Chapter 4

PICTURE Leif’s longboat bobbing in the swells outside Ambrose Light, while the twentieth-century liners steam past; a tiny, ancient thing, related to the new giants only as the Eohippus resembles the horse.

The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge); its jets were absurdly tiny, clearly incapable of blasting away from planetary gravity; its entire hull length was unbroken and sheer (did the pilot dare fly blind?).

The coupling connections were being rigged between the ships. “Come aboard,” said Haarland, spryly wriggling through the passage. Ross, swallowing his astonishment, followed.

The ship was tiny indeed. When Ross and Haarland, clutching handholds, were drifting weightlessly in its central control cabin, they very nearly filled it. There was one other cabin, Ross saw; and the two compartments accounted for a good nine-tenths of the cubage of the ship. Where that left space for the combustion chambers and the fuel tanks, the crew quarters, and the cargo holds, Ross could not imagine. He said: “All right, Mr. Haarland. Talk.”

Haarland grinned toothily, his expression eerie in the flickering violet light that issued from a gutter around the cabin’s wall.

“This is a spaceship, Ross. It’s a pretty old one—fourteen hundred years, give or take a little. It’s not much to look at, compared with the up-to-date models you’re used to, but it’s got a few features that you won’t find on the new ones. For one thing, Ross, it doesn’t use rockets.” He hesitated. “Ask me what it does use,” he admitted, “and I can’t tell you. I know the name, because I read it: nucleophoretic drive. What nucleophoresis is and how it works, I can’t say. They call it the Wesley Effect, and the tech manual says something about squared miles of acceleration. Does that mean anything to you? No. How could it? But it works, Ross. It works well enough so that this little ship will get you where you’re going very quickly. The stars, Ross—it will take you to the stars. Faster than light. What the top speed is I have no idea; but there is a ship’s log here, too. And it has a three-month entry—three months, Ross!—in which this little ship explored the solar systems of fourteen stars.”

Wide-eyed, Ross held motionless. Haarland paused. “Fourteen hundred years,” he repeated. “Fourteen hundred years this ship has been floating out here. And for all that time, the longliners have been crawling from star to star, while little hidden ships like this one could have carried a thousand times as much goods a million times faster. Maybe the time has come to get the ships out of hiding. I don’t know. I want to find out; I want you to find out for me. I’ll be specific, Ross. I need a pilot. I’m too old, and Marconi turned it down. Someone has to go out there——” he gestured to the blind hull and the unseen stars beyond—”and find out why nine planets are out of communication. Will you do it?”

Ross opened his mouth to speak, and a thousand questions competed for utterance. But what he said, barely aloud, was only: “Yes.”

The far-off stars—more than a thousand million of them in our galaxy alone. By far the greatest number of them drifted alone through space, or with only a stellar companion as utterly unlivable by reason of heat and crushing gravity as themselves. Fewer than one in a million had a family of planets, and most even of those could never become a home for human life.

But out of a thousand million, any fraction may be a very large number, and the number of habitable planets was in the hundreds.

Ross had seen the master charts of the inhabited universe often enough to recognize the names as Haarland mentioned them: Tau Ceti II, Earth, the eight inhabitable worlds of Capella. But to realize that this ship—this ship!—had touched down on each of them, and on a hundred more, was beyond astonishment; it was a dream thing, impossible but unquestioned.

Through Haarland’s burning, old eyes, Ross looked back through fourteen centuries, to the time when this ship was a scout vessel for a colonizing colossus. The lumbering giant drove slowly through space on its one-way trip from the planet that built it—was it semi-mythical Earth? The records were not clear—while the tiny scout probed each star and solar system as it drew within range. While the mother ship was covering a few hundred million miles, the scout might flash across parsecs to scan half a dozen worlds. And when the scout came back with word of a planet where humans could survive, they christened it with the name of the scout’s pilot, and the chartroom labored, and the ship’s officers gave orders, and the giant’s nose swerved through a half a degree and began its long, slow deceleration.

“Why slow?” Ross demanded. “Why not use the faster-than-light drive for the big ships?”

Haarland grimaced. “I’ve got to answer that one for you sooner or later,” he said, “but let me make it later. Anyway, that’s what this ship was: a faster-than-light scout ship for a real longliner. What happened to the longliner the records don’t show; my guess is the colonists cannibalized it to get a start in constructing homes for themselves. But the scout ship was exempted. The captain of the expedition had it put in an orbit out here, and left alone. It’s been used a little bit, now and then—my great-grandfather’s father went clear to 40 Eridani when my great-grandfather was a little boy, but by and large it has been left alone. It had to be, Ross. For one thing, it’s dangerous to the man who pilots it. For another, it’s dangerous to—the Galaxy.”

Haarland’s view was anthropomorphic; the danger was not to the immense and uncaring galaxy, but to the sparse fester of life that called itself humanity.

When the race abandoned Earth, it was a gesture of revulsion. Behind them they left a planet that had decimated itself in wars; ahead lay a cosmos that, in all their searches, had revealed no truly sentient life.

Earth was a crippled world, the victim of its playing with nuclear fission and fusion. But the techniques that gave them a faster-than-light drive gave them as well a weapon that threatened solar systems, not cities; that could detonate a sun as readily as uranium could destroy a building. The child with his forbidden matches was now sitting atop a munitions dump; the danger was no longer a seared hand or blinded eye, but annihilation.

And the decision had been made: secrecy. By what condign struggles the secrecy had been enforced, the secrecy itself concealed. But it had worked. Once the radiating colonizers had reached their goals, the nucleophoretic effect had been obliterated from their records and, except for a single man on each planet, from their minds.

Why the single man? Why not bury it entirely?

Haarland said slowly, “There was always the chance that something would go wrong, you see. And—it has.”

Ross said hesitantly, “You mean the nine planets that have gone out of communication?”

Haarland nodded. He hesitated. “Do you understand it now?” he asked.

Ross shook his head dizzily. “I’m trying,” he said. “This little ship—it travels faster than light. It has been circling out here—how long? Fourteen hundred years? And you kept it secret—you and your ancestors before you because you were afraid it might be used in war?” He was frowning.

“Not ‘afraid’ it would be used,” Haarland corrected gently. “We knew it would be used.”

Ross grimaced. “Well, why tell me about it now? Do you expect me to keep it secret all the rest of my life?”

“I think you would,” Haarland said soberly.

“But suppose I didn’t? Suppose I blabbed all over the Galaxy, and it was used in war?”

Haarland’s face was suddenly, queerly gray. He said, almost to himself, “It seems that there are things worse than war.” Abruptly he smiled. “Let’s find Ma.”

They returned through the coupling and searched the longliner for the old woman. A Sonny told them, “Ma usually hangs around the meter room. Likes to see them blinking.” And there they found her.

“Hello, Haarland,” she smiled, flashing her superb teeth. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Perfect, Ma. I want to talk to you under the seal.”

She looked at Ross. “Him?” she asked.

“I vouch for him,” Haarland said gravely. “Wesley.”

She answered, “The limiting velocity is C.”

“But C^2 is not a velocity,” Haarland said. He turned to Ross. “Sorry to make a mystery,” he apologized. “It’s a recognition formula. It identifies one member of what we call the Wesley families, or its messenger, to another. And these people are messengers. They were dispatched a couple of centuries ago by a Wesley family whose ship, for some reason, no longer could be used. Why?—I don’t know why. Try your luck, maybe you can figure it out. Ma, tell us the history again.”

She knitted her brows and began to chant slowly:

“In great-grandfather’s time the target was Clyde,

Rocketry firm and ores on the side.