Return from the Stars

“No one. That is… the infor at the hotel. Why?”

“It’s amusing,” he said. “I am not actually a doctor.”

“How is that?”

“I have not practiced for forty years. I am working on the history of cosmic medicine, because it is history now, Bregg, and outside of Adapt there is no longer any work for us specialists.”

“I’m sorry; I didn’t know…”

“Nonsense. I am the one who should be grateful to you. You are living proof against the Millman school’s thesis concerning the harmful effects of increased acceleration on the human body. You do not even exhibit hypertrophy of the left ventricle, nor is there a trace of emphysema… and the heart is excellent. But you know this?”

“Yes.”

“As a doctor, I really have nothing more to tell you, Bregg; however…”

He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“You are coping in our… present way of life?”

“Muddling along.”

“Your hair is gray, Bregg.”

“That means something?”

“Yes. Gray hair signifies age. No one turns gray now before eighty, and even then, rarely.”

It was the truth, I realized: I had seen no old people.

“Why?” I asked.

“There are preparations, medicines that halt graying. One can also restore the original color of the hair, although that is a little more trouble.”

“Fine,” I said, “but why are you telling me this?”

I saw that he was undecided.

“Women, Bregg,” he said abruptly.

I winced.

“Is that supposed to mean that I look like… an old man?”

“Like an old man — no, more like an athlete… but, then, you don’t walk about naked. It is mainly when you sit that you look… that an average person would take you for an old man who has had a rejuvenation operation, hormone treatments, etcetera.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I do not know why his calm gaze made me feel so awful. He took off his glasses and put them on his desk. He had blue, slightly watery eyes.

’There is a great deal you do not understand, Bregg. If you intended to live like a monk for the remainder of your days, your ‘I don’t mind’ might be in order, but… the society to which you have returned is not enthusiastic about what you gave more than your life for.”

“Don’t say that, doctor.”

“I am saying what I think. To give one’s life, what is that? People have been doing it for centuries. But to give up all one’s friends, parents, kin, acquaintances, women — you did sacrifice them, Bregg!”

“Doctor…”

The word hardly left my throat. I rested an elbow on the old desk.

“Apart from a handful of specialists, no one cares about it, Bregg. You know that?”

“Yes. They told me on Luna, at Adapt, only they put it… more delicately.”

We were silent for a while.

“The society to which you have returned is stabilized. Life is tranquil. Do you understand? The romance of the early days of astronautics is gone. It is like the achievements of Columbus. His expedition was something extraordinary, but who took any interest in the captains of galleons two hundred years after him? There was a two- line note about your return in the real.”

“But, doctor, that is not important,” I said. His sympathy was beginning to irritate me more than the indifference of others, though I could not tell him that.

“It is, Bregg, although you do not want to face it. If you were someone else, I would be silent, but you deserve the truth. You are alone. A man cannot live alone. Your interests, the ones you have returned with, are an island in a sea of ignorance. I doubt if many people would want to hear what you could tell them. I happen to be one of the interested ones, but I am eighty-nine years old…”

“I have nothing to tell,” I said, angry. “Nothing sensational. We did not discover any galactic civilization, and anyway, I was only a pilot. I flew the ship. Someone had to do it.”

“Yes?” he said quietly, raising his white eyebrows.

On the surface I was calm, but inside furious.

“Yes! A thousand times, yes! And that indifference, now — if you must know — affects me only on account of the ones who were left behind…”

“Who was left behind?” he asked quietly.

I cooled down.

“There were many. Arder, Venturi, Ennesson. Doctor, what point… ?”

“I don’t ask out of mere curiosity. This was — and believe me, I do not like grand words, either — a part of my own youth. It was because of you people that I took up these studies. We are equal in our uselessness. You may not, of course, accept this. I won’t belabor the point. But I would like to know. What happened to Arder?”

“No one knows exactly,” I answered. Suddenly it didn’t matter. And why shouldn’t I speak about it? I looked at the cracked black polish of the desk. I had never imagined that it would be like this.

“We were flying two probes over Arcturus. I lost contact with him. I couldn’t find him. It was his radio that had gone dead, not mine. When my oxygen ran out, I returned.”

“You waited?”

“Yes. That is, I circled Arcturus. Six days. A hundred and fifty-six hours, to be exact.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes. I had bad luck, because Arcturus developed new spots and I completely lost contact with the Prometheus. With my ship. Static. He could not return alone, without a radio. Arder, I mean. Because in the probes the directional teleran is connected to the radio. He could not return without me, and he didn’t return. Gimma ordered me back. He was quite right: to kill time, I later calculated the chances of my finding Arder by visual means, on the radar — I don’t remember exactly now, but it was something like one in a trillion. I hope he did the same as Arne Ennesson.”

“What did Arne Ennesson do?”

“He lost beam focalization. His thrust began to go on him. He could have stayed in orbit, I don’t know, another twenty-four hours; he would have spiraled, then finally fallen into Arcturus, so he chose to enter the protuberance at once. Burned up before my eyes.”

“How many pilots were there besides you?”

“On the Prometheus, five.”

“How many came back?”

“Olaf Staave and myself. I know what you’re thinking, doctor — that this was heroism. I, too, thought that way once, reading books about such people. But it isn’t so. Do you hear? If I could have, I would have left Arder and returned at once, but I couldn’t. He would not have returned, either. None of us would have. Including Gimma…”

“Why do you protest so much?” he asked softly.

“Because there is a difference between heroism and necessity. I did what anyone would have done. Doctor, to understand it you would have had to be there. A man is a bubble of fluid. All it takes is a defocalized drive or a demagnetized field, vibrations are set up, and in an instant the blood coagulates. Bear in mind that I’m not talking about outside causes, such as meteors, but only about malfunctions, defects. The least damned thing, a burned-out filament in the transmitter — and that’s it. If people were to let one another down under such conditions, the expeditions would amount to suicide. You understand?” I closed my eyes for a second. “Doctor — they don’t fly now? How can that be?”

“You want to fly?”