TO BE OPENED ONLY IN EMERGENCY.
He stood there for a long time, considering.
There had been the Mutter.
The stars were standing still.
Emergency, he thought. This is emergency.
For had it not been spoken that when the Mutter came and the stars stood still the End was near at hand?
And if the End was near at hand, then it was emergency.
He lifted the Letter in his hand and held it, hesitating. When he opened it, that would be the end of it. There would be no more handing down—no more of the Letter and the Reading. For this was the moment toward which the Letter had traveled down through time, from father to son for many generations.
Slowly he turned the Letter over and ran a thumbnail along the sealed edge, and the dry wax cracked open and the flap sprang loose.
He reached in and took the message out and spread it flat upon the counter top underneath the lamp. He read, his lips moving to form whispered words, reading as one must read who had spelled out the slow meaning of his words from an ancient dictionary:
To the son of my son many times removed:
They will have told you and by this time you may well believe that the ship is a way of life, that it started in a myth and moves toward a legend and that there is no meaning to be sought within its actuality and no purpose.
It would be fruitless for me to try to tell you the meaning or the purpose of the ship, for while these words are true, by themselves they will have little weight against the perversion of the truth, which by the time you read this may have reached the stature of religion.
But there is purpose in the ship, although even now, as this is written, the purpose has been lost, and as the ship plunges on its way it will remain not only lost, but buried beneath the weight of human rationalizing.
In the day that this is read there will be explanations of the ship and the people in it, but there will be no knowledge in the explanations.
To bring the ship to its destination there must be knowledge. There is a way that knowledge may be gained. I, who will be dead, whose body will have gone back into a plant long eaten, a piece of cloth long worn out, a molecule of oxygen, a pinch of fertilizer, have preserved that knowledge for you. On the second sheet of this letter are the directions for the acquiring of that knowledge.
I charge you to acquire that knowledge and to use it, that the minds and lives which launched the ship, and the others who kept it going, and those who even now reside within its walls, may not have used themselves, nor dedicated themselves, in vain, that the dream of Man may not die somewhere far among the stars.
You will have learned by the time you read this, even to a greater degree than I know it today, that nothing must be wasted, nothing must be thrown away, that all resources must be guarded and husbanded against a future need.
And that the ship not reach its destination, that it not serve its purpose, would be a waste so great as to stun the imagination. It would be a terrible waste of thousands of lives, the waste of knowledge and of hope.
You will not know my name, for my name by the time you read this will be gone with the hand that drives the pen, but my words will still live on and the knowledge in them and the charge.
I sign myself, your ancestor.
And there was a scrawl that Jon could not make out.
He let the Letter drop to the dust-laden counter top and words from the Letter hammered in his brain.
A ship that started in a myth and moved toward a legend.
But that was wrong, the Letter said.
There was a purpose and there was a destination.
A destination? What was that? The Book, he thought—the Book will tell what destination is.
With shaking hands he hauled the Book out of the drawer and opened it to D and followed down the columns with an unsteady finger: desquamative, dessert, destinate, destination—
Destination (n)—The place set for the end of a journey, or to which something is sent; a place or point aimed at.
The Ship had a destination.
The Ship was going somewhere.
The day would come when it would reach the place that it was going.
And that would be the End, of course.
The Ship was going somewhere.
But how? Did the Ship move?
He shook his head in disbelief. That the Ship moved was unbelievable. It was the stars, not the Ship, that moved.
There must be, he felt certain, another explanation.
He picked up the Letter’s second sheet and read it through, but didn’t understand it all, for his brain was tired and befuddled. He put the Letter and the Book and the bulb back in the drawer.
He closed the drawer and fled.
They had not noticed his absence in the lower level and he moved among them, trying to be one of them again, trying to pick up the old cloak of familiarity and wrap it around his sudden nakedness—but he was not one of them.
A terrible knowledge had made him not one of them. The knowledge that the Ship had a purpose and a destination—that it had started somewhere and was going somewhere and that when it got where it was going that would be the End, not of the Folk, nor of the Ship, but only of the Journey.
He went into the lounge and stood for a moment just inside the doorway. Joe was playing chess with Pete and a swift anger flared within him at the thought that Joe would play with someone else, for Joe had not played chess with anyone but him for many, many years. But the anger dropped quickly from him, and he looked at the chessmen for the first time, really saw them for the first time, and he saw that they were idle hunks of carven wood and that they had no part in this new world of the Letter and the Purpose.
George was sitting by himself playing solitaire and some of the others were playing poker with the metal counters they called “money,” although why they called it money was more than anyone could tell. It was just a name, they said, as the Ship was the name for the ship and the Stars were what the stars were called. Louise and Irma were sitting in one corner listening to an old, almost worn-out recording of a song, and the shrill, pinched voice of the woman who sang screeched across the room:
Jon walked into the room and George looked up from the cards. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“I went for a walk,” said Jon. “A long walk. On the center levels. It’s all wrong up there. It’s up, not in. You climb all the way.”
“The stars have not moved all day,” said George.
Joe turned his head and said, “The stars won’t move again. This is as it was spoken. This is the beginning of the End.”
“What is the End?” asked Jon.
“I don’t know,” said Joe and went back to his game.
The End, Jon thought. And none of them know what the End will be, just as they do not know what a ship is, or what money is, or the stars.
“We are meeting,” said George. Jon nodded.