Space! An emptiness. A mighty emptiness, filled with flaming suns that were called the stars. And across that space, across the stretches of it too vast to be measured by the mile, too great to be measured by anything but light-years, the space crossed by light in the passage of a year, sped a thing that was called a ship—not the Ship, Ship with a capital S, but simply a ship, one of many ships.
A ship from the planet Earth—not from the sun itself, not from the star, but from one of many planets that circled round the star.
It can’t be, he told himself. It simply cannot be. The Ship can’t move. There can’t be space. There can’t be emptiness. We can’t be a single dot, a lost and wandering mote in the immensity of a universal emptiness, dwarfed by the stars that shine outside the port.
Because if that were so, then they stood for nothing. They were just casual factors in the universe. Even less than casual factors. Less than nothing. A smear of wandering, random life lost amid the countless stars.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat there, staring at the machine.
Knowledge stored in there, he thought. What’s what the instruction sheet had said. Knowledge stored on spools of tape, knowledge that was drummed into the brain, that was impressed, implanted, grafted on the brain of a sleeping man.
And this was just the beginning. This was only the first lesson. This was just the start of the old dead knowledge scrapped so long ago, a knowledge stored against a day of need, a knowledge hid away. And it was his. It lay upon the spools, it lay within the cap. It was his to take and his to use—and to what purpose? For there was no need to have the knowledge if there were no purpose in it.
And was it true?
That was the question.
Was the knowledge true?
How could you know a truth? How could you spot an untruth?
There was no way to know, of course—not yet was there a way to know the truth. Knowledge could be judged by other knowledge, and he had but little knowledge—more than anyone within the ship had had for years, yet still so little knowledge. For somewhere, he knew, there must be an explanation for the stars and for the planets that circled around the stars and for the space in which the stars were placed—and for the ship that sped between the stars.
The Letter had said purpose and it had said destination and those were the two things he must know—the purpose and the destination.
He put the cap back in its place and went out of the vault and locked the door behind him, and he walked with a slightly surer stride, but still with the sense of guilt riding on his shoulders. For now he had broken not only the spirit, but the letter of the law—he was breaking the law for a reason and he suspected that the reason and the purpose would wipe out the law.
He went down the long flights of the escalator stairs to the lower levels.
He found Joe in the lounge, staring at the chess board with the pieces set and ready.
“Where have you been?” asked Joe. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Just around,” said Jon.
“This is three days,” said Joe, “you’ve been just around.”
He looked at Jon quizzically.
“Remember the hell we used to raise?” he asked. “The stealing and the tricks?”
“I remember, Joe.”
“You always got a funny look about you, just before we went off on one of our pranks. You have that same look now.”
“I’m not up to any pranks,” said Jon. “I’m not stealing anything.”
“We’ve been friends for years,” said Joe. “You’ve got something on your mind…”
Jon, looking down at him, tried to see the boy, but the boy was gone. Instead was the man who sat beneath the Picture, the man who read the Ending, the pious man, the good man, a leader of the Ship’s community.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Joe.”
“I only want to help.”
But if he knew, thought Jon, he wouldn’t want to help. He’d look at me in horror, he’d report me to the chapel, he’d be the first to cry heresy. For it was heresy, there was no doubt of that. It was a denial of the Myth, it was a ripping away of the security of ignorance, it was a refutation of the belief that all would be for the best, it was saying they could no longer sit with folded hands and rely upon the planned order of the Ship.
“Let’s play a game,” he said with resolve.
“That’s the way you want it, Jon?” demanded Joe.
“That’s the way I want it.”
“Your move,” said Joe.
Jon moved his queen pawn. Joe stared at him.
“You play a king’s pawn game.”
“I changed my mind,” said Jon. “I think this opening’s better.”
“As you wish,” said Joe.
They played. Joe won without any trouble.
At last, after days of lying on the bed and wearing the cap, of being lullabyed to sleep and waking with new knowledge, he knew the entire story.
He knew about the Earth and how Earthmen had built the ship and sent it out to reach the stars and he understood a little about the reaching for the stars that had driven humans to plan the ship.
He knew about the selection and the training of the crew and the careful screening that had gone into the picking of the ancestors of the colonists-to-be, the biological recommendations which had determined their mating so that when the fortieth generation should finally reach the stars they would be a hardy race, efficient to deal with the problems there.
He knew about the educational setup and the books that had been intended to keep knowledge intact, and he had some slight acquaintance with the psychology involved in the entire project.
But something had gone wrong.
Not with the ship, but with the people in it.
The books had been fed into the converter.
The Myth had risen and Earth had been entirely forgotten.
The knowledge had been lost and legend had been substituted.
In the span of forty generations the plan had been lost and the purpose been forgotten and the Folk lived out their lives in the sure and sane belief that they were self-contained, that the Ship was the beginning and the end, that by some divine intervention the Ship and the people in it had come into being and that their ordered lives were directed by a worked-out plan in which everything that happened must be for the best.
They played chess and cards and listened to old music, never questioning for a moment who had invented cards or chess or who had created music. They whiled away not hours, but lives, with long gossiping, and told old stories, and swapped old yarns out of other generations. But they had no history and they did not wonder and they did not look ahead—for everything that happened would be for the best.
For year on empty year the Ship was all they had known. Even before the first generation had died the Earth had become a misty thing far behind, not only in time and space, but in memory as well. There was no loyalty to Earth to keep alive the memory of the Earth. There was no loyalty to the Ship, because the Ship had no need of it.
The Ship was a mother to them and they nestled in it. The Ship fed them and sheltered them and kept them safe from harm.
There was no place to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to think about. And they adapted.
Babies, Jon Hoff thought.
Babies cuddling in a mother’s arms. Babies prattling old storied rhymes on the nursery floor.
And some of the rhymes were truer than they knew.
It had been spoken that when the Mutter came and the stars stood still the End was near at hand.
And that was true enough, for the stars had moved because the Ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis to afford artificial gravity.