by Hank Davis
I sat there until I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Come on in.” I said without moving. Nothing happened. I listened carefully until I could hear his careful breathing. It was short, swift. He was trying to breathe in a whisper. I began to be really edgy. I had a nasty suspicion that if I whirled I would be just in time to catch a bolt from a by-by gun.
Clenching my jaw till my teeth hurt, I rose slowly, and without looking around, went to the power-output telltales and looked at them. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I’d never been this way before—always expecting attack from somewhere. I used to be a pretty nice guy. As a matter of fact, I used to be the nicest guy I knew. I didn’t feel that way any more.
Moving to the telltales took me another six or eight feet from the man at the door. Safer for both of us. And this way I had to turn around to get back to the table. I did. It wasn’t the skipper. It was the chemist, Harry Voight. We were old shipmates, and I knew him well.
“Hello, Harry. Why the dark companion act?”
He was tense. He was wearing a little mustache of perspiration on his upper lip. His peculiar eyes—the irises were as black as the pupils—were set so far back in his head that I couldn’t see them, for the alleyway light was directly over his head. His bald, bulging forehead threw two deep purple shadows, and out of them he watched me.
“Hi, Rip. Busy?”
“Not too busy. Put it in a chair.”
He came in and sat down. He turned as he passed me, backed into the pilot’s seat. I perched on the chart table. It looked casual, and kept my weight on one foot. If I had to move in any direction, including up, I was ready to.
After a time, he said, “What do you think of this, Rip?” His gesture took in the ship, Xantippe, the league, the board.
“I only work here.” I quoted. That was the motto of the navy. Our insignia is the league symbol superimposed on a flaming sun, under which is an ultraradio screen showing the words, “I only work here.” The famous phrase expresses the utmost in unquestioning, devoted duty.
Harry smiled a very sickly smile. If ever I saw a man with something eating him, it was Harry Voight. “S’matter?” I asked quietly. “Did somebody do you something?”
He looked furtively about him, edged closer. “Rip, I want to tell you something. Will you close the door?”
I started to refuse, and then reflected that regulations could stand a little relaxing in a coffin like this one. I went and pressed the panel, and it slid closed. “Make it snappy,” I said. “If the skipper comes up here and finds that door closed he’ll slap some wrists around here.”
As soon as the door closed, Harry visibly slumped. “this is the first time in two days I’ve felt—comfortable,” he said. He looked at me with sudden suspicion. “Rip—when we roomed together in Venus City, what color was that jacket I used to keep my ‘Naval Manual’ in?”
I frowned. I’d only seen the thing a couple of times— “Blue,” I said.
“That’s right.” He wiped his forehead. “You’re O.K.” He made a couple of false starts and then said, “Rip, will you keep everything I say strictly to yourself? Nobody can be trusted here—nobody!” I nodded. “Well,” he went on in a strained voice. “I know that this is a screwy trip. I know that the crew is—has been made—sort of—well, not normal—”
He said, with conviction, “The league has its own reason for sending us, and I don’t question them. But something has gone wrong. You think Xantippe is going to get us? Ha! Xantippe is getting us now!” He sat back triumphantly.
“You don’t say.”
“But I do! I know she’s countless thousands of light years away. But I don’t have to tell you of the power of Xantippe. For a gigantic power like that, a little project like what they’re doing to us is nothing. Any force that can throw out a field three quarters of a billion miles in diameter can play hell with us at a far greater distance.”
“Could be,” I said. “Just what are they doing?”
“They’re studying us,” he hissed. “They’re watching each of us, our every action, our every mental reflex. And one by one they are—taking us away! They’re got the Hartley twins, and Bort Brecht, and soon they’ll have me. I don’t know about the others, but their turns will come. They are taking away our personalities, and substituting their own. I tell you, those three men—and soon now, I with them—those men are not humans, but Xantippeans!”
“Now wait,” I said patiently. “Aren’t you going on guesswork. Nobody knows if Xantippe’s inhabited. And I doubt that this substitution you speak of can be done.”
“You don’t think so? For pity’s sake, Rip—for your own good, try to believe me! The Xantippean Field is a thought force, isn’t it? And listen—I know it if you don’t—this crew was picked for its hatred of Xantippe. Don’t you see why? The board expects that hatred to act as a mental ‘fender’—to partly ward off the field. They think there might be enough left of our minds when we’re inside the field to accomplish our objective. They’re wrong, Rip—wrong! The very existence of our communal hatred is the thing that has given us away. They have been ready for us for days now—and they are already doing their work aboard.”
He subsided, and I prodded him with gentle questions.
“How do you know the Xantippeans have taken away those three men?”
“Because I happened to overhear the Hartley twins talking in the messroom two days ago. They were talking about their orders. I know I should not have listened, but I was already suspicious.”
“They were talking about their orders? I understood that the orders were confidential.”
“They were. But you can’t expect the Hartleys to pay much attention to that. Anyway, Jo confided that a footnote on his orders had intimated that there was only one sane man aboard. Phil laughed that off. He said he knew he was sane, and he knew that Jo was sane. Now, I reason this way. Only a crazy man would question the league; a crazy man or an enemy. Now the Hartleys may be unbalanced, but they are still rational. They are still navy men. Therefore, they must be enemies, because navy men never question the league.”
I listened to that vague logic spoken in that intense, convincing voice, and I didn’t know what to think. “What about Bort Brecht—and yourself?”
“Bort! Ahh!” His lips curled. “I can sense an alien ego when I speak to him. It’s overwhelming. I hate Xantippe,” he said wildly, “but I hate Bort Brecht more! The only thing I could possibly hate more than Xantippe would be a Xantippean. That proves my point!” He spread his hands. “As for me—Rip, I’m going mad. I feel it. I see things—and when I do, I will be another of them. And then we will all be lost. For there is only one sane man aboard this ship, and that is me, and when I’m turned into a Xantippean, we will be doomed, and I want you to kill me!” He was half hysterical. I let him simmer down.
“And do I look crazy?” I asked. “If you are the only sane man—”
“Not crazy,” he said quickly. “A schizoid—but you’re perfectly rational. You must be, or you wouldn’t have remembered what color my book jacket was.”
I got up, reached out a hand to help him to his feet. He drew back. “Don’t touch me!” he screamed, and when I recoiled, he tried to smile. “I’m sorry, Rip, but I can’t be sure about anything. You may be a Xantippean by now, and touching me might . . . I’ll be going now . . . I—” He went out, his black, burning eyes half closed.
I stood at the door watching him weave down the alleyway. I could guess what was the matter. Paranoia—but bad! There was the characteristic persecution mania, the intensity of expression, the peculiar single-track logic—even delusions of grandeur. Hah! He thought he was the one mentally balanced man aboard!
I walked back to the chart table, thinking hard. Harry always had been pretty tight-lipped. He probably wouldn’t spread any panic aboard. But I’d better tip the captain off. I was wondering why the Hartley twins and Harry Voight had all been told that all hands but me were batty, when the skipper walked in.<
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“Rip,” he said without preamble. “Did you ever have a fight with Hoch McCory?”
“Good gosh, no!” I said. “I never saw him in my life until the day we sailed. I’ve heard of him, of course. Why?”
Parks looked at me oddly. “He just left my quarters. He had the most long-winded and detailed song and dance about how you were well known as an intersolar master saboteur. Gave names and dates. The names I know well. But the dates—well, I can alibi you for half of ’em. I didn’t tell him that. But—Lord! He almost had me convinced!”
“Another one!” I breathed. And then I told him about Harry Voight.
“I don’t imagine Doc Renn thought they would begin to break so soon,” said Parks when I had finished. “These boys were under laboratory conditions for three solid years, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I don’t know a damn thing that’s going on around here and I’d better learn something before I go off my kilter, too.”
“Why, Ripley,” he said mockingly. “You’re overwrought!” Well, I was. Parks said, “I don’t know much more than you do, but that goofy story of Harry Voight’s has a couple of pretty shrewd guesses in it. For instance, I think he was right in assuming that the board had done something to the minds of . . . ah . . . some of the crew as armor against the field. Few men have approached it consciously—those who have were usually scared half to death. It’s well known that fear forms the easiest possible entrance for the thing feared—ask any good hypnotist. Hate is something different again. Hate is a psychological block against fear and the thing to be feared. And the kind of hate that these guys have for Xantippe and the field is something extra special. They’re mad, but they’re not afraid—and that’s no accident. When we do hit the field, it’s bound to have less effect on us than it had on the crews of poor devils who tried to attack it.”
“That sounds reasonable. Er . . . skipper, about this ‘one sane man’ business. What do you think of that?”
“More armor,” said Parks. “But armor against the man himself. Harry, for instance, was made a paranoiac, which is a very sensible kind of nut; but at the same time he was convinced that he alone was sane. If he thought his mind had been actually tampered with instead of just—tested, he’d get all upset about it and, like as not, undo half the Psy Board’s work.”
Some of that struck some frightening chords in my memory. “Cap’n—do you believe that there is one sane, normal man aboard?”
“I do. One.” He smiled slowly. “I know what you’re thinking. You’d give anything to compare your orders with mine, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. But I won’t do it. Confidential. I couldn’t let myself do it even if you agreed, because—” I paused.
“Well?”
“Because you’re an officer and I’m a gentleman.”
In my bunk at last, I gave over wishing that we’d get to the field and have it over with, and tried to do some constructive thinking. I tried to remember exactly what Doc Renn had said, and when I did, I was sorry I’d made the effort. “You are sane,” and “You have been subjected to psychic forces that are sufficient to drive a normal man quite mad” might easily be totally different things. I’d been cocky enough to assume that they meant the same thing. Well, face it. Was I crazy? I didn’t feel crazy. Neither did Harry Voight. He thought he was going crazy, but he was sure he hadn’t got there yet. And what was “crazy,” anyway? It was normal, on this ship, to hate Xantippe so much that you felt sick and sweated cold when you thought of it. Paranoia—persecution. Did I feel persecuted? Only by the thought of our duty toward Xantippe, and the persecution was Xantippe, not the duty. Did I have delusions of grandeur? Of course not; and yet—hadn’t I blandly assumed that Voight had such delusions because he thought he was the one sane man aboard?
What was the idea of that, anyway? Why had the board put one sane man aboard—if it had? Perhaps to be sure that one man reacted differently to the others at the field, so that he could command. Perhaps merely to make each man feel that he was sane, even though he wasn’t. My poor, tired brain gave it up and I slept.
We had two casualties before we reached the field. Harry Voight cut his throat in the washroom, and my gentle old buddy, Seabiscuit, crushed in the back of Hoch McCoy’s head. “He was an Insurrectionist spy,” he insisted mildly, time and again, while we were locking him up.
After that, we kept away from each other. I don’t think I spoke ten words to anyone outside of official business, from that day until we snapped into galactic stasis near Betelgeuse. I was sorry about Hoch, because he was a fine lad. But my sorrow was tempered by the memory of his visit to the captain. There had been a pretty fine chance of his doing that to me.
In normal space once more, we maneuvered our agile little craft into an orbit about the huge sun and threw out our detectors. These wouldn’t tell us much when the time came, for their range wasn’t much more than the radium of the field.
The mad planet swam up onto the plates and I stared at it as I buzzed for the skipper. Xantippe was a strangely dull planet, even this close to her star. She shone dead silver, like a moonlit corpse’s flesh. She was wrinkled and patched, and—perhaps it was an etheric disturbance—she seemed to pulsate slowly from pole to pole. She wasn’t quite round: more nearly an ovoid, with the smaller end toward Betelgeuse! She was between two and three times the size of Luna. Gazing at her, I thought of the thousands of men of my own service who had fallen prey to her, and of the fine ships of war that had plunged into the field and disappeared. Had they crashed? Had they been tucked into some weird warp of space? Were they captives of some strange and horrible race?
Xantippe had defied every type of attack so far. She swallowed up atomic mines and torpedoes with no appreciable effect. She was apparently impervious to any rayed vibration known to man; but she was matter, and should be easy meat for an infragun—if you could get an infragun close enough. The gun’s twin streams of highly charged particles, positrons on one side, mesatrons on the other, would destroy anything that happened to be where they converged. But an infragun has an effective range of less than five hundred miles. Heretofore, any ship which carried the weapon that close to Xantippe carried also a dead or mindless crew.
Captain Parks called the crew into the control room as soon as he arrived. No one spoke much: they didn’t need any more information after they had glanced at the viewplate which formed the forward wall of the chamber. Bort Brecht, the swarthy engineer, wanted to know how soon we’d engage the field.
“In about two hours,” said the captain glibly. I got a two-handed grip on myself to keep from yapping. He was a cold-blooded liar—we’d hit it in half an hour or less, the way I figured it. I guessed that he had his own reasons. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on the crew that way.
Parks leaned casually against the integrators and faced the crew. “Well, gentlemen,” he said as if he were banqueting on Earth, “we’ll soon find out what this is all about. I have instructions from the league to place certain information at your disposal.
“All hands are cautioned to obey the obvious commander once we’re inside the field. That commander may or may not be myself. That has been arranged for. Each man must keep in mind the objective—the destruction of the Xantippean Field. One of us will lead the others toward that objective. Should no one seem to be in command a pro-tem captain is to be elected.”
Brecht spoke up. “Cap’n, how do we know that this ‘commander’ that has been arranged for isn’t Harry Voight or Hoch McCoy?”
“We don’t know,” said Parks gravely. “But we will. We will.”
Twenty-three minutes after Xantippe showed up on the plates, we engaged her field.
All hands were still in the control room when we plunged in. I remember the sudden weakness of my limbs, and the way all five of the others slipped and slid down to the deck. I remember the Biscuit’s quaver, “I tell you it’s all a dirty Insurrectionist plot.” And then I was down on the deck, too.<
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Something was hurting me, but I knew exactly where I was. I was under Dr. Grenfell’s torture machine; it was tearing into my mind, chilling my brain. I could feel my brains, every last convolution of them. They were getting colder and colder, and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon now they would burst my skull and the laboratory and the building and chill the Earth. Inside my chest I was hot, and of course I knew why. I was Betelgeuse, mightiest of suns, and with my own warmth. I warmed half a galaxy. Soon I would destroy it, too, and that would be nice.
All the darkness in Great Space came to me.
Leave me alone. I don’t care what you want done. I just want to lie here and— But nobody wanted me to do anything. What’s all the hollering about, then? Oh. I wanted something done. There’s something that has to be done, so get up, get up, get—
“He is dead. Death is but a sleep and a forgetting, and he’s asleep, and he’s forgotten everything, so he must be dead!” It was Phil Hartley. He was down on his hunkers beside me, shrieking at the top of his voice, mouthing and pointing like an ape completely caught up in the violence of his argument. Which was odd, because he wasn’t arguing with anybody. The skipper was sitting silently in the pilot’s chair, tears streaming down his cheeks. Jo Hartley was dead or passed out on the deck. The Biscuit and Bort Brecht were sitting on the deck holding hands like children, starring entranced into the viewplate. It showed a quadrant of Xantippe, filing the screen. The planet’s surface did indeed pulsate, and it was a beautiful sight. I wanted to watch it drawing closer and closer, but there was something that had to be done first.
I sat up achingly. “Get me some water,” I muttered to Phil Hartley. He looked at me, shrieked, and went and hid under the chart table.
The vision of Xantippe caught and held me again, but I shook it off. It was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen and it promised me all I could ever want, but there was something I had to do first. Maybe someone could tell me. I shook the skipper’s shoulder.