“That is what I should have appreciated…at once.”
“How could you?”
“The People demand the highest standards of a Responder…it is their right.”
“But…”
“Equal Gil, your memory is imperfect by our standards…but it may contain information which would enable me to make restitution to the People…for my failure…please permit me to touch you.”
Snook hesitated only briefly before stepping closer to Felleth. He inclined his head forward, and kept his eyes open while Felleth closed with him and their foreheads touched. The contact lasted only a second, then Felleth stepped back.
“Thank you,” Felleth said. “The evidence is valuable.”
“I didn’t feel anything—what evidence?”
“When you first heard of Thornton’s Planet…it was expected to pass through your world…but it missed by many planetary diameters…and the divergence from the predicted course…was attributed to observational error.”
“I do seem to remember something about…” Snook’s excitement increased. “That’s evidence, isn’t it? It shows there are other planets in your own system.”
“Not conclusive evidence.”
“It seems conclusive to me.”
“The only positive conclusion,” Felleth said, “is that I am unworthy of the People’s trust.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Snook almost shouted. “They owe you everything.”
The long slit of Felleth’s mouth rippled in an emotional signal which Snook could not interpret. “The People have different mental attributes To those of your race…but they are not superior, as you believe…we have successfully rid ourselves of the great destructive passions…but it is more difficult to eradicate the trivial and the petty…the fact that I am using the words indicates that I, too…” Felleth broke off from the painful manufacture of speech sounds, his pale eyes locked on Snook’s in an oddly human display of helplessness. Snook stared at him in silence, then ideas began to crystallise and dissolve far back in his consciousness.
“Felleth/ he said, “is there something you have to tell me?”
Each day passed like a month; each month like a year.
Snook found that the small island allocated to him was sufficient for his needs, provided he worked hard with the simple agricultural tools which had been supplied, and regularly culled the shallows for edible sea plants. He had no tobacco or alcohol—the processes of fermentation were not used on Avernus outside science laboratories—but he had learned to live without them. The Avernians themselves, he knew, sometimes inhaled the vapours released from the pods of certain marine plants, claiming they had the power to elevate the spirit and enrich the vision. In the beginning. Snook had experimented with the pods, but always with negative results, and had concluded that his metabolism was wrong. “It may be a universal law,” he had written on a scrap of paper, “that you can only get high at home.”
When he was not busy with the growing of food, Snook had enough work of other kinds with which to occupy his time. The island’s only house had to be kept in repair—especially the roof—and he also had to mend his own clothes and shoes. Heating was no problem, because the stone slabs of the floor grew warm at night, apparently spontaneously. Snook almost wished that the heating was of a more primitive nature—a log fire would have given him companionship of a kind. It would have been especially appreciated in the dark evenings when he had been incautious enough to start thinking of Prudence, and the lights of the other islands reminded him that the life of the planet was continuing without his aid.
There is no apartment so lonely, he recalled his own thought, as the one in which can be heard faint sounds of a party next door,
Being a prisoner on a small uninhabited island added little to the tribulations of being a prisoner in an alien universe, Snook had learned, even though the People had proved themselves much more human than he had expected. With Felleth as his sole model, he formed an idealised impression of the Avernians—the super-intelligent beings who were rebuilding their civilisation after one planet-wide disaster, and were stoically preparing themselves for the ultimate calamity.
It had come as a shock to him to discover that the race of reason-guided beings resented his presence on their world as a representative of a sister planet which was refusing them a helping hand. And he had been both saddened and angered to
learn that Felleth had been permanently censured for having failed, as the Avemians saw it, in his duty as a Responder. They had also criticised Felleth for his unilateral action in transferring Snook into their world.
“It is more difficult,” Felleth had said, on the first day, “to eradicate the trivial and the petty.”
These were things which Snook tried not to think about as he struggled with his own burden—that of enduring from one day to the next, then repeating the process over and over again. Living in a world where nobody wanted to kill him was one thing; but the reverse of the coin was that he existed in a universe in which nobody had given him life and where there was no prospect of his passing life on to others. The thoughts were painful for a man with his particular history, for a human neutrino, but then he had realised his mistake the day he had walked into a hotel in Kisumu and had seen…
At that point in the evening Snook always went through the ritual of taking off his wrist watch and placing it on the orange-dyed crate beside his bed. And—if he had worked hard enough that day—he was blessed with sleep, sometimes with dreams.
Each day passed like a month; each month like a year.
Chapter Fifteen
Twelve months had passed, by Snook’s reckoning, on the morning he received the wordless message that the Avernians had confirmed the existence of other worlds in their own planetary system.
His early experiences on Avernus had shown that his facility for mind-to-mind communication was not much greater than it had been when he had lived on Earth and occasionally had snared the thoughts of other men. Ironically, he had been able to achieve full congruency of self with
Felleth only when they had inhabited different universes and had been able to merge their brains in the same volume of space. During Felleth’s regular visits to the island he had tried to extend his ability to receive data, but progress had been uncertain if it existed at all.
On this special day, however, he could not fail to be aware of the mood of the People. The emotions of joy and triumph, amplified millions of times, were spangled across the islands like the gold of the sunsets they never saw.
“Not bad,” Snook said aloud, looking up from his digging. “From complete ignorance of the skies to fully-fledged radio astronomy in one year. Not bad.”
He returned his attention to the work in hand, but kept scanning the waterways in the hope that Felleth would pay him a special visit to bring details of the new knowledge. The masses and orbital elements of the other worlds would determine the distance by which Thornton’s Planet would miss Avernus on its next pass, and Snook felt a proprietory interest in the information. He was incapable of understanding the relevant sets of equations, but they had affected the whole course of his life, and he wanted to know whether Avernus was destined for another disaster, of greater or lesser proportions, or if it had been granted a total reprieve. It also occurred to him that the People might regard his presence among them less distasteful were they assured of their futures once more.
Should that prove to be the case, he would ask for the right to travel as freely as he had once done on Earth. Felleth had told him there were larger land masses to the west and east, and exploring them—perhaps circumnavigating the watery globe—might give his life a semblance of purpose.