The Last Starship From Earth Page 2

  “Instead of advice,” Haldane suggested, “why don’t you put your talents to figuring the statistical possibilities of two persons meeting twice by accident in a city of eight million people?”

  “Take your problems to the pope.”

  “What a wonderful world you live in, Malcolm, where every problem can be solved by the pope or a prostitute.”

  Malcolm jutted his second finger up from his palm.

  Haldane walked out onto the balcony and looked across the bay where the glow of San Francisco was growing brighter in the deepening dusk. Mentally he lined his sight on the campus of Golden Gate University.

  She would be at her desk now, in her dormitory room, bent over a book, her left arm crooked around it, and the light from her desk lamp would glow on the down of her arms. She would have been to the shower and be clean-smelling of soap with the highlights glinting in her hair.

  Suddenly it occurred to Haldane that he was thinking in imagery. No doubt poets thought like this, because, for a moment, more than his brain had been involved. For a moment he had smelled the fragrance of her hair, and he had felt again that peculiar upsurge of pleasure which he had gained from her company.

  Helix would be happy to know that he could think like a poet, but she never would know.

  If he wished, he could pull his telephone from his pocket, dial her genetic number, and bounce his words and image directly to her. He even had a reason for calling, to check the Dewey decimal reference to a volume by Sir Lancelot.

  Her answer would come in precise, measured tones giving him the number and a choice of titles. And that would be the end of Haldane IV, for sure.

  She would know beyond cavil that his question was a blind thrown over his primitive yearnings, for that girl studied atavism as a prerequisite to Limerick-writing I.

  A casual conversation with a boy on a sunny afternoon was no more than a slight pleasantry, but a second conversation, deliberately sought, would indicate danger. Their meeting would have to seem an accident so natural that her defenses would not be alerted.

  He did not know at what point his thoughts resolved into a decision, but he knew that he had made it, despite the peril. The reward was worth the risk.

  Out across the bay a sprite of a lass was poring over tomes of old romance. He would cloak his eighteenth-century romanticism under a patina of twentieth-century social realism and come a-calling. He might have to memorize a few poems to create the right atmosphere, but with his memory it should be no problem. Little did the lass know that soon, very soon, romance would be incarnate in her life, that the gossamer, many-hued fabric of her dreaming would be given solid substance by the magic wand of Haldane IV.

  At Berkeley, four years before, a student professional in mathematics had brought about the ruin of a home economics major. Both had been S.O.S.-ed and declassed, and the mathematician had gone on to become famous as a quarterback for the Forty-niners. In campus slang, it would never be said of Haldane IV that he was “quarterbacking for the Forty-niners.” But there was a risk, and standing on the balcony, he accepted it.

  As a whisper in his memory, lines she had quoted came back to him, and he voiced them, slightly altered, into the deepening night.

  The church and state can go to hell

  And I’ll go to my Helix.

  Chapter Two

  During the following school week, Haldane plotted his second meeting with the girl on graph paper, using only variables, and he cursed a field of study which led a student to art lectures, concerts, recitals, and museums, and into low cafés and bars in San Francisco. Where to search was the easiest of his three problems, but surveying that one area convinced him that people were taking this art stuff too seriously.

  Because the Golden Gate University was there, his base of operations would have to be in San Francisco. That meant he would have to work out of the ancestral apartment, because he couldn’t afford to rent a room for weekends without asking his father for help. His father presented problems enough as it was: the old man was a member of the Department of Mathematics, as such he was an officer of the state, and his natural, unaroused suspicions would demand a verbal adroitness from Haldane easily equal to his mathematical talents.

  He would need a solid reason to explain his association with art students to his father and his friends.

  Science majors regarded the arty crowd as strictly back-of-the-bus society. Writers flaunted tams, painters wore tunics an inch longer than standard, and the musicians never moved their lips when they talked. All of them affected long-handled, water-cooled cigarette holders, and when they smoked they flicked ashes with a swish. Despite public acceptance of their product, they were socially relegated to a few cheap bars and cafés around San Francisco, to Southern California, and to France.

  No mathematician would sully his thinking with the privately defined symbols they used in conversations which were designed not for communication but for “expression.” In his brief encounters with those people, Haldane had never before in the history of his social relations heard so many say so much about so little.

  Personally, he tolerated them as long as they kept in their place. Their lank-haired frails slunk along instead of walking and were, with the overpowering exception of Helix, as hipless as the males were shoulderless.

  Haldane avoided making generalities about groups, but generalities could be made: colored peoples were usually colored, Fiji Islanders ate less blubber than Eskimos, and mathematicians were more precise thinkers than artists.

  Yet, his feelings toward them were not entirely condemnatory. They testified to the variety and versatility of life forms on the planet, and as such they were a tribute to the magnanimity of the Creator.

  Haldane’s father, a statistician, was not so liberal. In fact, he was bigoted. He felt that all nonmathematicians were second-class citizens, and he refused to integrate. His attitude amused Haldane, a theoretical mathematician who considered statisticians on a par with hod-carriers, but this statistician was a department member whose spoken command had the force of law. He would be perturbed by his son’s attending art lectures. His perturbation would be in extremis if he suspected his son intended to commit miscegenation, and with an art female.

  Sooner or later, Haldane would have to give the reason. The old man was inquisitive, argumentative, and dictatorial. Worse, he was an inveterate chess player. Haldane had begun to beat him consistently when he was sixteen, and the psychic trauma resulting had left his father convinced that his defeats—and he lost ninety per cent of the time—were flukes.

  Haldane III would hardly be impressed by his son’s presence on week-ends; he would be suspicious. Haldane averaged a week-end a month at home, and some months he forgot. His attitude toward his father had always been one of detached affection that was more affectionate the more detached it was.

  Then, his meeting with the girl after he found her would have to be casual and easily explained. If she suspected him, she would be off like a starship in overdrive. After ingratiating himself, he would need a room to take her to in a most casual and logical manner without seeming to lure her. Thereafter, the Haldane charm would become the vehicle of dalliance.

  Luck guided him to a trysting place.

  Malcolm’s parents owned an apartment in San Francisco. They had left four months ago for a year’s trip to New Zealand to teach Maori priests theological cybernetics for their papal communiques. Haldane knew about the apartment, for Malcolm went over occasionally to check it and dust the furniture. Haldane would have never taken his roommate into his confidence and asked for the key. Basically, he didn’t trust Malcolm. Malcolm didn’t smoke, drank very little, and went to church regularly.

  On Thursday, Malcolm entered the room waving a paper. “Haldane, I have failed to flunk. Thank you, mattress master.”

  Haldane, from flat on his back, recognized the chart on blue-beaked parakeets and could see it was marked with a B+.

  He was irked. “Why was it marked down fro
m A?”

  “The prof graded it and penalized me for lack of neatness.”

  “He shouldn’t use subjective criteria for an objective test.”

  “He figured it was subjective, since I was the eagle, so he didn’t run it through the grading machine… When I ate the parakeet, some of the feathers dropped on my plate.”

  Out of the talent of Haldane, sired by his long contemplation, the colt of inspiration was foaled at a full gallop.

  “You know, Malcolm, if Fairweather I could reduce moral laws to mathematical equivalents and store them in a memory bank to create the pope, why couldn’t I break down the components of a sentence, give each unit a mathematical weight, and design a machine for scanning and grading written essays?”

  Malcolm thought a moment.

  “For you, I think it would be a simple task except for two reasons: you’re not a grammarian, and you’re not Fairweather.”

  “Yes, and I don’t know anything about literature, but I read fast.”

  “What you propose is beyond the limit of things ascertainable. If I recall correctly, and I don’t have a photographic memory, Fairweather I had 312 gradations of the meaning of a single term, murder, ranging all the way from murder for profit to state euthanasia for undesirable proletarians. You would have to analyze every figure of speech in the language.”

  “He didn’t analyze every gradation,” Haldane objected. “He took two extremes and worked toward the middle.”

  “I wouldn’t know that.”

  “Listen, this idea might be a contribution!” He got up and paced the room, partly for dramatic affect and partly from genuine enthusiasm. “I can see the title page of the publication, now. There it is, in 14-point Bodoni bold: A MATHEMATICAL EVALUATION OF AESTHETIC FACTORS IN LITERATURE, by Haldane IV… No, I’ll use Garamond.”

  He wheeled and pounded his fist into his palm. “Think what this could mean. Literature professors wouldn’t have to grade essays, just stick them in the old slot.”

  Malcolm, seated on the edge of his bed, looked up at Haldane with genuine concern. “Haldane, there’s something frightening about you. A vagrant thought passes your mind, and, wham, it’s an obsession.

  “By the infallible transistors of the pope, I swear you’re touched with madness. Methinks you’d disinter the bones of Shakespeare, reflesh them once again, and lead them through a new quadrille.”

  Haldane was impressed by his name dropping. “You seem to know something about literature yourself.”

  “Indeed. My mother was the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of a minnesinger. I wanted to be a wandering minstrel, but my father was a mathematician.”

  “If I follow this idea up,” Haldane said, as if he were concentrating aloud, “I’ll have to spend my week-ends in San Francisco, at literary lectures. Dad will be a problem with his chess games. If only I had a place to be alone for a few hours.”

  “You could use Ma and Pa’s apartment, if you’d dust it.”

  “Dust it! I’d mop it.”

  “It mops itself. It’s the objets d’art in the living room that the carriers of my genes wish protected.”

  He walked over to his desk, pulled out a key, and handed it to Haldane who took it with feigned casualness.

  Haldane III was grudgingly pleased that his son had decided to come home for week-ends. In the beginning, he asked no questions and Haldane volunteered no information. Sooner or later, the questions would come, Haldane knew, and it would make his actions seem more authentic if his father had to wheedle the information out of him.

  He visited the quarters of Malcolm’s parents, a four-room apartment eight floors up with a view of the bay, and he memorized the movable contents of the living room using a crude mnemonics system. If the brocaded tiger on the backrest of the divan were to lunge three feet forward, it would strike the nose of an elongated roebuck, a lamp base, carved from wood.

  With heavy furniture he did not concern himself. A policeman planting a microphone in the room wouldn’t take the effort to move it.

  He thought the apartment ornate, but the view of the bay from its wide front window compensated for its flamboyance. After he completed his check, he stood idly gazing out on Alcatraz and the lulls beyond when a line from something she had said popped into his mind: “What mad pursuit? What pipes and timbrels?”

  A very good question. What mad pursuit had led him here? What mystic pipes and timbrels had he heard to lure him on? It was not normal for a worldly lad of twenty to make such elaborate plans to experience what could only be a minor variation, at best, on an old and familiar theme.

  Then the image of the girl’s face returned to his memory and he saw, again, the shadow of sadness behind the laughter in her eyes, heard her voice weaving around him the charms which had enchained him with their visions of other worlds and other times. Her memory triggered anew that chemical reaction in the blood which had confounded him, and he knew what pipes were calling… He heard, and he would follow, tripping lightly on his goat hoofs, the irresistible keening of the pipes of Pan.

  Two sorties the first week-end, a lecture on modern art at the civic center and a students’ presentation of Oedipus Rex on the Golden Gate campus, produced only three typical A-7s. He was not disappointed. He was merely sniffing around to pick up the scent and not expecting to break the law of averages.

  Back on campus, he squeezed every minute from his schedule to spend in the library reading the poetry and prose of the eighteenth century. He read rapidly with pinpoint concentration. Concepts fecundated in his mind like larvae in a fen, and one of the concepts on the periphery of his mire was the fear that he had undertaken to level Mount Everest with a spade.

  John Keats died at 26, and that was the happiest event that ever occurred in the life of Haldane IV. If the poet had lived five more years, his works and the works written about his works would have meant two more libraries for Haldane to plow through.

  To confound his confusion, he could not distinguish between the major works of minor poets and the minor works of major poets. As a result, he became the only undergraduate, internationally, who could quote long passages from Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Unknowingly, he was the world’s exclusive authority on the works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. He had Felicia Dorothea Hemans down cold.

  Long hours of boredom were relieved by minutes of hair-pulling as he attempted to grasp hidden meanings behind curtains of unintelligible phrases.

  In San Francisco, he was equally frustrated. Week moved into week with no trace of the girl. His father, who eventually wheedled from him his cover story, so little respected his son’s activities that he resented their incursions into his chess games.

  After six weeks, Haldane no longer needed the vision of that unworldly beauty to spur him on. He had become intrigued by the girl’s ability to break the law of averages. She was performing statistical legerdemain.

  On campus, he tore great chunks from the body of English Lit. with a monomania which deprived him of workouts at the gym, social intercourse with students, or dalliance at Belle’s Place. Volume after volume fell behind him as husks behind the champion at a corn-husking. Librarians came to hold him in such awe that they gave him the private cubicle of a professor on sabbatical lest the rustle of paper by other students distract his fantastic concentration.

  Finally, sodden with Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, with Felicia Dorothea Hemans oozing out of his pores, he collapsed across December 31, 1799, a long-distance runner making his final lunge at the tape. It was mid-afternoon on Friday when he closed his last book and stumbled out of the library into the wan sunlight of November.

  He was vaguely surprised that it was November. October was his favorite month. Somewhere between Byron and Coleridge, he had lost October.

  Bone tired, he drove home with a body that begged for rest, but the brain had scheduled a student concert at Golden Gate, and the body yielded. After checking 562 type A students, he found no Hel
ix, but he stayed for the concert because his knowledge of music was weak. He discovered that Bach was somewhat easier to sleep by than Mozart.

  On Saturday afternoon, he beat his father swiftly in three straight games of chess. During the fourth game, which the old man had acrimoniously insisted on and which Haldane had to win rapidly in order to get to a chamber-music recital he had planned, Haldane III looked up at his son and said, “How are your grades coming at school?”

  “I’m still in the upper ten percent.”

  “You don’t work at it.”

  “I don’t have to. I inherited a splendid mind.”

  “You’d better start thinking about applying it. Mathematics is a broad field, and to get across it you have to work fast.”

  Haldane could sense a lecture paragraphs away, and he didn’t particularly care for parental advice, particularly not in his present state of mental fatigue. Deliberately, he diverted the lecture by inviting an argument. “I don’t think the field’s so broad.”

  “My god, what arrogance!”

  “I don’t. Dad. Fairweather made the ultimate breakthrough when he jumped the time warp; mathematicians have merely been polishing the pieces. I’ll prophesy that the next breakthrough in human progress will be by the psychologists.”

  Lightning flickered in the old man’s eyes. “Psychologists! They don’t even work with measurable phenomena.”

  Without being aware of his destination, Haldane launched himself into a sea of theory.

  “It’s not always the measurable phenomena that counts. From the point of view of their literature, our ancestors seem to have done nothing but fight; yet they had something we have lost, the spirit to operate as individuals. They went out and met challenges without relying on directives from sixteen different committees. That aynrandistic independence of action was smothered under the Dewey-influenced reign of Soc Henry VIII, that antihomopapal, mechanodeistic, category-beheader!”

  “If you’re deriding a state hero, watch your language, boy!”