Anderson, Poul - SS Read online

  For his part, Hart began to be bored. It was not entirely a subjective attitude rising out of resentment at inferiority. These people were slow-speaking, formal, calm, they lacked the tension and the acrid mirth of the twentieth century. They were not weaklings in any sense, but they were—innocent.

  There was no entertainment except what groups provided for themselves—singing, dancing, amateur showmanship, a great deal of hobby-craft. The reason for the absence of professional entertainment was basically the same as that for the lack of large-scale industry. The group society was deliberately throwing the individual and the family on their own resources. Now that there were no external challenges of war, poverty, famine, disease, now that history had slowed almost to a standstill, man must return to a degree of primitive self-sufficiency, and independence if he was not to become the glorified termite inhabiting a purposeless machine city.

  Hart saw the reasoning, but it seemed puritanical to him. And he could not sympathize with a people who deliberately submitted to it. A man who plowed his own fields when science had advanced to the point where everyone could eat out of cans was a fool. To be sure, the man was conditioned to like it, and certainly the food was better than the sterilized pap of twentieth century canneries—but even so—

  Hart tried to leave Earth altogether. But he lacked the physique and the technical skill which would justify a spaceship in hauling him. And from what he read of the spatial colonies, he was likely to find a still more alien society out there.

  In the end, desperately, he took the weather station job.

  For a while that was better. He was alone, away from the subtler and cruder isolation of strangers’ company, and he was not entirely useless. The vast windswept snowfields, the far mysterious glimmer of northern lights wavering over enormous mountains, the snug hut where he had access to the books and music of all history, were all somehow comforting. He barely spoke to the pilot of the occasional supply rocket, and refused to be relieved.

  He couldn’t go back to a world which had no use for him. He could stay here and dream of what had been, out here in the wind-whining loneliness, alone in the dark with the ghosts of his own time whispering to him—

  They muttered on the dark corners, they wavered in the auroras and the pale cold sunlight, ghosts of the past, calling to him over a gulf of time. Time began to be meaningless, and space. In this unreal landscape of ice and snow and dark, wind blowing up between the frosty stars, it was hard to say where the solid world left off and the dreams began.

  Hart realized vaguely that he was slipping. But it didn’t matter. Certainly he couldn’t return to the politeness of the world, more cold and remote than the flying haggard moon, he couldn’t leave his old friends here— Why, his relief would sweep the dust out of the cabin, dust which had once been human, dust which had once lain in his arms or laughed at his humor— Now the wind laughed, hooting around the house and rattling the shutters in appreciation of Hart’s jokes.

  Waldor Rostom Chang looked, with horror creeping behind his eyes, at the thing which mumbled on the floor of the airjet. Hart was almost completely catatonic now.

  “If we had knuwed!” said the doctor. “If we had uwnly knuwed!”

  “How skood we?” asked the pilot, a weather service technician. “De job waar just 'made’ work, to give de poor felluw someting to do. Reports his waar filed in de wastebasket. And he had bee-an su un- suwciable dat de supply pilots simply left stuff his witout ewen seeing him. It waar uwnly when he had quit reporting for seweral days dat we got alarmed.”

  “I newwer drea-amed he would go crazy, ewen when he had bee-an dere two yaars witout relief,” said Chang. “After all, a modern man could stand it easily. And de twentyet century mind waar too strange to mind nos, completely unintegrated as it waar, for de psychotechnics to spot de instability in him.”

  “And nuw what will we do wit him?”

  “We cannot help de poor jorp. Psychiatry nos are preventive, mental disease su long forgetted dat we have no real curative technique— teories, records of old cure-metods, yes, but nuw experenced mental doctors.” Chang shrugged. “All we can do is put Hart back in de Crypt till such day as psychiatry have evolved cure for su extreme a case as his. And dere are su little need for psychocuring today dat I fear it will be a long, long time befuwre Hart can he outtaken again.”

  The pilot grinned mirthlessly. “By den,” he said, “society may be su alien dat Hart, once cured, will relapse into insanity too deep for dem to handle—so dey will have to put him back in de Crypt—” He spied his goal and sent the airjet slanting downward.