The Last Starship From Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

I?”
    “Look, dad,” Haldane laid a casual arm across his father’s shoulder, “if you want me to go along as an interpreter, then say so. But I tell you now that understanding Fairweather is less a matter of knowledge than of intuition.”
    “Instruct me, expert!”
    Haldane went to the chamber-music recital that evening without much hope of seeing Helix, and he didn’t. From the primitive jam session he drove to a coffee house which poets frequented, the Mermaid Tavern.
    There were a few A-7 students present, and he fell in with them. His coat concealed his tunic, and in the dim glow of the table lamps they mistook him for one of them.
    One mentioned Browning, and he awed them by quoting at length from The Ring and the Book .
    With their hands moving to accent their words, twisting their torsos forward to listen, squirming upright or sideways in affirmation or rebuttal, they reminded him of silverfish slithering around in some damp, dark corner. Yet their enthusiasm for a remembered phrase, quoted at times in the language of the writer, struck him with an impact similar to that he remembered when he had sat with Helix at Point Sur.
    His disguise was ripped when one of them asked what he thought of the latest translation of Maria Rilke from the German.
    With a fluting intonation, he answered, “I adore her in German, but Maria, in English, is blah!”
    His questioner turned to a companion. “Did you hear the man, Philip? He adores her in German.”
    “What are you, fellow? A police pigeon?”
    “Maybe he’s a soc major out researching the peasantry.”
    Haldane dropped the fluting, “When you call me a sociologist, boy bard, smile!”
    “Move it, fellow, before we move it for you.”
    He could have taken any three of them at one time, but there were five of them. He moved it. He didn’t want a dean’s reprimand at this stage.
    Driving back to Berkeley, he was perplexed. In his two and a half months of searching for Helix, he had visited and revisited the places where she should have been. Many of the A-7 students he had seen several times, but there was no Helix. Something had gone wrong with the laws of probability.
    He did not go to the Fairweather lecture.
    On Wednesday, he was dining in the student union when he saw a notice in the school paper. A Professor Moran was giving a lecture on the Golden Gate campus Friday evening on eighteenth-century romantic poetry. When he saw the item, he couldn’t finish his meal, but got up and walked out. If Helix didn’t go to this lecture, she’d never go to another on this earth.
    On his way home he realized he had a weakness which could betray him—his nerves. He had geared himself to such a high pitch of expectancy that he might break.
    He could see himself meeting her. But instead of a look of pleased surprise spreading over his face, he fell to the floor and crawled toward her, clutching her ankles and moaning hysterically in his relief and joy.
    Regally she gazed down on the fallen lad in shock and disdain, kicked her ankles free, and walked over and away from him, forever.
    He smiled at his own imagery as he climbed the stairs, but an insight gave his thoughts a graver tone. His immersion into literature had given an emotional cast and color to his thoughts. Strangely, the world seemed more vivid.
    Haldane’s father was disappointed when Haldane told him that he could not go with him to the Greystone lecture. Seeing the disappointment on his father’s face, Haldane felt remorse.
    “I’m sorry, Dad, but I can’t bring myself to miss the lecture on the romantic period. It falls exactly into the time period I’ve chosen to demonstrate my mathematical analysis of literary styles. Anyway, the Fairweather lecture is too advanced for a sophomore. In my sixth year, I’ll be up to my ears in Fairweather Mechanics, and if you can pick up a transcript of the lecture for my reserve notes, I’d appreciate it. This poetry reading has a valid relevance to my present