Alphecca II did not promise to be as memorable as those worlds. There would be nothing here to match the fantastic moonrise of Fomalhaut VI, the five hundred mirror-bright moons in stately procession through the sky, each glinting in a different hue. That moonrise had overwhelmed us four years ago, and remained yet bright. Alphecca II, dead world that it was, or rather world not yet alive, would leave no marks on our memories.
But bitterness was rising in Brock. I saw the pattern forming; I saw the question bubbling up through the layers of his mind, ready to be asked.
And on the fourth day, he let it be asked. After four days on Alphecca II, four days of staring at the grotesque twisted green shapes of the angular sprawling vines, four days of watching the lethargic fission of the pond protozoa who seemed to be the world’s only animal life, Brock suddenly looked up at me.
He asked the shattering question that should never be asked.
“Why?” he said.
Eleven years and a hundred sixty-four worlds earlier, the seeds of that unanswered question had been sown. I was fresh out of the Academy, twenty-three, a tall, sharp-nosed boy with what some said was an irritatingly precise way of looking at things.
I should say that I bitterly resented being told I was coldly precise. People accused me of Teutonic heaviness. A girl I once had known said that to me, after a notably unsuccessful romance had come trailing to a halt. I recall turning to her, glaring at the light dusting of freckles across her nose, and telling her, “I have no Teutonic blood whatsoever. If you’ll take the trouble to think of the probable Scandinavian derivation of my name—”
She slapped me.
Shortly after that, I met Brock—Brock, who at twenty-four was already the Brock I would know at thirty-five, harsh of face and voice, dark of complexion, with an expression of nervous wariness registering in his blue-black eyes always and ever. Brock never accused me of Teutonicism; he laughed when I cited some minor detail from memory, but the laugh was one of respect.
We were both Academy graduates; we both were restless. It showed in Brock’s face, and I don’t doubt it showed in mine. Earth was small and dirty and crowded, and each night the stars, those bright enough to glint through the haze and brightness of the cities, seemed to mock at us.
Brock and I gravitated naturally together. We shared a room in Appalachia North, we shared a library planchet, we shared reading tapes and music-discs and occasionally lovers. And eight weeks after my twenty-third birthday, seven weeks before Brock’s twenty-fourth, we hailed a cab and invested our last four coins in a trip downtown to the Administration of External Exploration.
There, we spoke to a bland-faced, smiling man with one leg prosthetic—he boasted of it—and his left hand a waxy synthetic one. “I got that way on Sirius VI,” he told us. “But I’m an exception. Most of the exploration teams keep going for years and years, and nothing ever happens to them. McKees and Haugmuth have been out twenty-three years now. That’s the record. We hear from them, every few months or so. They keep on going, farther and farther out.”
Brock nodded. “Good. Give us the forms.”
He signed first. I added my name below, finishing with a flourish. I stacked the triplicate forms neatly together and shoved them back at the half-synthetic recruiter.
“Excellent. Excellent. Welcome to the Corps.”
He shook our hands, giving the hairy-knuckled right hand to Brock, the waxy left to me. I gripped it tightly, wondering if he could feel my grip.
Three days later we were in space, bound outward. In all the time since the original idea had sprung up unvoiced between us, neither Brock nor myself had paused to ask the damnable question.
Why?
We had joined the Corps. We had renounced Earth. Motive, unstated. Or unknown. We let the matter lie dormant between us for eleven years, through a procession of strange and then less strange worlds.
Until Brock’s agony broke forth to the surface. He destroyed eleven years of numb peace with one half-whispered syllable, there in the ship’s lab our fourth morning on Alphecca II.
I looked at him for perhaps thirty seconds. Moistening my lips, I said, “What do you mean, Brock?”
“You know what I mean.” The flat declarative tone was one of simple truth. “The one thing we haven’t been asking ourselves all these years, because we knew we didn’t have an answer for it and we like to have answers for things. Why are we here, on Alphecca II—with a hundred sixty-three visited worlds behind us?”
I shrugged. “You didn’t have to start this, Brock.” Outside the sun was climbing towards noon height, but I felt cold and dry, as if the ammonia atmosphere were seeping into the ship. It wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to start this. I could have let it fester for another eleven years. But it came popping out, and I want to settle it. We left Earth because we didn’t like it there. Agreed?”
I nodded.
“But that’s not why enough,” he persisted. “Why do we explore? Why do we keep running from planet to planet, from one crazy airless ball to the next, out here where there are no people and no cities? Green crabs on Rigel V, sand-fish on Caph. Dammit, Hammond, what are we looking for?”
Very calmly I said, “Ourselves, maybe?”
His face crinkled scornfully. “Foggy-eyed and imprecise, and you know it. We’re not looking for ourselves out here. We’re trying to lose ourselves. Eh?”
“No!”
“Admit it!”
I stared through the quartz window at the stiff, almost wooden vines that covered the pebbly ground. They seemed to be moving faintly, to be stretching their rigid bodies in a contraction of some sort. In a dull, tired voice, Brock said, “We left Earth because we couldn’t cope with it. It was too crowded and too dirty for sensitive shrinking souls like us. We had the choice of withdrawing into shells and huddling there for eighty or ninety years, or else pulling up and leaving for space. We left. There’s no society out here, just each other.”
“We’ve adjusted to each other,” I pointed out.
“So? Does that mean we could fit into Earth society? Would you want to go back? Remember the team—McKees and Haugmuth, is it?—who spent thirty-three years in space and came back. They were catatonic eight minutes after landing, the report said.”
“Let me give you a simpler why,” I ventured. “Why did you start griping all of a sudden? Why couldn’t you hold it in?”
“That’s not a simpler why. It’s part of the same one. I came to an answer, and I didn’t like it. I got the answer that we were out here because we couldn’t make the grade on Earth.”
“No!”
He smiled apologetically. “No? All right, then. Give me another answer. I want an answer, Hammond. I need one, now.”
I pointed to the synthesizer. “Why don’t you have a drink instead?”
“That comes later,” he said sombrely. “After I’ve given up trying to find out.”
The stippling of fine details was becoming a sharp-focus picture. Brock—self-reliant Brock, self-contained, self-sufficient—had come to the end of his self-sufficiency. He had looked too deeply beneath the surface.
“At the age of eight,” I began, “I asked my father what was outside the universe. That is, defining the universe as That Which Contains Everything, could there possibly be something or someplace outside its bounds? He looked at me for a minute or two, then laughed and told me not to worry about it. But I did worry about it. I stayed up half the night worrying about it, and my head hurt by morning. I never found out what was outside the universe.”