Stepsons of Terra

18.

The return voyage seemed to take days. Ewing lay awake in the protecting cradle, staring through the open vision-plate at the blurred splendor of the heavens as the ship shot through notspace at super-light velocities. At these speeds, the stars appealed as blotchy pastel things; the constellations did not exist.

Curiously, he felt no sense of triumph. He had saved Corwin, true—and in that sense, he had achieved the goal in whose name he had set out on his journey across space to Earth. But he felt as if his work were incomplete.

He thought, not of Corwin now, but of Earth. Two years had gone by on the mother world since his departure; certainly, time enough for the Sirians to make their move. Firnik, no doubt, was high in the command of the Sirian Governor-General instead of holding a mere vice-consul’s job. Byra Clork was probably a noblewoman of the new aristocracy.

And Myreck and the others—well, perhaps they had survived, hidden three microseconds out of phase. But more likely they had been caught and put to death, like the potential dangers they were.

Dangers. There were no true dangers to the Sirians. Earth was self-weakened; it had no capacity to resist tyranny.

Guiltily, Ewing told himself that there was nothing he could have done. Earth’s doom was foreordained, self-inflicted. He had saved his own world; there was no helping Earth.

There was a way, something in his mind said reproachfully. There still is a way.

Leave Corwin. Cross space once again, return to Earth, lead the hapless little Earthers in a struggle for freedom. All they needed was a man with the bold vigor of the outworld colonies. Leadership was what they lacked. They outnumbered the Sirians a thousand to one. In any kind of determined rising, they could win their freedom easily. But they needed a focal point; they needed a leader.

You could be that leader, something within him insisted. Go back to Earth.

Savagely, he forced the idea to die. His place was on Corwin, where he was a hero, where his wife and child awaited him. Earth had to work out its own pitiful destiny.

He tried to relax. The ship plummeted onward through the night, toward Corwin.

It seemed that the whole populace turned out to welcome him. He could see them from above, as he maneuvered the ship through the last of its series of inward spirals and let it come gently to rest on the ferroconcrete landing surface of Broughton Spacefield.

He let the decontaminating squad do its work, while he watched the massed crowd assembled beyond the barriers. Finally, when the ship and the area around it were both safely cool, he stepped out.

The roar was deafening.

There were thousands of them there. In the front he saw Laira and Blade, and the Premier, and the Council. University people. Newsmen. People, people, people. Ewing’s first impulse was to shrink back into the lonely comfort of his ship. Instead, he compelled himself to walk forward toward the crowd. He wished they would stop shouting; he held up a hand, hoping to get silence, but the gesture was interpreted as a greeting and called forth an even noisier demonstration.

Somehow, he reached Laira and got his arms around her. He smiled; she said something, but her voice was crushed by the uproar. He read her lips instead. She was saying, “I was counting the seconds till you got back, darling.”

He kissed her. He hugged Blade to him. He smiled to Davidson and to all of them, and wondered quietly why he had been born with the particular conglomeration of personality traits that had brought him to this destiny, on this world, on this day.

He was a hero. He had ended a threat that had destroyed six worlds.

Corwin was safe.

He was swept inside, carried off to the World Building, smuggled into Premier Davidson’s private chambers. There, while officers of the peace kept the curiosity-seekers away, Ewing dictated for the airwaves a full account of what he had done, while smiling friends looked on.

There were parades outside. He could hear the noise from where he sat, seventy-one floors above the street level. It was hardly surprising; a world that had lived under sentence of death for five years found itself miraculously reprieved. It was small wonder the emotional top was blowing off.

Sometime toward evening, they let him go home. He had not slept for more than thirty hours, and it was beginning to show.

A cavalcade of official cars convoyed him out of the capital city and toward the suburban area where he lived. They told him a guard would be placed round his house, to assure him continued privacy. He thanked them all, and wished them good night, and entered his house. The door shut behind him, shutting out the noise, the celebration, the acclaim. He was just Baird Ewing of Corwin again, in his own home. He felt very tired. He felt hollow within, as if he were a villain rather than a hero. And it showed.

Laira said, “That trip didn’t change you, did it?”

He blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I thought that the cloud would lift from you. That you were worried about the invasion and everything. But I guess I was wrong. Were safe, now—and something’s still eating you.”

He tried to laugh it off. “Laira, you’re overtired. You’ve been worrying too much yourself. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

She shook her head. “No, Baird. I’m serious. I know you too well; I see something in your eyes. Trouble, of some kind.” She put her hands round his wrists and stared up into his eyes. “Baird, something happened to you on Earth that you haven’t told me about. I’m your wife. I ought to know about it, if there’s anything—”

“There’s nothing! Nothing.” He looked away. “Let’s go to sleep, Laira. I’m exhausted.”

But he lay in bed turning restlessly, and despite his exhaustion sleep did not come.

How can I go back to Earth? he asked himself bitterly.

My loyalties lie here. Earth will have to take care of itself—and if it can’t, more’s the pity.

It was a hollow rationalization, and he knew it. He lay awake half the night, brooding, twisting, drowning in his own agonized perspiration.

He thought:

Three men died so I could return to Corwin safely. Two of them were deliberate, voluntary suicides. I owe them a debt. I owe Earth a debt, for making possible Corwin’s salvation.

Three men died for me. Do I have any right to be selfish?

Then he thought:

When Laira married me, she thought she was getting Citizen Baird Ewing, period. She wasn’t marrying any hero, any world saver. She didn’t ask the Council to pick me for its trip to Earth. But she went through two years of widowhood because they did pick me.

How could I tell her I was leaving, going to Earth for good? Leaving her without a husband, and Blade without a father? It simply isn’t fair to them. I can’t do it.

And then he thought:

There must be a compromise. A way I can serve the memory of the dead Baird Ewings and be fair to my family as well. There has to be some kind of compromise.

There was. The answer came to him shortly before morning, crystal sharp, bearing with it no doubts, no further anxiety. He saw what his path must be. With the answer came a welling tide of peace, and he drifted into sound sleep, confident he had found the right way at last.

Premier Davidson, on behalf of the grateful people of the world of Corwin, called on him the next morning. Davidson told him he might pick anything, anything at all as his reward.

Ewing chuckled. “I’ve got everything I want already,” he said. “Fame, fortune, family—what else is there in life?”

Shrugging, the rotund litde Premier said, “But surely there must be some fitting—”

“There is,” Ewing said. “Suppose you grant me the freedom of poking around with those notebooks I brought back with me from Earth. All right?”

“Certainly, if that’s what you want. But can that be all that—”

“There’s just one other thing I want. No, two. The first one may be tough. I want to be left alone. I want to get out of the limelight and stay there. No medals, no public receptions, no more parades. I did the job the Council sent me to do, and now I want to return to private life.

“As for the second thing—well, I won’t mention it yet. Let’s just put it this way: when the time comes, I’m going to want a favor from the Government. It’ll be an expensive favor, but not terribly so. I’ll let you know what it is I want, when and if I want it.”

Slowly, the notoriety ebbed away, and Ewing returned to private life as he had wished. His life would never be the same again, but there was no help for that. The Council voted him a pension of 10,000 stellors a year, transferable to his heirs in perpetuity, and he was so stunned by their magnanimity that he had no choice but to accept.

A month passed. The tenseness seemed to have left him. He discovered that his son was turning into a miniature replica of his father, tall, taciturn, with the same inner traits of courage, dependability, conscience. It was a startling thing to watch the boy unfolding, becoming a personality.

It was too bad, Ewing thought, as he wrestled with his son or touched his wife’s arm, that he would have to be leaving them soon. He would regret parting with them. But at least they would be spared any grief.

A second month passed. The apparatus he was building in his basement, in the sacrosanct den that neither Blade nor Laira ever dared to enter, was nearing completion. The time was drawing near.

He ran the final tests on a warm midsummer day. The machine responded perfectly. The time had come.

He called upstairs via the intercom. Laira was reading in the study; Blade was watching the video. “Blade? Laira?”

“We’re here, Baird. What do you want?” Laira asked. Ewing said, “I’ll be running some very delicate experiments during the next twenty minutes or so. Any shift in the room balance might foul things up. Would you both be kind enough to stay put, in whatever room you’re in now, until I give the signal from downstairs?”

“Of course, darling.”

Ewing smiled and hung up. Quite carefully he took a massive crowbar from his tool-chest and propped it up at the side of the wall, near the outer door of the den. He glanced at his watch. The time was 1403:30.

He recrossed the room and made some final adjustments on the apparatus. He stared at his watch, letting the minutes go by. Six… seven… eight…

At 1411:30 he reached up and snapped a switch. The machinery hummed briefly and threw him back ten minutes in time.