Death Waits in Semispace

by Perry Rhodan

Perry Rhodan suddenly felt how unlikely the undertaking in which they were involved was. At stake was immortality, which was inconceivable. The action took place—or was supposed to take place—in a space that lay between the dimensions; and that was not only unimaginable, it was absurd. Out there, beyond the forcefields of the Drusus , waited a transport field that would bring the Gazelle and its occupants without any loss of time to a destination several million kilometers away and in the process contradict all the fundamentals of the Terran physics of just 100 years before.

  Perry Rhodan felt terror mount inside—the atavistic fear of the unknown, the incomprehensible.

  He reacted to that as he was accustomed to react: he became angry. He shot the Gazelle ahead with a wild spurt and let it race into the region where the transport field of the teletransmitter waited. He tensed his muscles, waiting for the expected shock, and then he realized with terror that the shock was even worse than he had anticipated.

  It hit him with the force of a jackhammer. A hull of steel seemed to have formed about his body in a thousandth of a second, fitting his shape exactly. It began to compress. He screamed and could not even hear his own voice. He was puzzled by the darkness around him and could not understand why he could no longer see nor hear his companions. He tried to resist the powerful force bearing down on him but the more he strained the worse the pain grew. He held still, ceased screaming and attempted to bear the incomprehensible. But the pain became so overpowering that he lost consciousness for a few seconds.

  As he came to once more, he was bathed in sweat. Colored rings danced in front of his eyes and his lungs felt as though he had just made a run of 10,000 meters. But in spite of the pain that still bothered him, he could see that the Gazelle was a few kilometers above that strange landscape which he still well remembered.

  With disbelieving surprise, he realized that the transport had succeeded. Blinking, he looked up at the bright sun shining far away in a blue sky, lavishly flooding the parkland below with light.

  They were on Wanderer.

  • • •

  Nathan conversed with the alien for as long as the latter was interested, then fell silent. Meanwhile Nathan had collected a good deal of information. He knew where lay the city that was the goal of his friends. And since he had nothing better to do, he made his way towards it.

  He found himself in an odd frame of mind. The loss of his body did not affect him especially. In the first place, he was certain that his friend would aid him in reuniting him with it and in the second place it would not be any great loss for him if he had to live out his life as a disembodied form. He would feel pain if his friend—should he never find him—decided to move his dead body so far away that his mental reflexes could no longer reach it and thereafter had to be stored in his incorporeal form. But the pain would be bearable.

  That was not it, then. No, what Nathan felt was the same feeling he had already had while on his way through the darkness of space to this strange world: the feeling of loneliness. He had never felt it before. For on Solitude the inhabitants lived in large herds and anyone who left the herd for awhile could do so with no danger for he could always find another herd a few kilometers away which would be happy to take him in. There was no such thing as loneliness on Solitude. Or rather, there had not been until the Druufs came and captured the Solitudians to lock them up. But Nathan remembered that even then he had not ever felt lonely. He could, in his present form, find and communicate with the non-material forms of other prisoners. Besides, the feeling of anger towards the Druufs overpowered all other feelings.

  But there was nothing here. Here he was alone on an artificial world whose ruler sat in a distant city and who meanwhile had become tired of conversing with him. There was no one with whom he could communicate. What he saw, heard and felt had to be kept to himself, although it was the way of his race to converse, exchange experiences, reporting various events, thinking together and thereby being pleased and happy.

  Here there was not even anything to experience. This world seemed to be empty. Nathan had landed on one of the huge grassy plains which stretched into the green-blue haze of the distance. There was nothing here but grass and a few beetles between the blades.

  Hardly had Nathan completed that thought than he suddenly perceived motion of some sort. At first he saw only a few dark and swiftly moving dots gliding low over the grass. The points grew larger and Nathan saw that in reality they were 4-legged creatures racing towards him at high speed. As they were still 100 meters away, Nathan noticed how oddly they were formed: they had a head, four legs and a tail but on their backs grew a second, smaller body which also had a head and two legs. At lightning speed Nathan mirrored the most forward of the strange creatures and ran to meet it in the same way it ran towards him. The forward creature suddenly became aware of him and stopped. With that it reared up on its hind legs, dangling its forelegs in the air. Nathan saw that the partial body growing out of the back moved violently and quickly and that it suddenly held an object in its hand. The object consisted of a straight and a bent piece which met at their ends: Nathan saw the being take a long staff, which was oddly ornamented at one end, and lay it along the device. Then the staff suddenly shot forward and sped humming through Nathan's astral form. The strange being was astounded, as were his fellows coming from behind. Nathan, however, galloped onward while yet still a few meters from the head creature, it turned and ran off. Nathan heard a hoarse cry. He watched as the head belonging to the back-implanted partial body turned around to look at him numerous times. Nathan felt the small incident as nothing but some welcome fun and ran behind the strange beings.

  Then something very strange happened. The partial body growing out of the back of the last of the running creatures came loose and fell into the grass. The rest of the creature ran on. That which had fallen off stood up from the grass and limped along, howling.

  Nathan realized his error: each of these beings actually consisted of two separate creatures—a four-legged one, like the one now chasing after the rest of the group and a two-legged one like the one which had sat on the first's back and now had fallen off. The fallen being was built similarly to Nathan's friend and the other strangers but its clothing was different and on its head it wore a colorful ornament.

  Nathan took on a new form, this time mimicking the two-legged being still limping through the grass in front of him. He glided behind it, caught up and stood in front of it, blocking the way. He saw its eyes open wide and the mouth open as well. He heard it scream and he made a gesture intended to be calming. However, the strange creature grabbed for an object made of a piece of wood and a piece of metal which had been affixed to part of its clothing; raised it, came closer to Nathan and threw it. Nathan heard the metal-wood object whiz through him and land on the ground behind. The alien screamed shrilly, then stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. It did not move any more.

  Nathan was simultaneously astounded and horrified. He had not wanted to hurt the alien, he had only wanted to find out if he could exchange thoughts with it; but evidently there was something about his astral form that frightened the alien. It was not dead, as Nathan saw from a steady movement of the being's trunk, but merely unconscious. It would soon stand up and run again after the 4-legged creature from which it had fallen.

  Nathan diffused into a formless cloud in order not to frighten the alien anymore should he suddenly wake up, then floated away.

  Suddenly he heard again the shrill, loud laughter of amusement belonging to the invisible lord of the planet. He heard it call out: "Poor friend! Did you scare him and thus scare yourself? You have no need to fear. He isn't real. He is only a shadow."

  Nathan understood nothing. The stranger seemed to notice his confusion.

  "Didn't you say you have a friend?" he asked. "He's waiting out there in a giant spaceship for something to happen so that he can reach this world, right? The beings you've seen here come from his home world. There, they call them Indians."

&nb
sp; Nathan looked back at the alien being lying far below in the grass, unconscious with terror.

  "It looks real, doesn't it?" said the stranger, amused. "Even though it's only a shadow."

  Nathan considered the concept of 'shadow'. It could not mean the bodiless existence because the alien creature had been solid and real. It , the ruler of this world, seemed to know of another means of Spirit-Matter transformation.

  Nathan waited for the stranger to speak again. But it did not. The brief conversation seemed to have been enough for it. Nathan looked up into the sky and saw an odd animal glide through the air with a wide wingspan. He looked at it for awhile, then moved off again.

  • • •

  According to the scale on the map the distance from the island in the ocean to the north coast should have been 1,800 kilometers. However, the figure Mike Tompetch read from the vidscreen of the light-locator varied between 700 and 850 kilometers. The uncertainty was due to the fact that the Gazelle's speed was not known within 20% of the exact figure. Seeing that he could no longer rely on comparisons with the map, Reginald Bell had calculated a rough formula.

  The shrinking had increased. If, at the beginning, they had flown over the island in the ocean while the ratio was 1:2, now it was about 1:2.3. Bell wondered if the variance in the figures couldn't be due to the inexactitude of the measurement or if the shrinking actually was a phenomenon even now in progress.

  Since the time the Gazelle had freed itself under full power from the jungle, 10 hours had gone by.

  Reginald Bell took the time to consider the changes in the surface of Wanderer. He remembered what he had heard before the flight from the Drusus and tried to make it correspond with what he saw with his own eyes on the sensor screen. Someone had come up with a theory of semispace according to which Wanderer was to be found in a rotating area of spatial instability. The rotation affected the axes of hyperspace and altered them, whereby the alteration was a constant function of the speed of rotation. What did it mean, alteration of an axis? Reginald Bell remembered that only a shortening had always been talked about. For an observer not taking part in the rotation, shortening an axis meant nothing but shrinking the scale. A stretch of land one kilometer long to an observer taking part in the rotation would only be 500 meters or even 100 meters long to an unaffected observer, depending on the degree of shortening. With that the effect which Bell and Tompetch had been wondering about for hours was explained.

  However, Reginald Bell realized quickly that this explanation was anything but comforting. Just as one or more of the spatial axes could be affected by the alteration, so could the time-axis, which would in turn mean that nothing certain could be said about the rate time passed on Wanderer relative to its passage aboard the Gazelle.

  The Gazelle had in the meantime left the equatorial ocean behind and was starting to cross a continent measuring 2,500 kilometers or so in a straight north-south line. At least the continent was 2,500 kilometers wide on the map; on the sensor screen, Tompetch had made his first readings and the continent measured only 1,000 kilometers. In other words, the foreshortening factor had increased. The ratio was now 1:2.5.

  With some relief Bell realized that the effect was to some degree favorable. When it is not known how much time one has, it is good being required to traverse only 2,000 or 3,000 kilometers rather than 6,000. He was thinking that just as the motors gave out.

  It happened suddenly and without warning. One moment the high-pitched whine of the motors filled the small control room; the next, it died out. It was suddenly deathly quiet in the Gazelle interior.

  Then Tompetch screamed in terror. He stared at the vidscreen, watching the continental outlines below increase in size with growing speed, seemingly coming straight toward the Gazelle. The antigravity maintained normal weight in the spaceboat cabin and neither Bell nor Tompetch felt the lightness of free fall. Yet there was no doubt that the craft was falling and in a few moments would smash against the ground.

  Reginald Bell began to act. With a single press of the button he intensified the protective forcefield that enveloped the Gazelle and with grim satisfaction listened to the hollow roar that penetrated the hull, emanating from the air outside being displaced by the falling spaceboat. With a balled fist Reginald Bell hit another switch and added to the forcefields an artificial gravitational field that counteracted Wanderer's gravity and braked the fall. Tompetch watched on his sensor screen as the image slowly came to rest while the gravitational field began to have its effect. The roaring died down and the Gazelle sank as though it hung from a huge parachute.

  With the help of his light-locator Mike Tompetch measured an altitude of just 1,200 meters and descent of six meters per second.

  "Don't believe for a second that we'll land softly," Reginald Bell said suddenly. "Six meters per second is a lot. Keep your head down and hang on!"

  It was uncanny, the dark-red world toward which they were falling. Bell tried to find something on the vidscreen to which he could orient himself. He saw a horizontal dark line running across the screen and assumed that it was the dividing line between earth and sky. Above it the screen was red; below it, the screen was black. There was no more to see.

  They were still 2,000 or 3,000 kilometers from their goal and without the Gazelle, Bell knew, they would never reach it.

  • • •

  Perry Rhodan looked around. Atlan smiled weakly. Marshall and Noir cowered in their seats, their eyes wide with fear. Ali el Jagat seemed to be unconscious, only now coming to. Nathan's still body was evidently the only thing aboard not to have been affected by the dangerous manoeuvre.

  "I don't know what it was," said Rhodan, attempting to make his voice sound as reassuring as possible, "but in any case we seem to have withstood it pretty well. We're here!"

  Atlan slowly loosened his magnetic belt, letting it slide back into its holder, and answered: "Evidently the transport beam of the teletransmitter is a clumsy way of getting into this semispace. Good heavens, I thought a bomb was going off."

  Perry Rhodan listened with only half an ear. Wanderer lay below them and it looked just as he remembered it. Being in semispace seemed not to have affected it. It must have noticed by this time that It had received some guests. Rhodan waited until It announced itself.

  But when the roaring laughter finally sounded, Rhodan had no time to pay any attention to it. Just before the first echo resounded in his mind, he had taken note of something else: the Gazelle's motors had stopped!

  Rhodan acted instinctively. There were but two manipulations which could be undertaken: pressing the button that would intensify the protective forcefields, and pulling the switch that would wrap the Gazelle in an artificial gravitational field. Once he had done both, he checked the motor controls. He pressed the test button, which lit up all the instrument lights connected to all still-functioning devices. Rhodan saw at first glance that only one light stayed dark, meaning all the equipment was in working order save one device.

  This one exception was the energy supply for the motors. During the Gazelle's transition from Einstein space to semispace, someone... or something... had absorbed all the energy being channeled to the spaceboat's motors.

  That reassured Rhodan. There were still a number of other generators on board and if he had enough time he was sure that he could connect the antigravity generator and the forcefield generators so that they channeled their energy into the motors instead of the antigrav field or into the protective field. With the means he had at his disposal, he could finish the job in three or four days. That much time he still had.

  He looked at the automatic calendar to convince himself he was right. As he read the lighted numerals he wanted to spring up and turn the mechanism back because at first sight he was certain someone had set the calendar wrong. Then, however, he remembered that he had checked the setting one last time before the Gazelle had left the Drusus. Since then, no one had had the opportunity to reset it. What he saw was correct, even if he could not e
xplain how it had happened.

  The chronometer read 15:32 hours. The date was April 30, 2042.

  • • •

  The impact was not half as bad as Reginald Bell had imagined it would be. There was a strong shock. Bell felt like a jack hammer had slammed him into the upholstery of his seat but the pain lasted for only half a second. Then it was all over. Groaning, Reginald Bell got up and looked at the vidscreen. The first thing he saw was that it had grown brighter outside.

  He tried to remember how far he had been able to see the last time he had looked at the vidscreen. His range of vision had certainly been no more than 100 meters. Now it had grown to at least one kilometer. On the other side of that boundary, outlines began to melt into the darkness. The sky now radiated an intense glowing red.

  Mike Tompetch had also stood up. He seemed confused but the realization that finally something had happened which he understood—even if it was a most regretful crash—seemed to have returned to him the largest part of his former self-confidence. "We can check the instruments," he said. "If we can find out what's broken down, perhaps we can..."

  "You're a smart boy, Tompetch," Bell interrupted. "I already checked during the fall. You won't believe this but someone has soaked up all energy from the generators like a thirsty man taking water from a sponge. And now the sponge is so dry you couldn't get another drop out of it even with a hydraulic press."

  "But the antigravity and the forcefields..."

  "Are still OK, right. Apparently their energy is in a form the energy thief can't use. I know what you're getting at: we can switch connections and fly with the antigravity or the forcefield energy. That's just what we're going to do. But first I want to look around a bit."

  Tompetch pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at the vidscreen. "Out... there?"

  Bell nodded. "Of course. There are some things we have to find out. For example, how well do the radio connections work when the sender is outside the Gazelle and the receiver is inside? After all, the physiotron is not going to come to me inside the ship—sooner or later I'm going to have to get out anyway."