The human species had been trying for a million years to find love and immortality. They had talked a lot about both, but humankind always talked most about those things which did not exist. Or, if they did, were so rare that almost nobody recognized them when they saw them. Love was rare, and immortality was only a thing hoped-for, unproven, and unprovable.
At least, it was so on Earth.
A little while later, he stood up and shook his fist at the sky.
And this was when he decided to leave Earth and start asking the primal question.
Why are we created only to suffer and to die?
5
THE BOOJUM OF SPACE
Simon explored the area on foot. He found the one-man spaceship where Comberbacke had left it. It had been built by the Titanic & Icarus Spaceship Company, Inc., which didn’t inspire confidence in Simon. After looking it over, however, he decided to fly it back to the Hwang Ho. He would store it in the big dock area in the ship’s stern. He could use it for a shuttle or a lifeboat during his voyages through interstellar space.
When he got back to the big ship, he discovered that the old man was gone. Simon set out on foot again. After he had walked down the muddy slope, he found Comberbacke rooting around among the ruins of a village. The old man looked up when he heard Simon’s feet pulling out of the mud with a sucking sound.
“Even an Armenian village must have a library,” he said. “Nobody’s illiterate anymore. So there must be a book that gives the scores of the World Series.”
“Is that all it’ll take to make you happy?”
The old man thought a minute, then said, “No. If I could get a hard-on, I’d be a lot happier. But what good would that do? There ain’t a woman in sight.”
“I was thinking more of somebody who’d be a companion for you and maybe a nurse, too.”
“Find somebody who likes baseball,” Comberbacke said.
Simon went away shaking his head. In the next few weeks he went over every inch of Great and Little Ararat, but the only humans he found were dead. The last day of his search, he started back to the ship with the idea of flying it around until he located land on which were some survivors. He’d make sure they’d take care of the old man, and then he’d leave for interstellar space.
It was dusk when he got to the ship. It lay broadside to him and, as usual, the sight of it disturbed him. He could never put his mental finger on the reason. It was about six hundred feet long, its main length cylindrical-shaped. The nose, however, was bulbous, and its stern rested on two hemispheres. These housed the engines which drove the Hwang Ho. They were separate from the ship so they could be released if the engines threatened to blow up.
Light streamed out from the main sideport, which had been left open. Simon was exasperated when he saw this. He had told the old man to keep it shut at night. The mosquitoes were fierce now that spring was here. Somehow, the deluge had not killed them all off, and they were multiplying by the billions since most of their natural enemies, the bats and the birds, were dead. He hurried into the ship and closed the port after him. He called out the old man’s name. Comberbacke did not reply. Simon went to the recreation room and found the old man dead in a chair. The side of his head was blown off. A Chinese pistol lay on his lap. On the table before him was a mud-and-water-stained book, its open pages streaked with water. But it wasn’t rain that had fallen on these pages. The marks were from tears.
The book was the Encyclopedia Terrica, Volume IX, Barracuda-Bay Rum.
There was no farewell note from Comberbacke, but Simon read under Baseball, World Series, all he needed to know. The 2457 Series had ended in a scandal. In the middle of the final game, Cardinals 3-Tigers 4, police officers had arrested five St Louis men. The commissioner had just been given proof that they had taken money from gamblers to throw the Series. The Tokyo Tigers won by default, and the five men had been given the maximum sentences.
Simon buried the old man and erected the von Parrot marker over him. On the backside of the stone, which he turned frontside, he scratched these letters:
That last line was good advice, but Simon wasn’t taking it.
He went into the Hwang Ho, closed the port, and seated himself before the control panel in the bridge. The stellar maps were stored in the computer circuits. If Simon wanted to go to the sixth Planet of 61 Cygni A, for instance, he had only to press the right keys. The rest was up to the computer.
Just as a joke—though who knew what knowledge lurked in its heart?—he asked the ship to take him to Heaven.
To his surprise the computer screen flashed the Chinese equivalent of “O.K.” There was a two-minute pause while the computer checked that everything was shipshape. Then it swung up off the ground, tilted upright, and climbed up toward the sky.
Simon didn’t feel the change in the ship’s attitude. An artificial gravity field adjusted for that.
Simon’s attitude of mind changed, however. He frantically punched the keys.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To Heaven, as directed.”
“Where is Heaven?”
“Heaven is the second planet of Beta Orionis. It is a T-type planet which was uninhabited by sentients until a Terrestrial expedition landed there in A.D. 2879 on first…”
Simon canceled the order.
“Take me to some unexplored galaxy, and we’ll play it by ear from there,” Simon typed.
A few seconds later they were off into the black unknown. The ship was capable of attaining 69,000 times the speed of light but Simon held it down to 20,000 times, or 20X. The drive itself was named the soixante-neuf drive, because this meant sixty-nine in French. It had been invented in A.D. 2970 by a Frenchman whose exact name Simon didn’t recall. Either it was Pierre le Chanceux or Pierre le Chancreux, he wasn’t sure which, since he’d not made a study of space history.
When the first ship equipped with the drive, the Golden Goose, had been revved up to top speed, those aboard had been frightened by a high screaming noise. This had started out as a murmur at about 20,000 times the speed of light. As the ship accelerated, the sound became louder and higher. At 69X, the ship was filled with the kind of noise you hear when a woman with a narrow pelvis is giving birth or a man has been kicked in the balls. There were many theories about where this screaming came from. Then, in 2980, Dr. Maloney, a brilliant man when sober, solved the mystery. It was known that the drive got all but its kick-off energy from tapping into the fifth dimension. This dimension contained stars just like ours, except that they were of a fifth-dimensional shape, whatever that was. These stars were living creatures, beings of complex energy structures, just as the stars in our universe were alive. Efforts to communicate with the stars, however, had failed. Maybe they, like the porpoises, just didn’t care to talk to us. Never mind. What did matter was that the drive was drawing off the energy of these living things. They didn’t like being killed and the drive hurt them. Ergo, Dr. Maloney explained, they screamed.