“Me? Nothing. That is — nothing has worked out for me. Nothing…” he repeated.
I was silent.
“What is this place called?” he asked.
“Clavestra. But the town is actually a few kilometers away. Say, let’s go there. I wanted to have the car repaired. We’ll come back cross-country — a little run. How about it?”
“Hal,” he said slowly, “you old hothead…”
“What?”
His eyes were smiling.
“You think you can drive out the devil with athletics? You’re an ass.”
“Make up your mind, a hothead or an ass,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It won’t work. Did you ever touch one of them?”
“Did… did I offend one? No. Why?”
“No, did you touch one of them?”
Finally I understood.
“There was no reason to. Why do you ask?”
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s like striking an old woman. You understand?”
“More or less. You got into a fight?”
I tried not to show my surprise. Olaf had been one of the most self-controlled men on board.
“Yes. I made a perfect idiot of myself. It was on the first day. At night, to be exact. I couldn’t get out of the post office — there was no door, only a kind of spinning thing. Have you seen one?”
“A revolving door?”
“No. I think it has to do with their controlling gravitation. In short, I spun around like a top, and some character who was with a girl pointed at me and laughed…”
The skin on my face seemed to grow tighter.
“Old woman or not,” I said, “he probably won’t laugh any more.”
“No. He has a broken collarbone.”
“They didn’t do anything to you?”
“No. Because I had just got out of the machine and he provoked me — I didn’t hit him right away, Hal. No, I asked what was so funny, since I had been away for so long, and he laughed again, pointing upward, and said, ‘Ah, from that monkey circus?’ “
“‘Monkey circus’?”
“Yes. And then…”
“Hold on. Why ‘monkey circus’?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he heard that astronauts are spun in centrifuges. I don’t know because I wasn’t talking to him by that time… So, that was that. They let me go, only from now on the Luna Adapt will have to do a better job on its new arrivals.”
“There are others returning?”
“Yes. Simonadi’s group, in eighteen years.”
“Then we have time.”
“Plenty.”
“You have to admit that they are easygoing,” I said. “You break his collarbone and they let you off like that…”
“I have the impression it was because of that ‘circus,’ ” he said. “Even they are… toward us… you know. And they’re not stupid. It would have caused a scandal. Hal, man — you don’t know anything.”
“Well?”
“Do you know the reason they didn’t publicize our return?”
“There was something in the real. I didn’t see it, but someone told me.”
“Yes, there was. You would have died laughing if you had seen it. ‘Yesterday, in the morning hours, a party of explorers returned to Earth from outer space. Its members are well. The scientific results of the expedition are now being studied.’ The end, period.”
“Are you serious?”
“Word of honor. And do you know why they did that? Because they fear us. That is also why they scattered us over the Earth.”
“No. I don’t understand that. They’re not stupid. You said so yourself a moment ago. Surely they don’t think that we are predators, that we will throw ourselves at people’s throats!”
“If they thought that, they wouldn’t have let us come. No, Hal. This doesn’t have to do with us. More is at stake. Can’t you see it?”
“Apparently I’ve grown stupid. Tell me.”
“The public is not aware…”
“Of what?”
“Of the fact that the spirit of exploration is dead. That there are no expeditions, they know. But they don’t think about it. They think that there are no expeditions because expeditions are unnecessary, and that’s all. But there are some who see and know perfectly well what is going on, and what consequences it will have. Has already had.”
“Well?”
“Pap. Pap and more pap for all eternity. No one will fly to the stars now. No one will risk a dangerous experiment now. No one will test a new medicine on himself now. What, they don’t know this? They know! And if the word got out who we are, what we did, why we flew, what it was all about, then it would be impossible, you see, impossible to conceal the tragedy!”
“Pap and more pap?” I asked, using his expression; someone listening to our conversation might have found this funny, but I was in no mood to laugh.
“Of course. And you don’t think it’s a tragedy?”
“I don’t know. Olaf, listen. For us that must be and will always be a great thing. The way we gave up those years — and everything — well, we believe this to be of the utmost importance. But perhaps it isn’t. One has to be objective. Because — tell me yourself — what did we accomplish?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, unpack the bags. Dump out everything you brought back from Fomalhaut.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Not at all. What was the value of this expedition?”
“We were pilots, Hal. Ask Gimma, Thurber.”
“Olaf, don’t give me that. We were there together, and you know perfectly well what they did, what Venturi did before he died, what Thurber did — why are you looking at me like that? What did we bring back? Four loads of various analyses, spectral, elemental, et-ceteral, mineral samples, and then there is that soup or metaplasm or whatever that rotten stuff from Beta Arcturi was called. Normers verified his theory of gravimagnetic rotations, and it turned out, in addition, that on planets of type C Meoli there can exist not tri- but tetraploids of silicon, and on that moon where Arder nearly did himself in there is nothing but lousy lava and bubbles the size of skyscrapers. And was it in order to learn that that lava hardens into those goddamn big bubbles that we vomited ten years out of our lives and came back here to be side-show freaks? Then why in hell did we go there? For what? Maybe you can tell me. For what?”
“Not so loud,” he said.
I was angry. And he was angry. His eyes had narrowed. I thought that we might fight yet, and my lips began to twitch into a grin. And then suddenly he, too, smiled.
“Still a hothead,” he said. “You can drive a man into a fury, you know that?”
“Get to the point, Olaf. To the point.”
“To the point? You haven’t got to the point yet. And what if we had brought back an elephant that had eight legs and talked algebra, what then, would that have made you happy? What were you expecting on Arcturus? Paradise? A triumphal arch? What do you want? In ten years I didn’t hear so much nonsense from you as now, in
