And Now the News (47 page)

The four of us had four different ideas for breaking the Luanae Barrier and that's what we were on our way to do. All four ideas were pretty far-fetched and the odds were much in favor of the Barrier's getting us, but it had to be done. After everything reasonable has been tried on something that must be done but can't be done, you have to start calling in the crackpots. I had to bring along my perfectly valid theories with the three crackpots because it was the only way they would ever get tried.

And that was the expedition personnel. The others were just operations. A skipper, Capt. Steev, strictly ferryboat, who knew everything he had to know about running the ship and getting her there, and didn't know, didn't care, wouldn't talk about anything else. Some of the others griped about the kind of skipper we had, but not me. He had to be expendable and he was. He had to know his job and he did. So?

The utility monkey was funny for about half an hour of anybody's time, and forever after that just unpleasant to have around. He was sort of misshapen, with a head much too big for his body and a left leg with too much bounce in it. It's been so many hundreds of years, I guess, since anyone had anything drastic wrong physically that nobody can get used to it any more. You know how to be polite about it when you do encounter it, and back home you know how to forget you saw it pretty thoroughly, but on a spacecan you never get the chance.

Personally, I think we should have shipped without a utility man. I don't know if I feel so strongly about it that I'd have done the dirty work on the ship myself, but maybe one of the others would. I don't care how much humanity progresses, there is always a little room somewhere for the unskilled hand, lifting and mopping and cleaning
out the sewer lines when something gets stuck. This monkey we had went by the name of Nils Blum, and nobody paid much attention to him.

And then we had the unemployed CG. Did you ever hear of an unemployed crew's girl—on a ship? I don't mean kicking around the spaceports waiting to ship out, unemployed that way. I mean right there aboard, she had nothing to do.

CGs as a whole are a dowdy bunch. There's no point in putting cute clothes, cute tricks and heady perfume aboard a spacecan. You don't need to stimulate anything; that takes care of itself as time goes by. They keep themselves clean and wait around till they're needed. They're a thick-skinned, slow-witted lot because there's no sense in sensitivity in their line. It just makes trouble.

This Virginia we shipped, she came from the bottom of the underside of the sump. She was everything that distinguishes a CG from a real Earthside female woman. She had a wide face that was closed and bland as a bank-vault door on the Sabbath, and a build that was neither this nor that but sort of statistically there. With a normal personality, or none at all, she might have had a job to do, and would have done it. But with the personality she had …

Well, at first you just didn't like her, and after a while you couldn't abide her, and finally you got the feeling about her that she was a lower animal, that you couldn't stand what the others might think of you if you went near her. There was a lot of difference of opinion aboard on a lot of subjects, but not on that one.

So that's what we had, believe it or not, an unemployed CG.

I read someplace about an Arctic explorer back in the days where the poles of Old Earth were covered with ice. He used to bring along the ugliest woman he could find to cook. Her other function was to inform him when he's been away from civilization too long, which she did by beginning to look good to him. Well, maybe, given time enough, we'd have found something for this Virginia to do. But given that much time, we'd all be dead.

Oh, she was a great help aboard, Virginia was.

That personality. I thought a lot about that personality of hers, just because on a long haul you have time to think a lot about everything
 … I knew a kid in school who had a face so insulting, so all-fired arrogant when it was relaxed that the teachers used to throw him out of the class just for sitting there. At least until they learned it was only physical and had him remodeled. Well, maybe Virginia's personality was something like that. Maybe she couldn't help it.

She had a way of carrying a cloud of what Potter once called “retroactive doubt.” When she was anywhere near you, you breathed it. You'd say something and she would repeat it, and by the way she did it—I can't describe it at all, but I'm telling you the truth—by the way she did it, she made whatever you'd said into a falsehood. Sometimes it suddenly sounded like a lie and sometimes like a mistake and sometimes like something you could be expected to believe because you were ignorant. I mean just repeating your own words.

You'd say, “Back home, I've got a silver-headed walking stick,” and she'd say, “Yeah, you've got a silver-headed walking stick,” in that dull flat drone of hers, and, by damn, you'd find yourself arguing with her that you
did
have one. I mean fighting, defending yourself, the way you only can when you doubt something yourself. Then she'd go away and you'd sit and stew about the walking stick, wondering where it was you last saw it, wondering if you actually did have it any more, if the head of it was real silver.

It didn't have to be something that was important at all; she could make you feel that way. When it
was
important … shipmate, better not mention it around her. I think you could tell her your name and she'd make you doubt it.

As a matter of fact, now I think of it, she did just that to me, the day I first saw her (which is traditionally the day after upship). I walked up to her in the mess hall and said, “My name's Palmer,” and she looked at me without blinking and said flatly, “Your name's Palmer,” and made me say, before I could stop myself, “No—really it is,” and then skulk off feeling damn strange.

We'd taken off with a null-grav tug and slipped into second-order matrix within six hours—all very fast and painless, thanks to the Luanae. Both devices were theirs, and so was the ship's power plant, and so was the sub-etheric communication we could get loud and clear for almost four full days after upship. Do you know how far
that would be in miles? Here, figure it out—four days is enough to take you halfway to Sirius, and that's a powerful long reach for a communicator phasing out of normal space and finding your receiver.

I recall especially that fourth day's bulletins, because we all gathered around to soak them up and chew them thoroughly. We knew that we'd hear nothing else from Earth Worlds from there on for the six ship-weeks it took us to get out to the Luanae Barrier, way out on the other side of the Coalsack.

We cheered the whiffleball scores and the chess results and laughed too loud at the human-interest bit about the kid who brought the Nova Mars stinkdog into school; and then there was the last real news we heard, that Chicago had been frozen from Northern Ontario Parish clear south to the Joplin city limits, back on Old Earth.

Everybody tsk-tsked.

“Well,” said Potter, looking at his finger, “I guess there's no other way.”

“But people always get killed in a freeze,” said big-eared England.

“More people get killed in a riot,” I remember saying.

About then, the signal faded, very abruptly, as it does when you get out of range in sub-space, and we all sat around worrying a bit.

It was funny, that news of all news being the last we heard. It was like a nudge, a send-off. A reminder.

Old Earth wasn't the only place where there were riots, not by a sight. Of eighteen planets in the two so-called Earth Galaxies, only Ragnarok and Luna-Luna were not bulging at the seams, and they'd be as bad as the others in a generation. By and large, people behaved themselves … but there were so
many
of them! The law of averages dictated that, in that number, there had to be so many troublemakers, and there were bound to be so many riots—and there had to be more troublemakers and riots all the time.

Unless we broke the Luanae Barrier.

We owe the Luanae a lot. As I said before, a good deal of our most advanced technology is built on transmissions from the Luanae. A very old people, ancient before old Sol the First was a sun. Wise and compassionate. That was the real cliché: the compassionate Luanae.
True enough, though.

No one had ever seen them, of course—the Barrier took care of that. No one understood the exact method of their transmissions, though they tried their best to explain. You'd get in range and then there it was, they were talking to you, inside your head. What they said was true—that you could bank on, swear by, hang your hat or your life on.

Some things have to be proved. But not anything the Luanae said. You might not believe it if you heard about something they said, from me, say. But go hear it from them—you'll
know
it's so. Never in the three hundred years of contact had anything they said turned out to be anything but exactly—really exactly—so.

They say that at first humanity took it with a dose of salts—we are a suspicious species. But although the Luanae couldn't give us the specs of a machine like theirs—they insisted that their thought transmitter was only a machine—they were able to describe an odd little recorder that would play back and “sound” like the original. When a few million of those had been made and distributed, there wasn't any suspicion any more. It just blew away.

But population-pressure rioting isn't as easy to dispose of as inbred suspicion. Put enough people in a limited area and you'll have trouble. Put too much in the same area and—look out. Now we had sixteen worlds with too much humanity, and two more with almost enough to start trouble. And all we could do was watch and feel, and freeze whole sections when the thing boiled over.

After each freeze, the United Planet men would spread through the countryside, picking up the mangled corpses from ground-cars and aircraft which had smashed up when everyone blacked out, and making the millions of others comfortable where they lay. They'd wake up in due course, with no sense of time passed, but the dead would have been long buried and the troublemakers located and treated, and the immediate causes of the riot, whatever they might be (it didn't take much) adjudicated and put right.

It was generally suspected that the UP boys declared riot and froze sections on somewhat less excuse than they really needed, but most people didn't object. At least it kept a few million people, each
time, from breeding any more for six to eight months. But nobody denied that this was pure stopgap.

As to halting reproduction altogether for a while, the suggestion came up monotonously in the Council sessions and was as monotonously knocked down. Enforced sterility is counter to the most basic of civil rights, and the Earth Worlds would die before they would relinquish any basic right.

They were dying, too.

And there, hanging just out of reach, were the Luanae Earths—eight fine Earth-type planets circling three suns in Galaxy Three. Eight beautiful worlds, ready and waiting; we wanted them and the Luanae wanted us to have them. And all we could do was watch them swing by and feel wistful, because of the Barrier.

The Luanae are not terrestrial. As far as can be understood, they have a boron metabolism and compete in no way with us hydrocarbon types. They need nothing from us and wouldn't take it if they did need it.

When they say they have those worlds to give us, when they say the worlds are suitable, and they say for sure that those are the only planets left in this entire quadrant of the Universe—why, you can bet on it. (They're the ones who found Luna-Luna and Ragnarok for us, when the Earth Worlds had despaired of ever finding another terrestrial planet.) We also have their assurance that in the other quadrants are literally thousands of terrestrial planets; but we will need a totally new technology to reach them, and that will take us maybe four centuries to acquire, even with their help.

Well, the Earth Worlds wouldn't last four centuries without the Luanae planets. With them, though—with them, it might be done. All we had to do was reach them. All we had to do was penetrate the Barrier.

The Barrier was a sphere in space—not a thing, exactly, just a place which could be represented on a cosmimap as a sphere. It was a fair-sized sphere; it englobed a third of the Luanae Galaxy, including, of course, the three little Luanae home-planets and the eight lovely, unreachable Luanae Earths.

All it did, that Barrier, was to draw a line. Anything outside of it
was left strictly alone. Anything penetrating it was instantly tracked, hunted and smashed by Luanae missiles. And anything that got cute enough to duck inside and out again was destroyed by the Barrier itself, which had the simple ability of reversing the terrene-sign of a random third of the atoms in any matter it touched.

You can imagine what happened to anything from a micrometeorite to a sun that got exposed to it. Shot through and through with contra-terrene matter. Disappeared in a single ferocious flash.

The Luanae Galaxy was discovered three hundred years ago by a creaky old Earth survey ship powered by Teller-formula atomics and a primitive subspace drive which barely quadrupled effective light-velocity.

The first thing the ship—it was called the
Luanae
, after its skipper's wife and daughter, both of whom were named Luana—the first thing they saw was the Luanae Galaxy, a long narrow elliptical one with a dark band, the perfect arc of a circle, a third of the way down the long axis. It looked artificial, so they hobbled over there to investigate.

It was artificial, all right. It was the Barrier, or, rather, the segment of space through which the Barrier had removed all impinging matter. And when they got within a dozen light-years of it, they were in range of the beings who came to be known by the same name as the ship and the galaxy—the Luanae.

They said
Stop
.