“How would I know,” went on the Lord Crudelta, “that we would succeed more than we wanted to succeed, that Rambo would tear space itself loose from its hinges and leave that ship behind, just because he loved Elizabeth so sharply - much, so fiercely much?”
Crudelta sighed.
“I know it and I don’t know it. I’m like that ancient man who tried to take a water boat the wrong way around the planet Earth and found a new world instead. Columbus, he was called. And the land, that was Australia or America or something like that. That’s what I did. I sent Rambo out in that ancient rocket and he found a way through space3. Now none of us will ever know who might come bulking through the floor or take shape out of the air in front of us.”
Crudelta added, almost wistfully: “What’s the use of telling the story? Everybody knows it, anyhow. My part in it isn’t very glorious. Now the end of it, that’s pretty. The bungalow by the waterfall and all the wonderful children that other people gave to them, you could write a poem about that. But the next to the end, how he showed up at the hospital helpless and insane, looking for his own Elizabeth. That was sad and eerie, that was frightening. I’m glad it all came to the happy ending with the bungalow by the waterfall, but it took a crashing long time to get there. And there are parts of it that we will never quite understand, the naked skin against naked space, the eyeballs riding something much faster than light ever was. Do you know what an aoudad is? It’s an ancient sheep that used to live on Old Earth, and here we are, thousands of years later, with a children’s nonsense rhyme about it. The animals are gone but the rhyme remains. It’ll be like that with Rambo someday. Everybody will know his name and all about his drunkboat, but they will forget the scientific milestone that he crossed, hunting for Elizabeth in an ancient rocket that couldn’t fly from peetle to pootle… Oh, the rhyme? Don’t you know that? It’s a silly thing. It goes,
“Don’t ask me what ‘ham’ and ‘turkey’ are. Probably parts of ancient animals, like beefsteak or sirloin. But the children still say the words. They’ll do that with Rambo and his drunken boat some day. They may even tell the story of Elizabeth. But they will never tell the part about how he got to the hospital. That part is too terrible, too real, too sad and wonderful at the end. They found him on the grass. Mind you, naked on the grass, and nobody knew where he had come from!”
They found him naked on the grass and nobody knew where he had come from. They did not even know about the ancient rocket which the Lord Crudelta had sent beyond the end of nowhere with the letters I, O and M written on it. They did not know that this was Rambo, who had gone through space3. The robots noticed him first and brought him in, photographing everything that they did. They had been programmed that way, to make sure that anything unusual was kept in the records.
Then the nurses found him in an outside room.
They assumed that he was alive, since he was not dead, but they could not prove that he was alive, either.
That heightened the pubzzle.
The doctors were called in. Real doctors, not machines. They were very important men. Citizen Doctor Timofeyev, Citizen Doctor Grosbeck and the director himself, Sir and Doctor Vomact. They took the case.
(Over on the other side of the hospital Elizabeth waited, unconscious, and nobody knew it at all. Elizabeth, for whom he had jumped space, and pierced the stars, but nobody knew it yet!)
The young man could not speak. When they ran eye-prints and fingerprints through the Population Machine, they found that he had been bred on Earth itself, but had been shipped out as a frozen and unborn baby to Earth Four. At tremendous cost, they queried Earth Four with an “instant message,” only to discover that the voting man who lay before them in the hospital had been lost from an experimental ship on an intergalactic trip.
Lost.
No ship and no sign of ship.
And here he was.
They stood at the edge of space, and did not know what they were looking at. They were doctors and it was their business to repair or rebuild people, not to ship them around. How should such men know about space3, when they did not even know about space2, except for the fact that people got on the planoform ships and made trips through it? They were looking for sickness when their eyes saw engineering. They treated him when he was well.
All he needed was time, to get over the shock of the most tremendous trip ever made by a human being, but the doctors did not know that and they tried to rush his recovery.
When they put clothes on him, he moved from coma to a kind of mechanical spasm and tore the clothing off. Once again stripped, he lay himself roughly on the floor and refused food or speech.
They fed him with needles while the whole energy of space, had they only known it, was radiating out of his body in new forms.
They put him all by himself in a locked room and watched him through the peephole.
He was a nice-looking young man, even though his mind was blank and his body was rigid and unconscious. His hair was very fair and his eyes were light blue but his face showed character - a square chin; a handsome, resolute sullen mouth; old lines in the, face which looked as though, when conscious, he must have lived many days or months on the edge of rage.
When they studied him the third day in the hospital, their patient had not changed at all.
He had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked, face down, on the floor.
His body was as immobile and tense as it had been on the day before.
(One year later, this room was going to be a museum with a bronze sign reading, “Here lay Rambo after he left the Old Rocket for space3,” but the doctors still had no idea of what they were dealing with.)
His face was turned so sharply to the left that the neck muscles showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body. The left arm formed an exact right angle from the body, with the left forearm and hand pointing rigidly upward at 90° from the upper arm. The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.
Doctor Grosbeck said, “It looks to me like he’s swimming. Let’s drop him in a tank of water and see if he moves.” Grosbeck sometimes went in for drastic solutions to problems.
Timofeyev took his place at the peephole. “Spasm, still,” he murmured. “I hope the poor fellow is not feeling pain when his cortical defenses are down. How can a man fight pain if he does not even know what he is experiencing?”
“And you, sir and doctor,” said Grosbeck to Vomact, “what do you see?”
Vomact did not need to look. He had come early and had looked long and quietly at the patient through the peephole before the other doctors arrived. Vomact was a wise man, with good insight and rich intuitions. He could guess in an hour more than a machine could diagnose in a year; he was already beginning to understand that this was a sickness which no man had ever had before. Still, there were remedies waiting.
The three doctors tried them.
They tried hypnosis, electrotherapy, massage, subsonics, atropine, surgital, a whole family of the digitalinids, and some quasi-narcotic viruses which had been grown in orbit where they mutated fast. They got the beginning of a response when they tried gas hypnosis combined with an electronically amplified telepath; this showed that something still went on inside the patient’s mind. Otherwise the brain might have seemed to be mere fatty tissue, without a nerve in it. The other attempts had shown nothing. The gas showed a faint stirring away from fear and pain. The telepath reported glimpses of unknown skies. (The doctors turned the telepath over to the Space Police promptly, so they could try to code the star patterns which he had seen in a patient’s mind, but the patterns did not fit. The telepath, though a keen-witted man, could not remember them in enough detail for them to be scanned against the samples of piloting sheets.)