People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Ed hugged his mother. They had memories. Now Ed stretched optimism considerably. "At last there can be a lot of time, Mom," he said. "Enough so that we might even see each other again, someplace...."

Soon he and Barbara were up there in the great ship. To his touch, her arm was as smooth and soft as ever. Her hair was dark and thick, her eyes were bright with adventure, her skin a golden tan. And was it a loss that she could have bent crowbar with her bare hands, or have braved a vacuum at near absolute-zero temperature without harm?

"You're insulting me in your mind, Ed," she joshed gaily. "Not that I'm much bothered. So the robot stoops to conquer, eh? Of course we have no souls, Eddie."

"Certainly not!" he responded in the same manner. "All our hopes spring from human sources. Even our firmer flesh was a human dream. Yet you can practically hear our mechanical joints creak. The old race was created perfect. Who could ever dare to make it any better?"

Ed's sarcasm was honest. Yet he knew that before the unprobed distance, even the ruggedest of his kind were disposed to do a little whistling in the dark.

Around them in the ship's huge assembly room, there were shouts, greetings, jokes and laughter. A young couple chatted brightly. A child studied a toy with serious petulance. A man consulted a notebook. Perhaps few here yet realized their range, power and freedom or just what they faced. Their environment had been narrow, like all earthly history. No doubt many were afraid of the strangeness and time and distance ahead. They had reason to be. Out there in the black pit of the galaxy, even giant stars could perish.

Mitchell Prell had not yet come aboard. Abel Freeman had already left for Titan—without his willful daughter. Schaeffer, the scientist, had gone with him.

Under Harwell's commands, the colossal craft kept taking on migrants at top speed for thirty hours. They boarded in numbers out of all proportion to the available living space. Meanwhile there were needles to submit to. Vitaplasm could be more rugged and adaptable now than when it was first used. The fluids from hollow needles were the means of imparting the improvements.

At last the ship quivered slightly. In contact with the heat of fusion of hydrogen and lithium to form the gaseous stellar ash called helium, any material rocket chamber would have been scattered instantly as incandescent vapor. But space warps stood firm in their place, squeezing with an atom-crushing pressure of their own, natural only at the centers of stars. And now there was no secondary arrangement for the conversion of such power as was released into electricity. Even the helium became pure radiation that emerged in a stream. It was a continuous, directed explosion of light, far stronger within its narrow limits than the outburst of a supernova. It had been known for centuries that light had both mass and pressure, and here it was concentrated matter—the ultimate in propulsive thrust—changed completely to energy. On the sullen Earth, neither man nor android dared watch that thin thread of fury, while slowly the ship began to accelerate toward a five-figure number of miles per second.

It was the start of the departure of fear from an ancient race. Or so it was meant to be. From Earth, curses no doubt followed the ship—and sighs of relief, and regrets, and good wishes. This setting forth should have been a human triumph. Many would insist that it was not that. Others knew that it was.