A World Out of Time Read online

  “Learn now,” said Pierce. “This knob controls speed. The volume is set for your hearing. You may replay any section once. Don’t worry about your arm; you can’t pull the tube loose.”

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you, only I couldn’t remember the word. What’s a rammer?”

  “Starship pilot.”

  Corbell studied the checker’s face, without profit. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Learn now.” The checker turned on Corbell’s screen and went away.

  II

  A rammer was the pilot of a starship.

  The starships were Bussard ramjets. They caught interstellar hydrogen in immaterial nets of electromagnetic force, compressed and guided it into a ring of pinched force fields, and there burned it in fusion fire. Potentially there was no limit at all on the speed of a Bussard ramjet. The ships were enormously powerful, enormously complex, enormously expensive.

  Corbell thought it incredible that the State would trust so much value, such devastating power and mass to one man. To a man two centuries dead! Why, Corbell was an architect, not an astronaut! It was news to him that the concept of the Bussard ramjet predated his own death. He had watched the Apollo XI and XIII flights on television, and that had been the extent of his interest in spaceflight, until now.

  Now his life depended on his “rammer” career. He never doubted it. That was what kept Corbell in front of the screen with the earphones on his head for fourteen hours that first day. He was afraid he might be tested.

  He didn’t understand all he was supposed to learn. But he was not tested, either.

  The second day he began to get interested. By the third day he was fascinated. Things he had never understood—relativity and magnetic theory and abstract mathematics—he now grasped intuitively. It was marvelous!

  And he ceased to wonder why the State had chosen Jerome Corbell. It was always done this way. It made sense, all kinds of sense.

  The payload of a starship was small and its operating lifetime was more than a man’s lifetime. A reasonably safe life-support system for one man occupied an unreasonably high proportion of the payload. The rest must go for biological package probes. A crew of more than one was out of the question.

  A good, capable, loyal citizen was not likely to be enough of a loner. In any case, why send a citizen? The times would change drastically before a seeder ramship could return. The State itself might change beyond recognition. A returning rammer must adjust to a whole new culture. There was no way to tell in advance what it might be like.

  Why not pick a man who had already chosen to adjust to a new culture? A man whose own culture was already two centuries dead when the trip started?

  And a man who already owed the State his life.

  The RNA was most effective. Corbell stopped wondering about Pierce’s dispassionately possessive attitude. He began to think of himself as property being programmed for a purpose.

  And he learned. He skimmed microtaped texts as if they were already familiar. The process was heady. He became convinced that he could rebuild a seeder ramship with his bare hands, given the parts. He had loved figures all his life, but abstract math had been beyond him until now. Field theory, monopole field equations, circuitry design. When to suspect the presence of a gravitational point source…how to locate it, use it, avoid it.

  The teaching chair was his life. The rest of his time—exercise, dinner, sleep—seemed vague, uninteresting.

  He exercised with about twenty others in a room too small for the purpose. Like Corbell, the others were lean and stringy, in sharp contrast to the brawny wedge-shaped men who were their guards. They followed the lead of a guard, running in place because there was no room for real running, forming in precise rows for scissors jumps, push-ups, sit-ups.

  After fourteen hours in a teaching chair Corbell usually enjoyed the jumping about. He followed orders. And he wondered about the stick in a holster at each guard’s waist. It looked like a cop’s baton. It might have been just that—except for the hole in one end. Corbell never tried to find out.

  Sometimes he saw Pierce during the exercise periods. Pierce and the men who tended the teaching chairs were of a third type: well-fed, in adequate condition, but just on the verge of being overweight. Corbell thought of them as Olde American types.

  From Pierce he learned something of the other professions open to a revived corpsicle/reprogrammed criminal. Stoop labor: intensive hand cultivation of crops. Body servants. Handicrafts. Any easily taught repetitive work. And the hours! The corpsicles were expected to work fourteen hours a day. And the crowding!

  Not that his own situation was much different. Fourteen hours to study, an hour of heavy exercise, an hour to eat, and eight hours to sleep in a dorm that was two solid walls of people.

  “Time to work, time to eat, time to sleep! Elbow-to-elbow every minute! The poor bastards,” he said to Pierce. “What kind of a life is that?”

  “It lets them repay their debt to the State as quickly as possible. Be reasonable, Corbell. What would a corpsicle do with his off hours? He has no social life. He has to learn one by observing citizens. Many forms of felon’s labor involve proximity to citizens.”

  “So they can look up at their betters while they work? That’s no way to learn. It would take…I get the feeling we’re talking about decades of this kind of thing.”

  “Thirty years’ labor generally earns a man his citizenship. That gets him a right to work, which then gets him a guaranteed base income he can use to buy education shots and tapes. And the medical benefits are impressive. We live longer than you used to, Corbell.”

  “Meanwhile it’s slave labor. Anyway, none of this applies to me—”

  “No, of course not. Corbell, you’re wrong to call it slave labor. A slave can’t quit. You can change jobs anytime you like. There’s a clear freedom of choice.”

  Corbell shivered. “Any slave can commit suicide.”

  “Suicide, my ass,” the checker said distinctly. If he had anything that could be called an accent it lay in the precision of his pronunciation. “Jerome Corbell is dead. I could have given you his intact skeleton for a souvenir.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Corbell saw himself tenderly polishing his own white bones. But where could he have kept such a thing? In his bunk?

  “Well, then. You’re a brain-wiped criminal, justly brain-wiped, I might add. Your crime has cost you your citizenship, but you still have the right to change professions. You need only ask for another—um, course of rehabilitation. What slave can change jobs at will?”

  “It would feel like dying.”

  “Nonsense. You go to sleep, only that. When you wake up you’ve got a different set of memories.”

  The subject was an unpleasant one. Corbell avoided it from then on. But he could not avoid talking to the checker. Pierce was the only man in the world he could talk to. On the days Pierce failed to show up he felt angry, frustrated.

  Once he asked about gravitational point sources. “My time didn’t know about those.”

  “Yes, it did. Neutron stars and black holes. You had a number of pulsars located by 1970, and the mathematics to describe how a pulsar decays. The thing to watch for is a decayed pulsar directly in your path. Don’t worry about black holes. There are none near your course.”

  “Okay…”

  Pierce regarded him in some amusement. “You really don’t know much about your own time, do you?”

  “Come on, I was an architect. What would I know about astrophysics? We didn’t have your learning techniques.” Which reminded him of something. “Pierce, you said you learned English with RNA injections. Where does the RNA come from?”

  Pierce smiled and walked away.

  He had little time to remember. For that he was almost grateful. But very occasionally, lying wakeful in his bunk, listening to the shshsh of a thousand people breathing and the different sounds from the loving bunks, he would remember…someone. It didn’t matter who.

&nbs
p; At first it had been Mirabelle, always Mirabelle. Mirabelle at the tiller as they sailed out of San Pedro Harbor: tanned, square face, laughing mouth, extravagantly large dark glasses. Mirabelle, older and marked by months of strain, saying good-bye at his…funeral. Mirabelle on their honeymoon. In twenty-two years they had grown together like two touching limbs of a tree.

  But now he thought of her, when he thought of her, as two hundred years dead.

  And his niece was dead, though he and Mirabelle had barely made it to her confirmation; the pains had been getting bad then. And his daughter Ann. And all three of his grandchildren: just infants they had been! It didn’t matter who it was that floated up into his mind. Everyone was dead. Everyone but him.

  Corbell did not want to die. He was disgustingly healthy and twenty years younger than he had been at death. He found his rammer education continually fascinating. If only they would stop treating him like property…

  Corbell had been in the army, but that was twenty years ago. Make that two hundred and forty. He had learned to take orders, but never to like it. What had galled him then was the basic assumption of his inferiority. But no army officer in Corbell’s experience had believed in Corbell’s inferiority as completely as did Pierce and Pierce’s guards.

  The checker never repeated a command, never seemed even to consider that Corbell might refuse. If Corbell refused, even once, he knew what would happen. Pierce knew that he knew. The atmosphere better fitted a death camp than an army.

  They must think I’m a zombie.

  Corbell was careful not to pursue the thought. He was a corpse brought back to life—but not all the way. What did they do with the skeleton? Cremate it?

  The life was not pleasant. His last-class citizenship was galling. There was nobody to talk to—nobody but Pierce, whom he was learning to hate. He was hungry much of the time. The single daily meal filled his belly, but it would not stay full. No wonder he had wakened so lean.

  More and more he lived in the teaching chair. In the teaching chair he was a rammer. His impotence was changed to omnipotence. Starman! Riding the fire that feeds the suns, scooping fuel from interstellar space itself, spreading electromagnetic fields like wings hundreds of miles out…

  Two weeks after the State had wakened him from the dead, Corbell was given his course.

  He relaxed in a chair that was not quite a contour couch. RNA solution dripped into him. He no longer noticed the needle. The teaching screen held a map of his course, in green lines in three-space. Corbell had stopped wondering how the three-dimensional effect was achieved.

  The scale was shrinking as he watched.

  Two tiny blobs, and a glowing ball surrounded by a faintly glowing corona. This part of the course he already knew. A linear accelerator would launch him from the Moon, boost him to Bussard ramjet speeds and hurl him at the sun. Solar gravity would increase his speed while his electromagnetic fields caught and burned the solar wind itself. Then out, still accelerating…

  In the teaching screen the scale shrank horrendously. The distances between stars were awesome, terrifying. Van Maanan’s Star was twelve light-years away.

  He would begin deceleration a bit past the midpoint. The matching would be tricky. He must slow enough to release the biological package probe—but not enough to drop him below ram speeds. In addition he must use the mass of Van Maanan’s Star for a course change. There was no room for error here.

  Then on to the next target, which was even further away. Corbell watched…and he absorbed…and a part of him seemed to have known everything all along even while another part was gasping at the distances. Ten stars, all yellow dwarfs of the Sol type, an average of fifteen light-years apart—though he would cross one gap of fifty-two light-years. He would almost touch lightspeed on that one. Oddly enough, the Bussard ramjet effect would improve at such speeds. He could take advantage of the greater hydrogen flux to pull the fields closer to the ship, to intensify them.

  Ten stars in a closed path, a badly bent and battered ring leading him back to the solar system and Earth. He would benefit from the time he spent near lightspeed. Though three hundred years would have passed on Earth, Corbell would only have lived through two hundred years of ship’s time—which still implied some kind of suspended-animation technique.

  It didn’t hit him the first time through, nor the second; but repetition had been built into the teaching program. It didn’t hit him until he was on his way to the exercise room.

  Three hundred years?

  Three hundred years!

  III

  It wasn’t night, not really. Outside it must be mid-afternoon. Indoors, the dorm was always coolly lit, barely bright enough to read by if there had been books. There were no windows.

  Corbell should have been asleep. He suffered every minute he spent gazing out into the dorm. Most of the others were asleep, but a couple made noisy love on one of the loving bunks. A few men lay on their backs with their eyes open. Two women talked in low voices. Corbell didn’t know the language. He had been unable to find anyone who spoke English.

  Corbell was desperately homesick.

  The first few days had been the worst.

  He had stopped noticing the smell. If he thought of it, he could sniff the traces of billions of human beings. Otherwise the odor was part of the background noise.

  But the loving bunks bothered him. When they were in use he watched. When he forced himself not to watch he listened. He couldn’t help himself. But he had turned down two sign-language invitations from a small brunette with straggly hair and a pretty, elfin face. Make love in public? He couldn’t.

  He could avoid using the loving bunks, but not the exposed toilets. That was embarrassing. The first time he was able to force himself only by staring rigidly at his feet. When he pulled on his jumper and looked up, a number of sleepers were watching him in obvious amusement. The reason might have been his self-consciousness or the way he dropped his jumper around his ankles, or he may have been out of line. A pecking order determined who might use the toilets before whom. He still hadn’t figured out the details.

  Corbell wanted to go home.

  The idea was unreasonable. His home was gone and he would have gone with it if it weren’t for the corpsicle crypts. But reason was of no use in this instance. He wanted to go home. Home to Mirabelle. Home to anywhere: Rome, San Francisco, Kansas City, Brasilia—he had lived in all those places, all different, but all home. Corbell had been at home anywhere—but he was not at home here and never would be.

  Now they would take here away from him. Even this world of four rooms and two roofs, elbow-to-elbow people and utter slavery, this world which they would not even show him, would have vanished when he returned from the stars.

  Corbell rolled over and buried his face in his arms. If he didn’t sleep he would be groggy tomorrow. He might miss something essential. They had never tested his training. Not yet, not yet…

  He dozed.

  He came awake suddenly, already up on one elbow, groping for some elusive thought.

  Ah.

  Why haven’t I been wondering about the biological package probes?

  A moment later he did wonder.

  What are the biological package probes?

  But the wonder was that he had never wondered.

  He knew what and where they were: heavy fat cylinders arranged around the waist of the starship’s hull. Ten of these, each weighing almost as much as Corbell’s own life-support system. He knew their mass distribution. He knew the clamp system that held them to the hull and he could operate and repair the clamps under various extremes of damage. He almost knew where the probes went when released; it was just on the tip of his tongue…which meant that he had had the RNA shot but had not yet seen the instructions.

  But he didn’t know what the probes were for.

  It was like that with the ship, he realized. He knew everything there was to know about a seeder ramship, but nothing at all about the other kinds of starships or i
nterplanetary travel or ground-to-orbit vehicles. He knew that he would be launched by linear accelerator from the Moon. He knew the design of the accelerator—he could see it, three hundred and fifty kilometers of rings standing on end in a line across a level lunar mare. He knew what to do if anything went wrong during launch. And that was all he knew about the Moon and lunar installations and lunar conquest, barring what he had watched on television over two hundred years ago.

  What was going on out there? In the two weeks since his arrival (awakening? creation?) he had seen four rooms and two rooftops, glimpsed a rectilinear cityscape from a bridge, and talked to one man who was not interested in telling him anything. What had happened in two hundred years?

  These men and women who slept around him. Who were they? Why were they here? He didn’t even know if they were corpsicle or contemporary. Contemporary, probably; not one of them was self-conscious about the facilities.

  Corbell had raised buildings in all sorts of strange places, but he had never jumped blind. He had always brushed up on the language and studied the customs before he went. Here he had no handle, nowhere to start. He was lost.

  Oh, for someone to talk to!

  He was learning in enormous gulps, taking in volumes of knowledge so broad that he hadn’t realized how rigidly bounded they were. The State was teaching him only what he needed to know. Every bit of information was aimed straight at his profession.

  Rammer.

  He could see the reasoning. He would be gone for several centuries. Why should the State teach him anything at all about today’s technology, customs, politics? There would be trouble enough when he came back, if he—come to that, who had taught him to call the government the State? How had he come to think of the State as all-powerful? He knew nothing of its power and extent.

  It must be the RNA training. With data came attitudes below the conscious level, where he couldn’t get at them.