Collected short fiction, p.467
Collected Short Fiction, page 467
“—four hours late!” They were in the low, gray-padded pilothouse at the top of the boxlike ship; and McGee’s voice came muffled from the black periscope hood as he stood at the controls.
“Which gives Captain Anders about seven hours’ start.” Rick grinned cheerfully. “But the first shall be last, as you didn’t say!”
For a time he felt elated. He had been taking orders for too many years and it was exciting to be driving through open space on the trail of the mystery rock. He watched the gray tiny point in the dark field of the periscope until it came to stand for all the ultimate enigma of timeless space, until his gaunt frame tensed with eagerness to meet its contradictory challenge.
A gray loneliness grew upon him, however, and he had to fight a bleak depression. Karen’s bright image came to urge that the expedition was expensive folly. But he made little McGee tell about the life and work of old Jim Drake. He learned to run the ship and helped in the galley, and once even offered to brew a pot of the weak bitter tea that the little spaceman drank incessantly—but that, McGee gently insisted, was an art beyond teaching.
Hopefully, he turned to the books of his father’s he found on a shelf in the narrow wardroom, dealing with the seetee drift. They were two days out, and he was plowing grimly through a ponderous old speculation on the mathematically possible types of nonterrene matter when he heard the buzz of the ship’s photophone.
“Tug Good-by Jane, of Obania.” He listened to Rob McGee’s soft-spoken identification. “Hello, Captain Anders. I thought you would be already out—” Silence, and then he heard a bewildered protest: “Eh? What men? . . . Injured or not, I don’t know anything about them. . . . No, we certainly didn’t speak you yesterday. . . . How should I know who they are? . . . All right, I’ll let you talk to Drake.”
Rick climbed the ladder into the square gray pilothouse. Little Rob McGee was standing with the photophone receiver in his hand. Silently, he held it out to Rick. His brown leather face had a blank expression. Wondering, Rick took the receiver.
“Drake speaking.”
“H’lo, Drake, this is Captain Anders.” The curt, slurred voice snapped back with no perceptible interval. That meant that Anders was somewhere within a few thousand kilometers—though the runaway was still thirty million kilometers ahead. “Where did you get those men?”
“Eh?” Rick was utterly bewildered. “What men?”
The thread of light brought him a low, sardonic chuckle.
“I don’t quite get it, Drake,” came the slurred pur of Anders. “But we’re in firing range, you know, and I’d advise you to explain.” His voice fell, cold and dangerous. “Where did you get those men?”
For a moment Rick couldn’t answer. He listened dazedly to the whisper of cosmic interference in the photophone receiver—to the muted murmuring of the nebulae, and the far-off drumming of pulsing suns. At last he stammered awkwardly:
“I don’t quite . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I’ll refresh your memory.” The Earthman’s voice seemed hard and alert, but he didn’t lose his tempered assurance. “You spoke us, twenty hours ago, when we were more than halfway out to that rock. How you got there is something I intend to find out—I still b’lieve you burn seetee in that old can!”
“Not yet!” Rick said. “And we didn’t speak you.”
“You’ve forgotten that you called us?” The brittle voice was sarcastic. “You’ve forgotten that we decelerated and gave you a pipe, and took off eighteen injured men because you didn’t have hospital facilities? And you don’t remember where you found them?”
“No,” Rick protested sharply. “We didn’t!”
Half a minute passed and there was only the dry whisper of the stars. Then the voice of Anders came again, oddly hesitant, and Rick knew he was afraid.
“Drake—who are those men?”
“I don’t know,” Rick said patiently. “We don’t know anything about them.”
“Say what you please, Drake.” Anders clung to his old self-possession. “I’m not going to arrest you now. We’ve not time to decelerate again, and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. But I warn you that I have full military authority and I intend to use it. Please think what you’re doing, Drake. It would be painful to your friends at Pallasport to learn you were on Pallas IV.”
Little Rob McGee took the dead receiver and replaced it on the hook. His rayburned face asked a mute, bewildered question. Rick Drake shook his head.
“Either Anders has gone crazy—which isn’t very likely—or else there’s a reasonable facsimile of the Jane floating around between here and the runaway with our doubles aboard.” His lean face broke into a sudden brown grin. “Must have been your double that called me at Pallasport!”
“Please, Rick,” protested McGee, “this is nothing to joke about. We’ve got too much at stake. Think of your father, and all he hopes to do with seetee. We can’t let Anders send us all to the prison rock.”
“No,” Rick agreed very soberly, “that wouldn’t be a joke.”
Silence hung in the cramped gray room, disturbed only by the muted vibration of the engine and the soft occasional click of relays in the pilot-robot. The eternal silence of space was getting on Rick’s nerves. He had envied the serene calm of Rob McGee, but now the little spaceman himself seemed unquiet. He fumbled for his pipe and Rick reminded him that he had left it down in his cabin. But he didn’t go after it.
“Rick, I don’t like this.” His squinted eyes were dark with strange foreboding. “I’ve lived all my life in high space and I’ve seen my share of mystery and wonder and terror.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “But this is—impossible.”
“It’s a riddle,” Rick assured him cheerfully. “I know it has an answer—some very simple and obvious fact—if we can only find it.”
McGee looked almost ill.
“I don’t like things I can’t understand.” His leather face twisted as he seemed to grope for words. “Because I can always feel the position and the speed of every rock that I can see—I know exactly what it is going to do, without thinking. Only this runaway—it doesn’t fit.”
His yellow head made a slow, baffled shake.
“I can’t explain, but the feel of it is somehow—wrong. Besides, there’s this call I didn’t make, and now Anders is talking about these men we never saw. But the feel of the rock is the worst. I can’t quite explain, but it hurts.”
Rick nodded slowly. He thought he understood. McGee’s remarkable perception was far more delicate than any sense of his own. Like any other fine instrument, it was easily disturbed by shock. “But let’s carry on, Cap’n Rob.” He attempted an encouraging grin. “Anders seems as much upset as we are.”
VI.
Three days later—by the ship’s calendar-chronometer, it was seven on the morning of March 30th—they were less than half a million kilometers from the runaway, decelerating. Standing with his head in the periscope hood, eagerly studying the dark angular rock, Rick didn’t hear the photophone. McGee tapped his shoulder and gave him the receiver.
“H’lo, Drake.” He heard the clipped, careless voice of Anders, imperturbed as ever. “S’pose you don’t remember those men, yet? Well, that doesn’t matter now. But since your memories are so short I must remind you not to get too near that rock. I’m setting up a military sphere around it. If you approach within a hundred kilometers the gunners will have orders to fire. Is that clear?”
“I suppose so,” Rick said.
“Don’t forget it.” Then Anders took a friendly tone again. “I’m not unreasonable, Drake. I like you, personally, and I understand your asterite sympathies. I admit frankly that I have no more than suspicion and circumstantial evidence against you, so far. And I know that you have very influential friends in the Mandate government. If you are willing to surrender and explain the things you’ve done, you can be sure of a pardon. What y’ say?”
“No,” Rick said desperately. “I mean, I’ve done nothing to explain.”
“As you please.” Anders dropped the sympathetic role. “But watch your step.”
The receiver clicked and Rick hung it up.
McGee whispered uneasily, “What did he want?”
“Information,” Rick said. “Somehow he thinks we know a lot more about the rock than we do. I believe he’s afraid of us. I think he was trying to bluff us into talking.”
“Maybe.” McGee looked uncomfortable. “But asterites have been arrested—and sentenced to life on Pallas IV—on no more than suspicion and circumstantial evidence.”
Rick said nothing. For a time the only sound in the low gray room was the dull, irregular click of the pilot-robot. The stillness of space became a smothering oppression. Rick caught himself tapping at the calculator keys just to make a noise.
At last McGee shuffled down the ladder to make himself some tea, and Rick turned back to the periscope. He found the blue and orange stern lights of the cruiser. They dimmed among the steady diamond stars ahead and presently he lost them.
Hour by hour the runaway grew until it became a dark, angular boulder, spinning slowly in its flight through the frost-pointed chasm of eye-aching blackness. Not round at all, it was jaggedly hewn by accidental fracture planes. As they drew nearer, the gray color of it separated into dark volcanic blues and the red and black of iron, splotched with brilliant ochers.
By late afternoon, Mandate time, deceleration had dropped them without five hundred kilometers of its rugged and swarthy enigma. Rick found the red and green bow lights of the cruiser beyond it, sliding down a spiral.
“What now?” inquired Rob McGee.
“Let’s swing into an orbit—say two hundred kilometers out,” Rick suggested. “That’s outside the military sphere and near enough so we can see what goes on.” He tried not to seem discouraged. “That’s all that we can do.”
With a silent, vaguely apprehensive nod, McGee stood to the controls. Clearly, he had lost his relish for the adventure. Still unable to explain exactly what violated his sensitive perception, he seemed acutely miserable.
“Do you mind?” Rick asked uncertainly, wondering if he wanted to turn back.
“It still feels wrong.” McGee’s voice came slow and faint from the muffling hood. “It makes my head hurt. But I’ll stay with you so long as you think we’ve got a chance to beat Anders to the answer.”
Half an hour later they were hanging two hundred kilometers to Sunward of the runaway. With his head in the periscope hood, Rick watched the somber-colored rock. The Sun struck its knife-sharp peaks and ridges with a painful glare that drowned the stars beyond. Shadows black as space itself clung mysterious in every airless hollow, and crawled and dwindled as the rock turned, and always clotted thick again.
The riddle of it held him fascinated. Every asteroid had its own spell of wonder—a tiny world, complete, unchanged by erosion or decay since the dawn of human knowledge, untrodden since its cataclysmic birth. The contraterrene meteors, invaders from the far unknown beyond, held the strong allure of bright and sudden danger. But this one dark little world was now a mystery beyond all others.
Unaccountably it had flamed into a nova and quenched itself again. It had changed its shape inexplicably. It fled from the drawing Sun. In Rick’s eager, baffled mind, it had come to stand for all the dark illimitable challenge of the Universe to the young, audacious race of spatial engineers.
“There!” He caught his breath sharply. “I see . . . I thought I saw something moving. It was tiny as a man in dirigible armor. The Sun was bright on it for a moment, but now it has gone back into the shadow.”
Reluctantly, he yielded the periscope to Rob McGee, who found nothing. “It couldn’t have been a man—not on a seetee rock,” he protested gently. “And the cruiser is still forty-one kilometers beyond the rock.”
He gave back the instrument. Adjusting his eyes from the dazzle of the rock, Rick saw the double star, red-and-green, swimming in the dark infinity. To his normal eyes it looked as far away as any binary—or as near. A yellow flash swallowed it.
“They’re firing!” Rick was startled. “But we’re outside their military sphere.”
“A test shot, probably,” McGee said calmly. “If it is, the flash should come in about twelve seconds. Watch for it.” He didn’t need to look at the chronometer. “Now!”
Contact, Rick knew, was the only test for contraterrene matter, and a gun was usually the most convenient testing instrument. If a test shell exploded against an uncharted rock like a shipload of tritonite, then the rock needed marking with a seetee blinker. Watching intently, he reported:
“No flash!”
“Maybe,” McGee suggested cautiously, “the shot struck the other side.”
For a time he merely watched. He lost the cruiser’s light, and eye fatigue made the field a flat black curtain. Turning in slow motion, the rock hung close against it. Jagged peaks struck back the Sun with a sullen, dazzling glare. Shadows flowed and shifted, like pools of viscid ink.
“Look—do you see that?” He pushed McGee at the periscope. “In that hollow at the west limb—below the V-shaped blue patch—just coming out of the shadow—what is it?”
“I don’t see it,” protested McGee. “Wait—it looks like a ship!”
“It is a ship—or the wreck of one!” Rick exclaimed. “That means the rock isn’t seetee, after all! That must have been changed, too—along with everything else that happened to it.”
He restrained a fierce impulse to drag Rob McGee away from the instrument. At last he stepped aside, and Rick thrust his head back into the hood. Now the rock’s rotation had brought the object fully out of the black shadow lake. Lying in a crater-pocked, ocher-yellow hollow, it was unmistakably a wrecked spaceship. Its lean black hull was torn and battered, and now apparently veiled with a thin cloud of condensing vapor.
“It’s still smoking,” he whispered, breathless. “And I think it has the outline of an M-4 cruiser. Has Anders—crashed?”
“No,” said Rob McGee, “because I hear him trying to speak the wreck.”
With tense fingers Rick swung the periscope away from the glaring asteroid. In a moment he could see the stars again. He found the unsteady flicker of the Guard cruiser’s photophone, and he could hear the tiny voice in McGee’s receiver:
“H’lo, cruiser aground.” It was the brittle voice of Captain Anders, rising with impatience. “Can you identify yourself? Can you hear me? Make any signal if you hear me. . . . H’lo, cruiser aground! Can you identify—”
The wreck answered then but not with any friendly signal. One of its flat turrets was crumpled underneath, but the other moved. A long spatial rifle pointed its black finger at that flickering light and the wreck was covered with a sheet of reddish incandescence.
With his face against the lenses, Rick had felt so near that it almost surprised him not to hear the gun. But there was only the thin voice of Anders in the photophone receiver, sharp and angry now.
“You’re firing on us! What’s the meaning of this? Piracy and treason, I s’pose? A damned asterite plot to work seetee and rebel against the Mandate? Please inform Richard Drake that traitors should be clever. Your ship is obviously a captured Guard cruiser. I demand your immediate surrender or we’ll return the fire.”
The answer was a second shot.
The tight voice of Anders abruptly ceased. Searching again, Rick couldn’t find the cruiser’s lights. For one dazed instant he thought it must have been hit. Then he realized that Anders was merely taking advantage of his black camouflage.
For the ship at space began firing. It was invisible between shots, though kylstron beams might have followed it. Rick knew that it was twisting through complicated dodging maneuvers, for each sudden mushroom of fading yellow flame came from a new position.
Against the ocher hollow the wreck made a black bull’s-eye. The single gun in the uppermost turret, however, continued the unequal battle. The first shots from space, Rick thought, fell strangely wild. But Anders’ gunners soon found the range and the yellow hollow became an erupting crater of dust and flame.
The cruiser at space fired twenty salvos. The wreck ceased to reply. When the smoke and dust of battle cleared, however, Rick was surprised to see that it was standing upright on its ground gear.
Its crew, no doubt, had made a frantic effort to get it away to the safety of open space. That effort had failed; yet, so far as he could see, it had survived the bombardment with no new damage. In fact it looked more spaceworthy than he had first thought. The photophone upon its black tapered snout began flickering furiously.
“Listen!” Rick urged breathlessly. “See if you can tell who they are.”
McGee listened. An expression of dull bewilderment came over his square, deep-furrowed face. With a little shrug of half-frightened bafflement he handed the receiver to Rick.
“See if you can understand ’em!”
Rick took the receiver—and felt a chilly spine-tingling.
“Sounds human—almost human—but there’s not a word I know.” His bronze head shook in slow, dazed wonderment. “I can understand just enough Russian and German and Chinese so I know it’s none of them.”
“This is getting me, Rick.” McGee took the receiver back and listened with a numbed expression. His voice was sick. “This is all insane. What explanation is possible?”
“We’ve come to find out.”
Avoiding the terror brooding in McGee’s squinted eyes, Rick turned back to the periscope to watch the grounded cruiser. The photophone light continued to flicker at brief intervals with that weirdly semihuman voice. The ship at space replied, for McGee picked up the tight voice of Anders:
“Better speak English if you want to surrender.”
Rick reported presently: “I see figures coming out of the air lock.” His voice was slow and puzzled. “Men in regulation armor, maybe. But there’s something . . . something wrong about them. It’s so far you can’t quite make them out, not even with the highest power. But there’s something—queer.” McGee was beside him, anxious for a look, but he said: “They’re gone now. They went over the south rim in a hurry.”
