Why?

by Robert Silverberg

And we left Capella XXII, after a six-month stay, and hopskipped across the galaxy to Dschubba, in the forehead of the Scorpion. And after the eight worlds of Dschubba had been seen and digested and recorded and classified, and after we had programmed all our material for transmission back to Earth, we moved on again, Brock and I.

We zeroed into warp and doublesqueaked into the star Pavo, which from Earth is seen to be the brightest star of the Peacock. And Pavo proved to be planetless, save for one ball of mud and methane a billion miles out; we chalked the mission off as unpromising, and moved on once again.

Brock was the coordinator; I, the fine-tooth man. He saw in patterns; I, in particulars. We had been teamed for eleven years. We had visited seventy-eight stars and one hundred sixty-three planets. The end was not quite in sight.

We hung in the greyness of warp, suspended neither in space nor in not-space, hovering in an interstice. Brock said, “I vote for Markab.”

“Alpha Pegasi? No. I vote for Etamin.”

But Gamma Draconis held little magic for him. He rubbed his angular hands through his tight-cropped hair and said, “The Wheel, then.”

I nodded. “The Wheel.”

The Wheel was our guide: not really a wheel so much as a map of the heavens in three dimensions, a lens of the galaxy, sprinkled brightly with stars. I pulled a switch; a beam of light lanced down from the ship’s wall, needle-thin, playing against the Wheel. Brock seized the handle and imparted axial spin to the Wheel. Over and over for three, four, five rotations; then, stop. The light-beam stung Alphecca.

“Alphecca it will be,” Brock said.

“Yes. Alphecca.” I noted it in the log, and began setting up the coordinates on the drive. Brock was frowning uneasily.

“This failure to agree,” he said. “This inability to decide on a matter so simple as our next destination—”

“Yes. Elucidate. Expound. Exegetize. What pattern do you see in that?”

Scowling he said, “Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is unhealthy. Conflict is valuable, but not for its own sake. It worries me.”

“Perhaps we’ve been in space too long. Perhaps we should resign our commissions, leave the Exploratory Corps, return to Earth and settle there.”

His face drained of blood. “No,” he said. “No. No.”

We emerged from warp within humming-distance of Alphecca, a bright star orbited by four worlds. Brock was playing calculus at the time; driblets of sweat glossed his face at each integration. I peered through the thick quartz of the observation panel and counted planets.

“Four worlds,” I said. “One, two, three, and four.”

I looked at him. His unfleshy face was tight with pain. After nearly a minute he said, “Pick one.”

“Me?”

“Pick one!”

“Alphecca II.”

“All right. We’ll land there. I won’t contest the point, Hammond. I want to land on Alphecca II.” He grinned at me—a bright-eyed wild grin that I found unpleasant. But I saw what he was doing. He was easing a stress-pattern between us, eliminating a source of conflict before the chafing friction exploded. When two men live in a spaceship eleven years, such things are necessary.

Calmly and untensely I took a reading on Alphecca II. I sighted us in and actuated the computer. This was the way a landing was effected; this was the way Brock and I had effected one hundred sixty-three landings. The ion-drive exploded into life.

We dropped “downward”. Alphecca II rose to meet us as our slim pale-green needle of a ship dived tail-first towards the world below.

The landing was routine. I sketched out a big 164 on my chart, and we donned spacesuits to make our preliminary explorations. Brock paused a moment at the airlock, smoothing the purple cloth of his suit, adjusting his air-intake, tightening his belt cincture. The corners of his mouth twitched nervously. Within the head-globe he looked frightened, and very tired.

I said, “You’re not well. Maybe we should postpone our first look-see.”

“Maybe we should go back to Earth, Hammond. And live in a beehive and breathe filthy grey soup.” His voice was edged with bitter reproach. “Let’s go outside,” he said. He turned away, face shadowed morosely, and touched the stud that peeled back the airlock hatch.

I followed him into the lock and down the elevator. He was silent, stiff, reserved. I wished I had his talent for glimpsing patterns: this mood of his had probably been a long time building.

But I saw no cause for it. After eleven years, I thought, I should know him almost as well as I do myself. Or better. But no easy answers came, and I followed him out onto the exit stage and dropped gently down.

Landing One Six Four was entering the exploratory stage.

The ground spread out far to the horizon, a dull orange in color, rough in texture, pebbly, thick of consistency. We saw a few trees, bare-trunked, bluish. Green vines swarmed over the ground, twisted and gnarled.

Otherwise, nothing.

“Another uninhabited planet,” I said. “That makes one hundred eight out of the hundred sixty-four.”

“Don’t be premature. You can’t judge a world by a few acres. Land at a pole; extrapolate utter barrenness. It’s not a valid pattern. Not enough evidence.”

I cut him short. “Here’s one time when I perceive a pattern. I perceive that this world’s uninhabited. It’s too damned quiet.”

Chuckling, Brock said, “I incline to agree. But remember Adhara XI.”

I remembered Adhara XI: the small, sandy world far from its primary, which seemed nothing but endless yellow sand dunes, rolling westward round and round the planet. We had joked about the desert-world, dry and parched, inhabited only by the restless dunes. But after the report was written, after our data were codified and flung through subspace towards Earth, we found the oasis on the eastern continent, the tiny garden of green things and sweet air that so sharply was unlike the rest of Adhara XI. I remembered sleek scaly creatures slithering through the crystal lake, and an indolent old worm sleeping beneath a heavy-fruited tree.

“Adhara XI is probably swarming with Earth tourists,” I said. “Now that our amended report is public knowledge. I often think we should have concealed the oasis from Earth, and. returned there ourselves when we grew tired of exploring the galaxy.”

Brock’s head snapped up sharply. He ripped a sprouting tip from a leathery vine and said, “When we grow tired? Hammond, aren’t you tired already? Eleven years, a hundred sixty-four worlds?”

Now I saw the pattern taking fairly clear shape. I shook my head, throttling the conversation. “Let’s get down the data, Brock. We can talk later.”

We proceeded with the measurements of our particular sector of Alphecca II. We nailed down the dry vital statistics, bracketing them off so Earth could enter the neat figures in its giant catalogue of explored worlds.

GRAVITY—1.02 E.

ATMOSPHERIC CONSTITUTION—ammonia/carbon dioxide

Type ab7, unbreathable

ESTIMATED PLANETARY DIAMETER—.87 E.

INTELLIGENT LIFE—none

We filled out the standard tests, took the standard soil samples. Exploration had become a smooth mechanical routine.

Our first tour lasted three hours. We wandered over the slowly rising hills, with the spaceship always at our backs, and Alphecca high behind us. The dry soil crunched unpleasantly beneath our heavy boots.

Conversation was at a minimum. Brock and I rarely spoke when it was not absolutely necessary—and when we did speak, it was to let a tight, tense remark escape confinement, not to communicate anything. We shared too many silent memories. Eleven years and one hundred sixty-four planets. All Brock had to do was say “Fomalhaut”, or I “Theta Eridani”, and a train of associations and memories was set off in whose depths we could browse silently for hours and hours.

Alphecca II did not promise to be as memorable as those worlds. There would be nothing here to match the fantastic moonrise of Fomalhaut VI, the five hundred mirror-bright moons in stately procession through the sky, each glinting in a different hue. That moonrise had overwhelmed us four years ago, and remained yet bright. Alphecca II, dead world that it was, or rather world not yet alive, would leave no marks on our memories.

But bitterness was rising in Brock. I saw the pattern forming; I saw the question bubbling up through the layers of his mind, ready to be asked.

And on the fourth day, he let it be asked. After four days on Alphecca II, four days of staring at the grotesque twisted green shapes of the angular sprawling vines, four days of watching the lethargic fission of the pond protozoa who seemed to be the world’s only animal life, Brock suddenly looked up at me.

He asked the shattering question that should never be asked.

“Why?” he said.

Eleven years and a hundred sixty-four worlds earlier, the seeds of that unanswered question had been sown. I was fresh out of the Academy, twenty-three, a tall, sharp-nosed boy with what some said was an irritatingly precise way of looking at things.

I should say that I bitterly resented being told I was coldly precise. People accused me of Teutonic heaviness. A girl I once had known said that to me, after a notably unsuccessful romance had come trailing to a halt. I recall turning to her, glaring at the light dusting of freckles across her nose, and telling her, “I have no Teutonic blood whatsoever. If you’ll take the trouble to think of the probable Scandinavian derivation of my name—”

She slapped me.

Shortly after that, I met Brock—Brock, who at twenty-four was already the Brock I would know at thirty-five, harsh of face and voice, dark of complexion, with an expression of nervous wariness registering in his blue-black eyes always and ever. Brock never accused me of Teutonicism; he laughed when I cited some minor detail from memory, but the laugh was one of respect.

We were both Academy graduates; we both were restless. It showed in Brock’s face, and I don’t doubt it showed in mine. Earth was small and dirty and crowded, and each night the stars, those bright enough to glint through the haze and brightness of the cities, seemed to mock at us.

Brock and I gravitated naturally together. We shared a room in Appalachia North, we shared a library planchet, we shared reading tapes and music-discs and occasionally lovers. And eight weeks after my twenty-third birthday, seven weeks before Brock’s twenty-fourth, we hailed a cab and invested our last four coins in a trip downtown to the Administration of External Exploration.

There, we spoke to a bland-faced, smiling man with one leg prosthetic—he boasted of it—and his left hand a waxy synthetic one. “I got that way on Sirius VI,” he told us. “But I’m an exception. Most of the exploration teams keep going for years and years, and nothing ever happens to them. McKees and Haugmuth have been out twenty-three years now. That’s the record. We hear from them, every few months or so. They keep on going, farther and farther out.”

Brock nodded. “Good. Give us the forms.”

He signed first. I added my name below, finishing with a flourish. I stacked the triplicate forms neatly together and shoved them back at the half-synthetic recruiter.

“Excellent. Excellent. Welcome to the Corps.”

He shook our hands, giving the hairy-knuckled right hand to Brock, the waxy left to me. I gripped it tightly, wondering if he could feel my grip.

Three days later we were in space, bound outward. In all the time since the original idea had sprung up unvoiced between us, neither Brock nor myself had paused to ask the damnable question.

Why?

We had joined the Corps. We had renounced Earth. Motive, unstated. Or unknown. We let the matter lie dormant between us for eleven years, through a procession of strange and then less strange worlds.

Until Brock’s agony broke forth to the surface. He destroyed eleven years of numb peace with one half-whispered syllable, there in the ship’s lab our fourth morning on Alphecca II.

I looked at him for perhaps thirty seconds. Moistening my lips, I said, “What do you mean, Brock?”

“You know what I mean.” The flat declarative tone was one of simple truth. “The one thing we haven’t been asking ourselves all these years, because we knew we didn’t have an answer for it and we like to have answers for things. Why are we here, on Alphecca II—with a hundred sixty-three visited worlds behind us?”

I shrugged. “You didn’t have to start this, Brock.” Outside the sun was climbing towards noon height, but I felt cold and dry, as if the ammonia atmosphere were seeping into the ship. It wasn’t.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to start this. I could have let it fester for another eleven years. But it came popping out, and I want to settle it. We left Earth because we didn’t like it there. Agreed?”

I nodded.

“But that’s not why enough,” he persisted. “Why do we explore? Why do we keep running from planet to planet, from one crazy airless ball to the next, out here where there are no people and no cities? Green crabs on Rigel V, sand-fish on Caph. Dammit, Hammond, what are we looking for?”

Very calmly I said, “Ourselves, maybe?”

His face crinkled scornfully. “Foggy-eyed and imprecise, and you know it. We’re not looking for ourselves out here. We’re trying to lose ourselves. Eh?”

“No!”

“Admit it!”

I stared through the quartz window at the stiff, almost wooden vines that covered the pebbly ground. They seemed to be moving faintly, to be stretching their rigid bodies in a contraction of some sort. In a dull, tired voice, Brock said, “We left Earth because we couldn’t cope with it. It was too crowded and too dirty for sensitive shrinking souls like us. We had the choice of withdrawing into shells and huddling there for eighty or ninety years, or else pulling up and leaving for space. We left. There’s no society out here, just each other.”

“We’ve adjusted to each other,” I pointed out.

“So? Does that mean we could fit into Earth society? Would you want to go back? Remember the team—McKees and Haugmuth, is it?—who spent thirty-three years in space and came back. They were catatonic eight minutes after landing, the report said.”

“Let me give you a simpler why,” I ventured. “Why did you start griping all of a sudden? Why couldn’t you hold it in?”

“That’s not a simpler why. It’s part of the same one. I came to an answer, and I didn’t like it. I got the answer that we were out here because we couldn’t make the grade on Earth.”

“No!”

He smiled apologetically. “No? All right, then. Give me another answer. I want an answer, Hammond. I need one, now.”

I pointed to the synthesizer. “Why don’t you have a drink instead?”

“That comes later,” he said sombrely. “After I’ve given up trying to find out.”

The stippling of fine details was becoming a sharp-focus picture. Brock—self-reliant Brock, self-contained, self-sufficient—had come to the end of his self-sufficiency. He had looked too deeply beneath the surface.

“At the age of eight,” I began, “I asked my father what was outside the universe. That is, defining the universe as That Which Contains Everything, could there possibly be something or someplace outside its bounds? He looked at me for a minute or two, then laughed and told me not to worry about it. But I did worry about it. I stayed up half the night worrying about it, and my head hurt by morning. I never found out what was outside the universe.”

“The universe is infinite,” said Brock moodily. “Recurving in on itself, topologically—”

“Maybe. But I worried over it. I worried over First Cause. I worried all through my adolescence. Then I stopped worrying.”

He smiled acidly. “You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance, and decided not to pull loose because it was too painful. Am I right, Hammond?”

“No. I joined the Exploratory Corps.”

I dreamed, that night, as I swung in my hammock. It was a vivid and unpleasant dream, which stayed with me well into the following morning as a sort of misshapen reality that had attached itself to me in the night.

I had been a long time falling asleep. Brock had brooded most of the day, and a long hike over the bleak tundra had done little to improve his mood. Towards nightfall he dialed a few drinks, inserted a disc of Sibelius in his ear, and sat staring glumly at the darkening sky outside the ship. Alphecca II was moonless. The night was the black of space, but the atmosphere blurred the neighboring stars.

I remember drifting off into a semisleep: a half-somnolence in which I was aware of Brock’s harsh breathing to my left, but yet in which I had no volition, no control over my limbs. And after that state came sleep, and with it dreams.

The dream must have grown from Brock’s bitter remark of earlier: You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance.

I accepted the statement literally. Suddenly I was a vegetable, possessed of all my former faculties, but rooted in the soil.

Rooted.

Straining for freedom, straining to break away, caught eternally by my legs, thinking, thinking…

Never to move, except for a certain thrashing of the upper limbs.

Rooted.

I writhed, longed to get as far as the rocky hill beyond, only as far as the next yard, the next inch. But I had lost all motility. It was as if my legs were grasped in a mighty trap, and, without pain, without torment, I was bound to the earth.

I woke, finally, damp with perspiration. In his hammock, Brock slept, seemingly peacefully. I considered waking him and telling him of the nightmare, but decided against it. I tried to return to sleep.

At length, I slept.

Dreamlessly.

The preset alarm throbbed at 0700; dawn had preceded us by nearly an hour.

Brock was up first; I sensed him moving about even as I stirred towards wakefulness. Still caught up in the strange unreal reality of my nightmare, I wondered on a conscious level if today would be like yesterday—if Brock, obsessed by his sudden thirst for an answer, would continue to brood and sulk.

I hoped not. It would mean the end of our team if Brock cracked up; after eleven years, I was not anxious for a new partner.

“Hammond? You up yet?”

His voice had lost the edgy quality of yesterday, but there was something new and subliminally frightening in it.

Yawning, I said, “Just about. Dial breakfast for me, will you?”

“I did already. But get out of the sack and come look at this.”

I lurched from the hammock, shook my head to clear it, and started forward.

“Where are you?”

“Second level,” he said. “At the window. Come take a look.”

I climbed the spiral catwalk to the viewing-station; Brock stood with his back towards me, looking out. As I drew near I said, “I had the strangest dream last night—”

“The hell with that. Look.”

At first I didn’t notice anything strange. The bright-colored landscape looked unchanged, the pebbly orange soil, the dark blue trees, the tangle of green vines, the murk of the morning atmosphere. But then I saw I had been looking too far from home.

Writhing up the side of the window, just barely visible to the right, was a gnarled knobby green rope. Rope? No. It was one of the vines.

“They’re all over the ship,” Brock said. “I’ve checked all the ports. During the night the damned things must have come crawling up the side of the ship like so many snakes and wrapped themselves around us. I guess they figure we’re here to stay, and they can use us as bracing-posts the way they do those trees.”

I stared with mixed repugnance and fascination at the hard bark of the vine, at the tiny suckers that held it fast to the smooth skin of our ship.

“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s sort of an attack by extra-terrestrial monsters, isn’t it?”

We suited up and went outside to have a look at the “attackers”. At a distance of a hundred yards, the ship looked weirdly bemired. Its graceful lines were broken by the winding fingers of the vine, spiraling up its sleek sides from a thick parent stem on the ground. Other shoots of the vine sprawled near us, clutching futilely at us as we moved among them.

I was reminded of my dream. Somewhat hesitantly I told Brock about it.

Why?

He laughed. “Rooted, eh? You were dreaming that while those vines were busy wrapping themselves around the ship. Significant?”

“Perhaps.” I eyed the tough vines speculatively. “Maybe we’d better move the ship. If much more of that stuff gets around it, we may not be able to blast off at all.”

Brock knelt and flexed a shoot of vine. “The ship could be completely cocooned in this stuff and we’d still be able to take oft,” he said. “A spacedrive wields a devil of a lot of thrust. We’ll manage.”

And whick!

A tapering finger of the vine arched suddenly and whipped around Brock’s middle. Whick! Whick!

Like animated rope, like a bark-covered serpent, it curled about him. I drew back, staring. He seemed half amused, half perplexed.

“The thing’s got pull, all right,” he said. He was smiling lopsidedly, annoyed at having let so simple a thing as a vine interfere with his freedom of motion. But then he winced in obvious pain.

“—Tightening,” he gasped.

The vine contracted muscularly; it skittered two or three feet towards the tree from which its parent stock sprang, and Brock was jerked suddenly off balance. As the corded arm of the vine yanked him backward he began to topple, poising for what seemed like seconds on his left foot, right jutting awkwardly in the air, arms clawing for balance.

Then he fell.

I was at his side in a moment, carefully avoiding the innocent looking vine-tips to right and left. I planted my foot on the trailing vine that held Brock. I levered downward and grabbed the tip where it bound his waist. I pulled; Brock pushed.

The vine yielded.

“It’s giving,” he grunted. “A little more.”

“Maybe I’d better go back for the blaster,” I said.

“No. No telling what this thing may do while you’re gone. Cut me in two, maybe. Pull!”

I pulled. The vine struggled against our combined strength, writhed, twisted. But gradually we prevailed. It curled upward, loosened, went limp. Finally it drooped away, leaving Brock in liberty.

He got up slowly, rubbing his waist.

“Hurt?”

“Just the surprise,” he said. “Tropistic reaction on the plant’s part; I must have triggered some hormone chain to make it do that.” He eyed the now quiescent vine with respect.

“It’s not the first time we’ve been attacked,” I said. “Alpheraz III-—”

“Yes.”

I hadn’t even needed to mention it. Alpheraz III had been a hellish jungle planet; the image in his mind, as it was in mine, was undoubtedly that of a tawny beast the size of a goat held in the inexorable grip of some stocky-trunked plant, rising in the air, vanishing into a waiting mouth of the carnivorous tree—

—and moments later a second tendril dragging me aloft, and only a hasty blaster-shot by Brock keeping me from being a plant’s dinner.

We returned to the ship, entering the hatch a few feet from one of the vines that now encrusted it. Brock unsuited; the vine had left a red, raw line about his waist.

“The plant tried,” I said.

“To kill me?”

“No. To move on. To get going. To see what was behind the next hill.”

He frowned and said, “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not so sure, yet. I’m not good at seeing patterns. But it’s taking shape. I’m getting it now, Brock. I’m getting it all. I’m getting your answer!”

He massaged his stomach. “Go ahead,” he said. “Think it out loud.”

“I’m putting it together out of my dream and out of the things you said and out of the vines down there.” I walked slowly about the cabin. “Those plants—they’re stuck there, aren’t they? They grow in a certain place and that’s where they remain. Maybe they wiggle a little, and maybe they writhe, but that’s the size of it.”

“They can grow long.”

“Sure. But not infinitely long. They can’t grow long enough to reach another planet. They’re rooted, Brock. Their condition is permanently fixed. Brock, suppose those plants had brains?”

“I don’t think this has anything to do with—”

“It does,” I said. “Just assume those plants were intelligent. They want to go. They’re stuck. So one of them lashes out in fury at you. Jealous fury.”

He nodded, seeing it clearly now. “Sure. We don’t have roots. We can go places. We can visit a hundred sixty-four worlds and walk all over them.”

“That’s your answer, Brock. There’s the why you were looking for.” I took a deep breath. “You know why we go out to explore? Not because we’re running away. Not because there’s some inner compulsion driving us to coast from planet to planet. Uh-uh. It’s because we can do it. That’s all the why you need. We explore because it’s possible for us to explore.”

Some of the harshness faded from his face. “We’re special,” he said. “We can move. It’s the privilege of humanity. The thing that makes us us.”

I didn’t need to say any more. After eleven years, we don’t need to vocalize every thought. But we had it, now: the special uniqueness that those clutching vines down there envied so much. Motility.

We left Alphecca II finally, and moved on. We did the other worlds of the system and headed outward, far out this time, as much of a hop as we could make. And we moved on from there to the next sun, and from there to the next, and onward.

We took a souvenir with us from Alphecca II though. When we blasted off, the vine that had wrapped itself round the ship gripped us so tightly that it wasn’t shaken loose by the impact of blastoff. It remained hugging us as we thrust into space, dangling, roots and all. We finally got tired of looking at it, and Brock went out in a spacesuit to chop it away from the ship. He gave a push, imparted velocity to it, and the vine went drifting off sunward.

If had achieved its goal: it had left its home world. But it had died in the attempt. And that was the difference, we thought, all the difference in the universe, as we headed outward and outward, across the boundless gulfs to the next world we would visit.

Content

Why?
by Robert Silverberg