“That’s right. A Grey Man, because of his special physical properties, would have no use for a machine at the best of times. And thousands of years on a planet like Prila I—where a machine couldn’t exist anyway—would have conditioned his mind to the point where our machine-orientated lives would have been incomprehensible to him.”
Surgenor drew on the fragrant smoke, and he felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for the massive alien being whose remains still lay on the black rock of the planet they had left behind. Life would have been very precious to a Grey Man, too precious for him ever to consider entrusting it to anyone or anything but himself. That, basically, was why he had made the mistake of trying to control the entity which the Sarafand’s crew thought of as Captain Aesop.
Wondering how the Grey Man felt in that final moment of discovery, Surgenor glanced at the discreet identification plate on the nearest of the terminals belonging to the ship’s central computer installation—that vast artificial intelligence into whose keeping they delivered their lives at the beginning of each survey. The plate said:
A.E.S.O.P.
Surgenor had heard the crewmen guess that the letters stood for Advanced Electronic Spaceship Operator and Pilot—but nobody was absolutely sure. Human beings, he suddenly realized, tend to take a lot for granted.
CHAPTER THREE
Space had different ways of punishing those who ventured into it. The physical danger was always present, like a threat that was whispered over and over again, and yet it was not the quality of the environment which weighed most heavily on the travellers’ minds. Space was hostile to human life, but it was more forgiving of errors than some other media—for example, the depths of an ocean—in which men had learned to live and work with almost complete equanimity. Its most potent weapon was, simply, its size.
No size of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them to a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveller saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.
There were no abrupt descents into psychosis among the Cartographical Service crews—the preliminary screening saw to that—and indeed it was rare for the men who drove the survey modules to philosophize about the meaning of their existence, but the stresses imposed by their way of life took a toll just the same. Loneliness and homesickness were occupational diseases. Only uninhabited worlds were surveyed by the Service, quickly sating the mapping crews with views of desert, barren rock and tundra to the point at which they began to pray for something unforeseen to occur, even if it involved hardship or extra danger. But incidents were so rare that a simple mechanical failure would provide conversational fodder for many months.
Against that background, men tended to complete the two years demanded by their employment contracts, follow up with one extra tour which proved to themselves and their friends that they could have gone on indefinitely, and then take their gratuities and retreat to occupations which would enable them to remain at home.
A few men, like Dave Surgenor, had the capacity to endure in the Service regardless of the intellectual and emotional hazards. The Sarafand, therefore, was akin to most other ships in having a cadre of veterans whose lot it was to partner less experienced men in the modules and oversee their progress. They also performed a valuable service, though one for which there was no official recognition, in that they created a stable group identity to which newcomers could relate. Surgenor had seen scores of men—and an occasional woman—come and go, and over the years had developed a wry, avuncular approach to their adjustment problems. Although he sometimes grumbled about the brashness of novices, he had to admit that they helped relieve the monotony of shipboard life.
A year had passed since the encounter with the Grey Man on Prila I, a year of completely routine survey work, and in that time two crew changes had occurred. One man had left the Service, another had transferred to a more modern ship of the Mark Eight class, and both had been replaced by recent recruits. Surgenor had watched the newcomers with unobtrusive interest and had formed the opinion that the more likeable of the pair was, unfortunately, the less likely to remain long in the Service. Bernie Hilliard was a talkative youngster who appeared to enjoy sparking his ideas against the flint of Surgenor’s well-established attitudes. And the breakfast hour, when he was fresh from sleep, was his favourite time for conversational fencing.
“What you don’t appreciate, Dave,” he said one morning, “is that I was home last night. With my wife. I was there.”
Hilliard leaned across the breakfast table as he spoke, pink face childishly solemn with conviction, his blue eyes imploring Surgenor to accept what he was saying, to share the joy which was so freely offered. Surgenor felt well-rested and well-fed, and therefore was in a mood to agree with almost anything—but there were problems. His mind fastened obstinately on the knowledge that the Sarafand was making its way through a dense star cluster many thousands of light-years from Hilliard’s home in Saskatchewan. There was also the obtrusive fact that young Hilliard was not married.
Surgenor shook his head. “You dreamed you were home.”
“You still don’t get it!” Exasperation and evangelist zeal caused Hilliard, who was normally quiet in his manner, to bounce on his chair. Men at the other end of the long table glanced curiously in his direction. The ship-day had just begun and the lighting panels in the semi-circular room, typical of spacecraft living quarters, were glowing most strongly at the end designated “east’.
“The experience of using a Trance-Port has little resemblance to ordinary dreaming,” Hilliard continued. “A dream is only a dream, and when you’re awake you recognize the memories of it as being nothing but dream memories. But with a Trance-Port tape you are transported, in the old sense of the word—that’s the reason for their name—into another existence. The recollections you have next day are indistinguishable from other memories. I tell you, Dave, they are completely real.”
Surgenor poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. “But right now, this morning, you know you weren’t in Canada a few hours ago. And you do know that you were bunked down in this ship on the deck above this room. Alone.”
“Pinky was alone, all right,” Tod Barrow—the second of the new men—put in, winking at the others. “I tried to slip into his room last night for a good-night kiss, but the door was locked. At least, I hope he was alone.”
“Incompatibility doesn’t make a memory any less real,” Hilliard said, ignoring the interruption. “What about all those times you were sure you had done something like packing a toothbrush, and then found you hadn’t? Even when it’s been proved that you didn’t pack the toothbrush you still go on ‘remembering’ how you did it. Same thing.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is.”
“It all sounds a bit strange to me,” Surgenor said doubtfully, taking refuge in his Oldest Member role, a part which was becoming progressively easier to play with each new voyage he made for the Cartographical Service. The mapping crews seemed to get younger every year and to demand a degree of pampering which would have been unheard of when he had first signed on.