“Have a cigarette, Lydia?” suggested Semanticist Leon Navarro, offering her one.
She accepted gratefully and deliberately turned her thoughts to the minor .irritation of Dr. Navarro’s twenty-four-hour five-o’clock shadow.
“It’s rough on you, isn’t it?” she said inanely.
The semanticist shrugged. “I seem to be along for the ride,” he told her. He nodded toward an immense gutted tower of curious nonhuman construction whose fire-blasted frame rose in skeleton silhouette against the too-vivid blue of the sky. “Maybe there will be records—something we can work from— in there.”
The men, thoroughly briefed on their appointed tasks, set about them, as did the women of the crew, who were almost as numerous. Dr. Gray considered briefly the bizarre effect which the advent of space travel had had upon the status of her sex. It occurred to her that those grim fosterers of women’s rights of years past, Susan Anthony and Carrie Nation, would have reveled in the change.
It had quickly become apparent that women adjusted better and more rapidly than men to the varied conditions of interplanetary exploration. Men—more limited in physical and biological function—were for the most part more brittle. Those who survived were not rugged Vikings of the Nansen-Amundsen type but, for the most part, smaller, softer, more feminine types—like Dr. Navarro or the Japanese astrogator of the expedition, Lieutenant Hyashi Suzuki.
“How’re pickings?” Dr. Navarro asked Biologist Marie Duchesne, the small-boned, precisely handsome Swiss, who had led a crew of workers into an oddly shaped metal structure—it looked like half a Roman arch—that seemed to have suffered less than its neighbors in the unnamed disaster that had struck the planet—another instance of the plague that seemed to have swept the galaxy.
“They were vertebrates,” said Dr. Duchesne in her odd, neat accents, motioning toward the cloth-covered load carried on a stretcher by two of her aides. “They seem to have had double pelvises and very large brain pans.”
Dr. Gray kicked at the smooth metal surface of the huge plaza on which she stood. She knew she should get organized, get into some of the buildings in search of scientific or industrial artifacts that might prove valuable, not only to the archeologists on the big ship but to the advancement of Earth science.
She didn’t want to go—she knew too well what would meet her. There would be machines, of course—new and alien and intensely interesting machines. There always were on planets as developed as this one had been. But there would also be skeletons, or at any rate some vestiges of inhabitants, whose mysterious and unfailing deadness would be as much mystery as their lives.
“Come on. kids! Let’s get it over with.”
She motioned with her head toward the young man and two young women who had been designated her assistants on this expedition. She could sense, though none of them voiced their emotions, that they, as much as she, felt reluctance to repeat a performance already grown unpleasantly familiar through repetition. But the job had to be done.
Dr. Gray felt sudden relief as the small auxiliary space ship Achilles nestled into its proper place, via tractor beam, in the smooth hull of the big ship, the Milky Way, which lay on a smooth stretch of what had been farmland a brief thousand miles from the city. In the two years they had been out from Earth, the big ship had become home.
It looked like an immense globe of silver, a thousand feet in diameter. Actually it was three concentric globes of the toughest, lightest metals human science had yet produced. Its two outer shells were separated by incredibly complex insulation to protect the inmates from the heat and cold and often lethal radiations of space travel. In space, anti-gravity radiations protected its two thick skins from contact with meteors that could puncture them like cheese.
The inner most globe rested in a liquid insulation so frictionless that its thirty decks remained fixed with the mighty, engines—the atmosphere drive and the interstellar overdrive and gravity and anti-gravity machines—always at the bottom of the world in which its two thousand inhabitants lived.
Elevators rose and fell smoothly, swiftly and silently in a great central shaft that thrust up from the fuel and engine decks, through the hydroponic gardens, the laboratories, the library, the living, the amusement, the theatrical and gymnasium decks, the dormitories and the arsenal, up to the smaller council quarters just beneath the bridge at the very top of the huge ship.
The auxiliary ships, designed for speedy planetary exploration, yet turtle slow compared to the overdrive that made star travel possible, nested stern to stern, like locomotives in some ancient railroad roundhouse, on one of the larger decks just below the largest central deck.
IN HER own quarters, just below the council deck, Dr. Gray smoked another cigarette as a slim, cool-eyed, dark-blonde girl assistant unwrapped the tape from her body. The task finished, the doctor, grateful once again for the artificial Earth-gravity of the Milky Way, showered and donned a simple close-fitting gown of silver that did full justice to her still-young figure, took time with her make-up and allowed the girl to comb out her medium-length brown hair—still, praise Allah, without a hint of gray.
In the many months of existence in the big ship she had come to appreciate the maintenance of as many symbols of femininity as she could muster—such as donning women’s clothes in the evening and forgetting her insignia as chief physicist of this incredibly complex mechanical and atomic wonder.
They were having cocktails now in the captain’s quarters; two decks above. Sifting in a comfortable armchair, Lydia looked briefly at the familiar faces of her colleagues on Earth’s first stellar expedition. Captain Arbuthnot, slim, crisp and British, looking more like a lad up at Oxford than the most brilliant and seasoned young space pilot in the System, grinned at her and made some remark about the fit of her gown—he called it a frock.
“You needn’t be gallant, Cyril,” Lydia drawled. “You know you’ve seen this rag at least twenty-five times in the past two years.” Arbuthnot, unembarrassed, murmured something inconsequential over the rim of his glass. Then his eyes strayed to Leon Navarro, whose flushed face indicated that he had grabbed at least a couple of quick ones in his cabin before joining the rest of them. Navarro had been hitting the bottle hard of late.
“How about you, Lydia?” said Arbuthnot, his face serious now. “Find anything sensational this trip? I gather it’s pretty much the same story.”
“The answers are, ‘I don’t know yet’ and, ‘Yes,’ ” Lydia told him honestly. “These Bootes Four people had a highly developed form of atomic power, maybe even mesonic. Their approach was different, of course. I look forward to some good swotting when we take off again.”
“If we take off again,” said Dr. Navarro gloomily. “We can’t hope to escape this horrible thing forever. Something is loose ahead of us.”
“That will be about enough of that,” said Captain Arbuthnot quietly but with, the authority, so unexpected but so effective, that lurked beneath his carefree exterior. .
Navarro regarded him sullenly for a moment, then kept his peace.
“Another martini, s’il vous plait?” said Dr. Duchesne in her trim, precise accents. A steward hurried forward from, the bar table to comply.
There was no need for discussion—the topic was too-old a one. It was as old as man’s first visit to Venus, thirty-three years before. Mars and the Moon, of course, had long since been dead and little was expected of them. But Venus, beneath her layer of clouds, had seemed more promising.
The first Earthmen to reach her soggy surface had sent back excited reports. There was life on Venus, beyond question—plant life. There was evidence of animal life of sorts. Skeletons were found, caches of broken and long-dead eggs—nothing dried up on Venus. Life on Venus was just around the corner.
But the corner was never turned. There had been life on Venus and fairly recent life. But no more. Something, some agency whose power transcended the understanding of human science, mighty as it was, had wiped all animate life from the
little planet more completely than a Biblical plague.
Jupiter, of course, had been a different matter. Thanks to its poisonous atmosphere and surface instability there had, in all probability, never been life of any sort recognized by man. And the outer planets—Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto—-had of course been simply barren wastes of frozen matter.
Ultimately human beings, carefully insulated against the fierce heat of the too-near sun, landed on Mercury. And here, as on Venus, they found evidences of organic life along with a rich and primitive hyper-tropical vegetation. There had been water creatures of sorts—remnants of their structural markings were, found in many places, like the traces jellyfish leave on rocks in the sun. But all of them, whatever they may have been, were dead when man arrived on Mercury.
There had been comment naturally. Man had been disappointed in one of his most cherished aims—the discovery of life on globes other than his own. But man went on to new goals once the planets were conquered—namely, passage to the stars.
***
THE RESULT was the Milky Way.
Into it went all the vast snowballing lore of human scientific wisdom—the fantastic overdrive, the self-perpetuating machinery with its ability to synthesize everything a human could conceive of, from food to air to new sorts of games of chance cooked up by the scientists aboard in lighter moments for the amusement of themselves and the crew.
It was probable, Dr. Gray reflected, that new and better ships were already somewhere on their trail, their long trail from Earth. Some new method of astrogation was needed, a more easily governable overdrive. As it was, the Milky Way could reach its pinpoint destinations in the vast voids of space only by a basically cumbersome combination of processes that cried for improvement.
First, of course, the incredibly powerful radio impulses—a far cry from the primitive radar with which humanity had first contacted the Moon back in 1946—were projected to the star-sun decided upon as an objective. A beam was fixed by spectroscopic means and needed distances and velocities were obtained.
Then the overdrive was turned on after the huge globular ship was clear of its planet of departure—rockets were still used for close-in flying. When the overdrive was stopped and an insane universe returned to something approaching normal, rocket flight was again employed while a “safe” planet was selected as a system base and the rocket-powered smaller ships sent out for scouting purposes. Thus it had been in the Proxima Centauri System, now in Bootes.
And everywhere it had been the same ghastly story—desolation, holocaust, death of all animate creatures. What had been puzzling and merely disappointing in Solar System exploration had become grotesque and frightening and inexplicable here. All of them felt it in Captain Arbuthnot’s quarters, as it was felt by every crewman and laboratory assistant and cook and mechanic aboard the vast ship.
“These—creatures we found today,” said Dr. Duchesne in her perfectly articulated English, “they offer some amusing possibilities. Those double pelvises. Really, they seem to have been a race of Siamese twins.”
“It didn’t help them any—being double,” said Dr. Navarro thickly. He looked from one to the other of them,his black eyes unnaturally bright. “We walk in the footsteps of some unthinkable calamity—some supra-human agency that wipes out all life apart from Earth just before we are able to reach it.”
“Don’t be fantastic,” said Lydia, but she too felt the strangeness of it. It was almost as if some power wished to prevent them from finding any life but that of Earth. She told herself it was she who was being absurd. How much more economical it would be to destroy the Milky Way than a whole series of planets.
“I am not being fantastic,” protested Dr. Navarro. “Something is very wrong in this universe. Everywhere it is the same. All animate creatures,‘billions of them, utterly destroyed before they can take even rudimentary precautions. The result? We have all seen it. Death followed by fire, by ruin.”
“Very well.” Captain Arbuthnot had apparently decided it was time to have the thing out in the open. “Have you any theory to offer, Leon?”
“I have,” said Navarro. “It is a plague, a pestilence of some sort whose key has escaped our biologists. It does not destroy plants— heaven knows our botanical bins are full of flourishing growths. But it is moving through space ahead of us and we cannot hope ourselves to escape it forever.”
“I believe that all of you knew this trip might be dangerous when you agreed to come aboard,” said Captain Arbuthnot. “We must go on.”
“l am not afraid,” said Navarro, his face reddening. “It is this strange mystery, this inexplicable death, this endless silence, that is troubling me.”
‘‘It’s troubling all of us, Leon,” said Lydia quietly. She hesitated, then when no one took up the burden of the conversation, added, “I think these people we visited today may have had an answer to our overdrive problem.” :
“You’re joking!” Captain Arbuthnot leaned forward, eyes alight.
“No.” Lydia shook her head. “It’s going to be quite a job to figure out just what they did have—unless Leon and his crew can unravel their writing. It looks utterly alien to me, of course. But they had star travel —we found some models in what must have been a museum. They’re queer-looking things—more like abstractions in solid geometry than ships—but unless my instinct is way off, they had an overdrive of sorts and some sort of control.”
“Is there a chance it’s adaptable?” the captain asked, his lips compressed with excitement.
Lydia understood how he felt. She herself was aware of what a fully controlled overdrive could mean—putting the Milky Way precisely where it was intended it should go; cutting the time of planet exploration, now the longest single element in stellar travel, to virtually nothing at all; enabling her to slip in and out of overdrive as casually as a runabout.
“There’s always a chance,” she said with a faint smile, and lifted her glass to her lips. She didn’t want to spoil the captain’s enthusiasm.
***
EXACTLY thirty days later, Dr. Gray pushed back a wisp of hair from her wide, smooth forehead and looked incredulously at the object before her. It was something like a pair of cones, joined at their apexes, created out of tubing whose spiraling appeared erratic only at first glance. Actually, its variations were fitted to the curve of supraspace.
She lit a cigarette and studied it, comparing it to a somewhat similar shape on the working model she had taken from the museum on Bootes IV, on whose surface the Milky Way still rested.
“Maybe—just maybe,” she murmured to herself. She laid down her smoke half finished, unable to wait, longer.
Adjusting the Bootean design, once its principles were even half understood, to the Terrean engines of the Milky Way had been an almost impossible job of what she called “solid paraphrasing.”
She attached it to a model of the Earth ship’s overdrive, which had been constructed by her assistants. Then, after carefully closing the doors of the metal cabinet in which the working model was contained, she pressed one of a series of buttons on the outside of the cabinet.
Slowly, moments later, a red light above the button began to dim, indicating that the overdrive was beginning to function within its limits as set by the housing of the model. Though small of size, terrific forces were at work. If the device failed, the model overdrive would be invisible within seconds.
Lydia pressed a second button and, at once, a white light showed as the red faded. Quickly she opened an observation port in the cabinet, whose walls supplied their own fluorescent illumination. Through the quartz pane she saw the overdrive. It was still blurred at the edges, but even as she looked it became clearly defined. It had been stopped before reaching maximum.
“How is it?” said Captain Arbuthnot’s voice behind her. “I see you couldn’t wait.” He peered through the window as she stood aside, lifted an eyebrow.
“It works;” she said. “Don’t ask me if it’s feasible. There are certain
principles involved that—well, a lot of it’s guesswork. But watch!”
She repeated the experiment and he regarded it with something close to incredulity.
“I don’t believe it,” he told her finally, with a smile. “But it seems to be so. And now—what about it’s application? Can we use it?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Lydia. “How about the Achilles for a starter? I can rig up one of these interdimensional transformers—l suppose that’s as good a way of naming them as there is—in a couple of days. We can run her out to one of the outlying planets—say Bootes Twelve—in just about nothing flat.”
“Direction? How are you going to astrogate her?” inquired the captain.
“That’s easy,” replied Lydia. “She can make a tractor pull on her own beam. We can make her pull back into dimension on automatic reaction two feet above surface level. Let’s see-—that’s a trip of about a billion and a quarter miles at present. We ought to be there seconds after we push the old buzzer.”
“If you’ve done it—” said the captain, shaking his boyish head. “If you really have done it, you can have the universe!”
“These poor devils we’ve got it from didn’t get much out of it,”‘she said quietly. “Perhaps, by getting there first, we may learn something.”
“You’re planning to go, Lydia?” he asked. “I’ll have to go,”‘she said, nodding. “I’m the only one aboard who can pull things together if this dingus turns into a booby trap. I’ll take Navarro with me, if I may.”
“Why Navarro?” The captain looked surprised. “He’s not much good.”
“He’s got nothing to do so far,” she told him. “What stuff he’s picked up needs Earth study. He hasn’t a prayer of cracking any of those languages out here and he knows it. The action might be good for him, and besides—”
“You have something else in mind?” Arbuthnot asked when her voice faded out.
She looked at him and her eyes were deep, but she shook her head.
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