World without Stars

by Poul Anderson

  “I’ll sing me a song about Mary O’Meara, with stars like a crown in her hair.

  Sing of her memory rangin’ before me whatever the ways that I fare.

  My joy is to know she is there.”

  Well, I thought with startling originality, it takes all kinds.

  V

  WE WERE ready to jump.

  Every system was tuned, every observation and computation finished, every man at his post. I went to the bridge, strapped myself into recoil harness, and watched the clock. Exact timing isn’t too important, as far as a ship is concerned; the position error caused by a few minutes’ leeway is small compared to the usual error in your figures. But for psychological reasons you’d better stay on schedule. Pushing that button is the loneliest thing a man can do.

  I had no premonitions. But it grew almighty quiet in my helmet as I waited. The very act of suiting up reminds you that something could go wrong; that something did go wrong for others you once knew; that our immortality isn’t absolute, because sooner or later some chance combination of circumstances is bound to kill you.

  What a spaceship captain fears most, as he watches the clock by himself on the bridge, is arriving in the same place as a solid body. Then atoms jam together and the ship goes out in a nuclear explosion. But that’s a stupid fear, really. You set your dials for emergence at a goodly distance from the target sun, well off the ecliptic plane. The probability of a rock being just there, just then, is yanishingly small. In point of fact, I told myself, this trip we’d be in an ideal spot. We wouldn’t even get the slight radiation dosage that’s normal: scarcely any hydrogen for our atoms to interact with, between the galaxies.

  Nevertheless, we were going two hundred and thirty thousand light-years away.

  And I do not understand the principle of the space jump. Oh, I’ve studied the math. I can recite the popular version as glibly as the next man: “Astronomers showed that gravitational forces, being weak and propagating at light velocity, were insufficient to account for the cohesion of the universe. A new theory then postulated that space has an intrinsic unity, that every point is equivalent to every other point. One location is distinguished from another only by the n-dimensional coordinates of the mass which is present there. These coordinates describe a configuration of the matter-energy field which can be altered artificially. When this is done, the mass, in effect, makes an instantaneous transition to the corresponding other point in space. Energy being conserved, the mass retains the momentum—with respect to the general background of the galaxies—that it had prior to this transition, plus or minus an amount corresponding to the difference in gravitational potential.”

  It still sounds like number magic to me.

  But a lot of things seem magical. There are primitives who believe that by eating somebody they can acquire that person’s virtue. Well, you can train an animal, kill it, extract the RNA from its brain, put this into another animal, and the second beast will exhibit behavior characteristic of that same training.

  The clock showed Minute One. I cut the drive. We ran free, weight departed, silence clamped down on me like a hand.

  I stared out at the chaotic beauty which flamed to starboard. So long, galaxy, I thought. I’ll be seeing you again, in your entirety; only what I’ll see is you as you were a quarter of a million years ago.

  The time reeled toward Minute Two. I unfastened the safety lock and laid my gloved finger on the red button.

  Nothing came over the comsystem into my earplugs. We were each without words.

  Time.

  The shock was too horrible. I couldn’t react.

  No blackness, with the great spiral for background and a wan red star, glowing before us. A planet filled the screen.

  I saw the vision grow, kilometers per second; hurtling upon us or we upon it. Half was dark, half was mottled with landscape, agleam with waters, under a blood-colored day. No chance to reset the jump unit and escape, no chance to do anything but gape into the face of Death. A roaring filled my helmet. It was my own voice.

  Then Hugh Valland’s tone cut through, sword-like with what I should have cried. “Pilots! For God’s sake, reverse us and blast!”

  That jarred me loose from my stupor. I looked at the degree scale etched in the screen and the numbers on the radar meters, I made an estimate of vectors and ripped out my commands. The engine boomed. The planet swept around my head. Acceleration stuffed me down into my harness and sat on my chest. Unconsciousness passed in rags before my eyes.

  We had too much velocity to kill in what time remained. But we got rid of some of it, in those few minutes before we struck atmosphere; and we didn’t flash directly down, we entered at a low angle.

  With such speed, we skipped, as a stone is skipped across a river. Shock after shock slammed into us. Metal shrieked. The viewscreens filled with incandescence. This ungainly I hulk of a vessel was never meant to land. She was supposed to lie in orbit while our two ferries served her. But now she had to come down!

  Somehow, Bren and Galmer operated the pilot board. Somehow they kept the drive going, resisting our plunge, bringing us groundward in a fury that only sufficed to boil away our outer plates. When the main drive was ruined and quit, they used the steering units. When those went out, one by one, they used what was left. Finally nothing remained and we fell. But then we were so low, our speed so checked, that a man had some chance.

  I heard the bellowings, the protest and the breaking of steel. I felt the furnace heat from the inner bulkheads, through and through my spacesuit until lips cracked open and nasal passages were tubes of anguish. I saw the water below, and braced myself, and remembered I must not. Relax, float free, let harness and suit and flesh absorb the shock.

  We hit.

  I crawled back to awareness. My mouth was full of blood, which had smeared my faceplate so that it was hard to see out. One eye being swollen shut didn’t help. Hammers beat on every cell of me, and my left arm wouldn’t respond. I thought in a dull, vague way, My skull can’t really be split open ….

  The men!

  Nothing sounded except my own rattling breath. But surely, I cried, this was because the comsystem had been knocked out. Got to go see. Got to unstrap and find my men.

  I didn’t set my teeth against the pain of movement. That would have taken more control than I had, in my present state. I whimpered through the many minutes of fumbling. At last I slid free, onto the canted, buckled deck. I lay there a while before being able to get up and feel my way aft.

  The ship was dead. No screens functioned, no ventilators whispered, no lights glowed except the evershine panels spotted along the corridors. By their dim greenishness I stumbled and slipped, calling out names.

  After some part of eternity a human shape met me in the passage. Not quite human, a two-legged bulk with a grotesque glassy head; but the radio voice was Hugh Valland’s. “That you, skipper?” I clung to him and sobbed.

  “We’re lucky,” he told me. “I’ve been lookin’ us over. If we’d crashed in a sea we’d be done. The whole after section’s flooded. We’ve sunk. But the nose seems to be pokin’ out into air.”

  “How are the others?” I dared ask.

  “Can’t find anyone in the engine compartment,” he said grimly. “I took a flash and went into the water, but no trace, just a big half-melted hole in the side. They must’ve been carried out with the main reactor. So there’s two gone.” (Let me record their names here: Morn Krisnan and Roli Blax, good men.) Valland sighed. “Don’t seem like young Smeth’ll last long either.”

  Seven men, I thought, in poor shape, wrecked on a planet that every probability says is lethal for them.

  “I came through fairly well, myself,” Valland went on. “Suppose you join the rest. They’re in the saloon. I want to gander out of a lock. I’ll report to you.”

  The room where we met was a cave. One evershine, knocked out of its frame, had been brought in for light. It threw huge misshapen shadows across crumpled walls. Snags
of girders protruded like stalactites. The men slumped in their armor. I called the roll: Bren, Galmer, Urduga, Rorn. And Smeth, of course. He hadn’t left us yet.

  He was even conscious, more or less. They had laid him out on a bench as well as might be. I peered into his helmet. The skin looked green in what light we had, and the blood that bubbled from his mouth was black. But the eyeballs showed very white. I tuned up his radio for him and heard the harsh liquidity of his breathing.

  Rorn joined me. “He’s done,” he said without tone. “His harness ripped loose from the stanchions when they gave way, where he was, and he got tossed against a bulkhead. So his ribs are stove through his lungs and the spine’s broken.”

  “How do you know?” I challenged. “His suit’s intact, isn’t it?”

  Teeth gleamed in the murk that was Rorn’s face. “Captain,” he said, “I helped carry the boy here. We got him to describe how he felt, when he woke, and try to move his arms and legs. Look at him.”

  “Mother, mother,” said the gurgle in my earplugs.

  Valland came back. “The ferryboats are smashed too,” he said. “Their housin’s took the main impact. We won’t be leavin’ this planet soon.”

  “What’s outside?” I asked.

  “We’re in a lake. Can’t see the oppsite edge. But the waters fairly shallow where we are, and there’s a shore about two kilometers off. We can raft to land.”

  “For what?” Rorn flared.

  “Well,” Valland said, “I saw some aquatic animals jump. So there’s life. Presumably our kind of life, proteins in water solution, though of course I don’t expect we could eat it.”

  He stood a while, brooding in gloom, before he continued: “I think I can guess what happened. You remember the Yonderfolk said their system included a planet in the liquid-water thermal zone. The innermost one, with a mass and density such that surface gravity ought to be two-thirds Earth standard. Which feels about right, eh?”

  Only then did I notice. Every motion had hurt so much that nothing except pain had registered. But, yes, I was lighter than before. Maybe that was the reason I could keep my feet.

  “The Yonderfolk gave us information on each planet of this star,” Valland went on. “I don’t know exactly who made the big mistake. There was that language problem; and the the factor on Zara was in a hurry to boot. So my guess is, the Yonderfolk misunderstood him. They thought we wanted to land here first, it bein’ more comfortable for us; they even thought we had the means to land directly. So they supplied figures and formulas for doin’ just that. And we assumed they were tellin’ us how to find a nice, safe, convenient point way off from the sun, and cranked the wrong stuff into our computer.”

  He spread his hands. “I could be wrong,” he said. “Maybe the factor’s to blame. Maybe some curdbrain in the home office is. Fact remains, though, doesn’t it, that you don’t blindly jump toward a point in space—because you have to allow for your target star movin’. You use a formula. We got the wrong one.”

  “What do we do about it?” Rorn snapped.

  “We survive,” Valland said.

  “Oh? When we don’t even know if the air is breathable? We could light a fire, sure, and test for oxygen. But how about other gases? Or spores or—Argh!” Rorn turned his back.

  “There is that,” Valland admitted.

  He swung about and stared down at Smeth. “We have to unsuit him anyway, to see if we’ve got a chance to help him,” he said finally. “And we haven’t got time—he hasn’t—for riggin’ an Earth-atmosphere compartment. So—”

  He bent onto one knee, his faceplate close to the boy’s. “Enver,” he said gently. “You hear me?”

  “Yes … yes … oh, it hurts—” I could scarcely endure listening.

  Valland took Smeth’s hand. “Can I remove your suit?” he asked.

  “I’ve only had thirty years,” Smeth shrieked. “Thirty miserable years! You’ve had three thousand!”

  “Shut up.” Valland’s tone stayed soft, but I’ve heard less crack in a bullwhip. “You’re a man, aren’t you?”

  Smeth gasped for seconds before he replied, “Go ahead, Hugh.”

  Valland got Urduga to help. They took the broken body out of its suit, with as much care as its mother would have given. They fetched cloths and sponged off the blood and bandaged the holes. Smeth did not die till three hours later.

  At home, anywhere in civilization—perhaps aboard this ship, if the ship had not been a ruin—we might have saved him. We didn’t have a tissue regenerator, but we did have surgical and chemical apparatus. With what we could find in the wreckage, we tried. The memory of our trying is one that I plan to wipe out.

  Finally Smeth asked Valland to sing to him. By then we were all unsuited. The air was thin, hot and damp, full of strange odors, and you could hear the lake chuckle in the submerged compartments. Valland got his omnisonor, which had come through unscathed while our biogenic stimulator shattered. “What would you like to hear?” he asked.

  “I like … that tune … about your girl at home.”

  Valland hesitated barely long enough for me to notice. Then: “Sure,” he said. “Such as it is.”

  I crouched in the crazily tilted and twisted chamber, in shadows, and listened.

  “The song shall ride home on the surf of the starlight and leap to the shores of the sky,

  Take wing on the wind and the odor of lilies and Mary O’Meara-ward fly.

  And whisper your name where you lie.”

  He got no further than that stanza before Smeth’s eyes rolled back and went blind.

  We sank the body and prepared to leave. During the past hours, men who were not otherwise occupied had taken inventory and busied themselves. We still had many tools, some weapons, clothes, medicines, abundant freeze-dried rations, a knockdown shelter, any number of useful oddments. Most important, our food unit was intact. That was no coincidence. Not expecting to use it at once on Yonder, nor at all if our stay wasn’t prolonged, we had stowed it in the recoil-mounted midsection. With the help of torches run off the capacitors, as long as they lasted, the work gang assembled a pontoon raft. We could ferry our things ashore.

  “We’ll live,” Hugh Valland said.

  I gazed out of the lock, across the waters. The sun was low but rising, a huge red ember, one degree and nineteen minutes across, so dull that you could look straight into it. The sky was deep purple. The land lay in eternal twilight, barely visible to human eyes at this distance, an upward-humping blackness against the crimson sheen on the lake. A flight of creatures with leathery wings croaked hoarsely as they passed above us. The air was dank and tropical. Now that my broken arm was stadered, I could use it, but those nerves throbbed.

  “I’m not sure I want to,” I muttered.

  Valland spoke a brisk obscenity. “What’s a few years? Shouldn’t taken us any longer to find some way off this hell-ball.”

  I goggled at him. “Do you seriously believe we can?”

  He lifted his tawny head with so much arrogance that he wasn’t even aware of it, and answered: “Sure. Got to. Mary O’Meara’s waitin’for me.”

  VI

  THE SUN crept down almost too slowly to notice. We had days of daylight. But because the night would be similarly long and very dark, we exhausted ourselves getting camp established.

  Our site was a small headland, jutting a few meters above the shore and thus fairly dry. Inland the country ran toward a range of low hills. They were covered with trees whose broad leaves were an autumnal riot of bronzes and yellows, as far as we could identify color in this sullen illlumination. The same hues prevailed in those tussocky growths which seemed to correspond to grass, on the open stretch between woods and water, and in the reedy plants along the mud beach. But this was not due to any fall season; the planet had little axial tilt. Photosynthesis under a red dwarf star can’t use chlorophyll.

  We saw a good deal of wild life; and though the thin air deadened sound, we heard much more, off in the swam
ps to the north. But having only the chemical apparatus left to make a few primitive tests—which did show certain amino acids, vitamins and so forth missing, as you’d expect—we never ventured to eat local stuff. Instead we lived off packaged supplies until our food plant was producing.

  To get that far was our most heartbreaking job. In theory it’s quite simple. You fit together your wide, flat tanks, with their pumps and irradiator coils; you sterilize them, fill them with distilled water, add the necessary organics and minerals; you put in your cultures, filter the air intake, seal off the whole thing against environmental contamination, and sit back. Both phyto- and zooplankton multiply explosively till equilibrium is reached. They are gene-tailored to contain, between them, every essential of human nutrition. As needed, you pump out several kilos at a time, return the water, cook, flavor, and eat. (Or you can dispense with flavors if you must; the natural taste is rather like shrimp.) You pass your own wastes back through a processor into the tank so that more plankton can grow. The cycle isn’t one hundred percent efficient, of course, but comes surprisingly close. A good construction only needs a few kilos of supplementary material per year, and we had salvaged enough for a century, blessing the Guild law that every spaceship must be equipped fail-safe.

  Simple. Sure. When there are machines to do the heavy work, and machines to control quality, and it isn’t raining half the time, and you’re acclimated to air and temperature, and your nerves aren’t stretched wire-thin with looking for the menaces that instinct says must lurk all around, and you don’t keep wondering what’s the use of the whole dismal struggle. We had to assemble a small nuclear generator to supply current, and level a site for the tanks with hand shovels, and put up our shelter and a stockade, and learn about the planet faster than it could find new ways to kill us, simultaneously.

  About hazards: No carnivores attacked. A few times we glimpsed web-arctoid giants. They kept their distance; doubtless we smelled inedible to them and doubtless we were. But a horned thing, thrice the mass of a human, charged from the brush at Rorn and Galmer as they went surveying. They gave it the full blast of two heavy torchguns, and it didn’t die and didn’t die, it kept on coming till it collapsed a meter away, and then as they left it crawled after them for a long while …. Bren almost drowned in a mudhole. The ground was full of them, concealed by plants growing on their surface …. Urduga came near a sort of vine, which grabbed him. The sucker mouths couldn’t break his skin, but he couldn’t get loose either. I had to chop free; naturally we never left camp alone …. Though we had portable radios and gyrocompasses, we dreaded losing our way in these featureless marshlands …. From time to time we noticed bipedal forms skulk in the distant brush. They disappeared before we could bring optical aids to bear, but Galmer insisted he had glimpsed a spear carried by one of them. And without the main reactor, the ship’s heavy weapons were inert. We had a few sidearms, nothing else.