Who or what he was, it is impossible now to say. He was the second coming of Christ; he was a latter-day John the Baptist; he was a prophet of Allah; he was the Messiah; he was an avatar of Vishnu; he was an old god returned; he was a new god born; he was all the gods; he was no god.
All these things have been said, and all are still believed. For every religion accepted Devarupa, as god or as prophet; and Devarupa rejected none of them. To many of the irreligious he became a new religion; to others he represented only the deepest greatness of mankind, and as such was even more holy.
What religion he himself professed cannot now be historically determined; each church has certain proof that he belonged to it. But all churches, and all those without the churches, agree on the doctrines that he taught.
There was nothing novel about these. Christ or Buddha or Kung-fu-tse had said them all. But Devarupa was aided by the time in which he spoke; and by the fact that his own mixed heritage enabled him to fuse, as none other had ever done, the practical vigor and solemnity of western religion with the sublime mysticism of the Orient.
The weary world at last truly and sincerely wanted peace. The teachings of Devarupa showed it the way. And from this fortunate meeting of the time and the man came the World State, the world peace, and, inevitably, the one-way trip.
For if man may not kill man—and no Devarupian teaching is more basic than this—surely the State may not do so. And yet man is but slowly perfectible; even a weary and repentant world contains its individual fiends. There must be some extreme penalty for the most extreme offenses.
Life imprisonment, even when it came to be enforced literally, proved unavailing. The prisoner’s mind inevitably grows to the shape of one purpose: to destroy his bars. Segregation, in something like a humane and idealized version of the old system of penal colonies without their imperialist element, seemed promising for a while. The independent state of segregates on Madagascar was apparently a complete success until that black year of’73 and the invasion of the African mainland.
Again the coincidence of time was fortunate, for the first rocket reached the Moon in ’74, and in ’75 Bright-Varney conceived the one-way trip.
The State may not kill, but it must dispose of certain individuals. Then ship them off into space. Put them in one-man nondirigible rockets, with a supply of condensed food and oxygen corresponding to their calculated normal life span, and send them forth on indeterminate journeys.
Most of these rockets became satellites of the Earth. Some chanced to enter the orbit of attraction of the Moon. And a few went off into the unknown reaches of space. Science-fiction writers were fond of the plot of a one-way tripper as the first man to set foot on an alien planet.
For, despite the discovery of the spaceship, the Solar System remained unexplored. Only the Moon and Mars had been reached, and only the Moon had been developed. For the exploratory voyages to Mars had themselves been one-way trips of the most fatal sort.
There had been five of these voyages, and thirty fine men had been lost on them in vain. The ships had landed; that much was almost certain from astronomical calculation and observation. But there had been no return. The ships could not carry enough fuel for a two-way trip; and a small crew could not maintain itself long enough on the planet to accumulate fuel from the known resources there present. Until ships could be built with greater fuel capacity, or enough men jolted themselves from their lethargy of peace, the farther reaches of space would be known only to those who never returned.
The possibility that a deliberately one-way rocket might find a strange landing place had been considered by the planners. As a result, the nose was equipped with repulsion jets which would function automatically upon sufficiently close contact with a larger body to effect a safe landing, and the equipment of the rockets included a pressure-regulating breathing suit and indestructible materials with which to leave a record for future explorers.
There were even microbooks in the rocket, with a small pocket-model viewer; there was hardly space for a projector. Every comfort of life, in fact, except companionship—which meant, to a man of a world believing so firmly and truly in the brotherhood of man, except life itself.
A nineteenth-century poet, still read not only by scholars, wrote of “the Nightmare Life-in-Death Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” And was this Life-in-Death who had replaced Death as the State’s reward to malefactors.
Gan Garrett woke feeling as refreshed, after the dormitol, as a ten-year-old on a summer morning when school was over. He started to spring carefree to his feet, ready to begin a vigorous day, and only when his movements floated him about free of gravity did he realize his situation.
This brought gravity enough to his thoughts, if not to his body. The days before the trial had gone by too fast for him to attain any true perception of what was happening. And there had always been the hope that something—
But there was no hope now. Nothing at all forever any more. Nothing but coursing through space in this rocket until the carefully calculated end of his allotted days, a Vanderdecken of the spaceways.
There woulci be others out here, too, others sealed in their rocketlets, cut off forever from communication with each other, going their several courses, yes, even when the inhabitant lay—or rather floated—dead and the rocket moved on forever in whatever path the chance combination of forces had decreed for it. Space zombies, moving bodies with the souls dead within them.
These were not
