“Yes—oh, my God,” said Blake, not mocking, but very close to mockery.
Horton rose stiffly. “I must go,” he said. “Thank you for the drink.”
“Senator,” said Blake, “I sent a message to Elaine and there was no answer. I tried to telephone.”
“Yes,” said Horton. “I am aware of that.”
“I must see her, sir. Before I go. There are certain things I want to say to …”
“Mr. Blake,” said Horton, “my daughter does not wish to see you, nor to speak with you.”
Blake rose slowly to face him. “But what is the reason? Can you tell me why?”
“I should think,” said Horton, “even to you, the reason must be obvious.”
34
The shadows crept into the room and Blake still sat upon the couch, unstirring, his brain still beating its weary circle about the one uncompromising fact.
She did not want to see or talk with him—and it had been the memory of her face that had finally brought him surging up out of the darkness and the quiet. If what the senator had said was true, then all the longing and the effort had been for nothing. He might better have stayed where he was until Thinker had finished with his cogitation and his calculation, lying there and healing.
But had the senator spoken the truth? Did he harbor some resentment for the part that Blake had played in the defeat of the bioengineering project? Had he taken this way to pay back, at least in part, the disappointment he had suffered?
This did not seem too likely, Blake told himself, for the senator surely knew enough of politics to have realized that the bioengineering business had been a gamble at the best. And there was something strange about it all. To start with, Horton had been affable and had brushed off mention of the referendum, then suddenly had turned brusque and cold. Almost as if he had been playing a part well thought-out beforehand, although such a thing as that simply made no sense.
—You are taking it most excellently, said Thinker. No pulling of the hair, no gnashing of the teeth, no moaning.
—Oh, shut up! snapped Quester. Leave the man alone.
—I but sought to pay a compliment, persisted Thinker, and to offer moral support. He approaches it on a high, cerebral level, without emotional outburst. That is the only way to bring solution to a problem such as this.
Thinker gave a mental sigh.
—Although, he said, I must admit I cannot untangle the importance of this problem.
—Don’t pay attention to him, Quester said to Blake. Any decision that you come to will be O.K. with me. If you wish to remain on this planet for a time, I would not mind at all. We could manage it.
—Oh, surely, Thinker said. There would be no problem. What is one human lifetime? You would not want to stay more than one human lifetime, would you?
“Sir,” asked the Room, “shall I turn on the lights?”
“No,” said Blake. “Not yet.”
“But it is becoming dark, sir.”
“I do not mind the dark,” said Blake.
“Would you care for supper, then?”
“Not at the moment, thank you.”
“Kitchen could make whatever you might like.”
“In a while,” said Blake. “I am not hungry yet.”
They had said that they would not mind if he should want to stay on Earth, if he should decide to have a try at becoming human, but what would be the use?
—You could try, said Quester. The female human might decide to change her mind.
—I don’t think she will, said Blake.
And that, of course, was the worst of it, that he could understand why she wouldn’t change her mind, why she should want nothing to do with a being such as he.
But it was not Elaine only, although she was, he knew, the greater part of it. It was, as well, the matter of cutting the final tie with these people to whom he could claim a kinship, the hankering for the home that he had never had, but that the humanity which was in him cried out should be his, of being forced to give up a birthright before he had a chance to claim it. And that was it, he told himself—the home, the birthright and the kinfolk were the more precious to him because, deep within his heart, he knew that he could never have them.
A bell tinkled softly.
The Room said, “The phone is ringing, sir.”
He slid along the sofa until he was in front of it. His hand reached out and flipped the toggle. The screen flickered and kept on flickering, but there was no image.
“This call,” said the voice of the operator, “must be made without visual transmission. It is within your right to refuse acceptance of it.”
“No,” said Blake. “Go ahead. It makes no difference to me.”
A voice, concise and frosty, speaking flat words, with no hint of intonation, said: “This is the mind of Theodore Roberts speaking. You are Andrew Blake?”
“Yes,” said Blake. “How are you, Dr. Roberts?”
“I am all right. How could I be otherwise?”
“I am sorry. I forgot. I did not think.”
“You had not contacted me, so I am contacting you. I think that we should talk. I understand you will be leaving soon.”
“The ship,” said Blake, “is almost ready for me.”
“You go to learn.”
“That is right,” said Blake.
“The three of you?”
“The three of us,” said Blake.
“I have thought of that often,” said the mind of Theodore Roberts, “ever since I was informed of your situation. The day will come, of course, when there’ll not be three of you, but one.”
“I had thought that, too,” said Blake. “It will take a long, long time.”
“Time has no meaning to you,” said the mind of Theodore Roberts. “To either of us. You have an immortal body that can only die by violence. I have no body and thus am immune to violence. The only thing that can kill me is the failure of the technology that supports my mind.
“And Earth has no meaning, either. I think it is important for you to recognize this fact. Earth is no more than a point in space—a tiny point in space, and insignificant.
“There is so little in this universe, once you think of it, that really matters. When you sit down to the bottom of it, all that really counts is intelligence. If you are looking for a common denominator in the universe, seek intelligence.”
“The human race?” asked Blake. “Humanity? It does not matter, either?”
“The human race,” said the precise, frosty voice, “is a splinter of intelligence, not as a human being, not as any kind of being.”
“But intelligence …” Blake began, then stopped.
It was useless, he told himself, to try to present another viewpoint to this thing with which he spoke, not a man, but a disembodied mind which was as biased in its environment as a being of flesh and blood would be biased by its environment. Lost to the physical world, remembering the physical world as dimly, perhaps, as a grown man might recall his babyhood, the mind of Theodore Roberts existed in a world of only one dimension. A small world with flexible parameters, but a world in which nothing happened except it happened as an intellectual exercise.
“What was that you said—or meant to say?”
“I suppose,” said Blake, ignoring the question, “that you tell me this …”
“I tell you this,” said Theodore Roberts, “because I know you must be sorely tried and very greatly puzzled. And since you are part of me …”
“I am not a part of you,” said Blake. “You gave me a mind, two centuries ago. That mind has changed. It’s not your mind any more.”
“I had thought …” said Theodore Roberts.
“I know. It was kind of you. But it isn’t any good. I stand on my two feet. I have to. There is no choice. Too many people had a hand in me and I can’t tear myself apart to give each one of them their due—not you, not the biologists who drew the blueprints, not the technicians who formed the bone and flesh and nerve.”
r /> There was a silence then and Blake said, quickly: “I’m sorry. Perhaps I should not have said that. I hope you are not angry.”
“Not angry,” said the mind of Theodore Roberts. “Gratified, perhaps. Now I need no longer worry, wondering if my biases and my prejudices might be of disservice to you. But I have allowed myself to ramble on too much. There was something that I meant to tell you, something I think that you should know.
“There was another one of you. Another synthetic man sent out on another ship …”
“Yes, I knew about that,” said Blake. “I’ve often wondered—what do you know of him?”
“He came back,” said the mind of Theodore Roberts. “Brought back. Much the same as you …”
“You mean suspended animation?”
“Yes. But this time the ship came home. A few years after it went out. The crew was frightened by what had happened and …”
“So I was no great surprise?”
“Yes, I am inclined to think you were. No one tied you up with what had happened so long ago. Not too many people in Space knew about it. It wasn’t until shortly before you escaped from the hospital, after the bioengineering hearing, that anyone began to wonder if you might not be the other one. But before anything could be done about it, you had disappeared.”
“This other one? He is still on Earth? Space had him?”
“I don’t think so,” said the mind of Theodore Roberts. “I don’t really know. He disappeared. I know that much …”
“He disappeared! You mean they destroyed him!”
“I don’t know.”
“Damn it, you must know,” screamed Blake. “Tell me! I’ll go out there and tear the place apart. I’ll find him …”
“It’s no use,” said Theodore Roberts. “He isn’t there. Not any more.”
“But when? How long ago?”
“Several years ago. Well before you were brought back from space.”
“Look—how do you know? Who told you …”
“There are thousands of us here,” said Theodore Roberts. “What one knows is available to all. There’s little that one misses.”
Blake felt the freezing breath of futility closing in upon him. The other man had disappeared, Theodore Roberts said, and undoubtedly he should know. But where? Dead? Hidden away somewhere? Sent out into space again?
The one man, the only other being in the universe to which he could have felt close kinship—and now that man was gone.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Theodore Roberts.
After a silence, Roberts asked, “You’re going back to space? You have decided to?”
“Yes,” said Blake. “Yes, I think I have. There’s nothing here on Earth.”
And there was, he knew, nothing here on Earth. If the other man was gone, there was nothing left on Earth. Elaine Horton had refused to talk with him and her father, once so friendly, had been cold and formal when he said good-bye, and Theodore Roberts was a frosty voice speaking from the emptiness of one dimension.
“When you come back,” said Theodore Roberts, “I’ll still be here. You will phone me, please. You will get in touch?”
If I come back, thought Blake. If you still are here. If there is anybody here. If Earth is worth the coming back to.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course, I’ll phone you.”
He reached out and flipped the toggle to break communication.
And sat, unstirring, in the dark and silence, feeling the Earth drawing back and away from him, flowing outward in an expanding circle that left him alone.
35
Earth lay behind. The Sun had shrunk, but was still the Sun and not another star. The ship was falling down the long tunnel of gravitational vectors that would, in a little time, build up its velocity to the point where the stars would seem to start shifting in their courses and their colors and it then would begin its slow transition into that other universe which existed beyond the speed of light.
Blake sat in the pilot’s chair, gazing through the curved transparency that opened out on space. It was so quiet here, he thought, so quiet and peaceful—the uneventfulness of the emptiness that lay between the stars. In a little while he’d have to get up and take a turn about the ship to satisfy himself that all was right and well, although he knew it would be. With a ship such as this nothing could go wrong.
—Going home, said Quester, speaking quietly in Blake’s mind. Going home again.
—But not for long, Blake told him. Only long enough to pick up the data that we missed before—that you didn’t have the time to get. Then moving on, to where you can reach out to other stars.
And going on and on, he thought, always moving on to harvest other stars, running the data gathered from them through the biological computer that was Thinker’s mind. Seeking, ever seeking, for the hints and clues that would make the pattern of the universe fall into a framework of understanding. And what would they find? he wondered. Many things, perhaps, that no one now could suspect.
—Quester’s wrong, said Thinker. We have no home. We cannot have a home. Changer found that out. In time we’ll realize that we do not need a home.
—The ship will be our home, said Blake.
—Not the ship, said Thinker. If you insist upon a home, then the universe. All space is home to us. The entire universe.
And that, thought Blake, might have been in substance what the mind of Theodore Roberts had tried to say to him. Earth is no more than a point in space, he’d said. And so, of course, were all the other planets, all the other stars—only points of matter and of energy, concentrated in remote localities, with emptiness between. Intelligence, Roberts had said, is all there is; it’s the one significance. Not life alone, not matter, not energy, but intelligence. Without intelligence, all this scattered matter, all the flaming energy, all the emptiness, was of no consequence because it did not have a meaning. It was only intelligence that could take the matter and the energy and make it meaningful.
Although, thought Blake, it would be good to have an anchor somewhere in all this emptiness, to be able to point, if only in one’s mind, to a particular glob of energy, and say that is my home—to have a place to tie to, to possess some frame of reference.
He sat in his chair, staring out at space, remembering once again that moment in the chapel when he had sensed for the first time his basic homelessness—that he never could belong, not on Earth, not anywhere, that while of Earth he never could be of Earth, that while human in form he never could be human. But that moment, he realized now, also had shown him that no matter how homeless he might be, he was not alone and could never be alone. He had the other two, and he had more than that. He had the universe and all the ideas, all the fantasies, all the seething intellectual ferment that had ever risen in it.
Earth could have been a home, he thought; he had a right to expect it could be home. A point in space, he thought. And that was right—Earth was a tiny point in space. But no matter how tiny it might be, man needed such a point as a homing signal, as a beacon. The universe was not enough because it was too much. As a man from Earth, one stood for something, possessed identity; but the man of the universe was lost among the stars.
He heard the soft fall of the footstep and sprang up and swung around.
Elaine Horton stood just inside the door.
He took a quick step forward, then halted, frozen in his tracks.
“No!” he shouted. “No! You don’t know what you’re doing.”
A stowaway, he thought—a mortal on an immortal ship. And she had refused to talk with him, she’d …
“But I do,” she said. “I do know what I’m doing. I’m where I belong.”
“An android,” he said in bitterness. “A simulated human. Sent to make me happy. While the real Elaine …”
“Andrew,” she said, “I am the real Elaine.”
He half lifted his arms, a gesture, and she suddenly was in them and he held her close, his body aching
in happiness at her being there, at having someone human, at the closeness of a very special human.
“But, you can’t!” he cried. “You can’t. You don’t realize what’s going on. I’m not human. I’m not always this way. I turn into other things.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “But I know,” she said. “You don’t understand. I’m the other one—the other one of us.”
“There was another man,” he said, somewhat stupidly. “There was …”
“Not another man. A woman. The other was a woman.”
And that was it, of course, he thought. Theodore Roberts, not knowing, had said the other man.
“But Horton? You are Horton’s daughter.”
She shook her head. “There was an Elaine Horton, but she died. Committed suicide. Rather horribly and for some sordid reason. It would have wrecked the senator’s career.”
“Then you …”
“That’s right. Not that I knew anything about it. When the senator set out to dig up the facts about the old Project Werewolf, he had found out about me. He saw me and was struck by my resemblance to his daughter. Of course I was in suspended animation then, had been for years on end. We were very naughty people, Andrew. We did not turn out at all the way they thought we would.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. I’m a little glad right now we didn’t. So you knew all the time …”
“Just recently,” she said. “The senator, you see, had Space across the barrel. They wanted very much to keep the Werewolf business under wraps. So when he came to them, frantic with grief at his daughter’s death, crazy at the thought he was a ruined man, they gave me to him. I thought I was his daughter. I loved him as my father. I had been brain-washed, conditioned, whatever it is that they do to you, to make me think that I was his daughter.”
“He must have pulled a lot of weight. To hush up his daughter’s death and then take you …”
“He was the one who could manage it,” she declared. “He was a lovely man, such a lovely father—but ruthless when it came to politics.”
“You loved him.”
She nodded. “That’s it, Andrew. In many ways, he still is father to me. No one can ever guess what it took for him to tell me.”