Doorways in the Sand Read Online Free PDF

me what it feels like when you reach the top."
    "An elation, I guess. A sense of accomplishment, sort of."
    "Up here the view is less obstructed. You can see farther, take in more of the features of the landscape. Is that it, I wonder? A better perspective?"
    "Part of it, maybe. But there is always one other thing I feel when I reach the top: I always want to go just a little bit higher, and I always feel that I almost can, that I am just about to."
    "Yes. That's true," he said.
    "Why do you ask?"
    "I don't know. To be reminded, perhaps. That boy in Cambridge would have said the same thing you did, but I had partly forgotten. It is not just the world that has changed."
    He took another drink.
    "I wonder," he said, "what it was really like? That first encounter-out there-with the aliens. Hard to believe that several years have passed since it happened. The governments obviously glossed up the story, so we will probably never know exactly what was said or done. A coincidental run-in, neither of us familiar with the system where we met. Exploring, that's all. It was doubtless less of a shock to them, being acquainted with so many other races across the galaxy. Still . . . I remember that unexpected return. Mission accomplished. A half century ahead of schedule. Accompanied by an Astabigan scouting vessel. If an object attains the speed of light it turns into a pumpkin. Everybody knew that. But the aliens had found a way of cheating space out of its pumpkins, and they brought our ship back through the tunnel they made under it. Or across the bridge over it. Or something like that. Lots of business for the math department. Strange feeling. Not at all the way I had thought it might be. Sort of like working your way up a steeple or a dome-really difficult going-and then, when you reach the point where you realize you've got it made, you look up and see that someone else is already there on top. So we'd run into a galactic civilization-a loose confederation of races that's been in existence for millennia. Maybe we were lucky. It could easily have taken a couple more centuries. Maybe not, though. My feelings were, and still are, mixed. How can you go a little bit higher after something that anticlimactic? They've given us the technical know-how to build pumpkin-proof ships of our own. They've also warned us off a lot of celestial real estate. They've granted us a place in their exchange program, where we're bound to make a poor showing. Changes will be coming faster and faster in the years ahead. The world may even begin to change at a noticeable rate. What then? Once that petty-pace quality is lost, everyone may wind up as bewildered as a drunken old nightclimber on a cathedral who has been vouchsafed a glimpse of the clicking gear teeth between himself here and the towers of Cambridge there, wherever. What then? See the mainspring and turn to pumpkins? Retire? Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak and Dubhe . . . They have been there. They know them. Perhaps, deep down inside, I wanted us to be alone in the cosmos-to claim all of that for ourselves. Or any aliens encountered, a little behind us in everything. Greedy, proud, selfish . . . True. Now, though, we're the provincials, God help us! Enough left to drink to our health. Good! Here's to it! I spit into the face of Time that has transfigured me!"
    Offhand, I could think of nothing to say, so I said nothing. Part of me wanted to agree with him, but only part. For that matter, part of me sort of wished he had not finished off the brandy.
    After a time he said, "I don't think I'll be doing any more climbing tonight," and I reckoned that a good idea. I had decided against further altitude myself, and, wheeling, we narrowed our gyre, down and around and down, and I saw the good man home.
    Bits and pieces. Pieces-
    I caught the tag end of the late late news before turning in. A fog-dispelling item involved a Paul Byler, Professor of Geology, set upon by vandals in Central Park