Part 1

Earth wasn't good enough once a man had a taste of deep space--and met his Ideal. Al Hall wanted to know why, so he volunteered for his--

TICKET to the STARS

By Raymond E. Banks

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1954 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I was sitting in the dining-bar of the Thousand Lights, in New York, watching Kelly as the woman walked into the bar. There was a ripple, an undercurrent of sensation. Not because of the way she looked, not because of her dress, but because she was an Ideal. People hate Ideals. The better-looking they are the more they are hated, and this one was right on top.

I sat at a table about twelve feet from Kelly. He sat at the bar and I could see his face in the mirror. His face scowled in an expression of hate. I saw him pick up his cigarettes and make a ball of the empty package with his fist. He tried to look away; his eyes crossed mine and he didn't even recognize me.

The Ideal came up to him and slipped on the stool beside him with some word of greeting. She was human all right. Too human. She was dressed in white. Most of them dress in white. There was some gold sprinkled on her costume. It was very expensive, made of Scolarian cloth, flowing around her body. Kelly bit his lip and pulled away from the touch of her arm. It was a well-rounded arm, white and perfect in the soft lights of the bar. The face was pleasant with a youthful glow. Her red hair was soft enough to halo, strong enough to fall a bit this way and that as she turned. She had a small nose, blue Irish eyes and a smattering of freckles.

She looked a little bit like Kelly.

She went on talking. When she smiled her white teeth flashed and sparkled. Nobody from earth quite had teeth like that.

The bartender set a drink before Kelly, took the Ideal's order. She made a few comments to Kelly and he dipped his face despairingly in his arms. The rest of the people in the bar went unconcernedly about their business.

"God damn it! Leave me alone!"

Kelly burst out just as the bartender served the girl's drink. Kelly took his own drink and threw it in the pretty Irish face of the redhead, whipped away from the stool and was gone. I caught a glimpse of his face as he went past and it was frightening. It was the face of a man who can never get drunk again, who can never really sleep again. You took one look at him and knew he'd been in deep space on the Stardust Overdrive, but it seemed queer to see the look on a familiar face.

My own insides felt cold. First Kelly made the moon. Then I did. Then I made Mars. Then he did. Then he went on the Stardust Overdrive ... and came back with his Ideal....

* * * * *

Kelly's redhead wiped the drink from her face, flushing a little. A bouncer came up and told her to leave. She gave him the look they all have. Of patience, of humor, of some exasperation. Some of her delectable red hair was soaked with the drink but she pushed it back from her eyes and got up. She gave a wistful glance at her untouched drink and started to go. She went past my table with a flash of smooth legs. There was the faint odor of deep-space perfume. The crowd parted in distaste from her, but a couple of near-spacemen made some grinning cracks and whistled.

I followed her out.

She stood on the curbing, white and gracious, fumbling absently with her coat as I came up. She was watching the parking lot. Her eyes barely grazed me as I helped her with the coat. It was snowing but her bare arms were warm.

"Is Kelly going back?"

She smiled her thanks for the help. "Maybe."

"Would he go back if anything happened to you?"

"I don't know."

Kelly was coming now. His aircar swooped up to the curb and he opened the door for her. She got in, sliding beside him with an amused but determined look.

I pulled out my gun and leaned forward. I put the muzzle against the curving throat of the girl.

"Jim," I said, "I'll do it for you if you want."

There was a flash of fright in her face and she put her hand up to her throat, but only to ease the pressure of the gun that dug into the white flesh.

Jim stared at the girl and me and the gun.

"No, Al."

"It's no crime," I said. "They'd never convict me for killing an Ideal. Jim, this is your last chance to beat the Stardust Overdrive."

"Thanks, Al," said Kelly. "Maybe I'll be sending for you someday to help."

"Out there," I said.

"Out there," he said bitterly. "I'm leaving tomorrow."

The girl's small hands moved up and with amazing strength pushed my gun away from her throat. Her look was one of triumph, even and cool, not gloating. Almost matter-of-fact.

"Remind me to scare the hell out of you some time," she said. "We're human too, you know."

I looked down at the sitting sweep of the white-clad thighs and grunted. "Maybe."

Then I looked at Jim and saw it was check-out time. For a moment his face had the old look of swagger. Just for a second he was the old Jim.

"Keep 'em flying, boy," he said.

"Same to you, Jim."

"Maybe I'll see you out there some time, Al."

"Maybe you will, Jim," I said.

"Goodbye, Albert Hall," said the girl. The aircar zoomed away from me.

* * * * *

I put my gun away angrily. Then I caught an aircar back to the office. On the way I did a lot of thinking. And what I thought made me even angrier. I thought about Kelly--and all the other men like him who signed on the Stardust Overdrive. They were good men, happy men--even married, some of them. But when they came back from deep space they were changed. For they always brought back an Ideal--a beautiful woman on the surface, and seemingly one who was a reflection of their every wish or desire--an Ideal. Human? As far as Earth science could determine. But science and deep space were light years apart and perhaps would always be that way for the men who went out there never talked about it much when they came back. Why? _Why!_

What made them hate it--like Kelly? And what made them _have_ to return? What turned a happy man into a miserable prisoner? _Why didn't Kelly quit the Stardust Overdrive?_

When I got to the office I had made up my mind. This had been gnawing at me for a long time and it had to be settled. I had to know....

I filled out my request for transfer from planetary runs to deep space. Then I went to the tele and called my wife.

"Honey, you won't like what I've just done," I told her. I could see her face take on a sudden chilled look. As if she knew....

"What is it, Al?" There was tenseness in her voice and I couldn't blame her a bit.

"The Stardust Overdrive." I said it quickly and then felt like a heel. But it was already too late.

"Al--no--you couldn't--"

"I signed the papers a few minutes ago. Honey, you've got to understand--I have to ... I saw Kelly a little while ago. He's changed, and I've got to know why. He was my best friend...."

Her face grew hard then. "Kelly! What about me? Don't I count? I'm your wife--remember? Or would you rather find someone to take my place--an Ideal!"

"You don't understand," I tried to tell her, but knew it was useless. She had never been in space, not even to Luna. A spaceman gets the challenge in his blood, he's got to see more, he's got to know what's beyond the solar system. Out where the Ideals come from. Sooner or later he's got to _know_.

Her face sobered suddenly and there was a desperateness in her eyes. "Al, did Kelly tell you?"

I looked into the tele at her. "Tell me what?"

Her lips were tight and white. "Kelly's wife committed suicide today. She couldn't take it any longer. It was her or--the Ideal...."

I felt the shock of her words and knew what she was trying to say. _It could happen to us!_

I shook my head. "I'm sorry to hear that." And then I felt a bitter anger. "She didn't give him a chance to find himself. Now he'll never quit--"

"Chance! What kind of a chance does any woman have against an Ideal? You're blaming _her_?"

This wasn't getting us anywhere and we both knew it. We stared at each other in the tele for a long silent minute. Then she said, "This will be the end for us, Al. Remember that before it's too late...."

I saw again the haunted look on Kelly's face. The almost desperate pleading there of something I could never understand unless--

"I'm going." I said before I could let her change my mind.

"Then there's nothing more to say. Goodbye, Al."

And she switched off the set on me. Her face was gone, and maybe our life together too. Just like that.

* * * * *

There was a three-day orientation period before we took off. Ships on the Stardust Overdrive were operated by two-man teams and I was assigned to a man named Radwick, an older man, who had been on the Drive before. He was as crazy as a carnival mirror. He was a semanticist and he carried around a small bag full of wooden blocks. He would set these on a table and shift them around into various positions. "I am thinking on the non-verbal level," he told me. "I'm expressing ideas in things."

"Maybe we'd better go over the Company manual. I got a lot to learn in only three days."

He had white hair and a thin face and a patient smile. "Nonsense. You can't learn that way. You learn by doing. When we get into space, I'll teach you all you need to know about the Drive."

I put in a complaint to the Company. "Listen," I told the supervisor. "I don't like the idea of teaming up with a grown-up man who plays with blocks. This boy has really lost his lid."

The supervisor gave me the stern Company treatment. "Don't you know that we can't get one man in a hundred for the Drive?" he said. "We can't afford to pick and choose. You volunteered for Stardust and you'll have to abide by our system of operation."

* * * * *

I was glad to get out of earth and into the planets. The people of earth loved that far-off metal we brought back from the stars, called duronium plus. You could make a hundred year suit with it or you could carry an atomic pile around in your pocket in a wallet made of the stuff. It was profitable trade for the Company, but nobody wanted to have anything to do with the rest of the culture of the far-off stars. Every human who had gone out there had either not come back, or had come back with too few of his marbles. In order to get their duronium plus they had to depend on the lunatic fringe of people like Radwick, Kelly and me. People who would try anything once. People who liked to scare themselves about a thing and then go out and do it.

Radwick and I traveled on a conventional ship almost to Pluto. The small, fast Overdrive ships never came very far into the solar system. The local boys who put us on the small, red traveler serviced the ship with a touch of awe. They were plenty scared, as if afraid they would be stuck on board when we left.

There was something odd about the construction of the ship, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"The design has passed through the minds of the Stardust beings," said Radwick, dumping his blocks on the table in the main cabin with a rattling sound. "Earthmen provided the blueprints but these ships are built out in Scolaris. They're partly organic."

"What!"

I put my hand against one red wall and felt a warm, lifelike glow.

"Certainly, why not?" smiled Radwick, clomping a design with his blocks. He made the carbon ring to symbolize life and an energy formula to symbolize the machine. "It's only in people's minds that there is a clean break between organic and non-organic. Machines have a youth, old age and death; so do people. They are really interchangeable...."

"I don't like the idea of traveling in the stomach of some space-monster," I babbled. "He might get the idea to digest us."

"Stomach-bummick," said Radwick. "This cabin could just as easily be an ear or the inside of an eye. Only the ship isn't organic in that way. It's just partly organic and partly not which may be expressed--"

He fell silent, throwing the blocks around. Suddenly I heard a bell. It consisted of four mellow tones struck at regular intervals.

"What's that?"

"Ideal sound," he said. "You'll have to get used to that too. It's another concept that we don't have back on earth."

"What's ideal about ringing a dinner bell?"

Radwick shrugged. "It's just a discontinuity to us. The Stardust people write off our fashions in clothing as a discontinuity in reasoning that they don't understand. We must write off theirs." He smiled briefly. "You'll come to write off a great many things, young man."

I didn't tell him I thought the bells were far from ideal. They didn't have any place to come from, and for the first time I felt a fear of the unknown. Radwick sat there unperturbed trying to fashion some concept, probably of the bells, with his blocks. The earthmen finished servicing and came in to make arrangements for a rendezvous with us some months from then.

"First time out?" the Captain asked me.

"Yessir," I said, trying to look fearless.

He sighed. "Watch out for the Ideals," he said. "The first time's the hardest." His crew stood behind him looking at me like they would look at a condemned man about to take his place in the electric chair.

"Well, all happiness," he said, giving a distasteful glance at the absorbed Radwick.

"All happiness," I managed and they left us alone in space with ringing bells and the red space ship that had the disconcerting habit of sighing once in a while or shifting its wall structure in a stretch that was so human you felt like apologizing for being inside it.

* * * * *

We were out in four light year space. In the big Empty between our solar system and the next. We had passed through two magnetic fields, and already I wasn't the same, but Radwick had laughed.

"Pleasure and pain," he said. "As common as an old shoe on a vacant lot. Why get corked over a little thing like that?"

It helped. It helped a lot to see him twisting and writhing on his bunk, the same as I was, only with the big red encyclopedia on his face as he pretended to read in indifference. We were in the painful magnetic field for about eight hours and I cried and cursed and prayed and laughed in horror and sweated a bucket. The reaction was worse. My frayed nerves temporarily gave out and I tried to walk through the wall of the space ship into the dining room of the Thousand Lights back in New York.

Shortly after that we hit the pleasure field. Those precious moments lasted for the same time as the painful sensations, but after that earth seemed like a cemetery of the dead. I mewed like a stroked kitten and Radwick kept putting down his encyclopedia and laughing in goofy happiness. It was silly; it was wonderful; it made me so glad to have a human body that I wanted to cry.

These magnetic fields were behind us now and I was staring at the outside emptiness apprehensively.

"Radwick, look--" I gasped.

I had been watching a point of light in the distance. It broke on us swiftly with dazzling power. The magnitudes of light were so powerful that I had to turn the screen down to its darkest level.

Out there was what looked like the true Choir of Heaven. Rank on rank of singing, human faces, spiraling upward. Tensions of mighty humanistic fire glowed from the banked, singing faces. The hymn was obscure but it was faintly religious and very stirring. Now we were winging down a long corridor in space banked on either side by a myriad shining, dedicated human faces, pouring out glory with solemn deep-soul singing. The celestial organ effect made the whole ship vibrate and made Radwick's blocks jump on the table like animated poker chips.

We were traveling towards a throne of golden light. In the midst of the throne was a blinding brilliance that was our goal. Now the vision closed in and the entire power of light and sound blasted into my deepest marrow. Even when I closed my eyes I could see the faces; my plugged ears yielded to the lifting sound.

Radwick was holding out a can of pork and beans towards me.

"Yesterday we had chili for supper," he shouted. "How's about beans tonight--or shall I open a canned steak?"

"Man," I yelled, pointing helplessly to the overpowering vision. "Man--"

I have never been particularly religious because it doesn't help in space. But for anybody that goes by the Book, this was Paradise in white and gold technicolor. I was ready to subscribe my salary to the cause and give up my life of sin in those seconds.

At the moment we came to the celestial throne, Radwick was scrounging in the kitchen drawer trying to find another can-opener to replace the one I'd bent.

We shot past the throne and into emptiness again. I mopped my brow and peered back, exalted by the vision but glad that I was only seeing things.

Only the Choir was still there and the throne, receding in the distance. We were on the back side of it now.

"How about that?" I croaked weakly to Radwick. "How about that?"

"Oh, it's real all right," said Radwick evenly. He took a hatchet to the can of beans and burst it open. "You can join up with the hymnals if you want. Step right outside the ship and fall into rank. Heaven by any definition. The company's lost plenty of spacemen there. Chance to become immortal, you know. I suspect that the Choir's time is infinity and past; present and future would cease to exist for you. Your body would wither away and you'd become an essence, still with a vague sense of your old name and address but totally wrapped up in the glory hallelujah and the singing. On the whole, not a bad place to spend the rest of eternity."

"Immortality," I breathed. "But--why--"

"According to the law of discontinuity," said Radwick, "the basic assumptions which make its existence impossible are wrong. In other words, we don't believe it could happen because of the known physical facts of the human body and the known facts of space. But if any step of reasoning along the way is wrong, then it could exist. So one link in our reasoning is wrong--and it exists."

I didn't get that and he sat down with his half of the can of beans and tried to explain it to me with his semantics blocks.

* * * * *

I remember arguing the point of meaning and insanity with Radwick while we were passing through the layers of time. The ship would give a jerk each time we cut into a new strip in the piled-up layers. First we would be in our own time which Radwick called white time. Then we would bump over into blue time and there was a pervading sense of oddness while our eyes adjusted to a new system of angles which made everything look like a parallelogram in shape. In blue time our drinking water was a rubbery chunk of blue stuff and the solid walls of our ship shimmered into opaque, running liquid that forever eddied and whirled and yet never drained away. You could put your hand into it and feel the walls splash and splatter like water. But our hands, and indeed, our whole bodies shifted in gaseous uncertainty, both Radwick and I becoming shapeless things of floating motion in a time where liquids were solid, solids liquid, and organic matter gaseous. Together we expanded to fill the cabin and I was fascinated by the shifts in form.

I felt the logical hammer strokes of Radwick's thinking. "You've heard ideal sound that pleases the auditory nerves. You've experienced the perfect tyranny of pain and pleasure. You've witnessed the extreme wonder of spiritual Heaven--now, my friend, feel freedom. A perfect, ideal freedom of mind and body and being that men who grub after freedom will never know."

Then we broke back into white time and everything became normal.

"No wonder they go mad out here," I breathed.

"Mad?" said Radwick. "No, not over that. The more alien a sensation, the less dangerous it is to sanity. With the unknown there is the fear symptom, perhaps, but there is no identity with the alien. The things that drive men crazy are the known, normal things which are just one beat off. Things that ought to be normal but aren't."

"Like the Ideals."

Radwick nodded his silver head. "Like the Ideals."

"How come you never met your Ideal, Radwick?"

He sighed. He played with the blocks. "I did. She was destroyed."

"You killed her?"

"She was destroyed."

In the red time there were suggestive mists that whispered. Radwick watched me with amusement. I had never seen a mist-woman before, and I forgot about the Ideals when I saw these graceful, half-solid creatures that drifted past the ship. In the distance they were alien forms but as they divined our own forms and wants they shifted into reasonable facsimilies of earth-women and smiled and whispered as we drew alongside.

"Sirens," I breathed, feeling cold fear inside.

Radwick concealed a smile as one of them materialized inside the ship. She balanced on the cabin table and fell towards me, whispering sounds that almost made words. The sensation was one of almost-solid and yet a yielding that gave way to the touch. There was a wetness and a warmness with just the suggestion of glossy, mist hair, dainty-brushing, lip-kissing. She formed herself around my body and nibbled my ear and teased me to open my pores and admit her.

"I don't know how!" I gasped, almost overwhelmed by the not-quite-solidity of her.

"And never will," laughed Radwick. "You aren't sex-oriented or you would be at the end of your run on the Overdrive right this moment, spirited away into the ideal of orgiastic perfection. The Company loses a lot of men to these mists and they go drifting in love forever, but she can't hurt you."

Then the delicious mist got mad and slapped my face and floated daintily off. Then came the jarring sensation and we were back in the daylight of our own time and heading again towards the next layer of blue time. Only by then I could marvel no more.

* * * * *

I saw Kelly on Scolaris while they were loading the ship with duronium. In exchange the Scolarians got various earth chemicals which were used for alien purposes beyond our knowing. Scolaris was a planet of a great star; it was also a city. It was a fine city but by no means different from New York. In fact it could've been New York done on an idealistic scale. The people of Scolaris, the Star-beings, were engaged in some terrific struggle which I couldn't quite understand.

"Back on earth," said Kelly as we sat in his sidewalk apartment, "there were a lot of things that went on I didn't like. If you loved someone, there was hate mixed with it. If you liked some idea--freedom, equal rights, the dignity of man, there was always some person or some institution around that spoiled it. You were always striving for some perfection and yet you knew you could never reach it. But listen, Al, they got it here--perfection." He leaned back with a sigh.

His red-headed Ideal of the Thousand Lights in New York was there. Her name was Valda and she smiled at me and asked if I had shot any more Ideals lately. I grinned a negative and accepted the drink of Scolaris that she mixed. It was perfect.