Beyond the Black Enigma

by Gardner Francis Fox

  Ingalls watched him. "You can refuse, he said softly. His hand came up to still the protest Craig was about to make. "I know, I know. You've just come off One assignment. It's too soon to send you out on another. You deserve a rest. Maybe I'm a fool for not wanting to give it to you.

  "I'll tell you why I want you this way, John, hopped up and still tense after Lyrosia. You haven't had a chance to let down. Your reflexes are perfect, Doctor who checked you out when you came down at post told me so. I didn't want to say anything when you made your own report a few hours ago because I hadn't seen the medical analysis yet.

  "I've studied the analysis. The medicos claim you are at your peak, right now. Six months on Lyrosia gave you a gradual build-up. You're like a Star Olympian ready for his best performance.”

  Craig grunted. It was nice to know he was healthy, fit for anything. He would have liked to expend that energy at play, on skis or in the water or some resort hotel. Or with a woman like Elva Marlowe. His gold braiding moved as he shrugged.

  All right, you've made your point. Just explain the necessity for all the speed.”

  he Enigma is growing bigger, Ingalls said tonelessly.

  A cold ball formed in his belly as the commander sat rigid in his chair. He needed no textbooks to understand what might happen if that darkness were to grow and grow. . . .

  It would swallow the stars nearest to it at first. Unchecked, it would swell and swell—perhaps it even fed on matter—until in time it would hold the entire universe inside its blackness. There would be an end to man, then, if the Enigma were malevolent.

  "I volunteer,” he murmured with a wry smile.

  Ingalls brightened. "Good man! Now, then: we haven't been idle on my side of the desk. Construction has built you a starship that puts evrything else we have to shame. The hull is of densatron—go ahead, whistle! The stuff sells for a thousand credits a quarter-ton, and the ship checks out at five thousand tons. "The Empire Tech boys tell me it will stand up to anything. They had to invent a special frequency beam to mine and shape it. They've tested it against the vibrations of the Enigma. It doesn't even scratch. As best as they can make out, the Tech men tell me the Enigma can't hurt it.”

  Dan Ingalls crushed out the tobacco tube in a disposal tray, then flushed it. “Those vibrations won't penetrate the hull so they can't do you in. There may be other vibrations or rays or ultra-frequencies deeper inside the Enigma, of course. These may kill you or destroy the ship. We have no way of knowing that.” Ingalls talked on. Craig leaned back and let the words seep into his brain, weighing and them.

  Empire had rigged up three communication devices.

  One has a wave-beam that could penetrate the Enigma vibration. Another was a beep signal that worked automatically whether the major were alive or dead. The third was a series of torpedoes formed of densatron, into which he was to place tape recordings of what was taking place once he was inside the blotch. He was to fire them back into norm-space where a catch-ship would he waiting for them as they moved silently out of the Enigma.

  "Now, then: Ordnance. The weapons crowd has come up with some new ideas on killing.” Ingalls reached to the edge of his desk and pressed a stud.

  The door opened and a tall, lanky man in rumpled tweeds entered, carrying a large sack that bulged at odd places. The sack was heavy, judging by his unbalanced walk. He set the sack down and metal rattled inside it.

  "Commander, this is Edmunds, chief of Ordnance staff here at Command Base. Edmunds has done a real good job for you. Got a couple of things in his mad-bag that you've never heard of before. Go ahead, Eddy. Show him.”

  Grinning, Ingalls sat back and watched the tall, thin man bring a slender metal rod out of the bag. It was yard long and glittered in the lamplight.

  Softly, Edmunds said, “This is a device we call The Imp.” He brought out a disc and fitted it over the near end of the rod with magnetic clamps. His eyes were dark, introspective, as he looked at Craig. "It's something of a new concept in aggressiveness, commander. It makes a man implode.”

  He lifted it in his hands, touched the disc. A thin flare of pale crimson ran a dozen feet from the rod and stopped.

  "Were a man standing there, he would shrink up until he's nothing more than a dust mote on the floor and—disappear. It works on the theory that the spaces between the atoms of matter—whether living matter or inert matter—can be closed up by a special type of energy. We call it implosive shrinkage on the ordnance levels. The atoms shrink closer to one another—and as the space between them is lessened to nullity then they become smaller until—they don't exist anymore.”

  Ingalls leaned over the edge of his desk, throwing a book on the carpeting.

  "Try it on that, Eddy.” When the pale crimson flare ran out on the book the volume shrank and shrank until it was no longer there.

  Commander Craig began to sweat. Edmunds smiled. He put the rod down and reached into his mad-bag again. This time he lifted out a black box five inches on each side. There was a large red dot set into its top.

  Assume you are being attacked by alien enemies, Commander Craig. You have no weapon-only this black box. You press the red dot.“

  Edmunds touched the red stud. Instantly the air shimmered about him, and a glass-like tube appeared, surrounding him. His lips moved, but Craig could not hear no sound. Commander Ingalls came around the edge of the desk and picked up The Imp.

  “Watch, John.” He pressed the disc. Pale crimson fire ran from the rod to the glass-like tube and—ended. It did not splash or splatter. It was cut off as if with a knife.

  “A force-field?” wondered Craig. “In a sense, yes. In another sense, no. That barrier warps time, as near as we can judge. It hurls that beam somewhere into the future, How far into the future, we don't know. It may or may not exist any longer.”

  Craig grimaced. "Ten years from now, anyone walking past that spot where Edmunds is standing may get a face-full of that implosive beam. It wouldn't be nice.”

  According to theory, the warping at the barrier destroys anything which penetrates it. Ordnance has tested it at various frequencies and at differing energy levels. Apparently there is no after effect.

  Edmunds pressed the black-box on the bottom. The barrier faded out. His thin face was amused as he lifted the box to show a blue button. "This shuts it off, commander. Red to activate, blue to cessate.” He put the black-box on the edge of the desk beside the implosive rod.

  "One more, then were done.” His hand into the sack that crumpled as he lifted out a thin metal hoop. It was perhaps a foot in diameter and the metal itself was an inch în width. Edmunds waved it back and forth so that it set up a faint, thin music.

  The lanky man pulled the hoop-down about his head and pushed it together so that it formed a kind of headband, giving him an odd appearance. "The halo, as we've named it, gathers the mental energies inherent in that human brain and enables the wearer to focus them. Even a human genius uses less than ten per cent of the full potential of his brain, commander. The halo lets him utilize almost all the other ninety per cent. The results are sometimes surprising and even-frightening. Observe the top of the Commander Ingall's desk.”

  Craig turned his head to see a little yellow ball floating above the glass. As he watched, it was surrounded by a shimmery whiteness, then by a hard shell. He reached out and lifted the egg, finding it as heavy as a real one, and just as solid.

  Edmunds chuckled. “We’ve made a meal of those things down in the lab. They're real, all right—actual eggs, I mean—but they're utterly tasteless. Somehow we can get everything into them but flavor. Even calories and vitamins.”

  Craig was awed, "How do you do it?”

  "You pull the halo about your ears and concentrate.

  You have to build up the object slowly, step by step. When we first tried it, we got empty eggshells."

  "Could you make a gun. Say, a rayer?”

  "If you could visualize all its parts, I'd say yes.”

  "Where do
the atoms come from that form these things?”

  "Nobody knows. Right now the halo is top hush-hush. Commander Ingalls wangled one out of Empire Security because of the job you're going to do.” His voice told Craig that the Ordnance chief had no idea what that job would be.

  "I'll feel like a magician with that thing around my skull," he smiled. "I guess, in a sense, it is magic."

  "It's a refinement and an adaptation of the sciences of biochemistry and atomology with a little extrasensory perception thrown in for good measure.”

  When Craig reached for the halo, Ingalls said, "Hands off, John. All these things will be put on your ship minutes before countdown. For security reasons, you understand. Maybe some day everybody in the Empire will have a halo all to himself, but right now—they're verboten to everyone. Except yourself, naturally, and then only after you enter the Enigma. A time lock on the weapons chamber will prevent you from playing with them until the right time.”

  "Cautious, cautious," grinned Craig.

  Edmunds said soberly, "We must be cautious, Commander. These three objects are the result of seventy centuries of experimentation and adaptation. They are miracles in metal because of the indeterminable amount of human thought that has gone into them.” Edmunds lifted his mad-bag and began to put the objects into it, one by one. Craig wondered if he might owe his life to these things some day. When the lanky man was done, he nodded at Ingalls and at Craig, then left the room dragging his bag behind him.

  “Whoosh,” breathed Craig. “Those things will convince you how badly the big brass is worried. The Enigma is hellishly dangerous, John. Empire will give you anything you need to learn how to beat it. If it can be beaten, that is. Even knowing that would be something. Right now, everyone's working in the dark.”

  "As I will be, once I get inside the Enigma."

  From his desk drawer Dan Ingalls lifted out half a dozen flat pieces of paper embedded in transparent plastic. He counted them off as he tossed them on the desktop. "Your clearance papers, your takeoff permission, your priority card, your punch-data to be fed into the ships computer, your identification numbers—they'll get you through to me as fast as the relays can work if you only mention them—and your report sheets. That about does it.”

  Commander Ingalls placed his hands palm down on the glass desk covering. It was his signal to Craig that their meeting was at an end. In the past Ingalls had used this same gesture before sending John to Pamakian, Treefik and most recently, Lyrosia.

  Craig felt that he had been given his death notice, for the first time in his career.

  Chapter Two

  John Craig stood now at the quartzite lens that stared blankly out at sector XC-87458-TK of space, and studied the stars that hung so silently and so brightly in the space sea. It had not been a long journey to the Enigma, no more than three days, actually, most of which was spent in the gray wasteland of hyperspace. He was aware that his heart was pounding more rapidly than was normal.

  Well, excitement was a good reaction, he supposed. Usually he was calm enough, vaning down for a job, but that was because he knew pretty well what he was going up against. Empire had known enough about the intelligent beasts of Lyrosia or the crystal things of Pamakian to clue him in on the dangers he would face. This job was—something else again.

  Nobody knew anything about the Enigma. Nothing at all. When the densatron hull hit that blackness, it might be annihilated, and himself with it. He might go mad. He might be frozen into a deathlike trance for all eternity, kept alive by what ever the Enigma was. Oh, there were any number of fates he might suffer, he decided; it was better not to think about them, better just to ride along with the ship and meet an emergency when it arose. It made for a happier existence.

  The faint whisper of the nucleatronic engines filled the living quarters as the Staraine started to build up speed. Hit the Enigma fast, was the theory. Break through any energy barrier before it could grip and hold the huge densatron hull, this was the way Alert Command thought. Craig had the uncomfortable feeling that it might be better to nose his way in, in case some barrier stood like a wall before him; otherwise he might splatter the Staraine and his body across half a hundred miles of Enigma rim.

  It was too late to change course. The punch-card had been fed into the computers and mechanical brains were running the ship. The commander was along for the ride.

  A bleep began to sound, off to his right, amid the banks of metal walls and dividers. Empire had begun its tracking system. The bleeps and the red dot and dash that accompanied it told the major that he had not been forgotten. Empire was watching, waiting. If he died, ten billion people would know about it almost as soon as he stopped breathing.

  It was not comforting, not at all. The commander was discovering that a man clung most tenaciously to life when that life was threatened. Even a man like himself, used to putting his life on the line against half a dozen different types of death. Probably the trouble was, he was not sitting at the controls. He was being rushed along, unable to do more than pace the metaloid floor and wonder.

  The black blotch filled the quartzite screen now. Within minutes he would be inside that immense darkness—or splattered all over it. Crossing the floor, he flipped a switch that activated his own signals. Now Commander Ingalls would know as fast as John Craig whether he lived or died. If the ship and he were destroyed, the signal would stop. If the signal continued its beep, Craig would be alive.

  He turned back toward the screen. Distances were deceiving in space. The great ship was hurtling at in conceivable speed into that blotch but the blackness barely moved.

  His breath clawed in his throat. Suddenly as the last few thousand miles were crossed in nanoseconds the Enigma appeared to explode. It swelled and swelled. It grew titanic.

  Craig felt his muscles tense. Impact point would be about—

  Now!

  Darkness engulfed him. It seeped into the ship, hiding everything from him but the sound of his own heartbeat. There was no bleep, no whisper of the engines. Nothing but his heart pounding and slamming. He was blind. He lifted a hand and touched his face, his chest,

  He was alive, at least. Ingalls could not know this, for if the Empire signal had died out, so had his own. If the nucleatronic motors had been shut off by the blackness, he would be able to send no radio message, and probably be unable to fire back a torpedo. He would try, though. He had to do something!

  He moved through the narrow metal corridors that led to the firing tubes. His hands fumbled with the skill of long practice until he could see and grip the release pins. He tugged. They held tight. There was no motor power anywhere in the Staraine.

  Anguish and despair moved in the major. Never had he felt so alone, so cut off from his old familiar world as in this moment of intense blackness, of utter helplessness. Under his fingertips lay an infinitude of nucleatronic power which would not work.

  Nor would his weapons. The skin crawled on the base of his neck, and tiny blonde hairs rose stiffly. All he had to fight with were his hands and his teeth, the tools of a caveman. Then his lips drew back and his teeth showed. If he could not see, no enemy could see to attack him.

  Or—could one? Suppose some monstrosity was ahead of him, waiting, waiting for him to come nearer

  Craig shook himself. This way lay frustration and its correlary, madness. He must get a grip on himself. A thought came to him. There was a sword-an ancient thing he took with him on all his journeys, like a good luck charm, that he had bought in an antique store at Marsopolis, long ago-hanging in his sleeping quarters. A sword needed no motor to function.

  He went back through the metal corridor and stooped to enter the stateroom that was fitted with a bunk, a reading lounge, a desk and a chair. His groping fingers found the metal scabbard. He lifted down the scabbard and the blade and let his fingers curl gratefully about the braided hilt. Then he hooked it on its belt chains.

  With the sword at his side he went back to the control center. Now if anything
came at him, he could at least fight back. It made him feel less helpless.

  He waited an eternity in the darkness before he saw the pallid radiance far ahead. All the time he had been walking blindly through the ship, the Staraine had been sliding through the blotch.

  His muscles ached with waiting. Deliberately he tried to relax, to force a sense of safety into his body. There was light up ahead. Soon the darkness would be a thing of the past. The light would show him his enemies, or that which had already destroyed two Earth fleets. His hand was tensed about the sword-hilt as if in rigor mortis.

  The light grew brighter, intensely brilliant after the blackness.

  The ship was traveling far faster than he had imagined, due to its original impetus. The brightness was growing with an unbelievable rapidity. It must be—yes! As the Staraine slid out of the last wisps of the dark Enigma, Craig found he was staring at a giant white star. It hung before him like a titanic ball flexing, flaring pale fire. He could see the solar prominences shooting outward, see the inward writhing of the blazing gases and the flaring corona,

  God! Is this what happened to the fleets? Had they plunged into that awesome ball as he was plunging? For a moment he stood petrified, muscles frozen. Then with a cry—the blinking lights had turned on all across the room—he hurled himself at the control relays.

  His hands stabbed down and back and forth. In response, the nucleatronic motors whispered into life. The forward motion of the Staraine checked. There was a faint lurch—in his haste he forgot about the niceties of easing into the gravitic drags—as the ship turned slightly, away from that brilliance.

  There was an instant when the motors fought the magnetic attraction of the white star with every last erg of energy in their generators. He hung over the relays, hands poised, feeding power and more power into the field coils.

  This may have happened to the fleets, but he doubted it. He had gone into the blotch several coordinates away from their points of entry. They would not have emerged here. Even if they had, their officers would have been able to fight the pull of that awesome star as he had done. Some of the ships would have escaped, even if many might have been drawn into that stellar inferno.