Collected Short Fiction, page 640
Old Habibula moved convulsively, overturning a bowl of broth. It flooded the end of the table and dripped on his knees.
“That ended the mining,” I said. “Half the people and most of the wealth of the colony had been lost. The survivors scattered. Even this ice asteroid was abandoned, until the Legion came. Commander Ken Star set up the beacon—”
“I know Ken Star.” A pink, slow smile warmed old Habibula’s round baby-face. “John’s younger son—I recall how he used to bring me toys to mend, long ago, when I was on guard duty at John’s great place on Phobos. My poor flesh freezes when I think of Ken out in the fearful anomaly now, fighting that enemy machine.
“I love Ken Star—”
“Captain, please go on,” Lilith’s anxious voice broke in. “Tell us every fact you can about the anomaly.”
“Reports of the disappearing rocks got back to the Legion,” I said. “Ken Star came out with a survey ship to investigate them. A new iron asteroid popped out of Nowhere just ahead of him. He landed on it, and found the wreck of that missing ore barge.”
Old Habibula had been mopping at the spilled broth with a fiber napkin. He froze again, his small eyes watching me with the flat bright blankness of two wet pebbles.
“In life’s name!” he gasped. “Where had the blessed ore boat been?”
“Nobody knows. Ken Star landed on the asteroid—his report is in the station files, but it doesn’t solve any mysteries. He found the bodies of the missing family, emaciated and frozen hard as iron. He found a diary the miner’s wife had started, but it makes no sense.”
“What did she write?”
“Most of it is commonplace. It begins with a bit of family history—she must have had forebodings of death, and she wanted her children to know who they were. Her son had been crippled in a mining accident; she was trying to get him to a surgeon. There’s a brief record of the flight—positions and velocities, tons of load, kilograms of water and food, tanks of oxygen full and used. The nonsense is in the last few entries.
“Something had put out the stars—”
Old Habibula gulped and neighed.
“What mortal horror could put out the stars?”
“The miner’s wife didn’t know. She was too busy trying to keep her family alive to write much more. But she writes that the barge is lost, drifting in the dark. She writes that they are searching the dark with the radar gear. She writes that they have picked up an object ahead. She writes that it’s approaching them, on a collision course. They are trying to signal, but they get no reply.
“That’s the end of the diary. The barge had no rockets of its own. In his comments in the files, Ken Star concludes that the object was that iron asteroid. The collision killed the woman and her family. But Star doesn’t even guess where it happened—or what had put out the stars.
“His own geodesic space-drive failed, soon after he left the wrecked barge on that iron asteroid. His landing rockets got him back to this snowball. He named it Nowhere Near and stayed here to watch the rocks while his first officer took the damaged ship out to a point where he could signal for relief.
“When the relief ship came, Star went outside to get equipment for the beacons and the observatory. He found it hard to interest anybody—these odd rocks were less than specks of dust in the whole universe, and people had other problems to solve.
“He had to use his friends in the Legion, but he got his equipment. The rock with the wrecked barge on it was gone again when he came back, but two others had appeared to take its place. He nudged this ice asteroid out of the middle of the anomaly—though not far enough to make it very safe. He installed the beacons and stayed here another year to watch Nowhere, before he went on to something else.
“We’ve been here since—or the station has. This is my own fourth year. We keep the beacon burning. We chart those rocks as they come and go—there are nineteen, now. We monitor the instruments.
“That’s the history of Nowhere Near.”
Giles Habibula gulped the last bite of the last yeastcake, and blinked at me uneasily.
“What effects do your instruments show?”
“Optical,” I said. “Magnetic. Gravitic. All connected with those rocks that come and go. Observing stars at certain angles through the anomaly, we find their images blurred and spectral lines shifted toward the red. Whenever a rock appears or vanishes, our magnetometers record violent magnetic storms. The motions of the rocks themselves—and even of the station—show abnormal gravitic fields far more intense than their masses could create. The gravitic fields keep the swarm of rocks compact.
“But I can’t explain any of those effects.”
Old Habibula had drained the last drop of algae broth from the last of the bowls. He sat for a moment staring sadly at the greenish smear of spilled broth beyond his empty dishes.
“That’s the dreadful shape of nature!” he wheezed abruptly. “That’s why I like machines. I don’t trust people, but mortal nature is by far the greater enemy. Worse than any faithless woman. Just when you think you know the rules, she amends ’em. Those who say nature’s kind are deluded romantic fools. At the very blessed best, she simply doesn’t care.”
He licked the last brown crumb of yeastcake from the corner of his mouth.
“Living things are in the race against us, for food and space and power.” Hopefully, he licked for another crumb. “The nearer they are to us, the crueler the conflict. Life knows our own dear kin are deadly enough. People might be worse than nature—if they possessed the wondrous mystery of that wicked anomaly.
“Anyhow, each of us is trapped between nature and mankind—pitiless nature and pitiless men!”
He shuddered fearfully.
“That’s why I choose machines. Their mission is to serve us. They aren’t in mortal competition with us for the precious prize of life, as our fellow beings are. They wear no cloak of wicked mystery, as nature does. They do what they are made to do, and that is that.”
“Giles, you’re dead wrong.”
Lilith Adams had been sitting straight and alert at the little table, gazing down at that dull black death’s-head on her finger. Her fine head was tilted slightly, and her lean white face wore a look of desperate intentness—almost I felt as if she were listening for Ken Star to call again from his strange battle in the wild heart of the anomaly.
“I love nature.” She looked abruptly back at us, her bronze eyes darkly grave. “I love the seas and fields of Earth. I love the cratered dust of Mars and the methane glaciers of Titan. I love the endless wild infinity of space—even as it looks from Nowhere Near.
“I can’t believe this anomaly is natural!”
“We’ve considered that it might be an artifact,” I agreed. “But in twenty years of watching we’ve never found a clue to indicate any kind of cause for it, natural or not.”
“I think you have a clue now,” she said. “You have that enemy machine!”
“Mortal—mortal me!” Old Habibula croaked and sputtered. “Let’s not speak of that fearful machine!”
“I think we must,” Lilith said. “Not all machines were made by men. Or designed to help men. If enemy machines made this anomaly, I think they may be worse than men or nature either—”
We all started when my intercom whined. “C-c-c-captain, sir!” Ketzler was stammering with tension and fatigue. “We’ve got another message from Commander Star, sir. S-s-s-s-something you should know. He says he is under a new attack from that enemy machine. The Quasar Quest is wrecked. He’s attempting to abandon ship. I th-th-th-thought you’d want to know, sir.”
“Thank you, Ketzler. Is Star still aboard?”
“I believe so, sir—though his signal was suddenly broken off. Most of his men had left the wreck in an escape capsule. Star and a few others stayed aboard to cover them. But their capsule was shot to pieces.”
I heard him draw a ragged, rasping breath.
“Wh-wh-wh-what shall we do, sir?”
“Duty as usual,” I told him. “Keep the station going.”
He paused a long time, while I shared his agony.
“Y-y-y-y-y-yes, sir.”
More faintly, a confusion of other lifted voices from the control drum came over the open intercom. Though the words were blurred, the tones were sharp with shock and consternation.
“A light, sir!” Ketzler’s voice came shrill with excitement, his stammer gone. “A queer light in space! We can see that enemy machine!”
The terror of his words ringing in my brain, I stared at Lilith. Though the rest of us were on our feet by then, she sat rigid and pale, staring down at the dull black skull on her ring as if its glittering ruby eyes had somehow hypnotized her.
6 THE BUBBLE OF DARKNESS
OLD HABIBULA and Lilith came with me down to the north observatory. Though he was acting half paralyzed with fear, she appeared desperately eager to see that strange light and the enemy machine.
I let them come because the riddle of their visit was not yet solved. Perhaps I had sensed a connection I could not understand, between the problem they had brought to the station and the peril outside—between those asteroids vanishing from the dark heart of the anomaly and those able spacemen vanishing from Scabbard’s geodesic flyer.
The men on duty in the zero-G dome seemed unnerved when they saw us flying in on the cable, almost as if they had taken us for mechanized invaders.
“Captain, you sort of startled me.” The dome chief hushed a harsh, unnatural laugh. “There’s the light—whatever it is!”
A gaunt and fearful ghost in the blood-colored glow from the instruments, he pointed a pale crimson arm at the transite dome. In a moment I found the light—it looked like a yellow star hung in the black pit of Nowhere.
“It’s going out, sir,” he added huskily. “Estimated magnitude two point three when we first observed it. Now about three point six. But still bright enough to show that—thing!”
The fan-jets lifted us into the greenish glow of the projection cell. We hung to the cold chrome rail at the back of the long narrow tube, watching the huge luminous screen that amplified the image from the electronic telescope.
Here that light was a tiny, bright-green disk. The rest of the screen was only a faintly greenish blankness, until the nervous-dome chief adjusted the controls. Shadowy shapes flickered and dissolved, and suddenly we saw the enemy machine.
Old Habibula made a low, hollow moan. I felt Lilith start and stiffen. A numbing something tingled at the back of my neck.
The thing covered half of that enormous tube. We saw it in shades of glowing green, outlined by that fading star. I felt stunned by its size, utterly baffled by its shape.
“A machine!” Even now, Lilith’s tight and breathless voice seemed curiously calm. “One men never made!”
“A fearful machine!” whispered old Habibula. “A monstrous machine. I’m not sure I like it!”
If its hugeness was dazing, its shape overwhelmed me. Parts projected out of it, but I could not call them masts or tentacles or towers—they fitted no familiar pattern. Their shadows, greenish black upon the screen, veiled whatever they projected from.
“If machines are designed to do things—” Though I was fighting for control, my voice came out hoarse and shaken. “What is this one for?”
“For nothing good,” old Habibula whimpered. “You can see its makers mean us fearful evil!”
“How is that, Giles?” Lilith’s voice was breathlessly intent. “What can you tell about it?”
“Too mortal much!” Clutching that cold rail, he shuddered apprehensively. “We can tell that it was built to propel itself through space, even in this fearful anomaly. We can tell that it was built to attack and pursue other spacecraft. We can tell that its unknown weapons were too much for poor Ken Star’s Quasar Quest. We can tell more, as we watch it work.
“For life’s sweet sake—look at that!”
His voice sank into a shivering moan.
Watching the screen, we saw the machine dart closer to that dying star. We saw a long projection, neither arm nor crane nor cable, extend itself to seize the star. The star was covered, dimmed, extinguished. The whole screen went greenish-black.
“What happened?” Lilith whispered sharply. “Where did it go?”
“Space is mortal dark out here,” old Habibula gasped. “With the nearest star thirty trillion miles away. Since the wicked thing put out the light, it’s black as space itself. But at least we saw it work.”
“What do you make of that, Giles?”
“Trouble!” he moaned. “Fearful trouble.”
With nothing more to see, we left the dome. I escorted Lilith and Habibula back to the full-G ring, and then made a careful tour of the duty posts. I found the men dangerously restive.
The unknown light had been put out. The enemy machine had vanished from our instruments. No new message had come from Commander Star. Only the great electronic chart on the end of the control drum showed the anomaly still growing—that black-bellied creature fatter, its purple legs reaching farther, its bright magnetic web spreading around and beyond us.
Without the chart, the anomaly was still invisible—perhaps that was the most dreadful thing about it. Only our computed drift revealed the intense gravitic forces dragging us deeper into that deadly web in spite of the thrust of our rockets.
The whole station was hushed and breathless with a sense of unseen menace closing in, so intangibly strange that we could not shield ourselves, against it. The strain of waiting—waiting for a shape of danger that we could not even imagine—was harder to endure even than the seen threat of that dark machine.
My next long watch had come and gone, when Commander Star reached the station. He came in the smaller escape capsule from the Quasar Quest, with only two men of his crew. To avoid detection, they had drifted all the way with dead rockets, keeping radio and laser silence. We had no notice of their coming until their retro-rockets fired, fifteen minutes away.
I hurried down to meet Ken Star in the lock. He came out of the capsule with a sling for his right arm and a bandage around his head. His gray face was streaked with grime. Yet I thought he bore himself well.
One of his men had both legs broken, and the other was dying of what seemed to be radiation sickness. At the station hospital, he made the medics do all they could for the injured men before he let them touch him.
Though the medics tried to insist, he refused to go to bed. His wounds were superficial, and he insisted that he had slept in the capsule. Dressed in a uniform of Ketzler’s, with clean sling and bandages, he let me take him up to eat in the mess hall.
A slight, quiet man, somewhat stooped, he looked more scholar than soldier. Though the medics had washed off the blood and dirt, his face was still seamed with fatigue. At first I had been vaguely disappointed to find that a son of the legendary John Star could be so small and frail and vulnerable, but I soon began to admire him.
“The rest of the crew left first,” he was saying as we left the elevator. “They took the larger capsule, with my executive officer in charge. The three of us tried to keep our attacker entertained, while they got away.”
He shook his head slightly, then froze himself, as if the movement hurt.
“That scheme failed,” he said. “The capsule was knocked out with what must have been a micro-missile—a tiny projectile fired at a fantastic velocity.”
He was limping a little, and he let me catch his arm to help him board the moving rim walk.
“The same sort of micro-missile made scrap metal of the Quasar Quest.” His voice was harsh and tired and bitter. “We had no chance at all—the finest cruiser in the Legion would have had no better chance.
“Not against those missiles!
“We’d see a faint flash many thousand miles away. The shot would hit us instantly—so hard it excited gamma radiation. I suppose those projectiles would be weighed in milligrams, but they are unbeatable. No possible shield could stop them. No possible ship could evade them.
“If you had seen that machine—”
“We did,” I told him. “By the light of—something.”
“That something was the Quasar Quest.” His worn face twitched with pain. “We had just got out of the wreck when they hit it with something else. Nothing that we could detect. But the hulk turned incandescent. Perhaps they were sterilizing it, before they came to pick it up! Another unbeatable weapon!”
“Commander—” I had to stop and steady my own voice. “What is this invader?”
Sagging wearily in the borrowed uniform, his worn body shrugged.
“If you saw it, Captain, you know as much as I do.”
At the mess hall, he got off the rim-strip with no help. Though we were early for dinner, we found old Habibula and Lilith already there. Habibula had an open tin of caviar and two bottles of his precious wine on the table before him. When the commander saw them, he stopped with a gasp.
“Lil! Giles!” He seemed delighted, yet somehow disturbed to see them. “I thought you’d be waiting for me, back at sector base.”
They were gaping with the same astonishment.
“Ken Star!” old Habibula bellowed. “We thought you were dead in space, killed by that enemy machine!”
Flushed and lovely with pleasure, bronze eyes glowing, Lilith came running to throw her arms around him so vigorously that he flinched with pain. I felt a sharper pang of puzzled jealousy. A very remarkable nurse, I thought, to be on kissing terms with Bob Star’s brother!
“Ken, we were afraid to wait,” she told him. “There was no way of communication, to you or Nowhere Near. We didn’t know what had happened. We got passage out here on a chartered ship—and finally persuaded Captain Ulnar to take us aboard.”
She gave me a dazzling, half-malicious smile.
Old Habibula came lumbering after the girl. With a hearty warmth, he wrung Ken Star’s hand—and then stepped back, his wine-colored eyes squinted fearfully.
“Where have you been?” he gasped. “What mortal peril have you uncovered, to chase you out of Nowhere—”
