«I can’t think,» he said. «Let’s sleep on it.»
«Okay,» said Forester.
«A drink?»
Forester shook his head.
He’s glad to drop it, too, thought Lodge. He’s glad to get away.
Like a hurt animal, he thought. All of us, like hurt animals, crawling off to be alone, sick of one another, poisoned by the same faces eternally sitting across the table or meeting in the halls, of the same mouths saying the same inane phrases over and over again until when you meet the owner of a particular mouth, you know before he says it what he is going to say.
«Good night, Bayard.»
«Night, Kent. Sleep tight.»
«See you.»
«Sure,» said Lodge.
The door shut softly.
Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
He woke, screaming in the night.
He sat bolt upright in the middle of the bed and searched with numbed mind for the actuality, slowly, clumsily separating the actuality from the dream, becoming aware again of the room he slept in, of the furniture, of his own place and who he was and what he did and why he happened to be there.
It was all right, he told himself. It had been just a dream. The kind of dream that was common here. The kind of dream that everyone was having.
The dream of walking down a street or road, or walking up a stairs, of walking almost anywhere and of meeting something—a spider-like thing, or a worm-like thing, or a squatting monstrosity with horns and drooling mouth or perhaps something such as could be fabricated only in a dream and have it stop and say hello and chat—for it was human, too, just the same as you.
He sat and shivered at the memory of the one he’d met, of how it had put a hairy, taloned claw around his shoulder, of how it had drooled upon him with great affection and had asked him if he had the time to catch a drink because it had a thing or two it wanted to talk with him about. Its odor had been overpowering and its shape obscene, and he’d tried to shrink from it, had tried to run from it, but could neither shrink nor run, for it was a man like him, clothed in different flesh.
He swung his legs off the bed and found his slippers with searching toes and scuffed his feet into them. He found his robe and stood up and put it on and went out to the office.
There he mixed himself a drink.
Sleep tight, he thought. God, how can a man sleep tight? Now it’s got me as well as all the others.
The guilt of it—the guilt of what mankind meant to do.
Although, despite the guilt, there was a lot of logic in it.
There were planets upon which no human could have lived for longer than a second—because of atmospheric pressure, because of overpowering gravity, because of lack of atmosphere or poison atmosphere, or because of any one or any combination of a hundred other reasons.
And yet those planets had economic and strategic value—every one of them. Some of them had both great economic and great strategic value. And if Man were to hold the galactic empire which he was carving out against the possible appearance of some as-yet-unknown alien foe, he must man all economic and strategic points, must make full use of all the resources of his new empire.
For that somewhere in the galaxy there were other intelligences as yet unmet by men there could be little doubt. The sheer mathematics of pure chance said there had to be. Given an infinite space, the possibility of such an intelligence also neared infinity. Friend or foe—you couldn’t know. But you couldn’t take a chance. So you planned and built against the day of meeting.
And in such planning, to bypass planets of economic and strategic value was sheer insanity.
Human colonies must be planted on those planets—must be planted there and grow against the day of meeting so that their numbers and their resources and their positioning in space might be thrown into the struggle if the struggle came to be.
And if Man, in his natural form, could not exist there—why, then you changed his form. You manufactured bodies that could live there, that could fit into the planets’ many weird conditions, that could live on those planets and grow and build and carry out Man’s plans.
Man could build those bodies. He had the technique to compound the flesh and bone and nerve, he had the skill to duplicate the mechanisms that produced the hormones, he had ferreted out the secrets of the enzymes and the amino acids and had at his fingertips all the other know-how to construct a body—any body, not just a human body. Biological engineering had become an exact science and biological blueprints could be drawn up to meet any conceivable set of planetary conditions. Man was all set to go on his project for colonization by humans in strange nonhuman forms.
Ready except for one thing: he could make everything but life.
Now the search for life went on, a top priority, highly classified research program carried on here and on other asteroids, with the teams of biochemists, metabolists, endocrinologists and others isolated on the tumbling slabs of rock, guarded by military patrols operating out in space, hemmed in by a million regulations and uncounted security checks.
They sought for life, working down in that puzzling gray area where non-life was separated from life by a shadow zone and a strange unpredictability that was enough to drive one mad, working with the viruses and crystals which at one moment might be dead and the next moment half alive and no man as yet who could tell why this was or how it came about.
That there was a definite key to life, hidden somewhere against Man’s searching, was a belief that never wavered in the higher echelons, but on the guarded asteroids there grew up a strange and perhaps unscientific belief that life was not a matter of fact to be pinned down by formula or equation, but rather a matter of spirit, with some shading to the supernatural—that it was not something that Man was ever meant to know, that to seek it was presumptuous and perhaps sacrilegious, that it was a tangled trap into which Man had lured himself by his madcap hunt for knowledge.
And I, thought Bayard Lodge, I am one of those who drive them on in this blind and crazy search for a thing that we were never meant to find, that for our peace of mind and for our security of soul we never should have sought. I reason with them when they whisper out their fears, I kid them out of it when they protest the inhumanity of the course we plan, I keep them working and I kill each of them just a little every day, kill the humanity of them inch by casual inch—and I wake up screaming because a human thing I met put its arm around me and asked me to have a drink with it.
He finished off his drink and poured another one and this time did not bother with the mix.
«Come on,» he said to the monster of the dream. «Come on, friend. I’ll have that drink with you.»
He gulped it down and did not notice the harshness of the uncut liquor.
«Come on,» he shouted at the monster. «Come on and have that drink with me!»
He stared around the room, waiting for the monster.
«What the hell,» he said, «we’re all human, aren’t we?»
He poured another one and held it in a fist that suddenly was shaky.
«Us humans,» he said, still talking to the monster, «have got to stick together.»
All of them met in the lounge after breakfast and Lodge, looking from face to face, saw the terror that lay behind the masks they kept in front of them, could sense the unvoiced shrieking that lay inside of them, held imprisoned by the iron control of breeding and of discipline.
Kent Forester lit a careful cigarette and when he spoke his voice was conversationally casual, and Lodge, watching him as he talked, knew the price he paid to keep his voice casual.