The Lights in the Sky are Stars

by Fredric Brown

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Starduster Yes, I'm Max Andrews. I'm one of the guys who fought and bled and worked to get to Mars. I figure what I gave up in those early years gave me the right to pilot the next big jump. I've lied and stolen for that right. I'd have killed, too, but I didn't have to. Instead, I let a woman give her life so I could have my chance, my door to space. You think I'd stop at anything, now? I'll be on that rocket, blasting away on America's biggest adventure, the hop out into the stars themselves. Only Fred Brown could have written this deeply moving science fiction novel about one man's epic, life-long struggle to open mankind's pathway to the stars.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 149

Sample

I’D BEEN intending to stay a few more days but, that afternoon, something changed my mind. It was the sight of myself in the mirror in my brother Bill’s bathroom. Stark naked, dripping wet, standing on one leg because I have only one leg to stand on, water running noisily out of the tub behind me, I decided to leave that very night.

Time was running out of me like the water out of that bathtub. The sight of myself in the long mirror on the door showed me that, all too clearly.

A mirror doesn’t lie to you. If it tells you that you look your fifty-seven years, then by God you do. And if there’s something you want to do, somewhere you want to go, then you’d better start the doing and the going. You’d better start using the time that’s left in you, because you can’t stop it from running out. You can stop water from running out of a tub by putting the plug back in, but there isn’t any plug that can stop time from running out of you. Oh, you can slow it down. By living right. By letting the medics give you the works in geriatrics you can baby yourself past the century mark, but brother you’re still old at seventy.

In thirteen years I’d be seventy, I thought. Maybe I’d be old sooner than that, what with the way I’d lived most of the time, what with one foot—hell, one leg up to the knee—in the grave already.

It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old.

After I dried myself and before I put my prosthetic leg back on, I hopped up on the bathroom scale and weighed myself. A hundred and twenty-six. Not too bad, I thought; I’d gained back seven of the fourteen pounds I’d lost. If I took even reasonable care of myself I’d have the rest of it back in another few weeks and I didn’t have to stay here until I had all of it back.

I looked at myself in the mirror again and this time it wasn’t so bad. It still had strength in it, that body, the wiry strength that’s better in the long run than heavy musculature. And now that the magnetite leg was back on it was a whole body, or looked like one.

The face above it wasn’t bad either; it too had a kind of strength in it.

I dressed and went downstairs, but I didn’t tell them yet. I waited until after dinner, until after Merlene went upstairs to put Easter and Bill Junior to bed. I knew there’d be an argument and I didn’t want the kids in on it. Bill Senior and Merlene I could handle; I could just agree with everything they said but tell them I was leaving anyway. But what can you do with Uncle Max, please don’t go stuff from kids.

Bill sat watching the viddy.

My kid brother, Bill. My kid brother with graying hair and a bald spot and no imagination. But a nice guy. Happily married, although he’d married late. A good steady job, good steady opinions.

But no taste whatsoever. He liked cowboy music. He was sitting listening to it now.

Out of space it came, that program. From Earth’s second artificial satellite, from the telestation twenty-two thousand miles out in empty space, revolving around Earth once a day as Earth turns once a day under and with it, staying always over Kansas, always twenty-two thousand miles over the tall corn of Kansas.

In full color, that program, tri-dimensional and out of space to Earth. And it was a man in a cowboy hat strumming a guitar and singing in a Texas accent:

Give me the lone pray-ree,And a stallion wild and free …

I’d rather have given him a gelding than a stallion, but I’d have given him anything to shut up.

Bill liked it.

I wandered over to the picture window and stood looking out into the night. A fine view of Seattle, Bill had, from this window facing it and thirty miles away, atop a hill. A fine view especially on a clear night like this one, one of those rare but wonderful warm, bright evenings that can happen in the fall of the year.

Below, the lights of Seattle; above, the lights in the sky.

Behind me, a cowboy singing. Then the song ended and Bill flicked the toggle switch on the arm of his chair that cut off sound while the commercial was on.

In the sudden and blessed silence I said, “Bill, I’m leaving.”

He did what I’d hoped he wouldn’t do, but had known that he would. He walked over and shut off the viddy completely.

Cowboy music he was giving up. Just to argue with me, to try to talk me into staying longer.

To make it worse Merlene came back into the room just then. The kids must have gone to bed without putting up even a token battle about it. I’d counted on having Bill worn down by the time Merlene came downstairs to reinforce him. Now I had both of them at once. And Merlene had heard what I’d said.

She said “No.” Firmly. She sat down on the sofa and looked at me.

I said “Yes.” Mildly.

“Max Andrews, you’ve been here less than three weeks. You’re about halfway well now. You need at least another two weeks of rest and you know it.”

“Not full time rest,” I said. “I’ll take things easy for a while.”

Bill was back in his chair. He said, “Listen, Max—” I turned toward him but he bogged down. He turned to Merlene and I turned too.

Merlene said, “You’re not well enough to leave here yet and you know it.”

“Then I’ll no doubt fall down just outside. If I do, you can drag me back in and I’ll stay. Okay?”

She glared at me. Bill cleared his throat and I looked at him. He got as far as “Listen, Max—” and bogged down again.

Merlene said, “You and those itchy feet of yours.”

“Just one of them itches,” I told her. “Now, children, if this argument must continue, will you please sit together so I don’t get dizzy turning around to face whichever one of you is talking. Bill, will you please sit on the sofa by your wife?”

He got up and moved over. Not gracefully; he stumbled. But grace has never been one of Bill’s strong points. Opposite of Merlene; she’d been a dancer before they were married and every movement she made was graceful. She could change Easter’s diapers as though it were part of a ballet—and with no conscious knowledge that she was making a dance out of it; that was what made it so wonderful to watch.

Merlene said, “Please understand this, Max. We like having you here. We like you. It isn’t as though you are imposing on us, or anything like that. And you’re paying your own way, which helps the budget a lot.”

“It can’t help your budget,” I pointed out, “when you insist on charging me cost only and figuring it down to the penny. If you’d let me pay you a flat fifty a week, as I’d suggested—”

“Will you stay two more weeks if we let you pay it that way?”

I’d walked into that one. I said, “No, darling, I’m sorry.”

I counterattacked. “Listen,” I said, “you’re only two to one against me, but you can increase the odds. You know I’m crazy about Easter and Billy, and they can’t possibly be asleep yet. Why don’t you get them here too and tell them I’m leaving so they can cry about it and soften me with their salty little tears?”

Merlene glowered at me. “You—you—”

I grinned at Bill. “The reason she’s speechless is that she was thinking about doing just that and now she can’t. She was probably wondering already what pretext she could use for bringing them back downstairs.” I looked at Merlene. “But it really wouldn’t be fair, honey. I don’t mean to me—that doesn’t matter. I mean it wouldn’t be fair to them. It might disturb them emotionally, and to no purpose. Because no matter how much it disturbs either them or me I’m leaving tonight. I’ve got to.”

Bill sighed. He sat there looking at me sadly, my kid brother with his temples turning gray. He said, “I don’t suppose, then, that it’ll do any good to tell you I’ve been working at wangling you a job with Union Transport. A good job.”

“I’m a rocket mech, Bill. Union Transport doesn’t use rockets.”

“It would be administrative work, Max. From that point of view what’s the difference between rockets and stratojets?”

“I don’t like stratojets. That’s the difference.”

“Rockets are going out, Max. And besides—my God, you can’t be just a mech all your life.”

“Why can’t I? And damn it, rockets are not going out. Not until we get something better.”

Bill laughed. “Such as sewing machines?”

I’ll never live that sewing machine episode down.

I smiled back at him, though, because by now it was funny to me too. Maybe it had been funny even then. It had cost me nearly two weeks’ time and nearly a thousand dollars cash but a really good joke on yourself is worth at least that.

Bill cleared his throat again, but Merlene saved me. She said, “Oh, let him alone, Bill. He’s going, whatever we say, so why spoil the last evening?”

I walked across the room and patted her shoulder. “My angel,” I said. “Can we have a drink to that?”

For a moment she looked doubtful. I said patiently, “It’s all right, darling. I am not an alcoholic—at least not in the sense that I can’t do normal social drinking or even get pixilated once in a while without it ‘starting me off.’ Now in celebration of my imminent departure, may I mix us a round of martinis?”

She jumped up. “I’ll make them, Max.” She walked out of the room and her walk was a dance. Both Bill’s eyes and mine followed her.

“Good gal,” I told him.

“Max, why don’t you get married and settle down?”

“At my age? I’m too young to settle down.”

“Seriously.”

“I’m serious.”

Bill shook his head slowly. Well, that’s the way I felt about him and his way of life.

Merlene spared us pitying one another further by bringing in the drinks. We touched glasses.

“Luck to you, Max,” Merlene said. “Decided where you’re going?”

“San Francisco.”

“Rocket mech on Treasure Island again?”

“Probably, but not right away. I meant what I said about resting up a little first.”

“But why not stay here until you’re ready to go back to work?”

“Something happening there I want to look in on, maybe give a hand with. News item I heard on the viddy last night.”

Bill said, “Bet I know which item. That crazy dame who’s running for senator and wants to send a rocket to Jupiter. My God, Jupiter. What have Mars and Venus got us?”

My poor little brother, my poor brother who was rich in money and bereft of vision, my blind blind brother.

I said, “Listen, children, I’m going to catch the two A. M. jet plane. And it’s only eight o’clock now, so that’s six hours away. Here’s a suggestion. You two haven’t taken advantage of having an expert baby sitter since I’ve been here and this is your last chance. Why don’t you rev up the hellie and run into Seattle for an evening out. Night club or something, see some live entertainment. If you get back by one-thirty or so Bill can run me to the stratoport in plenty of time to make the plane.”

Merlene looked reproachful. “Your last evening here and you think we’d rather—”

“Whatever you’d rather,” I told her, “I’d rather you did. I’ve got some thinking to do and some planning. And some packing. Off with you.”

I talked them into it.

My suitcase by the door, ready. It wasn’t heavy; I travel lightly and live lightly. Physical possessions tie you down and God knows we’re tied down enough without them.

I went back upstairs to my bedroom, or to the room that had been my bedroom for the past three weeks and which was the guest room again now that all my things were out of it. This time I didn’t turn on the light. I tiptoed across the room quietly—as I had packed quietly, because it was right next to the room Billy and Easter were sleeping in—opened the window and stepped through it onto the railed upper porch.

It was a beautiful night. Warm and clear. Mount Ranier in the distance, the near distance.

Overhead and in the far distance the lights in the sky that are stars. The stars they tell us we can never reach because they are too far away. They lie; we’ll get there. If rockets won’t take us, something will.

There’s got to be an answer.

We got to the moon, didn’t we? And Mars and Venus—

Thank God I was in on that, back in the glorious sixties when man erupted suddenly into space, the first step, the first three steps toward the stars.

I was there, I was in on it. Spaceman First Class Max Andrews.

And now? What are we doing now to reach the stars?

The stars—listen, do you know what a star is?

Our sun is a star and all the stars in the sky are suns. We know now that most of them have planets revolving about them, as Earth and Mars and Venus and the other planets of the solar system revolve around our sun.

And there are a hell of a lot of stars.

That isn’t profanity; it’s understatement. There are about a thousand million stars in our own galaxy. A thousand million stars, most of them with planets. If they average only one planet apiece that’s a thousand million planets. If one out of a thousand of those planets happens to be Earth-type—one with a breathable atmosphere, about the same size and distance from its sun as Earth so its temperature and gravity would be similar—then there ought to be at least a million planets in our own galaxy which man can colonize and on which he can live a normal life, on which he can be fruitful and multiply.

A million worlds for us to reach and take and live on.

But that’s going to be only the start, the beginning. That’s only our own galaxy, as tiny in relation to the universe as our little solar system is to our galaxy.

There are a hell of a lot of galaxies. There are more galaxies of stars in the universe than there are stars in our own galaxy. At least a thousand million times a thousand million suns.

A million times a million planets, habitable by man. Do you know how that figures out? To twenty-five planets or so apiece for every member of the human race, every man, woman and child.

Since no one can populate a planet all by himself let’s say fifty planets per couple. Fifty planets, and if we hold the average population density down to three billion per planet, times fifty—we’ll have to get there first of course, but when we do it’s going to take a lot of multiplying to populate all those worlds. Well, the human race has always been good at that, hasn’t it?

Or maybe we’ll find some of them already populated. Well, that will be interesting too. Just what will they be populated with?

San Francisco at three-fifteen in the morning. The damn stratojet was late. They always are.

I bought a tabloid at the jetport on Angel Island and caught a helicab to Union Square, the. . .