The Last Starship From Earth Page 3

  “O.K., I withdraw the nominative modifiers. But, face it. Dad. On this best of all possible planets with the best of all possible social systems, we have nowhere to go but inward, and any renaissance of spirit will be an implosion triggered under the jurisdiction of the Department of Psychology.”

  Haldane III, the chess game forgotten, roared into battle.

  “I tell you, you would-be grammarian, if the Department of Psychology ever develops anything, it’ll be through an implant from the Department of Mathematics. Fairweather didn’t know cold on Hell about theology, but he moved into Church and built a truly infallible pope which put an end to mealy-mouthed bulls and submontane temporizing.”

  “Yes, look at Fairweather,” Haldane counterattacked. “He gave us the starships, and what happened? A few ships lost on the first probes, or maybe they just kept going, a few crewmen returning with space madness, and the triumvirate calls off the probes. We’re socked in by Soc and psyched out by Psych!

  “Where are those ships today? Two left, with their skeleton crews, and both are Hell ships. We’ve got the stars, and we haven’t got the guts to unwrap the package. Now, what contributions can a mathematician make?”

  Taken aback by the explosive sincerity of his son, Haldane III dropped to a key of disgruntled sarcasm. “If you spent half as much time in the lab as you do in those art palaces, you might be able to make some contribution other than that inane sedimentation theory which should never have been accepted.”

  Gently, Haldane asked, “Dad, did you have a contribution on your record before you were twenty?”

  “You whelp,” his father said, paternal pride diluting his anger, “I’ve forgotten more math than you’ll ever know. Your move.”

  Haldane glanced at his watch. Time was running short. He had to get ready for the recital, so he beat his father in four moves.

  “Want to play another?” Haldane III asked. “We could make a little bet on the side.”

  Their side bets were drinks, with the loser mixing and serving.

  “Nothing doing, dad. I’m a chess player, not a sadist. But I’ll mix you one.”

  It was more than a drink, it was a peace offering, and his father accepted it.

  As Haldane mixed the drink, his father, who was storing the chess pieces, said to him, “Talking about Fairweather I, Greystone’s coming out next Saturday to lecture on the Fairweather Effect at the Civic Auditorium. Want to come along?”

  “Sounds interesting,” Haldane said, squeezing a lime.

  It was interesting. Greystone was Secretary of the Department of Mathematics and was reputedly one of the few mathematicians who understood the Simultaneity Theorem on which the starships operated. Also, he had a genius for simplifying concepts.

  “I might go along.”

  “This is not for publication, but I called Washington, yesterday, and talked to Greystone. He thinks he can get the alternate navigator for the ‘Styx’ and the ‘Charon’ to come along with him.”

  Haldane set the drink on the table in front of his father and said, “If he can get one of those surly freaks to say anything, it’ll be a wonder.”

  “Greystone can if anyone can.”

  Despite his conventional remark about the spaceman, Haldane had a secret respect for the breed. From the original crews that manned the space probes over a hundred years ago, those who survived were the toughest of the tough.

  On television he had often watched them arrive on the prison ships from Hell, surly, taciturn, the closest thing on earth to immortals because they aged only a few months, earth time, in each century. Broad-shouldered, heavy, more solidly built than their descendants, they were held to earth less by their own desire, Haldane sensed, than by the umbilical cord of their supply line.

  “I’d like to go to the lecture,” Haldane said, “if something more important doesn’t come up.”

  “What could be more important than a lecture by Greystone on Fairweather I?”

  “Look, dad,” Haldane laid a casual arm across his father’s shoulder, “if you want me to go along as an interpreter, then say so. But I tell you now that understanding Fairweather is less a matter of knowledge than of intuition.”

  “Instruct me, expert!”

  Haldane went to the chamber-music recital that evening without much hope of seeing Helix, and he didn’t. From the primitive jam session he drove to a coffee house which poets frequented, the Mermaid Tavern.

  There were a few A-7 students present, and he fell in with them. His coat concealed his tunic, and in the dim glow of the table lamps they mistook him for one of them.

  One mentioned Browning, and he awed them by quoting at length from The Ring and the Book.

  With their hands moving to accent their words, twisting their torsos forward to listen, squirming upright or sideways in affirmation or rebuttal, they reminded him of silverfish slithering around in some damp, dark corner. Yet their enthusiasm for a remembered phrase, quoted at times in the language of the writer, struck him with an impact similar to that he remembered when he had sat with Helix at Point Sur.

  His disguise was ripped when one of them asked what he thought of the latest translation of Maria Rilke from the German.

  With a fluting intonation, he answered, “I adore her in German, but Maria, in English, is blah!”

  His questioner turned to a companion. “Did you hear the man, Philip? He adores her in German.”

  “What are you, fellow? A police pigeon?”

  “Maybe he’s a soc major out researching the peasantry.”

  Haldane dropped the fluting, “When you call me a sociologist, boy bard, smile!”

  “Move it, fellow, before we move it for you.”

  He could have taken any three of them at one time, but there were five of them. He moved it. He didn’t want a dean’s reprimand at this stage.

  Driving back to Berkeley, he was perplexed. In his two and a half months of searching for Helix, he had visited and revisited the places where she should have been. Many of the A-7 students he had seen several times, but there was no Helix. Something had gone wrong with the laws of probability.

  He did not go to the Fairweather lecture.

  On Wednesday, he was dining in the student union when he saw a notice in the school paper. A Professor Moran was giving a lecture on the Golden Gate campus Friday evening on eighteenth-century romantic poetry. When he saw the item, he couldn’t finish his meal, but got up and walked out. If Helix didn’t go to this lecture, she’d never go to another on this earth.

  On his way home he realized he had a weakness which could betray him—his nerves. He had geared himself to such a high pitch of expectancy that he might break.

  He could see himself meeting her. But instead of a look of pleased surprise spreading over his face, he fell to the floor and crawled toward her, clutching her ankles and moaning hysterically in his relief and joy.

  Regally she gazed down on the fallen lad in shock and disdain, kicked her ankles free, and walked over and away from him, forever.

  He smiled at his own imagery as he climbed the stairs, but an insight gave his thoughts a graver tone. His immersion into literature had given an emotional cast and color to his thoughts. Strangely, the world seemed more vivid.

  Haldane’s father was disappointed when Haldane told him that he could not go with him to the Greystone lecture. Seeing the disappointment on his father’s face, Haldane felt remorse.

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I can’t bring myself to miss the lecture on the romantic period. It falls exactly into the time period I’ve chosen to demonstrate my mathematical analysis of literary styles. Anyway, the Fairweather lecture is too advanced for a sophomore. In my sixth year, I’ll be up to my ears in Fairweather Mechanics, and if you can pick up a transcript of the lecture for my reserve notes, I’d appreciate it. This poetry reading has a valid relevance to my present purpose, and a beginner in literature can gain more from hearing verse than from reading it.”

  His father shook hi
s head. “I don’t know, son. Maybe what you are doing has value. You fooled me on the sedimentation theory, and you may fool me on this. Go. Your mind is made up. You’re a Haldane, and nothing I can do can change it.”

  He came early to the lecture hall and seated himself on a back row to study the faces of arrivals. As he had surmised, fully eighty per cent of the students in attendance were A-7s, and practically all the full professionals, though without insignia, had the A-7 look, a preoccupied dreaminess; and long-handled cigarette holders were standard equipment for the smokers.

  Most of the students came in clusters to the seats, and after the house lights had dimmed, there was an inrush of students from the lobby. He had not spotted Helix, but the bulk of the students came after the lights were dimmed and he was confident that she was among the shadowy figures.

  When the light at the lectern came on and the lecturer walked out from the wings, Haldane turned his entire attention to the speaker, a diminutive, bald-headed man in his late sixties with ears that jutted from his head. He leaned back from the lectern and spoke with a voice surprisingly powerful for so small a man.

  “My name is Moran. I’m a professor here. My field and my subject for tonight, is the romantic poets of England. As for myself, in the dim past my people came from Ireland. Our family history says that we were barred from the priesthood because a leprechaun got into the Moran cabbage patch. Do you believe that?”

  The audience laughed agreement.

  “So much for me. Now, for the poets. I will name them and let them speak for themselves.”

  Moran did precisely what he said he would.

  His readings, delivered in a clear, compelling voice, went beyond meanings and grasped moods and emotions in the lines. Haldane knew from the opening sentence of the first poem that the professor had him hooked.

  Moran’s recitation leaped ravines no theory of aesthetics could ever bridge. Helix, in all her beauty and with all her enthusiasm, was only dawn’s glow compared to this man’s full sunrise.

  Haldane heard the roar of the River Alph tumbling to a sunless sea, and he knew whom Coleridge had in mind when he wrote:

  Weave a circle round him thrice

  And close his eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the Milk of Paradise.

  Lord Byron spoke to him personally.

  He had thought himself fortunate that Keats had died young. In the darkened auditorium, he mourned, now, the death of a poet who could speak with such poignancy and describe with such sweet exactitude “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

  Shelley sang to him. Wordsworth comforted him. His heart danced to the skirling Scottish pipes of Burns.

  When the house lights went on and the crowd rose to leave, the mood lingered. There was no hum of voices and no applause. Haldane moved quickly to the lobby to await the exit of Helix.

  Eyes that caught his own returned his gaze with gentle sadness, but the eyes of Helix were not among them.

  He turned and walked out of the lobby and down the mall into the crisp evening, his feet crunching softly on the fallen leaves. He paused for a moment at the fountain near the center of the campus and said softly to himself:

  And this is why I sojourn here

  Alone and palely loitering

  Though sedge is withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  He drew his cloak more tightly around him against the chill and turned the collar up, noticing his shadow sprawled over the granite flagstones surrounding the fountain.

  It was a Byronesque shadow, and well it should be. He was one with Byron, with Keats, with Shelley. He had come to find his beloved and had found, instead, the living loves of dead men; yet he was alone.

  Earth weary, companioned by poignancy, he turned and walked over the sere grass and beneath the stark limbs of trees that whispered in the winds of late November. He was a ghost drifting among ghosts, for he was no longer Haldane IV of the twentieth century. Helix had introduced him, and Moran had wedded him, to the immortal dead. Only his body trudged this desolate heath; his soul danced a minuet in an eighteenth-century drawing room.

  He found his car and drove back to the apartment.

  His father had not arrived. Remembering the disappointment he had caused the old man, Haldane went to the bureau and removed the chess pieces, setting them up for a game.

  Greystone wasn’t one to talk forever. His father should be in early enough for a game. Haldane, in a spirit of repentance, knew in advance that his father would win tonight.

  Haldane III entered, bringing the chill on his overcoat and rubbing his hands together. His eyes lighted when he saw the chess board. “Ready for a beating?”

  “Ready to give you one.”

  “Good. How was your lecture?”

  “So-so,” Haldane said. “How was yours?”

  “Excellent. I’ve got the Fairweather Effect down pat. How about mixing me a drink while I make room for it.”

  Haldane went to the bar and poured two drinks.

  His father, divested of his coat, returned and pulled up a chair to the chess table. “So, your lecture was only fair. Mine was good, very good.”

  Well into the game, Haldane sat silent and moody until his father remarked, “I can’t understand why you young people all want to jump your categories.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There was an art student at the lecture tonight. A girl. They introduced me as an honored guest before the lecture, and she came over and introduced herself. We sat and talked for quite a while, and she listened to me. More than I can say for my son.”

  “Uh-huh. What’d she look like?… Check.”

  “What difference does it make? A female’s a female.”

  “I was just wondering if my old man still had an eye for a frail.”

  “As you have often had the kindness to point out, son, I’m not too observant. But, as I remember, this girl had chestnut hair, hazel eyes, a rather broad face, and a determined chin. Her nose tilted slightly. Her breasts were high and wide apart. She walked with a slight sway to her hips that would have doubled her income if she had been a prostitute.”

  He looked over at his son with a half-grin. “Do you want me to tell you about the mole under her left breast and the appendix scar about four inches below her navel?”

  Haldane looked at him seriously, “Father, I’ve never before truly gauged the extent of your satyriasis.”

  “She had beauty, a strange beauty. It seemed to be a quality of the mind as much as the body, and as I talked to her I had the impression I was talking to a much older woman. She was writing a paper on the poetry of Fairweather, and I told her about you.”

  “She must have made an impression if you were willing to clank out the family skeleton.”

  “She did. I invited her to dinner tomorrow night. She doesn’t have far to come. She’s a student at Golden Gate. I told her I would try to get you to join us if you weren’t away at some poetry lecture.”

  “I’ll try to make it,” Haldane said.

  Chapter Three

  She glittered as coldly as the Northern Lights, and the eyes which laughed for his father turned on him with immaculate propriety. “If your machine should work, citizen, all you would need do would be to reverse the input, and you would have an electronic poet. Such a device would destroy my category.

  “Logically, the next step would be machines to create machines, and there would be no social need for human beings. Don’t you agree, sir?”

  “Absolutely, Helix. I told him it was a foolish idea.”

  Haldane had never found his father more quick to agree, had never seen him more charming or animated. The light from the old man’s eyes practically illuminated the table. Outflanked, Haldane withdrew into dessert and silence as his father launched a monologue.

  “You’ve touched on an idea that we in the department have already taken under consideration, the inadvisability of removing the human elem
ent entirely from the manipulation of machinery. Once, an invention came before the board for review…”

  Haldane noted the phrase, “we in the department.” His father was preening. Ordinarily he said merely “the department.”

  When they were introduced in the living room, she had said, “Citizen, your father tells me you are interested in poetry.”

  “Only by association.”

  “One would expect you to attend only mathematics lectures.”

  He had entered the dining room with a singing heart and his faith in the law of averages restored. She had been seeking him at the mathematics lectures while he was seeking her.

  Now, as his father talked, Haldane’s thoughts vibrated between mathematics and analytics. She had about her a quality of freshness, half aetherial, half of earth, which reminded him of spring grass rising between patches of melting snow, and the vivacity of her thoughts were caught in the nuances of her face.

  She was a logical impossibility. He knew that she must have liver and lungs and a thorax that functioned as those of any girl, but the whole was greater than the parts.

  He leaned over and refilled his father’s wine glass.

  Haldane III diverted his attention from the girl long enough to ask, “Are you trying to get me drunk in order to impress our guest with your wit and brilliance while I sleep?”

  “Would you care for water instead?”

  Haldane had offered alternatives to ensure a choice. He cared little what his father drank as long as he drank.

  As his father watched him pour, Helix said, “If you’re determined to be a vivisectionist of poetry, citizen, perhaps you might be interested in its birth. As a class project, I’m writing a poem about Fairweather I, and I need help in translating his mathematics into words. Your father tells me you have an understanding of his works.”

  “Indeed, citizen,” Haldane answered, “rather than destroy my father’s confidence, I’ll rush into the library after the meal and write a one paragraph explanation of his Simultaneity Theorem and draw a diagram demonstrating the Fairweather Effect. The last is simple, really. He merely uses quarks to jump the time warp.”