E C Tubb, page 9
"We'll be ready." Varl rose from his seat at the head of the table. "We leave in an hour. Starting then we'll alter watches -- one third of personnel to be suited and armed at all times."
Varl took his place in the control room, checking the instruments, aware of but not wholly
concentrating on the blur of preflight checks. On the screens, the asteroid they had used as a training ground spun deceptively slowly. The training finally showed in the crispness of the action taking place, in the time lopped off the period needed to man and fire the guns, in the smooth efficiency now attending every function of the _Odile._
A woman reported from her station before a console. "Power at optimum level. Hydee ready to engage."
Her throaty contralto was echoed by Machen's deeper, precise voice. "Course fixed. Ready to leave."
Varl was slow to give the word that would send them on their way. This was the last any of them might see of the normal universe -- death could come at any time and smear them into extinction before they knew it. No commander with sense failed to make a last-minute assessment of the most delicate instrument he carried: his own basic instinct for danger.
"Check course. Asner?"
"Optimum, Commander. PEAP on minimal operation. No interference."
Varl wondered how the engineer felt surrounded by an invisible crowd. Again he checked the screens and the _Odile's_ target star: Rigel, in the constellation Orion. Burning five hundred light-years distant, Rigel was a blazing point even among the glittering panoply of stars.
Suddenly he was impatient to be on his way.
"Stand by," he snapped. "Leave on five. Mark!" Five seconds and ... "Go!"
Now, more than ever since the first few times when he had still been awed by the wonder of it, he was aware of transition. The tension mounted to burst in a peculiar sensation of being twisted, warped, stretched into bizarre dimensions. The feeling passed, and he stared at the screens: Devoid of stars, they were filled with nothing but gray, a vague, amorphous, mistlike something which coiled and writhed and seemed to be ever on the edge of forming familiar patterns but never did.
The color of nonspace, the realm in which ships traveled by virtue of the hydee -- Kreutzal's world.
Varl stared at it. According to psychologists, the color was gray because it was a noncolor, and the swirling was due to the mind trying to take shapelessness and turn it into a recognizable whole by associating it with familiar forms. Such explanations answered nothing, but held a certain logic and provided comfort for those who needed to be convinced they were safe.
Did the mist hold monsters? Slavering things ready to pounce and rip open the hull and scoop out the tender delicacies within as a man would eat fresh peas from the pod or a bear delve in a hive for honey?
Was the _Odile_ heading down a gargantuan mouth into an unimaginable intestine to be dissolved by acids, ingested by an unseen, unsuspected creature of horror? Or heading directly into the heart of a sun to be converted to atoms and spread among the stars? Or doomed to drift for eternity in the coffin of the ship not dead, not alive, but frozen in an eternal moment?
"Commander!" Varl turned toward the navigator. "On flight," Machen reported. "All systems green."
Varl realized that his introspection had lasted no longer than a few seconds. He automatically checked his console, then leaned back and looked again at the screens. The hypnotic fascination of the gray mist contained a subtle danger: Pilots had been found helpless in their chairs, lost in a private universe, catatonic or mad.
A face appeared in the swirling grayness, one he had seen before:
_"Kreutzal!"_
The face was gone and only the amorphous mist remained to answer his shout. Had he shouted? No one had turned toward him, and Varl knew the shout, like the face, had been in his own mind. Had the mist swallowed its discoverer?
Lydon had said that nothing really died -- what happened to those who vanished in hydee? Lydon!
Varl remembered the machine.
"Control to engine. Have PEAP activated at full intensity."
"Check," Asner replied. "Machine at full."
The ship came alive, a place crammed with humanity, jostling, surging, crowding close. The mist,
too, seemed to live; as a woman screamed, Varl slammed his hand against the switch, killing the screens and the images they held. He was sweating, his skin crawling with remembered terrors, seeing again the cell, the robed figure, the instruments which had turned him into a whimpering beast.
He realized the images must be born of mental stimulation. Ghosts were of those who had once lived, not the reflections of pain and fear. And ghosts were not real.
He relaxed and felt the _Odile_ vibrant with life. A ship prepared to kill. A ship loaded with fictional humanity as bait -- waiting for the killers to strike.
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*CHAPTER 14*
AGAIN Stacey looked at the hell found in the _Lewanna._ He was not bothered by the blood smeared over the bulkheads and the floors -- red paint would have made a similar pattern. But the huddled masses were something else, and he felt the old sickness as he studied the pulped tissue, the bone, the ravaged organs.
He sipped, feeling the stinging warmth of the brandy running down his throat. Man's oldest anesthetic and still one of the most efficient, the alcohol dulled, made tragedy seem like comedy, a crisis a slight and ephemeral affair. And if it could not cure, at least it made dying easy. He sipped again and studied what he saw.
The holograms had been taken by an expert and left nothing to the imagination. The crawling thing was obviously trying to use legs that were no longer in their usual position. The horror that swayed and dripped like an exotic tree bathed in carmine held an unmistakable resemblance to the human anatomy; that was the heart and there were the kidneys and that -- a hand. Something that twitched and moved and seemed to beckon...
Once again brandy won the day.
Stacey breathed again and looked at the images through the empty glass. The tape was on a loop and repeated itself with sickening regularity; three-dimensional images filled the sick bay, ghosts to accompany the others riding with the _Odile,_ the invisible presences that stared at him but were never there when he looked.
He reared as something touched his arm.
"Steady!" It was Erica, her golden hair glinting in the light. "It's only me."
"I thought -- " Stacey gulped and reached for the bottle to refill his glass. "God, you gave me a scare. I thought I was alone."
"Lock your door the next time." She looked at the glass, the bottle standing on the floor by his side.
"If Kurt catches you drunk he'll kill you."
"He can try."
"Don't you think he could do it?"
"Do you think I care?" Stacey gestured with the glass toward the images. "Could anything he might do be as bad as that? Look at that thing. It's still living, you know. Still conscious and aware. How do you think it must feel?"
"It?"
"You want me to give it the dignity of sex?" Stacey looked at her, at the glass, at the distorted thing.
"It's a woman. Those yellow-white patches you see are the mammary glands. That other thing, lower down, is the womb. I don't know how young she was, but she couldn't have been too old. That -- "
"Don't!"
"You asked."
"Not for details." Erica snatched the glass from his hand and drank and handed it back empty.
"What in God's name happened to her?"
"At a guess," Stacey said flatly, "I'd say she's been turned inside out."
"But -- "
"It can't happen, I agree. You can't treat a person as you would a surgical glove. You know how we remove soiled gloves? We take the top and pull it downward and end with a nice, neat glove, but the outside is on the inside and the inside is on the outside -- like that girl. Like the one you wanted me to
talk about. To dignify with sex. What the hell's dignified about death?"
He sat and reached for the bottle and poured himself a large drink. She watched as he downed it, and said nothing until she was sure she had his attention.
"I lied for you, Hans. I said you'd been cleared. No emotional hang-ups, no phobias, no aberrations.
Now I find you a drunk."
"Because of this?" Stacey lifted the glass. "When did you inhale ka'sence last?"
"That's different."
"Naturally; our own weaknesses always are. But I'm not a drunk. My trouble is simply that I've too much imagination." He set down the glass and stood and lifted a hand. "Listen, can't you hear them? The things all around us which we can't see. We know they're there but we can't see them. But if we turn quickly enough, then, perhaps, we shall catch a glimpse. That's why you startled me. I thought a ghost had touched me. One day they will."
And one day she too might feel their touch. The ship was full of them, and some were getting stronger; a young man she had known when a girl who had died in a crash -- he had smiled at her the day before. He was no more than a hint in a shadow, but she had seen him. He could appear the next day in the flashing pages of a riffled report, the reflection on a polished surface, the combination of light and darkness.
"1 treat people," Stacey said. "I clean their cuts and wash their scratches and prescribe pills for upset stomachs and headaches and insomnia. Those I can handle. There are others, those with guts showing through a ripped belly, bone sticking from lacerated flesh, punctured lungs. They too can be healed -- it just takes a while longer. Then there are those I can't heal at all. I feel for them. I suffer with them, all of them. I know what it has to be like. As I know what those poor damned bastards must have suffered after they were hit. God help me, I _know!"_
Perhaps he was a rudimentary telepath. After dying and suffering a thousand times in an unsuspected rapport, how could he ever fear death? But what had been done to the people on the _Lewanna_ was worse than death.
Erica looked at the images thronging the sick bay. "Why?"
"The quest for knowledge never ends." Stacey did not misunderstand her meaning. Stooping, he picked up the bottle and glass and put them away. "At least, thank God, you didn't tell me to heal myself."
"Could you?"
"I'm working at it." He straightened, breathing deeply, recovering his courage, his pride. "And I'm curious. I put on the recording to study it. Look at the hull -- unbroken, right? So how did whatever performed that obscenity get in? And how, after they did, was it possible for them to do what we see?
That girl -- no, take that man. Be clinical. Remember your anatomy and tell me how any human form could be so distorted and still remain alive."
The thing was impossible. Erica looked away. "The recording was limited to the salon. The hull could have been penetrated elsewhere."
"They would still have had to get into the salon. It was fitted with emergency air doors. No matter what happened to the hull outside it would have remained intact." Stacey killed the projection; he looked older, more bleak in the normal lighting. "A sealed area," he murmured. "Things done which are anatomically impossible. A puzzle. One we may never solve until the same thing happens to us."
"If it happens."
"That's what we're here for, isn't it? Unless it does, this is a wasted journey."
She could have done without that reminder; in the passage outside the sick bay she leaned against a bulkhead, fighting to control a rising nausea. The horror had been dulled by repetition, but the basic fear remained: She was frightened by the possibility that she too could be converted into something like that girl. The breasts, the womb -- why had Stacey been so explicit?
And why had he stated the obvious? What had happened to the _Lewanna_ would happen to them
-- Varl would see to that. He would go on and on tempting the things to attack and relying on the _Odile's_ weapons to defeat whatever it was that turned people inside out. How long would the crew of
the _Odile_ be prepared to act as bait?
"Major!" Shelia Laudert approached, hand lifted in salute. She was just coming on duty; her face bore the traces of cosmetics carelessly removed. "You look pale. Are you sick?"
"No." Erica forced a smile. "Just tired, I guess."
"You need to relax. Take a break. Get rid of this thing and dress like a woman." Shelia touched her coverall. "I'll be glad when we can all act normally again."
The rules were already being ignored. Erica watched the woman walk away; the traces of cosmetics would grow, the coverall take on a more feminine drape with tucks and pleats and subtle shapings. Even in prisons women still used artifice, and the _Odile_ held more temptations than a jail.
Kurt must have known that, and he had probably anticipated the weakening of his directive. He was cunning -- while the women resisted their unflattering uniforms they would not have thoughts to spare for other worries.
Erica paused as she entered the engine room. Asner was on duty and waved to her. Lydon seemed to be asleep, crouched against his machine, but as she approached he stirred and looked up with reddened eyes.
"Hello, Major."
Erica smiled. "How are you, Ben?"
"Fine. On a tour of inspection?"
"Just stretching my legs." She liked the old man with his studious expression and general air of detachment, a man with little time for mundane affairs. "Everything as before?"
"As yet, yes."
She caught the inflection and frowned. "As yet? You mean there's going to be a change?"
"The commander ordered it. A small addition." He glanced at the engineer as if appealing for help.
"A slight difference in the projection."
"What will it do?"
Asner answered, joining them by the whirling, glinting, humming machine. "Maybe nothing, but it makes good sense. As yet we've had no response from whatever could be out there, and we've come a damned long way. Too far for safety -- we'll have to emerge soon to check position and calibration.
Pushing a hydee too hard and too far is begging for trouble."
"You've a spare?"
"Of course, but that isn't the point. We're heading God alone knows where." Asner looked at Lydon's machine. "So we're trying something. Big ships carry large complements of mixed sexes, men, women, children, right?"
"So?"
"We've got the crowd or the impression of one, but something could be lacking. A normal pursuit.
The one thing which might attract whatever it is we're looking for."
"And that is?" Erica looked at him, and at Lydon, and suddenly felt a fool for having asked the question. "You can't mean it!"
"It _fits,"_ Asner said. "As yet we've worked on the assumption that numbers alone are effective, but there could be a correlation we've overlooked. Emotion," he explained. "Put men and women together and you provide the elements of intense emotional involvement."
"Love," Erica snapped. "Sex. Say what you mean!"
"Peaks of high intensity," Lydon said. "The reproductive urge is the strongest emotion known to the race. I can't understand why we didn't think of it before."
But Varl had thought of it -- why else the mixed crew?
"And how are you going to simulate this emotion? I suppose -- " She broke off as the explanation came to her. "Recordings. You've set up relays in the cabins. Listened in. Watched like a lot of filthy voyeurs!"
"No," Lydon said quickly. "Not listened and not watched. All I wanted was the electronic pattern accompanying the creative act."
Recorded, amplified, and blended with the other emissions from the machine, those patterns were
sauce to add spice to the bait. Suddenly Erica saw the humor of it: space filled with fornicating ghosts.
"What about side effects?" she asked.
"There won't be any." Asner was positive. "Switch on, Ben."
There was no change in the machine, no change in the engine room, the lights, or the composition of the air. But something had been added.
Erica turned, feeling naked, hands lifting in an age-old gesture of protection against lascivious eyes.
She saw nothing but felt herself blush and wondered at her unsuspected prudery. She wondered, too, at the sudden look in Asner's eyes, the jerk of Lydon's head, the abrupt nausea gripping her stomach.
"God! What was that?"
The _Odile_ had moved.
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*CHAPTER 15*
A ship did not lurch or twist or seem to skid in hyperspace. The movement should not have happened. Locked by the hydee in a cocoon of invisible forces, a ship could travel only in one direction, like a bullet in the barrel of a gun.
Yet the _Odile_ had moved!
The lurch happened again while she fought her sickness; she staggered, bruising her thigh against a stanchion. Asner crashed to the deck as he dived toward his panel.
"Turn it off!" Erica screamed to Lydon. "The machine -- turn it off!"
In a moment the whirling glitter of oddly shaped protrusions began to slow, and, as they lost their power, the ghosts died with them.
"There can be no association," Lydon said. "We tested --
"Forget it!" Erica had no time for patience. "Keep it off. Help Asner. Get him to his station."
She ran from the engine room, wondering why there had been no alarm. Time contraction; the alarm blasted from the speakers even as she thought about it, alerting the ship as she reached Varl's cabin.
"Kurt! I -- "
"Later!" He had rested fully dressed; he pulled on his shoes without looking at her. "Check your stations."
The alarm died as he burst into the control room, checking those present, taking the main chair as it was vacated by Cole.
"Report?"
"Movement," Cole said. "A veering from the direct line. Minor yet obvious and followed by a second."
"Direction?"
"Opposed, as far as I can gather." Cole gestured at the board. "The instruments registered nothing but odd flickers."
Varl checked the telltales and listened to the stream of reports submitted from all over the vessel. All appeared to be in order.
"Fresh watches," he ordered. "Double suited personnel. Emergency alert standby."
The ship readied for action. The tension could not be held for too long -- it was a delicate balance for the crew, and if Varl guessed wrong their lives could pay the penalty.
