But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future. What future was there? Certainly not the one he had envisaged — a future of humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.
Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization…
And yet…
Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.
Or perhaps not.
Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.
He had written that once in an unpublished article on third-world development. The developed nations could serve their interests best by fostering the growth and development of less privileged, weaker nations…
And perhaps that was what was happening here.
But many experts on strategy had read his article and criticized it severely, citing many historical examples to prove him wrong. “Whose interests does the Soviet Union serve?” one reader had asked him. The Soviet Union, he had acknowledged, was stronger than ever — apparently — but faced enormous problems coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others thought might prove fatal in the long run. “But not yet — and how many nations last for more than centuries?” the critic had responded.
Now apply the theory of necessary altruism to groups of intelligent beings that have survived tens of thousands of years. If only one of them launches planet-eating, civilization-destroying probes, and none of them respond by launching probe-killers—
Who wins?
Probe-killers, then, were definitely launched in self-interest. But why attempt to preserve possibly competing civilizations? Why not just destroy the planet-eaters and be done with it?
The network was not available to him; all he had were implanted memories, information he was not always able to access without the help of the network.
He often spurred thought by letting his fingers speak. Now he opened a file and began to type. The first few sentences came out as gibberish and he erased them. There is an answer here, inside me. I know it.
But try as he would, he could not bring it all together.
I don’t know why they’re trying to preserve us.
When he was outside of the soothing and persuasive direction of the network, that lack of an answer worried him.
Harry Feinman could not make a connection with his past. That time, when he had been mobile and free of pain, was fiction, something concocted by his imagination. He could not conceive of ever having made love or of having eaten a full meal. In the few moments of lucidity left to him each day, he searched his body for any sign of that past and found nothing. All was failing. He was a different person; Harry Feinman had already died.
Most of the time he spent sleeping or nearly asleep, heavily doped. He thought or dreamed vaguely of life after death and decided the question didn’t really matter; anything, even complete oblivion, was better than this half-and-half existence.
Ithaca drifted in and out of the room like a cloud. When he was in pain, between medications, she sat by him sharp as a razor, saying nothing as he lay rigid, teeth clamped.
You pays your money coming in, going out. Ticket price for this ride: pain.
The difference between day and night was not clear to him anymore. Sometimes the lights were down when he was awake, sometimes not.
There was a miraculous hour when somehow his medication was perfectly balanced, and he felt almost normal, and in this time he cherished Ithaca’s presence. He told her he wanted her to marry again and she accepted this unintentional but necessary torture with the calmness he had come to expect and rely on; then he remembered having told her several times before.
“Why worry about it?” she asked quietly. “We’ll probably all be gone soon anyway.”
Harry shook his head as if disagreeing, but she looked at him with her “Oh, come on” look, one eyebrow arched, and he said, “I’d like to see that. What a show that’ll be, if it comes.”
“If?” Ithaca smiled ironically. “You’re my favorite pessimist. Now you sound hopeful.”
“Just barely hopeful,” Harry said.
“What did Arthur tell you?”
“Never try to hide anything from my woman.” Harry took a moment to remember. “He said the planet is covered by little spiders now.”
Ithaca leaned forward. “What?”
“The cavalry is here, but it’s probably come too late.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“He showed one to me. A little robot. They’re harvesting the Earth before it goes. Trying to save a little breeding population, I’d guess. Like a zoo expedition. And they’re destroying the machines that are doing this to us.”
“Arthur told you all this?”
He nodded. “I thought he was nuts, then he showed me one of the spiders. He seemed…not happy, but he seemed to know he was doing something useful. He thought maybe they were controlling his thoughts, but he said he didn’t mind, and he couldn’t be…” Harry’s weakness came on him and he closed his eyes for several minutes. “He said they knew what was best, probably.”
Ithaca studied his face closely, leaning forward. “I saw one,” she said softly. “I think I did. In the garden.”
“One what? Spider?”
“Silver.” She held up her open hand. “Big as this. It ran away before I could see it clearly, but when I looked — it had been on the trunk of the old live oak-there were cuts through the bark, knife cuts. I thought I was seeing things, or just mistaken. Harry, should we tell people?”
“What good?” he asked. His thoughts were blurring again, so he said no more and only held her hand lightly in his.
Ithaca called the Gordon house the next evening and received no answer. The last part of Harry had died, finally, at eleven in the morning.
53
The Glomar Discoverer, its engines in reverse against a steady surface current and a constant twelve-knot southwesterly wind, drifted at the edge of a vast sea of lime-green and gray and white foam. The air was filled with a constant churning roar. High overhead, peculiar clouds were forming — swirling bands, curving upward as if along the inside of a funnel.
Walt Samshow scanned the foaming sea to the distant horizon and could see no end to it. He hardly needed to breathe at all now. Most of the men held wet rags over their noses and mouths. Nosebleeds were common; the delicate nasal tissues were deteriorating under the drying, burning effect of too much of a good thing: oxygen.
“We can’t stay here long,” Sand said, standing beside him on the bridge.
“Do we have our samples and readings?” Samshow asked. Sand nodded.
“Any word from the Navy ships?”
“They’ve left the area already. We’ve been listening for the deep submersible, but all we hear is the roar of bubbles.”
“Tell the captain we should pull back ourselves,” Samshow said. “Can anybody fight this?” He had directed his question out over the bridge railing, but Sand shook his head.
“I doubt it.”
“It’s like watching the whole ocean being dismantled,” Samshow said. He pulled a bottle of eyedrops from his peacoat pocket and leaned his head back to administer them.
Sand refused the bottle when Samshow offered it. “It’s scary.”
Samshow grimaced. “It’s goddamned exhilarating, and I don’t mean the oxygen. You can see the end of things, you can see a plan — or at least some outline of a plan — and it’s horrifying, it’s grand.”