He settled back luxuriously on the worn cushions of his car. Even so little as twenty years before, it would have been impossible for him--for anyone--to stop his vehicle in the middle of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue purely to meditate. But it was his domain now. He could go in the wrong direction on one-way streets, stop wherever he pleased, drive as fast or as slowly as he would (and could, of course). If he wanted to do anything as vulgar as spit in the street, he could (but they were his streets now, not to be sullied) ... cross the roads without waiting for the lights to change (it would be a long, long wait if he did) ... go to sleep when he wanted, eat as many meals as he wanted whenever he chose.... He could go naked in hot weather and there"d be no one to raise an eyebrow, deface public buildings (except that they were private buildings now, his buildings), idle without the guilty feeling that there was always something better he could and should be doing ... even if there were not. There would be no more guilty feelings; without people and their knowledge there was no more guilt.
A flash of movement in the bushes behind the library caught his eye. Surely that couldn"t be a fawn in Bryant Park? So soon?... He"d thought it would be another ten years at least before the wild animals came sniffing timidly along the Hudson, venturing a little further each time they saw no sign of their age-old enemy.
But probably the deer was only his imagination. He would investigate further after he had moved into the library.
Perhaps a higher building than the library.... But then he would have to climb too many flights of stairs. The elevators wouldn"t be working ... silly of him to forget that. There were a lot of steps outside the library too--it would be a ch.o.r.e to get his bicycles up those steps.
Then he smiled to himself. Robinson Crusoe would have been glad to have had bicycles and steps and such relatively harmless animals as bears to worry about. No, Robinson Crusoe never had it so good as he, Johnson, would have, and what more could he want?
For, whoever before in history had had his dreams--and what was wrong with dreams, after all?--so completely gratified? What child, envisioning a desert island all his own could imagine that his island would be the whole world? Together Johnson and the Earth would grow young again.
No, the stars were for others. Johnson was not the first man in history who had wanted the Earth, but he had been the first man--and probably the last--who had actually been given it. And he was well content with his bargain.
There was plenty of room for the bears too.
Contents
SUBJECTIVITY.
by NORMAN SPINRAD Boredom on a long, interstellar trip can be quite a problem ... but the entertainment technique the government dreamed up for this one was a leeetle too good...!
Interplanetary flight having been perfected, the planets and moons of the Sol system having been colonized, Man turned his attention to the stars.
And ran into a stone wall.
After three decades of trying, scientists reluctantly concluded that a faster-than-light drive was an impossibility, at least within the realm of any known theory of the Universe. They gave up.
But a government does not give up so easily, especially a unified government which already controls the entire habitat of the human race. Most especially a psychologically and sociologically enlightened government which sees the handwriting on the wall, and has already noticed the first signs of racial claustrophobia-an objectless sense of frustrated rage, increases in senseless crimes, proliferation of perversions and vices of every kind. Like grape juice sealed in a bottle, the human race had begun to ferment.
Therefore, the Solar Government took a slightly different point of view towards interstellar travel-Man must go to the stars. Period. Therefore, Man will go to the stars.
If the speed of light could not be exceeded, then Man would go to the stars within that limit.
When a government with tens of billions of dollars to spend becomes monomaniacal, Great Things can be accomplished. Also, unfortunately, Unspeakable Horrors.
Stage One: A drive was developed which could propel a s.p.a.ceship at half the speed of light. This was merely a matter of technological concentration, and several billion dollars.
Stage Two: A ship was built around the drive, and outfitted with every conceivable safety device. A laser-beam communication system was installed, so that Sol could keep in contact with the ship all the way to Centaurus. A crew of ten carefully screened, psyched and trained near-supermen was selected, and the ship was launched on a sixteen-year round-trip to Centaurus.
It never came back.
Two years out, the ten near-supermen became ten raving maniacs.
But the Solar Government did not give up. The next ship contained five near-supermen, and five near-superwomen.
They only lasted for a year and a half.
The Solar Government intensified the screening process. The next ship was manned by ten bona-fide supermen.
They stayed sane for nearly three years.
The Solar Government sent out a ship containing five supermen and five superwomen. In two years, they had ten super-lunatics.
The psychologists came to the unstartling conclusion that even the cream of humanity, in a s.e.xually balanced crew, could not stand up psychologically to sixteen years in a small steel womb, surrounded by billions of cubic miles of nothing.
One would have expected reasonable men to have given up.
Not the Solar Government. Monomania had produced Great Things, in the form of a c/2 drive. It now proceeded to produce Unspeakable Horrors.
The cream of the race had failed, reasoned the Solar Government, therefore, we will give the dregs a chance.
The fifth ship was manned by h.o.m.os.e.xuals. They lasted only six months. A ship full of lesbians bettered that by only two weeks.
Number Seven was manned by schizophrenics. Since they were already mad, they did not go crazy. Nevertheless, they did not come back. Number Eight was catatonics. Nine was paranoids. Ten was s.a.d.i.s.ts. Eleven was m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts. Twelve was a mixed crew of s.a.d.i.s.ts and m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts. No luck.
Maybe it was because thirteen was still a mystic number, or maybe it was merely that the Solar Government was running out of ideas. At any rate, ship Number Thirteen was the longest shot of all.
Background: From the beginnings of Man, it had been known that certain plants-mushrooms, certain cacti-produced intense hallucinations. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists-and others less scientifically minded-had begun to extract those hallucinogenic compounds, chiefly mescaline and psilocybin. The next step was the synthesis of hallucinogens-L.S.D. 25 was the first, and it was far more powerful than the extracts.
In the next few centuries, more and more different hallucinogens were synthesized-L.S.D. 105, Johannic acid, huxleyon, baronite.
So by the time the Solar Government had decided that the crew of ship Number Thirteen would attempt to cope with the terrible reality of interstellar s.p.a.ce by denying that reality, they had quite an a.s.sortment of hallucinogens to choose from.
The one they chose was a new, as-yet-untested ("Two experiments for the price of one," explained economy-minded officials) and unbelievably complex compound tentatively called Omnidrene.
Omnidrene was what the name implied-a hallucinogen with all the properties of the others, some which had proven to be all its own, and some which were as yet unknown. As ten micrograms was one day"s dose for the average man, it was the ideal hallucinogen for a starship.
So they sealed five men and five women-they had given up on s.e.xually unbalanced crews-in ship Number Thirteen, along with half a ton of Omnidrene and their fondest wishes, pointed the ship towards Centaurus, and prayed for a miracle.
In a way they could not possibly have foreseen, they got it.
As starship Thirteen pa.s.sed the orbit of Pluto, a meeting was held, since this could be considered the beginning of interstellar s.p.a.ce.
The ship was reasonably large-ten small private cabins, a bridge that would only be used for planetfalls, large storage areas, and a big common room, where the crew had gathered.
They were sitting in All-Purpose Lounges, arranged in a circle. A few had their Lounges at full recline, but most preferred the upright position.
Oliver Brunei, the nominal captain, had just opened the first case of Omnidrene, and taken out a bottle of the tiny pills.
"This, fellow inmates," he said, "is Omnidrene. The time has come for us to indulge. The automatics are all set, we won"t have to do a thing we don"t want to for the next eight years."
He poured ten of the tiny blue pills into the palm of his right hand. "On Earth, they used to have some kind of traditional ceremony when a person crossed the equator for the first time. Since we are crossing a far more important equator, I thought we should have some kind of ceremony."
The crew squirmed irritably.
I do tend to be verbose, Brunei thought.
"Well ... anyway, I just thought we all oughta take the first pills together," he said, somewhat defensively.
"So come on, Ollie," said a skinny, sour-looking man of about thirty years.
"O.K., Lazar, O.K." Marashovski"s gonna be trouble, Brunei thought. Why did they put him on the ship?
He handed the pills around. Lazar Marashovski was about to gulp his down.
"Wait a minute!" said Brunei. "Let"s all do it together."
"One, two, three!"
They swallowed the pills. In about ten minutes, thought Brunei, we should be feeling it.
He looked at the crew. Ten of us, he thought, ten brilliant misfits. Lazar, who has spent half his life high on baronite; Vera Galindez, would-be medium, trying to make herself telepathic with mescaline; Jorge Donner.... Why is he here?
Me, at least with me it"s simple-this or jail.
What a crew! Drug addicts, occultists, sensationalists ... and what else? What makes a person do a thing like this?
It"ll all come out, thought Brunei. In sixteen years, it"ll all come out.
"Feel anything yet, Ollie?" said Marsha Johnson. No doubt why she came along. Just an ugly old maid liking the idea of being cooped up with five men.
"Nothing yet," said Brunei.
He looked around the room. Plain steel walls, lined with cabinets full of Omnidrene on two sides, viewscreen on the ceiling, bare floor, the other two walls decked out like an automat. Plain, gray steel walls....
Then why were the gray steel walls turning pink?
"Oh, oh ..." said Joby Krail, rolling her pretty blond head, "oh, oh ... here it comes. The walls are dancing...."
"The ceiling is a spiral," muttered Vera, "a winding red spiral."
"O.K., fellow inmates," said Brunei, "it"s. .h.i.tting." Now the walls were red, bright fire-engine red, and they were melting. No, not melting, but evaporating....
"Like crystal it is," said Lin Pey, waving his delicate oriental hands, "like jade as transparent as crystal."
"There is a camel in the circle," said Lazar, "a brown camel."
"Let"s all try and see the camel together," said Vera Galindez sharply. "Tell us what it looks like, Lazar."
"It"s brown, it"s the two-humped kind, it has a two-foot tail."
"And big feet," said Lin Pey.
"A stupid face," said Donner.
"Very stupid."
"Your camel is a great bore," said the stocky, scowling Bram Daker.
"Let"s have something else," said Joby.
"Okay," replied Brunei, "now someone else tell what they see."
"A lizard," said Linda Tobias, a strange, somber girl, inclined to the morbid.
"A lizard?" squeaked Ingrid Solin.
"No," said Lin Pey, "a dragon. A green dragon, with a forked red tongue...."
"He has little useless wings," said Lazar.
"He is totally oblivious to us," said Vera.
Brunei saw the dragon. It was five feet long, green and scaly. It was a conventional dragon, except for the most bovine expression in its eyes....
Yes, he thought, the dragon is here. But the greater part of him knew that it was an illusion.
How long would this go on?
"It"s good that we see the same things," said Marsha. "Let"s always see the same things...."
"Yes."
"Yes!"
"Now a mountain, a tall blue mountain."
"With snow on the peak."
"Yes, and clouds...."
One week out: Oliver Brunei stepped into the common room. Lin Pey, Vera, and Lazar were sitting together, on what appeared to be a huge purple toadstool.
But that"s my hallucination, thought Brunei. At least, I think it is.
"h.e.l.lo Ollie," said Lazar.