Ticket to Anywhere
Damon Knight
I
Richard Falk was a sane man. Up until three months ago he had been, so far as he could discover, the only sane man left in a world of lunatics.
Now he was a dead man.
He lay in a metal coffin twenty yards long by three wide, airless, soundless. Behind the faceplate of his helmet, under the rime of frozen air, his lips were bright blue, his cheeks, nose, forehead a lighter color, almost violet. The flesh was stiff as frozen leather. He did not move, breathe, or think: he was dead.
Beside him, strapped to the bulging torso of his suit, was a metal box labeled: SCATO HEART PROBE, SEE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE.
All around him, strapped tight to the walls by broad loops of webbing, were boxes, canisters, canvas bags, kegs. Cargo. His coffin was a freighter, going to Mars.
In his frozen brain the memories were neatly stacked, Just as he had left them. Not coupled now, each cell isolated, the entropy of his mind fallen to zero. But uppermost among them, waiting for the thaw that might never come, were the memories of his last few hours of life.
Once the ship was launched and free, he had had to wait until its dancing molecules had stilled, their heat all radiated away into space. Then to wait again, heater turned off, listening to the silence while his own life’s heat drained away: fingers and toes numb first, ears and nose following, then lips, cheeks, and all his flesh; shivering in an agony of cold, watching his breath fill the helmet with cloud, the cold drops beading on the colder faceplate.
Tricky, that, and a thing that demanded courage. Act too soon, and the last drop into stillness would be too slow - the freezing liquids in his body would crystallize, gashing his cells with a million tiny stabs. Wait too long, and the cold would steal his ability to act at all.
He had waited until the false warmth of the dying had crept over him, the subtle destroyer, cumbering his limbs not with harshness but with too much peace. Twisting then in the dead center where he floated, he had drawn himself into the lane between two looped bundles of cargo, forcing them aside, until he reached the naked hull. There, spread-eagled against the chill metal, embracing it as one who crucifies himself gladly, he had died.
The ship, stillest of sepulchers, hung fixed in the center of the starry globe. So it might have remained for time without end, changeless, knowing no time; for there was no time here, no “events” - the ship and all its contents - except its robot control, inactive now but warmed by a minute trickle of electrons - now being very nearly at zero Absolute.
But a relay clicked, communicating its tremor through support frame and girder and hull. Time had begun again. The radar assembly in the prow began to emit timed clusters of radiation; presently other relays snapped over, and then the engine awoke, whispered to itself an instant, and was silent. For an instant the ship had become once more a thing in motion, a pebble flung between the stars. Another such instant came, then another; then, at long last, the hull shuddered to the whip and carom of atmospheric molecules. Lightly it dipped into Martian air, out again, in again, making a great circuit of the globe. A final relay clicked, and Falk’s coffin hurled itself groundward, free of the skeletal ship whose rockets now flamed again, driving it back into the timeless deep.
A parachute opened as the cargo hull hurtled downward: a preposterous parasol that would not have held the weight a minute against Earth’s gravity, in Earth’s air; but here it slowed that plummeting fall until the box met Martian sand at not quite killing speed.
In the shell, Falk’s corpse slowly thawed.
His heart was beating. That was Falk’s first conscious realization, and he listened to the tiny sound thankfully. His chest was rising and falling in a deep, slow rhythm; he heard the hiss and whisper of breath in his nostrils and felt the veins twitch at his temples.
Then came a prickling, half pain, in his arms and legs; then he saw a ruddy haze of light on his closed lids.
Falk opened his eyes.
He saw a pale glow that turned Itself into a face. It went away briefly, then came back. Falk could see it a little better now. Young - about thirty - pale-skinned, with a blue beard shadow. Black straight hair, a little untidy. Black-rimmed spectacles. Ironic lines on either side of the thin mouth,
“All right now?” said the face.
Falk murmured, and the face bent closer. He tried again. “Think so.”
The young man nodded. He picked up something from the bed and began taking it apart, fitting the components into the cushioned troughs of a metal box. It was the heart probe, Falk saw: the bulky control box and the short, capillary-thin needle.
“Where did you get this?” the young man asked. “And what the devil were you doing aboard that freighter?”
“Stole the probe,” said Falk. “And the suit, and the rest of the stuff. Dumped enough cargo to match my weight. Wanted to get to Mars. Only way.”
The young man let his hands fall Into his lap. “You stole it,” he repeated incredulously, “Then you never had the analogue treatment?”
Falk smiled. “Had it, all right. Dozen times. Never took.” He felt very tired. “Let me rest a minute, will you?”
“Of course. Sorry,”
The young man went away, and Falk closed his eyes, returning to the slow surge of memory that moved in his mind. He went through those last hours, painful as they were, and then again. There was trauma there; mustn’t let it get buried to cause him trouble later. Accept it, know the fear, live with it.
After a while the young man came back, carrying broth that steamed in a cup, and Falk drank it gratefully. Then he fell unknowing into sleep.
When he awoke he was stronger. He tried to sit up, and found to his mild surprise that he could. The other, who had been sitting in an armchair across the room, put down his pipe and came to thrust pillows behind Falk’s back. Then he sat down again. The room was cluttered and had a stale odor. Floor, walls, and ceiling were enameled metal. There were books and rolls of tape, records, in shelves; more piled on the floor. A dirty shirt was hanging from the doorknob.
“Want to talk now?” the young man asked. “My name’s Wolfert.”
“Glad to know you. Mine’s Falk…You want to know about the analogue business first, I suppose.”
“And why you’re here.”
“It’s the same thing,” Falk told him. “I’m immune to analogue treatment. I didn’t know it for sure till I was ten, but I think I was born that way. From seven on, I remember the other kids talking about their Guardians, and me pretending I had one too. You know how kids are - anything to run with the mob.
“But for a long time, years, I wasn’t certain whether everyone else was pretending like me, or whether I really was the only one without an invisible Guardian to talk to. I was pretty sure the kids were lying when they said they could see theirs, but whether they were there at all or not was another question. I didn’t know; actually it didn’t bother me much.
“When I was ten, I stole something. It was a book I wanted that my father wouldn’t let me have. The clerk was looking the other way - I put it under my jacket. Funny, I was halfway through it before it struck me that I’d just proved I had no Guardian. By that time, you see, I’d decided that I’d just never seen mine because I’d never done anything bad. I was proud of that, a little prissy about it if you want the truth - only I wanted this book….
“I had sense enough, thank God, to burn that book after I’d finished it. If I hadn’t, I don’t suppose I would have lived to grow up.”
Wolfert grunted. “Should think not,” he said. His eyes were fixed on Falk, interested, alert, wary. “One man without any control could turn the whole applecart over. But I thought immunity was theoretically impossible?”