The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “True,” he conceded. “I should have said ‘spiritual faith.’ You do not speak as one who is interested in the nature and destiny of his soul—nor of anyone else’s soul—I fear?”

  I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However, if he was interested in saving my soul he had at least begun the operation by looking after my bodily needs with a generously good meal.

  “When I was young,” I told him, “I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.”

  “There is also vanity in thinking oneself self-sufficient,” he said.

  “Certainly,” I agreed. “It is chiefly with the conception of the soul as a separate entity that I find myself out of sympathy. For me it is a manifestation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modified by the external environment, and influenced more directly by the glands.”

  He looked saddened, and shook his head reprovingly. “You are so wrong—so very wrong. Some are always conscious of their souls, others, like yourself, are unaware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he understands its value.”

  It was not an observation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us continue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embarrassment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, however, showed no embarrassment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beautifully laundered handkerchief, and dealt with them.

  “I hope you will never learn what a dreadful thing it is to have no soul,” he told me, with a shake of his head. “It is to hold the emptiness of space in one’s heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one’s life.”

  Lamely I said: “I’m afraid this is out of my range. I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. No one understands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come somebody who does understand, and can help.”

  “But the soul is a manifestation of the self,” I said. “I don’t see how that can be lost—it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost”

  “Mine is,” he said, still looking up into the vasty blue. “Lost—adrift somewhere out there.... Without it I am a sham.... A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing—nothing —nothing....”

  “Perhaps a psychiatrist—” I started to suggest, uncertainly.

  That stirred him, and checked the tears. “Psychiatrist!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Damned frauds! Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche!—why they even deny its existence... !”

  There was a pause.

  “I wish I could help----”

  “There was a chance. You might have been one who could. There’s always the chance...” Whether he was consoling himself, or me, seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host’s mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

  “I have to go now,” he told me. “I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.”

  I watched him make his way along the Place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit, and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently unconcerned about payment

  The dusky waitress arrived by my table, and stood looking after him.

  “O, le pauvre monsieur Georges,” she said, sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the remnant of his fruit and remove his hat to enter. “Il va faire la prière,” she explained. “Tous les jours ‘e make pray for ‘is soul. In ze morning, in ze afternoon. C’est si triste.”

  I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I misjudged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

  “Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous êtes convive. C’est d’accord. Alors, monsieur Georges ‘e sign bill tomorrow. S’arrange. C’est okay,” she insisted, and stuck to it.

  The elderly man whom I had noticed before broke in: “It’s all right—quite in order,” he assured me. Then he added: “Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?”

  There seemed to be a fine open-handedness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

  “I’m afraid no one can have briefed you about poor George,” he said.

  I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

  “Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. One doesn’t like that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”

  “It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he’s improving. I doubt whether he knows it himself, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner.—Rather depressing until one got used to it.”

  “He lives here in Lahua, then?” I asked.

  “He exists. He spends most of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand-daughter’s place. She sees that he’s decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”

  I thought I must have misheard.

  “His grand-daughter!” I exclaimed. “But he’s a young man. He can’t be much over thirty years old...”

  He looked at me.

  “You’ll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn’t the sort of thing the family likes to publicize, but there’s no secret about it.”

  The café-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:

  * * * *

  About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger asteroids—the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis, working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accommodation forward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the outward journeys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assignment was simply to pick up a load of uranium ore—Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was necessary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

  But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course —but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of outfliers of all sizes that you couldn’t hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objective as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velocity, and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands—hundreds of thousands, maybe—of miles. Fellows get bored and inattentive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don’t know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course deflector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there’s so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensitive enough to react to it you’d have your ship shying off everything the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mechanism with only a limited range of operation— say, a hundred miles—but no one does. So, as I say, it’s tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they’ve lost half-a-dozen ships in there, and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all... On the other hand, uranium is uranium....

  Gerald’s a good lad though. He has the authentic Troon yen for space without being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn’t too far from the inner rim of
the orbit—not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance—what’s more, he’d done it several times before.

  Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he’d got a bit careless by then; in any case he’d not be expecting to find anything in orbit around the asteroid. But that’s just what he did find—the hard way...

  * * * *

  There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enormous bell. It’s about the nastiest—and very likely to be the last —sound a spaceman can ever hear. This time, however, their luck was in. They discovered that as they crowded to watch the indicator dials. Nothing vital had been hit.

  Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled spacesuits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on the spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the airlock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.

  One thing was evident right away—that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn’t have to conserve warmth, nor contain air, nor to resist the friction of an atmosphere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravitational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the complexities necessary to sustain life.

  Another, which was immediately clear, was that this was not the only misadventure that had befallen the small ship. Something had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hopelessly disabled.

  Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its airlock must lie forward, somewhere inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke, through his helmet radio to the operator in the Celestis’s living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:

  “Can you raise the moon-station just now, Jake? I’d better make a report.”

  “Strong and clear, Cap’n.”

  “Good. Tell them to put me on to the Duty Officer, will you.”

  He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and recrossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice:

  “Hullo Celestis! Hullo Celestis! Moon-station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over I”

  Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. In due course another voice spoke.

  “Hullo Celestis! Moon-station Duty Officer speaking. Give your location and go ahead.”

  “Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from Celestis now in orbit about Psyche. Approximately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel. Not repeat not in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage ...” He went on to give particulars, and concluded: “I am about to investigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over!”

  The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold’s entrance-port. Gerald took the key, inserted it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the purchase to wind it.

  The moon man’s voice came again.

  “Hullo, Ticker. Understand no immediate danger. But don’t go taking any chances, boy. Can you identify the derelict?”

  “Repeat no danger,” Troon told him. “Plumb lucky. If she’d hit six feet further forward we’d have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the forepart of the derelict. Will try to identify it.”

  The cavernous darkness of the hold made it necessary for them to switch on their helmet lights. They could now see the front part Of the derelict; it took up about half the space there was. The ship had punched through the wall, turning back the tough alloy in curled petals, as though it had been tinplate. She had come to rest with her nose a bare couple of feet short of the opposite side. Steve pointed to a ragged hole, some five or six inches across, about halfway along the embedded section. It had a nasty significance that caused Gerald to nod somberly.

  He shuffled to the ship, and on to its curving side. He found the airlock on the top, as it lay in the Celestis, and tried the winding key. He pulled it out again.

  “Calling you, Charles,” he said. “No identifying marks on the derelict. She’s not space-built—that is, she could be used in atmosphere. Oldish pattern—well, must be—she’s pre the standardization of winding keys, so that takes us back a bit. Maximum external diameter, say, twelve feet Length unknown—can’t say how much after part there was before it was knocked off. She’s been holed forward, too. Looks like a small meteorite, about five inches. At speed, I’d say. Just a minute...Yes, clean through and out, with a pretty small exit hole. Can’t open the airlock without making a new key. Quicker to cut our way in. Over!”

  He shuffled back, and played his light through the small meteor hole. His helmet prevented him getting his face close enough to see anything but a small part of the opposite wall, with a corresponding hole in it.

  “Easiest way is to enlarge this, Steve,” he suggested.

  The engineer nodded. He brought his cutter to bear, switched it on and began to carve from the edge of the hole.

  “Not much good, Ticker,” came the voice from the moon. “The bit you gave could apply to any one of four ships.”

  “Patience, dear Charles, while Steve does his bit of fancy-work with the cutter,” Troon told him.

  It took twenty minutes to complete the cut through the double hull. Steve switched off, gave a tug with his left hand, and the joined, inner and outer, circles of metal floated away.

  “Celestis calling moon. I am about to go into the derelict, Charles. Keep open.” Troon said.

  He bent down, took hold of the sides of the cut, kicked his magnetic soles free of contact, and gave a light pull which took him floating head-first through the hole in the manner of an underwater swimmer. Presently his voice came again, with a different tone:

  “I say, Charles, there are three men in here. All in spacesuits—old-time spacesuits. Two of them are belted on to their bunks. The other one is ... Oh, his leg’s gone. The meteorite must have taken it off.... There’s a queer— Oh God, it’s his blood frozen into a solid ball...!”

  After a minute or so he went on: “I’ve found the log. Can’t handle it in these gloves, though. I’ll take it aboard, and let you have particulars. The two fellows on the bunks seem to be quite intact—their suits, I mean. Their helmets have those curved strip-windows so I can’t see much of their faces. Must’ve— That’s odd.... Each of them has a sort of little book attached by a wire to the suit fastener. On the cover it has: ‘Danger—Perigroso’ in red, and underneath: ‘Do not remove suit—Read instructions within,’ repeated in Portuguese. Then: ‘Hapson Survival System.’ What would all that mean, Charles? Over!”

  While he waited for the reply Gerald clumsily fingered one of the tag-like books and discovered that it opened concertina-wise, a series of small metal plates hinged together printed on one side in English and on the other in Portuguese. The first leaf carried little print, but what there was, was striking. It ran: “CAUTION! Do NOT open suit until you have read these instructions or you will KILL the wearer.”

  When he had got that far the Duty Officer’s voice came in again: “Hullo, Ticker. I’ve called the Doc. He says do NOT, repeat NOT, touch the two men on any account. Hang on, he’s coming to talk to you. He says the Hapson System was scrapped over thirty years ago. He—oh, here he is....”

  “Ticker? Laysall her
e. Charles tells me you’ve found a couple of Hapsons, undamaged. Please confirm and give circumstances.”

  Troon did so. In due course the doctor came back:

  “Okay. That sounds fine. Now listen carefully, Ticker. From what you say it’s practically certain those two are not dead—yet. They’re—well, they’re in cold storage. That part of the Hapson system was good. You’ll see a kind of boss mounted on the left of the chest. The thing to do in the case of extreme emergency was to slap it good and hard. When you do that it gives a multiple injection. Part of the stuff puts you out. Part of it prevents the building-up in the body of large ice crystals that would damage the tissues. Part of it—oh, well, that’ll do later. The point is that it works practically a hundred per cent. You get Nature’s own deep-freeze in Space. And if there’s something to keep off direct radiation from the sun you’ll stay like that until somebody finds you—if anyone ever does. Now I take it that these two have been in the dark in an airless ship which is now in the airless hold of your ship. Is that right?”