Crag turned to look that way, and swore. The sunward side of the spaceship glinted—far away. It was moving outward from the asteroid, getting smaller in the distance. Not under power; it was drifting, but drifting fast. Had he misjudged Olliver, after all? Was Olliver simply going away and leaving them to die as soon as the air supply of their suits was exhausted?
A sudden bellow of rage in his helmet radio answered the question for him. Olliver was still on the other side, the day side, of the asteroid and he had just seen the dwindling ship.
And at that moment a hand closed on Crag’s arm, and Judeth’s voice said, “Crag, I’m sorry. I had to push it off. There wasn’t a chance for us to get into it; the hatch was way on his side, the day side, and he’d have—”
“Wait,” Crag said.
He groped in the darkness until he found the switch of her helmet radio, turned it off, and then his own. He leaned forward so the front plate of his helmet touched hers and said, “While our helmets touch we can hear one another, and Olliver can’t hear us. You can hear me?”
“Yes.” her voice was flat, but not frightened. “But what does it matter about Olliver? We’re all dead, all three of us. I’m sorry, Crag. I had to do it.”
“What did you do with the heatgun?”
“My pocket. Here. But it’s not loaded.”
Crag took it and hefted it. It was a little lighter than the missile he would have preferred, but his spacesuit kept him from using that one. He thought he’d be able to throw the gun fairly straight.
He said, “Wait here,” and squeezed Judeth’s arm gently, then turned and started back for the day side. The asteroid was shrinking fast now, only about twenty feet in diameter. He had to crouch to keep his head from showing as he neared the borderline between light and darkness. Then, as he stood only a step away from the edge, he abruptly straightened, the gun held back ready to throw.
Olliver stood there, turning in a tight circle, trying to watch all sides at once. The gun left Crag’s hand, and didn’t miss; Olliver’s helmet shattered.
He took a deep breath and walked the rest of the way. He turned on the radio switch of his helmet and called out, “Judeth. Is your radio on? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Crag.” She was coming. She looked down at Olliver’s body and shuddered. “He was a mad dog, Crag. And yet—I wasn’t sure, clear till the last minute, after we landed here. I suspected him, but I was never sure, until then. I thought maybe he really meant—”
“Was he right about you being a spy for the Guild Party?”
“No. Nor for anyone else. I fell in love with him and married him, three years ago. And I believed in his new party that was going to end corruption and bring back decent government.”
“You were still in love with him?”
“No, not for months now. Almost a year. But by the time I’d fallen out of love, I’d begun to suspect him. And stuck with him in case I was right and in case I could stop him. And thank God I did. He’d have destroyed most of the human race just to have absolute rule over whatever was left of it. You consider yourself a criminal, Crag; you’re not one at all, compared to him.”
She turned to stare up at the dwindling spaceship. “There’s no chance of your reaching it and bringing it back?”
“Not now. I could jump after it, but the chance of hitting it would be one in a million.” He picked up Olliver’s fallen heatgun. “If this was a reactor gun, so I could steer myself in space—but it isn’t, and a heat gun doesn’t help. Well—”
“Crag, we’ve got to destroy that disintegrator. There’s only a chance in a billion that our bodies will ever be found here, but if they are, that’ll be found too and—someone might discover what it is and get the same idea Olliver had.”
“All right.” Crag reached down and went through pockets of Olliver’s space suit, came up with the disintegrator. “Guess this heatgun will melt it to a lump of—Wait, might as well use it first. This small world of ours is getting smaller. No use having it unnecessarily crowded.”
He flipped the thumb switch of the disintegrator, held it a foot above Olliver’s body, moved it slowly from the shattered helmet to the space-booted feet. “We don’t need him for company, do we?”
“Crag, a wonderful idea. Will you use it on me in a few minutes?”
“A few minutes? The air in these suits should be good for another half hour, Judeth. Why be in a hurry?”
“My air’s giving out already, Crag. Olliver must have tampered with it as well as with the charge in the heatgun I had in my spacesuit pocket. He must have known I’d turn against him when he told us his plans. Even if he didn’t really think I was a spy.”
Her breath was coming hard now. “Crag, you will use the disintegrator on me, please? I just don’t want to be found ever, looking the way a woman looks when she asphyxiates.”
“Sure,” Crag said.
“And—I’m afraid, Crag. Will you put your arms around me?”
He did, and he didn’t hate her at all.
She clung to him. She was panting now, fighting for every breath. She said, “Good-by, Crag, I won’t make you listen to—” She shut off her helmet radio.
Less than a minute later she was limp in his arms. Crag put her down gently and, as she had requested him to do, used the disintegrator. This time he didn’t watch.
Then he put the disintegrator down, used Olliver’s heatgun on it for a full minute at only a few inches, until it was a shapeless bubbling blob of molten metal.
His little world was almost too small to stand on now, but for another few minutes he managed to stand, looking upward at the bright little stars in the big black sky. He was breathing hard now; the oxygen in his own suit was nearly exhausted now and he didn’t have more than another ten minutes or so to live. Judeth must have been wrong in thinking that air had been taken from her supply deliberately; Olliver would have had no reason to short the supply in Crag’s. Probably both or even all three suits had been short of oxygen through Olliver’s negligence, which wouldn’t have mattered had the spaceship remained for them to return to.
The asteroid was less than a yard in diameter now, and Crag gave up trying to stand on it and sat down.
And smaller, until he got off it and looked and laughed at the poor shrinking thing, the world that had been an asteroid as big as Olliver’s house when they’d landed on it.
Fought for breath and got ready to die. Alone, but that didn’t matter, so long had he lived alone.
Held the small world in his hand now, the size of an orange. Laughed a final time as he put it in the pocket of his space suit, wondering what they’d ever make of finding it there, a three-inch ball with hundreds of tons of mass, if they ever found him here.
Slid into blackness as dark as the sky but unrelieved by stars.
And died.
CHAPTER SIX
ENTERING his several millionth solar system, he had expected nothing unusual. Why should he have? It seemed like any other.
He passed two cold dead giant planets, one with a ring around it. He had seen many such, and knew how they had been formed. He passed the orbit of Jupiter, but Jupiter was on the other side of the sun; otherwise, on certain of Big Jupe’s moons, he might have encountered sooner that for which he had long since ceased to search, life other than his own.
Next toward the still distant yellow sun, a belt of asteroids. Chunks of rock like him, but unlike him, only lifeless rock, unthinking, insentient. Some many times larger than he, some much smaller. In such a belt of orbiting asteroids he himself had been one of thousands until had happened the molecular accident that, billions of years ago, had brought consciousness to him and had made him unlike the others.
This belt had been formed the same way and was no different, he thought at first. Then, suddenly:
From only light-seconds away, at a point along the inner edge of the asteroid belt, he perceived something. Something confused and muddled, but which was, which had to be consciousness. Alien con
sciousness. Another being besides himself. Or beings; there seemed to be several of them.
Quickly he dropped into subspace and almost instantaneously reappeared in normal space a dozen miles from the point from which he had detected these emanations of consciousness. It was an asteroid, a small one. He matched his speed to its and maintained his distance from it, to observe. His reason for not approaching closer was not caution; it was simply that at this convenient distance he could observe as well as from any nearer point; he could perceive, through a sense that was not sight for he had no seeing organs, not only the outward appearance but the very arrangement of the molecules of the asteroid and the things or beings upon it or attached to it.
He was aware that a change was taking place in the molecular arrangement of the asteroid itself, a simple chain reaction that was collapsing not only the molecules but the very atoms of which the molecules were made in upon themselves, a reaction that once started would now continue until the asteroid was reduced to a tiny chunk of collapsed matter a minute fraction of the original size of the original form of the asteroid. This did not hold his interest; he was familiar with such reactions and could himself instigate or reverse them.
Nor did his interest center upon the subject moored to the collapsing asteroid, although in the absence of the alien life forms, it would have interested him considerably in that, by the fact that it was an artificial construction, it would have been his first discovery of evidence that sentient beings other than himself existed anywhere in the universe. But here were the sentient beings themselves and he concentrated his scannings upon them. One of them was at that very moment detaching the mooring line of the artificial construction from the asteroid and giving it an impetus that sent it drifting out into space.
The being in question, and the other two like it, were, he perceived, themselves encased within smaller constructions. Most parts of these smaller constructions, he could tell from their molecular structure, were flexible. As were most parts of the bodies of the beings inside the constructions. Strange, complicated bodies they were. And fragile, so fragile; there was an arrangement to produce heat within the constructions that housed them, and they held a gas; apparently both the gas and heat were necessary to these beings. He analyzed the gas and found it to be mostly oxygen and carbon dioxide; there were traces of other elements. The beings drew this gas into their bodies and exhaled it less much of its oxygen content; a container of concentrated oxygen automatically replaced the oxygen absorbed by the bodies inside the constructions. It seemed a very strange and limiting arrangement. There were planets, many of them, with oxygen atmospheres and with the degree of heat the construction supplied and held in. On such planets these beings could live without the artificial casings that now held them and it came to him that they must be from such a planet—possibly inhabited by others like them—and that their presence here on an airless asteroid in the cold of space was temporary, their casings designed to permit survival in—
Survival? Whence had that concept come to him? Until now, death had been a meaningless concept, one that had never occurred to him, but now suddenly he knew what it meant and knew that these beings he was observing lived for a short time only and then ceased to be. And that he now knew this was only in part a deduction from the study of their physical bodies, so it meant that their thoughts—at first a meaningless jumble of utterly alien concepts—were beginning to be understandable to him.
And then, quite suddenly, there were only two beings, two focuses of consciousness. One of the three had quite suddenly—died. His body had suddenly become a piece of lifeless rather than living matter. Another of the three had propelled an object that had broken a rigid and shatterable part of the first one’s protective casing, and this had been the result. Now a device was being used on the dead one and his casing that was setting up the chain reaction of molecular collapse. Apparently these people had only slight mental powers, to use a physical contraption for so simple a matter.
He concentrated his study on the two remaining. One of them seemed to be having—the concept pain came to him, although he did not yet understand it fully—and the pain seemed to be connected with the fact that the oxygen content of the gas within its casing was lessening. And since the reserve of oxygen seemed exhausted, this being, too, would soon die, and he concentrated his study upon it while it lasted, which wasn’t long.
The remaining one again used the device and again there wasn’t even a body left. Were these creatures all so ephemeral?
Now, with only one of them left, the thoughts were more nearly clear. Completely alien concepts, though. With another device, one for producing heat, this last one was destroying the thing that had produced molecular collapse in the bodies of the first two.
Why? Again, he tried to probe the surviving mind, and found the thoughts confusing. They were completely alien concepts, behind which he sensed something fierce and wild. And then something calm and waiting, and again the pain. And nothing. The third being had ceased to be.
It had all happened so incredibly quickly. After these eons to have found three living beings, three sentient entities, and then to have had them all three flicker out as quickly as meteorites entering an atmosphere! For a moment he considered going on, searching for the planet from which these beings, he had already deduced, must have come. But there was something else he could try first.
Carefully and leisurely he examined the structure of the body of the last of the three to die, and the only one of the three which had not been disintegrated. Closely studied, much became obvious. He found two spongy organs that held air and muscles that gave bellows action to draw in the air and push it out again. He synthesized oxygen and teleported it into the casing’s oxygen container and then activated the muscles that controlled the spongy organs. The being breathed. Simultaneously he activated an organ of heavy muscle which served as a pump to circulate a stream of fluid throughout the body. After a while he found he could cease to activate those muscles and they continued of themselves.
The top or conscious level of the being’s mind remained dormant, passive, but the creature lived. He probed into the lower, the memory level of the mind and found with satisfaction that now, without the conflict of emotion or surface thought, his task was much easier. In Crag’s memories he found the answers to his questions about the puzzling series of events upon the asteroid. He learned who the other two beings had been and why the three of them had been there.
He learned everything Crag remembered of Crag’s own history and everything Crag had ever read or heard of human and planetary history, even the things Crag’s conscious mind had long since forgotten. He got to know Crag, in the process, better than one entity has ever known another.
And, in the process, he found that he was no longer alone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRAG awoke as an animal wakes, suddenly and completely aware of himself. But things were wrong—rather, things were right that should have been wrong—and he neither opened his eyes nor moved a muscle. He was breathing air, and he shouldn’t have been. He’d been dying for lack of it; he should be dead now instead of awakening.
Besides that, he was lying on hard rock, with enough of a gravitational pull to hold his space suit as firmly against it as though he was on Earth again. Not even the largest asteroid had that strong a gravity; could he be back on Earth? Another spaceship could conceivably have found him and picked him up before he died, the air in his suit could have been replenished, but…it didn’t make sense. His space suit would have been taken off him long before making planetfall. Or—another possibility occurred to him; he could be lying on a pile of rock in the ore locker of one of the wildcat mining ships that worked the asteroid belt for uranium and—
“No, Crag,” said a voice inside his mind. “You are safe, but you are neither on Earth nor on a ship.”
Crag opened his eyes and looked up—into space. Into blackness lighted by untwinkling stars and a distant sun. He sat up and looked aro
und him. Again he was on the surface of an asteroid, but this time a much larger one. From what he could see of it from a sitting position, it was possibly up to a mile in diameter—but still far too small to have a gravity field equal to, or anywhere near, the normal Earth-gravity he was feeling.
“The gravity is artificial, Crag,” said the voice inside his mind. “About the strength of that of your native planet. Would you prefer a lesser one, like that of the fourth planet, the one you think of as Mars?”
“Who are you?” Crag asked aloud. He wondered for a brief moment if he was really dead, and if this was some mad, weird dream in an afterlife; then he discarded the idea. This was real, and he was not dead.
“I have no name,” said the voice. “I am what you think of as an asteroid on which you are sitting. And, in a sense, I am an asteroid, but from another solar system very far from here. But I am a sentient being, as you are.”
“Siliceous life?” Crag asked. “But why did you—?”
“Is life based on silica any stranger than life based on carbon? As to why I saved you—brought you back to life, really—call it curiosity, if nothing more. You are the first alien being I ever encountered.”
“Then—you came along and found me after what happened on the—the other asteroid?”
“While it was happening. But it was only confusion to me, until it was all over; I did not know what was going on there. I know everything that happened, though, now, from your thoughts and memories while you slept after I brought you back to life. You’re finding it difficult to believe all this, but it is true. And you are not dead nor are you now dreaming.” There was a slight pause and then the voice said, “That space suit is hurting you; you’ve had it on too long. Shall I enclose an atmosphere inside a force field so you can take it off for a while?”
“I’m all right,” Crag said. He started to get to his feet, but found himself pinned to the ground by one side of his space suit, the side which had the pocket into which he had put the collapsed smaller asteroid. He grinned and said, “Except that I’m stuck. I’ve got a few hundred tons in my pocket, in this gravity. Could you unstick me?”
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