Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. But there was no more Finnish girl, no more Paris, no more Nike of Samothrace. There was night.

  VII

  Pride: Alaric: the conqueror; Wayne: wain, wagon, traveling and wandering into unknownness. Thus: the wain which will carry the conqueror beyond the sky. The hollow conqueror

  Emptiness within. Loneliness forever. But no more weeping alone in darkness since the night the rocket crashed and bore in flames for on that night all the tears were used up and there are no more.

  Fifth of his line, Grouchy the dog tries to help and understand. But there is so little he can do. There is not full communication (basic function of man-as-man, to differentiate him from man-as-animal) there can only be the absence of fear.

  The conqueror fears, alone within himself. He does not think these other two-legs wish him ill. But he does not understand, and they do not understand, and he must fight to talk in their words.

  Self-pity: a worm feeding on his own tail. Enough. They are building the motors now.

  Energy of escape: and beautiful is the matrix that no one else knows:

  Leaves are bronze and gold and flying red flame. The wind from the darkening pole is cold on cheeks and hands.

  ‘Mr. Wayne?’

  ‘Yes—’ (His name? They told you once. Oh, yes.) ‘What is it, Mr. Collingwood?’

  ‘I been thinkin’. I think I’d like to be in your crew after all.’

  ‘Thank you. I am glad of that.’

  ‘I, uh, well, at first it seemed kind of a wild notion. I was all set to go home. But then I figgered this was a chance to do something real useful.’ Glow of eyes: ‘An’ it ought to be fun, too!’

  ‘Well, you’ll be an engineering assistant on the voyage. It w-w-wouldn’t hurt if y-y-y-you—’

  ‘Studied? Oh, sure, Mr. Wayne. I’m doin’ that. I’ll be all set by springtime. Only one thing I been wonderin’ about. Why leave then? Ain – isn’t Mars closer later in the year?’

  ‘To be sure. However, the plan is to swing close around the sun and do a certain amount of the blasting in that neighborhood. It will save time and reaction mass, since we will be utilizing the gavitational potential energy of the mass with respect to the sun, and – well, it has all been worked out.’

  All of it. A thick volume of calculations, tables, curves, for the benefit of the men who will stay behind. It is all contained in one Wayne matrix equation.

  But they don’t think that way. They have to take one thing at a time, step by step. The huge network of simultaneously interacting factors, the enormous unity of it, that is meaningless to them, they have to crawl link by link through its mesh and the entire picture is never really there.

  But they see what you cannot. You must have most of the totality before you can consider it at all – anything less is an ungraspable fragment, jagged in infinity. They can seize that one piece, and hold it to them, and make it their own. Unrelatedness does not fill them with a blind unconscious panic, so that their minds recoil from it and thinking blurs.

  Practicality: A web of equations, diagrams, and shining metal. Potential fields, mathematical abstractions more real, somehow, than the wind and the earth and the far pale sun.

  Practicality: There will be one woman along. We need her hearing. She can pick out subsonics and supersonics, analyze them, tell us as surely as any instrument

  which would have to be painstakingly designed and built and tested and re-designed and re-built (consuming time, and time gallops like a wild horse)

  which would have to include a massive computer (but the human brain, a couple of pounds of wet spongy tissue, can do the same work if you train it properly)

  which would have to … (equations again, a vague adumbration – no! Too much else to think about)

  how the rockets are functioning. Still: I wish there could be some other way. One unmarried woman, a little on the prim side, and seven men – why don’t human beings behave as sensibly as electrons?

  The conqueror is too afraid of women to know them. He could have almost any one he asked for, but there would be too much strangeness in her eyes. What would she be thinking, alone within herself?

  Snow is chill and glittering, blue shadows under a high thin heaven. ‘Hello, Mr. Feinberg. How’s it going?’

  ‘Just fine, Mr. Wayne, just fine. I’d never appreciated how much work had to go into a spaceship. Every plate in her hull is a chunk of precision equipment, huh? But we’re getting her built, and we’ll nurse her to Mars all right.’ Glow: ‘God, you don’t know what this means to me! I was going to go home. I was spending my life fiddling around with stuff that didn’t mean a thing. Now I can work on this.’

  Curious, the romance in cold steel and bare equations. We have to set up a special office just to turn away would-be crewmen. But when she finally stands on her tail and blows flame and thunder, that will be a high and proud moment.

  Captain Wayne, pilot officers O’Neill, Arakelian, and Gammony, engineers Feinberg, Collingwood, and Grenfell, general crewman Ivanovitch, their names will be bright in history. But they would go even if it were not to be recorded at all. In the months of training and indoctrination, they are shaking down into a team. Even the dog Grouchy is accepted to a degree. There is no obvious reason to carry his mass and appetite along, but Captain Wayne desires it.

  (Companionship. The habit of thinking out loud, talking incomprehensibly to a dog with too much brain. Perhaps the dog even understands some of it. We would be very lost without each other, but we need not tell them that. Let Grouchy go as mascot.)

  Rivers brawl noisily between crumbling snowbanks, earth-dark puddles ruffle and stir under a bright cold wind, the sky is becoming clangorous with returning birds. ‘Oh, she tested wonderfully. I don’t think she’ll give much trouble. You might overhaul that No. Three timer, though, just for luck.’

  ‘Excellent, Mr. Arakelian. We’ll soon be on our way.’

  ‘ “It’s Johnny Bowlegs, pack your kit and trek.” Okay, fine, Mr. Wayne.’

  I would like to call them by their first names. But somehow I cannot do it. I cannot know exactly what they would think of it. And as long as I remain formal, so will they. Well, there is safety in formality. It is a good mask.

  The first tender green, as if spring had just breathed on the bare dark limbs. ‘Well, Al, tomorrow’s the big day.’

  ‘Tomorrow midnight, yes.’

  ‘If you aren’t back inside a year, we’ll come looking for you.’ How often has President Boyd said that?

  ‘No need. Give us a few months extra. I can always calculate an orbit on short notice, if we get off schedule.’

  ‘You know, sometimes I think you want to stay there’

  ‘Well, Mars has i-i-its points.’

  The lights glare out of darkness. The ship is a hundred-foot pillar reaching up toward the invisible stars. Machines grind and rumble through the humming, chattering voices. A sweep-second hand goes quickly around, once, twice, three times, four times, the minute hand crawls toward midnight. But this is now. We must always live in now. It is a crippling thing to the network mind. But that mind has been lamed by growing up in strangeness, it will always limp and fumble. ‘I needn’t wish you good luck. You know what we think of you people.’

  The doors hiss softly shut. The atomics thutter, warming up the firing chamber. A relay clicks. Metal enfolds like a colder womb. ‘Testing one, two, three. Testing one, two, three.’

  Mesh of energies, the potential fields forming oneness, continuum around the curve of the universe. Consider the equations of an interplanetary orbit. Space and time are relational concepts only. The energy-relation of the ship to sun-Earth-Mars-universe is going to be changed.

  ‘Number One bank ready.’

  ‘Number Two bank ready.’

  ‘Number Three bank ready.’

  ‘Stand by. All hands stand by … or lie by, as the case may be. Four seconds to go, three, two.’

  Easy, Grouchy, easy, lie there and let the giant’s hand stuff you back into your couch. Lie there and wait.

  ‘Fire!’

  Roar and rumble and shriek, pressure, darkness ragged before the eyes, outward bound.

  Energy requirement equals the integral of the gravitational function from Earth-surface to infinity.

  VIII

  Beyond the viewports there was night and the stars, flash and glitter and cold blackness to the end of forever. Collie turned from the sight with a shiver along his nerves. Sometimes, on winter nights in the mountains, he had seen the sky almost as chill and pitilessly brilliant, but never just like this. Never from a shell of metal and plastic and thrumming force, unrestful between the worlds. Here Earth was a double star, amber and blue, high mountains and windy plains and the great tramping seas were shrunk to a fleck of light.

  The rockets droned and shivered, always talking, always in his flesh. Collie slept with that voice in him, here as they rounded the sun, weaving in and out of uneasy dreams, growling and sighing and mumbling of loneliness. It was no place for a man.

  He grew aware that Lois Grenfell was standing beside him there in the narrow, girder-barred passage between living quarters and engine room. Her wide eyes were looking past him, out at the stars, but there was a blankness to tell she did not really see them.

  ‘Hi,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘ ’Lo.’ She turned to face him. ‘How’re you?’

  Idle question, when you lived and breathed, washed and ate and worked and slept together, day after day, no more privacy than two cells in the same body. Quarrels had begun when they were hardly a week out from Earth, though nothing had become serious yet. Collie had tended to withdraw into his own shyness, saying little to anyone.

  ‘Okay, I reckon,’ he told her. With an attempt to smile: ‘You got nothin’ to complain of, neither. One gal with seven men!’

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ she said, ‘and it’s going to get harder. I may have made a mistake, coming along.’

  ‘Captain Wayne, he’d’a known if—’

  ‘Wayne! Suddenly she flared at him, with rawness in her voice. ‘Always Wayne, Wayne the infallible. Wayne the invincible, Wayne the superman. Why can’t people see that he’s blind? Why can’t they see that he knows less about human beings than a backwoods trapper? He just threw together such of us as would fit into his machine – he never thought we might be more than cogs.’

  Collie lifted his hand, as if to fend her off. He felt shocked by the blaze in her. ‘Take it easy,’ he murmured. ‘Take it easy, Lois.’

  She subsided, leaning against the wall and looking at the floor. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Mebbe you should rest a bit. You look tired.’

  ‘I can’t rest. There’s too much noise.’

  ‘Yeah – yeah, it’s pretty loud for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘I can get used to the volume of it, the same as you. But to you its just background, unchanging, like the hull itself. I can always hear the changes. A little flutter here, a shifting tone there, a creaking and a whispering – and I sit up wondering what it means, wondering if something’s about to give and if we aren’t going to go spinning away till the end of time. It’s never the same! I can’t ever get used to it!’

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  ‘Then there’s Tom. He – well – you know. And I like him a lot, but— And I know sooner or later Misha’s going to make a pass at me, he can’t help himself, and there’ll be trouble. And the others, how long will they stay the way they are? I don’t know, and I get scared.’

  Her hands were grasping at his, blindly in search of comfort, and he took them without thinking. ‘Once we reach Mars, things’ll get better,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you come along?’ she asked slowly.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Same reason as the rest, I suppose. This seemed like a big an’ worthwhile thing to do. But out here, you get to wonderin’ if anything we can do matters very much.’

  ‘I like you, Collie,’ she said impulsively. ‘There’s something about you, I don’t know what … yes, maybe I do. All the rest of us, everyone else aboard this ship, we’re all twisted up, frustrated one way or another, full of doubt and weakness. You grew up in a cleaner world.’

  His face was hot. ‘I get scared too,’ he mumbled, looking away.

  ‘It’s a healthy fright, then, You—’

  A footstep on the companionway from the bridge: Collie turned to look into O’Neill’s gaunt face. He had a brief wish to jerk his hands back from Lois’ – she wasn’t his girl – but he thrust it down. ‘Hi, Tom,’ he said.

  The Irishman’s mouth grew crooked. ‘Hello,’ he said. Then, very quietly: ‘You too, eh?’

  ‘Me too, what?’ Collie hedged

  O’Neill sighed. ‘Never mind. I don’t like scenes.’

  Lois gave him a cold look. ‘For your information,’ she said, ‘I was talking to Collie because he’s the only one I can talk to without worrying over what he really means.’

  ‘And Joe Gammony, perhaps – or the dog.’ O’Neill chuckled, a sad little sound under the pulsing of the rockets. ‘Well, no matter, I was looking for both of you on business. The Old Man doesn’t quite like something about the engines. He says he can’t put his finger on the trouble, but he’s sure something is amiss.’

  ‘The instruments read pretty good,’ said Collie. ‘ ’Course, with new-type engines like this, you can’t never tell, but—’ His voice trailed off, and there was a sudden lump of chill in him.

  ‘I—’ Lois face drew into a frown, and her eyes clouded. ‘I can’t be sure, Tom. There’s been a sort of new pattern lately in the noise. A supersonic buzz from the tubes themselves, that hasn’t been there before. I don’t know what it means. I listened to this thing on the test stand and the test flights till I thought I’d memorized every noise it could make. But lately—’

  ‘No one,’ said O’Neill softly, ‘has ever taken a spaceship this far before now.’

  Collie spoke through a stiffness in his throat. ‘I know how our orbit’s laid out. If the engines quit on us at this time, an’ we don’t get them workin’ again mighty fast, we’ll be too close to the sun to pull away. We’ll prob’ly fall into the sun.’

  They stood unmoving while the metal sang around them, thinking of the fire-sheathed immensity they had watched through shielded ports.

  Wayne’s mind can analyze the sounds he can hear, and the instrument readings he can see, and get a pattern out of them,’ said O’Neill at last, grimly. ‘But he can only hear divvil a few of ‘em; he hasn’t got enough data. You can hear it all, macushla, but you can’t fit it into a complete picture the way he can.’

  She looked at Collie with a certain weariness. ‘I told you,’ she said in a flat voice ‘I told you Wayne thought of us as cogs in a machine, and we aren’t.’

  ‘Well,’ said O’Neill, ‘the skipper wants you to write down what you can hear, Lois. You know, on that multisonic scale they worked out for you. And Collie, will you be talking to Abe about this?’

  The hillman nodded and left, moving along the rat-hole passageway toward the rear bulkhead.

  Beyond it was a narrow engine-control room, the rear wall a single gleaming constellation of instruments and switches and dials. Abe Feinberg looked up from his seat. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘You don’t go on duty for three hours yet.’

  Collie explained. Feinberg scowled. ‘I don’t like that new flutter in the ion-blast meters,’ he said. ‘But the potential fields seem to be holding fairly steady.’

  He opened a drawer and took out the diagrams of the ship. Collie had pored over them till his eyes swam, and now he followed their intricacies without much trouble. Beyond the heavily shielded room in which he stood was the water-jacketed pile that was their energy souce; water fed in automatically from the surrounding storage space to the pile chamber, where it was converted to superheated steam which was then electrically torn apart. The ions, positive and negative, were fed out through their various tubes, their course regulated by potential fields; in effect, each tube was a huge-scale linear accelerator. It was, in principle, a simple arrangement; but the multitude of control systems, interwoven and feeding back into each other, made it hard for anyone but Wayne to understand as a totality.

  ‘Hm.’ Feinberg shook his head. ‘I dunno. There’s a flutter in the blast, all right, and it’s building up; but what’s causing it? And what’ll it lead to?’

  ‘It’d be a funny way to die,’ murmured Collie. ‘A bit o’ the sun, shinin’ forever in the sky. It could be worse.’ He grinned without much humor. ‘Not that I want to, you understand.’

  Feinberg gave him a sharp look. ‘Don’t let it get you, Collie,’ he said at last. ‘This that’s around us is bigger than anything man was ever meant for, but we’ll just have to remember we’re human. We’ll just have to keep going, and not think too much.’

  Collie held his breath, listening to the broom-broom-broom of the rockets and the many whispers and creakings and mutterings that wove around it. Was it only his imagination, or could he hear a saw-edged whine in that noise? And if he could, did it mean anything?

  Eight mutant humans, knit so closely together with their ship that it could hardly stir without all of them, riding a fireball no man had ever really tested into a sky no man had ever seen— For the first time, it shocked home to him what a long chance Alaric Wayne was taking. What a wild and reckless stunt this voyage was. He must have dominated the rulers of America like a god to make them agree to this.

  Sure, sure, the mission was of terrible urgency, but even so! For an instant Collie felt a rage in him at the silent man who had thus carelessly thrown them out beyond heaven. Didn’t the crazy bastard care what happened, even to himself?

  Slowly, then, Collie began to see that Wayne didn’t care. Not very much.

  It explained a lot of things, but it left him feeling cold.