A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  And if they found the Truns—what then? Granting the possibility, was the prize worth seeking? All that was known of the Truns had been gleaned from a dead, broken ship and her crew. What of ships thousands of cubits in length and breath, glowing fire at the mouths of tubes large enough to swallow a Deelan craft and never even cough? What of Truns alive, not corpses mummified? What would living Truns think of an alien ship that came blundering into their empire?

  To attempt to return was death. To go on was to pass ever more deeply into mystery.

  Meyl jumped up with an unquenchable cry of frustration and rage, lashing out at the chartboard. As he stood stiff-muscled and seething, it clattered across the compartment and fell to the deck, the pinned-down charts uppermost. The Trun stars looked up at him mockingly . . .

  In the arc-seared engineroom, scarred by the dozen electrical fires that had raged there since the ship had left Deela, the last explosion was almost a relief. The extinguisher system worked perfectly, and the engine hands had the benefit of experience. The fires were out in minutes, and the engineers could at last relinquish all responsibility together with all hope, and let the

  entire weight of the common burden pass to the captain’s shoulders.

  They had no way of knowing what Dekkin saw through his screens as the ship passed out of hyperspace and irrevocably broke back into the normal universe.

  Dekkin stared at the sky. “How far do you think we’ve come?” he asked Meyl in a whisper.

  Meyl shook his head. “I don’t know. A hundred light-years from our last position—or ten thousand. It might be anything.” He was breathing harshly.

  A city hung suspended between the stars. Agleam with soft light, linked into a whole by the graceful arcs of long, ribboning traceries of roadways, corruscating in the night, it drifted gently down on them.

  “There’s no dome . . . no air . . .” Meyl whispered.

  “A robot city?”

  “That—for robots? Look at it, man! Look at it!”

  Dekkin looked. He saw dazzling patterns of color, green and black and gold, shimmering up the steeps of the city’s delicate structures. Ruby-red flashed fire at his eyes, and silver drifted off into the distances like frozen moonlight.

  “How big is it?” he asked.

  Meyl measured it with his navigator’s eyes. His glance swept from left to right, hesitated, began again, turned aside. He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t follow the pattern.”

  Dekkin tore his eyes away and flicked off the screen. He shook Meyl by the shoulder, vigorously. “You don’t have to follow the pattern to make a rough guess as to its size.”

  “It would utterly dwarf our three largest cities,” Meyl said.

  “Do you suppose,” Dekkin asked, “that we’ve found the Truns?” Meyl stared at him helplessly. “It’s quite possible. I don’t know—”

  Dekkin nodded. “Neither do I. But we’re in no condition to pick and choose. We’ll have to appeal to them for help, Truns or not.” He added wearily: “Even if it’s a city of the dead.”

  Meyl looked at him, puzzled. “It may be a dead city,” Dekkin said. “There was nothing moving on the roads, and no movement between the buildings. We should have been challenged by now. There’s not even a patrol craft.” Meyl switched the screens on again for a quick glance, then shut them off with a convulsed motion of his arm. “That—dead?”

  Dekkin nodded.

  “What in the name of space could happen to the builders of a city as tremendous as that?” Meyl flung out an arm and pointed beyond the blank screens at the city’s shimmering circumference.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps they were Truns, and the same thing that happened to their ship happened to them here. Perhaps they were Truns, but so far removed from the ships’s time that the two have no connection. Perhaps they were not Truns, and the Truns conquered them. I don’t know.”

  They looked at each other again. The only possible answers lay in the city, in its vastness, its strangeness, its depth upon depth of weaving radiance that seemed as fathomless as the night itself . . .

  Dekkin, Meyl, and a small party of crewmen drifted toward the towering metropolis in their space-suits. Already, they were so close that they could not see past the city in any direction, north, east, west or south.

  Dekkin shivered a little. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the group was spread unevenly back toward the ship, the more timid men moving forward barely at snail’s pace.

  “Close ranks!” he ordered brusquely.

  Flame burst from the stragglers’ suit-jets, and they became a tight knot of men once more. But the flame died almost instantly, and cold darkness and cold starlight swept back, while the pile of the city showered cold, magnificent color on them.

  “There’s a landing stage of some kind,” Meyl almost whispered, pointing.

  Dekkin made sure the rest of the men had seen it, then jet-propelled himself up toward it. Meyl moved up beside him. They switched off their radios, touched helmets.

  Meyl’s voice, conducted by the plastic of their fishbowls, was hollow. “No safeguards,” he said.

  “Yes, I thought of that,” Dekkin answered. “Do you suppose the builders didn’t care whether the city was looted or not?”

  Meyl shook his head. You could ask questions, but there were no answers for them. They drifted apart before the other men had a chance to notice their private conference and become apprehensive.

  They touched the landing platform.

  Meyl was pointing unobtrusively at his chest. Dekkin looked down and saw he had forgotten to switch his radio on. As he did so the low murmur of his men’s helmeted breathing returned to his ears.

  “Captain—look over there!” One of the crew was pointing.

  A wheeled machine of some kind was rolling toward them over a smooth surface of polished stone. Instinctively Dekkin’s hand leapt toward his gun.

  “No firing!” he ordered harshly. “I’ll give the order when its needed.”

  The machine was obviously a transport. Rolling on its eight wheels, it swept swiftly nearer, and Dekkin saw that it was large enough to hold all of his men. Meyl was watching it closely, his body tense.

  The machine, starlight-trapped and mellowed in the dull sheen of its metal, stopped directly in front of them. A door on its side opened, folded down. As it touched the platform, its metal shivered and then, incredibly, it began to melt. It twisted, still fluidly changing shape, and became a set of impossibly proportioned steps. There was a click, and soft lighting flooded its interior.

  Dekkin stepped forward hesitantly.

  “I beg your pardon.” The voice was soft, mellow, and it spoke perfect Deelin in a perfect accent.

  Dekkin spun around in ludicrous haste, as if convinced that one of his men had suddenly taken leave of his wits.

  “I beg your pardon,” the voice said again. “It was I who spoke. I am a robus. My apologies. It took me a few moments to perform the required analysis and alter my circuits accordingly.”

  Dekkin stared at the machine his mouth suddenly dry. The steps had re-aligned themselves, and the shape of the doorway had altered. The interior lighting had changed to a more pleasant shade.

  “Please accept my services,” the robus said.

  It was Meyl who was first able to make the necessary mental readjustment, and speak to the machine directly.

  “Is this a Trun city?” he asked.

  “It was,” the robus answered. “Though, by the time it was built, The Trun called themselves Ras.”

  So . . . How many millennia separated the Trun from the Ras, while mummified in their suits and a pilotless ship slipped among the stars and the gas-clouds? How long . . .

  Dekkin spoke hoarsely. “Are there no Truns left?”

  “Not here,” the robus replied.

  “Where, then?”

  “I don’t know. I know only as much as they taught me. When they left, it became impossible for me to acquire new knowledge.”
<
br />   Suddenly, Dekkin began to laugh. The sound clattered in his helmet until, he felt Meyl’s touch on his shoulder, and realized that the others were watching him.

  He scrutinized the machine more intently. “The Ras built and taught you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you are not unusual. Am I correct? Your duties are to welcome visitors. But there are other machines, with other duties, and with just as many talents as you possess?”

  “Far greater talents,” the robus said. “I am only a single-purpose mechanism.”

  “Meyl, Meyl, Meyl . . .” Dekkin murmured sadly. “We came to find the masters—but even the slaves are gods, compared to us.”

  The executive officer nodded slowly.

  “Will you come with me?” the robus asked. “The city is yours, for as long as you may care to remain.”

  Dekkin shook his head wearily. Fie looked at Meyl’s face, and saw mirrored in the strained eyes, and tight, unsmiling lips a despair equal to his own.

  “No,” Dekkin told the machine. “There would be no point in our staying. Tell me—are there ships here? Ships that could take us back to our home world?”

  “Yes. The Ras left their ships behind, when they went away.”

  “Will you take us to one?”

  “There is no need, unless you wish to rest. I will call one.”

  “Thank you. No, I do not think we will rest here.”

  The ship, like the robus, spoke Deelan. Without waiting to be asked, it had provided an oxygen atmosphere for them, and there was Deelan food in its lockers. The fittings, too, were Deelan—Deelan with an added perfection of artistry that Deela’s craftsmen might themselves achieve, someday. The incredible craft hovered beside the weary Deelan ship, extending its airlock and altering it to fit the narrower Deelan airlock while the crew transferred.

  Dekkin slumped in a chair, watching his silent, shuffling men, come aboard. Deep in his mind he somehow knew he was in the presence of a crew that would never go to space—possibly never laugh—again. The old, thrusting Deelan pride was gone, forever. He looked at Meyl.

  “I hope it’s not a long journey. I want to go home.”

  Meyl nodded. “I, too. And never leave again. Thank God the ship runs itself. If my one, consuming desire is to lie in my cabin and simply gaze at the ceiling, I can imagine how the crew must feel. But we’ll be home soon. At least this craft has a working hyperspatial unit.”

  “Are you ready?” the ship asked. “Yes,” Dekkin told it. “You know where Deela is, I suppose?”

  “Certainly,” unlike the robus, the ship spoke almost arrogantly.

  Their departure was instantaneous, like the shifting of a carefully focused beam of light. The city simply melted on the screens and became a puddle of molten color. For an instant the stars ran sulfur-yellow in the sky, and then the ship was in hyperspace.

  Meyl sighed.

  The ship lurched, and there was a flash of fire. It flickered across the pilot compartment and was reflected up the corridors, and from the distant engineroom. With a dull droning the ship dropped back into normal space.

  “My apologies,” the ship said, with a curious, rather startling uneasiness in its voice. “A malfunction of some sort. It will be corrected immediately.”

  Meyl looked at Dekkin, his eyes wide with astonishment. “Well,” he said. “Well. So the Truns had their little difficulties too?”

  “Re-entering hyperspace,” the ship said, evenly.

  Dekkin shrugged. “It might have been anything.”

  “It might have been, but—”

  The ship lurched again. Stars re-appeared on the screens.

  “This is very unusual,” the ship announced. “Repairing.”

  Meyl was sitting with his mouth half-open, the thought which had come to him recording its staggering implications on his face. “No,” he muttered, shaking his head. “No, it couldn’t be.”

  “Once again, my apologies,” the ship said, more humbly than before. It, too, seemed puzzled. “Reentering hyperspace.”

  The stars dissolved, and once again they were in the silent universe where light was motionless and matter flowed like electricity.

  “Tell me, ship—what can make a hyperspatial generator fail?” Meyl asked.

  “Nothing,” the ship answered. “That is—nothing to my knowledge. If a generator can push a ship through the barrier at all, there should be no further load on it until it is used to re-enter normal space. Even then, the return should be accomplished before the generator can possibly be damaged seriously enough to impair its functioning. That we know—from the laws of hyperspatial transfer. Once in hyperspace, the generator is absolutely invulnerable.”

  Dekkin frowned. “But our generators did fail. Time after time.”

  “And it’s happening now—to another ship,” Meyl interrupted. He clutched the arms of his chair. “Look, Dek—”

  Abruptly the ship lurched again. Dekkin groaned.

  “Dekkin—” Meyl persisted urgently, ignoring the new failure. “The stars on the Trun chart—remember?”

  “Well?”

  “How many billions of years ago, Dekkin, do you suppose it was that the universe looked like that? How many stars have been born since then? How many have died? Just how much has the universe, swinging and shifting, changed its physical aspect since those charts were drawn?”

  Dekkin stared at him, startled comprehension in his eyes. How many centuries before the Ras built the city—the long-dead and abandoned city—had they called themselves Truns and left a ship dying in space, victim of some accident or action he could not even begin to visualize?

  “It might be,” he conceded. “It just might be . . .”

  “Well, then—And did the city have a dome? Was there ever an atmosphere around it?”

  “No,” the ship said. “The Ras did not breathe.” It, too, seemed fascinated by Meyl’s train of thought.

  Meyl looked steadily at Dekkin, as if debating whether it would be wise to tell a man so emotionally shaken what he had already told himself.

  “No atmosphere, Dekkin. And a city in space. Do we live in space? Have we evolved, Dekkin, to the point where we do not breathe, and so do not need to eat or drink—a point where we must nourish our bodies on the energies of stars themselves? How many millions of years will it be, Dekkin, before Deelans live in space as naturally as they now live on their home planet?”

  Dekkin shook his head in desperation, but Meyl kept relentlessly on, as though his own sanity depended on his not being alone with his knowledge.

  “Consider,” he said. “We begin on a planet called Deela, or a planet called Tura—and we spread to other planets. We take to hyperspace, and conquer the universe. And, through the long years, we conquer space itself, and cease to pay any attention to mere planets.

  “Now consider hyperspace, and the hyperspatial drive. A drive which has always worked—which must work—but which now works in fits and starts, as though a wagon, jouncing along a road, were to catch its wheels upon a row of unevenly spaced rocks.

  “And now think. You have left planets to live in space. If you leave space, where must you go?”

  Dekkin stared at his executive officer, whose hands and arms were trembling.

  “You might—you might go on to hyperspace. And if another civilization were to rise, after a time, and tried to travel through it—”

  “Yes, Dekkin. Exactly. Who knows what we would do to them?

  Are we passing through their cities like cannon shells? Are we somehow disrupting the entire fabric of their universe, so that we are cast out into normal space again?” Dekkin looked at him woodenly. His arms and legs felt heavy. “They—they would hate us with a consuming hate. Do you think they’re looking for us?”

  Meyl shook his head as though his neck were made of clay. “I don’t know. If I was one of them, I would be.”

  Dekkin’s voice sank to a hoarse, despairing whisper. “How would they go about it, do you supp
ose?”

  “I don’t know. How would we trace down something that was flashing through our planets, going through solid matter like a hot knife plunged into butter? We’d trace the trajectory, project it backward—and find the source. We’d make sure nothing like that could ever happen again.”

  “Deela!”

  Meyl nodded. “I wonder if they’ve found it yet? And if they have—I wonder what they did to it.”

  “We’ve got to get back!”

  Meyl gestured toward the useless generators. “How?” he asked with a bitter smile. “On planetary drive—At the rate of one light year for every two of our years? That’s forty thousand years, Dekkin. Would you care to try?”

  “I’m afraid even that would now be impractical,” the ship said, its voice fatalistic.

  Dekkin jumped up, staring toward the screens. Meyl, taking longer to realize that the ship had been talking about an immediate danger, could not stop him in time. He could not stop him at all.

  “Don’t, Captain!” Meyl shouted. “There’s no point—it’s better not to—”

  But Dekkin had reached the screens, and was peering into them. Meyl, unable to take his own advice, thrust himself out of his chair and stood beside him.

  Off in one corner of the screens, still small but growing rapidly, the blackness was spreading. Gigantically eclipsing the universe, extinguishing the suns as they came, the Truns were advancing toward them.

  OCCUPATION FORCE

  Frank Herbert

  When that tremendous ship from outer space appeared in the vicinity of the moon, Earth’s inhabitants had a clear idea of what was in store for them: a deluge of superbombs, the landing of weird aliens out of last month’s issue of Amazing Stories to enslave what remained of the population after the holocaust. And then a scout ship swooped dozen to land in Washington and out stepped the conquerors, armed with the one weapon nobody had considered . . .

  HE WAS a long time awakening. There was a pounding somewhere, General Henry A. Llewellyn’s eyes snapped open. Someone at his bedroom door. Now he heard the voice. “Sir . . . sir . . . sir . . .” It was his orderly.