“There’s nothing the matter with the engines. It’s us, sir. We can’t start them.”
“Talk sense, man. Why can’t you?”
“We can’t remember how. We’ve forgotten how to start the engines!”
Warren switched on the light above the desk and straightened, seeking out the book among the others on the shelf.
“It’s right here, Mac,” he said. “I knew I had it here.”
He found it and took it down and opened it beneath the light. He leafed the pages rapidly. Behind him he could hear the tense, almost terrified breathing of the engineer.
“It’s all right, Mac. It’s all here in the book.”
He leafed too far ahead and had to back up a page or two and reached the place and spread the book wide beneath the lamp.
“Now,” he said, “we’ll get those engines started. It tells right here …”
He tried to read and couldn’t.
He could understand the words all right and the symbols, but the sum of the words he read made little sense and the symbols none at all.
He felt the sweat breaking out on him, running down his forehead and gathering in his eyebrows, breaking out of his armpits and trickling down his ribs.
“What’s the matter, Chief?” asked Mac. “What’s the matter now?”
Warren felt his body wanting to shake, straining every nerve to tremble, but it wouldn’t move. He was frozen stiff.
“This is the engine manual,” he said, his voice cold and low. “It tells all about the engines – how they operate, how to locate trouble, how to fix them.”
“Then we’re all right,” breathed Mac, enormously relieved.
Warren closed the book.
“No, we aren’t, Mac. I’ve forgotten all the symbols and most of the terminology.”
“You what?”
“I can’t read the book,” said Warren.
“It just isn’t possible,” argued Spencer.
“It’s not only possible,” Warren told him. “It happened. Is there any one of you who can read that book?”
They didn’t answer him.
“If there’s anyone who can,” invited Warren. “Step up and show us how.”
Clyne said quietly, “There’s none of us can read it.”
“And yet,” declared Warren, “an hour ago any one of you – any single one of you – probably would have bet his life that he not only could start the engines if he had to, but could take the manual if he couldn’t and figure how to do it.”
“You’re right,” Clyne agreed. “We would have bet our lives. An hour ago we would have. It would have been a safe, sure bet.”
“That’s what you think,” said Warren. “How do you know how long it’s been since you couldn’t read the manual?”
“We don’t, of course,” Clyne was forced to admit.
“There’s something more. You didn’t find the answer to the junkyard. You guessed an answer, but you didn’t find one. And you should have. You know damn well you should have.”
Clyne rose to his feet. “Now see here, Warren …”
“Sit down, John,” said Spencer. “Warren’s got us dead to rights. We didn’t find an answer and we know we didn’t. We took a guess and substituted it for the answer that we didn’t find. And Warren’s right about something else – we should have found the answer.”
Under any other circumstances, Warren thought, they might have hated him for those blunt truths, but now they didn’t. They just sat there and he could see the realization seeping into them.
Dyer finally said, “You think we failed out there because we forgot – just like Mac forgot.”
“You lost some of your skills,” replied Warren, “some of your skills and knowledge. You worked as hard as ever. You went through the motions. You didn’t have the skill or knowledge any more, that’s all.”
“And now?” asked Lang.
“I don’t know.”
“This is what happened to that other ship,” said Briggs emphatically.
“Maybe,” Warren said with less conviction.
“But they got away,” Clyne pointed out.
“So will we,” promised Warren. “Somehow.”
The crew of that other, alien ship had evidently forgotten, too. But somehow or other they had blasted off – somehow or other they had remembered, or forced themselves to remember. But if it had been the simple matter of remembering, why had they rebuilt the engines? They could have used their own.
Warren lay in his bunk, staring into the blackness, knowing that a scant two feet above his head there was a plate of steel, but he couldn’t see the steel. And he knew there was a way to start the engines, a simple way once you knew it or remembered it, but he couldn’t see that, either.
Man experienced incidents, gathered knowledge, knew emotion – and then, in the course of time, forgot the incident and knowledge and emotion. Life was a long series of forgettings. Memories were wiped out and old knowledge dulled and skill was lost, but it took time to wipe it out or dull it or lose it. You couldn’t know a thing one day and forget it on the next.
But here on this barren world, in some impossible way, the forgetting had been speeded up. On Earth it took years to forget an incident or to lose a skill. Here it happened overnight.
He tried to sleep and couldn’t. He finally got up and dressed and went down the stairs, out the lock into the alien night.
A low voice asked, “That you, Ira?”
“It’s me, Bat Ears. I couldn’t sleep. I’m worried.”
“You’re always worried,” said Bat Ears. “It’s an occu … occu …”
“Occupational?”
“That’s it,” said Bat Ears, hiccoughing just a little. “That’s the word I wanted. Worry is an occupational disease with you.”
“We’re in a jam, Bat Ears.”
“There’s been planets,” Bat Ears said, “I wouldn’t of minded so much being marooned on, but this ain’t one of them. This here place is the tail end of creation.”
They stood together in the darkness with the sweep of alien stars above them and the silent planet stretching off to a vague horizon.
“There’s something here,” Bat Ears went on. “You can smell it in the air. Them fancy-pants in there said there wasn’t nothing here because they couldn’t see nothing and the books they’d read said nothing much could live on a planet that was just rocks and moss. But, me, I’ve seen planets. Me, I was planet-checking when most of them was in diapers and my nose can tell me more about a planet than their brains all lumped together, which, incidentally, ain’t a bad idea.”
“I think you’re right,” confessed Warren. “I can feel it myself. I couldn’t before. Maybe it’s just because we’re scared that we can feel it now.”
“I felt it before I was scared.”
“We should have looked around. That’s where we made our mistake. But there was so much work to do in the junkyard that we never thought of it.”
“Mac took a little jaunt,” said Bat Ears. “Says he found some towers.”
“He told me about them, too.”
“Mac was just a little green around the gills when he was telling me.”
“He told me he didn’t like them.”
“If there was any place to run to, Mac would be running right now.”
“In the morning,” Warren said, “we’ll go and see those towers.”
They were towers, all right, and there were eight of them in line, like watchtowers that at one time had stretched across the planet, but something had happened and all the others had been leveled except the eight that were standing there.