Their need to know drove them on. The loneliness had not yet become unbearable. The awful fear had not yet begun.
The gates were for the use of the people who followed the Gillettes into the unsettled reaches of the galaxy; they could be used in succession to travel outward, but the travelers couldn’t return through them. They were like ostrich eggs filled with water and left by natives in the African desert; they were there to make the journey safer and more comfortable for others, to enable the others to travel even farther.
Each time the Gillettes left one star system for another, through null space, they put a greater gulf of space and time between themselves and the world of their birth. “Sometimes I feel very strange,” admitted Gillette, after they had been outbound for more than two years. “I feel as if any contact we still have with Earth is an illusion, something we’ve invented just to maintain our sanity. I feel like we’re donating a large part of our lives to something that might never benefit anyone.”
Jessica listened somberly. She had had the same feelings, but she hadn’t wanted to let her husband know. “Sometimes I think that the life in the university classroom is the most desirable thing in the world. Sometimes I damn myself for not seeing that before. But it doesn’t last long. Every time we go down to a new world, I still feel the same hope. It’s only the weeks in null space that get to me. The alienation is so intense.”
Gillette looked at her mournfully. “What does it really matter if we do discover life?” he asked.
She looked at him in shocked silence for a moment. “You don’t really mean that,” she said at last.
Gillette’s scientific curiosity rescued him, as it had more than once in the past. “No,” he said softly, “I don’t. It does matter.” He picked up the three kittens from Ethyl’s litter. “Just let me find something like these waiting on one of these endless planets, and it will all be worthwhile.”
Months passed, and the Gillettes visited more stars and more planets, always with the same result. After three years they were still rocketing away from Earth. The fourth year passed, and the fifth. Their hope began to dwindle.
“It bothers me just a little,” said Gillette as they sat beside a great gray ocean, on a world they had named Carraway. There was a broad beach of pure white sand backed by high dunes. Waves broke endlessly and came to a frothy end at their feet. “I mean, that we never see anybody behind us, or hear anything. I know it’s impossible, but I used to have this crazy dream that somebody was following us through the gates and then jumped ahead of us through null space. Whoever it was waited for us at some star we hadn’t got to yet.”
Jessica made a flat mound of wet sand. “This is just like Earth, Leslie,” she said. “If you don’t notice the chartreuse sky. And if you don’t think about how there isn’t any grass in the dunes and no shells on the beach. Why would somebody follow us like that?”
Gillette lay back on the clean white sand and listened to the pleasant sound of the surf. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there had been some absurd kind of life on one of those planets we checked out years ago. Maybe we made a mistake and overlooked something, or misread a meter or something. Or maybe all the nations on Earth had wiped themselves out in a war and I was the only living human male and the lonely women of the world were throwing a party for me.”
“You’re crazy, honey,” said Jessica. She flipped some damp sand onto the legs of his pressure suit.
“Maybe Christ had come back and felt the situation just wasn’t complete without us, too. For a while there, every time we bounced back into normal space around a star, I kind of half-hoped to see another ship, waiting.” Gillette sat up again. “It never happened, though.”
“I wish I had a stick,” said Jessica. She piled more wet sand on her mound, looked at it for a few seconds, and then looked up at her husband. “Could there be something happening at home?” she asked.
“Who knows what’s happened in these five years? Think of all we’ve missed, sweetheart. Think of the books and the films, Jessie. Think of the scientific discoveries we haven’t heard about. Maybe there’s peace in the Mideast and a revolutionary new source of power and a black woman in the White House. Maybe the Cubs have won a pennant, Jessie. Who knows?”
“Don’t go overboard, dear,” she said. They stood and brushed off the sand that clung to their suits. Then they started back toward the landing craft.
Onboard the orbiting ship an hour later, Gillette watched the cats. They didn’t care anything about the Mideast; maybe they had the right idea. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to his wife. “I’ll tell you who does know what’s been happening. The people back home know. They know all about everything. The only thing they don’t know is what’s going on with us, right now. And somehow I have the feeling that they’re living easier with their ignorance than I am with mine.” The kitten that would grow up to be Benny’s mother tucked herself up into a near little bundle and fell asleep.
“You’re feeling cut off,” said Jessica.
“Of course I am,” said Gillette. “Remember what you used to say to me? Before we were married, when I told you I only wanted to go on with my work, and you told me that one human being was no human being? Remember? You were always saying things like that, just so I’d have to ask you what the hell you were talking about. And then you’d smile and deliver some little story you had all planned out. I guess it made you happy. So you said, ‘One human being is no human being, and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and you went on about how if I were going to live my life all alone, I might as well not live it at all. I can’t remember exactly the way you put it. You have this crazy way of saying things that don’t have the least little bit of logic to them but always make sense. You said I figured I could sit in my ivory tower and look at things under a microscope and jot down my findings and send out little announcements now and then about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling and I shouldn’t be surprised if nobody gives a damn. You said that I had to live among people, that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from it. And that I couldn’t climb a tree and decide I was going to start my own new species. But you were wrong, Jessica. You can get away from people. Look at us.”
The sound of his voice was bitter and heavy in the air. “Look at me,” he murmured. He looked at his reflection and it frightened him. He looked old; worse than that, he looked just a little demented. He turned away quickly, his eyes filling with tears.
“We’re not truly cut off,” she said softly. “Not as long as we’re together.”
“Yes,” he said, but he still felt set apart, his humanity diminishing with the passing months. He performed no function that he considered notably human. He read meters and dials and punched buttons; machines could do that, animals could be trained to do the same. He felt discarded, like a bad spot on a potato, cut out and thrown away.
Jessica prevented his depression from deepening into madness. He was far more susceptible to the effects of isolation than she. Their work sustained Jessica, but it only underscored their futility for her husband.