Out There

Norman Spinrad

Answers don’t always have the form the questioner might like....

* * * *

After the successful launch of the biosphere probe, the Project Director, the Old Astronaut, and the Star Science Fiction Writer repaired to the nearest saloon, the Director to celebrate, the Astronaut to grouse, the Writer to reflect upon life, the universe, and everything, and after sufficient lubrication, all three missions seemed all too compatible.

“A few centuries to get there, and what, a few decades to get anything back? Everyone who worked on the project will be long dead by then, and no one’s ever going to be able to set foot there,” groused the Astronaut, “so what’s the point?”

“The point is astronomy,” the Project Director told him, “and you flyboys never seemed to get it. A thousand or so solar systems currently detected, a hundred or so extrasolar biospheres, and if the ratio holds, that means millions of them in the galaxy.”

“So what?” groused the Astronaut. “Not a peep from any of them. Assuming there’s anything anywhere out there to do the peeping.”

“Hence the probe program.”

“So what? One of them goes into orbit around a civilized planet hundreds of years from now, sends back the news, and no one from here is going to be able to get there and vice versa, unless the laws of physics get repealed, isn’t that right, Mr. Sci-Fi Guy? Hyperspace drives, wormhole tunnels, all your faster-than-light stuff is really out there with the flying dragons and unicorns, now isn’t it?”

“Uh . . . generation starships—” “A thousand years in tin-can submarines? Been, there, done that. I rode one to Mars for a lousy year, and believe me, lousy it was. You or anyone else gonna condemn your umpteenth-generation descendants to that? You think they’d stay with the program that did it to them if they ever got anywhere? Would you?”

“Dispersion Theory,” muttered the Program Director.

No one had to explain that to anyone now. Even the supermarket tabloids had picked it up under headlines like VELIKOVSKI WAS RIGHT! Or THE COSMIC POOL TABLE or CREATIONISM PROVEN!

The galaxy was full of solar systems, but upon exploration and reflection, there was no reason for any of them to necessarily be stable. Gas giants sucked into tight spiraling orbits around their stars and evaporating. Planetoids, asteroids, comets, rocks, and pebbles bashing into each other to accrete into planets bashing into each other, knocking themselves out into the far reaches of interstellar space, and maybe one would-be solar system out of ten happening by chance upon the long-term stability like ours necessary for biospheres to have a chance to evolve, unless you believed that God was holding the pool-cue.

That was the bad news. The good news, at least to the science fiction writers who were making good use of it, was that it meant that the space between the stars was no empty void. Full planets ejected from solar systems, failed and otherwise, asteroids and smaller debris left over from their formation, Oort Clouds and Kuiper Belts intersecting and interweaving out there.

“It took tens of thousands of years and hundreds of generations for humans to disperse over this planet, by foot, by raft, by horse,” said the Project Director, “and no one who started any leg of the journey ever lived to see the end of it. Or knew what it would be.”

“So why did they—”

“One of the questions most of us sci-fi guys get asked is what does it feel like to write about all those wondrous futures you know you’ll never live to see—”

“I love that stuff myself,” said the Project Director. “I think it’s why I’m an astronomer. Same thing, now, isn’t it?”

“If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have readers, and you wouldn’t even have the crummy appropriations you guys bitch about,” the Science Fiction Writer told him.

“So why do you write it and why do I read it and why have I dedicated my short life to beginning a collective search for knowledge I know I’ll never live to see?”

“Why did your ancient humans embark on the journeys whose ends they could never hope to see? Same answer.”

“Which is?” asked the Astronaut, seriously enough to order up another round.

“Because there isn’t any. I once spoke on New Caledonia at the western end of the great millennial spread of the Polynesians eastward across the vast and supposedly empty Pacific, and I was bombing out with the locals until it hit me. The wine-dark sea speckled with islands that had never seen the foot of man, the wine-dark sea of galactic space where, uh, no man has gone before—”

“The same thing!” the Astronaut and the Project Director exclaimed simultaneously.

The Science Fiction Writer nodded. “Canoes spreading the species to those isolated islands over the great ocean of water, generation upon generation, until they reached and created the beach at Waikiki. Humans oozing out light-year by light-year, generation by generation, planetoid by planetoid, until—”

“Until what?”

“There is no final what,” the Science Fiction Writer said. “That’s the nature of my game. If the Americas hadn’t been in the way, the Polynesians would have kept on going. The journey goes ever on, as it damned well better, or in the end neither will we.”

“That’s the nature of the human game, now isn’t it?” said the Astronaut, none too happy about it.

The Science Fiction Writer nodded. “Those are the cards we’ve been dealt, to see futures out there we’ll never live long enough to reach ourselves. A royal flush, they ain’t, but all we can do is play them.”

“Like it or not,” the Astronaut groused, “I guess we’ve gotta drink to that.”

And he ordered yet another round on his own tab, and they did.