Mission to Universe

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Ben looked on into the entrance and saw the cause of John’s start. Sprockets, the cat, had just appeared there, and the small jaws were still gaped in what must have been a querulous meow.

  “Well,” said Ben, dryly—by now the whole room had discovered the cat’s presence, “come on in and join us.”

  Sprockets hesitated, tail-tip twitching. Then he walked forward to the side of Polly’s chair and waited for Polly to pick him up. Polly did so, and the attention of the room came back to Ben.

  “—Our decision,” went on Ben, speaking to them all, “is one we’d have, come to eventually, I think. But it’s been ,hastened by the latest reduction in crew numbers.” He was making an effort to speak as dispassionately, in as machine-like a way as possible. “We’ve landed on two worlds now, and each time we’ve lost people. We can’t go on like this.”

  He paused for a bright, stark moment of silence to emphasize that fact.

  “Accordingly,” he went on, “I’ve given orders to Captains Bone and Taller that from now on no landings will be made on any world that doesn’t seem, from orbit, to meet all the qualifications of the planet we’ve been sent out to find. In other words, we will land from now on only to confirm or reject what appears to be a completely safe and humanly habitable world.”

  He paused and looked around them. They were all listening.

  “In order to improve our chances of finding such a world,” he went on, “I’ve decided to make the large jump immediately from here halfway in toward the center of the galaxy, where the chances will be increased greatly by the increased number of stars in a given area of space. This means our next destination is approximately fifteen thou-sand light-years away. This will undoubtedly take us twenty-five or thirty shifts to correct estimated error before we arrive in the area I have picked out. So, we’ll get back to our Sections, now, and get to work immediately.”

  He stopped speaking.

  “That’s all,” he added, as they continued to sit still and silently.

  He got down from the platform and made his way back through the room where everybody was beginning to stand up and talk. No one stopped him to ask him questions, and he was able to get out of the Lounge, down the corridor on the men’s side, and back into his office and back to his study of the star charts. Those charts would improve with each new shift toward their destination, but what he could discover now might make him quicker-eyed to see things in the more detailed charts that would come after.

  They had hesitated here, one light-year from Old Twenty-nine, just long enough to hold the conference that preceded his announcement to the crew and to allow those aboard to recover somewhat from the shock of the experience on the world they had just left. The long-range effects of that shock, Ben told himself now, were yet to be discovered—like the full effect of the wounds Lee had taken from the carnivore; though at first examination these appeared, if painful, superficial enough. What was certain in the case of the crew, though, was that everyone aboard had suffered a heavy emotional blow, and the effects of that blow had to show up somewhere.

  It could, thought Ben, spreading the charts out on his desk, turn into resentment of him, as the man who ordered the takeoff that left two men behind. In fact, that was the most likely and—he thought a little bitterly—probably the safest course it could take. He would have to watch the crew closely for signs of reaction as they shifted inward toward midpoint to the Galactic Center.

  “Ready to shift,” announced Coop, rousing him from his work some four hours later. Coop had been assigned Duty Officer status along with Walt, now that Lee was out of action. “First gross shift.”

  “I’ll come,” said Ben.

  For the first time they were really up against the mathematics of phase shifting. Theoretically, they had only to calculate the point of arrival they wished, and a single shift would bring them to it, across the whole fifteen thou-sand light-years of distance. Practically, it was a matter of making that calculation with correct values of distance and position. Observation, after all, could only give them approximate figures for both the distance of their present position and the distance of their point of destination from the Galactic Centerpoint that was the reference point of their calculations. In fact, that Centerpoint itself was only theoretical and its position approximate.

  So, until Observation could make a direct, line-of-sight measurement on some star near that destination point, all phase shifts were “gross”—movements to an approximated and unseen destination point. Once such a star could be sighted on and measured they would become “fine” phase shifts—still with a varying quantity of built-in observational error and computational limitations, but with a lesser scale of problem.

  The first “gross” jump would be practically a blind jump halfway to Galactic Centerpoint. They would emerge in their new position, if they were lucky, not more than a few thousand light-years in error. Then, as the hours of calculation and observation grew on each successive shift, they would try to decrease that error, and decrease it again, and so on until a stellar reference point could be established and the whole business would begin over again on a finer scale.

  “Prepare to shift,” said Ben now, emerging into the Control Room. Ralph Egan was in the chair before the control instruments while Coop stood behind him.

  The sensation of shifting struck hard this time. Ben felt his stomach lurch as if it had been turned inside out—which, topologically and theoretically speaking, it more or less had been, along with the rest of him. It was no help to him to realize that this feeling was entirely subjective and after the fact—that the shift itself was instantaneous and it was merely the memory of it that nauseated him. But the fact that, looking around him now, he could see that Coop and Ralph had been similarly affected did help.He straightened up and looked into the screen above Ralph’s head.

  The difference was there to see. Just where they were now, it would take some hours, perhaps even days, to calculate, but there was no doubt about the difference in this their present position and the fact that it was far closer to the Centerpoint than they had ever been before. The screen showed a scarcely-broken carpet of stars in all colors.

  “Call me once our position’s established,” said Ben harshly, breaking the spell that tempted him to stand marveling at the star-scene, like a hoard of jewels, thrice-ransom for an emperor, spread out before him.

  He turned sharply, seeing Coop and Ralph stirring dazedly out of their own reaction at the sight of the alien stars, and went back into his office, shutting the door behind him.

  But once the door was closed, he sat down at his desk and turned on his desk screen to show a view of the thick-clustered stars here, halfway to the center of the galaxy.

  He sat looking at them. They were beautiful—almost too beautiful to believe. But as he sat staring, he felt rising in him the same stiff coldness of fear he had felt in orbit around Alpha Centauri as he had sat looking out at the stars his screen showed there. Now, at last, they had stuck their heads into what might be a den of lions.

  It was inevitable and necessary that they finally come here. But that did not lessen the dangers inherent in their coming. They were like the members of some primitive tribe, descending from their bare and starving mountain-top into the richer valley lands below. On the mountaintop they had gone hungry, but also they had gone unchallenged. Here, they should not go hungry, but no sensible man could believe they could go forever unchallenged—where there was so much richness to dispute. With an abrupt effort of will, Ben pushed it from his mind. He switched off the screen.

  There followed, after all this, days stretching into weeks—stretching at last into a month—of strange peacefulness. For the first time aboard the phase ship they went week after week, day after day, without sighting a single star close enough to think of it as a sun. Always the thickly carpeted space of stars surrounded them on all sides—so numerous that it was only by laying one star chart made by Observation next to another that the untutored eye co
uld see that a shift had moved them at all. Under these conditions, the crew of the ship seemed to retreat into themselves and the artificial universe of phase-shifting mathematics, as they had in the first few weeks after leaving Earth.

  Lee was not healing as he should from the wounds the vine-tiger had given him. He had been scratched on the upper thighs and upper chest and had tooth puncture wounds in his upper left shoulder. In addition, one of the neck-base tentacles of the vine-tiger had evidently whipped him around the neck, leaving a shallow scoring in the flesh, though not deep enough to cause dangerous bleeding from any of the blood vessels there. There was no evident infection or undue inflammation. But the wounds were healing with extreme slowness. They were as painful now, six weeks later, as they had been the day after the attack. And under the scourge of the constant pain, Lee was becoming aged and gaunt.

  “What’s wrong with me, Ben?” he asked, almost fretfully.

  “I don’t know, Lee.” Ben had come by Lee’s stateroom, now converted into a hospital room of sorts, not because there was anything he could do for Lee physically, but to tell the other man that the next shift should bring them within sight of their first point of destination—a system with a Go star like Earth’s Sun and a very good chance of an Earth-like planet orbiting around it.

  “You must have some idea!” Lee moved his head restlessly on its pillow.

  Ben, about to say no, changed his mind. Suddenly he had remembered his own resentment in the past of physicians whom he had suspected of not telling him as much as they could about his ailments. He understood those physicians now—a guess could turn out to do more harm than good if it were wrong. But he had no professional authority to maintain, in any case.

  “It’s just speculation,” he told Lee now. “But I don’t think you’re the victim of an alien virus or anything like that.The original idea that alien life forms couldn’t infect us or vice versa seems to hold up as far as that goes.”

  “Then why don’t I heal up?” demanded Lee.

  “Well, I think it may be something simply chemical in its action,” said Ben, “something I don’t know enough or don’t have the equipment aboard here to identify as being in your wounds—but something that chemically inhibits the natural process of cellular regrowth.”

  “Then I’ll never get well!” Lee’s head rolled on the pillow again, revealing the whip-like laceration, like a black line with the clotted blood in it.

  “Yes, you will,” said Ben. “You’re healing up in spite of this. And I think you’re healing a little faster all the time,which would mean the chemical action is weakening as the chemical itself is being destroyed or somehow expelled from your body.” He saw Lee was not comforted by the explanation. Perhaps he had been wrong to tell him of it, after all. “Why don’t you clip your electrodes on again and get some rest?”

  “Rest!” said Lee, “It’s like spending part of my time being dead.” He did not object, however, as Ben picked up the clips and replaced them on the shaved areas of his scalp, so that the electric anesthesia provided by the slight current through clips and scalp and skull could put him into an easy sleep.

  Like being dead it might be, thought Ben, looking down now at the immediately sleeping man. But if he had been forced to combat Lee’s constant pain with something like barbiturates, Lee would be in a sad state by now. Electrical anesthesia was a godsend to this kind of situation.

  He turned about and left the stateroom. Coop was waiting for him just outside the door.

  “Ready to shift to orbit around Destination Star One,” said Coop.

  “All right. I’ll come.”

  Destination Star One was a Go star, the first of a cluster of six such Sun-like stars scattered in an area of about two hundred light-years in diameter. The odds were strong that it would possess planets; and when they had shifted to it, they found that it did. But none of them were habitable.

  “Very well,” said Ben, after four days' search of the area about Star One. “We’ll go on. Star Two.”

  Star Two, only sixty light-years away, also possessed planets but these were also uninhabitable. And so the search continued. When this area was exhausted, Ben, in conference with Walt and Nora and Coop, chose another and they began all over again. Every so often they were tempted with a world that seemed to have only one flaw—an atmosphere just too low in oxygen to be breathable or a planet barely too scant of water—hilt Ben held firmly to his decision not to land unless the world seemed completely habitable from orbit.

  In this atmosphere of search and search again, Christmas came and then the New Year aboard the phase ship. By Earth calendar they moved on into January and then February. On February sixteenth, they had barely shifted into orbit around a Go star, when Walt stepped into Ben’s office.

  “Possible planet,” said Walt. “It looks good.”

  Walt’s face was as expressionless as usual, but there was an intensity about him like the glow of invisible heat from a metal ingot not yet fired to the point of changing color, but already dangerous to approach closely.

  “Ready to shift to it?”

  Walt nodded and stood aside as Ben rose from behind the desk and walked past him into the Control Section.

  “Prepare to shift,” Ben said, turning formally to Walt as he entered, closing the door to the office behind him.

  “Yes sir.” Walt turned to Tessie Sorenson. “Prepare to shift.”

  “Report,” said Tessie into her phone to the other Sections.

  There was a pause as the other Sections waited for Observation to report first. The pause extended itself with no answer—and suddenly there was a hoarse yell from Observation and the sound of some thing or things falling, heard not over the phone but through the connecting entrances between Sections.

  “Hold!” snapped Walt, turning toward the entrance to Computation Section. But Ben was already ahead of him, striding through Computation, past the two people on duty there, and into Observation.

  The shutters were back over the Observation window overhead, and the stars outside were so bright with their total light that they made themselves seen through the window even in the face of the interior illumination of the Section. Of those on duty there, one was still seated in his chair, while Kirk Walish the Section leader, was squatted before John Edlung who was crouched in a comer, shivering, his hands over his face.

  “What’s the matter here?” said Ben. Kirk looked up. For once the sharp-voiced, balding man looked bewildered and at a loss.

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said—and the fact that the “sir” was said ungrudgingly was an index of Kirk’s loss of aplomb. Ben had given up trying to maintain that element of military order except among the on-duty people, but Kirk had continued to resist it even when leading his Section. “—I just said he was being a little slow,” went on Kirk, “and he dived at me, as if he was trying to choke me.” Kirk’s hand went wonderingly to his own throat.

  John Edlung continued to crouch, shivering with his hands over his face. For a moment Ben thought the man was weeping, but it was simply hoarse and tortured breathing he heard.

  “All right,” said Ben, “help me get him down to the dispensary. Captain Bone, find somebody to replace him, and run through the shift on your own authority—but write it up in the ship’s log when you’re done.”

  “Yes sir,” said Walt. Ben and Kirk between them were lifting John by hands under his armpits and guiding him up through the Sections, through Ben’s office, and out the door on the women’s side to the dispensary. They sat him down in the chair in that white room with its glass cases of equipment and medicines and its white-clothed narrow table on which Polly had lost her leg. He still had his hands over his face.

  “All right, Kirk,” said Ben. Kirk went out, closing the door behind him. Ben sat down on an edge of the narrow table, waiting. After a few minutes John’s hands came slowly down from his face revealing eyes that were bloodshot and with the skin under them puffed and darkened.

  “Wh
at is it?” Ben asked.

  “Nothing,” said John almost whispering. He did not look up to meet Ben’s gaze.

  “You haven’t been sleeping—is that it?” asked Ben, evenly.

  John shuddered with his whole body. The shudder sent little waves of movement through his pale, lax cheeks.

  “Nightmares,” he said. “—I’ve been having nightmares.” His voice was just barely above a whisper.

  “Why didn’t you come to me about this?”

  John shuddered again. His hands twitched as if he would have liked to put them up to his face again, but he held them down on his knees.

  “I’m going to die,” he said. “I know I’m going to die. I’m never going to get home. I wasn’t going to let anyone know. I thought I could make myself not think about it, but I keep dreaming it, night after night . . .”

  The dammed up horrors inside John came tumbling out.It seemed that as a boy he had lived with his parents in a small seaside town in the state of Washington, where there were a couple of fish canneries. The town was plagued with large, gray wharf rats, and in an abandoned warehouse next to one of the canneries the rats swarmed thickly. The children had a story about a King of All the Rats, as big as a man, who lived in the warehouse; and one day a group of them including John had crawled in a broken window to explore the ruined structure. The rest had slipped away, leaving John, the youngest, behind. And when he went to get out, he found that the rats had blocked the entrance.

  Fearful, hardly daring to breathe, he had crouched thereon some ancient burlap sacks by the window, expecting the King of All the Rats at any moment. And time went by . . .

  And then he heard at last the voices of the other children coming to release him—but in that moment, he saw something move, in the farther shadows of the rafters and forgotten crates and boxes. Something as big as a man.

  When the other children unblocked the window, they found him hysterical. This had frightened them, so that they had said nothing of what had happened, and neither had he. Over the years he had forgotten it until the episode on Old Twenty-nine. Now, every night he dreamed of it, dreamed of the King of All the Rats, who was somewhere on one of the worlds among the stars, waiting for him.