"They're all mad. Fancy not begging me to go on the Gansas! I discovered these creatures, I know them! The Gansas needs me! You must do what you can, Mihaly, for the sake of an old friend.”
Grimly, Pasztor shook his head.
"I can do nothing for you, I have explained why I my-self am temporarily not very much in favor. You must do what you can for yourself, as we all must. Besides, there is a war on.”
"Now you are using that same excuse! People have all been against me, always. My father was. So's my wife, my son - now you. I thought better of you, Mihaly. It's a public disgrace if I'm not on the Gansas when she hits vacuum, and I don't know what I'll do.”
Mihaly shifted uncomfortably, hugged his whisky glass and stared at the floor.
"You didn't really expect better of me, Bruce. At heart, you know you never expect better of anybody.”
"I certainly shan't in future. You don't wonder a man grows bitter. My God, what really is there to live for!" He stood up, stubbing the end of his mescahale into a disposer. "I can see myself out," he said. In a state approaching elevation, he left the room, forging past the covertly interested secretary. Of course he didn't feel as badly as he led Mihaly, that trumped up little Hungarian, to believe; it would do the fellow good to see that some people had real sufferings, and weren't just poseurs.
He fell back on an earlier track of thought. You didn't go through the business of searching for new planets -with all the sweat and sacrifice that that entailed - merely because you hoped some day to find a race of beings to whom life was not just a burden for anyone with any sort of sensitivity. No, there was another side to that coin! You went because life on Earth was such hell, because, to be quite precise, living with other human beings was such a messy job.
Not that it was so wonderful on board ship - that bastard Bargerone, he was to blame for all this trouble -but at least on a ship everyone had his position, his station, and there were rules to keep him to it, and punish him if he did not keep to it. Perhaps that was the secret of the exploring spirit. Yes, perhaps that had always been the knowledge in the hearts of the other great explorers! Taxing though the unknown realms were, they held no dangers like those that lurked in the breast of friends and family.
Better the devils you don't know, than those that know you!
He headed for home in fine angry contentment. Hadn't he always thought that things would turn out like this!
When the Master Explorer had left his office, Sir Mihaly Pasztor drained his glass, set it down, and walked heavily over to the door of his small adjourning room. He opened it. A young man sat in the large cupped hand of a chair, smoking a mescahale as if he would eat it. He was of willowy build, with a neat beard that made him look older than his eighteen years. His usually intelligent face, as he turned it now in a mute question towards Mihaly, was merely heavy and glum.
"Your father has gone, Aylmer." Mihaly said. "I recognized his voice. He sounded all overwrought as usual." They moved back into the office.
Aylmer slipped his mescahale into the disposer on the desk and asked. "What was he after? Anything to do with me?”
"Not really. He wanted me to get him aboard the Gansas.”
Their eyes met. The young sullen face began to smile. Together, they burst into laughter.
"Like son, like father! You didn't tell him, I hope, that I had come with an exactly similar request?”
"Of course not. He had enough to be unhappy about for one day." As he spoke, Mihaly rummaged in his desk. "Now don't be offended if I push you off fast, young man, but I have a lot of work to do. You are sure that you still want to join the Exploration Corps?”
"You know I do. Uncle Mihaly. I feel I cannot stay on Earth any more. My parents have made that impossible for me, at least for the present. I want to get out into space, away.”
Mihaly nodded sympathetically. He'd heard the same sentiments so often, and never discouraged them, if only because he once thought that way himself. When you were young you never realized that there was no "away", only - even in the most distant galaxy - endless locations haunted by the self. He laid out some documents on the top of the desk.
"These are the various papers you will need. A friend of mine, Bryant Lattimore of the USGN Flight Advice, has explained things to David Pestalozzi, who will captain the Gansas on this run. Because your father is well known, it has been thought wiser to have you ship under an assumed name. Accordingly, you will be known as Samuel Melmoth. I hope you won't mind that?”
"Why should I mind? I'm very grateful for all you have done, and I have no particular fondness for my own name.”
He clenched his fists above his head and beamed with triumph.
How easy it was to be excited when you were young, Mihaly thought. How hard for real friendship to spring up between two different generations - one could communicate, but it was often like two different species signaling to each other across a gulf.
"What happened to that girl you were mixed up with?" he asked.
"Oh, her!" The sour look returned for a moment. "She was a dead loss.”
"I hope you'll forgive my curiosity, Aylmer, but was she not the cause of your being turned out of your father's house? What did the two of you do that your father regarded as so unforgiveable?”
Aylmer looked restless.
"Come, you can tell me, surely." Mihaly said, with impatience. "I am a broadminded man, a man of the world, nothing like your father.”
Aylmer smiled. "That's funny, I always thought that in many ways you and father were rather alike. For instance, you have this background of space travel; and then neither of you likes the hygienic synthetic foods and you still eat old-fashioned foods, such as - well, bits of animal cooked." He made a gesture of disgust and said, "But if it satisfies your curiosity, you may as well know that father came in unexpectedly one night on his last leave when I had my girl on my bed. I was kissing her between the thighs when he opened the door. The sight nearly drove him off his nut! Does it shock you too?”
Looking down at his desk, Mihaly shook his head and said, "My dear Aylmer. what shocks me is that I should appear to you like your father. This business of food -can't you see how generation by generation we are getting farther and farther divorced from nature? This craving for synthetic food is one more instance of man's denial of his animal nature. We are a mixture of animal and spirit, and to deny one side of our nature is to impoverish the other.”
"The Stone Age men used the same argument, I dare-say, to whoever started cooking their food. But we live in the Buzzardian universe now, and must think accordingly. You must see, Uncle, that we've come too far for us to be able to argue any longer about what is 'natural' and what isn't.”
"Oh? Why then are you disgusted about my eating 'bits of animal'?”
"Because that is inherently ... well, it's just disgusting.”
"You'd better go, Aylmer, I have the business of handing over my two aliens to the vivisectors. I wish you well.”
"Cheer up, Uncle, we'll be bringing you lots more to experiment on!" And with that thoughtless word of encouragement, Aylmer Ainson was stuffing the documents into his pocket, waving, leaving.
CHAPTER TEN
Viewed from space on an accelerated time scale, Earth and its peoples might have been taken for one organism. Occasionally the organism would have a convulsion. Moving like microbes down arteries, the human specks would slide down their traffic lanes and converge on various points on the globe until those points began to look like sores on the cuticle of the sphere.
The inflammation would grow, would seem to be a mere diseased confusion, until a change took place. The specks would draw back from a central object, producing a semblance of orderliness. This central object would stand out like a pustule, a stormhead of infection. Then it would burst, or appear to burst, and fly outwards. As if some intolerable pressure had thus been relieved, the people that resembled specks to the cosmic observer would now disperse, possibly to reassemble later at another seat of infection. Meanwhile, the ejected blob of matter hurtled out-wards - making the cosmic eye duck out of the way and attend to its own business.