Frederik Pohl - Father Of The Stars.pdf - Frederik Pohl - margozap

Father of the Stars

NORMAN MARCHAND sat in the wings of the ballroom’s small stage, on a leather

hassock someone had found for him. There were 1,500 people outside in the

ballroom, waiting to do him honor.

Marchand remembered the ballroom very well. He had once owned it. Forty

. . . no, it wasn’t forty. Not even fifty. Sixty years ago it had been, sixty

and more years ago that he and Joyce had danced in that ballroom. Then the

hotel was the newest on Earth, and he was the newly married son of the man who

had built it, and the party was the reception for his wedding to Joyce. Of

course, none of these people would know about that. But Marchand remembered

Oh, Joyce, my very dear! But she had been dead a long time now.

It was a noisy crowd. He peered out through the wings and could see the

head table filling up. There was the Vice-President of the United States

shaking hands with the Governor of Ontario as though, for the moment, they had

forgotten they were of different parties. There was Linfox, from the

Institute, obligingly helping a chimpanzee into the chair next to what,

judging by the microphones ranked before it, would probably be Marchand’s own.

Linfox seemed a little ill at ease with the chimp. The chimpanzee had no doubt

been smithed, but the imposition of human intelligence did not lengthen its

ape’s legs.

Then Dan Fleury appeared, up the steps from the floor of the ballroom

where the rest of the 1,500 diners were taking their places.

Fleury didn’t look well at all, Marchand thought—not without a small

touch of satisfaction, since Fleury was fifteen years younger than himself.

Still, Marchand wasn’t jealous. Not even of the young bellhop who had brought

him the hassock, twenty years old at the most and built like a fullback. One

life was enough for a man to live.

Especially when you had accomplished the dream you had set out to bring to

fruition. Or almost.

Of course, it had cost him everything his father left. But what else was

money for?

“It’s time to go in, sir. May I help you!” It was the young fullback

nearly bursting his bellhop’s uniform with the huge, hard muscles of youth. He

was very solicitous. One of the nice things about having this testimonial

dinner in a Marchand hotel was that the staff was as deferential to him as

though he still owned the place. Probably that was why the committee had

picked it, Marchand ruminated, quaint and old-fashioned as the hotel must seem

now. Though at one time— He recollected himself. “I’m sorry, young man. I

was—woolgathering. Thank you.”

He stood up, slowly but not very painfully, considering that it had been

a long day. As the fullback walked him onto the stage, the applause was enough

to drive down the automatic volume control on his hearing aid.

For that reason he missed the first words from Dan Fleury. No doubt they

were complimentary. Very carefully he lowered himself into his chair, and as

the clapping eased off, he was able to begin to hear the words.

Dan Fleury was still a tall man, built like a barrel, with bushy

eyebrows and a huge mane of hair. He had helped Marchand’s mad project for

thrusting Man into space from its very beginnings. He said as much now. “Man’s

grandest dream!” he roared. “The conquering of the stars themselves! And here

is the one man who taught us how to dream it, Norman Marchand!”

Marchand bowed to the storm of applause.

Again his hearing aid saved his ears and cost him the next few words:

“—and now that we are on the threshold of success,” Fleury was booming, “it is

altogether fitting that we should gather here tonight . . . to join in

fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope . . . to rededicate

ourselves to its fulfillment . . . and to pay our respects and give of our

love to the man who first showed us what dream to have!”

While the AVC registered the power of Dan Fleury’s oratory, Marchand

smiled out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of

Fleury to put it like that. The threshold of success indeed! How many years

now had they waited on it patiently?—and the door still locked in their faces.

Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial

dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest.

But still . . . He

turned painfully and looked at Fleury, half perplexed. There was something in

his tone. Was there—Could there be— There could not, he told himself firmly.

There was no news, no

breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships, no dream come true at

last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have

kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing.

“—and now,” Fleury was saying, “I won’t keep you from your dinners.

There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterward, I

promise you! But now let’s eat!”

Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks.

The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He

sat with his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just

a touch deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn’t envy the

young people anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth,

or their life expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice.

He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in

crackers and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had

kept Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he

chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been

good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his life

expectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of

those remaining months he was willing to give up for one really good meal. He

rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical

checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days

and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red

cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of luck he still

had a month. Perhaps as much as two.

“I beg your—pardon,” he said, half-turning to the chimpanzee. Even

smithed, the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that

he was being addressed.

He should not have turned.

His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted; the

soggy crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the

way—it was bad enough to be old; he did not want to be sloppy—and he moved too

quickly.

The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself

going over.

Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought; if I

was going to do this sort of thing, I might just as well have eaten some of

those shrimp. . . . But he did not kill himself.

He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that,

because he began to wake up while they were still carrying him back to his

dressing room behind the stage.

Once upon a time, Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope.

Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had

taken everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing

Extra-Solar Planets. He had, to begin with, given away several million

dollars.

That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and

it was nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used

it to hire publicity men, fund raisers, investment counselors, foundation

managers. He had spent it on documentary ifims and on TV commercials. With it

he had financed cocktail parties for United States Senators, and prize

contests for the nation’s sixth grades, and he had done what he set out to do.

He had raised money. A very great deal of money.

He had taken all the money he had begged and teased out of the pockets

of the world and used it to finance the building of twenty-six great ships,

each the size of a dozen ocean liners, and he had cast them into space like a

farmer sowing wheat upon the wind.

I tried, he whispered to himself, returning from the darkest place he

had ever seen. I wanted to see Man reach out and touch a new home. . . and I

wanted to be the one to guide him there. . .

And someone was saying: “—he knew about it, did he? But we were trying

to keep it quiet—” Someone else told the first person to shut his mouth.

Marchand opened his eyes.

Czerny was there, unsmiling. He saw that Marchand was conscious. “You’re

all right,” he said, and Marchand knew that it was true, since Czerny was

scowling angrily at him. If the news had been bad, he would have smiled— “No,

you don’t!” cried Czerny, catching him by the shoulder. “You stay right there.

You’re going home to bed.”

“But you said I was all right.”

“I meant you were still breathing. Don’t push it, Norm.”

Marchand protested, “But the dinner—I ought to be there—”

Asa Czerny had cared for Marchand for thirty years. They had gone

fishing together, and once or twice they had gotten drunk. Czerny would not

have refused for nothing. He only shook his head.

Marchand slumped back. Behind Czemy the chimpanzee was squatting

silently on the edge of a chair, watching. He’s worried,

Marchand thought. Worried because he feels it’s his fault, what happened to

me. The thought gave him enough strength to say: “Stupid of me to fall like

that, Mr.— I’m sorry.”

Czerny supplied the introduction. “This is Duane Ferguson, Norman. He

was supernumerary on the Copernicus. Smithed. He’s attending the dinner in

costume, as it were.” The chimpanzee nodded but did not speak. He was watching

that silver-tongued orator, Dan Fleury, who seemed upset. “Where is that

ambulance?” demanded Czerny, with a doctor’s impatience with interns, and the

fullback in bellhop’s uniform hurried silently away to find out.

The chimpanzee made a barking sound, clearing his throat. “Ghwadd”—he

said—more or less: the German ich sound followed by the word “what.” “Ghwadd

did jou mee-an aboud evdial, Midda Vleury?”

Dan Fleury turned and looked at the chimp blankly. But not, Marchand

thought suddenly, as though he didn’t know what the chimp was talking about.

Only as if he didn’t intend to answer.

Marchand rasped, “What’s this ‘evdial,’ Dan?”

“Search me. Look, Mr. Ferguson, perhaps we’d better go outside.”

“Ghwadd?” The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it

occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. “What did you

bean—did you mean?”

He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was

tiring him.

Although there was something about that insistent question— Marchand winced

and felt for a moment as though he were going

to throw up. It passed, leaving him wobbly. It wasn’t possible he had broken

anything, he told himself. Czerny would not lie about that. But he felt as if

he had.

He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury

hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and low-pitched

chirrup like the scratching of a cricket’s legs.

If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind,

thoughts, and—yes—soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in

that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand.

Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for

the ambulance. Men who volunteered for the interstellar flights he had done so

much to bring about knew what they were getting into. Until some super-Batman

invented the mythical FTL drive, it would always be so. At possible

speeds—less than light’s 186,000

m.p.s. crawl—it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile

planet thatwas known.

The smith process allowed these men to use their minds to control

chimpanzee bodies—easily bred, utterly exp~ndable—whi1e their own bodies

rested in the deep-freeze for all the long years between the stars.

It took brave men, naturally. They were entitled to courtesy and

consideration.

But so was he, and it was not courteous to blather about “evdial,”

whatever that was, while the man who had made their trip possible was

seriously injured. .

Unless .

Marchand opened his eyes again.

“Evdial.” Unless “evdial” was the closest chimpanzee vocal chords and

chimpanzee lips could come to—to—unless what they had been talking about,

while he was unconscious, was that utterly impossible, hopeless, and fantastic

dream that he, Marchand, had turned his back upon when he began organizing the

colonization campaign.

Unless someone had really found the way to FTL travel.

As soon as he was able the next day, Marchand got himself into a

wheelchair—all by himself; he didn’t want any help in this—and rolled it out

into the chart room of the home the Institute had given him, rent free, for

all of his life. (He had, of course, given it in the first place to the

Institute.)

The Institute had put $300,000 into the chart room. Stayed and guy-wired

stars flecked the volume of a forty-foot ballroom, representing in scale all

the space within fifty-five light-years of So!. Every star was mapped and

tagged. They had even moved a few of them slightly, a year ago, to correct for

proper motion. It was that carefully done.

The twenty-six great starships the Institute had financed were there,

too, or such of them as were still in space. They were out of scale, of

course, but Marchand understood what they represented. He rolled his chair

down the marked path to the center of the room and sat there, looking around,

just under yellow Sol.

There was blue-white Sirius dominating them all, Procyon hanging just

above. The two of them together were incomparably the brightest objects in the

room, though red Altair was brighter in its own right

than Procyon. In the center of the chamber Sol and Alpha Centauri A made a

brilliant pair.

He gazed with rheuming eyes at the greatest disappointment of his life,

Alpha Centauri B. So close. So right. So sterile. It was an ironic blunder of

creation that the nearest and best chance of another home had never formed

planets. . . or had formed them and swept them into the Bode-area traps set by

itself and its two companions.

But there were other hopes. .

Marchand sought and found Tau Ceti, yellow and pale. Only eleven

light-years away, the colony should be definitely established by now. In

another decade or less they should have an answer. . . if, of course, it had

planets Man could live on.

That was the big question, to which they had already received so many noes.

But Tau Ceti was still a good bet, Marchand told himself stoutly. It was a

dimmer, cooler sun than Sol. But it was Type G, and according to

spectropolarimetry, almost certainly planetiferous. And if it was another

disappointment— Marchand turned his eyes to 40 Eridani A, even dimmer, even

farther away. The expedition to 40 Eridani A had been, he remembered, the

fifth ship he had launched. It ought to be reaching its destination soon—this

year or perhaps next. There was no sure way of estimating time when the top

velocity was so close to light’s own. .

But now, of course, the top velocity was more.

The sudden wash of failure almost made him physically ifi. Faster than

light travel—why, how dared they!

But he didn’t have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed

on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight

again, looking around. At 96, you dare not do anything slowly, not even

daydream.

He glanced at and dismissed Procyon. They had tried Procyon lately—the

ship would not be even halfway. They had tried almost everything. Even Epsilon

Eridani and Groombridge 1618; even, far down past the probable good bets among

the spectroscopic classes, 61 Cygni A and Epsilon mdi, a late and despairing

try at Proxima Centauri (though they were very nearly sure it was wasted; the

Alpha Centauri expedition had detected nothing like viable planets).

There had been twenty-six of them in all. Three ships lost, three

returned, one still Earthbound. Nineteen were still out there.

Marchand looked for comfort at the bright green arrow that marked where

the Tycho Brahe rode its jets of ionized gas, the biggest of his ships, three

thousand men and women. It seemed to him

that someone had mentioned the Tycho Brahe recently. When? Why? He was not

sure, but the name stuck in his mind.

The door opened and Dan Fleury walked in, glancing at the arrayed stars

and ships and not seeing them. The chart room had never meant anything to

Fleury. He scolded, “Damn it, Norman, you scared us witless! Why you’re not in

the hospital now—”

“I was in the hospital, Dan. I wouldn’t stay. And finally I got it

through Asa Czerny’s head that I meant it, so he said I could come home if I

would stay quiet and let him look in. Well, as you see, I’m quiet. And I don’t

care if he looks in. I only care about finding out the truth about FTL.”

“Oh, cripes, Norm! Honestly, you shouldn’t worry yourself—”

“Dan, for thirty years you’ve never used the word ‘honestly’ except when

you were lying to me. Now give. I sent for you this morning because you know

the answer. I want it.

“For God’s sake, Dan!”

Fleury glanced around the room, as though he were seeing the glowing

points of light for the first time . . . perhaps he was, Marchand thought.

He said at last, “Well, there is something.”

Marchand waited. He had had a great deal of practice at waiting.

“There’s a young fellow,” said Fleury, starting over again. “He’s named

Eisele. A mathematician, would you believe it? He’s got an idea.”

Fleury pulled over a chair and sat down.

“It’s far from perfect,” he added.

“In fact,” he said, “a lot of people think it won’t work at all. Yoti

know the theory, of course. Einstein, Lorentz-Fitzgerald, the whole

roster—they’re all against it. It’s called—get this!—polynomiation.”

He waited for a laugh, hopelessly. Then he said, “Although I must say he

appears to have something, since the tests—”

Marchand said gently and with enormous restraint: “Dan, will you please

spit it out? Let’s see what you said so far. There’s this fellow named Eisele,

and he has something, and it’s crazy, but it works.”

“Well—yes.”

Marchand slowly leaned back and closed his eyes. “So that means that we

were all wrong. Especially me. And all our work—”

“Look, Norman! Don’t ever think like that. Your work has made all the

difference. If it weren’t for you, people like Eisele never would have had the

chance. Don’t you know he was working under one of our grants?”

Frederik Pohl - Father Of The Stars.pdf

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