The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Bottle in hand, he staggered in the general direction of section N, to find a Navigator.

  * * * *

  By this time, Yiddir was busy leading various groups of recruits through maintenance hatches and guiding them to a safe rendezvous between the walls. He became very apprehensive as Nad’s quota failed to appear, however. Suspecting that something was wrong, he deputized certain young men to guard the others and keep them quiet, and then he moved swiftly to take in Nad’s groups.

  When at last he came to Yldra’s group, he questioned them, through the visiplate, concerning Nad. When he learned that the latter had gone searching for Lylwani in section N, a shadow of grave disappointment fell across his aged countenance.

  “We cannot wait,” he said. “All of you enter the first apartment of this unit, quickly!”

  “But this is a bachelor’s unit!” protested one of the girls.

  “Forget all the laws the Navigators ever taught you, if you value your life,” said Yiddir. “Go quickly!”

  Yiddir led the last of the recruits through a maintenance hatch just as he was fastening it behind him, however, the whole ark began to resound with alarm bells.

  “What is that?” Yldra asked him, close by his shoulder.

  Yiddir’s old hands trembled as he tightened the last bolt. “Perhaps our plan has been discovered,” he said. “Listen!”

  The sonophones were raising a bedlam. “All guard units report immediately to T.H.Q.” came the announcement.

  “T.H.Q. means Technical Headquarters,” said Yiddir. “And only Technical knows anything about this area of the ship we are in. I think they are after us. We must move immediately to the life boat lockers. Follow me!”

  “But Nad—and Lylwani!” protested Yldra.

  “Casualties,” said Yiddir, coldly. “Forget them or you’ll all be caught. There is too much at stake now. Come on, quickly, all of you!”

  CHAPTER VI

  Nad did not try to excuse himself for disobeying Yiddir’s admonition to subordinate personal desires to the welfare of the majority. When it came to leaving Lylwani in Sargon’s clutches—forever, never to see her again—his rationalizations ceased and instinct took over. In a blind, reckless rage, he sought Sargon out.

  By following the catwalks forward, he soon reached section N, and at his first opportunity he began unfastening one of the now-familiar safety hatches. Yiddir had armed him with both an M-Ray and a Disruptor. In the mood he was in, he was prepared to M-Ray all Navigators into a state of complete idiocy, or blast the whole section to atoms, if necessary.

  When he came through the hatch he fixed it so that it was unfastened while appearing not to have been disturbed. This would be his exit, he hoped.

  He found himself in a vault-like room that was a maze of instruments, some whirring and ticking, others flickering with kaleidoscope colors. Quickly, he tried the door of the chamber and found it could only be opened from the outside. So he blasted it with the Disruptor.

  Once outside, he found himself in a shining corridor, face to face with a young Navigator who was paralyzed with shock. Evidently, nothing of this nature had ever occurred in his lifetime. To see an armed Passenger come blasting his way out of the recording vault was too much for him.

  By the time he had recovered, he found himself covered with a hot-barreled Disruptor, and he was looking into a pair of cold gray eyes that said simply: Obey or die!

  “Take me to Sargon,” said Nad. “No questions. Quick!” He jabbed the Navigator and the latter moved without saying a word.

  Two more Navigators turned into the corridor ahead of them. They were armed guards, Sargon’s own men. In spite of their surprise, they raised their Stun Rays almost simultaneously.

  But Nad’s M-Ray was on them, and their weapons lowered suddenly to dangle ludicrously from their fingertips. They grinned idiotically as Nad and the now fully terrified Navigator passed them. Nad acquired one of the Navigators’ Stun Rays and thrust it into his belt.

  “I’m your man,” the Navigator with him whispered. “Just don’t M-Ray me! I swear I won’t double cross you!”

  “Shut up and keep moving—fast! Nad hissed. “How much farther is it?”

  “Here!” The Navigator pointed to a large metal door on Nad’s right.

  Whereupon Nad extracted the Stun Ray from his belt. “This won’t hurt,” he whispered. The other slumped quietly to the floor, blissfully unconscious.

  Nad tried Sargon’s door and found it to be unlocked. Then he flung it open and sprang into the middle of the room.

  The first thing he focused his eyes on was Lylwani, herself, sitting up in her cushioned chair as though paralyzed with amazement. Obviously she had been crying, for her usually clear green eyes were bloodshot and their lids were swollen.

  Now her eyes widened and an incredulous cry rose to her lips, but Nad instantly signalled her to be quiet. He turned and dragged into the room the inert body of the Navigator he had stunned, and he closed the door behind him. Then he beckoned Lylwani to him.

  She sprang to her feet and came into his arms, trembling on the edge of hysteria. “My darling!” she whispered. “You’re safe! You’re safe!”

  “Far from it,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Where’s Sargon?”

  “I don’t know. He told me you had killed yourself, so I gave up all hope of ever—”

  “Never mind, honey. Let’s go!

  Then he stopped in his tracks as alarm bells started ringing everywhere. The sonophone in the room boomed a torrent of excited orders.

  “Come on!” he said, opening the door to the corridor. But when he looked out he knew his way was blocked. The corridor was filled with running guards.

  “Oh Nad!” cried Lylwani. “What can we do now!”

  “Plenty,” he said, locking the door from inside. “Follow me!”

  He took her by the hand and led her into an inner compartment which composed Sargon’s private quarters. Unfortunately he did not find the usual maintenance hatch.

  The two looked at each other. The din raised by the alarms, the bellowing of the sonophones and the sound of many running feet began to increase the beating of their pulses, and terror found a grip on their hearts.

  Just then, guards outside in the corridor began to pound on Sargon’s office door.

  Lylwani clutched at Nad’s arms and pressed her head tightly against his chest. “You tried, darling,” she said. “It’s all right. We’ll go out together!”

  “That’s right,” he said, grimly. “We’ll go out together. Get behind me!”

  When she stepped wonderingly behind him, he focused his Disruptor on the wall of the apartment. There was a white flash accompanied by an explosion, and Lylwani saw a ragged hole leading into unknown darkness.

  “What is it?” she whispered in awe. “The Abyss?”

  “No. It is the road to the Abyss—and freedom. Follow me!”

  Soon it became apparent that Navigators had entered between the walls, because he could hear them shouting, and their voices echoed and reechoed eerily through the dark and narrow labyrinths. Far ahead of him, Nad heard a series of startled shouts and screams.

  “They’ve found them!” he muttered. “They’re fighting—probably being M-Rayed! Come on, quickly, or we’re lost forever!”

  At that precise moment, a booted foot kicked Nad’s light out of his hand and darkness engulfed him. At the same time, he felt his M-Ray being snatched out of his grip.

  Viciously, he sprayed the whole area in front of him and to each side with Stun Ray, and silence filled in the darkness to completion. Aside from dim and distant sounds of fighting, he could only hear Lylwani’s frightened breathing and his own. He felt the walls on either side of him and found them to be of a strange, warm substance that he had felt once before when Yiddir first guided him between the walls.

  Suddenly, from above his head a voice said, “I have this M-Ray focused on both of you. Don’t move!”

  As the two loo
ked up into the apathetic glare of Nad’s own flashlight, they did not have to see who was there above it in the darkness. The voice was that of Sargon.

  Nad swiftly analyzed his predicament. He and Lylwani stood on a narrow catwalk between the walls. Below them was a black pit of emptiness. Above, somewhere deadly close, crouched Sargon. And far away somewhere Yiddir and the recruits struggled with the Navigators.

  Whatever was to be done had to be done instantly or the whole cause was lost. But Sargon had an M-Ray focused on him, and there came to Nad’s mind all too clearly the full evaluation of his danger in regard to that weapon.

  If Sargon activated it, Nad and perhaps Lylwani also would lose all memory of life, their purpose, their hopes and plans, their love for each other, their conditionings, their personalities—their very identity. A wave of real terror engulfed him, but he fought it, strengthened at last by one element in his blood and marrow that was unfailing—his hatred of Sargon.

  “In my hand,” he said quietly to Sargon, “I hold a Disruptor. I believe you know better than I do whether or not there is an instant of awareness before the mind succumbs to the M-Ray. In that instant, if you use it on me, I will blast you into extinction, as well as a good portion of the ship.”

  There was a tantalizing silence, except that Nad heard Sargon breathing tensely above him. He also felt Lylwani’s tightened grip on his arm.

  “Lylwani,” he said, divining Sargon’s thoughts, “if you feel the M-Ray, grip my arm as hard as you can.”

  Sargon said, “You also have some reason for not using your weapons.”

  “Yes,” Nad replied, every sense tingling with alertness. “The Stun Ray might miss.” He realized that the action of using the Stun Ray might allow the brief instant of awareness of the M-Ray to come and pass, leaving him helpless. “Furthermore,” he said, “we are standing between two reactor shields.” Yiddir had tried to explain what lay behind these weird shields, but all Nad had understood was that something of monstrous power lay harnessed there. “You can appreciate better than I,” he said to Sargon, “what would happen if the Disruptor were to penetrate these shields.”

  “It would blow this whole ark to blazes,” said Sargon coldly.

  “Then don’t force me to use it in this spot,” countered Nad. “Drop that M-Ray and get out of here!”

  There was another moment of intense silence, while Nad nervously fingered his Stun Ray and Lylwani still gripped him with a feverish tenacity. Sweat trickled around the trigger finger of Nad’s other hand, where it rested on the Disruptor release. The roaring of his pulse drowned out the more distant sounds of alarm and fighting. He marveled, in spite of his predicament, at the degree of tenseness to which the mind could be brought without breaking down.

  Finally, slowly and calmly, Sargon spoke. “It’s Lylwani I want,” he said. “I’ll take every risk you will, so listen to this, if you want to help your friends down there, leave Lylwani here and go. If you don’t like that proposition—”

  There was no more room for words, Nad fired the Stun Ray upward as rapidly as his hand could work, but in the same moment he yelled as Lylwani’s fingernails tore his flesh. Simultaneously, Sargon’s heavy body thumped unconscious onto the catwalk.

  Nad placed his weapons in his belt and reached down with hungry hands to find the other’s throat. But he was too late to prevent the body from slipping off the catwalk into nothingness.

  “Lylwani!” he called. Groping behind him, he found her and clutched her to him, kissing her face and lips. “You’re safe! We’ll make it yet!”

  Then his flesh crept and he felt his hair bristling. For Lylwani only giggled at him and made nameless sounds in response.

  * * * *

  Nad could never quite remember how he found his way to the lifeboat lockers, even though Yiddir had already shown him the way.

  Vaguely, he recalled interminable periods of balancing precariously on dark catwalks with Lylwani in his arms, or of hiding while Navigators led the poor recruits back into captivity, passing him close by, with lights, so that he could see the victims’ idiotic smiles. They had all been M-Rayed like his beloved Lylwani. The whole plan was at an end, he had thought dimly.

  Except for himself and Lylwani. He had an irrational desire to risk it in one of the space boats alone with her, somehow to master the secret of the controls and in spite of having no knowledge of astronomy whatsoever to find that little lost world of which Yiddir had told him. There he would reeducate his sweetheart and they would live and reproduce their own kind.

  With these dim, mad thoughts and with Lylwani lying childlike in his arms, he arrived at the lockers. There he saw lights and Navigator guards, a squad of ten of them who had made one fatal mistake, Nad perceived. They were all gathered together in one small group.

  Suddenly, his reason became twisted between insupportable grief and a reckless thirst for revenge. He set Lylwani down and deliberately aimed his Disruptor at the guards, firing without warning.

  There followed a quick succession of blinding flashes and deafening explosions. Not only the guards went into nothingness, but several space boats, as well, along with part of the metal floor. Fortunately, the great cryosite doors separating the lockers from the Abyss held, although the inner sections of the two airlocks were destroyed.

  He stood there, wondering if he were going to vomit. Behind him, Lylwani laughed and clapped her hands gaily at the fireworks and the smouldering results. Nad did not look back at her. He stood alone in the broken desolation of the place, trying to swallow a lump in his throat that threatened to choke him.

  Then, suddenly, he felt a friendly hand on his arm and a voice sad “Follow us quickly.” It was Yiddir.

  Nad’s mind was reeling from the impact of events too terrible and swift to assimilate. He heard Yldra’s voice crying out in the darkness behind him as she discovered Lylwani’s plight, and there were a few other male voices, but he cared not whether they were of friend or foe, of sane man or idiot. He followed blindly…

  * * * *

  There were other space boats and launching locks that were still intact, although one thing bothered Yiddir that he refrained from mentioning to the others. He observed a very curious thing about one of the launching locks, but paused there for only a brief moment. Then, grimly, he led his pitifully small party onward. There was no time for conversation. The Navigators would be back in a matter of moments.

  The dark ship lay enigmatically in its lock—a question mark standing between precarious Today and a totally unknown Tomorrow. Success? Failure? Privation, recapture, endless wandering through blackness and into madness? Sudden, violent, merciful death? All these questions were equally unanswerable as they filed silently on board and Yiddir turned to the control room.

  No one was curious about the interior of this ark of freedom for which they had fought and for which scores of their companions had sacrificed their personalities. To them it was shelter. They tied themselves into cushioned seats as Yiddir instructed them to do—and they waited.

  Yiddir had not wasted his thirty years of hidden exile. He had studied all controls and every phase of maintenance with painstaking care, and now he knew more about these space boats than the best Navigator on board the mother vessel. Expertly, he activated the lock and caused the outer doors to slide open, exposing the lifeboat to the awful gulf of blackness outside. For one brief moment his hand paused on the control. For centuries, his kind had been bottled up in darkness, except for sporadic, half-forgotten intervals. He felt suddenly the weight of Man’s loneliness, lost as they all were in the far reaches of the unknown galaxy. He knew that this single lifeboat, once detached from its base, would be like an electron lost in the farthest depths of the Seventh Sea.

  With an unaccustomed prayer on his lips, he launched the boat outward into the great darkness…

  CHAPTER VII

  Their little group consisted of seven. There were Yiddir, Nad, Ron, Yldra, Lylwani, Gorn and Karg. Gorn was a pale, blu
e-haired Venusian like Yldra. Karg was one of Lylwani’s race—a Martian. Gorn had been wounded by a bad fall from one of the catwalks. Two ribs had punctured his left lung and he was dying from a pulmonary hemorrhage.

  He was bitterly contemptuous of Ron. Just before he died, on that first day out, he called everybody around him and addressed Ron in their presence. In his dimming eyes they could see most of those qualities which they needed so desperately for their venture-courage, strength, and a full awareness of the role they were all acting in the destiny of their kind.

  “Ron,” he said, laboriously, “I want you to witness my death and realize what it means. This expedition could well be the only chance for survival of the human race. Of course, you may all die and one or both branches of the fleet may succeed. But it’s just as possible that the reverse may happen. Here there is no room for a coward!” His emphasis on this last phrase cost him a new pain and he almost fainted. “I want you to realize that your outburst to Krylorno was directly responsible for the failure of the others to reach this ship. Thanks to you, about eighty-five recruits, young men and women, have been deprived of being here. If this thought haunts you through the days or years ahead as you seek a new world, I hope it serves to cure you of your cowardice. My death is also your fault, Ron. So you are responsible for taking my place in this party.” His eyes closed and his whole body tensed. “Take over—Ron!”

  These were his last words.

  As Yiddir decelerated as much as he could within the limits of reasonable comfort, the invisible mother ship and the rest of the rebel fleet receded at the rate of millions of kilometers each minute; in an opposite direction the distant Government Fleet still flung its light years long phalanx into ever expanding vastness; and he and his handful of lost souls were totally detached from all things kindred. They were like the first seeds of life in the Beginning, or like the last dust of the ages settling in the sunset of Creation. Whether colossal Nature would be mother or nemesis to them was a question that would remain unanswered through long months or even years to come. Yiddir was without hope, because of their small number, but where hope ran out, life continued. Almost like a robot, he went forward with the plan. He decelerated, day after day and week after week, calculating that their velocity would be reduced to that of the speed of light within two months. Then, for the first time in years, he would see the stars. It would be the first glimpse for the rest on board, and he wondered if that overwhelming spectacle would inspire them, or depress them with a sense of utter futility.