Beloved Son Page 2

  Forgotten. All those years out there, and forgotten. Poor bastards.

  The camera cut to an austerely military lounge-room and seven unfabulous-looking men. Two were playing chess, two reading, two chatting; one, a little separate from the others, merely sat. All save the last tried to look as though failing to be aware of a camera was their normal way of life; he simply looked uncomfortable.

  The camera inspected the chess players. Falworth purred, ‘Doctor Ivan Doronin, physician-psychiatrist—’ Doronin looked up on cue, smiled, nodded, looked down and moved a piece ‘—and Doctor Piotr Kulayev, biologist and radiologist—’ Kulayev managed an abstracted smile while he scanned Doronin’s inroad on his middle game ‘—both of the USSR.’

  The view moved to a thin blond gent with a pipe and a book which he laid on his knee before the camera could kick it out of his hand. ‘Doctor James Lindley, surgeon-psychiatrist. Of Britain.’ Lindley gave a clear ‘Good evening’ in a voice as English as Oxford, money and a distaste for the camera could make it.

  Two armed-forces types, clean cut and crew cut but not much at ease, were ‘Doctor Ewan Matthews, astronomer-physicist, and Doctor Gordon Fraser, astronomer-mathematician. Both of the USA.’

  Matthews offered a strained ‘Hi!’ in a voice that owed something to education and something to the Bronx – the old, forgotten, pounded-into-rubble Bronx. Fraser said, ‘Howdy,’ trying to be gracious-relaxed. Despite his name the voice recalled a boyhood spent in the environs of Yoknapat-awpha County. And who, save for an unlikely specialist in literary archives, remembers Yoknapatawpha County?

  A slightly fleshy gentleman with spectacles and bushy eyebrows was Doctor Joachim Streich, bio-chemist and neuro-surgeon, of Germany. He gave ‘Good evening’ in nearly accentless English.

  The lens examined the man sitting apart more thoroughly, from above and below and both sides. He was notable for an ugly face whose individually acceptable features seemed clumsily mated and for the fact that of the seven only he wore clothes he might have slept in. And for the additional fact that, forty-four years later, Jackson remembered him. And then thought, It isn’t memory; I have seen him somewhere. Recently. And that’s not possible. Or is that one of the things I’m supposed to catch on to?

  Falworth positively smirked his climax. ‘Last and not at all least – Senior Officer Albert Raft, Commander of Columbus.’

  Raft opened his mouth, thought of nothing to say, glared at the camera with demented self-control and finally made a strangled sound of greeting.

  Falworth moved with relief into a sequence better than a round of name calling and Jackson’s curiosity noted that he made no reference to Raft’s outstanding peculiarity – that alone in this galaxy of bi-disciplinary professionals he was credited with no scientific standing.

  ‘Commander Raft is more than simply another member of an illustrious complement. He is the living symbol of a long-kept secret, for “dinkum cobber” Raft’ (Raft flinched visibly) ‘is an Australian, and with him Australia makes her début in the great adventure of star travel. She enters right at the top, in command of the most tremendous voyage in history. And Australia has earned her right to this accolade for – and this is the long-kept, well-kept secret – the discovery of the slow-metabolism technique which alone makes this voyage possible for human beings is the work of an Australian biologist, John Heathcote.’

  Well, well. But why a secret, well-kept or any other kind? Memory scraped a few vague impressions regarding the man, who had made no splash in his time. A rumoured connection with the starship … rumour again! But to the world he had been a nobody.

  The picture froze to a still. The young projectionist said, ‘Something funny here. That name – Heathcote – had a sound blur over it, as if it had been drowned in some background noise. It wasn’t easy to remove. They must have wanted it suppressed because the announcer’s voice had been tinkered with, too, re-handled to make a sort of downbeat as if the sentence ended at “biologist”. Was it worth that trouble?’

  ‘To them, apparently. Perhaps we’ll find out why.’ But they did not.

  Falworth jerked back into speech. ‘I spoke to Commander Raft earlier in the day and of course we talked of the journey.’

  The view cut to an unidentifiable country road where Raft and Falworth strolled in sunlight, Falworth impeccable in the featureless business suit of the eighties and Raft shambling and disreputable in timeless overalls. Grubby overalls.

  Overdoing the common-touch Aussie bit. Or was – is – he really like that?

  Falworth was hearty. ‘Your job puzzles me, Albert.’ Raft’s resentment of familiarity did not escape the camera. ‘As I understand it the course is computer-controlled throughout, yet you are listed as, among other things, navigator and pilot. Will you be called upon to do any actual piloting?’

  Raft’s answering voice was identifiably Australian without being aggressively national, but his speech was slow and stilted.

  The kind who can’t repeat a scripted speech naturally.

  ‘Quite a bit. The computer programming is only provisional for orbit. For one thing, we haven’t an exact figure for the mass of Barnard’s Star and satellites, so there will be corrections necessary to the basic orbit computed for rounding the star. That means the provisional course programmed for return to Earth will need corresponding correction. I’ll probably bring the ship in manually over the last months of the home stretch.’

  It isn’t camera fright; he knows too much, and classified facts keep getting between his thought and his tongue.

  Falworth cried fatuously, ‘So man still rules his machines! Now, what can you tell us about the flight in general?’

  Still in the tone of one crunching through a balky set piece, Raft had scarcely begun with, ‘We’ll cover the first eight years at one-eighth g—’ when Falworth broke in on him.

  ‘Please, a question! Why only one-eighth g when the slowest rockets take off fifty times faster than that?’

  This seemed unplanned and Raft showed some animation in replying. Animation and irritation. ‘Because that’s the best optimum acceleration we can depend on getting. Our fuel is interstellar dust and gas and it’s spread thin. And not evenly. We’d like a full g, but we must have as many constants as possible to keep formulae manageable, and one-eighth looks to be the likely consistent high. And that will give us a bloody sight higher final velocity than any rocket ever reached or could reach.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, the trip itself …’

  ‘Eight years at one-eighth g will bring us to eighty-seven L – that means eighty-seven per cent of the speed of light – and five-sixths of a light year on our way. Then we’ll coast for about four and a third light years – not quite five years travelling – and spend eight years slowing for orbit of the star. Same routine to get home.’

  It was a flat recital; Jackson imagined Falworth seeing his scoop fall apart in sheer inertia. ‘Allowing a year for orbit, that makes forty-three years?’

  ‘I’m only figuring approximately, so it’ll actually be a month or so over forty-two years. We’ll sleep most of the time.’

  ‘In slow metabolism?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll have altogether thirty-seven years at ten per cent met. and a total of five years of waking periods each for the experimental work and observations.’

  ‘Let’s see – five years plus thirty-seven at ten per cent living rate’ – classical rendition of rapid calculation – ‘will make you all just eight and three-quarter years older than at take-off.’

  ‘A bit over eight. There’s time dilation. Apparent time slows to exactly half at eighty-seven L, and that cuts the coasting in half for those inside the craft. The effect before that won’t be much because it builds exponentially.’

  Falworth was not getting himself into an on-camera tangle with time dilation. He mimed confusion and despair, probably genuine. ‘Please! I don’t begin to understand accelerated time.’

  What’s all this scaled-down-to-the-public shop
talk to me? For familiarisation with the face? Where have I seen it – or one like it?

  ‘Nobody understands it. It just is.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. And now the inevitable question: What sort of world do you expect to return to?’

  Raft became ruminative. After ten paces he said, ‘There’ll be superficial changes, but they won’t matter much. Basics don’t alter in a short time; history only shows different facets of the human animal against different backgrounds.’ Then he delivered the line which earned him another nickname before he left Earth. ‘If there’s anything left at all, it’ll be the same old shitheap.’

  That was how we felt. Cold wars, hot wars, pollution, overcrowding, hunger, diminishing resources, fragmenting ecology, corruption, violence, greed. How right he was, and how wrong.

  The rest was ten minutes of bland, uninformative interviews with the scientists. According to the youngster the thing had been chopped to pieces, apparently to eliminate even the most oblique technical references. Jackson could discover nothing worth hiding in the babble, but at that time he had been an Aboriginal Rights PR man, too close to protest and argument to pay much attention to science.

  One amusing jolt of memory came at the end, as the youngster wheeled his gadget away. He recalled that his whole family had seen that newscast, and what returned to him was the remark of his teenage sister: ‘I could do a drool over the Englishman, but isn’t our Australian a drear?’

  2

  A note, signed by Campion, lay atop the papers in the folder: ‘Transcript of material found aboard Columbus. The whole FYEO at present. Ian.’ For Your Eyes Only, i.e. keep your yapping mouth shut.

  The first clip of typescript was headed: ‘From the private journal of Albert Raft, Senior Officer (Commander) of Columbus Six, also Pilot, Navigator, Instrument Technician and Electrical and Mechanical Engineer.’ Raft was also multi-disciplinary in his highly practical fashion.

  Jackson began to read.

  Two days out after a flawless fare-thee-well. Much jubilation and radioed congratulation and a certain flatulence after meals, possibly due to the lightweight acceleration.

  And so?

  The great adventure may turn out to be the great boredom. I had a juvenile hope that some special feeling would emerge …

  Nothing is changed – ‘Why, this is Hell; nor am I out of it.’

  Oh, dear, a literary gent. Who’d have guessed it of shaggy old ‘dinkum cobber’? Like hearing the garbage collector toss off an aria on his round.

  Marlowe said it for himself as well as for Mephisto. I know how he felt – like a rat in a trap. In my case, the parent trap.

  Perhaps my childhood was better than many, but it was bad enough. I lacked identity, which every child needs, early. I remember the sensation sometimes of splitting, of divorcement from self and environment, while some other ‘I’ observed the unreality of me and my surroundings. It’s common enough, I believe, but most seem to forget it, to give in, to accept the illusory ‘me’ of dusty flesh as all there is.

  I couldn’t forget. The only child of two near-geniuses (neither of them with the faintest conception of a child’s worth) has to find identity or be swamped by theirs.

  An introvert’s holiday. Who were the parents? Should check. Newspaper files, perhaps? We were able to preserve more than most areas.

  But identity recedes; the last mirage. But there are moments of near approach, as when they told me: ‘You will pilot the ship; the stars are yours.’

  And excitement tore my silly heart loose from sense and Barnard’s Star became heaven in a red dwarf.

  The uncertainties, the dangers, all Earth itself lost in the paradoxes of time dilation and slow metabolism, could not shadow the dream of the ultimate journey with identity inevitably at its end. When I came home I would know who and what was Albert Raft.

  Then I learned why – the real ‘why’ – I had been selected and the walls of the trap snapped back around my hallucinated wishing.

  My combination of talents and capacities could have been matched by dozens of men, hundreds. I felt the choice must have been a matter of millipoints of difference. Or mere chance.

  It was neither.

  I was chosen because physique and manual dexterity and a dozen characteristics not in themselves unusual are in me strongly defined. The list includes the shape of my nose (measured in three dimensions with nanometric exactness), the number of hair follicles in various parts of my body, the range of my colour and sound perception, my encephalograph readings, my IQ tests over a period of years, my endocrine readings and God knows what else.

  Out here, in this incarnation of everywhere and nowhere, I am still what John made me – an experimental rat in a biological trap.

  John? Heathcote? No pie without a biologist’s finger in it. I could almost hope there’s a Hell, just for their judgement.

  They’re waiting on my return, after forty-two of their snailpace years, so that a new generation of cell carpenters and psychometrists can use me as a control for their examination of the others. Once and for all the great argument, environment versus heredity, will have its answer.

  They must be damned sure we will actually get back. Ourselves think the odds are good but not all that certainly good.

  As for those others, growing to manhood back there on the mudball, the less said the better. But how much will long remain private in this cul-de-sac of the cosmos? Before the years are through we will have investigated each other clear down to the synapses for lack of better amusement.

  What others? Is this what we are after? Why can’t people write their journals for posterity instead of the blowing-off of private steam?

  Day 10. Some four hundred and fifty million kilometres out, further than anyone has ever been. Probes have passed Jupiter but no man. That’s a nice big diary thought but quite meaningless; you can’t stay excited in a job already settled into routine.

  The first days were active while the schedules were set up in ant-scurry efficiency; then the computers took over and we lapsed into our first spasm of little to do. The real work, starts when we are free of the major impact of solar radiation, and that won’t be long now.

  Meanwhile we talk, and talk circles endlessly around homing year – 2032. And here’s a curious thing: when these high-powered IQs attempt subjects outside their field they produce ideas as woolly and flaccid as those of the people next door at home. They throw their special jargons at each other – and sometimes throw them clear over my head – and I stay shut up until they stray on to ground of my experience. And then they are little better than tattling housewives.

  Conventional! They confine their guessing to hardware technology and their predictions are straight from the science fiction magazines. The older magazines, at that.

  Cheap beamed power. (Nuclear of course; will they never learn?) Synthetic foods. Deep ocean farming. Disposable clothing. Weather control. As though these things are not already embryonically with us or at least on the drawing boards.

  But nobody mentions gerontology or gene manipulation or a dozen related monster-weavings striving to break out of the laboratories. Streich and Kulayev, who might be expected to point up such matters, stick to snappier computers and labour-saving devices for the kitchen.

  They may be afraid. Who knows what private orders they may have had, in spite of the love-and-kisses international nature of the trip?

  Fraser and Matthews as Americans distrust the two Russians, who distrust them. That weed hasn’t withered despite the moving together of the two nations in the face of China’s contemptuous isolationism; they see espionage and subtlety feeding in with every computer tape. Britain and Germany, those traditional enemies, get along as they always did in peacetime, keeping suspicion out of sight. The poor Australian bothers nobody; he isn’t a scientist and so has nothing intelligible to say.

  I suppose I’ll have to put a stop to that eventually; not too roughly, I hope.

  But even friendly Strei
ch and Lindley can offer the rough edges of their tongues, as when Lindley said he hoped on return to find psychology established as an exact science, and Streich cut him down with an unpretty insolence.

  ‘And so the end of psychologists, superseded by computerised chemo-therapy!’

  Lindley remained placid (a tough training, English gentlehood) but I saw the sting enter. ‘That has been the direction since the early sixties, but therapy is not the only end of the discipline; the final uses have scarcely been glimpsed yet.’

  Said Streich, ‘Then guessing is useless,’ and talked of something else.

  From Streich it was a fear reaction. They all fear the psychiatrists. They ‘know’ that Lindley and Doronin are the ship’s spies; nobody has said it but it hangs in the air. They ‘know’ their actions and words will be analysed, from take-off to planetfall, that ‘reports’ will be made and that sharp and disastrous consequences may follow.

  The idea clings in part because a harmless percentage of it is true. We know the working quarters are bugged for sight and sound, but this is overt. Our activities as a group will be the foundation of a whole new discipline dealing with the behaviour – psychological, social and physical – of man-in-space. But the private cabins are not bugged; a measure of inalienable privacy was recognised as an absolute requirement.

  But I’ll bet that every one of them has searched his cabin for suspicious fittings and hollows and concealed leads. They know what manner of place their world is. (All right, little truth book; I’ve searched mine, too.)

  Referring back to the 2032 discussion, only Fraser (speaking today’s language incongruously in that cotton pickin’ mammy accent) attempted to break the mediocrity barrier.

  ‘Don’t be surprised,’ he said, ‘if beamed transmission of matter is with us by then. It sounds long range, but technology’s a-galloping.’