by Damon Knight
As the slow days passed into weeks, Wesson grew aware of the Station almost as a living thing. He could feel its resilient metal ribs enclosing him, lightly bearing his weight with its own as it swung. He could feel the waiting emptiness “up there” and he sensed the alert electronic network that spread around him everywhere, watching and probing, trying to anticipate his needs.
Aunt Jane was a model companion. She had a record library of thousands of hours of music; she had films to show him, and micro-printed books that he could read on the scanner in the living room; or if he preferred, she would read to him. She controlled the Station’s three telescopes, and on request would give him a view of Earth, or the Moon, or Home…
But there was no news. Aunt Jane would obligingly turn on the radio receiver if he asked her, but nothing except static came out. That was the thing that weighed most heavily on Wesson, as time passed: the knowledge that radio silence was being imposed on all ships in transit, on the orbital stations, and on the planet-to-space transmitters. It was an enormous, almost a crippling handicap. Some information could be transmitted over relatively short distances by photophone, but ordinarily the whole complex traffic of the spacelanes depended on radio.
But this coming alien contact was so delicate a thing that even a radio voice, out here where the Earth was only a tiny disk twice the size of the Moon, might upset it. It was so precarious a thing, Wesson thought, than only one man could be allowed in the Station while the alien was there, and to give that man the company that would keep him sane, they had to install an alpha network…
“Aunt Jane?”
The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul?”
“This distress that the books talk about—you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”
“No, Paul.”
“Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”
“Right, Paul.”
“So tell me this—why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”
A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?
He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life; there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.
“A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.
“No,” said Wesson. The music stopped.
Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.
The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.
“Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”
“Yes,” he snarled.
“Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.
“Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.
Aunt Jane was silent.
Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.
The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two; It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.
At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock,this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanet freighter. But that was nobody’s business—no human being’s.
In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the Station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurised; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the airseal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it was airless, unwarmed and unlit. Alone, said his footsteps; alone…
He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself, and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping him into, the lightless gulf.
Wesson recognized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.
The thought ticked through his head, They want me to be afraid. But why? Why now? Of what?
Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness…
It was time.
His first month was up.
The alien was coming.
As Wesson turned, gasping, the whole huge structure of the Station around him seemed to dwindle to the size of an ordinary room… and Wesson with it, so that he seemed to himself like a tiny insect, frantically scuttling down the walls toward safety.
Behind him as he ran, the Station boomed.
In the silent rooms, all the lights were burning dimly.
Wesson lay still, looking at the ceiling. Up there his imagination formed a shifting, changing image of the alien—huge, shadowy, formlessly menacing.
Sweat had gathered in globules on his brow. He stared unable to look away.
“That was why you didn’t want me to go topside, huh, Aunt Jane?” he said hoarsely.
“Yes. The nervousness is the first sign. But you gave me a direct order, Paul.”
“I know it,” he said vaguely, still staring fixedly at the ceiling. “A funny thing… Aunt Jane?”
“Yes, Paul?”
“You won’t tell me what it looks like, right?”
“No, Paul.”
“I don’t want to know. Lord, I don’t want to know… Funny thing, Aunt Jane, part of me is just pure funk. I’m so scared I’m nothing but a jelly—”
“I know,” said the voice gently.
“—and part is real cool and calm, as if it didn’t matter. Crazy, the things you think about. You know?”
“What things, Paul?”
He tried to laugh. “I’m remembering a kid’s party I went to twenty… twenty-five years ago. I was, let’s see, I was nine. I remember, because that was the same year my father died.
“We were living in Dallas then, in a rented mobilehouse, and there was a family in the next tract with a bunch of red-headed kids. They were always throwing parties; nobody liked them much, but everybody always went.”
“Tell me about the party, Paul.”
He shifted on the couch. “This one, this one was a Hallowe’en party. I remember the girls had on black and orange dresses, and boys mostly wore spirit costumes. I was about the youngest kid there, and I felt kind of out of place. Then all of a sudden one of the redheads jumps up in a skull mask, hollering, “C’mon, everybody get ready for hidenseek.” And he grabs me, and says, “You be it,” and before I can even move, he shoves me into a dark closet. And I hear that door lock behind me.”
He moistened his lips. “And then—you know, in the darkness—I feel something hit my face. You know, cold and clammy, like, I don’t know, something dead…
“I just hunched up on the floor of that closet, waiting for that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and kind of gritty, hanging up
there. You know what it was? A cloth glove, full of ice and bran cereal. A joke. Boy, that was one joke I never forgot… Aunt Jane?”
“Yes, Paul.”
“Hey, I’ll bet you alpha networks make great psychs, huh? I could lie here and tell you anything, because you’re just a machine—right?”
“Right, Paul,” said the network sorrowfully.
“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane… It’s no use kidding myself along. I can feel that thing up there, just a couple of yards away.”
“I know you can, Paul.”
“I can’t stand it, Aunt Jane.”
“You can if you think you can, Paul.”
He writhed on the couch. “It’s—it’s dirty, it’s clammy. My God, is it going to be like that for five months? I can’t, it’ll kill me, Aunt Jane.”
There was another thunderous boom, echoing down through the structural members of the Station. “What’s that?” Wesson gasped. “The other ship—casting off?”
“Yes. Now he’s alone, just as you are.”
“Not like me. He can’t be feeling what I’m feeling. Aunt Jane, you don’t know…”
Up there, separated from him only by a few yards of metal, the alien’s enormous, monstrous body hung. It was that poised weight, as real as if he could touch it, that weighed down his chest.
Wesson had been a space dweller for most of his adult life, and knew even in his bones that if an orbital station ever collapsed the “under” part would not be crushed but would be hurled away by its own angular momentum. This was not the oppressiveness of planetside buildings, where the looming mass above you seemed always threatening to fall: this was something else, completely distinct, and impossible to argue away.
It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face… It was dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota… wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold…
With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around him in slow, dizzy circles.
Wesson felt his jaw muscles contorting with the strain as he knelt, then stood erect. His back and legs tightened; his mouth hung painfully open. He took one step, then another, timing them to hit the floor as it came upright.
The right side of the console, the one that had been dark, was lighted. Pressure in Sector Two, according to the indicator was about one and a third atmospheres. The air-lock indicator showed a slightly higher pressure of oxygen and argon; that was to keep any of the alien atmosphere from contaminating Sector One, but it also meant that the lock would no longer open from either side. Wesson found that irrationally comforting.
“Lemme see Earth,” he gasped.
The screen lighted up as he stared into it. “It’s a long way down,” he said. A long, long way down to the bottom of that well… He had spent ten featureless years as a servo tech in Home Station. Before that, he’d wanted to be a pilot, but had washed out the first year—couldn’t take the math. But he had never once thought of going back to Earth.
Now, suddenly, after all these years, that tiny blue disk seemed infinitely desirable.
“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane, it’s beautiful,” he mumbled.
Down there, he knew, it was spring; and in certain places, where the edge of darkness retreated, it was morning: a watery blue morning like the sea light caught in an agate, a morning with smoke and mist in it; a morning of stillness and promise. Down there, lost years and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom’s song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide: one spring morning on Earth.
Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, fast as the gulf beneath him was, all this—Earth, Moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the Sun and all the rest of his planets, too—was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.
Beyond—there was the true gulf. In that deep night, galaxies lay sprawled aglitter, piercing a distance that could only be named in a meaningless number, a cry of dismay: O, O, O…
Crawling and fighting, blasting with energies too big for them, men had come as far as Jupiter. But if a man had been tall enough to lie with his boots toasting in the Sun and his head freezing at Pluto, still he would have been too small for that overwhelming emptiness. Here, not at Pluto, was the outermost limit of man’s empire: here the Outside funneled down to meet it, like the pinched waist of an hour-glass: here, and only here, the two worlds came near enough to touch. Ours—and Theirs.
Down at the bottom of the board, now, the golden dials were faintly alight, the needles trembling ever so little on their pins.
Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate and it was forwarded for analysis…”
Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.
That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.
Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life;—and still we did not know why.
Above him, Wesson imagined he could see that sensed body a-wallow in the glacial blackness, its bulk passively turning with the station’s spin, bleeding a chill gold into the lips of the tubes, drip, drop.
Wesson held his head. The pressure inside made it hard to think; it felt as if his skull were about to fly apart. “Aunt Jane,” be said.
“Yes, Paul.” The kindly, comforting voice: like a nurse. The nurse who stands beside your cot while you have painful, necessary things done to you. Efficient, trained friendliness.
“Aunt Jane,” said Wesson, “do you know why they keep coming back?”
“No,” said the voice precisely. “It is a mystery.”
Wesson nodded. “I had,” he said, “an interview with Gower before I left Home. You know Gower? Chief of the Outerworld Bureau. Came up especially to see me.”
“Yes?” said Aunt Jane encouragingly.
“Said to me, “Wesson, you got to find out. Find out if we can count on them to keep up the supply. You know? There’s , fifty million more of us,” he says, “than when you were born. We need more of the stuff, and we got to know if we can count on it. Because,” he says, “you know what would happen if it stopped?” Do you know, Aunt Jane?”
“It would be,” said the voice, “a catastrophe.”
“That’s right,” Wesson said respectfully. “It would. Like, he says to me, ‘What if the people in the Nefud area were cut off from the Jordan Valley Authority? Why, there’d be millions dying of thirst in a week.
“ ‘Or what if the freighters stopped coming to Moon Base. Why,’ he says, ‘there’d be thousands starving and smothering to death.’
“He says, ‘Where the water is, where you can get food and air, people are going to settle, and get married, you know? and have kids.’
“He says, ‘If the so-called longevity serum stopped coming…’ Says, ‘Every twentieth adult of the Sol family is due for his shot this year.’ Says, ‘Of those, almost twenty per cent are one hundred fifteen or older.’ Says, ‘The deaths in that group in the first year would be at least three times what the actuarial tables call for.’ ” Wesson raised a strained face. “I’m
thirty-four, you know?” he said. “That Gower, he made me feel like a baby.”
Aunt Jane made a sympathetic noise.
“Drip, drip,” said Wesson hysterically. The needles of the tall golden indicators were infinitesimally higher. “Every twenty years we need more of the stuff, so somebody like me has to come out and take it for five lousy months. And one of them has to come out and sit there, and drip. Why, Aunt Jane? What for? Why should it matter to them whether we live a long time or not? Why do they keep on coming back? What do they take away from here?”
But to these questions, Aunt Jane had no reply.
All day and every day, the lights burned cold and steady in the circular gray corridor around the rim of Sector One. The hard gray flooring had been deeply scuffed in that circular path before Wesson ever walked there: the corridor existed for that only, like a treadmill in a squirrel cage; it said “Walk,” and Wesson walked. A man would go crazy if he sat still, with that squirming, indescribable pressure on his head; and so Wesson paced off the miles, all day and every day, until he dropped like a dead man in the bed at night.
He talked, too, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the listening alpha network; sometimes it was difficult to ten which. “Moss on a rock,” he muttered, pacing. “Told him, wouldn’t give twenty mills for any damn shell… Little pebbles down there, all colors.” He shuffled on in silence for a while. Abruptly: “I don’t see why they couldn’t have given me a cat.”
Aunt Jane said nothing. After a moment Wesson went on, “Nearly everybody at Home has a cat, for God’s sake, or a goldfish or something. You’re all right, Aunt Jane, but I can’t see you. My God, I mean if they couldn’t send a man a woman for company, what I mean, my God, I never liked cats.” He swung around the doorway into the bedroom, and absent-mindedly slammed his fist into the bloody place on the wall.
“But a cat would have been something,” he said.
Aunt Jane was still silent.
“Don’t pretend your damn feelings are hurt, I know you, you’re only a damn machine,” said Wesson. “Listen, Aunt Jane, I remember a cereal package one time that had a horse and a cowboy on the side. There wasn’t much room, so about all you saw was their faces. It used to strike me funny how much they looked alike. Two ears on the top with hair in the middle. Two eyes. Nose. Mouth with teeth in it. I was thinking, we’re kind of distant cousins, aren’t we, us and the horses. But compared to that thing up there—we’re brothers. You know?”