“Hell, this is the Goddamnest…”
“We’re forgetting about Charlie,” the shorter astronaut cut in, speaking for the first time. “I think he’s dead, Hal. He told us he was going to die—and he did it. This is really weird.”
“You’re telling me,” Hal Buxton replied, his gaze still locked on Jerome’s face. There was a perplexity in his eyes, a deep uneasiness, and Jerome knew exactly what was causing it. Two highly unusual events had happened almost simultaneously, and although it was patently impossible to connect them there was a voice whispering inside the astronaut’s head, a persuasive voice telling him there had to be a connection. That voice was well known to Jerome. It was the one which had assured him there had to be a link between cases of spontaneous human combustion, and he did not want Buxton to continue listening to it. “Don’t look at me that way,” he said, projecting all the sincerity he could muster. “What possible reason could I have for lying to you?”
CHAPTER 11
The Earth, as seen from the Quicksilver’s observation ports, was more vast than Jerome could have anticipated.
It curved away from him on all sides in rolling blue-white vistas which occupied almost half the sky, its hugeness emphasized by the incredible amount of detail on show. Individual clouds could be seen like grains of powder which had been stirred into spirals on a blue ceramic platter, and where land masses were visible the mind supplied a million fractals for even the smallest feature. The outline of the North American continent, with all its school atlas associations, held Jerome’s attention for hours at a time as he went on imaginary drives from one well-remembered region to another.
His homesickness had increased steadily during the three months of the return journey, and now that the Quicksilver was actually in Earth orbit he had an addict’s craving to regain the life he had known. Intellectually he knew it was impossible—the change in his appearance alone was enough to guarantee that—but the heart is more stubborn than the mind. In dreams and daydreams he browsed in Whiteford’s bookshops, strolled the familiar streets, replanted his lawn with the best imported dwarf grass, took time for art classes in the ivy-clad Methodist College…
And when wide awake he found it hard to believe he was in the final hours of the flight from Mercury to Earth.
Looking back over the three months he had spent locked in a small cabin with two other men he was able to identify the factors which had made the journey bearable. Foremost among them was the friendship he had developed with Buxton and Teinert, although the relationship—naturally enough—could hardly have had a less promising start.
Some of the initial friction might have been avoided had he been able to help in the burial of the man they knew as Charles Baumanis. It had taken more than two hours for the astronauts to get their radioed reports accepted by anybody in the Spacex Corporation’s operational HQ in Florida, and they had been caught in a personal dilemma by the first clear instruction regarding Baumanis: Discard the body and proceed with your mission.
The mission controllers, secure in their bounteous home environment, had failed to understand the psychology of remoteness, of men whose ties with the rest of humanity had been stretched invisibly thin. A dead comrade had to be buried, and with all due honour. There was no other way.
Jerome understood that better than Buxton and Teinert knew, but by then he had been running out of oxygen and compelled to take refuge in the ship. At that point the astronauts had been faced with another problem which was connected with the ungovernable fears of the space traveller. They had solved it by placing Jerome in the dead man’s seat and securely tying his hands and feet. Even with that safeguard they kept glancing at the ship all the while they were gathering stones and raising a cairn over Baumanis’s body, and Jerome knew what was going through their minds. It was virtually impossible for him to get free of his bonds, even more impossible for him to fly the Quicksilver alone, but he was in the ship and they were out of it, and Earth was very far away, and space always kills when it can.
The pure symbolism of his assisting in the burial would have been significant. Large and versatile though the Quicksilver was compared to the Moon landers of thirty years earlier, it could not have taken four men back to Earth. As Buxton and Teinert saw it, for logic has no place in such matters, their friend’s life had been traded for that of a stranger, and some innermost part of them would have been mollified if he could have been seen to pay his last respects by the grave. In the rich social matrix of the home world the consideration would have scarcely arisen, but at the far point of a billion-kilometre round trip it was important.
Other difficulties had arisen from his snap decision to claim to be a Soviet cosmonaut. It had not been so much a question of ideology and national stances—the remoteness of Earth had been a bonus in that respect—but the restraint on his natural honesty. Having told the basic lie, he had been forced to use it as the cornerstone of a complex structure of lies about his boyhood on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, his family and friends, and his military career. An excellent memory for detail had enabled him to maintain the deception. Buxton was from Tulsa and Teinert from a small town in Idaho, and they liked to tell rambling yarns about their early lives to pass the long watches of the mid-voyage. The communions had formed a vital part of the three-cornered friendship, and Jerome’s sense of guilt had increased every time he invented a good embellishment or a specially convincing detail for his own fictional past.
Gazing down on the convex panoramas of Earth, he wondered if he would ever have the chance to speak truthfully to the two spacemen and dispel some of the mysteries which otherwise were going to haunt them till they died. They had, for example, spent many hours trying to work out an explanation for what had happened with Baumanis. There had been no physical symptoms of illness, but in the late stages of the flight Baumanis had grown more and more listless and withdrawn. Just before touchdown at Mercury’s north pole he had appeared to be delirious, though with no fever, and had uttered some fragmented sentences, apparently vowing to hang on to life for the extra minutes it would take to reach “home’. They had been shocked to realize the extent of his mental deterioration and had decided to put him under sedation, but Baumanis had pleaded with such sudden intensity that they had chosen to let him do exactly as he wished during what were to be his last few minutes.
Jerome—keeper of many secrets—had consoled himself with the reflection that, even if he had been free to speak, the truth about Baumanis would have received as little credence as the truth about the opal ring he wore on his left hand.
He had quite expected the Thabbren’s pebble-like container to be difficult and perhaps impossible for him to open, but it had split readily along an invisible seam on the first application of tension. It had then occurred to him that the container might be a good example of Dorrinian mind-to-matter engineering. Had he not been accepted as an instrument of the Guardians the pebble might have remained as obdurate as the real thing, protecting its contents from profane eyes for a further thousand years if necessary. And in spite of his desire that things should be otherwise, there had been a strong element of the quasi-religious in the awe Jerome had experienced on actually seeing and touching the Thabbren itself.
Floating in the dimness of the Quicksilver’s cabin, while the two astronauts drowsed in their restraint nets, Jerome had been numbed and humbled by the sight of the lenticular opal into which had been concentrated the past and future of an entire race. The varicoloured motes within it seemed to shine with a light of their own, and to move and change even when the ring itself was being held steady. For a moment he had surrendered to the notion that those were the kalds of the Four Thousand, continuing their lives in the microminiature cosmos of the jewel, then had come the understanding that the opal itself was a container. At its heart would be a core of unique molecules forming a crystal which might be smaller than a grain of sugar, and it was there that the Four Thousand lay icily dormant, awaiting resurrection on another world.