The Eternal Enemy

by Michael Berlyn

  Markos looked but saw nothing irregular.

  “Not only are they armed, but they’re closing in on us.”

  Van Pelt’s weapon emitted a bright, tight beam of emerald light, and the Habers toppled to the ground, sliced in half one by one, in a few horrifying instants. The grass in the area smoldered. Van Pelt returned to the ship as the breeze carried the scent of charred meat to Markos’s nostrils.

  He was sick to his stomach.

  There had been talk, rumors, probably started by Van Pelt, of taking over and exploiting the planet once the Habers were gone. He’d made noises about cutting in all the crew members for shares. Markos no longer cared if the rumors were true. He’d seen enough to know Van Pelt meant business. He threw down his weapon and ran for one of the screamers, then headed for the mountains at top speed.

  And then Markos remembered the rest and sat up on the bed in the cavern. Memories rushed back in one tremendous, painful surge—the boulder! The impact and explosion, then blackness. But he couldn’t have survived that crash.

  He started to tremble.

  “What’s—” he started to ask but stopped when he heard his own voice. It was a rough, gravelly rasp—bubbling and liquid, totally different from what his voice should have been. He was shocked, and a hot flash, like a river of molten metal, ran diagonally through his chest.

  He looked at his hands. They were different too. Deformed. Ugly. Wrinkled and cracked and the wrong kind of skin and mottled and spotted with reds, greens, and oranges and blues and he could see right through the skin and into his arms and legs and chest.

  He screamed a frothing, gargled, piteous wail.

  2

  Markos waited. It was what he did best. He figured that if there were ever prizes awarded for having the most patience, he would probably win one. Waiting. That was all NASA 2 was about.

  They’d told him he would get a chance to meet alien creatures. They told him he would get the chance to fly in the first and only faster-than-light ship ever developed. They told him he could go to Tau Ceti and find out what happened to that missing guy, the one who disappeared in that pod.

  But all they had done so far was stick Markos in a geltank and have their computers throw all different kinds of imaginary aliens at him to see if he were xenophobic.

  He sat on the edge of his bunk, looking across the small room at Jackson, one of the others “handpicked” to make the trip on the Paladin. How do you select people to man a ship that might blow up the instant the f-t-l drive is engaged? Do you pick expendable people? Or qualified ones? And what if they don’t come back?

  Markos picked up the magazine he’d placed on the bedstand, the one he’d bought in the spaceport on Earth. The voice chips printed on the magazine’s cover had said something that caught his attention, something about an exposé and NASA 2. It was some fifty years after the pod had left, but the arrival of the telemetered information from the pod made this guy, Jacob Galley, news again. It also implied that the NASA 2 selection criteria were not exactly what might be expected.

  Markos read it.…

  Jacob Galley started life like most city children, but somewhere in the process of personality development, something special happened. His parents had always considered themselves lucky to be able to afford a private apartment in a good neighborhood, even though they earned the right by each working two jobs. The other four families who lived in the apartment considered themselves equally fortunate. Fifteen people shared meals, entertainment, and living space in a happy communal spirit until Jacob was four.

  It started innocently enough. Jacob took to hiding under the furniture instead of playing in the common areas, locked in his own little world. And there were times he would sit in dark closets, huddled in a corner, eyes closed. Everyone thought it a little strange but since his odd behavior violated no laws, no formal complaints were registered. If his parents had had the extra money, they could have sent him to a clinic to be cured, but the extra money was simply never there.

  As he grew, he went to school like all other children. He had a good time there, sitting in his private cubicle, headset plugged into the teacher, absorbing knowledge and developing understanding. He stayed later than most children, in no rush to get home to spend time with his extended family. By the time he reached his teens, Jacob’s personality was set.

  He had developed into a loner, and yet people liked him well enough. He was an attractive young man with a genuine, disarming smile, soft-spoken and intelligent. He just didn’t socialize well. He graduated a chemical engineer, near the top of his class, and his parents were proud. The fourteen other people he lived with were proud, too, and they all attended his graduation. His real problems started after he left school, though.

  Work didn’t afford him the time or opportunity for privacy, and his living quarters were even more crowded and difficult for him than his family’s apartment had been. His desire for solitude was interpreted as unhappiness by the people he lived with and the people he worked with. Each group did its best to pull him out of his quiet retreats into their own realities. Jacob appreciated their well-meaning intentions and realized he was fighting a losing battle.

  When the company for which he worked landed a contract with the government, the opportunity for a transfer to the space colony arose. He was well qualified for the job, and the people he worked with recommended his transfer with great enthusiasm thinking it was a solution to the problem of how to deal with him. His eagerness to go into space was due solely to the living arrangements aboard the colony—he would have to share his living quarters with only three other people.

  While Jacob lived his quiet life, NASA 2 was created. NASA had grown too large to be properly managed; their responsibilities included the space colony, attempts to mine asteroids, and other projects limited to the Solar System. NASA 2 was formed to explore deep space, to venture out beyond the gravitational field of Sol and determine if there really was any life out there.

  NASA 2 searched for two years and three months until they found just the right people to man their deep-space probes. The psychologists had designed a model of the perfect personality, a personality capable of handling the elastic years of solitude, the enforced sense of mission, and the tremendous responsibility that went along with the mission’s potential.

  When they met Jacob Galley, they knew they had a potential match.

  He had been working on board the space colony. He was found hiding in the lower levels, cramped into a tiny locker, when his roommates reported him missing. The doctors who examined him saw that his disorder was easily treated and filed a standard fitness report. NASA saw the report and brought it to the attention of NASA 2.

  NASA 2 ordered a few intensive treatments in the geltanks. Their doctors regressed him, unwound his experiences, then regressed him some more, but when they brought him forward, they eliminated the negative associations of being a loner, eliminated the social stigma. The doctors took care to keep the things that made Jacob different.

  While he was in the geltank, completely submerged in the fluid vat, the psychologists modified him to bring his personality closer to the ideal. They provided him with a reinforced sense of self-importance and memories of people, places, and things that had never existed for him, experiences that would have been impossible for him but necessary to survive the empty years that lay ahead.

  There were lies, false memories of training sessions in NASA 2’s nonexistent underground complex on the Moon. There was a memory of a man created within Jacob, a Brian Taggert, a man who was Jacob’s roommate in this fiction the psychologists wove. There were interactions with people of all nationalities, sexes, and physical abnormalities added to his memory. There was a theoretical and practical knowledge and understanding of all human language, a knowledge burned into his synoptical connections. In the years of solitude Jacob was submerged in the ship’s geltank, the ship could use these memories to stimulate him, to ward off the inevitable return of solitude.


  By the time they were finished with Jacob, his new memories fit him comfortably. When he stepped out of the training geltank, he felt as if he were the same person he’d always been.

  Jacob Galley was perfect for the mission NASA 2 needed done, for the years of solitude and enforced self-discipline.

  Six sectors of space demanded exploration and explorers. There were planetary bodies circling nearby stars, and these needed to be visited by a human being. The stars were all neighbors: Tau Ceti, Alpha Centauri A and B, Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni A, 61 Cygni B, and Epsilon Indi. The drive units NASA 2 had developed were capable of reaching the farthest of these, capable of speeds slightly in excess of 0.25 c, 46,500 miles per second. The pods would accelerate until this speed was achieved and then “coast” until arrival. The trip to Tau Ceti could be made in under fifty years. Everything was falling into place for NASA 2—exploring the neighboring stars with a human being along for the ride, just in case.

  Just in case the exploratory pod ran across something the instruments might not be able to interpret properly, just in case immediate action was called for, just in case the pod ran across something unexpected, something for which NASA 2 hoped and prayed, Jacob Galley would be there.

  They were prepared for this eventuality. NASA 2 left little to chance, least of all Jacob Galley.

  If contact were established, the ship would activate a sequence and Jacob would lose some of the artificially layered personality the psychologists and geltank had provided. After all, they didn’t want an emissary of Earth to appear more alien than any life-form he might run across. Like a clockwork mechanism, like a posthypnotic suggestion, Jacob was two people—one who could deal with the immense distances and time of the trip, the other one waiting, invisible until needed.

  Jacob and five others like him left. Only five of the six returned, and Jacob was not one of them.…

  Markos put the dramatized version of Galley’s biography aside and picked up the NASA 2 “official” transcription. NASA 2 would not say anything regarding the Galley biography, and after reading it, Markos felt he understood why. It didn’t make them look too good at all, and it made Galley look a little stranger than he probably was.

  He picked up the report by his bedstand. It was titled “Transcription and Interpretation of Telemetered Data from Pod 6, Manned by Jacob Galley, Assumed Lost.”

  “We’re here,” Galley said. (Transmissions reveal the strain in his voice.)

  “Approaching, anyway, but there is more,” the ship said.

  “More what?” (Fear audible in Galley’s voice.) “Increase magnification,” Galley said.

  “Magnification is logarithmic and at maximum,” it said.

  “It looks like a planet—the one we’ve been looking for?”

  “It is. If this were all there were to it, I wouldn’t have left you in the tank. There is more.”

  “More what? More planets?”

  “Yes, there are more planets. But there is also a small body, well under planetary mass, traveling the exact orbit of the planet, forty-five degrees above the ecliptic.”

  “Give me visual confirmation,” Galley said.

  (A commanding tone could be detected in his voice at this point. His entire personality firmed, a result of the geltank training and imprinting.)

  “Impossible. Albedo is less than ten percent, and at this distance, resolution from background radiation is impossible.”

  “Graphics, then. Give me something!”

  “Screen three,” it said.

  (Telemetered data showed that the third screen held a computer graphic of a large disk, Tau Ceti, and a smaller disk toward the right edge, the planet. Above the graphic of the planet was a point of light, surrounded by a circle.)

  “The object in question is within the circle. Scale is nonrepresentational.”

  “What do you make of it?” Jacob asked.

  “It is one of two things: an astronomical anomaly in direct contradiction to all presently accepted models for solar system evolution, or it is an artifact of non-Terran origin.”

  “Which do you think?”

  “Be serious. The odds against it being a natural phenomenon are high enough to rule that out as a possibility.”

  “Then why did you keep me in the tank? I should have been out here the second the object was spotted.”

  “I thought you enjoyed spending time in the tank,” the ship said. “You have always argued for more time and more frequent immersions.”

  “That’s irrelevant, and you know it.” (An audible sigh, let out slowly.) “Forget it. Have you gathered any data on the planet yet?”

  “Yes. We are still too far away for our more sensitive analysis equipment to be effective, so whatever data I have are incomplete. Screen four.”

  (Preliminary report on the planet scrolled on screen four. Most of the spaces for information had “UNKN” in place of numbers. The planet was 0.92 Earth mass, rotated every 21 hours, and was just under 0.79 AUs from Tau Ceti. The planet’s albedo was 0.32. From the raw data the ship telemetered, the planet seems Terran enough.)

  “An additional piece of pertinent data,” the ship said.

  “What is it?”

  “The smaller body is sending a beam of coherent green light to the planet’s surface.”

  (This rules out the natural-phenomenon theory proposed by the antiexploration and antiterraforming lobbies. Coherent light doesn’t beam down to a planet’s surface in nature. This was sufficient evidence to get funding for the Paladin expedition.)

  “It appears as if we’ve activated some sort of warning system,” the ship said.

  “Possibly. Recommendations?”

  “None,” it said.

  “You sure are a lot of help when you want to be,” Jacob said.

  “As you’ve been over the last four decades,” the ship said.

  “More information. Just give me more information. I’ve got to know what’s going on. You’re not telling me much of anything.”

  “I do what I can. I have very little data on which to base recommendations or draw conclusions.”

  “What makes you think it’s an early-warning system? Couldn’t it be a ship?”

  “You asked for conclusions based on raw data. The primary consideration used was our approach. We have entered the Tau Ceti system and are being considerably influenced by Tau Ceti’s gravity well. As soon as this influence was significant, the green light appeared”

  (This reasoning is sound.)

  “With our present position, course, and speed, you have under two hours to make your decision,” the ship said.

  “I know.”

  “Have you decided, then?”

  “Two hours, “Jacob said. ‘You said so yourself. Don’t push me or I’ll pull your plug.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Don’t tempt me. If I can’t, I’ll still try, and probably end up doing irreparable damage.”

  “One hour, fifty-nine minutes, thirty-five seconds.”

  “Stop the countdown. Just tell me how much time is left every fifteen minutes.”

  (Galley faced the following decisions: return to Earth, or alter his course. The pods were designed to have some advanced science contact them—not to initiate contact, so they were limited in fuel. This decision to limit fuel enabled us to get these exploratory missions funded. Actually there was most probably enough fuel for deceleration into a stable orbit around Tau Ceti and for limited course corrections when reentering our Solar System. But there was a limit to the fuel, and that put a definite limit on the number of course corrections available, and the psychologists stressed the importance of contact. We stacked the odds in favor of his deciding to opt for contact.

  If he chose to ignore the possible contact and simply waited another forty-odd years until the pod reentered the Solar System, he would have a safe amount of fuel to adjust his angle of entry and decelerate into a stable orbit around Sol. He would be picked up by a NASA 1 shuttle.

  At
this point the lights, instruments, and life-support systems shut down for two seconds. End of first telemetry and transcription.)

  “How many times you gonna read that?” Jackson asked.

  “Huh?” Markos asked, looking up from the papers. “What?”

  “I asked how many times you were gonna read that stupid thing. Nothing changes in there, does it? It’s not one of those interactive articles.”

  Markos shook his head. “That’s not the point,” he said. “I read it so I can understand what this guy went through, what he ran into. Maybe it’ll help when we get there.”

  “If we get there, you mean.”

  “Come on, man. It’s not that risky.”

  “Yeah? Then where is this guy? How come he never came back?”

  “I don’t know,” Markos said. “That’s what we’re going there to find out.”

  Markos sighed and put the transcription on his nightstand. The guy in the pod, Jacob Galley, had gone a little around the bend. Markos slipped his hands behind his head to stare at the ceiling. Perhaps some of the answers of what really happened to the pod, why it was the only one not to return, would appear there, written in the fused, dull plastic.

  “I hear Van Pelt’s in the tank now,” Jackson said.

  “Yeah. Better him than me,” Markos said. “I didn’t test out as a leader, so I don’t have to worry about that.”

  “You and me both, man. You hear where they found him?”

  “I heard. You know the name of the prison?”

  Jackson smiled. “Some maximum-security place. That’s all I know. That’s all he’d say.”

  “Straka said that Van Pelt’s a psychopath. A real criminal genius.”

  “If he makes it out of that tank, he’ll be normal enough,” Jackson said.

  Markos shook his head, then rolled onto his side so that he could face Jackson. For some reason the tall black man looked even taller when lying down. “You hear how many they carted out of there in a straitjacket?”

  “I heard seven so far.”

  “Get serious, man. Two or three, tops,” Markos said.