by Hank Davis
And so here I was. A month trip. All I had to do was survive a month.
“Have you ever thought,” Jack said. He crossed the common room that was all we had outside the engine room and the storage room for our found materials, and dove into the cupboard for a piece of cheese. Hard cheese. He bit into it, leaving the mark of his teeth in the white-yellowness of the cheese. “Have you ever thought,” he said, “that the monsters were there; that they moved on? They were there when man first woke, when man first said I am, there in the darkness of the cave away from the camp fire, waiting, waiting. Any human who wandered away from the camp fire was slash, cut, gash.” He made vicious motions with the hand holding the piece of cheese. “Nothing but the remains found in the morning, half-eaten.”
“I imagine there were tigers and bears and stuff,” I said. I’d almost said saber-tooth tigers, but then I wasn’t sure if those had lived at the same time as humans. Natural history modules were extra and not needed for a space ship navigator. “Waiting to snack on a human,” I said. “But not supernatural monsters.”
Jack quirked an eyebrow at me. He had bushy eyebrows, very white, like the tentacles that grow over the eyes of certain dark-dwelling fish, and which give a sort of light to move by. “No?” he said. “But what if there were? And what is supernatural, exactly? Just a word people use to hide what they can’t explain. There’s always things people can’t explain. Imagine that there were those things, there, in the dark, waiting for humans to stray beyond safety and then—”
“I won’t suppose anything of the sort,” I said. “Stop trying to scare me. Did you fix the engine?”
He shoved the rest of the cheese in his mouth, wiped his fingers to the coveralls, leaving crumbs of cheese behind amid the oil smears. He waggled his hand at me. “Almost,” he said. “I can keep the artificial gravity on and the air purifying, but we’re still not moving. We’re marooned here. I’ll go do battle with it again.”
The engine room swallowed him. He left the door open, though, so he could talk. I wondered why he was talking to me about monsters, and figured it was part hazing since I didn’t quite belong to his world and never would, and part to keep himself amused while he worked.
I knew how to repair engines, too, at least in theory. I’d taken the module just before coming on this trip. But I didn’t know what had happened to the Gone Done It in the fifty years since she’d left the factory, and I doubted very much that her entrails resembled much of anything that the modules had shown me.
Jack had changed her, at least for the last thirty years, and he should know her way around her twisted, convoluted interior.
“Consider, young Pete, consider. Perhaps there were things out there. Why else would our ancestors write about them, our oldest songs and legends sing of them: of things of claw and tooth and scale, of night and infinite malice. Suppose they were made of something not-flesh, something our ancestors couldn’t kill. Consider they were rivals with humans—rival intelligences, zealously defending their space against the curious monkey-minds. When humans left the campfire, the place all other human minds know, the place all other humans tell each human he is safe and lit and rational, then these things pounce. They pounce in defense of their lair, of their secret dark. They kill and rend in order to be allowed to go on living.”
He banged something. It sounded like he was hitting metal hard with a hammer, and then there was a series of pings, that sounded like he’d managed to loosen a piece and was pulling it around, the other way, slowly. “They were there,” his voice came above the other sounds. “In the dark of the cave. But then more and more humans ventured out into that dark, humans learned to make torches, take the fire with them, make the darkness less dark.
“And the monsters fled, before the light of the torches, before the certainty of the human minds that they were safe. They gathered in distant lands, in forests, in plains where they could ambush the human mind, feed on human fear. The few who ventured there and survived brought out stories. Fearful stories of those who lurked there. They came with claw and tentacle and with tearing fang, and humans ran back with stories and warnings. Don’t go into the forest, they said. And don’t stray far from the shore. And maps were drawn with vast areas marked Here there be dragons.
“But the humans came, over hill, around trees. They came in numbers, in family groups, in migratory bands. They cut down trees and built among them. What had been strange and wonderful became familiar, safe. The dangerous animals were killed and the suggestion of fangs, the shadow of claws retreated. The monsters retreated, to the cold, salty, trackless deep ocean, hovering over the unexplored waters. Till the humans went there too, and above the Earth, in the sky. And then the monsters fled, still further.
“These things were chased from Earth,” Jack put his head in the opening of the door, and grinned at me, a pantomime devil, his forehead sooted with machine oil, his eyes slanted and amused, and I thought he was laughing at me. This was almost all hazing, and he was laughing at me, amused at my discomfiture, waiting for my reaction. “Do you ever wonder?” he asked me, and raised his tumultuous eyebrows at me. “Do you ever wonder where they went? Where they are?”
“I imagine they went back to hiding under beds and scaring children,” I said, sardonically.
He went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “They went out to the dark of space, to the unknown land out there—claw and wing, tentacle and fang. They wait out here, they wait—”
There was a particularly loud and vicious clang. “There will never be enough of us out here, far enough out here, to carry our light, our certainty of safety. Even the asteroid miners . . . How many are there at any time? A hundred? Fewer? Most places still send up robots to do the mining. It’s more loss of robots and time, more wasted trips, but fewer lives lost. There’s few of us, and space is immense. Out here—” Another clang, which gave me the impression that he’d gestured wide with his hand and hit something nearby. “Out here, they can live, undisturbed, they can spread and mutate and grow. They’ve found a place where we can’t overwhelm them, we can’t despoil them. They found their realm of cold and dark. We’re as nothing here. And when we venture here, they pounce—they come at us, to avenge their old wrong, their stolen paradise. We pushed them from the warm nights of Earth to here, and in the process we made them harder, sharper, more malicious. And they wait—for us.”
I sighed, and let my sigh be really audible. “I’m not going to be scared, Jack, I really am not. Did you tell these stories to my father? Was he scared?”
There was something like a short bark of laughter, and then, “I didn’t have to tell your father anything. He knew it already. There was this time, out in the belt—”
And then his voice died away, and a triumphant “aha!” came back, and there was a clang, and Jack came out, looking like he’d been crawling around in someone’s chimney, soot on his hair, soot marking his white eyebrows. He threw a wrench on the floor of the main cabin, and retreated to the fresher in the corner, with its vibro-clean.
I picked up the wrench and set it in the tool cabinet. When I’d come into the Gone Done It, there had been tools everywhere, and bits and pieces of material used for repairs. I’d tagged, organized it, put it away, and kept it put away, with no help from Jack. No wonder, I thought, the man dreamed of monsters hiding in dark and cluttered places. He’d been living in a dark and cluttered place when I’d got here.
That night we ate some dried fish, and a bit of hard bread. Food for asteroid miners was about as good as food had been for mariners. At least we didn’t have to drink grog, though given the Gone Done It’s ancient purification arrangements, it didn’t do to dwell too long on where the water we drank came from. And we didn’t.
We ate, and then we went to bed. The beds let down from the wall, each with a thin mattress and an ancient blanket that smelled as much of oil and soot as the rags that Jack used in the engine room.
We were in bed, one on either side of the cabin, when Jack s
aid, “There was this one time, out in the belt—”
He sounded thoughtful, reminiscent, not at all like he’d sounded when he’d oh so obviously been trying to scare me. “Your father was standing guard—”
I didn’t say anything. It was one of those things. I knew Jack and Dad had taken some trips together. It was part of the reason that Jack had given me this chance at a trip, even though I was completely inexperienced. But the father I remembered was the man who came home with substantial funds for our account, the man who sat quietly, reading. The man who made Mother smile, and who never raised his voice to me.
I’d been torn, since I’d come on the ship with Jack, afraid of what he’d say. It sounds stupid and cowardly, but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hear the man who was so neat at home had left tools and wrenches all over in the Gone Done It. It would be like looking at a side of him that my father had kept quiet, like peeking into someone who had been part of my father, but not the part Mother and I knew.
So I stayed quiet, and Jack was quiet a long time, and it seemed to me that he’d fallen asleep, but then he went on as though he’d been talking all alone, as though he spoke out of a deeper silence, as though I were remembering or seeing the same things he was remembering and seeing, and all he needed to do was give me a few words to remind me. “If he hadn’t been so fast on the uptake, Pete, the truth is, neither the Gone Done It nor I would be here. But it was all the work of a moment. By the time I came in, he’d chopped off the part of the thing that was inside the engine room, and he’d stopped the leak, and the only thing to say something odd had happened was that tentacle . . . It was the oddest thing, Pete . . . writhing and alive, but not flesh at all. It was as if it were made of darkness, built of shadow and gathered fear.
“When I turned the lights on, it vanished, but it left an icy feel in the air. An icy feel.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t asleep and talking out of a nightmare. Surely what he was talking about was a nightmare. My father—
If my father had seen something that fantastic, he would have spoken. When I talked of going to the stars, he would have warned me. Surely—
There was no time to dwell on it, and in the morning I woke to Jack shaking me. He’d fixed the sensors, and we’d located an asteroid that was all platinum and some rare isotopes, and he wanted my help with the robots, to do the mining.
Asteroid mining is not a physical occupation, not even when humans go out as miners. You don’t put on your spacesuit and step out, and grunt and sweat with your pickax, to extract minerals from the wandering space junk. No, you use the sensors to detect the ore or the minerals or the rare Earths. And then you send out a probe that brings the stuff in to be analyzed and confirm your find. And finally you send little robots out, an army of ant-shaped homunculi who crawled all over the asteroid and cleaned it of anything that might be valuable on Earth.
I was better at controlling the harvesting robots than Jack was. Visual acuity and hand-eye coordination get worse with age. It fell to me to spend three days in front of the screen, manipulating the buttons and the pad, working to get those robots to harvest every last particle of saleable stuff, and to store it in our holds.
It was a small asteroid—maybe twenty feet across. But ours was a small ship. Once I was done, exhausted, my eyes burning from strain, my hands shaking from the days and days of close in work, the holds were full. And all I wanted was to sleep.
Jack had rested, and slept and played solitary while I harvested, and now he took over, as I crawled into my bed and fell into a sleep full of images of robots moving across the uncertain, flickering screen of the Gone Done it, my hand still reflexively moving, in my sleep, trying to gather more wealth into the hold, trying—
Jack meanwhile woke, and got on the controls. The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll take her home now, Pete. I’ll take us home now, son.”
I don’t know how long I slept. I thought it might have been hours, but it could as well be days. I hadn’t slept at all while harvesting, because we didn’t have the tech to hold onto the asteroid, and we had to harvest while we could, while we could follow its orbit, and before a smaller asteroid—or larger—hit against our relatively fragile side. Asteroid hits were always a danger in the asteroid belt, and probably the reason why the profession was considered hazardous, the one reason beyond the radiation why so few miners made old bones.
You couldn’t harden these small mining ships enough while keeping them light enough to carry ore and valuables back to Earth in quantity enough to justify the trip. Instead, every ship was provided with quick patches and fast-fix-it for the walls, and you hoped the meteor that hit you wouldn’t be big enough to take the ship out, and that it wouldn’t hit anyone on the way through the ship.
The Gone Done It had so many quick patches on her walls that there might be more of them than of the original walls. I knew no one had ever died in it. Which meant, I guess, it was better to be lucky than good.
I slept—I rocked in an ocean of deep and dark slumber, in a dream full of small asteroids zooming and dancing around the Gone Done It, slowly metamorphosing into dragons and ants and things with claws, dancing, safe, in the dark of space.
I don’t know how long.
I know I woke. I woke startled and shocked, from deep, dark sleep to wide awake, sitting on my bed, heart hammering, eyes open, trying to see into darkness.
There had been a sound. A clang.
An asteroid strike. It had to be an asteroid strike. I called into the darkness, “Jack?” but there was no sound. No. I lie. There was a sound. The sound was a whoosh, as though every wind on Earth had gathered there, to blow into the ship. No. To blow out of the ship.
Before the pressure and air alarm sounded its first jangling peep, I was up, and halfway in the space suit.
Bolting the helmet on, turning on my oxygen, I lurched into the engine room where the steering apparatus was, the place where Jack would be when he was driving us out of the asteroid belt, carefully trying to avoid just this kind of—
Just this kind of disaster. There was a hole on the wall in the engine room. Jack was on the floor, unconscious. I thought he was bleeding but it was hard to tell. It could be true. Or it could be that he’d passed out through lack of oxygen. It was probably pretty low in here, while the air hissed outside the ship.
I groped for the hole. And that’s when I felt it: the tentacle wrapped around my waist, pulling out. There was a claw clamped around my ankle. I saw, through my visor, fearful and intent, a large, slitty yellow eye, something like a malevolent cat, full of fury and vengeance.
The tentacle squeezed. The claw would pierce through the suit. There was a suggestion of teeth, a feeling of things, small, large, hungry, gnawing at the space suit.
I screamed. And then I reached for the emergency lights. As the tentacle dragged me inexorably, my hand fell on the button for the emergency light.
The light would have been turned off in here, of course, while we were underway, to allow Jack to concentrate on the screens that showed the view all around the ship. So he could avoid—
My hand, in its heavy glove, found the button and punched it.
For just a moment there was the feeling of tightening, of harder clawing. Then a shriek like a million damned forced out into the outer darkness.
The outer darkness—
Light coming on must have startled them. I had time to pull away from the tentacle, the claw, the myriad malevolent teeth without mouths that were trying to eat me into a maw of darkness.
And then by rote, without even glancing at Jack, without looking at the things of darkness and cold, insubstantial but real, which filled the engine room, I applied patch and fast-fix-it. I slammed the controls to bring the emergency oxygen into circulation.
I fixed, I cleaned, I made all safe.
I didn’t go to Jack till it was all done, because I had a feeling what I would find. It was as I’d expected. The old miner was dead, on the
floor, sprawled like a broken doll, his skin gone the pallor of a landed fish, his eyes wide open and staring at some unimaginable horror.
What I wasn’t expecting, what I wasn’t prepared for, was his wounds: A hundred piercings, a thousand cruel rents where claw and fang had gone in.
I gave him a burial in space, as best I could, and I cleaned the floor of the engine room, and I tried to forget the brief view I had when the lights came on, of tentacle and claw and fang.
I never spoke of it. Won’t speak of it. What good would it do? At best people would think I was playing an hoax on them . . . At worst—
There was enough money, even when I’d split with Jack’s widow, to get me the module to become a navigator.
The bigger ships, the interstellar ones that do commerce with the colonies are well-armored enough. There’s no reason to fear the sort of asteroid strike that was carefully recorded in the log book of the Gone Done It as having caused Jack’s death.
There is nothing to fear. I’m told that our interstellar ships are some of the safest forms of transportation. You stand a better chance of dying on Earth from having an asteroid fall on your head out of a clear blue sky than you stand of dying in one of these.
Deaths happen, of course. Nothing is ever completely safe. We lose a ship or three every few decades. But the causes, though often not explained, simply because the ships can’t be recovered from the immensity of space, are usually obvious and mundane: engine failure, human error and, often presumed, simply landing in a place other than where the ship meant to go. Not hard to do with quantum ships that navigate the n-dimensional folds of an infinite space.
My cabin in the interstellar ship is large, well appointed, bigger than my parents’ house, back on Earth.
It’s impossible that, lying there, snug in my comfortable bed, I can actually hear anything through the thick walls of the ship.
And yet, often and often I wake in the night, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. If anyone heard of these night terrors, they’d invalid me out of the service as unstable, so I tell no one.