Ticket to Anywhere

II

He prowled the rest of the cabin with Wolfert, resting at intervals until his strength returned. There wasn’t much to see: the Doorway room, with a spyhole Falk had not noticed between it and the bedroom; the room that housed radio, radar, and the computer that controlled the grazing orbits of the supply rockets; the power plant, and the compressor that kept the cabin’s air at breathable pressure; kitchen, bathroom, and two storage chambers.

The radio room had a window, and Falk stood there a long time, looking out over the alien desert, violet now as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Stars glittered with unfamiliar brilliance in the near-black sky, and Falk found his gaze drawn to them even against the tug of that unearthly landscape.

In his mind he sketched hairlines of fire across the sky— a cat’s cradle of stars. The thought that tomorrow he would be standing on a planet of one of those suns was like an icy douche; the mind recoiled from it as from the thought of personal death. But at the same time it lured him. He felt like a boy standing on the edge of an unsounded pool whose black waters might hold treasure or death: he was afraid to dive, and yet he knew that he must.

How could a man feel otherwise, he wondered, knowing that the way was open, that he had only to step forward?

Wolfert said abruptly, “You haven’t asked me whether I reported to Earth when I found you in that freighter shell.”

Falk looked at him. “You did, of course,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone long before they can do anything about me. You’ll tell them that I overpowered you and escaped through the Doorway - they won’t be able to prove otherwise - unless you’re conditioned against lying?”

“No,” said Wolfert, “I’m not. That part’s all right, with one emendation: I’ll say I revived you, then shot and buried you. But what made you so sure that I’d be - sympathetic?”

“You’re here,” said Falk simply. “You’re a volunteer. They haven’t got to the stage of conditioning people to do jobs they don’t want to do, though I suppose they will eventually. And when I’d heard you speak, I knew you were intelligent. So - you’re a hermit. You don’t like the madhouse they’re making of Earth, any more than I do.”

“I don’t know,” said Wolfert slowly. “Perhaps you’re assuming too much similarity.” He looked down at his ever-present pipe, tamping the tobacco with a horny thumb. “I don’t feel as you do about the analogue system, or the present government. I’m adjusted, there. In my personal universe, it works. I can see that it will lead to disaster eventually, but that doesn’t bother me much. I’ll be dead.”

He looked at Falk earnestly. “But I want the stars,” he said.

“That’s an emotional thing with me…There are no slugs in these cartridges.” He indicated the gun at his hip. “Or in any of the ammunition I’ve got. They didn’t condition me against that.”

Falk stared at him. “Look,” he said abruptly, “you’ve got a directive against stepping through that Doorway, is that right?”

The other nodded.

“Well, but is there any reason why I couldn’t knock you over the head and drag you through?”

Wolfert smiled wryly, shaking his head slowly. “No good,” he said. “Somebody’s got to stay, this end.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a chance that you’ll find the secret out there, somewhere. That’s what you’re hoping, too, isn’t it? You’re not just looking for a place to hide - you could do that in a thousand places on Earth. You’re after knowledge, and in spite of what I’ve told you, you’re hoping you’ll be allowed to bring it back and make the Earth over.”

“It sounds a little quixotic,” said Falk, “but you’re right.”

Wolfert shrugged, letting his gaze drift away again. “Well, then… there’s got to be somebody here. Somebody with no slugs in his gun. If I went with you, they’d take good care to send a different sort of man next time.”

He met Falk’s eyes again briefly. “Don’t waste time feeling sorry for me,” he said. “You may not believe it, but I’m quite happy here. When I’m… alone, that is.”

Falk had been wondering why the government had not sent a married couple instead of a single man, who might go mad from sheer loneliness. Now it struck him that he had been stupid. Wolfert had a wife, undoubtedly; the best kind - one who suited him perfectly, who would never be fickle, or want to return to Earth; one who cost nothing to feed, consumed no air, and had not added an ounce of weight when Wolfert had been shipped out here. And on Mars it did not ordinarily matter that no one else could see her.

He felt an inward twinge of revulsion and instantly knew that Wolfert had seen and understood it. The man’s cheeks flushed, and he turned away to stare through the window, his lips thin and hard.

After a moment Falk said, “Wolfert, I like you better than any man I’ve ever met. I hope you’ll believe that.”

Wolfert hauled out a pipe cleaner, a complicated thing of many hinged stems, the free ends stamped into shovel shapes, tamper shapes, probes. He said, “I’m afraid I dislike you, Falk, but it’s nothing personal. I simply hate your guts a little, because you’ve got something I wasn’t lucky enough to be born with. You’re the master of your own mind.”

He turned and put out his hand, grinning. “Aside from that trifling matter, I entirely approve of you. If that’s good enough—?”

Falk gripped his hand. “I hope you’re here when I get back,” he said.

“I’ll be here,” said Wolfert, scraping his pipe, “for another thirty-odd years, barring accidents. If you’re not back by then, I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back at all.”

At Wolfert’s suggestion, Falk put on one of the other’s light Mars suits instead of the spacesuit he had worn in the freighter. The latter, designed for heavy-duty service in the orbital space station that circled Earth, was, as Wolfert pointed out, too clumsy for use on a planet’s surface. The lighter suit furnished adequate protection in thin atmosphere and was equipped with gadgetry that the other lacked: a head lamp, climbing gear, built-in compass, and traps for the occupant’s ingestion and excretion. It carried air tanks, but also had a compression outfit - which, given an atmosphere at least as oxygen-rich as that of Mars, would keep the wearer alive for as long as the batteries held out.

“You’ll have to find a place where you can live off the land, so to speak, anyhow,” said Wolfert. “If all the planets you hit should happen to be dead, so will you be, very shortly. But this suit will give you longer to look, at least, and the stuff in the knapsack will last you as long as you have air. I’d give you this gun, but it wouldn’t do you any good - all the ammunition’s buggered, as I told you.”

He disconnected the booby trap and stood aside as Falk moved to the entrance. Falk took one last look around at the bare metal room and at Wolfert’s spare figure and gloomy face. He stepped into the brown-glass cubicle and put his gloved hand on the lever.

“See you later,” he said.

Wolfert nodded soberly, almost indifferently. “So long, Falk,” he said, and put his pipe back in his mouth.

Falk turned on his helmet lamp, put his free hand near the control box at his belt - and pressed the lever down.

Wolfert vanished. An instant later Falk was aware that the lever was no longer beneath his hand. He turned, dazedly, and saw that it was back in its original position, above his hand.

Then he remembered the curious blank that had taken Wolfert’s place and he turned again to the entrance. He saw -nothing. A gray-white blankness, featureless, uncommunicative. Was this some kind of intermediary state - and if so, how long did it last? Falk felt a brief surge of panic as he realized they had only assumed the journey was instantaneous, and another as he recalled the eight transmitters that had never been heard from….

Then common sense took over, and he stepped forward to the entrance.

The gray-white shaded gradually, as his gaze traveled downward, into gray-blue and violet, and then a chaos of dim colors of which his eye made nothing. He gripped the edge of the Doorway and bent forward, looking downward and still downward. Then he saw the cliff, and all the rest of the scene fell into perspective.

He stood at the top of a sheer mountain - an impossible, ridiculous height. Down it went and again down, until whatever was at the bottom melted into a meaningless tapestry of grayed color. He looked to right and left and saw nothing else. No sound came through the diaphragm of his helmet. He had only the tactile and muscular responses of his own body, and the hard reality of the Doorway itself, to assure him that he was real and live.

The planet was dead; he felt irrationally sure of that. It felt dead; there was not even a whisper of wind: only the featureless blanket of gray cloud, the cliff, the meaningless colors below.

He looked at the kit slung to his belt: the pressure gauge, bottled litmus papers, matches. But there was no point in testing this atmosphere: even if it were breathable, there was clearly no way of getting out of the Doorway. The cliff began not more than an inch from the entrance.

Falk went back to the lever, pressed it down again.

This time he watched it as it reached the end of its stroke. There was no hint of transition: the lever was there, under his hand, and then it was back in the starting position - as if it had passed unfelt through the flesh of his hand.

He turned.

Deep blue night, blazing with stars. Underneath, a flat blue-green waste that ran straight away into the far distance.

Falk stepped out onto the icy plain and looked around him, then upward. The sky was so like the one he had known as a boy in Michigan that it struck him almost as a conviction that this terminus was on Earth - in the Antarctic, perhaps, near the Pole, where no explorer had ever happened across it. Then, as he looked automatically for the Dipper, Orion’s Belt, he knew that he was wrong.

He saw none of the familiar patterns. These were alien stars, in an alien sky. He reviewed what he could remember of the configurations of Earth’s southern hemisphere, but none of them fitted either.

Directly above him was a group of eight stars, two of them very brilliant - four arranged in a straight line, the rest spread out in an almost perfect semicircle. Falk knew that if he had ever seen that constellation before he would not have forgotten it.

Now he looked down toward the horizon, blacker than the sky. How could he know that light, warmth, safety, knowledge were not hiding just beyond the curve of the planet?

He turned back to the cubicle. He was here on sufferance, a man in a Mars suit, with weeks - or, with great luck, months or years - to live. He had to find what he sought within a pitifully small radius from the Doorway, or not at all.

Down went the lever again. Now it was still night - but when Falk went to the Doorway, he saw an avenue of great buildings under the stars.

Now the pressure gauge came out - low, but the compressor could handle it. The litmus papers - negative. The match burned - weakly, and only for an instant, but it burned.

Falk started the compressor and shut off the flow of air from the tanks slung at his back. Then he turned on his helmet light and marched off down the avenue.

The buildings were variations on a theme: pyramid, cone, and wedge shape, they sloped away as they rose, so that for all their enormous bulk they did not hide the sky. Falk looked up when he had taken a few steps, subconsciously expecting to see the half-circle constellation. But it was not there, and he realized with a shock that, for all he knew, he might be halfway across the galaxy from the spot where he had stood five minutes ago.

He drew a picture of the galaxy in his mind, an oval clot of mist against blackness. Near one focus of the ellipse he put a dot of brightness that stood for Sol. Then he made another dot and drew a shining line between them. Then another dot, and another line; then another. They made a sprawling letter N across the misty oval.

It was incomprehensible. A race that could span the galaxy, but could not choose one destination from another?

The only other alternative was: there was some function of the Doorways that men had failed to grasp, some method of selection that evaded them, as a savage might be bewildered in a modern tubeway system. But Falk’s mind rejected that. The mechanism was simple and clear. A cubicle and a lever. Function is expressed by shape; and the shape of the Doorway said “Go”; it did not say “Where?”

He looked again at the buildings. The upper quarter of them, he saw now, was badly eroded: layers inches deep had been eaten away. He glanced at the fine orange sand that paved the avenue and saw that it filled doorways almost to the top. Evidently this city had lain all but buried for many years, and in some recent time the shifting sands had uncovered it again.

The space between the sand and the tops of the doorways was narrow, but he thought he could squeeze through. He picked out one, centering it in the brilliant disk of his head lamp - and stood there, in the middle of the avenue, reluctant to move.

He glanced back at the cubicle, as if for reassurance. It was still there, comfortably clear and sharp-lined, timeless. Now he realized what was troubling him. This city was dead - dead as the planet of the cliff or the planet of ice. The buildings were stone; they had crumbled under the weather. Their makers were dust.

He had agreed with Wolfert when the other had suggested that he was on a quest for knowledge; that he hoped the Doorway would eventually take him back to Sol, armed with knowledge, ready to remake the world. But it wasn’t true. That had been his conscious idea, but it was a dream, a self-delusion - an excuse.

He had no love for Earth, or any conviction that humanity must be rescued from its own weakness. If that force had driven him, there would have been no logic in leaving Earth. He could have stayed, worked himself into the governing elite, organized a revolution from within. His chance of success would have been small, but there would have been some chance.

Yes, he might have done it - and for what? To remove the one control that kept humanity from destroying itself?

That coin had the same face on both sides. Uncontrolled, mankind was not fit to colonize. Controlled, it dared not take the risk. Human civilization was not ready, was a dead end, an aborted experiment. Mankind was a dirty beast, ravaging its planet, befouling itself - capable of any imaginable perversion, degradation, horror.

But there had been another civilization once - one that had been worthy of the stars. Falk did not believe it was dead. Stone crumbled; metal rusted; and the races that used them vanished and were not mourned. The Doorways still lived, still functioned, defying time.

That race was not here; it had left no trace of itself except the Doorway. Without another glance at the buildings around him, Falk turned and went back to the brown glass cubicle.

When he was three yards away from it, he saw the footprints.

There were five of them, lightly impressed into the sand near the Doorway’s entrance. Search as he might, Falk could not find any more. Two, apparently, pointed away from the cubicle; the other three were the returning trail, for one overlapped one of the previous set.

They were smaller than Falk’s booted prints, oval, slightly flattened along the sides. Falk stared at them as if the mere act of looking would make them give up more information; but they told him nothing.

They were not human; but what did that prove?

They had been made long since the time when the Doorways had been built; Falk did not know what winds swept this world, but it could only have been a few years, at most, since the sands had dropped to their present level. But even that train of logic led nowhere.

They could be the trace of a Doorway builder. Or they could have been made by a wanderer like himself, another barbarian venturing in the paths of his betters.

The bitterest thing of all was that, having found the trail, he could not follow it. For it led through the Doorway - to any one of sixty billion suns.

Falk stepped into the cubicle and pressed the lever down once more.