by Lake, Jay
“Well—” Donovan got the words out slowly. “If I don’t have to enlist. I will not take an oath to your Emperor.”
“You needn’t. Your status will be that of a civilian under Imperial command, directly responsible to me. You will have a cabin of your own, but no compensation except the abandonment of criminal proceedings against you.” Jansky relaxed and her voice grew gentler. “However, if you serve well I’ll see what I can do about pay. I daresay you could use some extra money.”
“Thank you,” said Donovan formally. He entered the first phase of the inchoate plan which was taking cloudy shape in his hammering brain: “May I have my personal slave with me? He’s nonhuman, but he can eat Terran food.”
Jansky smiled. There was sudden warmth in that smile, it made her human and beautiful. “As you wish, if he doesn’t have fleas. I’ll write you an order for his embarkation.”
She’d hit the ceiling when she found what kind of passenger she’d agreed to, thought Donovan. But by then it would be too late. And, with Wocha to help me, and the ship blundering blind into the Nebula—Valduma, Valduma, I’m coming back! And this time will you kiss me or kill me?
* * * *
The Ganymede lifted gravs and put the Ansa sun behind her. Much farther behind was Sol, an insignificant mote fifty light-years away, lost in the thronging glory of stars. Ahead lay Sagittari, Galactic center and the Black Nebula.
Space burned and blazed with a million bitter-bright suns, keen cold unwinking flames strewn across the utter dark of space, flashing and flashing over the hollow gulf of the leagues and the years. The Milky Way foamed in curdled silver around that enormous night, a shining girdle jeweled with the constellations. Far and far away wheeled the mysterious green and blue-white of the other galaxies, sparks of a guttering fire with a reeling immensity between. Looking toward the bows, one saw the great star-clusters of Sagittari, the thronging host of suns burning and thundering at the heart of the Galaxy. And what have we done? thought Basil Donovan. What is man and all his proud achievements? Our home star is a dwarf on the lonely fringe of the Galaxy, out where the stars thin away toward the great emptiness. We’ve ranged maybe two hundred light-years from it in all directions and it’s thirty thousand to the Center! Night and mystery and nameless immensities around us, our day of glory the briefest flicker on the edge of nowhere, then oblivion forever—and we won’t be forgotten, because we’ll never have been noticed. The Black Nebula is only the least and outermost of the great clouds which thicken toward the Center and hide its ultimate heart from us, it is nothing even as we, and yet it holds a power older than the human race and a terror that may whelm it.
He felt again the old quailing funk, fear crawled along his spine and will drained out of his soul. He wanted to run, escape, huddle under the sky of Ansa to hide from the naked blaze of the universe, live out his day and forget that he had seen the scornful face of God. But there was no turning back, not now, the ship was already outpacing light on her secondary drive and he was half a prisoner aboard. He squared his shoulders and walked away from the viewplate, back toward his cabin.
Wocha was sprawled on a heap of blankets, covering the floor with his bulk. He was turning the brightly colored pages of a child’s picture book. “Boss,” he asked, “when do we kill ’em?”
“The Impies? Not yet, Wocha. Maybe not at all.” Donovan stepped over the monster and lay down on his bunk, hands behind his head. He could feel the thrum of the driving engines, quivering in the ship and his bones. “The Nebula may do that for us.”
“We go back there?” Wocha stirred uneasily. “I don’t like, boss. It’s toombar. Bad.”
“Yeah, so it is.”
“Better we stay home. Manor needs repair. Peasants need our help. I need beer.”
“So do I. I’ll see if we can’t promote some from the quartermaster. Old John can look after the estate while we’re away, and the peasants will just have to look after themselves. Maybe it’s time they learned how.” At a knock on the door: “Come in.”
Tetsuo Takahashi, the ship’s exec, brought his small sturdy form around Wocha and sat down on the edge of the bunk. “Your slave has the Old Lady hopping mad,” he grinned. “He’ll eat six times a man’s ration.”
“And drink it.” Donovan smiled back; he couldn’t help liking the cocky little Terran. Then, with a sudden renewed bitterness: “And he’s worth it. I couldn’t be without him. He may not be so terribly bright, but he’s my only proof that loyalty and decency aren’t extinct.”
Takahashi gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you hate us so much?” he asked.
“You came in where you weren’t asked. Ansa was free, and now it’s just another province of your damned Empire.”
“Maybe so. But you were a backwater, an underpopulated agricultural planet which nobody had ever heard of, exposed to barbarian raids and perhaps to nonhuman conquest. You’re safe now, and you’re part of a great social-economic system which can do more than all those squabbling little kingdoms and republics and theocracies and God knows what else put together could ever dream of.”
“Who said we wanted to be safe? Our ancestors came to Ansa to be free. We fought Shalmu when the greenies wanted to take what we’d built, and then we made friends with them. We had elbow room and a way of life that was our own. Now you’ll bring in your surplus population to fill our green lands with yelling cities and squalling people. You’ll tear down the culture we evolved so painfully and make us just another bunch of kowtowing Imperial citizens.”
“Frankly, Donovan, I don’t think it was much of a culture. It sat in its comfortable rut and admired the achievements of its ancestors. What did your precious Families do but hunt and loaf and throw big parties? Maybe they did fulfill a magisterial function—so what? Any elected yut could do the same in that simple a society.” Takahashi fixed his eyes on Donovan’s. “But rights and wrongs aside, the Empire had to annex Ansa, and when you wouldn’t come in peaceably you had to be dragged in.”
“Yeah. A dumping ground for people who were too stupid not to control their own breeding.”
“Your Ansan peasants, my friend, have about twice the Terran birth rate. It’s merely that there are more Terrans to start with—and Sirians and Centaurians and all the old settled planets. No, it was more than that. It was a question of military necessity.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“Read your history sometime. When the Commonwealth broke up in civil wars two hundred years ago it was hell between the stars. Half savage peoples who never should have left their planets had learned how to build spaceships and were going out to raid and conquer. A dozen would-be overlords scorched whole worlds with their battles. You can’t have anarchy on an interstellar scale. Too many people suffer. Old Manuel I had the guts to proclaim himself Emperor of Sol—no pretty euphemisms for him, an empire was needed and an empire was what he built. He kicked the barbarians out of the Solar System and went on to conquer their home territories and civilize them. That meant he had to subjugate stars closer to home, to protect his lines of communication. This led to further trouble elsewhere. Oh, yes, a lot of it was greed, but the planets which were conquered for their wealth would have been sucked in anyway by sheer economics. The second Argolid carried on, and now his son, Manuel II, is finishing the job. We’ve very nearly attained what we must have—an empire large enough to be socio-economically self-sufficient and defend itself against all comers, of which there are many, without being too large for control. You should visit the inner Empire sometime, Donovan, and see how many social evils it’s been possible to wipe out because of security and central power. But we need this sector to protect our Sagittarian flank, so we’re taking it. Fifty years from now you’ll be glad we did.”
Donovan looked sourly up at him.
“Why are you feeding me that?” he asked. “I’ve heard it before.”
“Think so if you wish.”
“We could use a hypnoprobe on you, you know. We’d squeeze your skull dry of everything it contained. But we’d rather spare you that indignity.”
“And you might need me when you get there, and I’d still be only half conscious. Quit playing the great altruist, Takahashi.”
The exec shook his head. “There’s something wrong inside you, Donovan,” he murmured. “You aren’t the man who licked us at Luga.”
“Luga!” Donovan’s eyes flashed. “Were you there?”
“Sure. Destroyer North Africa, just come back from the Zarune front—Cigarette?”
They fell to yarning and passed a pleasant hour. Donovan could not suppress a vague regret when Takahashi left. They aren’t such bad fellows, those Impies, They were brave and honorable enemies, and they’ve been lenient conquerors as such things go. But when we hit the Black Nebula—
He shuddered. “Wocha, get that whiskey out of my trunk.”
“You not going to get drunk again, boss?” The Donarrian’s voice rumbled disappointment.
“I am. And I’m going to try to stay drunk the whole damn voyage. You just don’t know what we’re heading for, Wocha.”
Stranger, go back.
Spaceman, go home. Turn back, adventurer.
It is death. Return, human.
The darkness whispered. Voices ran down the length of the ship, blending with the unending murmur of the drive, urging, commanding, whispering so low that it seemed to be within men’s skulls.
Basil Donovan lay in darkness. His mouth tasted foul, and there was a throb in his temples and a wretchedness in his throat. He lay and listened to the voice which had wakened him.
Go home, wanderer. You will die, your ship will plunge through the hollow dark till the stars grow cold. Turn home, human.
“Boss. I hear them, boss. I’m scared.”
“How long have we been under weigh? When did we leave Ansa?”
“A week ago, boss, maybe more. You been drunk. Wake up, boss, turn on the light. They’re whispering in the dark, and I’m scared.”
“We must be getting close.”
Return. Go home. First comes madness and then comes death and then comes the spinning outward forever. Turn back, spaceman.
Bodiless whisper out of the thick thrumming dark, sourceless all-pervading susurration, and it mocked, there was the cruel cynical scorn of the outer vastness running up and down the laughing voice. It murmured, it jeered, it ran along nerves with little icy feet and flowed through the brain, it called and gibed and hungered. It warned them to go back, and it knew they wouldn’t and railed its mockery at them for it. Demon whisper, there in the huge cold loneliness, sneering and grinning and waiting.
Donovan sat up and groped for the light switch. “We’re close enough,” he said tonelessly. “We’re in their range now.”
Footsteps racketed in the corridor outside. A sharp rap on his door. “Come in. Come in and enjoy yourself.”
III
Donovan hadn’t found the switch before the door was open and light spilled in from the hallway fluorotubes. Cold white light, a shaft of it picking out Wocha’s monstrous form and throwing grotesque shadows on the walls. Commander Jansky was there, in full uniform, and Ensign Jeanne Scoresby, her aide. The younger girl’s face was white, her eyes enormous, but Jansky wore grimness like an armor.
“All right, Donovan,” she said. “You’ve had your binge, and now the trouble is starting. You didn’t say they were voices.”
“They could be anything,” he answered, climbing out of the bunk and steadying himself with one hand. His head swam a little. The corners of the room were thick with shadow.
Back, spaceman. Turn home, human.
“Delusions?” The man laughed unpleasantly. His face was pale and gaunt, unshaven in the bleak radiance. “When you start going crazy, I imagine you always hear voices.”
There was contempt in the gray eyes that raked him. “Donovan, I put a technician to work on it when the noises began a few hours ago. He recorded them. They’re very faint, and they seem to originate just outside the ear of anyone who hears them, but they’re real enough. Radiations don’t speak in human Anglic with an accent such as I never heard before. Not unless they’re carrier waves for a message. Donovan, who or what is inside the Black Nebula?”
The Ansan’s laugh jarred out again. “Who or what is inside this ship?” he challenged. “Our great human science has no way of making the air vibrate by itself. Maybe there are ghosts, standing invisible just beside us and whispering in our ears.”
“We could detect nothing, no radiations, no energy-fields, nothing but the sounds themselves. I refuse to believe that matter can be set in motion without some kind of physical force being applied.” Jansky clapped a hand to her sidearm. “You know what is waiting for us. You know how they do it.”
“Go ahead. Hypnoprobe me. Lay me out helpless for a week. Or shoot me if you like. You’ll be just as dead whatever you do.”
Her tones were cold and sharp. “Get on your clothes and come up to the bridge.”
He shrugged, picked up his uniform, and began to shuck his pajamas. The women looked away.
Human, go back. You will go mad and die.
Valduma, he thought, with a wrenching deep inside him. Valduma, I’ve returned.
He stepped over to the mirror. The Ansan uniform was a gesture of defiance, and it occurred to him that he should shave if he wore it in front of these Terrans. He ran the electric razor over cheeks and chin, pulled his tunic straight, and turned back. “All right.”
They went out into the hallway. A spaceman went by on some errand. His eyes were strained wide, staring at blankness, and his lips moved. The voices were speaking to him.
“It’s demoralizing the crew,” said Jansky. “It has to stop.”
“Go ahead and stop it,” jeered Donovan. “Aren’t you the representative of the almighty Empire of Sol? Command them in the name of His Majesty to stop.”
“The crew, I mean,” she said impatiently. “They’ve got no business being frightened by a local phenomenon.”
“Any human would be,” answered Donovan. “You are, though you won’t admit it. I am. We can’t help ourselves. It’s instinct.”
“Instinct?” Her clear eyes were a little surprised.
“Sure.” Donovan halted before a viewscreen. Space blazed and roiled against the reaching darkness. “Just look out there. It’s the primeval night, it’s the blind unknown where unimaginable inhuman Powers are abroad. We’re still the old half-ape, crouched over his fire and trembling while the night roars around us. Our lighted, heated, metal-armored ship is still the lonely cave-fire, the hearth with steel and stone laid at the door to keep out the gods. When the Wild Hunt breaks through and shouts at us, we must be frightened, it’s the primitive fear of the dark. It’s part of us.”
She swept on, her cloak a scarlet wing flapping behind her. They took the elevator to the bridge.
Donovan had not watched the Black Nebula grow over the days, swell to a monstrous thing that blotted out half the sky, lightlessness fringed with the cold glory of the stars. Now that the ship was entering its tenuous outer fringes, the heavens on either side were blurring and dimming, and the blackness yawned before. Even the densest nebula is a hard vacuum; but tons upon incredible tons of cosmic dust and gas, reaching planetary and interstellar distances on every hand, will blot out the sky. It was like rushing into an endless, bottomless hole, the ship was falling and falling into the pit of Hell.
“I noticed you never looked bow-wards on the trip,”
said Jansky. There was steel in her voice. “Why did you lock yourself in your cabin and drink like a sponge?”
“I was bored,” he replied sullenly.
“You were afraid!” she snapped contemptuously. “You didn’t dare watch the Nebula growing. Something happened the last time you were here which sucked the guts out of you.”
“Didn’t your Intelligence talk to the men who were with me?”
“Yes, of course. None of them would say more than you’ve said. They all wanted us to come here, but blind and unprepared. Well, Mister Donovan, we’re going in!”
The floorplates shook under Wocha’s tread. “You not talk to boss that way,” he rumbled.
“Let be, Wocha,” said Donovan. “It doesn’t matter how she talks.”
He looked ahead, and the old yearning came alive in him, the fear and the memory, but he had not thought that it would shiver with such a strange gladness.
And—who knew? A bargain—
Valduma, come back to me!
Jansky’s gaze on him narrowed, but her voice was suddenly low and puzzled. “You’re smiling,” she whispered.
He turned from the viewscreen and his laugh was ragged. “Maybe I’m looking forward to this visit, Helena.”
“My name,” she said stiffly, “is Commander Jansky.”
“Out there, maybe. But in here there is no rank, no Empire, no mission. We’re all humans, frightened little humans huddling together against the dark.” Donovan’s smile softened. “You know, Helena, you have very beautiful eyes.”
The slow flush crept up her high smooth cheeks. “I want a full report of what happened to you last time,” she said. “Now. Or you go under the probe.”
Wanderer, it is a long way home. Spaceman, spaceman, your sun is very far away.