by Jerry eBooks
Jimmy was dazed. He turned and plunged back toward the ship. Television! Across light-centuries! He’d seen Sally as she was at that instant.
The marvel of the vision overwhelmed the greater marvel of the working of a technical device after a thousand centuries. He was like a sleepwalker when he arrived at the ship and told the Skipper what he’d found.
The whole crew followed him back. Howell stood aside as they arrived. The Skipper tried it first, perching in the awkward, uncomfortable seat. The mists formed and cleared, and he looked—and the others looked with him—at the office of the spaceline which owned the Carilya. Men the others did not know moved and spoke to each other in the three-dimensional scene.
The Skipper gaped at them. The scene dissolved abruptly into another. A fat woman—the Skipper’s wife—was cooking on an induction-heating stove. He gaped again, and the scene flickered and a child on fat, wobbly legs waddled in front of them, clutching a toy.
The Skipper got off the seat, blew his nose loudly.
“It works! That last was my grandson! Fat little beggar! Now, how in the world—”
But the others were clamoring crazily over the seat. It was extraordinary how every man ignored the technical aspects of the discovery in their hunger to make use of its human side. They had been seven weeks in space without news from home. They had expected to be forty-odd weeks more without communication. They ignored the wonder of the device and the greater wonder that it still functioned. They clamored to see their homes and their families as men hopelessly imprisoned might have desired to look in a crystal ball that actually worked.
All but Danton, and Howell. Howell stood back very quietly, watching the others. Danton hung back, biting his lips, his eyes like coals. Suddenly Howell returned to the ship.
At sundown the others trailed back to the Carilya, babbling to each other. Danton remained behind. An hour after sunset, the Skipper sent for him. The absence of dangerous intelligent beings on this planet was certain. But the lack of deadly carnivores was not so sure. Two oilers went after the engineer, armed and with lights.
They came back with Danton, and he had all the look of a madman. He was hoarse, as if he had been screaming curses. His eyes were bloodshot and glittering. There was foam on his lips. When the two oilers released him, he bolted into his cabin and locked himself in, muttering incoherencies in a rage-thickened voice.
Jimmy found Howell staring at the ceiling of their cabin. His expression was distinctly queer. Jimmy said breathlessly:
“I still can’t believe it—television without a transmitter! And above light-speed! It’s impossible—but it’s true!”
“Maybe not,” said Howell detachedly. “Maybe it’s not impossible, that is. But it certainly isn’t true!”
“What?” Jimmy could not believe his ears. “Not true? Did you try it?”
Howell nodded abstractedly. “That’s why I say it isn’t true. I thought of a sister of mine and there she was in that hollow space, going about her regular affairs in a perfectly normal fashion, in a room I remember to the last detail.”
Jimmy was listening intently.
“The house she lived in,” said Howell briefly,” was to be torn down, last time I visited her. In fact, it was torn down before we lifted from Earth. But I’ve no idea what her new home looks like. So, subconsciously, I imagined her in a room I did know, and that’s what I saw!”
JIMMY’S mouth dropped open. “You mean—that thing simply took pictures out of our heads and made them visible up in that shell space?”
“Yes,” said Howell. “I thought of the World President, and there he was. But there wasn’t any background. I don’t know of any background for him—I’ve only seen him on vision-screens. There’s no doubt about it, the thing simply takes pictures out of your head and makes them real and visible for others to see. They can probably be photographed, for that matter. But they wouldn’t mean anything unless the person in the seat was, say, clairvoyant. Or unless he had precognition. Then they’d mean plenty!”
He lifted his head to look at Jimmy, then continued:
“A man with proved precognition—foresight—a gift of seeing the future—that gadget would make his powers available to his fellows. Once you proved someone reliably capable of seeing the future—which can be done—you’d have something. Maybe the Lost Race got that. Checks and counterchecks, of course, until they were sure they saw what was coming. . . .”
Jimmy sat down. It was his idea that when one thought, it was better not to have actual vision at a distance. There’d be no privacy.
“Even if you’re right,” he said, “the Space-Guard will go crazy! An artifact of the Lost Race; not only intact, but working!”
“The Space-Guard?” said Howell without intonation. “What do you think’s happening to Danton? He stayed behind to look at images all by himself. He doesn’t know that what he saw was his own imaginings only. He is insanely jealous. I think he saw his most abominable fears realized to the very last atom of horror. What will happen to him?”
It was not pleasant to think of. Jimmy lay awake for a long time. He did not like Danton. Sally had told him convincingly of the trick he’d used to get Jane to marry him. She was a fool to be taken in, perhaps; but she’d surely suffered enough for her folly. But Danton must be literally in hell. Everything he feared, and that which he tormented himself by suspecting, must have taken form under the metal hood, in color and in three dimensions and in lifesize. He must have seen himself mocked intolerably. . . .
With these thoughts whirling in his mind, sleep was a long time coming to Jimmy.
When morning came there was simply no question about what the crew of the Carilya would do. A first-landing had been required by the Space-Guard, and it was highly desirable as a break in the awful monotony of overdrive travel. But the discovery of a Lost Race artifact justified anything in the way of delay. The entire crew, all eight men, struggled back to the amphitheatre, carrying the equipment the Skipper had decided on. They set up a camera to photograph the images formed; other cameras to photograph every possible detail of the amphitheatre. Grubbing tools were used to clear away the vines.
It was an extraordinary scene. The weird, unearthlike vegetation; the curiously alien shell of deeply tarnished metal, with the queer-shaped seat before it, and eight men in spacecraft uniform staring at the image of the Skipper’s grandchild waddling about and playing with blocks. He was actually on Earth, multiple millions of billions of miles away. But the camera purred, taking his picture.
As the men stared in rapt concentration, there came a racking, muffled Boom! a mile away. Then the eerie, lunatic whistling of a lifeboat screaming for the sky.
The eight of them gasped. Instinctively, every man counted all the others. But they were all on hand. Then they ran for the Carilya, forgetting the cameras and the hood itself.
The airlock door was open. Smoke welled out. A lifeboat blister gaped wide and it was empty. The fought their way into the stifling vapor. It was thickest toward the engineroom. The Skipper himself was first into the compartment which was the heart of the ship.
And the ship’s engines were so much wreckage. The Carilya would never lift from this unnamed planet without new engines. And the fuel container gaped wide. The bessendium fuel had vanished. No man was missing. Every one was still at hand. Only a lifeboat was gone—a lifeboat and the unthinkably precious fuel-block. No food, no stores taken. Nothing else.
THE SKIPPER’S face went gray. A thing exactly like this had not happened before, perhaps, but disasters enough like it were nightmares to spacemen. The Carilya was now missing. Permanently. She would never be searched for. It was not practical. No other ship would touch on this planet for a thousand years. The crew of the Carilya was marooned in absolute helplessness, literally until it rotted.
“It looks as if we found more than a relic of the Lost Race,” the Skipper said hoarsely. “It looks as if a survivor of the Lost Race found us! And he—it—took our fuel a
nd smashed our engines and went off in a lifeboat. Crazy! A lifeboat can’t use bessendium! And its drive is good for half a light-year or less!”
“But there are other planets,” Howell said. “Or maybe there’s a colony of survivors somewhere else on this world.” Then, to Jimmy, he said wryly, “Maybe one of them with precognition foresaw our arrival, and they made plans ahead of time!”
But something stuck absurdly in Jimmy’s mind. He said bewilderedly:
“But look—that smoke was nitriol! Human explosive! Our stuff! An intelligent creature might work out a drive and the controls of a lifeboat blister and a lifeboat itself, from inspection. That’s physics. But how’d he know what was explosive? That’s chemistry. How could he know it was an explosive without analyzing it?”
Howell jumped. Jimmy started blindly forward to talk to the Skipper. But Howell caught his arm and drew him back.
“Wait!” he said fiercely. “Hold it! You’ve said something!”
The Skipper was organizing for an unheard-of emergency, giving hasty orders. A guard at the airlock. Hunting parties of two each, to comb the area immediately around the ship for signs of intelligent life. They would carry walkie-talkies for reporting. Meanwhile, break out cargo and search for weapons and anything else the situation required.
Howell and Jimmy made one of the two hunting pairs. They went cautiously away from the ship. Then Howell said roughly:
“We’re going back to that hood! The cameras are still running. We’ll turn them off, and arrange things.”
Jimmy was beginning to see the situation as it affected all of them: Marooned for all time—with a ship for shelter, and stores, and a full cargo of supplies for a Space-Guard base, but utterly without hope of ever leaving. He’d never see Sally again. She’d never know what had happened to him. She’d imagine the Carilya disabled and floating helplessly until her crew starved or suffocated—
Howell led the way directly to the shell in which the images formed. He turned off the cameras—but hid two of them and triggered them to the vines by the seat in front of the shell.
“I’ve got a hunch,” he said grimly, “which does not come from the subconscious! I think you’re right about that explosion. After all, any of us could have set a time bomb to wreck the engines, and any of us could have set time controls to open the blister and send the lifeboat off untenanted.”
“But—he’d be marooned with the rest,” protested Jimmy. “And what would he gain?”
“Five pounds of bessendium,” said Howell. “Forty million credits, salable in the black market anywhere. And if he is a certain sort of man—other satisfactions.”
Howell’s face was savagely stern. He replaced the vines so they would not seem to have been disturbed. But the cameras would photograph any images formed in the metal shell.
They went on, and faithfully searched for signs of alien, intelligent beings. They found nothing. Strange enough creatures, to be sure. They saw flightless birds—at least, they had feathers—with teeth, and once they saw what looked like a tiny lizard spinning a webb of sticky stuff; and once they passed a hole in the ground, two inches across, from which shrill singing of a birdlike quality issued. But there was no sign of intelligent life anywhere.
BACK at the ship there was feverish activity. They were dead men, all eight of them, was the general consensus. Perhaps in a thousand years a ship might descend on this planet. It might or might not find the corroded remains of the Carilya. But they were dead to all the rest of humanity. They might as well be dead physically.
It seemed absurd to be mounting blasters to defend the Carilya against the fellows of the assumed Lost Race creature which had smashed the ship’s engines and gone off in a lifeboat. Each crew member had the look of a newly-condemned criminal. But each one differed in his reaction. Danton looked like a madman, with raging eyes. But all worked with desperate haste.
The other searching party found no sign of intelligent life, either. Toward sunset, two more searching parties went out. Danton was in one of them. Jimmy was called on to help the Skipper check over the ship’s manifest for useful articles. With a certain irony, he pointed to the notation of a needle-boat carried in the Carilya’s hold for the base on Cetis Alpha Two. The Skipper nodded gloomily.
“An explorer craft,” he said wearily. “The Guard’s trying to find unsmashed traces of the Lost Race. They’re short-handed, because Guard pay is low. So they’re going in for two-man ships. If they don’t go crazy, two men can map a star cluster as well as a cruiser’s forty. If we had our fuel, we could get back to earth in that needle-boat.”
But the fuel was gone. Jimmy and the Skipper went on with their work, picking out cases to be opened. They worked until exhaustion stopped them.
Jimmy had just reached his cabin when Howell turned up, smelling of crushed jungle growth. He was deathly pale. He had the rolls of film from the cameras.
“They turned on,” he said harshly, “and I’ve got the film. But you’re not going to look, Jimmy. I look first!”
He threaded the film in the viewer and turned it so that Jimmy could not see. Then there was silence. For fifteen minutes or more Howell watched, and a deadly fury filled his face. It was a cold and horrible rage. Then he pulled out the film and deliberately touched a match to it. It shriveled, smoked, and fell to ash. Then he sat still, his lips tautened to a thin line. At long last he stood up.
“Danton used the gadget again, to see what he thought his wife was doing,” he said tonelessly. “And I’ve just looked into his mind. If you ever get a chance to do that, Jimmy—don’t!” He paused, then added evenly, “Apparently there are two things intelligent people shouldn’t do: they shouldn’t look into the future, and they shouldn’t look into each other’s minds.”
He went out. Jimmy tried desperately not to think of the fact that he would never see Sally again. He was very glad that he’d kept busy so that now he was exhausted. He fell asleep.
When he reported for duty next morning, the Skipper seemed strangely abstracted and uneasy. He said shortly:
“Howell sprang a queer theory on me just now.” A pause, then, “How’s his stability? You share a cabin with him. Is he over-imaginative?”
“I don’t think he deludes himself,” said Jimmy, his voice tired. He’d waked without any feeling of having rested. All night he had dreamed of Sally. In the dream, she’d given up hope of ever seeing him again, and she was crying. And he had been unable to speak to her or comfort her.
“I’m going to send the remaining lifeboat off on an aerial search,” said the Skipper slowly. “Howell suggested it—and he may be right. And we’re going to make a more thorough search in the jungle around here. I’ll leave Danton as ship-guard, and the rest of us will search the jungle with a fine-tooth comb.”
JIMMY was apathetic. Despair had settled on him. There was no conceivable hope. The Carilya was a wreck and she would never lift again, and there was no fuel and none could be improvised, and there were no engines. And there was not the faintest chance of any other vessel coming this way, or of landing on this planet if it did; and even then, with tens of millions of square miles of surface—
The rest of the crew members were as numbed as he was. The remaining lifeboat took off and went away across the jungle. There were three men in it. Four more, including Howell and Jimmy, marched away with the Skipper to search in the jungle. Danton stayed behind as ship-guard, with orders to send up sound bombs in case of any alarm. But the men on foot did not go far. Once out of sight of the ship, the Skipper halted them.
“I’m taking Howell’s word for something,” he said heavily. “We’re going to a spot where we can watch the ship from a hiding place.”
“I’m sure of part of it,” Howell said. “I think the rest, psychologically, is pretty certain.”
He led the way in a long circuit. They came to the back of the hillock which had shielded the amphitheatre and the metal shell from the blasts which destroyed the city. The lifeboat had land
ed there and the three men were waiting. All seven climbed the hillock’s far side. Presently they could see the Carilya between the canes of giant grass which covered the hill.
They waited, watching. Around them, the unfamiliar cries of living things filled the air. Wind whispered among the huge grass blades overhead.
Howell said in a low tone to Jimmy, “Danton used the gadget to see what his wife was doing. He saw his own imaginings only, but he didn’t know it. He thought—still thinks!—they were real! So he’s a crazy man. He simply can’t face the prospect of spending a year on the way to Cetis Alpha, imagining her acting as he thinks is now proved. He’s got to get back to Earth and kill her! For him there’s no alternative!
“But—remember, I said Genghis Khan built a pyramid of skulls? Danton’s got to do that. He’s got to boast. So, I think we’ll be called back presently. Also, he’ll have prepared an escape after he kills her, so he can gloat over it afterward.” His face took on a faraway look. “It’s bad business, Jimmy, to coddle oneself by indulging in hate. I’ve done it, and it’s bad!”
There was a stirring. A man pointed, startled.
Down below and far away, a great cargo panel opened in the Carilya’s side. Danton had opened it. Then objects came tumbling out. The cargo unloader was pushing them. The Skipper winced as cases crashed open. Then a long, sharp nose poked put. The needle-ship which was part of the Carilya’s cargo thrust out its bow, and then trundled down the slanting cargo panel to the ground. It was in the open air.
Bewildered babblings up on the hill. Sudden, hopeless hope—
“Stay here!” ordered the Skipper harshly. But he turned a tortured face to Howell. “You’re sure?”
“I’m positive!” said Howell steadily.
Danton appeared, a minute figure. He opened the port of the needle-boat and entered, and came out again and went back to the Carilya. He returned to the needle-boat. After a moment there was the muffled, droning thunder of a bessendium-fuel drive in test operation.
Cries broke from the throats of the men on the hill. They would have plunged toward the ship had not the Skipper restrained them. His face was bitter and angry.