Methuselah.
The morning was already warm and she decided to take a swim. Her clothes carefully folded on the palm frond, she strode boldly out into the surf. Whatever else, she thought, the extraterrestrials are unlikely to find themselves aroused by the sight of a naked woman, even if she is pretty well preserved. She tried to imagine a microbiologist stirred to crimes of passion after viewing a paramecium caught in fla-grante delicto in mitosis.
Languidly, she floated on her back, bobbing up and down, her slow rhythm in phase with the arrival of successive wave crests. She tried to imagine thousands of comparable… chambers, simulated worlds, whatever these were—each a meticulous copy of the nicest part of someone's home planet. Thousands of them, each with sky and weather, ocean, geology, and indigenous life indistinguishable from the originals. It seemed an extravagance, although it also suggested that a satisfactory outcome waswithin reach. No matter what your resources, you don't manufacture a landscape on this scale for five specimens from a doomed world.
On the other hand… The idea of extraterrestrials as zookeepers had become something of a cliche.
What if this sizable Station with its profusion of docking ports and environments was actually a zoo? “See the exotic animals in their native habitats,” she imagined some snail-headed barker shouting. Tourists come from all over the Galaxy, especially during school vacations. And then when there's a test, the Stationmasters temporarily move the critters and the tourists out, sweep the beach free of footprints, and give the newly arriving primitives a half day of rest and recreation before the test ordeal begins.
Or maybe this was how they stocked the zoos. She thought about the animals locked away in terrestrial zoos who were said to have experienced difficulties breeding in captivity. Somersaulting in the water, she dived beneath the surface in a moment of self-consciousness. She took a few strong strokes in toward the beach, and for the second time in twenty-four hours wished that she had had a baby.
There was no one about, and not a sail on the horizon. A few seagulls were stalking the beach, apparently looking for crabs. She wished die had brought some bread to give them. After die was dry, she dressed and inspected the doorway again. It was merely waiting. She felt a continuing reluctance to enter.
More than reluctance. Maybe dread.
She withdrew, keeping it in view. Beneath a palm tree, her knees drawn up under her chin, she looked out over the long sweep of white sandy beach.
After a while she got up and stretched a little. Carrying the frond and the microcamera with one hand, she approached the door and turned the knob. It opened slightly. Through the crack she could see the whitecaps offshore. She gave it another push, and it swung open without a squeak. The beach, bland and disinterested, stared back at her. She shook her head and returned to the tree, resuming her pensive posture.
She wondered about the others. Were they now in some outlandish testing facility avidly checking away on the multiple-choice questions? Or was it an oral examination? And who were the examiners? She felt the uneasiness well up once again. Another intelligent being—independently evolved on some distant world under unearthly physical conditions and with an entirely different sequence of random genetic mutations— such a being would not resemble anyone she knew. Or even imagined. If this was a Test station, then there were Stationmasters, and the Stationmas-ters would be thoroughly, devastatingly nonhuman. There was something deep within her that was bothered by insects, snakes, star-nosed moles. She was someone who felt a little shudder—to speak plainly, a tremor of loathing— when confronted with even slightly malformed human beings. Cripples, children with Down syndrome, even the appearance of Parkinsonism evoked in her, against her clear intellectual resolve, a feeling of disgust, a wish to flee. Generally she had been able to contain her fear, although she wondered if she had ever hurt someone because of it It wasn't something she thought about much; she would sense her own embarrassment and move on to another topic.
But now she worried that she would be unable even to confront—much less to win over for the human species— an extraterrestrial being. They hadn't thought to screen the Five for that. There had been no effort to determine whether they were afraid of mice or dwarfs or Martians. It had simply not occurred to the examining committees. She wondered why they hadn't thought of it; it seemed an obvious enough point now.
It had been a mistake to send her. Perhaps when confronted with some serpent-haired galactic Stationmaster, she would disgrace herself—or far worse, tip the grade given to the human species, in whatever unfathomable test was being administered, from pass to fail. She looked with both apprehension and longing at the enigmatic door, its lower boundary now under water. The tide was coming in.
There was a figure on the beach a few hundred meters away. At first she thought it was Vaygay, perhaps out of the examining room early and come to tell her the good news. But whoever it was wasn't wearing a Machine Project jump suit. Also, it seemed to be someone younger, more vigorous. She reached for the long lens, and for some reason hesitated. Standing up, she shielded her eyes from the Sun. Just for a moment, it bad seemed… It was clearly impossible. They would not take such shameless advantage of her.
But she could not help herself. She was racing toward him on the hard sand near the water's edge, her hair streaming behind her. He looked as he bad in the most re-cent picture of him she had seen, vigorous, happy. He had a day's growth of beard. She flew into his arms, sobbing.
“Hello, Presh,” he said, his right hand stroking the back of her head.
His voice was right. She instantly remembered it. And his smell, his gait, his laugh. The way his beard abraded her cheek. All of it combined to shatter her self-possession. She could feel a massive atone seal being pried open and the first rays of light entering an ancient, almost forgotten tomb.
She swallowed and tried to gain control of herself, but seemingly inexhaustible waves of anguish poured out of her and she would weep again. He stood there patiently, reassuring her with the same look she now remembered he had given her from his post at the bottom of the staircase during her first solo journey down the big steps. More than anything else she had longed to see him again, but she had suppressed the feeling, been impatient with it, because it was so clearly impossible to fulfill. She cried for all the years between herself and him.
In her girlhood and as a young woman she would dream that be had come to her to tell her that his death had been a mistake. He was really fine. He would sweep her up into his arms. But she would pay for those brief respites with poignant reawakenings into a world in which he no longerwas. Still, she had cherished those dreams and willingly paid their exorbitant tariff when the next morning she was forced to rediscover her loss and experience the agony again. Those phantom moments were all she had left of him.
And now here he was—not a dream or a ghost, but flesh and blood. Or close enough. He had called to her from the stars, and she had come.
She hugged him with all her might. She knew it was a trick, a reconstruction, a simulation, but it was flawless. For a moment she held him by the shoulders at arm's length. He was perfect. It was as if her father had these many years ago died and gone to Heaven, and finally—by this unorthodox route—she had managed to rejoin him. She sobbed and embraced him again.
It took her another minute to compose herself. If it had been Ken, say, she would have at least toyed with the idea that another dodecahedron—maybe a repaired Soviet Machine—had made a later relay from the Earth to the center of the Galaxy. But not for a moment could such a possibility be entertained for him.
His remains were decaying in a cemetery by a lake.
She wiped her eyes, laughing and crying at once.
“So, what do I owe this apparition to—robotics or hypnosis?”
“Am I an artifact or a dream? You might ask that about anything.”
“Even today, not a week goes by when I don't think that I'd give anything—anything I had—just to spend a few minutes with my father again.”
“Well, here I am,” he said cheerfully, his hands raised, making a half turn so she could be sure that the back of him was there as well. But he was so young, younger surely than she. He had been only thirty-six when he died.
Maybe this was their way of calming her fears. If so, they were very… thoughtful. She guided him back toward herfew possessions, her aim around his waist. He certainly/eft substantial enough. If there were gear trains and integrated circuits underneath his skin, they were well hidden.
“So how are we doing?” she asked. The question was ambiguous. “I mean—”
“I know. It took you many years from receipt of the Message to your arrival here.”
“Do you grade on speed or accuracy?”
“Neither.”
