Rite of Passage Read online

  Rite of Passage

  Chad Oliver

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1954

  This copy derived from the above source.

  Everybody knows what civilization means… in their own terms. But try and spot the other fellow’s civilization when he’s using quite other terms.

  * * *

  I.

  The ship was named the Juarez.

  Outside, all was well. A tiny white bubble of flame played about the stern jets and the Juarez, one hundred light-years distant from the planet Earth, picked its graceful way through the system of Carinae.

  Inside, it was different. The Juarez was a death ship. Someone, somehow, on one of the outer planets, had taken a chance with a germ. Perhaps he had been in a hurry, perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps it was just one of those things.

  It didn’t really matter now.

  The Juarez carried a crew of fifty-four. Six were still alive. Of the remaining six, three were clearly dying.

  It was a long way home.

  Martin Ashley wiped the cold sweat from the palms of his hands. He handed the doctor a glass of water. “Here you go, Doc,” he said quietly.

  Doc Slonsky managed to control his trembling long enough to hurl the water against the wall in a gesture of supreme contempt. “A dying man asks for a drink,” he said acidly, “and you bring him water. I have told you, Martin—there is no time for jokes. Not any more.” The trembling stopped and beads of colorless sweat popped out on his forehead. “Get me a drink.”

  Martin Ashley walked shakily across the dimly-lit room, picked his way between two silent, sheet-covered figures, and retrieved a half-empty bottle of bourbon from a table. It couldn’t do any harm now, he knew. When they reached that stage, nothing made any difference. He went back to the doctor, poured out a glassful, and handed it to him. Slonsky downed it at one prodigious draft, shuddered from a new cause, and managed to prop himself up on one elbow.

  “Bourbon,” the little man said unhappily, “you’d give a dying man bourbon.”

  “You’re not dying, Doc,” Martin told him, stuffing a pillow behind him for support. “You’re indestructible.”

  “Garbage,” the doctor said, dropping the glass on the floor and taking the bottle instead. “Many men have been indestructible—Caesar, Hannibal, Bluebeard. Where are they today? Dead, all dead.” He took a long pull from the bottle.

  “You’ll pull through, Doc,” Martin lied. “You’re not the same as the others, you don’t have quite the same thing, you see, and—”

  “Martin.”

  The room was very quiet around them. No one talks in a graveyard, Martin thought coldly. No one but the caretaker.

  Slonsky let his head fall back and Martin took the bottle out of his limp hand. Slonsky closed his eyes as though the effort of keeping them open was too much for him. “Martin,” he said again, his voice very weak.

  “Yes, Doc.”

  “Martin, Gallen has a prayer to pull through; he passed the crisis hours ago and is still alive. He has a chance. You seem to be immune; it is because you have lived an evil life, although that particular remedy didn’t work in my case. The Chavez boy never came down either. That makes three of you, two for sure. You’d belter get the rest of us out of the ship, Martin.”

  “Now, Doc—”

  “Give me a drink, Martin.”

  Martin Ashley put the bottle in Slonsky’s hand, but the hand didn’t respond. It was very quiet. Doc Slonsky’s eyes opened for the last time, unseeing, and Martin pulled the sheet up to cover his face.

  He was alone again.

  “Good luck, Doc,” he said.

  He walked slowly through the silent room, not thinking about anything. He had seen it happen too many times. He was numb. He took a drink out of the bottle himself, being long past the stage where sanitary precautions concerned him. If he didn’t have it now, he wasn’t going to get it, and maybe that was too bad. The bourbon burned a little in his stomach but failed to warm him. He set the bottle down on a convenient table and left it there.

  He stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He stood for a long minute, listening to the faint throbbing hum of the mindless atomics, and then he began to walk down the empty corridor, not sure where he was going, or why.

  As he had so many times before when he was confused, or just lonesome, he wound up with Carol. He had carried her to her room a long time ago, when there still had been hope, and he went there now, needing a word, a look, anything.

  He didn’t get it.

  Her blond hair was lifeless on the pillow, and one slim arm hung down by the side of the bed, rocking slightly with the vibrations of the ship. She had no make-up on, as usual, and her blue eyes were closed. She was still breathing, faintly.

  Martin Ashley looked at her for a long time. He remembered. Mostly, he remembered the long talks they had had, and the laughs, while most of the Juarez slept around them. Carol had been one of the navigators, and Martin had always thought of her as a potentially beautiful woman. She could have been beautiful, and more than that, but she didn’t let herself be. She had lost her man, a long time ago, and Martin had never been able to take his place. He had only kissed her once, and never tried again.

  But they had had a closeness between them. They had understood one another, and they needed that. They had cheered each other up when they were low, and when they both felt good they had fun. They had both known that some day—

  Well, some day wouldn’t come, now. Maybe it never would have anyway, but they had both liked to think that it would.

  There wasn’t anything he could say to Carol. He left her where she was, because he couldn’t watch, and went out again into the empty corridor.

  Martin Ashley needed life. He needed to see a living thing, even a dog or a fish or a plant. The Juarez was like a tomb. It was a tomb.

  He walked through the tunnels to the senior’s cabin, listening to the click and echo of his heels on the metal floor. Long before he got there, he heard the sobbing that filled the corridor.

  That would be Bob Chavez, the senior’s son, he knew. Probably, it meant that old Alberto Chavez was dead. He smiled a little, sadly. Al Chavez had only been fifty-five, twenty years older than himself, but that was old for space. He caught himself wishing that Al could have pulled through, instead of his son. He didn’t even dislike himself for the thought; he was past caring very much. It wasn’t that Bob was no good, of course, but simply that he probably wasn’t good enough.

  He knocked on the door. “Come on out, Bob,” he said.

  The sobbing choked off, hurriedly. His knock wasn’t answered.

  “Come on, Bob,” he said tonelessly. “We’ve got work to do.”

  The door opened finally. Robert Chavez was twenty-one years old and he was dark and handsome in the classic tradition. His eyes were red now, and Martin reflected idly that this was the first time he had ever seen him without his hair combed.

  “Let me alone,” the boy said. “Go away.”

  Martin felt sorry for him, as much as he could feel sorry for anyone today, but it obviously wouldn’t do to leave Bob in there alone with his father. “We’re all that’s left, Bob,” he said quietly, “unless you count Gallen. I know how you feel, but that won’t help. We’ve got about twelve hours at the outside to orbit this ship and pick us a planet. I need your help.”

  “I don’t give a damn, Mart,” Chavez said. “I just don’t give a damn.” He started to close the door, but Martin had his foot in it. “It isn’t easy to grow up in a hurry,” he said, “but you’re going to have to do it. I’m going up to the control room, and I’ll give you fifteen minutes. You take a look at your father and figure out what you ought to do. I’m sh
oving off, and whether you come along or not is your business.”

  He turned and walked away. It would have to be Bob, he thought. It would have to be him, of all people.

  He walked toward the control room, smiling sourly.

  Fifty-one down and three to go.

  They had set up a cot for Ernest Gallen in the control room, by his radio equipment, just in case. When Martin Ashley came in and sat down next to him, he opened his eyes and managed to hold up two fingers in an ironic V for Victory.

  “Man,” he said, “I’m still alive. How do you like that?”

  “I like it fine, Ernie,” Martin said. “How do you feel?”

  “Like the worms wouldn’t have me. I’m afraid I may live.”

  “You’d better.”

  “Who else we got, Mart?”

  “The kid. Period.”

  Gallen sighed. “In that case,” he said, “suppose you just pick up a gun and put a bullet through my brain, and I’ll toddle along peacefully to the happy hunting ground. No point in prolonging the agony.”

  Martin Ashley looked at the man on the cot, sizing up what he knew about him. Ernie Gallen was about forty, with a short and stocky build, blondish hair and brown eyes. He was moody, and inclined to be at his most cheerful when the going was the toughest. He was—or had been—the radio expert on the Juarez, and in other fields he tended toward the “common sense” approach to problems. He had a sense of humor. Ashley liked the man, which helped. Ernie might be a good man to have along, from a purely objective viewpoint, or he might not.

  That would depend on what they ran into.

  “Hell of a note,” Gallen said, shifting his position on the cot. “Two guys left to run a spaceship in the middle of nowhere—an anthropologist and a radio bug. Add one kid who knows all the answers, and what have you got?”

  “Not very much,” Martin Ashley admitted. “Not enough, certainly.”

  The control room was silent around them, except for an occasional click or buzz from automatic equipment. The small noises served as a mechanical counterpoint to the not-sound of emptiness. The great viewer still flashed its images. The computer hummed with readiness. The dials presented their data with complete unconcern, and the lighted control bank was ready to go.

  But the ship was dead. The heart and brain and spirit were not working. They were stretched out in rows, with sheets over their faces. They were cold. The ship was a corpse—fine on the outside, and all the organs still in place, but incapable of thought or action. It kept going, zombie-fashion, but it was not alive.

  And the three who still lived? Martin Ashley smiled. An active thyroid gland—that was the kid. A larynx and a velum—that was Ernie. And himself?

  A bit of spinal cord, maybe. And, no doubt, a dash of ego.

  It wasn’t going to be a very lively corpse.

  “What can we do, Mart?”

  “The radio is out, I suppose?”

  Ernie Gallen shrugged as well as he could from a prone position: “There should be another ship from Earth out this way in another zillion hours or so,” he said. “Conceivably, there might be an alien ship along about the same time. Until then, we can chat with the star-static. There’s nothing coming in.”

  Martin Ashley grinned, deliberately keeping his mind from touching again on what had been his friends, stacked in neat white rows through the Juarez. His friends and Carol, who had been more than that. “The solution is obvious,” he said. “We just sit down and wait for a mutation to turn us into supermen. From that point, presumably, the problem will be duck soup. Neat, eh?”

  Ernie Gallen groaned.

  “There’s only one alternative, really,” Ashley said slowly.

  “That’s one more than is visible from here,” Ernie said. “Let’s have it.”

  “Well, let’s look at the facts. We’re a hundred light-years from home, and the three of us simply do not constitute an adequate crew for the Juarez. If three men—even three specialists—could handle this crate, they’d have sent out three men in the first place, and not fifty-four. We may be able to pull off some very simple and elementary type of maneuver at low speed, but trying to operate this monster in overdrive would be suicide, but fast—and no pun intended. You with me so far?”

  “No argument,” agreed Gallen. “You spoke of an alternative—?”

  “After a fashion. We agree that we can’t move this ship out of the Carinae system; O.K. We seem to agree also on the ugly point that there’s no practical chance of our being picked up before we’re too senile to care. So what’s left?”

  Gallen essayed another shrug, and Ashley noted with alarm that the strain of talking was already beginning to wear Ernie down. When he spoke of three men, even that was something of an overstatement.

  “Here’s the way I see it, then,” he said slowly. “We can either live out our lives on the Juarez, just sitting around staring at each other until we all flip our lids, or we can take the shuttle, pick us a planet, and go down and carve some sort of a life out for ourselves—or try to. Here’s another little fact for our collection: I figure that if we don’t swing the Juarez around within the next few hours, we’ll be out of the system into deep space—and I don’t know whether or not we can get it back again.”

  Ernie Gallen just looked at him, unspeaking.

  “If we can find a planet we can live on—and the survey showed several possibilities in that direction—we can try to orbit the Juarez around it, and take the shuttle down. That way, we can always come back if things get too rough. We can rig up a broadcast beam from the ship, telling where we are and who we are, just in case another ship should blunder out this way. That’s the only chance I see for us, Ernie. I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve only got one life to live, according to the best information available, and I don’t want to live it in this coffin. I want some grass under my feet, and some air over my head. I want a chance to be a human being, and not an animal floating around on a raft after the world’s gone bang. Excuse the speech.”

  The control room was lost in emptiness, with furtive clicks and buzzes chattering in the immensity.

  “What’s down there, Mart?” Ernest Gallen asked finally.

  Martin Ashley shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. No broadcast waves coming in that we’ve been able to pick up, and nothing on the energy detectors. That may mean that there’s nothing there, or it may mean there’s something around that hasn’t reached a Stage Four technology, or it may mean that we’ll be up against something so different we’ll never understand it or live with it. Pick one.”

  Gallen smiled weakly. “You’re not much of an ad man,” he observed.

  Martin Ashley waved a hand at the steel hollowness around them. “I know what’s here,” he said quietly, “and that’s enough data for me. I’m going. If you think your chances are better on the Juarez, you’re probably right. But it’s not for me, Ernie.”

  “Not for me either, Mart,” Gallen said in a low voice. “You’ll have to carry me out, though.”

  They were silent then, feeling the death all around them in the Juarez. The silence was broken with startling abruptness by a furtive sound from the control room door. Martin Ashley felt the hackles on the back of his neck crawl. He turned around, half expecting to see a walking corpse.

  Bob Chavez stood in the doorway. His face was very pale, his eyes very bright. He was breathing hard and fast.

  “They’re all dead,” he said in a high, taut voice. “All dead but us. What’s going to happen to us?”

  There was more silence.

  “That,” Martin Ashley said finally, “is a very good question.”

  II.

  It was four “days” later.

  The shuttle from the Juarez blasted uneasily through the emptiness of space toward the blue-green globe that was the fourth planet in the system of Carinae. It was a tiny ship, designed for short ship-to-planet hops, and it was out of its depth now—a slender minnow from sun-drenched shallows, caught in
the center of a dark sea, and going down and down and down—

  Into what?

  Martin Ashley, strapped in next to Ernie Gallen, kept his eyes on Bob Chavez at the controls. He did not look out at the sucking immensity that waited for them outside the plastiglass shield. But he felt it—a yellow, burning sun, a million stars, a vastness beyond imagination. It was a measurement of the infinite and it cut man down to size. It was a mirror that reflected back to every man a true and merciless image of himself.

  Looking out into space from a small ship was not a popular experience.

  “Try the beam, Ernie,” he said. “It’s too quiet in here, jets or no jets.”

  Ernie nodded. He was still weak, but he was stronger than he had been, and his brown eyes were clear. “You just like to hear yourself talk, Mart,” he said. He cut in the shuttle’s radio.

  Martin Ashley’s voice came in out of space.

  It was perma-recorded, coming from the transmitter of the empty Juarez. The Juarez was orbited about the fourth planet now, traveling in a long, silent circle through the emptiness that had been her home. There was no life on the dark Juarez, and the only sound on the ship came from Ashley’s steady flow of words into the unknown:

  “THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE OF CREW OF FIFTY-FOUR. THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN. WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH SHUTTLE RADIO. SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT. THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE—”

  * * *

  Martin Ashley closed his eyes, remembering.

  He remembered ejecting fifty-one bodies into space.

  He remembered a nightmare of orbiting the massive Juarez.