The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  The steak was rare, the way he liked it. The first good meat he’d had since they left Earth. He could have eaten more, but the mashed potatoes made from powder were nearly as good as his mother’s. Cruzet had made lemonade for him and Day. Dessert was a vanilla milk shake that had the taste of actual milk.

  “Capital!” Mopping his plate with a soya crust, Andersen grinned at Cruzet. “Tony, you missed your calling.”

  A shrill little squeal from Day froze his grin. Andersen got up quickly, and she followed him back toward the nose.

  “Daby,” Kip called after her, “don’t you care how much Mom misses us?”

  “I care.” She turned back, and the voice was her own again. He saw tears rolling down her smooth baby cheeks. “I do. But Me Me needs us more.”

  She trotted on in a moment to catch up with Andersen. Cruzet was still sitting across the little table, sipping a second cup of coffee.

  “I’m sorry for you, Kipper.” Sympathetically, he shook his head. “I know it’s hard, but none of this is quite what we expected. You’ve got to remember where we’re going.”

  He seemed so human and friendly that Kip dared to ask, “What will the ice cap be like when we get there?”

  “Rough.” Soberly, he shrugged. “Looking down from orbit, we saw mountain ranges that rimmed a high plateau on the only continent. The major area of mountain building on the planet, Andy says. We’ll have big problems. Thousands of kilometers of ice. Cliffs to climb. Glaciers and crevasses to cross. Unknown hazards.”

  Yet he was whistling cheerfully as he showed Kip how to work the microwave and load the dishes into the cleanser. Suddenly, however, the whistling stopped. Silent again, he hurried down into the engine bay.

  Feeling very much alone, Kip looked into the nose. Andersen sat rigidly straight at the controls. Day had perched again on the monitor beside him. Her blue eyes were wide, fixed on the high-crowned hat blazing in the blackness just above the west horizon. Her lips were slightly parted in an empty smile that gave her the look of a glass-eyed doll. He shivered when he found the bead behind her ear, shining in the dimness with an eerie blue glow. Afraid to speak to them, he climbed back to the bubble.

  He sat there a long time, watching the wheel tracks unrolling in the frost behind him. Perhaps the stars that made the hat had climbed a little higher; maybe the black sun blot behind had sunk a little lower, but nothing else showed any motion. No glow of dawn would ever break here. The bitter night would never end. He looked away from the hat, wishing for his Game Box.

  Cruzet and Andersen took turns tending the controls and the fusion engine. Wearing the beads, they seemed to need little sleep. Day slept more, but she still spent most of her time sitting on the monitor, searching out the way ahead. They never stopped the spider except for hurried meals. The watch clock chimed and chimed again, but nobody seemed to care. Their meals came a long time apart.

  Andersen and Cruzet were nearly human when they did stop the spider, laughing and joking, talking about how many kilometers they had made, as if the trip really was a great adventure. But those breaks never lasted long. Pushing on again, they had no time for him.

  He ate when there was food, and cleaned the dishes afterward. Sometimes he stood watching Cruzet or Andersen at the wheel, and Day perched beside them, but they never spoke to him. Once he followed Cruzet down into the engine room. Without a word for him, Cruzet pointed at a red-glowing sign that read, Warning! High Voltage! Keep Clear!

  Keeping clear, he spent most of his time alone in the bubble, watching the wheel tracks behind and the guiding stars ahead. Worried about his mother, he sometimes tried to call the ship, but all he ever heard was the meaningless murmur of the cosmos. Sometimes he wondered if anybody had tried to follow in the Alpha. No matter if they had. The Beta was moving too fast to be overtaken.

  Day’s sharp squeak came over the interphone, and then her human voice, just as urgent.

  “Dr. Andersen, no! Don’t drive around it. We’re stopping there for something Me Me needs.”

  The high-crowned hat had crawled a little to the left. He watched it creep back again till it was almost straight ahead. “There!” Day squealed. “Hold us there.”

  “Okay,” Andersen said. “I’ll hold us there.”

  He watched the hat till a ragged black shadow crept up from the flat horizon. The shadow of a tall mountain peak. The ice grew rough. The spider lurched and swayed, lumbering over hummocks of broken ice and then across a boulder-cluttered beach. It stopped close to the base of a high black cliff.

  He heard Day’s shrill squeak again, and Andersen’s almost human voice.

  “I don’t think so. It looks impossible.”

  She answered him, speaking in her uncanny language of grunts and trills and clicks.

  “For Me Me,” she finished. “It’s something she must have.”

  “It’s a difficult climb,” he muttered, “but I guess we must try.”

  Kip heard the thunk of the closing air lock and the muffled hiss and drum of the pumps. Andersen came out, looking lean and tall in the yellow airskin, a lamp burning on the crown of his helmet. He walked back and forth, searching for a way up the cliff, and finally began to climb.

  The interphone brought a sharp yip from Day.

  “I’m suiting up,” Cruzet told her. “I’m going outside.”

  She shrilled something that sounded like a question.

  “We’ve been pushing the machine pretty hard,” he said, “with a lot of rough country ahead. I want to inspect the drive motors and the wheels.”

  A long half minute of silence.

  “A prudent precaution,” she agreed at last, in a half-human voice. “Me Me says you may go.”

  The air lock hissed and the pump drummed again.

  Andersen went up the sheer black cliff, clinging with fingers and toes to narrow cracks and ledges Kip could hardly see. Once he slipped, but he caught himself and inched down again as slowly as he had climbed. Back on the ground, he searched the foot of the cliff again, and climbed once more. High up, he disappeared.

  Waiting for his light, Kip heard the lock cycle again. The interphone brought a murmur from Cruzet. Day grunted something he didn’t understand.

  “It’s been too long.” He heard Cruzet’s lifted voice. “Andy’s in trouble. I’ve got to follow.”

  “No!” It was Day’s voice, still strangely hard. “Me Me says he is okay. Just very busy, doing exactly what she told him.”

  “There!” Kip had been nodding, dreaming he was on an expedition with Captain Cometeer to the far Crimson Cluster. Cruzet’s eager voice brought him wide awake. “Andy Andersen, the human fly!”

  He looked up and found the lean yellow figure climbing down again, a bulging plastic bag slung from his belt. An awkward burden. Again and again he seemed to slip or paused to rest, but at last he was back on the ground, limping toward the spider. Kip heard the air lock, and crept down to the cabin.

  “Bones!”

  Andersen tossed a yellow plastic bag on the cabin floor.

  “Bones of predators. Bones of prey. Big bones and baby bones. Fish bones and worm bones. Round amphibian skulls and dagger-jawed monster skulls. The flying predators nested in the cave; nothing else could reach it. The history of the planet is written in the bones, if we knew how to read it.”

  Kip saw no bones, however, when he upended the sack. What rolled out was something dark and shapeless, glinting like a huge black crystal.

  “Beads?” Cruzet squinted at it. “Amphibian beads?”

  The honeycomb was a black-glinting mass of the tiny prisms stuck together, side by side and end to end. He pulled one of them off, polished it on the leg of his yellow jumpsuit, peered at it through a pocket magnifier, and frowned inquiringly at Andersen.

  “What else?” Andersen grinned. “I found one with every amphibian skull. Not that I’ve got a clue what they are. Harder than diamonds and adhering like magnets, with no magnetism in them. Unchanged, I think, by all the a
ges since the planet froze.”

  Day snatched one of them, with an eager little squeal.

  “No!” She scowled in disappointment “No good.”

  She tossed it back to try another and still another, till at last she tilted her head as if to listen.

  “Me Me’s voice!” She smiled triumphantly at Andersen. “Really clear, like she was right here with us. She knows the way and she needs us to hurry.”

  Cruzet and then Andersen himself bent eagerly over the honeycomb, trying replacements for the beads they had worn. They stood up at last, smiling in satisfaction.

  “Me Me needs us,” Day urged them again. “She needs us terribly.”

  “Not quite yet.” Wearily, Andersen shook his head. “I’m used up. I want a shot of Stecker’s bourbon and a good long nap.”

  “And something to eat?” Kip urged them. “I’m famished.”

  They turned to Day. She looked far off, listening again, and finally nodded.

  “She says we have a long way to come. We can eat when we have to, but we can’t waste time.”

  Andersen mixed himself a bourbon and water from a bottle in the locker. He sat on the berth, sipping it sleepily, while Cruzet broiled another of Stecker’s stasis-wrapped steaks. After they had eaten, Andersen stretched and yawned and started toward the curtained berth.

  Day stopped him with a sharp little bark.

  “Me Me called,” she told him. “We must move. If you really require it, you can sleep while Dr. Cruzet drives the spider.”

  “Tell her we’re on our way,” Cruzet said.

  Andersen picked up the bag of crystals and carried them into the curtained berth. Day followed Cruzet back to the wheel. Left alone in the cabin, Kip stacked pans and dishes in the cleaner. Suddenly heavy with sleep, he had started for the berth when he saw a black crystal lying where Day must have tossed it.

  “Tony!” Shrinking from it, he shouted into the nose. “Day! You left a bead on the floor.”

  He heard no answer. Walking to the door of the pilot bay, he found Cruzet at the wheel, backing the spider away from the cliff. Day sat watching, her eyes gone glassy again. He shouted once more, close to their ears. They weren’t listening, not to him.

  Feeling very lonely, he climbed the steel stairs into the bubble. The heat lamp, high on its mast, was a dim red sun among the stars overhead. Beyond its feeble glow, the starlit frost reached ahead to the midnight sky, unbroken by anything.

  He sat down at the narrow navigation table, listening to the turbine’s steady hum, watching the faint tracks the tires left behind, wondering about the bones. Were the amphibians still alive? Guarding the planet and flashing keep-off warnings? More likely, he thought, those giant flying predators had killed them all before the planet froze.

  Cruzet and Andersen wanted answers. Or they said they did when Day was asleep and they were almost themselves. What she wanted, or what the beads wanted, he had no way to know. He had no way to guess what would happen next. His head ached from wondering.

  He wanted his Game Box and Captain Cometeer. His adventures were never quite so strange as this drive to the ice cap, but they were always thrilling enough, and when he wanted to quit he could always hit the exit key. The box was back on the ship, and he had no key to cancel the terrible power of the beads.

  The spider rolled on. The turbine hummed. All he could see anywhere was the empty ice ahead, the faint tire tracks behind the strange stars above. Half-asleep, he stumbled out of the navigator’s chair when Cruzet came up the steps. Without a word, not even seeming to see him, Cruzet sat at the desk and picked up the binoculars to sweep the ice horizon.

  Feeling uneasy there, Kip went back down the stairs and looked into the pilot bay. Andersen was back at the wheel, standing stiffly straight, watching the dials and gauges. Day sat on the monitor beside him, as motionless as an actual doll, her glassy eyes fixed on the black horizon.

  “Andy, I’m hungry.” Andersen didn’t answer, and he raised his voice. “Can’t we stop to eat?”

  “Broken ice ahead.” It was Day who spoke, the cold and toneless voice not at all her own. “Steer twenty-two degrees right for the next two hundred kilometers to get around it.”

  His little sister. How did she know there was broken ice two hundred kilometers ahead? Of course she didn’t. The bead behind her ear was talking. Shivering, he went back to the cabin. There was nothing he could do about her or the beads, but he still felt hungry. Looking in the locker, he found a box of soyamax crackers and a can of mock orange powder. He mixed a cup of juice and ate the dry crackers with it. They were almost good.

  Suddenly he had to sleep. Keeping as far as he could from the black bead under the curtain, he crawled onto the narrow cabin berth and lay there with his back to the bead. He tried to forget it, but he had no way to send it away. He lay a long time wondering what was waiting for them on the ice ahead, till at last he slept.

  Twenty-five

  “Sit where you are!” Rasping hoarsely at them, Roak waved the gun. “Obey my orders, and nobody gets a bullet.”

  Mondragon clutched at the knife he had used to cut the ham. He dropped it when the pistol swung toward him. Rima sat frozen.

  “Surprised?” Roak squinted at her with one blood-rimmed eye. He looked desperate, his long hair matted and tangled, but he was grinning through the stiffened mask of black stubble and drying blood that covered half his face. “Well, so am I. Happy to find you got us away from those maniacs on the ship.” He waved the gun at Mondragon and leered at Rima. “Happier to find you here, my dear. Where did you think you were going?”

  “To find my children,” she whispered.

  “You never will.” He laughed at her, harshly. “Because I’m not as crazy as Cruzet and Andersen. We’re not chasing them across the ice cap. Or returning to the lunatics in the ship. I like it right where we are.”

  Unsteady on his feet, he swayed to the middle of the cabin where his gun could cover them both.

  “Stecker’s precious Kona coffee.” Glancing at the table, he scowled imperatively at Mondragon. “Boy, I’ll have a cup.”

  “I’m not a boy….” Mondragon began, and stopped when the gun swung toward him. “Okay,” he muttered, and filled a coffee mug. Sipping it, Roak made a sour face and turned to Rima.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry you dislike me—”

  “I despise you!” Her voice rose raggedly. “I’d kill you if I could.”

  “I don’t think you can.” He gave her a sardonic smirk. “Because now I’ve got the upper hand, with no more guff from Stecker.” He nodded at Mondragon, who stood beside her. “If you want to keep your pet Mex alive, tell him to relax and sit down.”

  Mondragon shrugged uncomfortably and sat back at the table.

  “Here we are.” Roak waved the gun at the cabin around them. “Our own little world for the rest of our lives. My own little world.” Warningly, he shook his head at Mondragon. “I don’t want anybody hurt, so don’t get rash.”

  He sipped again, made another bitter face.

  “I’m lucky, in fact, to have you here, because I was in an ugly fix.” He shrugged and flinched as if the movement hurt. “It all began when our good captain’s interphone went dead. He sent me out with orders for Washburn. That black bitch!”

  Scowling at the coffee, he set it back on the counter.

  “She shot me. Sent her hoodlums after me. I was lucky to get away alive. Luckier when you two got aboard, because I can’t run this damn contraption.” He frowned bleakly at Mondragon. “How far have we come from the ship?”

  “Forty kilometers.”

  Calculating, he frowned through the blood.

  “Far enough,” he decided. “Far enough so the bastards can’t sneak out in their airskins to end our honeymoon.”

  He grinned at Rima’s shudder.

  “A lovely honeymoon, my dear.” His thick voice taunted her. “With all the goodies Stecker had me load for his own getaway. And your boyfriend here for a servan
t.”

  Squinting warily at Mondragon, he paused to listen.

  “Stop the engine,” he snapped. “I don’t want anybody calling the ship. Or them trying to trace us.”

  “Better let me keep the turbine turning,” Mondragon told him. “At least on standby, to run the generator. We’d freeze without the heat lamp. The cycler needs power, if you want to keep breathing.”

  Roak hesitated, scowling suspiciously.

  “Okay,” he grunted. “But no tricks. For the lady’s sake.”

  “No tricks,” Mondragon agreed. “Just let me get us out of drive mode. That can build up a dangerous back pressure if we aren’t moving.”

  Which wasn’t quite true, but Roak was no fusion engineer.

  Roak let the pistol trail him into the pilot bay and turned to grin at Rima.

  “Just us three, my dear.” She cringed from his mockery. “You may not like it, but you’ll learn to get along.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mondragon coming silently back from the control bay, clutching his iron strip.

  “Jonas Roak, you were born a fool.” She raised her voice to hold him. “You’ll die a fool. Touch me, and I’ll kill you—”

  Close behind him, Mondragon raised the club. Roak must have seen the fleeting movement of her eye. He spun. The club came down. Her ears rang from the crash of the shot, but the gun went spinning across the floor. Roak moaned and toppled toward her. Mondragon dashed to recover the gun and stood staring at a wide red blot across the back of Roak’s yellow jumpsuit.

  “Don’t!” Roak raised his head, whimpering like a hurt child. “Don’t kill me, for God’s sake!”

  “Por qué no?” Mondragon stood over him, breathing hard. “Un cabrón!”

  “Reba! The sneaky bitch!” Roak tried to rise and sagged back to the floor. “Hurt me. Hurt me bad. Shot me in the gut.” He twisted his head to look up at Rima. “Help—you’ve got to help me.”

  Mondragon stepped warily back, holding the gun on him.

  “Rima, please!” he begged. “Don’t let me die.”

  Weak in the knees, she swayed farther away.