Return From the Stars Page 9

  I got up. I couldn’t sit still. I walked from corner to corner.

  Enough. I opened the bathroom door, but there was no water, of course, to splash on my face. Stupid. Hysterics.

  I went back to the room and started to pack.

  THREE

  Spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I had looked forward to them, after the microfilms that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons — lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal corn — my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks — larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that — as it told me — it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single “copies” of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.

  The originals — crystomatrices — were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enameled steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books. On learning that there were secondhand bookshops that had paper books, I went and found one. I was disappointed; there were practically no scientific works. Light reading, a few children’s books, some sets of old periodicals.

  I bought (one had to pay only for the old books) a few fairy tales from forty years earlier, to find out what were considered fairy tales now, and I went to a sporting-goods store. Here my disappointment had no limit. Athletics existed in a stunted form. Running, throwing, jumping, swimming, but hardly any combat sports. There was no boxing now, and what they called wrestling was downright ridiculous, an exchange of shoves instead of a respectable fight. I watched one world-championship match in the projection room of the store and thought I would burst with anger. At times I began laughing like a lunatic. I asked about American free-style, judo, ju-jitsu, but no one knew what I was talking about. Understandable, given that soccer had died without heirs, as an activity in which sharp encounters and bodily injuries came about. There was hockey, but it wasn’t hockey! They played in outfits so inflated that they looked like enormous balls. It was entertaining to see the two teams bounce off each other, but it was a farce, not a match. Diving, yes, but from a height of only four meters. I thought immediately of my own (my own!) pool and bought a folding springboard, to add on to the one that would be at Clavestra. This disintegration was the work of betrization. That bullfights, cockfights, and other bloody spectacles had disappeared did not bother me, nor had I ever been an enthusiast of professional boxing. But the tepid pap that remained did not appeal to me in the least. The invasion of technology in sports I had tolerated only in the tourist business. It had grown, especially, in underwater sports.

  I had a look at various equipment for diving: small electric torpedoes one could use to travel along the bottom of a lake; speedboats, hydrofoils that moved on a cushion of compressed air; water microgleeders, everything fitted with special safety devices to guard against accidents.

  The racing, which enjoyed a considerable popularity, I could not consider a sport; no horses, of course, and no cars — remote-control machines raced one another, and bets could be placed on them. Competition had lost its importance. It was explained to me that the limits of man’s physical capability had been reached and the existing records could be broken only by an abnormal person, some freak of strength or speed. Rationally, I had to agree with this, and the universal popularity of those athletic disciplines that had survived the decimation, deserved praise; nevertheless, after three hours of inspecting, I left depressed.

  I asked that the gymnastic equipment I had selected be sent on to Clavestra. After some thought, I decided against a speedboat; I wanted to buy myself a yacht, but there were no decent ones, that is, with real sails, with centerboards, only some miserable boats that guaranteed such stability that I could not understand how sailing them could gratify anyone.

  It was evening when I headed back to the hotel. From the west marched fluffy reddish clouds, the sun had set already, the moon was rising in its first quarter, and at the zenith shone another — some huge satellite. High above the buildings swarmed flying machines. There were fewer pedestrians but more gleeders, and there appeared, streaking the roadways, those lights in apertures, whose purpose I still did not know. I took a different route back and came upon a large garden. At first I thought it was the Terminal park, but that glass mountain of a station loomed in the distance, in the northern, higher part of the city.

  The view was unusual, for although the darkness, cut by street lights, had enveloped the whole area, the upper levels of the Terminal still gleamed like snow-covered Alpine peaks.

  It was crowded in the park. Many new species of trees, especially palms, blossoming cacti without spines; in a corner far from the main promenades I was able to find a chestnut tree that must have been two hundred years old. Three men of my size could not have encircled its trunk. I sat on a small bench and looked at the sky for some time. How harmless, how friendly the stars seemed, twinkling, shimmering in the invisible currents of the atmosphere that shielded Earth from them. I thought of them as “little stars” for the first time in years. Up there, no one would have spoken in such a way — we would have thought him crazy. Little stars, yes, hungry little stars. Above the trees, which were now completely dark, fireworks exploded in the distance, and suddenly, with astounding reality, I saw Arcturus, the mountains of fire over which I had flown, teeth chattering from the cold, while the frost of the cooling equipment, melting, ran red with rust down my suit. I was collecting samples with a corona siphon, one ear cocked for the whistle of the compressors, in case of any loss of rotation, because a breakdown of a single second, their jamming, would have turned my armor, my equipment, and myself into an invisible puff of steam. A drop of water falling on a red-hot plate does not vanish so quickly as a man evaporates then.

  The chestnut tree was nearly out of bloom. I had never cared for the smell of its flowers, but now it reminded me of long ago. Above the hedges the glare of fireworks came and went in waves, a noise swelled, orchestras mingling, and every few seconds, carried by the wind, returned the choral cry of participants in some show, perhaps of passengers in a cable car. My little corner, however, remained undisturbed.

  Then a tall, dark figure emerged from a side path. The greenery was not completely gray, and I saw the face of this person only when, walking extremely slowly, a step at a time, barely lifting his feet off the ground, he stopped a few meters away. His hands were thrust into funnellike swellings from which extended two slender rods that ended in black bulbs. He leaned on these, not like a paralytic, but like someone in an extremely weakened state. He did not look at me, or at anything else — the laughter, the shouting, the music, the fireworks seemed not to exist for him. He stood for perhaps a minute, breathing with great effort, and I saw his face off and on in the flashes of light from the fireworks, a face so old that the years had wiped all ex
pression from it, it was only skin on bone. When he was about to resume his walk, putting forward those peculiar crutches or artificial limbs, one of them slipped; I jumped up from the bench to support him, but he had already regained his balance. He was a head shorter than I, though still tall for a man of the time; he looked at me with shining eyes.

  “Excuse me,” I muttered. I wanted to leave, but stayed: in his eyes was something commanding.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere. But where?” he said in a surprisingly strong voice.

  “I doubt it,” I replied, shaking my head. “I returned only yesterday… from a very long voyage.”

  “From… ?”

  “From Fomalhaut.”

  His eyes lit up.

  “Arder! Tom Arder!”

  “No,” I said. “But I was with him.”

  “And he?”

  “He died.”

  He was breathing hard.

  “Help me… sit down.”

  I took his arm. Under the slippery black material were only bones. I eased him down gently onto the bench. I stood over him.

  “Have… a seat.”

  I sat. He was still wheezing, his eyes half closed.

  “It’s nothing… the excitement,” he whispered. After a while he lifted his lids. “I am Roemer,” he said simply.

  This took my breath away.

  “What? Is it possible… you… you… ? How old… ?”

  “A hundred and thirty-four,” he said dryly. “Then, I was… seven.”

  I remembered him. He had visited us with his father, the brilliant mathematician who worked under Geonides — the creator of the theory behind our flight. Arder had shown the boy the huge testing room, the centrifuges. That was how he remained in my memory, as lively as a flame, seven years old, with his father’s dark eyes; Arder had held him up in the air so the little one could see from close up the inside of the gravitation chamber, where I was sitting.

  We were both silent. There was something uncanny about this meeting. I looked through the darkness with a kind of eager, painful greed at his terribly old face, and felt a tightness in my throat. I wanted to take a cigarette from my pocket but could not get to it, my fingers fumbled so much.

  “What happened to Arder?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “You recovered — nothing?”

  “Nothing there is ever recovered… you know.”

  “I mistook you for him…”

  “I understand. My height and so forth,” I said.

  “Yes. How old are you now, biologically?”

  “Forty.”

  “I could have…” he murmured.

  I understood what he was thinking.

  “Do not regret it,” I said firmly. “You should not regret it. You should not regret a thing, do you understand?”

  For the first time he lifted his gaze to my face.

  “Why?”

  “Because there is nothing for me to do here,” I said. “No one needs me. And I… no one.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  “What is your name?”

  “Bregg. Hal Bregg.”

  “Bregg,” he repeated. “Bregg… No, I don’t remember. Were you there?”

  “Yes. At Apprenous, when your father came with the corrections Geonides made in the final month before takeoff… It turned out that the coefficients of refraction for the dark dusts had been too low… Does that mean anything to you?” I broke off uncertainly.

  “It does. Of course,” he replied with special emphasis. “My father. Of course. At Apprenous? But what were you doing there? Where were you?”

  “In the gravitation chamber, at Janssen’s. You were there then, Arder brought you in, you stood high up, on the platform, and watched while they gave me forty g’s. When I climbed out, my nose was bleeding. You gave me your handkerchief.”

  “Ah! That was you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that person in the chamber had dark hair, I thought.”

  “Yes. My hair isn’t light. It’s gray. It’s just that you can’t see well now.”

  There was a silence, longer than before.

  “You are a professor, I suppose?” I said, to say something.

  “I was. Now… nothing. For twenty-three years. Nothing.” And once more, very quietly, he repeated, “Nothing.”

  “I bought some books today, and among them was Roemer’s topology. Is that you or your father?”

  “I. You are a mathematician?”

  He stared at me, as if with renewed interest.

  “No,” I said, “but I had a great deal of time… there. Each of us did what he wanted. I found mathematics helpful.”

  “How did you understand it?”

  “We had an enormous number of microfilms: fiction, novels, whatever you like. Do you know that we had three hundred thousand titles? Your father helped Arder compile the mathematical part.”

  “I know about that.”

  “At first, we treated it as… a diversion. To kill time. But then, after a few months, when we had completely lost contact with Earth and were hanging there — seemingly motionless in relation to the stars — then, you see, to read that some Peter nervously puffed his cigarette and was worried about whether or not Lucy would come, and that she walked in and twisted her gloves, well, first you began to laugh at this like an idiot, and then you simply saw red. In other words, no one would touch it.”

  “And mathematics?”

  “No. Not right away. At first I took up languages, and I stuck with that until the end, even though I knew it might be futile, for when I returned, some might have become archaic dialects. But Gimma — and Thurber, especially — urged me to learn physics. Said it might be useful. I tackled it, along with Arder and Olaf Staave, but we three were not scientists…”

  “You did have a degree.”

  “Yes, a master’s degree in information theory and cosmodromia, and a diploma in nuclear engineering, but all that was professional, not theoretical. You know how engineers know mathematics. So, then, physics. But I wanted something more — of my own. And, finally, pure mathematics. I had no mathematical ability. None. I had nothing but persistence.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “One would have to have that to fly…”

  “Particularly to become a member of the expedition,” I corrected him. “And do you know why mathematics had this effect? I only came to understand this there. Because mathematics stands above everything. The works of Abel and Kronecker are as good today as they were four hundred years ago, and it will always be so. New roads arise, but the old ones lead on. They do not become overgrown. There… there you have eternity. Only mathematics does not fear it. Up there, I understood how final it is. And strong. There was nothing like it. And the fact that I had to struggle was also good. I slaved away at it, and when I couldn’t sleep I would go over, in my mind, the material I had studied that day.”

  “Interesting,” he said. But there was no interest in his voice. I did not even know whether he was listening to me. Far back in the park flew columns of fire, red and green blazes, accompanied by roars of delight. Here, where we sat, beneath the trees, it was dark. I fell silent. But the silence was unbearable.

  “For me it had the value of self-preservation,” I said. “The theory of plurality… what Mirea and Averin did with the legacy of Cantor, you know. Operations using infinite, transfinite quantities, the continua of discrete increments, strong… it was wonderful. The time I spent on this, I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

  “It isn’t so useless as you think,” he muttered. He was listening, after all. “You haven’t heard of Igalli’s studies, I suppose?”

  “No, what are they?”

  “The theory of the discontinuous antipole.”

  “I don’t know anything about an antipole. What is it?”

  “Retronihilation. From this came parastatics.”

  “I never even heard of these terms.”

  “Of course, for it originate
d sixty years ago. But that was only the beginning of gravitology.”

  “I can see that I will have to do some homework,” I said. “Gravitology — that’s the theory of gravitation?”

  “Much more. It can only be explained using mathematics. Have you studied Appiano and Froom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, you should have no difficulty. These are metagen expansions in an n-dimensional, configurational, degenerative series.”

  “What are you saying? Didn’t Skriabin prove that there are no metagens other than the variational?”

  “Yes. A very elegant proof. But this, you see, is transcontinuous.”

  “Impossible! That would… but it must have opened up a whole new world!”

  “Yes,” he said dryly.

  “I remember one paper by Mianikowski…” I began.

  “Oh, that is not related. At the most, a similar direction.”

  “Would it take me long to catch up with everything that has been done in all this time?” I asked.

  He was silent for a moment.

  “What use is it to you?”

  I did not know what to say.

  “You are not going to fly any more?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m too old. I couldn’t take the sort of accelerations that… and anyway… I would not fly now.”