Mission to Universe

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The vehicle under them kept going downwards. Now,either the ground had dropped away, or they were descending into some great, artificial, pit-like depression. They now moved and descended by levels, interspersed with the tree-like plants in all sizes, all filled with the curving white shapes of buildings. Then without warning they had flashed through an entrance and were inside a wide, white room, whose circular wall swept up to make a dome above it.

  The aliens got off the sled, and Ben followed them. There were others of the Gray-furs in the room—four of them, working with four black boxes set on high tripods around Ben. The two who had brought Ben back from the phase ship turned and walked off, the sled following them like an obedient dog. Ben turned to follow them, but abruptly he was caught and held by a pressure as heavy as if he had been immersed in liquid mercury. He could not stir.

  After the first surging attempt to break loose, he stood still, and the pressure relaxed. The four boxes were being moved in around him now, about fifteen feet distant in each case from him. And for the first time he was aware of a humming noise in the room, a humming set up by each of the Gray-furs, as if that was their way of communicating with each other.

  The box on Ben’s right put out a pale beam toward him, taking him by surprise, and Ben felt a warm touch on the right side of his head. His shoulder twitched once, undirected by his mind.

  There was a warm touch on the left side of his head, another pale beam had reached out to him from the box on that side, and unexpectedly he found himself weeping. He was torn by a raging sorrow—he did not know why. And then, as suddenly, the sorrow was gone and his left leg had jerked upward as two other warm touches made themselves felt against his scalp. In a moment he was laughing uncontrollably.

  He stood there, being worked like a puppet on strings by the four Gray-furs with boxes, and through the muscle spasms and the reasonless bursts of emotion that played through him, his mind fastened on an understanding. These Gray-furs were charting his brain, locating emotional and motor centers by noting what reaction they got by stimulating this or that area beneath his skull. It was an advanced method of what had been done back on Earth in the way of stimulating pleasure, pain, or motor centers in the brains Of animals, by means of electrodes touching the animals’ brains at certain points. What he was going through was impersonal and not cruel, but it was humiliating, emotionally shattering, and degrading. Ben burned with sudden anger.

  Almost at once he was aware that the stimuli were no longer being applied to him. Of the two beams on the side and the one in front, he could see that the front and right side beams were pale, while the left side beam pulsed redly. Astonishment and sudden caution replaced the anger, and the red light faded from the beam on his left while the beam to the box straight before him brightened with a steady blue glow.

  They were no longer transmitting stimuli to his brain.

  They were receiving—reading off the electrical discharge of his own emotions. Ben made an effort to find a point of emotional neutrality. For a moment his mind scrambled for something to hang on to, and found nothing. The harsh scent of his own sweat was in his nostrils and he felt like an animal in a trap—and then abruptly his mind came clear and sharp and analytical. The emergency had triggered the calculative element in him, developed over twenty years of trying to fit himself into the situations thrown up by his fellow human beings. All at once his thoughts stood off to one side considering the situation with himself as only one of the factors in it—and the three beams he could see shone pale and colorless.

  There was an outburst of humming from the Gray-furs—and he was being manipulated physically and emotionally again. But this time his intellectual detachment held good. When they stopped, he was still detached and thinking, and the beams flowed pale.

  There was a change in movement, the box directly before him shifted off to one side, and slowly three-dimensional images formed in the vacated space. Ben found himself looking at a world swimming in black, star-swarmed space. No, not just a world—this world of the Gray-furs, as he had seen it from the phase ship in orbit.

  The world dwindled, the view lengthened and became a model of the solar system to which the world belonged. Twelve worlds circled about a Go type star. Their circling ceased. They began to rotate backwards and the flow of further stars beyond them began to flow backwards. He was watching, Ben suddenly realized, a reversal of time, a movement back into the past, into history.

  The speed of the backing up continued and increased to blurring speed. The motion of the Gray-furs’ world was a constant ring of movement to the eye, about its sun. Thousands of years back, perhaps a hundred thousand years in ordinary space time was unreeled before Ben’s eyes. It slowed, it stopped, and the point of view moved in close on the Gray-furs’ single planet again.

  The motion of time moved forward. Tiny shapes that were long, flat, space going vessels came out of the stars toward the galactic center, and landed on a world lacking much of the vegetative cover that shrouded it now. The motion stopped and reversed itself. Like a movie run in reverse, the Gray-furs who had come out of the landed vessels backed into them once more, the ships backed off into space and receded from this world and its solar system. As they receded the view lengthened until the fleet of vessels became a moving point of light.

  The point of light became a bar stretching back toward the region of the Galactic Center. It stretched centerwards for perhaps a thousand or more light-years, and there it divided into a number of fingers, reaching out to end on a number of different planets on nearby solar systems. The ships landed and time moved back again for perhaps fifty or a hundred years.

  Then time began to move forward again.

  Cylindrical ships came out of space. They landed; and from them emerged tall, slim, golden-skinned and graceful-looking bipeds with strange, thin, lance-like weapons that glowed at the tip and wrought incredible destruction. The defeated Gray-fur survivors escaped to another world of their own kind, circling another star.

  The golden-skinned aliens razed the eggshell-white cities of the Gray-furs and built slim, towering metropolises of their own. They attacked, conquered, and settled another of the Gray-fur worlds. Planet by planet, they drove the Gray-furs outward until only one, overcrowded planet remained in Gray-fur possession.

  The Gray-furs assembled a fleet of the long, flat space-ships Ben had seen earlier. That fleet took aboard all the Gray-furs that remained and swam outward for a thousand light-years until it reached at last this world on which the descendants of its passengers and Ben now stood. The point of view moved back to give a view of the complete solar system and time blurred forward, slowed, stopped, and the point of view moved back in, down to this city, this room, and the present moment with a view of Ben standing watching with the boxes, the Gray-furs, and the domed room surrounding him.

  The images vanished. Ben tried to move, but the mercury-like pressure still held him captive.

  There was renewed humming among the Gray-furs. The boxes were drawn farther off from him. Their beams lengthened. Still, he saw with a touch of self-congratulation, the beams were pale. Whatever reaction the history of the Gray-furs had caused in him, no betraying hint of it had been available for his captors to read. But now what?

  They did not keep him in suspense long. Abruptly, he felt the restraining pressure vanish, from around him. But at the same time, six feet away all around him, a ring of floor ten feet wide sank noiselessly and swiftly out of sight. He found himself marooned on a little island of floor space. He took one step to the edge of his island and looked down.

  Dizziness swam in him and he felt an unexpected fear of falling that made one of the beams still touching his head flare yellow. The floor had sunk away an inconceivable distance. He could barely make out a circle of level, far below down there just before the shining walls seemed to come together with the illusion fostered by the distance. He was perched on a tiny platform twelve feet in diameter and at least a hundred feet above its base. He l
ifted his eyes quickly from that smooth depth and stepped hastily back to the center of his platform. Then he saw that something was happening at its further end.

  The air there was thickening, changing. The room about him, beyond the circle of depth, was darkening and dis-appearing. In the thickening air above the platform, shapes like the three-dimensional images of the Gray-fur’s pictures were struggling to be born.

  The four beams still reached out to touch Ben’s skull. Now, the touch of one of them warmed against the side of his head and without warning fear welled up inside him. Fear, then terror—then panic was being stimulated in him by the beam. Ben found himself crouching slightly at the knees, turning to look for a place to hide. But there was no place to hide on the small platform, and his turnings only brought him back to face the image that was struggling to be resolved.

  But now it was resolving itself. And as he began already to realize what it would be, a purely instinctive, uncontrollable fear of his own producing leaped up in Ben. The pit of his stomach, the short hairs on the nape of his neck, the smooth muscles of his contracting throat knew what was taking shape even before it was recognizable. The fingers of his right hand flexed uncontrollably. He looked down. There was no flimsy twig in his grasp there—but his palm and fingers felt that it was there. Jerkily, his gaze moved upward again to the resolving figure and saw it taking plain shape at last.

  Towering, as large, relative to his grown size, as its original shape had beer to his seven-year-old height, the furred and mighty, gray-silver-haired body took form, standing man-like on its hind legs. One huge forearm was hooked over a shadowy tree limb, and the great dog-like muzzle was uplifted to sniff the air.

  Ben took two instinctive, automatic steps backward—and felt the heel of his right foot come down on no surface. For a moment, under the momentum of his backward movement, he teetered on the edge of the depth behind him. Then he caught his balance and took one hurried step forward again. He wet his dry lips and looked once more at the grizzly.

  His mind told him it was only an image, but the fear impulses being pumped into him along the beams from the black boxes and his very nerves and cells leading the old, primitive portions of his brain called his mind a liar.And then, slowly, the muzzle began to come down. It dropped,dropped, and tilted toward him. Gleaming in the dusk of twilight that surrounded him, two small and burning eyes lowered and focused on him.

  The huge, upright shape swayed toward him. Fragments of forgotten fear—bright knowledge flickered wildly in Ben’s brain—Ursus Horribilis—Rudyard Kipling’s poem—The Bear That Walks Like a Man Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray—From brow to jaw that steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!” . . .Closer came the shape, shuffling, looming, burning-eyed. Fear packed Ben’s body all within like wet clay. It was almost upon him and there was no place to run.

  Then it was on him, one last step from him, and there was no hope left. Fear broke into desperation, an abandonment to fury, and Ben leaped forward and upward at the grizzled throat, hands outstretched—

  He went sprawling on a hard surface, his hands as far as the elbows stretching out over emptiness. He lifted his head, dazedly. The shape was gone and the floor was rising swiftly toward him to fill in the space between him and the Gray-furs with their boxes beyond.

  He got to his feet, becoming aware that the beams were no longer reaching out from the boxes to touch his skull. Now, two Gray-furs were coming forward with a sled like that on which he had ridden here. The sled sidled around to hang in the air just above the floor beside him.

  Ben stepped shakily upon it. The two Gray-furs mounted also, one before and one behind him. The sled started to move.

  They went out through the entrance, picking up speed swiftly as they did so, and the trip back to the phase ship was made in silence. When they got close to the ship Ben could see a number of the humans standing just inside the line, waiting for him. The sled reached the line, one of the Gray-furs opened it, and Ben stepped through. The Gray-furs remounted their sled and picked up the rod that was still imaging the scene around Ben back here by the ship. They went swiftly away.

  “Ben . . .” began Nora, who was in the forefront of those waiting.

  “Don’t say anything now,” said Ben, harshly. He had been thinking furiously on the way here. “Let’s get back aboard the ship—all of us.”

  He led the way back in through the airlock. It had been late morning when the phase ship had touched surface herein this valley. Now, it was late afternoon and the sun would be down in another hour. Ben went directly to his office.

  “Coop, Nora, Julian—somebody get me Walt,” he reeled off the names, as he turned around, standing behind his desk. “The rest of you clear out of here.” He stared att he crowd that had pushed into the office behind him. “Well?” he snarled, “What’s the matter with all of you? Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  They stared back at him with what he suddenly realized were expressions of deep concern—and out of the blue it burst upon him that they had been worried about him and that that was why they were clustering around him now.It was a naked moment of sheer embarrassment.

  “Will you get out?” he roared. “There’s nothing out of the ordinary to stare at around here!”

  At that they went, but as the door closed behind the last back, Nora spoke behind him.

  “Ben?”

  He turned around almost savagely.

  “What?”

  “Hadn’t you better lie down? After all they—” the word seemed to stick in her throat.

  “They what?” he demanded.

  “Well, they tortured you! We saw them do it!”

  Understanding broke upon him like a strong light. Of course, the whole ship would have watched everything that happened to him, imaged in the air above the rod outside the yellow line. He had not thought it possible to be more embarrassed than he had been at the realization that the rest aboard had been worried about him. Worried about Ben Shore—the man who had kidnaped them and already cost them four lives out of their number. But then he discovered an even greater embarrassment was possible.

  It came home to him suddenly—they had all seen him. They had seen him weeping like a child and laughing like a fool. They had seen him jerking like a puppet and convulsed with fear before what they could only know of as an outsize image of a grizzly bear. So much for the arbitrary and awesome figure of authority he had tried to make of himself over the last long months. —But there was no time to mourn over that loss now.

  “It wasn’t torture,” he said roughly. “It just looked that way.” Just then Walt entered the office from the Control Section and Ben turned gratefully to him. “Walt. Good. Now listen to me, all of you. We’re getting out of here tonight.”

  “Shift off?” asked Coop.

  “Not until those weapons up on the cliff covering us are out of action,” said Ben. “Now, first—” he turned to Julian, “give me an answer to a question. If we cut a section out of part of the ship’s hull that’s resting on the ground, in order to get at the rock we’re lying on, can we weld that section back afterwards and have a safe hull again? Can you answer that—or do you want to check with Lee?”

  “Why . . said Julian. “I think I can answer it all right. It’s a double hull, you know, with insulation between. But provided the section is welded back tight without leaks and the insulation replaced, we shouldn’t have any difficulty.”

  “Fine,” said Ben. He turned to Walt “What about those yellow lines? Did Observation find out what they’re made of?”

  “Yes,” said Walt, “they’re wire.”

  “Wire?” said Ben, frowning.

  “Almost microscopic wires—the tensile strength of each individual strand must be fantastic, to make those bands of them stand up over the ship in the air the way they do. But we’ve examined them under high magnification and that’s what they are. The wires put out a slight magnetic field, so that essentially we’ve got a bowl-sh
aped, weak magnetic field covering the ship.” He looked curiously at Ben. “That’s how they guarded against our making a sudden shift off-planet. The yellow lines are just a warning system—like a burglar alarm. The minute we activated the magnetic fields of the ship’s receptors preparatory to making the shift, their field would be pulled out of shape.”

  “Then how—” began Nora, and stopped herself.

  “We’re going to tunnel out,” said Ben, flatly, glancing at her for a second. He looked away again as her eyes met his, uncomfortable all over again with his embarrassment. “Julian, get some men busy cutting out a section of the hull where it lies flat against the rock. Then start your men with ultra-high temperature torches cutting through the rock underneath. Go down at least six feet and then tunnel horizontally toward the cliff on our right. That cliff face isn’t any more than thirty feet away. You ought to reach it in four hours at the most.”

  “Yes sir,” said Julian, turning toward the door.

  “I’ll need some commandos,” said Ben. “I’m going to take four men out that tunnel and put those weapons and their operators out of action. They’d better be people who can climb, as well as fight. We’re going to have to climb the cliff face to get up there. Coop?”

  “Yes,” said Coop. “I’ll be one.”

  “Who else? Who do you suggest? Kirk?”

  “Kirk would be good,” said Coop. “And Ralph Egan.”

  “You’d better take me,” said Walt.

  “No,” said Ben. “I want you here to take over if anything happens to me.”

  “Why don’t you stay here and I’ll lead them?” asked Walt.

  “Because that’s the way it’s going to be!” snapped Ben. He could not tell them that he did not trust anyone but himself to handle the silencing of the Gray-fur weapons.Walt was easily the most powerful individual aboard the ship—but he was a theoretician by nature, not a man of action. He should, Ben accused himself in the following second after his outburst, have been able to come up with an excuse, a reason of some sort. But he was too tense at the moment to be politic.