Schloss Graustein was not the worst place in the cosmos to be a prisoner. Though gaunt and drafty on its high ridge, it was surrounded by forests where the hunting was excellent. The food was heavy but edible, and the local beer superb. Landholder Graustein did his best to make the distinguished, if compulsory, guest feel at home. During long conversations and occasional guided tours of the planet, Falkayn spotted interesting commercial opportunities, once the region had been pacified.

  Unless—He didn’t want to contemplate the alternative. And after some weeks, time began to hang as leaden as the knackwurst.

  Thus Falkayn was quite happy when a servant knocked at the door of his suite and announced a visitor. But then she stepped through. He had never thought she would be an unwelcome sight.

  “Jutta,” he whispered.

  She closed the door behind her. Dark wood and granite panels framed her where she stood vivid under the fluorolight. She was in mufti, and if he had thought her beautiful when uniformed, he must now multiply by an astronomical factor.

  “So it is indeed you,” she said.

  “P-p-please sit down,” he managed.

  She remained standing. Her features were stony, her voice flat. “Those idiots took for granted you were what you claimed, a merchant who simply chanced to pass by and saw too much. They never interrogated you in depth, never notified the fleet command. I only heard of you yesterday, in conversation with Landholder von Lichtenberg, after I came home on leave. The description—” Words trailed off.

  Falkayn rallied his courage. “A stratagem of war, my dear,” he said gently.

  “What have you done?”

  He told his pulse to decelerate, took out his pipe, and made a production of loading and kindling it. “You can squirt me full of babble juice, so I might as well Tell All,” he smiled. “I guessed the truth and went for a look to make certain.”

  “That funny little being who left about the same time as you did…he knew?”

  Falkayn nodded. “He’s reported to HQ long ago. If the League is half as realistic as I think, a battle fleet you can’t hope to resist is on its way right now.”

  She clenched one hand over another. Tears stood in her eyes. “What follows?”

  “They should head straight here. I expect them any day. You’ve nothing in the Beta System except a few patrollers; the rest of your navy is spread over a dozen stars. Right? The League doesn’t want to bombard planets, but in the case—” She uttered anguish. He went quickly to her, took both those hands, and said, “No, no. Realpolitik, remember? The object of war is not to destroy the enemy but to impose your will on him. Why should we kill people that we might sell things to? We’ll simply take the Beta System prisoner, and then bargain about its release.

  “I don’t make policy, but I can predict what’ll happen. The League will demand you disband your armed forces, down to a normal defense level. And, naturally, we’ll want to keep our trade concessions. But that’s all. Now that some Kraoka have starships, they can go ahead and unify, as long as they do it peacefully. We’d hoped to sell them a cargo and passenger fleet, at a huge markup, but that hope isn’t worth fighting for—you do have bargaining power yourselves, in your own capabilities for making trouble, you know. Neuheim can keep any social order it wants. Why not? If you try to maintain this wretched autarchy, you’ll be depriving yourselves of so much that inside of ten years your people will throw out the Landholders and yell for us.”

  He chucked her under the chin. “I understand,” he said. “It’s tough when a dream dies. But why should you, your whole life, carry your father’s grudges?”

  She surrendered to tears. He consoled her, and a private hope began to grow in him.

  Not that he was in the market for a wife. Judas! At his age? However—

  Afterward they found themselves on the balcony. Night had fallen, the auroral night where vast banners shook red and green across the sky, dimming the stars, and the mountain swooped down to a forest which breathed strange sweet odors back upward. Wine glasses were in their hands, and she stood close to him.

  “You can report who I am,” he said, “and cause me to have an unpleasant time, maybe even be shot.” Pale in the shuddering light, her face lost its look of happiness and he heard the breath suck between her teeth. “Your duty, according to the articles of war,” he continued. “And it won’t make one bit of difference, it’ll be too late—except that the League protects its own and will take a stiff price for me.”

  “What choice have I?” she pleaded.

  He flashed a well-rehearsed grin. “Why, to keep your lovely mouth shut, tell everybody you were mistaken and Sebastian Tombs has nothing to do with that Falkayn character. When peace comes—well, you’re quite influential on this planet. You could do a lot to help your people adjust.”

  “And become merchants?” she said, in a dying flare of scorn.

  “I remarked once,” he said, “that we aren’t really so ignoble. We’re after a profit, yes. But even a knight must eat, and our bread doesn’t come from slaves or serfs or anyone who had to be killed. Look beyond those lights. They’re fine, sure, but how about the stars on the other side?”

  She caught his arm. He murmured, as best he could in Latin, “Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea…” and when she turned questioning to him he added, low in the dusk,

  Their topmasts gilt by sunset, though their sails be whipped to rags,

  Who raced the wind around the world go reeling home again,

  With ivory, apes, and peacocks loaded, memories and brags,

  To sell for this high profit: knowing fully they are Men!

  “Oh-h-h,” he heard.

  And to think he’d resented his schoolmasters, when he was a kid on Hermes, making him read Flecker and Sanders in the original.

  “I will not tell anyone,” she said. And: “May I stay here for a while?”

  Falkayn was downright regretful a week later, when the League fleet arrived to rescue him.

  MUSTN’T TOUCH

  There got to be too much knowledge; and more kept pouring in. The fusion of disciplines helped for a while. But soon a biophysicist, say, found his head so full of quantum mechanics and advanced stochastics that he couldn’t follow the newest revisions of unified field theory, though he knew in a vague way that eventually some aspects were bound to impinge on his own work. Cybernetic information retrieval made anything quickly available to him—but how could he know just what to look up? The development of creatively synthesizing robot brains—a poor term, but “computer” is even less accurate—was helpful; nevertheless, their own capacity, while large, was finite, and in any case a man had to decide what assignment to give them. He couldn’t always be sure, or even guess what general type of problem he ought to foresee.

  The story goes that in the very earliest days of astronautics, an engineer in a manned-capsule project asked the physiologist on the team how much dissolved material it was necessary to remove from urine in order to reclaim potable water. “All of it,” the physiologist replied, “if you want to stay friends with your astronaut.” Raise that communication barrier by several orders of magnitude, and you will appreciate the dilemma that evolved.

  Until one day—

  Luna had fallen behind. The forward viewscreens held only blackness and stars. Job moved through space like a whale through the sea, as quietly and smoothly. There was no sound in Emil Eide’s cabin other than the hum of a ventilator, the occasional clicking of a switch or relay. Acceleration pressed him into his seat, so gently that he felt buoyant, almost young again.

  But his eyes were tired. He racked away the copy of Scientific American he had been studying. It was dated several years ago, he had read the lead article before, had simply wanted to refresh his memory. Not that it could tell him much. The magazine had tried valiantly to give a responsible account of the theory behind faster-than-light drive, but you had to be a matrix physicist really to understand.

  He rubbed his eyes and rested them with a long look at infinity. So many were the ice-sharp points of light out there that the constellations were drowned. Not to him, of course, with the experience of his youth to guide him. Even after three decades Earthside, he could pick out Orion and the Hounds, the Wain and the Dragon. But it came back to him, suddenly and startlingly, that each of those stars was a sun.

  When the ships began to fare yonder, soon now—A couple of lines ran through his head.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  Well, he thought, he had had his own dawn. Noontime, anyhow, while the last bodies in the Solar System that could possibly be colonized were being made ready. His work hadn’t been entirely in the lab, either, on the biotechnic problems. Shorthanded as the crews were, he’d often been out with a bullmole; and the preliminary surveys had involved some rough expeditions. There was a sense of fellowship at the end of such a day, the like of which could no longer be found on poor crowded Earth.

  To strike out afoot beneath a new sun, clean air and a living landscape—Ah, stop sniveling, you old idiot. You can always listen to the stories the young men bring back. Besides, you’ve been handed a share in the enterprise, right here and now.

  He felt an obscure guilt about that. Dow’s unexpected death was the reason why Oslo University’s professor of bionics had been co-opted into Project Cosmos. Experts in that particular field were so rare, and there was so much eagerness to go ahead with the work, that Eide’s briefings were short and he had boarded Job with less information than he really ought to have had. Well, Dow, you were a good man, God rest you—

  He got out his pipe and stuffed it with fingers that were still scarred and big-knuckled. “Job,” he said aloud.

  “Yes?” said the ship.

  “Are you too busy to talk?”

  “No.” The voice from the cabin speaker had inflections, but no real tone like a man’s. There was a faint brazen ring to it. “This is an entirely routine interception curve.”

  “When will we get there?”

  “We will have matched velocities and made contact in another eighteen minutes. Loading the probe aboard should take less than ten minutes. But as for the various tests to be made, at present there is insufficient data for prediction.”

  The flatness irritated Eide. “Damnation, aren’t you excited at all?” he grumbled. “I could wonder if transistors and mesoducers and the rest of robot circuitry ever feel any emotion—No, don’t comment.” His annoyance faded out. “I’m well aware that an emotion is the perception of a drive in action, and you have drives. Just not my kind. What I really wonder is how it feels to be you.”

  “There is an extensive literature on robopsychology,” Job said.

  “I know. I’ve read some. All behavioristic. No use to me.”

  “Technically your statement is incorrect.”

  “Never mind technicalities. Behaviorism is what it amounts to. Pure description, from the outside only. We can’t get inside our own creations.” Eide noticed that his pipe was yet unlit, and flicked a torchie to its bowl. “Ah, well,” he said, “I daresay you feel the same way about me, if you ever bother to wonder. And is that intrinsically any different from the way my children and I felt about each other, when they were growing up? There was always a strangeness between us, no matter how much we wanted to bridge it.”

  Job did not answer. Eide sighed. He’d been attempting to make amends for his outburst. When he remembered, he tried harder than the average person to treat robots courteously. After all, they were rational, conscious beings. However often he was told that they didn’t mind their situation, that it was perfectly satisfactory to them in so far as “satisfactory,” or any human-emotional word, meant anything in that connection—he could not quite get rid of an uneasy feeling that he was a slavemaster. But his attitude never seemed to affect their responses to him, one way or another.

  “Well,” he said inanely, “I think I’ll go forward.” He rose, a short, thick, gnarly man, face gnomish under a ruff of gray hair, clothes a trifle rumpled and shabby. Job opened the cabin door for him and he moved along the corridor with the dreamlike ease of low-weight.

  Bill Villiers and Dave Urban, the Australians, were seated with spaceman’s bombillas of tea in the main observation verandah. Besides Eide, they were the only men aboard. And none were really needed. The laboratory ship could do everything—recover the probe, transcribe data from the instruments, observe and dissect and analyze the living specimens, draw conclusions, prepare a formal report—with electronic speed. But it wasn’t psychologically possible for the people at Cosmos’ Lunar base to send no representatives. Their presence was justified on the grounds that something unforeseen might arise and men would be needed to make quick executive decisions. Eide suspected that was mere rationalization.

  Nonetheless he was glad, with a deep quiet happiness, to be here.

  “Hullo, cobber,” said Villiers. “Come to watch the show at last?” He was an assistant director of the engineering section, a long lean man given to loud shirts and baggy trousers. “You do take your work seriously.” He told the servitor to bring another bombilla.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Eide replied, finding a seat for himself. “I know there has been much public complaint at the slowness of progress, but I think Canberra appointed a crew of beavers. Colbert’s equations were published only ten years ago, Otway made the first experimental demonstrations three years later, and in a bare five years of work on Luna, you have produced FTL probes. Whoof!”

  Villiers chuckled. “Actually,” he said, “Otway could have made his breakthrough far sooner, if he’d known about Huang’s theory of the relationship of hyperons and gravity currents. But the connection between that and Colbert’s equations wasn’t obvious enough.”

  Eide laughed back. “How familiar that sounds! I wasted sixteen months once, working on the genetic code, finding out what I was after in the hardest possible way. And all the time my results were implicit in the Wavicle Theorem—as several biophysicists pointed out with glee as soon as I had published.”

  “Genetic code?” Urban, medium-sized and blond, looked surprised. He was a biologist himself, though his competence was elsewhere than the submolar level on which Eide worked. “But that was cracked more than a century ago.”

  “This was a question about its nature,” the Norwegian said. “Almost a philosophical question, though the answer is empirically verifiable. You see, it’s been known for a long time that the code is the same for every form of life. So either it’s not subject to mutation—which doesn’t make sense—or there are certain constraints on how an amino acid can pair with a codon on an RNA molecule. But in the latter case, what are the constraints? Well, that’s equivalent to asking how the code-reading mechanism works, not just in a chemical sense but as a function of natural law.”

  Urban shook his head and clicked his tongue: “Fascinating. I never knew before, and I thought I kept up with the field rather well. Just goes to show you, eh?” He paused. “Er…wait a bit. D’you mean that life everywhere in the universe has to use the same code?”

  “N-no. We aren’t sure about that. I suspect not, but we don’t know what the permissible variations are. That’s one of the things I hope your starships will come back and tell us.”

  “Yeih,” Villiers drawled. “Which is why the scientists have been on the Authority’s back, wanting the project hurried beyond all reason. Impatient to know. There was quite a tussle last year, when we were readying the first instrumented probes. One faction wanted them sent immediately to the nearer stars. We resisted, though. Haste makes waste. We’re still a long ways from itemizing every property of warped space.”

  “Besides,” Urban added, “unmanned probes can furnish just enough information to tantalize the hell out of us. We’ll send them in advance of the first manned expeditions, naturally—but the men are what we’re really counting on.”

  “And who are counting on you,” Eide said quietly.

  Villiers blinked. “What? Oh, you mean colonization.”

  “Well, yes, in part.” Eide’s mind went back to Earth: too many people, no more wilderness, no escape from your fellow man, individuality strangling in an unavoidable web of law and regulation. Crowding wouldn’t increase forever, probably. Put rats in a cage and let them reproduce for a while. Though you feed them well, the overpopulation soon makes them so neurotic that their breeding rate nosedives. He didn’t like to think of his grandchildren growing up misanthropic agoraphobes.

  As an alternative, you could put the brakes on in time, reduce the numbers of mankind step by step to a reasonable level, finally stabilize birth and death…what a fine, manicured, smug, ingrown future that was!

  He struck the bulkhead with a balled fist. Urban started at the thud. “This project will succeed,” Eide said, “because it’s got to.”

  “I say, you really do itch for adventure, don’t you?”

  Villiers remarked. “Myself, I’m content to stay in the lab.”

  “I’m too old to go,” Eide shrugged. “But my youngest son, he’s the sort that really ought to have shipped out with Leif Erikson. And he’s not unique.”

  “I know,” Urban said. “Canberra is counting heavily on us. Not that interstellar emigration can reduce population pressure much at home; but social pressure, restlessness and discontent, that’s something else again. Especially when we start feeling the impact of new knowledge about the universe. Bound to have strong effects on society, both direct and indirect.”

  Eide reached for his bombilla, which the servitor had been patiently holding out to him. He forgot it when Villiers yelled: “Look! There she is!”

  The shape grew rapidly in the viewscreen, sharp across the Milky Way. Sunlight dazzled off its slender flank. There went a primitive tingle along Eide’s nerves. That object had carried the first living creatures ever to go faster than light, from this orbit to Neptune’s and back, in less than one minute.