Chapter 4

The next morning, Roger Bond told him all about the dance.

“It was the dullest thing you could imagine. Same old people, same dusty old dances. Couple of people asked me where you were, but I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Good.”

They wandered on through the heap of old, ugly buildings that composed the Starmen’s Enclave. “It’s just as well they think I was sick,” Alan said. “I was, anyway. Sick from boredom.”

He and Roger sat down carefully on the edge of a crumbling stone bench. They said nothing, just looking around. After a long while Alan broke the uncomfortable silence.

“You know what this place is? It’s a ghetto. A self-imposed ghetto. Starmen are scared silly of going out into the Earther cities, so they keep themselves penned up in this filthy place instead.”

“This place is really old. I wonder how far back those run-down buildings date.”

“Thousand years, maybe more. No one ever bothers to build new ones. What for? The starmen don’t mind living in the old ones.”

“I almost wish the medical clearance hadn’t come through after all,” said Roger moodily.

“How so?”

“Then we’d be still quarantined up there. We wouldn’t be able to come down and get another look at the kind of place this really is.”

“I don’t know which is worse--to be cooped up in quarantine or to go wandering around a dismal hole like the Enclave.” Alan stood up, stretched, and took a deep breath. “Phew! Get a lungful of that sweet, fresh, allegedly pure Terran air! I’ll take ship atmosphere, stale as it is, any time over this smoggy soup.”

“I’ll go along with that. Say, look--a strange face!”

Alan turned and saw a young starman of about his own age coming toward them. He wore a red uniform with gray trim instead of the orange-and-blue of the Valhalla.

“Welcome, newcomers. I suppose you’re from that ship that just put down? The Valhalla?”

“Right. Name’s Alan Donnell, and this is Roger Bond. Yours?”

“I’m Kevin Quantrell.” He was short and stocky, heavily tanned, with a square jaw and a confident look about him. “I’m out of the starship Encounter, just back from the Aldebaran system. Been in the Enclave two weeks now--with a lot more ahead of me.”

Alan whistled. “Aldebaran! That’s--let’s see, 109 years round trip. You must be a real old-timer, Quantrell!”

“I was born in 3403. Makes me 473 years old, Earthtime. But I’m actually only seventeen and a half. Right before Aldebaran we made a hop to Capella, and that used up 85 years more in a hurry.”

“You’ve got me by 170 years,” Alan said. “But I’m only seventeen myself.”

Quantrell grinned cockily. “It’s a good thing some guy thought up this Tally system of chalking up every real day you live through. Otherwise we’d be up to here in confusion all the time.”

He leaned boredly against the wall of a rickety building which once had proudly borne the chrome-steel casing characteristic of early 27th Century architecture, but whose outer surface was now brown and scaly from rust. “What do you think of our little paradise?” Quantrell asked sarcastically. “Certainly puts the Earther cities to shame.”

He pointed out across the river, where the tall, glistening buildings of the adjoining Earther city shone in the morning sunlight.

“Have you ever been out there?” Alan asked.

“No,” Quantrell said in a tight voice. “But if this keeps up much longer--” He clenched and unclenched his fists impatiently.

“What’s the trouble?”

“It’s my ship--the Encounter. We were outspace over a century, you know, and when we got back the inspection teams found so many things wrong with the ship that she needs just about a complete overhauling. They’ve been working her over for the last two weeks, and the way it looks it’ll be another couple of weeks before she’s ready to go. And I don’t know how much longer I can stand being penned up in this Enclave.”

“That’s exactly how your brother--” Roger started to say, and stopped. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Alan said.

Quantrell cocked an eye. “What’s that?”

“My brother. I had a twin, but he got restless and jumped ship last time we were down. He got left behind at blastoff time.”

Quantrell nodded understandingly. “Too bad. But I know what he was up against--and I envy the lucky so-and-so. I wish I had the guts to just walk out like that. Every day that goes by in this place, I say I’m going over the hill next day. But I never do, somehow. I just sit here and wait.”

Alan glanced down the quiet sun-warmed street. Here and there a couple of venerable-looking starmen were sitting, swapping stories of their youth--a youth that had been a thousand years before. The Enclave, Alan thought, is a place for old men.

They walked on for a while until the buzzing neon signs of a feelie theater were visible. “I’m going in,” Roger said. “This place is starting to depress me. You?”

Alan shot a glance at Quantrell, who made a face and shook his head. “I guess I’ll skip it,” Alan said. “Not just now.”

“Count me out too,” Quantrell said.

Roger looked sourly from one to the other, and shrugged. “I think I’ll go all the same. I’m in the mood for a good show. See you around, Alan.”

After Roger left them, Alan and Quantrell walked on through the Enclave together. Alan wondered whether it wasn’t a good idea to have gone to the feelie with Roger after all; the Enclave was starting to depress him, too, and those three-dimensional shows had a way of taking your mind off things.

But he was curious about Quantrell. It wasn’t often he had a chance to talk with someone his own age from another ship. “You know,” he said, “we starmen lead an empty life. You don’t get to realize it until you come to the Enclave.”

“I decided that a long time ago,” Quantrell said.

Alan spread his hands. “What do we do? We dash back and forth through space, and we huddle here in the Enclave. And we don’t like either one or the other, but we fool ourselves into liking them. When we’re in space we can’t wait to get to the Enclave, and once we’re down here we can’t wait to get back. Some life.”

“Got any suggestions? Some way of fixing things up for us without queering interstellar commerce?”

“Yes,” Alan snapped. “I do have a suggestion. Hyperspace drive!”

Quantrell laughed harshly. “Of all the cockeyed--”

“There you are,” Alan said angrily. “First thing you do is laugh. A spacewarp drive is just some hairbrained scheme to you. But haven’t you ever considered that Earth’s scientists won’t bother developing such a drive for us if we don’t care ourselves? They’re just as happy the way things are. They don’t have to worry about the Fitzgerald Contraction.”

“But there’s been steady research on a hyperdrive, hasn’t there? Ever since Cavour, I thought.”

“On and off. But they don’t take it very seriously and they don’t get anywhere with it. If they’d really put some men to work they’d find it--and then there wouldn’t be any more Enclaves or any Fitzgerald Contraction, and we starmen could live normal lives.”

“And your brother--he wouldn’t be cut off from his people the way he is--”