People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Braced in a cubicle two meters long, one wide and half a meter high, Ed Dukas held his wife's hand. Tiered rows of other cubicles were around them. Mitchell Prell had been with them minutes ago, and he had simply said, "Good night," half jokingly. Or was it more whistling in the dark?

"Just good night. That's how it'll be, sweet," Ed whispered now. "The years won't mean anything. In the old mythology, the demigods could sleep for a millennium."

So the small spark of dread flickered out in them, as they invoked a power which they had used before, in smaller android bodies, and for a much shorter interval. No drug was needed. Their sleep became suspended animation.

Fine dust began to settle on them. But after forty years, measured by the ship's chronometers—on the basis of a retarded time imparted to objects moving at high velocity, a somewhat longer interval must have passed on Earth—Ed was awakened to help patrol the vessel.

With a few other silent men, he moved through its ghostly, dimly lighted corridors and compartments inhabited by the living dead. The stillness was all around, and outside only the stars burned in the void. The decades had been like the passing of a night of sleep; yet now awake, Ed was aware that the time had gone, building up an unimaginable distance. Here was the abyss. It was a cold awareness which made him neither confident nor happy. Sometimes he looked down at Barbara's quiet face, but he did not wish her to awaken now.

Ahead was Sirius, brighter than before. Beside it, visible at least to the unaided eye, was the dim speck of its companion star, a white dwarf, shrunken and old, little larger than the Earth, but incredibly massive, the very atoms at its core compressed by its fearsome gravity and the weight of material above them. This dwarf's internal substance, largely pure nuclear matter, would have weighed tons per cubic inch.

Instruments, brought nearer to a destination, now showed more clearly, by the irregularities in the movements of this binary system, the existence of planets pursuing changing paths in the complicated cross drags of two stellar bodies revolving around a common center. Those worlds, known of on Earth for a quarter century, were still out of telescopic view. Their seasons must be crazy—hot, cold, uncertain. Yet other, nearer star systems had the same, and worse, drawbacks. And Sirius was relatively near, too. Besides, need an android worry about the fluctuations of mad climates so much?

After a month, Ed Dukas relinquished his duties to others who were aroused briefly. He slept again, for more decades, and on through the first contact with a Sirian world. His mind still slightly blurred, he came down in a tender from the orbiting star ship, after others had landed. Barbara was with him. Somewhere far ahead, among hills rapidly shedding their glacial coat under hot sunshine, was Mitchell Prell.

The sunshine came from Sirius itself, farther away than the distance from Earth to Uranus; hence its size and brilliance were counteracted. Yet this world did not attend Sirius directly. It belonged to the white-hot speck at zenith—the dwarf with an almost equal attraction—tiny, but much closer. The planet hurried like a moon around this miniature sun.

Ed looked up at thin fish-scale clouds that were rose-tinted. Before him was a prairie covered with waving stalks bearing white plumes. Might you call them flowers blown by the wind?