by Hank Davis
“All right, Hartigan.”
A hurried fretful voice. Come on, Moon; report that, as always, nothing has happened.
“Lunar conditions the same,” said Hartigan. “No ships have put in, or have reported themselves as being in distress. The hangar is in good shape, with no leaks.”
“Right,” said Stacey, in the voice of a busy man. “Supplies?”
“You might send up a blonde.”
“Be serious, please. Supplies?”
“I need some new power bulbs.”
“I’ll send them on the next ship. Nothing irregular to report?”
Hartigan hesitated.
On the floor of the main airlock was a mound of burned, bluish mineral substance giving no indication whatever that it had once possessed outlandish, incredible life. In the walls of the hangar, at the base were half a dozen new dents, but ricocheting meteors might have made those. The meteoric shell from which this bizarre animal had come had been devoured, so even that was not left for investigation.
He remembered the report of the board of science on Stuyvesant.
“Therefore, in our judgment, Benjamin Stuyvesant suffered from hallucination—”
He would have liked to help Stuyvesant. But on the other hand Stuyvesant had a job with a second-hand space-suit store now, and was getting along pretty well in spite of Spaceways’ dismissal.
“Nothing irregular to report?” repeated Stacey.
Hartigan stared, with one eyebrow sardonically raised, at the plump brunette on the pin Radio Gazette cover pasted to the wall. She stared coyly back over a bare shoulder.
“Nothing irregular to report,” Hartigan said steadily.
Hank Davis
When an editor includes a story of his own in a book (a possibly disreputable but nonetheless common practice), a certain diffidence accompanied by a bit of foot-shuffling is in order, as when one is seen in public doing something legal but not quite respectable. So, I’ll just mention that this turned out as a combination of Keith Laumer and H.P. Lovecraft, two writers who loom huge in my mental landscape. Of course, Laumer would have done it better, at least before his stroke, and while Lovecraft appreciated what he called “the interplanetary story” (as when he heaped praise on C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau”), he never showed any interest in writing such yarns himself. Maybe if his beloved Providence had established a colony on another planet . . .
Hank Davis is an editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old!), he was led astray by sf comic books, and then by A. E. van Vogt’s Slan, which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog, If, F&SF, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions, but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.
VISITING SHADOW
Hank Davis
“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate . . . He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again . . . and why no one can behold Them as They tread. . . . Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.”
—from The Necronomicon,
quoted in “The Dunwich Horror” by H.P. Lovecraft
If the planet hadn’t reminded me so much of Earth, they might not have gotten me. But it did. And they did. I was being stupid, of course.
The Shadow wasn’t there at the time, or I don’t know what might have happened. Maybe nothing different. But it hadn’t been at the edge of my vision for a couple of days, so I took a chance, docked the Dutchman at the Tucker Station at the L5 point, and stepped through the airlock.
I don’t know where the thing goes when it’s away, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know why it . . . takes . . . other people, but not me. So far.
I wasn’t going down to the planet, of course. Even if it hadn’t been blue with white clouds, like Earth, and the clouds hid the shapes of the continents enough so that, if I didn’t look too close, it might be Earth. I didn’t know what the Shadow might do if it were on a planet. Maybe I shouldn’t have been on the space station. But it was between shifts and all the refreshments and amenities were closed. I saw that nobody else was in the observation dome for tourists and business types passing through, and went on in. It had a striking view of the Earthlike planet the station orbited.
It wasn’t Earth, of course. I never go within a hundred lights of Earth.
It turned out that I shouldn’t have gone within a hundred lights of this station, either. The back of my neck was itching, and I had a feeling somebody was watching me. Of course, I often have that feeling, but this didn’t feel like the Shadow.
I turned around quickly. They had moved very quietly, which meant they were professionals. There were five of them, two women and three men, and they had surrounded me before I got the idea anybody was there. “Nice view,” I said.
“You need to come with us,” the beefiest of the bunch said. “Someone wants to have a talk with you.”
They were wearing ordinary clothes, but I had the feeling they were also used to wearing uniforms. Maybe Terran Fleet uniforms. I had thought that after half a century, the Fleet would have stopped looking for me, but maybe I had underestimated their singlemindedness.
Or they might be cops, investigating a string of mysterious disappearances scattered across this arm of the Galaxy. I hadn’t caused any of the disappearances—directly—but I was always there when they happened.
“Let’s see some I.D.,” I said. “And a warrant, if you’re cops. I’ll enjoy the view some more while you’re looking for them,” I said, and turned back to the planet that wasn’t Earth, hanging in the blackness. And I kept turning, fast, but not fast enough. I got beefy boy, whom I took for the leader, in his midsection, but my hand barely clipped the one to his right on his ear, not what I was aiming for. I must have been out of practice.
Suddenly there was something barely noticeable, barely visible out of the corner of my eye, and then one of the women wasn’t there anymore. Not entirely, anyway. As usual, there were pieces of her, falling to the floor in the low gravity of the station, along with her gun, but most of her had disappeared.
I thought that might distract them long enough for me to get the falling gun. I was wrong. The other three of them shot me, simultaneously as far as I could tell, three stunbeams converging on me while I was diving for the gun. I don’t know how close I came to it, because I didn’t know anything anymore, and that situation lasted for a long time. I was out before I even had time to regret they weren’t shooting anything lethal. But maybe that wouldn’t have worked. I’ve tried suicide and it doesn’t work.
They may have shot me more than once, from the way I felt when I finally came out of it. I can’t really blame them. They didn’t know what had suddenly, terribly happened to one of them, and they were scared. Of course, I knew what had happened, and I was scared, too. Particularly since I didn’t know why it happened, either this time or the many other times . . .
I knew Colonel Oberst didn’t like me, but I didn’t think he disliked me enough to get me killed. That might have been a mistake. He had called me into his office inside the officer’s dome and offered me a smoke and a drink. That should have made me worry; but I wasn’t worrying because I was a shorttimer. One more week, and I’d be heading back to Earth and my discharge from the Fleet. Marrying Angie, with a job as a civilian pilot lined up. Buzzing around the Solar System like an electron in a nanocircuit: nice, safe, routine. What could happen now?
“Kelly, I need a volunteer, and I think you’re the best bet.”
I had turned down the smoke, and now I wished I had turned down the drink. Uh-oh.
“Not the gate, I assume, sir?”
“Actually, it is the gate. The rats came back all right, and so
did the monkey yesterday. We need a man to go.”
We? This wasn’t even the Fleet’s job. We were on the outermost moon of a gas giant that didn’t even have a name, just a number, to provide security for the scientists who were investigating the gate. The science guys were working for the Terran government, or else we wouldn’t have been there, but the gate was their problem. Unless somebody ordered us to blow it up—but nobody was sure that was possible. Attempts to get samples from the gate’s material for analysis hadn’t worked. I’d heard one of the scientists saying it was like trying to get a sliver off of a endurosteel wall with only a modeling clay chisel to work with.
“Thank you for your confidence in me, sir, but I respectfully decline. I’m leaving in a week and—”
“I know, going back to Earth and getting married. It’d be a shame if you couldn’t leave because of a problem with paperwork. After all, this has been determined to be a Priority One mission—one of the few signs of a technology of nonhuman origin that’s more advanced than we or any of our e.t. allies have. In a P-1 mission, the commanding officer has considerable leeway in determining when critical personnel can be released. You might be in for the duration.”
“Sir, I still decline, and I’ll make a formal protest—”
“That’s your right. Of course formal protests can take a long time to work through the legal plumbing. And in the meantime, your new job might not be there anymore. In fact, there might not be any other job openings for some time.”
He wasn’t being subtle. His brother was very high up in the Terran government, though nobody in the media or the government seemed to have any idea just exactly what Patrick Oberst’s job was. He was probably the reason that Colonel Oberst was here in a nice safe assignment, no obvious dangers, nobody shooting at him, and if the mystery of the gate was solved on Oberst’s watch it might mean at least one star on his shoulder. It’d look good on his resume when he retired and ran for office, keeping the running of the Terran government in the family. If either of the brothers Oberst wanted to get me blackballed from everywhere I might look for a piloting job . . .
“Let’s hear it, sir.” I wasn’t saying “yes,” yet. “What do I do that a monkey can’t?”
His face had gotten hard, but now it eased up. Except for his eyes. They never eased up. “You know the story here, of course.”
I knew the story. An expedition had found something that looked artificial: an arch about thirty feet high and twenty-five wide made of some white material which they couldn’t identify, with what they thought was a jet black surface on one side, and a flat surface made of the same unidentifiable white material on the other. The black side turned out not to be solid. It was pure ebony blackness, not reflecting anything, and instruments poked into it went through like it was a vacuum, and came back apparently unaffected. Except that no information came back from them while they were on the other side of the black surface. Telemetry didn’t transmit. Cameras and other gizmos on rods were poked through with wires leading back outside, but they didn’t produce any info. Nothing came back on the wires. But the cameras, radars, thermometers, barometers, geigers, and so on, worked fine once they were back on our side of the black surface. And of course, the rods were long enough that they should have been stopped by the solid other side of the gate, but nothing stopped them. They apparently went—somewhere else.
So, they started calling it a “gate,” and more equipment and more scientists were sent to the moon, along with Fleet personnel, including me, fully armed, in case somebody or something unfriendly came out of the gate. The few members of the original expedition had been housed in their ship when they weren’t investigating. Now, the gate had several domes, including separate ones for the officers and the NCOs and enlisted men. So far, the military personnel had nothing much to do.
I wish it had stayed that way.
“You remember that they tried all sorts of recording devices, putting them through the gate, and they came out fine, except that nothing had been recorded. They even tried still photographs. With chemical film. God! I didn’t know such things still existed. Then they tried putting a cage of lab rats through, and they came back perfectly healthy.”
I was beginning to see where this was going . . .
“. . . and the monkey came back fine. So now they have a chair big enough for a human, and they need somebody to sit in it while it’s pushed through the gate. How about it, Lieutenant? It’ll look good on your record. Volunteering for a dangerous mission. Maybe even a medal.”
Nobody ever needs volunteers for a safe mission, I thought. Maybe I’d come through it all right, and be on my way in a week. Looked like I didn’t have much choice.
“Okay, sir. Got any more bourbon?”
No more bourbon, as it happened. The scientists weren’t happy about my having had even one shot. They didn’t know what effect it might have on the other side of the gate. So I put on my pressure suit, and they strapped me into a plastic chair they’d taken out of the day room, removed the legs, added straps, and bolted it to a girder that was welded to the front of a deuce and a half vactrac. I could feel the vibrations of the tractor conducted through the girder behind me, and the gate got closer and closer, and I tried not to think of it as a mouth. A wide open mouth. The unreflecting black surface got closer, and I went through it with no resistance . . .
. . . and the next thing I remember was walking back out through the gate. I was wondering where the chair and the vactrac had gone, then I wondered why troops in pressure suits were running toward me, with their guns aimed in my direction. But I wasn’t the complete center of attention. Several of the scientists were staring past me. So I turned around and saw that the black surface was gone. This side of the gate now looked like the opposite side. Solid. Then, Oberst came bouncing over in the low gravity. My radio was still on and I heard him yelling, “Where the hell were you? What did you do while you were gone?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I haven’t been gone more than a couple of seconds.”
“How’s your oxygen?” one of the scientists said.
I checked the digital readouts inside the helmet, and said, “It’s fine. Nearly full tanks.”
“You’ve been gone nearly two days,” he said.
All this time, I had been noticing something odd. I once had an eye infection and my right eye had to be bandaged over for a couple of weeks. During that time, I kept looking to my right, because it was like a shadow was on my right side, and I kept reflexively turning to see what was making the shadow.
There was nothing covering either eye right now, but I kept seeing—almost seeing—something like a shadow, at first on my right, then on my left. I kept turning, but couldn’t see anything casting a shadow. Then the part about how long I had been gone sank in: nearly two days. And I only had an eighteen-hour oxygen supply.
I should have been dead. But if the readouts were right, I hadn’t consumed a noticeable amount of oxygen at all.
“Let’s get to my office,” Oberst said, and headed toward the officer’s dome.
I followed, feeling very confused. Again, I thought I saw a shadow on my left side, but when I turned my head in the helmet, there was nothing close enough to me to cast a shadow.
Out of the suit, I needed a drink but decided not to ask Oberst for bourbon.
“That’s ridiculous! You were gone for forty-six hours and thirteen minutes. You must have gotten your tanks refilled somewhere.”
“Sir, I don’t remember being in there for any time at all,” I said. “The chair went through the black whatever-it-is . . .”
“Whatever-it-was. It’s gone now. What did you do to turn it off?”
I was getting very annoyed. A drink probably wouldn’t have helped. At least I was two days’ closer to being a Proud Friggin’ Civilian again. “Once again, sir, the chair put me through it, and the next thing I remember was walking out through it, on my own feet. What happened to the chair?”
“As pe
r the plan, after one minute the tractor pulled you out again. Or pulled the chair out again. You weren’t in it and the straps hadn’t been unbuckled. What are you hiding, Kelly?”
Then his face got a look that told me he had just had an idea. I was was sure I wouldn’t like it. I was right.
“If you are Kelly? Maybe I should put you in the brig until they can give you a full physical.” He stood up, and I stood up, and I don’t know if that’s what caused it. I was very upset, and I still don’t know if that caused it. But suddenly he was staring at my right and his eyes were very wide. And the shadow that was visible out of the corner of my eye was where he was staring as he pulled his gun from its holster. Then he was gone. Most of him.
There were pieces of his uniform scattered around his office, and little pieces of the colonel, and puddles of what looked like blood in unlikely places. But most of the colonel was gone.
They hadn’t let me take a gun on the mission through the gate, so I didn’t have mine, but Oberst’s gun was on the floor. I moved as fast as I could in the low gravity and grabbed it up. Then I turned around. Several times. But I was apparently alone in the office. I didn’t even see the shadow.
I thought about calling for help. Then I wondered which would be worse, being examined, maybe dissected, to see if I was really human—Oberst wouldn’t be the only one to get that idea—or put on trial for Oberst’s murder. There was enough of Oberst left to be identified, and I was the only one with him in his office when it happened. Whatever had happened.
On second thought, I probably wouldn’t get a trial. One of the crown princes of the Oberst family was dead and I was the only fall guy around. I’d probably just disappear, unless I disappeared on my own.
Then I thought I saw the shadow again. Or Shadow—I wasn’t thinking of it as capitalized yet, but I soon would. I turned quickly and aimed the gun, but there was nothing there.