"I don’t want to hear any more of that cockamamie Earthman’s Burden talk,” said Zara Doy, “I heard too much of it when I was a kid. I don’t want you going out to die. Stay here with me.”
Pertin said fondly, “You’re sweet, Zara. But this is important. The situation on the probe is exploding; the beings are fighting. They”re dying uselessly. I can’t back out just for some sentimental ideas of—”
“Sentimental be damned! Look. When we get married I want you right in bed with me, all of you. I don’t want to be thinking about part of you dying way off in nowhere!”
“I’ll be with you, honey. All of me.”
“You know what I mean,” she said angrily.
He hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with his fiancee two days before they were to get married - and less than two days before he kept his promise to go to the probe ship. He rubbed his troth ring and said, “Zara, I have to go to the probe.”
First, I said I would; and the boss has passed the word to all the other top brass on Sun One. Second, it’s important. It’s not "Earthman’s Burden", It’s simple logic. We’re new and pretty far behind, compared to the Scorpians or the methane crowd or the T’Worlie. But look what We’ve done already. We have Earth people on every major planet, working in every big project taking part in everything that’s happening. The others are getting used to us. They consult us now. If I back out, who else is there to go? Earth won’t be represented—”
“I don’t care.”
“It’s not as if I haven’t done it before—”
“The other time you went we weren’t going to be married," the girl responded fiercely.
“All right, that’s true. Now I owe you something. But I owe our planet something too. We’re just beginning to contribute our share of leadership in the Galaxy, Zara. I mean, look at that waiter! Half the purchased people around are human beings, now. When the nonviables edit a copy for Sun One, say, what shape do they copy? Human! The human shape is as familiar in the Galaxy now as the Sheliaks - and all in twenty years!”
Zara sucked at the last of her drink and put it down in its cage. She stared at the waiter, who was smoking a cigarette and thinking whatever thoughts a blanked-out personality was allowed to think; then she shook her head.
“I’ll lay it out nice and orderly like an engineer for you, Ben” she said. “First, if they copy human shape, is it because they respect us or because they have some crazy methane sense of humour? Second, if they buy our convicts for purchased people, likely enough it’s because we have more criminals to sell. Third, I don’t like the whole idea of Earth trying to dominate the Galaxy. Fourth—”
“Dominate! I said "leadership". It’s not the same thing at all.”
“It’s a prerequisite. Not sufficient, but necessary. Fourth, I still hate it all on personal grounds, and I’m not talking about idealism, I’m talking about sex. I’ll get over it. I know that. But it’s going to take some of the joy out of going to bed with you, Ben, thinking that at the same time somewhere else you’re getting eaten by a Sheliak or dying of radiation burn. I’m sorry it’s so, but it’s so.”
Ben said doubtfully, after a moment, “Would it be better if we postponed the wedding a little bit?”
“I don’t know. Let me think.”
He waited, finished his drink, looked cautiously at the girl. There was no anger or misery on her pretty face; she was simply staring thoughtfully out at the other beings in the concourse.
Pertin beckoned to the waiter and paid the bill. “They thank you,” said the waiter, staring appraisingly at Pertin and the girl.
“Will there be anything else?”
“No, we’re going.” But still the girl sat there. Then she sighed, and smiled at him.
“Well. You want to go pretty badly. Feeling the way you do, I suppose you ought to go. I won’t stop you, Ben, and it’s silly to put off getting married. But there is one thing I want you to do.”
He waited warily.
“Give me your ring. No, just to hold. When you’re finished going to the probe I’ll give it back to you. But I don’t want you wearing my ring when you die.”
Last-minute briefing was in the tachyon transport chamber, out at the far shell of Sun One, and heavily shielded. Dr Gerald York Bielowitz checked Pertin out himself. He was a methodical man - one of the reasons he was head of the mission to Sun One: and he read from a sound-scripted list.
“We’ve got about ten minutes, Ben Charles. Let’s see. Object Lambda. You know as much about it as I do. It’s anomalous, it’s exciting, the only way to find out about it is this probe, and it’s in Earth’s interest to make the probe succeed.”
He dropped his eyes to the page and went on: “There’s no possibility of survival on the probe, of course, and this has undoubtedly had some effect on the psyches of all the beings there. To the extent they have what we can map as psyches, I mean.
But in my opinion, the physical problems have caused the trouble. Some of the beings are dying - your predecessor among them, of course. Others are functioning poorly, probably because of ionization interference with their nervous systems - or whatever corresponds to nervous systems.
“At any rate,” he said, checking off another point, “the beings on the probe no longer constitute an orderly system. There’s violence. Some of the deaths are from fights or murders. This is seriously interfering with the operation of the probe, and threatening its very success. You know how important that is. If we blow this, it’s more than a hundred years before we get another chance.
“And finally,” he said, folding the list and putting it in his sporran, “your account here will be credited with double-rate pay for your services on the probe. Your equipment will follow, along with Doc Chimp here.” He nodded civilly to the hairy little handyman who crouched next to Pertin. “And good luck to you both!”
"Thank you, Gerald York,” said Pertin gravely. He stepped up to the transport portal, waited for the signal and entered, giving a half wave to Bielowitz as the door closed behind him.
This was the fourth time he had found himself in a tachyon transporter box, or at least the fourth time that he remembered,; or that it had actually happened to him. They all looked about the same. On the inside they were featureless except for what looked like studded nail heads almost completely covering each of the six interior surfaces. He stood there for a moment, and felt nothing.
But something was going on. The sensors were counting, locating and identifying every atom in his body, measuring their bonds to adjacent atoms, charting them in a precise three-dimensional matrix. The information obtained they encoded into a string of binary numbers; whereupon the great tachyon generators glowed into life, transmitting the numbers at a billibit per second in the direction of a point outside the farthest spiral arm of the Galaxy. It took only moments.
Then Ben Charles Pertin stepped out of the box and shook hands with his head of mission. “You’re the best man I’ve got,” said Bielowitz solemnly. “Thanks.”
Pertin then went back to his office and worked through the rest of the afternoon. He left a little early to meet his fiancée and take her to dinner. Over the coffee she returned his troth ring to him.
2
At about the same time that Ben Charles Pertin was putting his ring back on his finger, as much as time at two points separated by relativistic distances and velocities can be called the ‘same”, Ben James Pertin pushed his way out of another, almost identical box on the probe ship.