Nemesis (20 page)

“Do you think that might be so?”

“I don’t know. The trouble is that there is no other distinction. Both sexes were hit, roughly equally, and no clear bias as far as age, education, or gross physical characteristics could be found. Of course, the Plague victims make up a relatively small sample, so the statistics aren’t compelling. Pitt thought we might go along with the out-of-the-usual bit, and in recent years, no one has come to Erythro who hasn’t been a pretty dull clod—not unintelligent, you understand, but a plodder. Like myself. I’m the ideal subject for immunity from the Plague, an ordinary brain. Right?”

“Come, Siever, you aren’t—”

“On the other hand,” said Genarr, not waiting for her protest, “I would say that Marlene’s brain was remarkably out of the ordinary.”

“Oh yes,” began Eugenia. “I see what you’re getting at.”

“It’s possible that when Pitt discovered that Marlene had this ability and that she was asking to go to Erythro, he saw at once that by merely acceding to her request, he might possibly get rid of a mind he instantly recognized as dangerous.”

“Obviously, then, we ought to leave—go back to Rotor.”

“Yes, but I’m quite sure Pitt can prevent that for a while. He can insist that these measurements you wish to make are vital and must be completed and you won’t be able to use the Plague as an excuse. If you even try, he will have you held for mental examination. I would suggest that you complete those measurements as quickly as you can, and, as for Marlene, we will take all possible precautions. The Plague
has
died down, and the suggestion that out-of-the-ordinary brains are particularly vulnerable is just that, a suggestion, and no more. There’s no real reason to think we can’t get away with it. We can keep Marlene safe and do Pitt in the eye. You’ll see.”

Insigna stared at Genarr, not quite seeing him, her stomach tying itself into a knot.

Adelia was a pleasant Settlement, much more pleasant than Rotor had been.

Crile Fisher had now been on six Settlements other than Rotor and all had been more pleasant than Rotor. (Fisher paused momentarily to go over the list of names and sighed. There were seven, not six. He was losing track. Perhaps it was all getting to be too much for him.)

Whatever the number, Adelia was the most pleasant Settlement Crile had visited. Not perhaps physically. Rotor had been an older Settlement, one that had managed to work itself into an assembly of traditions, so to speak. There was an efficiency about it, a sense of each person knowing his place exactly, being satisfied with it, and working away at it successfully.

Of course, Tessa was here on Adelia—Tessa Anita Wendel. Crile had not pursued matters there yet, perhaps because Tanayama’s characterization of him as irresistible to women had shaken him. However much it might have been meant as humor (or as sarcasm), it forced him, almost against his will, to go slowly. Producing a fiasco would seem doubly bad in the eyes of someone who believed him, however insincerely, to have a way with women.

It was two weeks after Fisher had settled himself into the Settlement before he managed to see her. It was always a source of wonder to him that on any Settlement one could always manage to arrange to get a view of
anyone
. Not all his experience had accustomed him to the smallness of a Settlement, to the fewness of its population, to the manner in which everyone knew everyone
else in his or her social circle—
everyone
else—and almost everyone else outside that circle, too.

When he did see her, however, Tessa Wendel turned out to be rather impressive. Tanayama’s description of her as middle-aged and as twice-divorced—the quirk of his aged lips as he said so, as though he were knowingly setting Fisher an unpleasant task—had built a picture in Fisher’s mind of a harsh woman, hard-faced, with a nervous twitch, perhaps, and an attitude toward men that was either cynical or hungry.

Tessa did not seem at all like this from the moderate distance at which he first saw her. She was almost as tall as he was and brunette, with her hair sleeked down. She looked quite alert and she smiled easily—he could tell that. Her clothes were refreshingly simple, as though she went out of her way to eschew ornament. She had kept herself slim and her figure was still surprisingly youthful.

Fisher found himself wondering why she was twice-divorced. He was ready to assume that she had tired of the men, rather than the other way around, even though common sense told him that incompatibility could strike against all odds.

It was necessary to be at some social function at which she would also be present. His being an Earthman interposed a small difficulty, but there were people on every Settlement who were, to some extent or other, in Earth’s pay. One of them would surely see to it that Fisher would be “launched,” to use the term most Settlements applied to the ritual.

The time came, then, when he and Wendel were facing each other and she gazed at him thoughtfully, her eyes making a slow sweep downward, then upward again, followed by the inevitable, “You’re from Earth, aren’t you, Mr. Fisher.”

“Yes, I am, Dr. Wendel. And I regret that exceedingly—if it offends you.”

“It doesn’t offend me. I presume you’ve been decontaminated.”

“Indeed. To death, just about.”

“And why have you dared the decontamination process in order to come here?”

And Fisher said, without staring at her too directly, but
keen to detect the effect, “Because I was told that Adelian women were particularly beautiful.”

“And now, I suppose, you will go back and deny the rumor.”

“On the contrary, it has just been confirmed.”

She said, “You’re a fetcher, you know that?”

Fisher didn’t know what a “fetcher” was in Adelian slang, but Wendel was smiling, and Fisher decided the first exchange had gone well.

Was it because he was irresistible? He suddenly remembered that he had never tried to be irresistible to Eugenia. He had merely wanted a way of being launched into the difficult Rotorian society.

The Adelian society was not so difficult, Fisher decided, but he had better not belabor his irresistibility. Yet to himself, he smiled sadly.

A month later, Fisher and Wendel were sufficiently at ease with each other to spend some time together in a low-G gym. Fisher had almost enjoyed the workout—but only almost, because he had never grown sufficiently acclimated to gymnastics at low-G to avoid a certain amount of space sickness. On Rotor, there had been less attention to such things, and he had usually been excluded from them because he was not a native Rotorian. (That was not legal, but custom often has a habit of being stronger than legality.)

They took an elevator to a higher-G level, and Fisher felt his stomach settling down. Both he and Wendel were wearing a minimum of clothing, and he had the feeling that she was as aware of his body as he was of hers.

After their showers, they had both robed and retired to one of the Privacies, where they could order a small meal.

Wendel said, “You’re not bad at low-G for an Earthman, Crile. Are you enjoying yourself on Adelia?”

“You know I am, Tessa. An Earthman can never get entirely used to a small world, but your presence would overbalance a great many disadvantages.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what a fetcher would say. How does Adelia compare to Rotor?”

“To Rotor?”

“Or to the other Settlements you’ve been on? I can name them all, Crile.”

Fisher felt discomfited. “What did you do? Investigate me?”

“Of course.”

“Am I that interesting?”

“I find anyone interesting who is clearly going out of his way to be interested in me. I want to know why. Excluding the possibility of sex, of course. That’s taken as a given.”

“Why am I interested in you, then?”

“Suppose you tell me. Why were you on Rotor? You were there long enough to get married and have a child and then you got off in a hurry before it scooted away. Were you afraid of being stuck on Rotor all your life? Didn’t you like it there?”

Fisher had gone from feeling discomfited to feeling harassed. He said, “Actually, I didn’t like Rotor very much because they didn’t like me—Earthmen, that is. And you’re right. I didn’t want to be stuck there as a second-class citizen all my life. Other Settlements are easier on us. Adelia is.”

“Rotor had a secret, though, that it was trying to keep from Earth, didn’t it?” Wendel’s eyes seemed to glitter with amusement.

“A secret? You mean, I suppose, hyper-assistance.”

“Yes, I suppose that
is
what I mean. And I suppose that that was what you were after.”

“I?”

“Yes, of course you. Did you get it? I mean, that’s why you married a Rotorian scientist, wasn’t it?” She rested her face on her two fists, elbows on the table, and leaned toward him.

Fisher shook his head, and said guardedly, “She never said a word to me about hyper-assistance. You’re all wrong about me.”

Wendel ignored his remark, and said, “And now you want to get it from me. How do you plan to do that? Are you going to marry me?”

“Would I get it from you if I married you?”

“No.”

“Then marriage seems to be out of the question, doesn’t it?”

“Too bad,” said Wendel, smiling.

Fisher said, “Are you asking me these questions because you’re a hyperspatialist?”

“Where were you told that that was what I was? Back on Earth, before you came here?”

“You’re listed in the
Adelian Roster
.”

“Ah, you’ve investigated me, too. What a curious pair we are. Did you notice that I was listed as a theoretical physicist?”

“It also lists your papers, and when quite a few of the titles have the word ‘hyperspatial,’ it makes you sound like a hyperspatialist to me.”

“Yes, but I’m a theoretical physicist just the same, so I approach the whole matter of hyperspatialism in a theoretical way. I’ve never tried to put it into practice.”

“But Rotor did. Did that bother you? I wonder. After all, someone on Rotor got ahead of you.”

“Why should it bother me? The theory is interesting, but the application isn’t. If you were to read more of my papers than the titles, you would discover that I say, quite flatly, that hyper-assistance isn’t worth the effort.”

“Rotorians were able to get a vessel far into space and studied the stars.”

“You’re talking about the Far Probe. That enabled Rotor to get parallax measurements for a number of comparatively distant stars, but is that worth the expense they went to? How far did the Far Probe go? Just a few light-months. That’s not really very far. As far as the Galaxy is concerned, the Far Probe’s extreme position and that of Earth and the imaginary line that can be drawn between them all amounts to a point in space.”

“They did more than send out the Far Probe,” said Fisher. “The entire Settlement left.”

“They certainly did. That was in ’22, so they’ve been gone six years now. And all we know is that they left.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Of course not. Where did they go? Are they still alive?
Can
they still be alive? Human beings have never been isolated on a Settlement. They have always had Earth in the vicinity, and other Settlements, too. Can a few tens of thousands of human beings survive, alone in the Universe,
on a small Settlement? We have no idea if that is a psychological possibility. My guess is that it isn’t.”

“I imagine their purpose would be to find a world they could live on. They wouldn’t remain on a Settlement.”

“Come, what world will they find? They’ve been gone six years. There are exactly two stars they could have reached by now since hyper-assistance can only move them at an average speed equal to that of light. That’s Alpha Centauri, a three-star system, four-point-three light-years away, one of the three being a red dwarf. Then there’s Barnard’s star, a single red dwarf, five-point-nine light-years away. Four stars: a Sun-like star, a near-Sun-like star, and two red dwarfs. The two Sun-likes are part of a moderately close binary and therefore unlikely to have an Earth-like planet in stable orbit. Where do they go next? They won’t make it, Crile. I’m sorry. I know that your wife and child were on Rotor, but they won’t make it.”

Fisher kept calm. He knew something she didn’t. He knew about the Neighbor Star—but that was a red dwarf, too.

He said, “Then you think that interstellar flight is impossible?”

“In a practical sense, yes, if hyper-assistance is all there is.”

Fisher said, “You make it sound as though hyper-assistance
isn’t
all there is, Tessa.”

“It may
be
all there is. It wasn’t long ago when we thought that even that much was impossible and to go further yet— Still, we can at least dream of true hyperspatial flight and true superluminal velocities. If we could go as quickly as we wished for as long as we wished, then the Galaxy, perhaps the Universe, would become one large Solar System, so to speak, and we could have it all.”

“That’s a nice dream, but is it possible?”

“We’ve had three All-Settlement Conferences on the matter since Rotor’s flight.”

“Just All-Settlement? What about Earth?”

“There were Earth observers present, but Earth is not a physicists’ paradise these days.”

“What conclusions did the conferences reach?”

Wendel smiled. “You’re not a physicist.”

“Leave out the hard parts. I’m curious.”

She merely smiled at him.

Fisher clenched his fist on the table before him. “Forget this theory of yours that I’m some sort of secret agent after your information. I have a child out there somewhere, Tessa. You say she’s probably dead. What if she’s alive? Is there a chance—”

Wendel’s smile disappeared. “I’m sorry. I did not think of that. But be practical. Finding a Settlement somewhere in a volume of space that is represented by a sphere that, at the present time, is six light-years in radius and is growing ever larger with time is an impossible task. It took us over a century to find the tenth planet, and that was enormously larger than Rotor and a much smaller volume of space had to be combed.”