of his face.

  If it were possible for a man so heavily endowed with rugged beauty to have a strong point, Father Kelly’s strong point was his profile. From the side, his features seemed carved by a master sculptor who had lingered for years over the shape of the nose and the line of the lips.

  Haldane knew this one. He had appeared often on local television presiding at the burial rites of famous actors. On camera he was handsome. In person, he was overwhelming. He made Haldane regret the size of the cell.

  With an engaging smile and the self-conscious worldliness of a man of God, Father Kelly’s first remark after introducing himself was, “My son, they tell me you lost your head over a bit of tail.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “It happened to Adam. It happened to you. It could happen to me.” He motioned Haldane to be seated on the bed, but he himself walked over to look out the window. There was nothing there but an alley. Flaxon’s eyes had not even focused on the view, but Father Kelly looked upward, and he seemed to be drinking in the sunlight.