World in a Bottle, Allen Kim Lang [children's ebooks free online txt] 📗

in pathology, and had besides a special interest in this case—but I found the job more than I could take. Mary had been a sister to me for twenty-three years. In tears, I left the morgue during the classic cruciform incision.

I found the Firebird in the library. I recognized her through the anonymity of her chastity-suit by the characteristic pose of her head and arms as she sat reading: elbow braced on the table-top, her right fist blocked stubbornly against the plastic cheek of her helmet, her left arm curved around the book as though to be a break-water against distraction. I sat beside her, and said, "Dorothy."

Without a word she closed her book, stood, and replaced it on the shelf. We walked hand in hand out into the autumn campus.

"Last year," I said, "it was Mike Bohrman, walking through snow-drifts in his suit-shorts, wanting for once in his life to feel the real world against his skin. So he died. Five days ago, Mary deWitte married the man she loved. So she died," I said.

"Our life isn't generally as hopeless as that," the Firebird said.

"No," I said. "We're fed and entertained. We're being educated at one of the finest universities in the world—for us, she's been a genuine, homogenized-milk Alma Momma. She even gives us an allowance to buy airmail stamps for our collection, or bar-bells, or gas for our sports-car. She's given us everything we need for happiness. Everything, Firebird, but purpose. That's why we're all going nuts—why Mike went barefoot in the snow and Mary used love for a suicide-weapon. That's why we've got to break free."

"Free?" she asked. "You mean, free to step outside the Big Tank, shed our sterility-suits, turn septic—and die?"

"I mean free to step off earth."

We sat by mutual consent on a bench beneath a sugar maple, brushing aside half an inch of multicolored leaves. I told the Firebird of the broadcast from a southern star, and about the Immermann skull. I told her all I knew about the Orion rockets, the nuclear-pulse ships that had gone through five prototypes to reach the Zeta. "She's built to travel light-years," I said. "I'm going with her when she leaves."

"Of course, I'm going with you," she said. "Your spacemen will need a dietitian to make metabolic sense out of algal soups and hydroponic salads for the first couple of generations, and to teach the youngsters to take over the kitchen once they're on their own."

"Firebird," I said, "I'm happy to welcome you aboard. Now we've got to get that ship."

"We'll get it," she said. "Understand, Johnny, it's not the professional challenge that makes me want to blast off for Alpha Centauri with four generations to feed. I've got no special urge to tame frontiers. The reason I'm going—forgive me for mentioning it again, and cold sober—is to stay near you."

I stood up, drawing her up after me, and was struck again by the aptness of the nickname, "chastity-suit."

"Perhaps I've overestimated the effectiveness of a certain taboo," I said. "Come on, sweet Firebird. Let's get back to the Tank to help Bud recruit the rest of our crew."

Colonel Barrett was young for eagles. My fellow volunteers-designate and I, all twenty-eight of us, were gathered in the lounge of English Hall, creaking and wheezing in our sterility-suits, looking very ready for hard space.

The colonel wore crisp blues. His tunic was decorated by a triple row of medals-for-merit. It was not his fault that he wore no battle-stars. Barrett had graduated from the Air Academy into our seemingly endless Pax Desperandum. He'd never had a chance to see a roentgen radiated in anger. The Marsman Badge at the center of his left breast pocket was one rarely seen: the circle-with-arrow symbol of Mars had within it a "III," signifying that its wearer had been a member of the Third Mars Expedition, back in the days when a flight to Mars had been something more than a teamster's run. The Marsman Badge was balanced by the star-topped, laurel-wreathed—and anachronistic—silver wings of a Command Pilot.

As I shook hands with Colonel Barrett I found it difficult to conceal the envy that writhed in me. He'd seen the continents spread cloud-flecked on the receding, curving earth, the stars shining beside the sun against the black sky. He'd splashed across the dust-carpet of the moon, tasted water melted from the polar cap of Mars. As a member of Expedition Three, he'd been with the crew of the Orion Gamma when Immermann discovered the twenty-thousand-year-old skull at the base of Roosevelt Ridge.

Colonel Barrett addressed his remarks to me. "Central University," he said, "will lose the results of an eighty-million-dollar investment if you people leave. They'll be getting off cheap, compared to us. The Defense Department has been requested to turn over to you twenty-eight untrained grounds-men the greatest spaceship yet built, the first of the interstellar ships. The Zeta cost the taxpayers four dollars a pound to build. She weighs five hundred thousand tons, Dr. Bogardus."

"You're mistaken, Colonel, when you say that the University's investments in gnotobiotic research over the past eighty years will be lost if we Lapins end our part of the experiment. That's not true. That investment has been repaid many times over. More has been learned of human physiology, nutrition, and disease processes in the twenty-six years' study of germ-free humans than was learned concerning these subjects during any similar period in medical history.

"And, Colonel," I went on, "we're not untrained. Bud Dorsey, to your right, is an astrophysicist who worked with the Agassiz Observatory team in mapping the interstellar anti-matter dust clouds. Dr. Keto Hannamuri is a pediatrician. Dorothy Damien, our Firebird, is a dietitian. Fizz Ewell is a nuclear engineer. Karl Fyrmeister's degree is in chem engineering, as is Janie Bohrman's. Gloria Moss is working on her doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, Colonel, deals with the social dynamics of small human groups such as ours. Alfred MacCoy, standing behind you, has written three symphonies and an oratorio so far; and R.C.A. Victor has threaded them all with the New York Philharmonic. Lucy Cashdollar has had her works of sculpture displayed in the National Gallery and at London's Tate. There are some few resources here, Colonel."

"I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments, Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry, much less the techniques required to lift half a million tons on a nuclear-pulse thrust."

"We can learn," I said.

"I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach you."

"We're in?" Bud Dorsey demanded.

"You're in," Colonel Barrett said. "The decision in the Pentagon went against my recommendation that professionals in rocketry be recruited for the Alpha Centauri flight. The generals liked your argument, Dr. Bogardus, that we should send a germ-free ship and a germ-free crew to a possibly germ-free planet. In a sense, this is tradition. Back in the '50s, moon-missiles were sponged down with Lysol before launching, just in case they got where they were aimed at. Our people didn't want to contaminate the moon's surface with earthly micro-organisms, cluttering up the picture for the bacteriologists who were scheduled to arrive later. The Chief of Staff said that if there is a germ-free population on one of the Centaurus planets, we must not initiate our contact with them by handing out the sort of prizes Cook's crew brought to the South Seas—measles, tuberculosis, smallpox. We can't know that even innocuous bacteria might not be fatal to a gnotobiotic, alien population. So you go."

"Colonel," I said, "I'm sure that Washington didn't give up the Zeta to us out of sheer altruism. What's their real reason?"

"Where else could we get a crew of twenty-eight men and women who've given proof they can live together for a long period of time, peaceably, retaining a fair degree of sanity? Miss Moss's studies in group dynamics were most interesting to the Chief of Staff. Doubtless they did much to influence his decision in your favor."

"There's one thing I don't understand, Colonel Barrett."

"What's that, Miss Damien?" he asked.

"Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as the Zeta's crew?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?"

"You're right, Miss Damien," Colonel Barrett said. "My new assignment is a vital one. You must forgive me if I seemed curt and unfriendly." He paused. "I've been trying to hide my feelings, but evidently I failed. You see, Miss Damien, my wife and I had headed the previous list of volunteers—the contaminated crew."

Looking from the ports of the rocket that had brought us from Memorial Orbital Station, I'd thought von Weizsäcker Crater the most impressive sight I'd ever seen. The Orion Zeta looked from our height like nothing so much as a miniature silver cocktail-shaker, glinting at the center of the vast circle of von Weizsäcker.

Later, standing a few hundred feet from Zeta's base, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousand-foot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive than a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship.

We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrust-chamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From the Zeta, our aged great-grandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri.

One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives!

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories.

As far away as those things lay our goal.

We entered the sublunarian chambers beneath the ship. Dr. McQueen had preceded us here; and under his direction the Orion Zeta had been made as aseptic as the Big Tank itself. Colonel Barrett and his subordinates who'd train us to operate the Zeta would have to wear sterility-suits aboard her, and would enter through the formaldehyde sump that was now her only entrance. Even the dust of the moon was not entirely sterile.

The Firebird took my arm to urge me toward the liquid gateway to the ship, eager to see our new home. "Wait," I said, holding her back till all the others had gone through the antiseptic pool.

"Cold feet, Johnny?" she teased me.

"Gloria Moss once told me, Firebird, that a healthy respect for tradition is essential to the organic strength of a group such as ours," I said. "So...." I bent and picked the Firebird up, her weight moon-trimmed to that of a three-year-old. She put her arms around my neck as I carried her down the ladder into the poisonous decontamination tank that was our front door to Alpha Centauri.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of World in a Bottle, by Allen Kim Lang