THERE had been silence—for many generations. Then the silence ended. The Mutter came at "dawn." The Folk awoke, crouching in their beds, listening to the Mutter. It had been spoken that one day would come the Mutter? And that the Mutter would be the beginning of the End? Jon Hoff awoke, and Mary Hoff, his wife.
They were the only two within their cubicle, for they had no children. They were not yet allowed a child. Before they could have a child the elderly Joshua must die before there would be room for it, and knowing this they had waited for his death, guilty at their unspoken prayer that he soon must die—willing him to die so they might have a child.
The Mutter came and ran throughout the Ship. Then the bed in which Jon and Mary crouched spun upward from the floor and crashed against the wall, pinning them against the humming metal, while all the other furniture—chest and chairs and table—came crashing from floor to wall, where it came to rest, as if the wall suddenly had become the floor and the floor the wall.
The Holy Picture dangled from the ceiling, which a moment before had been the other wall, hung there for a moment, swaying in the air; then it, too, crashed downward.
In that moment the Mutter ended and there was silence once again —but not the olden silence, for although there was no sound one could reach out and pinpoint, there were many sounds—a feeling, if not a hearing, of the sounds of surging power, of old machinery stirring back to life, of an old order, long dormant, taking over once again.
Jon Hoff crawled out part way from beneath the bed, then straightened on his arms, using his back to lift the bed so his wife could crawl out, too. Free of the bed, they stood on the wall-that-had-become-a-floor and saw the litter of the furniture, which had not been theirs alone, but had been used and then passed down to them through many generations.
For there was nothing wasted; there was nothing thrown away. That was the law—or one of many laws—that you could not waste, that you could not throw away. You used everything there was, down to the last shred of its utility. You ate only enough food—nor more, no less. You drank only enough water—no more, no less. You used the same air over and over again—literally the same air. The wastes of your body went into the converter to be changed into something that you, or someone else, would use again. Even the dead—you used the dead again. And there had been many dead in the long generations from the First Beginning. In months to come, some day perhaps not too distant now, Joshua would be added to the dead, would give over his body to the converter for the benefit of his fellow-folk, would return, finally and irrevocably, the last of all that he had taken from the community, would pay the last debt of all his debts—and would give Jon and Mary the right to have a child.
For there must be a child, thought Jon, standing there amidst the wreckage there must be a child to whom he could pass on the Letter and the Reading.
There was a law about the Reading, too. You did not read because reading was an evil art that came from the Beginning and the Folk had, in the Great Awakening, back in the dimness of Far Past, ferreted out this evil among many other evils and had said it must not be.
So it was an evil thing that he must pass on, an evil art, and yet there was the charge and pledge—the charge his long-dead father had put upon him, the pledge that he had made. And something else as well: The nagging feeling that the law was wrong.
However, the laws were never wrong. There was a reason for them all. A reason for the way they lived and for the Ship and how the Ship had come to be and for those who peopled it.
Although, come to think of it, he might not pass the Letter on. He might be the one who would open it, for it said on the outside of the envelope that it was to be opened in emergency. And this, Jon Hoff told himself, might be emergency—when the silence had been broken by the Mutter and the floor became a wall and the wall a floor.
Now there were voices from the other cubicles, frightened voices that cried out and other voices that shrieked with terror, and the thin, high crying of the children.
"Jon," said Mary Hoff, "that was the Mutter. The End will be coming now."
"We do not know," said Jon. "We shall have to wait and see. We do not know the End."
"They say ..." said Mary, and Jon thought that was the way it always was.
They say. They say. They say.
It was spoken; it was not read nor written.
And he heard his dead father speaking once again, the memory of how he had spoken long ago.
"The brain and the memory will play you false, for the memory will forget a thing and twist it. But the written word will stay forever as it was written down. It does not forget and does not change its meaning. You can depend upon the written word."
"They say," said Mary, "that the End will come swiftly when we hear the Mutter. That the stars will no longer move, but will stand still in the blackness and that is a sure sign the End is near at hand."
And, he wondered, the end of what? The end of us? The end of the Ship? The end of the stars themselves? Or, perhaps, the end of everything, of the Ship and stars and the great blackness in which the stars were spinning.
He shuddered to think of the end of the Folk or of the Ship, not so much that the Ship should end or that the Folk should end, but that the beautiful, efficient, well-balanced order in which they lived should end. For it was a marvelous thing that every function should be so ordered that there always would be enough for the Folk to live on, with never any surplus. No surplus of food or water or air, or of the Folk themselves, for you could not have a child until someone assigned against the coming of that child should die.
There were footsteps running in the corridors outside the cubicles and excited shouting, and suddenly there was someone pounding on the door.
"Jon! Jon!" the voice shouted. "The stars are standing still!"
"I knew it!" Mary cried. "I told you, Jon. It is as it was spoken."
Pounding on the door!
And the door was where it should have been, where a door logically should be, where you could walk straight out of it to the corridor, instead of climbing the now-useless ladder that ran ridiculously to it from the wall-that-used-to-be-the-floor.
Why didn't I think of that before? he asked himself. Why didn't I see that it was poor planning to climb to a door that opened in the ceiling?
Maybe, he thought—maybe this is the way it should have been all the time. Maybe the way it had been before was wrong. As the laws might well be wrong.
"I'm coming, Joe," said Jon's voice.
He strode to the door and opened it and he saw that what had been the wall of the corridor was now the floor and that many doors were opening into it directly from the cubicles and that folks were running up and down the corridor and he thought: We can take down the ladders now, since we have no use for them. We can feed them into the converter and that will give us the margin that we never have.
Joe gripped him by the arm.
"Come with me," he said.
They went to one of the topsy-turvey observation blisters. The stars were standing still.
Exactly as it had been spoken, the stars were still.
It was a frightening thing, for now you could see that the stars were not simply spinning lights that seemed to move against the flatness of a dead-black curtain, but that they were hanging in an emptiness that took the pit out of your stomach and made you gasp and clutch the metal of the ports, fighting to keep your balance, fighting off the lightheadedness that came upon you as you stared into a gulf you could not understand.
THERE were no games that "day," there were no hikes, there was no revelry in the amusement lounge. There were knots of frightened people talking. There was praying in the chapel where hung the largest of the Holy Pictures, showing the Tree and the Flowers and the River and the House far off, with a sky that had Clouds in it and a Wind you could not see, but only knew was there. There was a picking up and a straightening up of the cubicles in preparation for a "night" of sleeping and a rehanging once again of the Holy Pictures that were the prized possession of each cubicle. There was a taking down of ladders.
Mary Hoff rescued the Holy Picture from the debris on the floor and Jon stood one of the chairs against the wall and hung it upon the wall-that-once-had-been-the-floor and wondered how it happened that each of the Holy Pictures was a little different from all the others of them. And it was the first time he had ever wondered that.
The Hoff's Holy Picture had a Tree in it, too, and there were Sheep beneath the Tree and a Fence and Brook, and in the corner of the picture there were some tiny Flowers, and, of course, the Grass that ran up to the Sky.
After he had hung the picture and Mary had gone off to another cubicle to talk in horror-stricken, old-wife fashion with some of the other women, Jon went down the corridor, strolling as casually as he could so no one would notice him, so that no one would mark any hurry in him.
But there was hurry in him—a sudden, terrible hurry that tried to push him on like two hands against his back.
He tried to look as if he were doing nothing more than genteelly killing time. It was easy for him, for that was all he'd done his entire life, all that any of them had ever done. Except the few, the lucky or unlucky ones, whichever way you might look at it, who had the hereditary jobs—tending the hydroponic gardens[1] or the cattle pens or the poultry flocks.
But the most of them, thought Jon, loitering his way along, had done no more than grow expert in the art of killing time. Like he and Joe, with their endless chess games and the careful records that they kept of every move they made, of every move and game. And the hours they spent in analyzing their play from the records that they made, carefully annotating each decisive move. And why not, he asked himself—why not record and annotate the games? What else was there to do? What else?
There were no people now in the corridor and it had grown dimmer, for now there were only occasional light bulbs to drive back the darkness. Years of bulb-snatching to keep the living cubicles supplied had nearly stripped the Ship.
He came to an observation blister and ducked into it, crouching just inside of it, waiting patiently and watching back along his trail. He waited for the one who might have followed him and he knew there would be no one, but there might be someone and he couldn't take the chance.
No one came, and he went on again, coming to the broken-down escalator which went to the central levels, and here, once again, there was something different. Always before, as he had climbed level after level, he had steadily lost weight, lost the pull against his feet, had swam rather than walked toward the center of the Ship. But this time there was no loss of weight, this time there was no swimming. He trudged broken escalator after broken escalator for all the sixteen decks.
He went in darkness now, for here the bulbs were entirely gone, snatched or burned out over many years. He felt his way upward, with his hand along the guide-rails, feeling the cross-draft of the corridors that plunged down the great Ship's length.
He came at last to the proper level and felt his way along until he came to the hiding place, a dispensary room with a pharmaceutical locker against one wall.
He found the proper drawer and pulled it open and his hand went in and found the three things that he knew were there—the Letter, Book, and a bulb.
He ran his hand along the wall until he found the outlet and when he found it inserted the bulb and there was light in the tiny room, light upon the dust that lay across the floor and along the counter tops, light upon the wash basin and the sink, the empty cabinets with their idly open doors.
He laid the Letter face up beneath the light and read the words that were printed in block letters:
TO BE OPENED ONLY IN EMERGENCY.
He stood there for a long time, considering. There had been the Mutter.
The stars were standing still.
Emergency, he thought. This is emergency.
For had it not been spoken that when the Mutter came and the stars stood still the End was near at hand?
And if the End were near at hand, then it was emergency.
He lifted the Letter in his hand and held it, hesitating. When he opened it, that would be the end of it. There would be no more handing down, no more of the Letter and the Reading. For this was the moment toward which the Letter had traveled down through time, from father to son for many generations.
Slowly he turned the Letter over and ran a thumbnail along the sealed edge and the dry wax cracked open and the flap sprang loose.
He reached in and took the message out and spread it flat upon the counter top underneath the lamp. He read, his lips moving to form whispered words, reading as one must read who had spelled out the slow meaning of his words from an ancient dictionary:
To the son of my son many times removed: They will have told you and by this time you may well believe that the ship is a way of life, that it started in a myth and moves toward a legend and that there is no meaning to be sought within its actuality and no purpose. It would be fruitless for me to try to tell you the meaning or the purpose of the ship, for while these words are true, by themselves they will have little weight against the perversion of the truth which by the time you read this may have reached the stature of religion. But there is purpose in the ship, although even now, as this is written, the purpose has been lost, and as the ship plunges on its way it will remain not only lost, but buried beneath the weight of human rationalizing. In the day that this is read there will be explanations of the ship and the people in it, but there will be no knowledge in the explanations. To bring the ship to its destination there must be knowledge. There is a way that knowledge may be gained. I, who will be dead, whose body will have gone back into a plant long eaten, a piece of cloth long worn out, a molecule of oxygen, a pinch of fertilizer, have preserved that knowledge for you. On the second sheet of this letter are the directions for the acquiring of that knowledge. I charge you to acquire that knowledge and to use it that the minds and lives which launched the ship and the others who kept it going and those who even now reside within its walls, may not have used themselves, nor dedicated themselves, in vain, that the dream of Man may not die somewhere far among the stars. You will have learned by the time you read this, even to a greater degree than I know it today, that nothing must be wasted, nothing must be thrown away, that all resources must be guarded and husbanded against a future need. And that the ship not reach its destination, that it not serve its purpose, would be a waste so great as to stun the imagination. It would be a terrible waste of thousands of lives, the waste of knowledge and of hope. You will not know my name, for my name by the time you read this will be gone with the hand that drives the pen, but my words will still live on and the knowledge in them and the charge. I sign myself, your ancestor,
And there was a scrawl that Jon could not make out.
He let the Letter drop to the dust-laden counter top and words from the Letter hammered in his brain.
A ship that started in a myth and moved toward a legend.
But that was wrong, the Letter said.
There was a purpose and there was a destination. A destination? What was that?
The Book, he thought—the Book will tell what destination is.
With shaking hands he hauled the Book out of the drawer and opened it to D and followed down the columns with an unsteady finger, desquamative, dessert, destinate, destination
Destination (n) The place set for the end of a journey, or to which something is sent; a place or point aimed at.
The Ship had a destination.
The Ship was going somewhere.
The day would come when it would reach the place that it was going.
And that would be the end, of course.
The Ship was going somewhere.
But how? Did the Ship move?
He shook his head in disbelief. That the Ship moved was unbelievable. It was the stars, not the Ship, that moved.
There must be, he felt certain, another explanation.
He picked up the Letter's second sheet and read it through, but didn't understand it all, for his brain was tired and befuddled. He put the Letter and the Book and bulb back in the drawer.
He closed the drawer and fled.
THEY had not noticed his absence in the lower level and he moved among them, trying to be one of them again, trying to pick up the old cloak of familiarity and wrap it around his sudden nakedness—but he was not one of them.
A terrible knowledge had made him not one of them. The knowledge that the Ship had a purpose and a destination—that it had started somewhere and was going somewhere and that when it got where it was going that would be the End, not of the Folk, nor of the Ship, but only of the Journey.
He went into the lounge and stood for a moment just inside the doorway. Joe was playing chess with Pete and a swift anger flared within him at the thought that Joe would play with someone else, for Joe had not played chess with anyone but him for many, many years. But the anger dropped quickly from him and he looked at the chessmen for the first time, really saw them for the first time, and he saw that they were idle hunks of carven wood and that they had no part in this new world of the Letter and the Purpose.
George was sitting by himself playing solitaire and some of the others were playing poker with the metal counters they called "money," although why they called it money was more than anyone could tell. It was just a name, they said, like the Ship was the name for the ship and the Stars were what the stars were called. Louise and Irma were sitting in one corner listening to an old, almost worn-out recording of a song and the shrill, pinched voice of the woman who sang screeched across the room:
"My love has gone to the stars,
"He will be away for long . . ."
Jon walked into the room and George looked up from the cards. "We've been looking for you."
"We've been looking for you."
"I went for a walk," said Jon. "A long walk. On the center levels. It's all wrong up there. It's up, not in. You climb all the way."
"The stars have not moved all day," said George.
Joe turned his head and said, "The stars won't move again. This is as it was spoken. This is the beginning of the End."
"What is the End?" asked Jon.
"I don't know," said Joe and went back to his game.
The End, Jon thought. And none of them know what the End will be, just as they do not know what a ship is, or what money is, or the stars.
"We are meeting," said George. Jon nodded.
He should have known that they would meet. They'd meet for comfort and security. They'd tell the Story once again and they'd pray before the Picture. And I, he thought, and I?
He swung from the room and went out into the corridor, thinking that it might have been best if there'd been no Letter and no Book, for then he'd still be one of them and not a naked stranger standing by himself—not a man torn with wondering which was right, the Story or the Letter.
He found his cubicle and went into it. Mary was there, stretched out on the bed, with the pillows piled beneath her head and the dim bulb burning. "There you are," she said.
"I went for a walk," said Jon.
"You missed the meal," said Mary. "Here it is." He saw it on the table and went there, drawing up a chair. "Thanks," he said.
She yawned. "It was a tiring day," she said. "Everyone was so excited. They are meeting."
There was the protein yeast, the spinach and the peas, a thick slice of bread and a bowl of soup, tasty with mushrooms and herbs. And the water bottle, with the carefully measured liquid.
He bent above the soup bowl, spooning the food into his mouth.
"You aren't excited, dear. Not like the rest."
He lifted his head and looked at her. Suddenly he wondered if he might not tell her, but thrust the thought swiftly to one side, suddenly afraid that in his longing for human understanding he finally would tell her. He must watch himself, he thought.
For the telling of it would be proclaimed heresy, the denying of the Story, of the Myth and Legend. And once she had heard it, she like any of the others, would shrink from him and he'd see the loathing in her eyes.
With himself, it was different, for he had lived on the fringe of heresy for almost all his life, ever since that day his father had talked to him and told him of the Book. For the Book itself was a part of heresy.
"I have been thinking," he said, and she asked, "What is there to think about?"
And what she said was true, of course. There was nothing to think about. It was all explained, all neat and orderly. The Story told of the Beginning and the beginning of the End. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing for one to think about.
There had been Chaos and out of the Chaos order had been born in the shape of the Ship and outside the Ship there was Chaos still. It was only within the Ship that there was order and efficiency and law—or the many laws, the waste not, want not law and all the other laws. There would be an End, but the End was something that was still a mystery, although there still was hope, for with the Ship had been born the Holy Pictures and these, in themselves, were a symbol of that hope, for within the picture were the symbolism-values of other ordered places (bigger ships, perhaps) and all of these symbol-values had come equipped with names, with Tree and Book and Sky and Clouds and other things one could not see, but knew were there, like the Wind and Sunshine.
The Beginning had been long ago, so many generations back that the stories and the tales and folklore of the mighty men and women of those long-gone ages pinched out with other shadowy men and women still misty in the background.
"I was scared at first," said Mary, "but I am scared no longer. This is the way that it was spoken and there is nothing we can do except to know it is for the best."
He went on eating, listening to the sound of passing feet, to the sound of voices going past the door. Now there was no hurry in the feet, no terror in the voices. It hadn't taken long, he thought, for the Folk to settle down. Their Ship had been turned topsy-turvy, but it still was for the best.
And he wondered if they might not be the ones who were right, after all—and the Letter wrong. He would have liked to have stepped to the door and -hailed some of those who were passing by so he could talk with them, but there was no one in the ship (not even Mary) he could talk to.
Unless it were Joshua.
He sat eating, thinking of Joshua in the ponic gardens, pottering around, fussing with his plants. As a boy, he'd gone there, along with the other boys, Joe and George and Herb and all the rest of them. Joshua then had been a man of middle age who always had a story and some sage advice and a smuggled tomato or a radish for a hungry boy. He had, Jon remembered, a soft gentle way of talking and his eyes were honest eyes and there was a gruff, but winning friendliness about him.
It had been a long time, he realized, since he'd seen Joshua. Guilt, perhaps, he told himself.
But Joshua would be one who could understand the guilt. For once before he had understood.
It had been he and Joe, Jon remembered, who had sneaked in and stolen the tomatoes and been caught and lectured by the gardener. Joe and he had been friends ever since they had been toddlers. They had always been together. When there was devilment afoot the two of them were sure, somehow, to be in the middle of it.
Maybe Joe ...
Jon shook his head. Not Joe, he thought. Even if he were his best friend, even if they had been pals as boys, even if they had stood up for another when they had been married, even if they had been chess partners for more than 20 years—even so, Joe was not one he could tell about this thing.
"You still are thinking, dear," said Mary.
"I'll quit," said Jon. "Tell me about your day."
She told him. What Louise had said. And what Jane had said. And how foolish Molly was. The wild rumor and the terror and the slow quieting of the terror with the realization that, whatever came, it was for the best.
"Our Belief," she said, "is a comfort, Jon, at a time like this."
"Yes," said Jon. "A great comfort, indeed." She got up from the bed.
"I'm going down to see Louise," she said. "You'll stay here?" She bent and kissed him.
"I'll walk around until meeting time," he said.
He finished his meal, drank the water slowly, savoring each drop, then went out.
HE headed for the hydroponic gardens. Joshua was there, a little older, his hair a little whiter, his shuffle more pronounced, but with the same kind crinkle about his eyes, the same slow smile upon his face.
And his greeting was the joke of old: "You come to steal tomatoes?"
"Not this time," said Jon.
"You and the other one."
"His name is Joe."
"I remember now. Sometimes I forget. I am getting older and sometimes I forget." His smile was quiet. "I won't take too long, lad. I won't make you and Mary wait."
"That's not so important now," said Jon.
"I was afraid that after what had happened you would not come to see me."
"It is the law," said Jon. "You and I, nor Mary, had anything to do with it. The law is right. We cannot change the law."
Joshua put out a hand and laid it on Jon's arm. "Look at the new tomatoes," he said. "They're the best I've ever grown. Just ready to be picked." He picked one, the ripest and the reddest, and handed it to Jon.
Jon rubbed the bright fruit between his hands, feeling the smooth, warm texture of it, feeling the juice of it flow beneath the skin.
"They taste better right off the vine. Go ahead and eat it."
Jon lifted it to his mouth and set his teeth into it and caught the taste of it, the freshly-picked taste, felt the soft pulp sliding down his throat.
"You were saying something, lad."
Jon shook his head.
"You have not been to see me since it happened," said Joshua. "The guilt of knowing I must die before you have a child kept you away from me. It's a hard thing, I grant—harder for you than it is for me. You would not have come except for a matter of importance."
Jon did not answer.
"Tonight," said Joshua, "you remembered you could talk to me. You used to come and talk with me often, because you remembered the talk you had with me when you were a kid."
"I broke the law," said Jon. "I came to steal tomatoes. Joe and I and you caught us . . ."
"I broke the law just now," said Joshua. "I gave you a tomato. It was not mine to give. It was not yours to take.
"But I broke the law because the law is nothing more than reason and the giving of one tomato does not harm the reason. There must be reason behind each law or there is no occasion for the law. If there is no reason, then the law is wrong."
"But to break a law is wrong ..."
"Listen," said Joshua. "You remember this morning?"
"Of course I do."
"Look at those tracks—the metal tracks, set deep into the metal, running up the wall."
Jon looked and saw them.
"That wall," said Joshua, "was the floor until this morning."
"But the tanks! They . . ."
"Exactly," said Joshua. "That's exactly what I thought. That's the first thing I thought when I was thrown out of bed. My tanks, I thought. All my beautiful tanks. Hanging up there on the wall. Fastened to the floor and hanging on the wall. With the water spilling out of them. With the plants dumped out of them. With the chemicals all wasted. But it didn't happen that way."
He reached out and tapped Jon on the chest.
"It didn't happen that way—not because of a certain law, but because of a certain reason. Look at the floor beneath your feet."
Jon looked down and the tracks were there, a continuation of the tracks that ran up the wall.
"The tanks are anchored to those tracks," said Joshua. "There are wheels enclosed within those tracks. When the floor changed to the wall, the tanks ran down the tracks and up the wall that became the floor and everything was all right. There was a little water spilled and some plants were damaged, but not many of them."
"It was planned," said Jon. "The Ship . . ."
"There must be reason to justify each law," Joshua told him. "There was reason here and a law as well. But the law was only a reminder not to violate the reason. If there were only reason you might forget it, or you might defy it or you might say that it had become outdated. But the law supplies authority and you follow law where you might not follow reason.
"The law said that the tracks on the wall, the old wall, that is, must be kept clear of obstacles and must be lubricated. At times we wondered why, for it seemed a useless law. But because it was a law we followed it quite blindly and so when the Mutter came the tracks were clear and oiled and the tanks ran up them. There was nothing in the way of their doing so, as there might have been if we'd not followed law. For by following the law, we also followed the reason and it's the reason and not the law that counts."
"You're trying to tell me something," Jon said. "I'm trying to tell you that we must follow each law blindly until we know the reason for it. And when we know, if we ever know, the reason and the purpose, we must then be able to judge whether the reason or the purpose is a worthy one. We must have the courage to say that it is bad, if it is bad. For if the reason is bad, then the law itself is bad, for a law is no more than a rule designed for a certain reason or to carry out a purpose."
"Purpose?"
"Certainly, lad, the purpose. For there must be some purpose. Nothing so well planned as the Ship could be without a purpose."
"The Ship itself? You think the Ship has Purpose? They say . . ."
"I know what they say. Everything that happens must be for the best."
He wagged his head.
"There must have been a purpose, even for the Ship. Sometime, long ago, that purpose must have been plain and clear. But we've forgotten it. There must be certain facts and knowledge . . ."
"There was knowledge in the books," said Jon. "But they burned the books."
"There were certain untruths in them," said the old man. "Or what appeared to be untruths. But you cannot judge the truth until you have the facts and I doubt they had the facts. There were other reasons, other factors ...
"I'm a lonely man. I have a job to do and not many come to visit. I have not had gossip to distract me, although the Ship is full of gossip. I have thought. I have done a lot of thinking. I thought about us and the Ship. I thought about the laws and the purpose of it all.
"I have wondered what makes a plant grow, why water and chemicals are necessary to their growth. I have wondered why we must turn on the lamps for just so many hours—what is there in the lamps that helps a plant to grow? But if you forget to turn them on, the plant will start to die, so I know the lamps are needed, that the plants need not water and chemicals alone, but the lamps as well.
"I have wondered why a tomato always grows on a tomato vine and why a cucumber always grows on a cucumber vine. You never find a tomato on a cucumber vine and there must be a reason.
"Behind even so simple a thing as the growing of tomatoes there must be a mass of reasons, certain basic facts. And we do not know these facts. We do not have the knowledge.
"I have wondered what it is that makes the lamps light up when you throw the switch.
"I have wondered what our bodies do with food. How does your body use that tomato you've just eaten? Why must we eat to live? Why must we sleep? How did we learn to talk?"
"I have never thought of all that," said Jon. "You have never thought at all," said Joshua, "or almost not at all."
"No one does," said Jon.
"That is the trouble with the Ship," the old man told him. "No one ever thinks. They while away their time. They never dig for reasons. They never even wonder. Whatever happens must he for the best and that's enough for them."
"I have just begun to think," said Jon.
"There was something you wanted," said the old man. "Some reason that you came."
"It doesn't matter now," said Jon. "You have answered it."
He went back, through the alleyways between the tanks, smelling the scent of green things growing, listening to the gurgle of the water running through the pumps. Back up the long corridors, with the stars shining true and steady now through the ports in the observation blisters.
Reason, Joshua had said. There is reason and a purpose. And that had been what the Letter had said, too—reason and a purpose. And as well as truths there will be untruths and one must have certain knowledge to judge a thing, to say if it is true or not.
He squared his shoulders and went on.
THE meeting was well under way when he reached the chapel and he slid in quietly through the door and found Mary there. He stood beside her and she slipped her hand in his and smiled.
"You are late," she whispered.
"Sorry," he whispered back, and then they stood there, side by side, holding hands, watching the flicker of the two great candles that flanked the massive Holy Picture.
Jon thought that never before had he seen it to such a good advantage nor seen it quite so well and he knew that it was a great occasion when they burned the candles for it.
He identified the men who sat below the Picture—Joe, his friend, and Greg and Frank. And he was proud that Joe, his friend, should be one of the three who sat beneath the Picture, for you must be pious and a leader to sit beneath the Picture.
They had finished reciting the Beginning and now Joe got up and began to lead them in the Ending.
"We go toward an End. There will be certain signs that shall foretell the coming of the End, but of the End itself no one may know, for it is unrevealed . . ."
Jon felt Mary's hand tighten upon his and he returned the pressure and in the press of hand to hand he felt the comfort of a wife and of Belief and the security of the brotherhood of all the Folk.
It was a comfort, Mary had said while he had eaten the meal she had saved for him. There is comfort in our Belief, she'd said.
And what she had said was true. There was comfort in Belief, comfort in knowing that it all was planned, that it was for the best, that even in the End it would be for the best.
They needed comfort, he thought. They needed comfort more than anything. They were so alone, especially so alone since the stars had stopped their spinning and stood still, since you could stand at a port and look out into the emptiness that lay between the stars.
Made more alone by the lack of purpose, by the lack of knowing, although it was a comfort to know that all was for the best.
"The Mutter will come and the stars will stop their spin and they will stand naked and alone and bright in the depth of darkness, of the eternal darkness that covers everything except the Folk within the Ship. . . ."
And that was it, thought Jon. The special dispensation that gave them the comfort. The special knowing that they, of all the things there were, were sheltered and protected from eternal night. Although, he wondered, how did the special knowing come about? From what source of knowledge did it spring? From what revelation?
And blamed himself for thinking as he did, for it was not meet that he should think such things at meeting in the chapel.
He was like Joshua, he told himself. He questioned everything. He wondered about the things that he had accepted all his life, that had been accepted without question for all the generations.
He lifted his head and looked at the Holy Picture —at the Tree and Flowers and the River and the House far off, with the Sky that had Clouds in it and Wind you could not see, but knew was there.
It was a pretty thing—it was beautiful. There were colors in it he had never seen anywhere except in the Pictures. Was there a place like that, he wondered, or was it only symbolism, only an idealization of the finest that was in the Folk, a distillation of the dreams of those shut up within the Ship .. .
Shut up in the Ship! He gasped that he had thought it. Shut up! Not shut up. Protected, rather. Protected and sheltered and kept from harm, set apart from all else which lay in the shadow of eternal night.
He bent his head in prayer, a prayer of contriteness and self-accusation. That he should think a thing like that!
He felt Mary's hand in his and thought of the child that they would have when Joshua was dead. He thought of the chess games he had played with Joe. He thought of the long nights in the darkness with Mary at his side.
He thought of his father, and the long-dead words thundered in his brain. And the Letter that spoke of knowledge and of destination and had a word of purpose.
What am I to do? he asked himself. Which road am I to follow? What is the Meaning and the End?
HE COUNTED doors and found the right one and went in. The place was thick with dust, but the light bulb still survived.
Against the farther wall was the door that was mentioned in the instruction sheet enclosed within the Letter—the door with the dial built into its center. A vault, the instruction sheet had said.
He walked across the floor, leaving footprints behind him in the dust, and knelt before the door.
With his shirt-sleeve he wiped the dust from the lock and read the numbers there. He lay the sheet upon the floor and grasped the dial. Turn the indicator first to 6, then to 15, back to 8, then to 22 and finally to 3. He did it carefully, following the instructions, and at the final turn to 3 he heard the faint chucking sound of steel tumblers dropping into place.
He grasped the handle of the door and tugged and the door came open, slowly because it was heavy.
He went inside and thumbed the switch and the lights came on and everything was exactly as the instruction sheet had said. There was the bed and the machine beside it and the great steel box standing in one corner.
The air was foul, but there was no dust, since the vault was not tied in with the air-conditioning system which through centuries had spread the dust through all the other rooms.
Standing there alone, in the glare of the bulb, with the bed and machine and great steel box before him, terror came upon him, a ravening terror that shook hint even as he tried to stand erect and taut to keep it away from him—a swift backlash of fear garnered from the many generations of unknowing and uncaring.
Knowledge—and there was a fear of knowledge, for knowledge was an evil thing. Years ago they had decided that, the ones who made decisions for the Ship, and they had made a law against Reading and they had burned the books.
The Letter said that knowledge was a necessary thing.
And Joshua, standing beside the tomato tank, with the other tanks and their growing things about him, had said that there must be reason and that knowledge would disclose the reason.
But it was only the Letter and Joshua—only the two of them against all the others of them, only the two of them against the decision that had been made many generations back.
No, he said, talking to himself, no, not those two alone—but my father and his father before him and fathers before that, handing down the Letter and the Book and the art of Reading. And he, himself, he knew, if he had had a child, would have handed him the Letter and the Book and would have taught him how to read. He could envision it—the two of them crouched in some obscure hiding beneath the dim glow of a bulb, slowly studying out the way that letters went together to form the words, doing a thing that was forbidden, continuing a chain of heresy that had snaked its way throughout the Folk for many generations.
And here, finally, was the end result, the bed and machine and the great steel box. Here, at last, was the thing to which it all had pointed.
He went to the bed, approaching it gingerly, as if it might be a hidden trap. He poked and prodded it and it was a bed and nothing more.
Turning from the bed to the machine, he went over it carefully, checking the wiring contacts as the instructions said he should, finding the cap, finding the switches, checking on other vital points. He found two loose contact points and he tightened them, and finally, after some hesitation, he threw on the first switch, as the instructions said he should, and the red light glowed.
So he was all ready.
He climbed onto the bed and took up the cap and set it on his head, twisting it securely into place. Then he lay down and reached out and snapped on the second switch and there was a lullaby.
A lullaby, a singing, a tune running in his brain and a sense of gentle rocking and of drowsiness. Jon Hoff went to sleep.
HE WOKE and there was knowledge. A slow, painful groping to recognize the place, the wall without the Holy Picture, the strange machine, the strange thick door, the cap upon his head.
His hands went up and took off the cap and he held it, staring at it, and slowly he knew what it was. Bit by painful bit, it all came back to him, the finding of the room, the opening of the vault, checking the machine and lying down with the cap tight upon his head.
The knowledge of where he was and why he was there—and a greater knowledge.
A knowing of things he had not known before. Of frightening things.
He dropped the cap into his lap and sat stark upright, with his hands reaching out to grasp the edges of the bed.
Space! An emptiness. A mighty emptiness, filled with flaming suns that were called the stars. And across that space, across the stretches of it too vast to be measured by the mile, too great to be measured by anything but light-years, the space crossed by light in the passage of a year, sped a thing that was called a ship—not the Ship, Ship with a capital S, but simply a ship, one of many ships.
A ship from the planet Earth—not from the sun itself, not from the star, but from one of many planets that circled round the star.
It can't be, he told himself. It simply cannot be. The Ship can't move. There can't be space. There can't be emptiness. We can't be a single dot, a lost and wandering mote in the immensity of a universal emptiness, dwarfed by the stars that shine outside the port.
Because if that were so, then they stood for nothing. They were just casual factors in the universe. Even less than casual factors. Less than nothing. A smear of wandering, random life lost amid the countless stars.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat there, staring at the machine.
Knowledge stored in there, he thought. That's what the instruction sheet had said. Knowledge stored on spools of tape, knowledge that was drummed into the brain, that was impressed, implanted, grafted on the brain of a sleeping man.
And this was just the beginning. This was only the first lesson. This was just the start of the old dead knowledge scrapped so long ago, a knowledge stored against a day of need, a knowledge hid away. And it was his. It lay upon the spools, it lay within the cap. It was his to take and his to use—and to what purpose? For there was no need to have the knowledge if there were no purpose in it.
And was it true?
That was the question.
Was the knowledge true?
How could you know a truth? How could you spot an untruth?
There was no way to know, of course—not yet was there a way to know the truth. Knowledge could be judged by other knowledge, and he had but little knowledge—more than anyone within the ship had had for years, yet still so little knowledge. For somewhere, he knew, there must be an explanation for the stars and for the planets that circled around the stars and for the space in which the stars were placed—and for the ship that sped between the stars. The Letter had said purpose and it had said destination and those were the two things he must know —the purpose and the destination.
He put the cap back in its place and went out of the vault and locked the door behind him and he walked with a slightly surer stride, but still with the sense of guilt riding on his shoulders. For now he had broken not only the spirit, but the letter of the law—he was breaking the law for a reason and he suspected that the reason and the purpose would wipe out the law.
He went down the long flights of the escalator stairs to the lower levels.
He found Joe in the lounge, staring at the chess board with the pieces set and ready.
"Where have you been?" asked Joe. "I've been waiting for you."
"Just around," said Jon.
"This is three days," said Joe, "you've been just around."
He looked at Jon quizzically.
"Remember the hell we used to raise?" he asked. "The stealing and the tricks?"
"I remember, Joe."
"You always got a funny look about you, just before we went off on one of our pranks. You have that same look now."
"I'm not up to any pranks," said Jon. "I'm not stealing anything."
"We've been friends for years," said Joe. "You got something on your mind . . ."
Jon, looking down at him, tried to see the boy, but the boy was gone. Instead was the man who sat beneath the Picture, the man who read the Ending, the pious man, the good man, a leader of the Ship's community.
He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Joe."
"I only want to help."
But if he knew, thought Jon, he wouldn't want to help. He'd look at me in horror, he'd report me to the chapel, he'd be the first to cry heresy. For it was heresy, there was no doubt of that. It was a denial of the Myth, it was a ripping away of the security of ignorance, it was a refutation of the belief that all would be for the best, it was saying they could no longer sit with folded hands and rely upon the planned order of the Ship.
"Let's play a game," he said with resolve.
"That's the way you want it, Jon?" demanded Joe. "That's the way I want it."
"Your move," said Joe.
Jon moved his queen pawn. Joe stared at him.
"You play a king's pawn game."
"I changed my mind," said Jon. "I think this opening's better."
"As you wish," said Joe. They played. Joe won without any trouble.
At last, after days of lying on the bed and wearing the cap, of being lullabyed to sleep and waking with new knowledge, he knew the entire story.
He knew about the Earth and how Earthmen had built the ship and sent it out to reach the stars and he understood a little about the reaching for the stars that had driven humans to plan the ship.
He knew about the selection and the training of the crew and the careful screening that had gone into the picking of the ancestors of the colonists-to-be, the biological recommendations which had determined their mating so that when the fortieth generation should finally reach the stars they would be a hardy race, efficient to deal with the problems there.
He knew about the educational setup and the books that had been intended to keep knowledge intact and he had some slight acquaintance with the psychology involved in the entire project.
But something had gone wrong.
Not with the ship, but with the people in it. The books had been fed into the converter.
The Myth had risen and Earth had been entirely forgotten.
The knowledge had been lost and legend had been substituted.
In the span of forty generations the plan had been lost and the purpose been forgotten and the Folk lived out their lives in the sure and sane belief that they were self-contained, that the Ship was the beginning and the end, that by some divine intervention the Ship and the people in it had come into being and that their ordered lives were directed by a worked-out plan in which everything that happened must be for the best.
They played at chess and cards and listened to old music, never questioning for a moment who had invented cards or chess or who had created music. They whiled away not hours, but lives, with long gossiping and told old stories and swapped old yarns out of other generations. But they had no history and they did not wonder and they did not look ahead —for everything that happened would be for the best.[2]
For year on empty year the Ship was all they had known. Even before the first generation had died the Earth had become a misty thing far behind, not only in time and space, but in memory as well. There was no loyalty to Earth to keep alive the memory of the Earth. There was no loyalty to the Ship, because the Ship had no need of it.
The Ship was a mother to them and they nestled in it. The Ship fed them and sheltered them and kept them safe from harm.
There was no place to go. Nothing to do. Nothing. to think about. And they adapted.
Babies, Jon Hoff thought.
Babies cuddling in a mother's arms. Babies prattling old storied rhymes on the nursery floor.
And some of the rhymes were truer than they knew.
It had been spoken that when the Mutter came and the stars stood still the End was near at hand.
And that was true enough, for the stars had moved because the ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis to afford artificial gravity.
But when the ship neared the destination, it would automatically halt the spin and resume its normal flight, with things called gyroscopes taking over to provide the gravity.
Even now the ship was plunging down toward the star and the solar system at which it had been aimed. Plunging down upon it if—and Jon Hoff sweated as he thought of it—if it had not already overshot its mark.
For the people might have changed, but the ship did not. The ship did not adapt. The ship remembered when its passengers forgot. True to the taped instructions that had been fed into it more than a thousand years before, it had held its course, it had retained the purpose, it had kept its rendezvous and even now it neared its destination.
Automatic, but not entirely automatic.[3]
It could not establish an orbit around the target planet without the help of a human brain, without a human hand to tell it what to do. For a thousand years it might get along without its human, but in the final moment it would need him to complete its purpose.
And I, Jon Hoff told himself, I am that man. One man. Could one man do it?