A World Out of Time Page 7

  “I guess not. I just didn’t…didn’t see it. Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER THREE:

  The House Divided

  I

  He remembered posters. He had bought them in a little shop in Kansas City and taped them to his bedroom wall. They had been there for a year before he tired of them: blown-up photographs of the planet Earth, taken from close orbit and from behind the Moon, by Apollo astronauts.

  In his memory Earth was all the shades of blue, frosted with masses and clots of white cloud. Even the land was blue tinged with other colors, except where a rare red-brown patch of desert showed through.

  Jerome Branch Corbell, bald and wrinkled and very thin from his time in the cold-sleep tank, hovered in black space in a contour couch surrounded by an arc of lighted dials and gauges. Clouds and landscape raced past three hundred miles below.

  It could have been Earth. Even the shapes of seas and continents seemed vaguely familiar. There was far too much reddish-brown in the mix, but after all…three million years.

  He tried his voice. It was husky, rusty with long sleep, and pitched too high. “Is it Earth?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peerssa.

  “Peerssa, that’s silly. Is this the solar system or isn’t it?”

  “Try not to get excited, Corbell. I don’t know if this is Sol system. The data conflict. This is the system from which came messages. I followed them to their source.”

  “Let’s hear these messages. Why didn’t you wake me earlier, before we were committed?”

  “We were committed before I found the anomalies. I waited until we had achieved orbit before I woke you. I was afraid you might die of the shock. You can’t tolerate another spell in cold sleep, Corbell. You would not live to reach another star.”

  Corbell nodded. This last of his thawings was the worst yet. It was like waking with Asian flu and a brandy hangover. He felt sick and ugly. Less than ten years ago, by the evidence of his memory, the State had brought a young man to life. Ten years awake, plus a century and a half in cold sleep, had left of the young man a withered stack of bones. He had grown mortally afraid of senility…but his thoughts seemed clear.

  “Let’s deal with the messages,” he said.

  What appeared on the Womb Room walls was not quite reality. Peerssa controlled those images; Peerssa projected what his senses picked up from the world below. Now Peerssa made a window appear in what had been deep space. Through the window Corbell saw two translucent cubes, slowly rotating. Within the cubes were shapes and figures formed in much tinier cubes—about a hundred per side.

  “A laser was beamed at me while I was still thirty-two light-years distant from this star system,” said Peerssa. “There were two separate messages, two sequences of dots and gaps, each totaling one million, thirty thousand, three hundred and one bits each. One hundred and one cubed. One hundred and one is prime. There is some ambiguity, of course; I may have reversed left for right.”

  It was not the best way to make pictures, but Corbell could recognize a man and a woman holding hands…the same figures in each cube. There were polygons of assorted sizes, in rows, and rough spheres. Peerssa created a red arrow for a pointer. “In your opinion, are these intended to represent human beings?”

  “Sure.”

  He indicated the similar figures in the right-hand cube. “And these?”

  “Yes.”

  The arrow returned to the left-hand cube. “This was the first message to arrive. These figures may represent atoms, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. Do you agree?”

  “For all of me they do. Why would they be there?”

  “They form the basis for protoplasmic chemistry. This bigger row, might it be a solar system? The large, nearly spherical hollow object would be the sun. The symbols inside may be four hydrogen atoms next to a helium atom. The row of smaller polygons would be planets.”

  “All right. Is it the solar system?”

  “Not unless the solar system has changed radically. What about this second cube? Why are these human figures different from the others?”

  Corbell looked from one to the other. In the first message the figures were solid, except for hollow bubbles to mark the lungs. The cubistic figures in the second group were hollow, and there was an X of small cubes running through them. “I think I see. They’re crossed out in that second message. And those rows of polygons look like eight more stellar systems, suns and planets, drawn smaller. Some double suns.”

  “What message do you see?”

  “Eight star systems, two with double stars. Crossed-out hollow people. All right, read it this way. ‘To whom it may concern. We are human, we fit the given model, our chemistry is based on carbon and water. We come from a star system that looks like this. The similar people who come from these eight other systems look human, but they aren’t. Accept no substitutes.’ Does that sound right?”

  “I agree.”

  “Well, it’s a very human thing to say. I could see your precious State sending a message like that, except…except the State didn’t have any natural enemies. Everyone belonged to the State. So this is the message you followed home?”

  “Yes. I felt that human beings must have sent it, and I was not sure of finding Sol otherwise.”

  “How did they find us? Whoever sent that beam would have had to find us a couple of hundred light-years out. We were still moving at near lightspeed, weren’t we?”

  “The exhaust from a ramship would be most conspicuous to the right instruments. But the returning beam was very powerful. Sending it required strong motives.”

  Corbell smiled in evil satisfaction. “The strongest. Heresy. Your State came apart, Peerssa. The colonies revolted. The State around Sol must have wanted to warn any returning starships. Don’t stop at the colonies.”

  “The State was a water-monopoly empire, as you told me. Such entities do not die by internal revolution. They die only by conquest by an outside force.”

  Corbell laughed. He didn’t like the sound: a high-pitched cackle. “I’m not a history teacher, Peerssa, you idiot! I’m an architect! It was a friend who told me about water-control empires, and he’s one of—he was one of these guys who say everything in absolutes because it gets more attention. I never knew how seriously to take him.”

  “But you believe him.”

  “Oh, a little, but what empire ever lasted seventy thousand years? If you hadn’t taken me so damn seriously, we’d have been home…two million, nine hundred and thirty thousand years ago.” Corbell was studying the pattern of the sun and planets in the left-hand cube. “We’re in a system that matches that picture?”

  “Yes.”

  There was the sun, then three small objects, then a large object with a conspicuous lump on it (a large moon?), then three medium sized objects. “The Earth isn’t there. Otherwise—”

  “Do you see the body now rising beyond this world’s horizon?”

  For a split second Corbell thought it was the Moon rising above the world’s hazy edge. It was half full. It showed bigger than the Moon. It glowed in white and orange-white bands along the lighted side. What should have been the dark side glowed just at red heat.

  Peerssa said, “This oxygen-atmosphere world we circle is in orbit about that larger body. The primary is a massive gas giant, hotter than theory would account for. There are other anomalies in this system.”

  “We’re in orbit about a moon of that thing?”

  “I said that, yes.”

  Corbell’s head whirled. “All right, Peerssa. Show me.”

  Peerssa showed him, with diagrams and with photographs taken during Don Juan’s fiery fall through the system.

  The sun was a young red giant, swollen and hot: of about one solar mass, but with a diameter of ten million kilometers.

  Peerssa showed him the inner planet next to a map of Mercury. Granted the two planets resembled each other, but this system’s version was scarred and gouged in a different pattern.

  The seco
nd planet had considerably less atmosphere than Venus, and what there was included some oxygen. But it was the right size and in the right place.

  There was nothing in Earth’s orbit.

  The third planet remarkably resembled Mars, but for the lack of moons and the great featureless mare marring one face. “There are curious parallels all through the system,” Peerssa remarked.

  Corbell’s reaction to these revelations was a slowly mounting anger. Had he come home or hadn’t he? “Right. Curious. What about Earth?”

  A moon much like the Earth circled this fourth planet…a world as massive as Jupiter, but far hotter than a world at this distance from its primary ought to be, even given the hotter sun. It was pouring out infrared radiation in enormous quantities, and more dangerous radiation too.

  “And the other moons? Their orbits would be funny anyway; they’d have been altered when the Earth was moved into place, if that’s Earth.”

  “I thought of that. But I can find no moon of this world analogous to Ganymede, the biggest of the Jovian moons.”

  “All right, go on.”

  The fifth planet was an unknown, an ice giant in a drunken skewed orbit that took it from just inside the Jovian’s orbit almost out to the sixth planet’s. It was near the Jovian now, naked-eye visible from Don Juan. Peerssa showed him a close view of a marble banded in pale blues.

  “This system may be much younger than Sol system,” Peerssa said. “The skewed orbit of the fifth planet has not had time to become circular via tidal effects. The Jovian is hot because it only recently condensed from the planetary nebula. The star has not yet settled down to steady burning.”

  “What about this Earthlike world? Could it have evolved that fast?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. And that third planet looked a lot like Mars. But not enough, dammit!”

  “Then observe the sixth.”

  The sixth planet—well, it looked like a target. Don Juan had crossed nearly over the North Pole. Nestled within banded white rings was the fainter banding of an ice-giant planet, in very pale blues and greens. The oval shadow of the planet lay across the rings, rendering the transparent inner ring invisible. The sharp-edged rift must be Cassini’s Divide, Corbell thought. He found other, lesser rifts probably caused by tides from smaller moons. “Saturn,” he said.

  “It resembles Saturn most remarkably. I went to some effort to take our course near this sixth planet. I tried to find discrepancies—”

  “That’s Saturn!”

  “But nothing else matches my memory!”

  “Somebody’s been mucking with the solar system. Three million years. A lot could have happened.”

  “The sun Sol could not have become a red giant in three million years. It is too young. Theory will not allow it. Theory does allow a similarity in the formation of planetary systems.”

  “That is Saturn. And that is Earth!”

  “Corbell, is it not possible that State citizens settled a moon of a Jovian world? Might they have recreated Saturn’s rings for nostalgia and the love of beauty? You tell me. Is the love of beauty that powerful?”

  It was a strange concept. It had its attractions, but…“No. It doesn’t hold up. They’d have put the rings around the Jovian for a better view. And why would they build another Mars?”

  “Why would the State destroy the topography of Mercury? What removed two-thirds of the atmosphere of Venus and changed its chemistry? Uranus is missing. Ganymede is missing: a body bigger than Mercury. A gas giant more massive than Neptune orbits nearer the sun in a skewed orbit.”

  “That hotter sun could have burned away part of Venus’s atmosphere. Mercury…hmmm.”

  “What changed the sun? How could the Earth have been moved at all? Corbell, I can’t decide!” There might have been agony in the computer’s voice. Indecision was bad for men, but men could live with it. A man’s memories could fade and grow blurred. But not Peerssa’s…

  “They moved the Earth because the sun got too hot,” Corbell speculated.

  “What do you imagine? Did the State moor huge rocket motors at the North Pole and fuel them with Venus’s atmosphere? The ocean would have flowed to cover the northern hemisphere! The Earth’s surface would have ripped everywhere, exposing magma!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe they had something besides rockets. But that was Mars you showed me, and that’s Saturn, and that’s Earth. There! Couldn’t that be the coast of Brazil?”

  “It does not match my memory.” With evident reluctance Peerssa added, “If other evidence were not considered, that shoreline could be the edge of the Brazilian continental shelf, altered by the shifting of tectonic plates.”

  “The ocean must have dropped. Maybe some megatons of water vapor got left behind when they moved the Earth.”

  “The State could not have moved the Earth. There would have been no need, because Sol was not an incipient red giant.”

  “Computer! You can’t go against your theories, can you? What if we were in the ergosphere of a black hole longer than we thought? We might have lost more than three million years. In tens of millions of years, could the sun be a red giant?”

  “Nonsense. We would never have found Sol at all.”

  That was the last straw, because it was true. Corbell was an uncomfortably old man with a cold-sleep hangover. “All right,” he said between his teeth, “you win the argument. Now, for purposes of discussion, we are going to assume that that planet is Earth. At long last we have come home to Earth. Now how do I get down?”

  It developed that Peerssa had that all figured out.

  II

  Corbell’s pressure suit looked clean and new. It was formfitting, with a bulging bulb of a helmet and a pointy-ended white spiral on the chest. He would not have been surprised to find it rotted with age. It had been waiting for nearly two hundred years, ship’s time.

  He went out the airlock with the suspicion that he was going to his death. He had never done this before…and in fact the suit held up better than he did. Panting, perspiring, with his pulse thundering irregularly in his ears, be maneuvered himself at the end of a tether and turned for a look at Don Juan.

  The silver finish had dulled. Corbell winced at the sight of a gaping hole in one of the probes. Peerssa had never mentioned a meteor strike. It could as easily have hit the life-support system.

  Four of the probes were missing.

  The biological package probes were what made Don Juan a seeder ramship. Each of the probes held a spectrum of algae with which to seed the unbreathable reducing atmosphere of some nearby Earthlike world, to turn the atmosphere into breathable air and the world into a potential colony. Of course they had never been used for that purpose. Deprived in detail of his civil rights, Corbell had stolen the ship and lit out for the galactic core.

  There had been ten probes mounted around Don Juan’s waist. Now there were six. “I ran the onboard hydrogen tank nearly empty,” Peerssa explained. “I had to use four of the thrust systems in the probes to make orbit around Earth. Afterward I put the probes in orbits as relay satellites. You will be able to call me from the surface, wherever you are.”

  “Good.”

  “How do you feel? Can you survive a re-entry?”

  “Not yet. I’m out of shape. Give me a month.”

  “You’ll have it. You’ll have exercise too. We must make ready one of the probes for your descent.”

  “I’m going down in one of those?”

  “They are designed to enter an atmosphere. Don Juan is not.”

  “I should have thought of that. I never did figure a safe way to get down. Aren’t you coming down yourself?”

  “Not unless you so order.”

  Small wonder if he sounded reluctant. It came to Corbell that Peerssa’s body was the ship. He would be a total paraplegic if he survived re-entry. Corbell said, “Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves on his death. Can I do less? After I’m down, living or dead, magnanimously I free you
from all orders previous or subsequent.”

  “Thank you, Corbell.”

  He had trained to work in a pressure suit, under orders from Pierce the checker. But he’d been suspended in a magnetic field, not in actual free-fall; and he had trained in a young body, long ago. The work was hard. On the second day he hurt everywhere. On the third he was back at work. He would stop only when Peerssa insisted.

  “We won’t try to build you a life-support system,” Peerssa told him. “We’ll put what you need in the capsule with you and fill the capsule with plastic foam. Your suit will be your life-support system.”

  But emptying the probe warhead involved moving large masses and manhandling the bulky cutting laser for hours at a time. The algae tanks and the machinery that served them had to be removed in inspection-hatch-sized pieces. Corbell dared not rip the hull. His life depended on its integrity.

  He needed long rest periods. He spent them in the Womb Room, watching films of Don Juan’s entry into what Peerssa now called (rightly or wrongly) the solar system.

  For a computer, Peerssa had been starkly ingenious. Corbell would not have thought of using the package probes as thrusters. He would not have looked for Earth as a big new moon of what Peerssa now called Jupiter—and Peerssa nearly hadn’t, either. Peerssa came that close to departing Sol with Corbell still in cold sleep, to search nearby systems for remnants of the State…

  Corbell probably would have died en route.

  Apparently the question of where they were no longer bothered Peerssa. It had only required Corbell’s order to stop his worrying about it. But at the time, Corbell gathered, Peerssa was frantic. He had used fuel he couldn’t spare to make close flybys past Saturn and Mercury.

  Now Corbell looked down at the Earth and yearned. “All the mistakes I made, and still I got here. The mistakes all canceled. If I hadn’t turned the receiver back on you couldn’t have beamed your personality into the computer. I’d have wrecked the ship trying to run all the way at one gravity. If I’d been right about the galactic core I’d have died of old age, that far from home. It’s like something led me back here.”