'But it was inevitable! Did not the Forerunner predict in hisTime and the World Linethat such a planet would be found? I believe it was on page five seventy-three!'
Macneff smiled and said, 'I am glad that your scriptural lessons have left such an impression.'
How could they not? Hal thought. Besides, they were not the only impressions. Pornsen, my gapt, whipped me because I had not learned my lessons well enough. He was a good impresser, that Pornsen. Was? Is! As I grew older and was promoted, so was he, always where I was. He was my gapt in the creche. He was the dormitory gapt when I went to college and thought I was getting away from him. He is now my block gapt. He is the one responsible for my getting such low M.R.'s.
Swiftly came the revulsion, the protest. No, not he, for I, and I alone, am responsible for whatever happens to me. If I get a low M.R., I do so because I want it that way, or my dark self does. If I die, I die because I willed it so. So, forgive me, Sigmen, for the contrary-to-reality thoughts!
'Please pardon me again, Sandalphon,' said Hal. 'But I did the expedition find any records of the Forerunner having been on this planet? Perhaps, even, though this is too much to wish, find the Forerunner himself?'
'No,' said Macneff. Though that does not mean that there may not be such records there. The expedition was under orders to make a swift survey of conditions and then to return to Earth. I can't tell you now the distance in light-years or what star this was, though you can see it with the naked eye at night in this hemisphere. If you volunteer, you will be told where you're going after the ship leaves. And it leaves very soon.'
'You need a linguist?' said Hal.
'The ship is huge,' said Macneff, 'But the number of military men and specialists we are taking limits the linguists to one. We have considered several of your professionals because they werelamedhiansand above suspicion. Unfortunately . . .'
Hal waited. Macneff paced some more, frowning. Then, he said, 'Unfortunately, only onelamedhian joatexists, and he is too old for this expedition. Therefore–'
'A thousand pardons,' said Hal. 'But I have just thought of one thing. I am married.'
'No problem at all,' said Macneff. 'There will be no women aboard theGabriel.And, if a man is married, he will automatically be given a divorce.'
Hal gasped, and he said, 'A divorce?'
Macneff raised his hands apologetically and said, 'You are horrified, of course. But, from our reading ofThe Western Talmud,we Urielites believe that the Forerunner, knowing this situation would arise, made reference to and provision for divorce. It's inevitable in this case, for the couple will be separated for, at the least, eighty objective years. Naturally, he couched the provision in obscure language. In his great and glorious wisdom, he knew that our enemies the Israelites must not be able to read therein what we planned.'
'I volunteer,' said Hal. 'Tell me more, Sandalphon.'
Six months later, Hal Yarrow stood in the observation dome of theGabrieland watched the ball of Earth dwindle above him. It was night on this hemisphere, but the light blazed from the megalopolises of Australia, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, India, Siberia. Hal, the linguist, saw the glittering disks and necklaces in terms of the languages spoken therein. Australia, the Philippine Islands, Japan, and northern China were inhabited by those members of the Haijac Union that spoke American.
Southern China, all of southeast Asia, southern India, and Ceylon, these states of the Malay Federation spoke Bazaar.
Siberia spoke Icelandic.
Hal's mind turned the globe swiftly for him, and he visualized Africa, which used Swahili south of the Sahara Sea. All around the Mediterranean Sea, Asia Minor, northern India, and Tibet, Hebrew was the native tongue. In southern Europe, between the Israeli Republics and the Icelandic-speaking peoples of northern Europe, was a thin but long stretch of territory called March. This was no man's land, disputed by the Haijac Union and the Israeli Republics, a potential source of war for the last two hundred years. Neither nation would give up their claim on it, yet neither wished to make any move that might lead to a second Apocalyptic War. So, for all practical purposes, it was an independent nation and by now had its own government (unrecognized outside its own borders). Its citizens spoke all of the world's surviving tongues, plus a new one called Lingo, a pidgin whose vocabulary was derived from the other six and whose syntax was so simple it could be contained on half a sheet of paper.
Hal saw in his mind the rest of Earth: Iceland, Greenland, the Caribbean Islands, and the eastern half of South America. Here the peoples spoke the tongue of Iceland because that island had gotten the jump on the Hawaiian-Americans who were busy resettling North America and the western half of South America after the Apocalyptic War.
Then there was North America, where American was the native speech of all except the twenty descendants of French-Canadians living on the Hudson Bay Preserve.
Hal knew that when that side of Earth rotated into the night zone, Sigmen City would blaze out into space. And, somewhere in that enormous light, was his apartment. But Mary would soon no longer be living there, for she would be notified in a few days that her husband had died in an accident. She would weep in private, he was sure, for she loved him in her frigid way, though in public she would be dry-eyed. Her friends and professional associates would sympathize with her, not because she had lost a beloved husband, but because she had been married to a man who thought unrealistically. If Hal Yarrow had been killed in a crash, he must have wanted it that way. There was no such thing as an 'accident.' Somehow, all the other passengers (also supposed to have died in this web of elaborate frauds to cover up the disappearance of the personnel of theGabriel)had simultaneously 'agreed' to die. And, therefore, being in disgrace, they would not be cremated and their ashes flung to the winds in public ceremony. No, the fish could eat their bodies for all the Sturch cared.
Hal felt sorry for Mary; he had a time keeping the tears from welling to his own eyes as he stood in the ciowd in the observation dome.
Yet, he told himself, this was the best way. He and Mary would no longer have to tear and rend at each other; their mutual torture would be over. Mary was free to marry again, not knowing that the Sturch had secretly given her a divorce, thinking that death had dissolved her marriage. She would have a year in which to make up her mind, to choose a mate from a list selected by hergapt.