by Chad Oliver
And now he was no longer with them.
Mark Langston turned off the screen and limped back to his desk. They had opened up the greatest frontier of them all—and for what? For Mrs. Simmons and Laura? For stupidity and greed and ignorance? For wealthy tourists who made the Earth a world to be ridiculed? For what?
Yes, he was still in space. He smiled without humor. He would have been wiser to have stayed on Earth, or on one of a hundred worlds that he had known. Wiser to have cut it cleanly and for good. Wiser to have left space behind him. Once, on the long runs, the new runs, he had been proud and happy to be a man; he had gloried in it. Now—
But he could not leave space. It was a part of him.
A red light flashed over his visibox. He switched it on. It was Stan Owens, the ship anthropologist. He looked excited, which was profoundly unusual.
“What’s up, Stan? More of those pesky space pirates?”
“Cut the clowning, Father Time. We’ve run smack dab into the middle of something.”
“On the Capella run? What is it—the Ultimate Boredom at last?”
“On the level, Mark. We need you in the control room on the double.”
Mark Langston eyed his friend’s face with sudden interest. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not kidding!”
“Come up and see for yourself,” Owens smiled, and switched off.
Mark Langston left his office at a thoroughly respectable speed, hurried down the corridor with scarcely a limp, and caught the lift to the control room. He stepped out and instantly it hit him—the spirit, the feel of a ship up against the unknown. He had known that feeling a thousand times in his life, and he responded to it with a spreading grin.
Owens collared him and pulled him toward a knot of men gathered around a subsidiary computer. “Hang on tight, old son,” the anthropologist said. “This may be too much for your ancient nervous system—this crate has hit the well-known jackpot.”
The men stepped back to make room and Captain Kleberg welcomed Mark by shoving a computer report into his hand. “Take a look at this, Mark,”’ he said, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair, “I’ve about decided that the computer’s psycho, or we’re psycho, or both.”
Langston examined the report with a practiced eye. It was a sub-space survey report—normal space being sub-space with respect to their ship, the Wilson Langford, in hyperspace—and seemed to be routine enough at first glance. There was the usual co-ordinate check, the drift check, the hydrogen check, the distress beam check—nothing to get excited about. In fact—
Then he saw it.
“But that’s impossible,” he said.
“Agreed,” said Captain Kleberg. “But there it is.”
“You figure it out,” Owens suggested.
Mark Langston checked the report again carefully. “Is this a gag?” he asked, knowing full well that it wasn’t. “There can’t be a ship down there.”
“Just the same,” pointed out the Navigation Officer, “thar she blows!”
“Maybe it’s the Flying Dutchman,” Owens offered.
Langston tried to think the thing through logically. But it simply wasn’t logical. There evidently was some sort of a ship down there, in normal space, light-years out from any planetary system. What was it doing there? How did it get there?
“Any distress calls of any sort?” he asked.
“Dead silence,” said Captain Kleberg. “And we can’t get a blip out of her.”
“How about positioning?”
“We’re almost directly ‘above’ her,” the Navigation Officer reported. “We’re practically back-pedaling to keep from losing her.”
“How about acceleration?”
“Hard to tell, but I’d guess that she’s in free fall. Absolutely no energy tracings at all, and no radiation. She’s dead.”
Langston let that sink in for a minute. “Have you got a picture yet?” he asked finally.
“They’re building one up downstairs,” Captain Kleberg said. “It isn’t an easy job, of course, but they should be getting something soon.”
“Just wait until some of our noble human cargo gets wind of the fact that we’re off our course and will miss scheduled landing time by a week or three,” Stan Owens chuckled. “We’ll have everybody down on us like a pack of hyenas.”
“That isn’t funny,” said Captain Kleberg.
“We’ll probably get strung up by our thumbs,” Mark Langston said, “while the esteemed officials of the Interstellar Board of Trade dance around the tribal fires and massage our toes with jolly acid.”
“That isn’t funny either,” the harassed captain pointed out.
“Have you met Mrs. Simmons?” asked Stan Owens fiendishly. “A very interesting cultural phenomenon—”
“You and your cultural phenomena,” shot back Captain Kleberg. “You anthropologists think you’re so—”
There was a whirring buzz and a three-dimensional mock-up thumped out of a chute. Captain Kleberg snatched it up and put it on a chart table where everyone could get a good look at it.
There was a dead silence in the control room.
“It just can’t be,” Captain Kleberg said finally, his voice very small.
“No,” Mark Langston agreed softly. “But it is.”
The men stared at each other, searching for words that were not there.
They came up from the depths, spawned in hate, fed on fury. Collins could smell them, feel the warmth currents from their bodies and the rush and surge of air currents from beating wings. They choked the chamber, filling it, strangling it, shooting up like gas under pressure from the world below.
Like creatures from hell, and yet—
Collins edged back to the mouth of the tunnel and stopped, letting the rest of the rear guard slide into position around him. Differences were forgotten now, melted in the flame of danger. Collins smiled without humor. It was ironic—they respected him only as a fighter—
He floated down to the very floor of the chamber and touched the cold metal. He blanked his mind, watching his chance.
The other men came in high, as they always did, and he felt and smelled and heard the battle in the darkness above him. Knives and clubs and spears collided with clanging crashes and the echoes of harsh breathing filled the chamber with sound. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Something wet and sticky brushed his face—blood pumping in a warm pulsing stream from a punctured artery.
With a blind rage seething within him, a rage as much at himself as his enemies, Collins launched himself from the floor. His nostrils quivered and he angrily choked off a low animal growl of defiance in his throat. He went up, high and hard, his knife extended in front of him. For a long, intolerable instant there was nothing. And then—contact.
Collins cut and slashed with methodical accuracy, giving no warning and no quarter. Like so many men who see fighting for what it is, he cherished no illusions about it and was chillingly effective. His invisible antagonist fought in silence and then stopped, suddenly. Collins moved on, pushing the body away from him. He went up again, slowly, trying to sort the sounds and smells and feelings of battle into some kind of a coherent pattern that would enable him to tell friend from foe. He hesitated, briefly, sensing danger, and then shifted just in time as something hissed past his head and struck his shoulder a numbing blow.
Fighting to see, Collins closed to the attack. The man almost got away from him, but he grabbed a foot and held on. The man suddenly lurched forward and up, and Collins felt the rush of air from his wings. Desperately, he lashed out with his knife. He had to get the mutant before he was smashed against a wall—those fragile wings gave the man an impossible advantage in the open air.
A foot kicked him over and over again, methodically, in the face. There was a complete absence of vocal sound, lending to the combat the unreal deadness of a dream. Collins twisted into position, ignoring the kicking foot, and slashed at a wing. The knife punched home, and Collins carefully ripped the thin membrane t
o shreds. His opponent faltered. Collins cut him again, and then was pushed away. Collins let him go and dived for the tunnel. He could feel the battle receding around him as the other men began to turn back. The smell of blood was sickening in the still air. His shoulder throbbed with pain and his throat was dry and thick with dust.
Collins darted into the tunnel, gasping for breath, and pushed himself forward. He hadn’t gone ten yards before he contacted someone else—going the other way.
A knife whirred past his ear and he caught an arm and twisted. There was only a weak, hopeless resistance. Tired or wounded, or perhaps both, he thought grimly. He moved in for the kill, his own knife ready.
“You’re beaten,” he whispered. “Surrender.”
By way of reply, a hand reached out of the darkness and fingernails clawed at his face. Collins closed in warily, seeking an opening. A cornered animal was always dangerous, he had read, and man was no exception. But he was sick of the killing, sick with horror and the smell of blood. His anger was gone, leaving the man. But he could see no way out. What could you do with such a man? When you gave him a chance for his life, he thanked you with renewed fury. His enemy was not a man, he caught himself thinking. He was an animal—
He raised the knife.
“My spirit will return to destroy you,” the man hissed weakly. “My spirit will not forget!”
Suddenly revolted by the thing he had almost done, Collins returned the knife to its sheath.
“You are my prisoner,” he said quietly.
The man laughed in his face and clawed him again, feebly. Collins hit him once, wincing as his fist smashed into his jaw, holding on to the other’s arm to keep him from floating away. Then he pulled the inert body with him down the tunnel, away from the chamber of death and into the endless darkness and the silence.
After turning the man over to Malcolm, and resting briefly in his quarters, Collins swam up through the dark tunnels to the captain’s room. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and floated inside.
The captain’s torch was burning as always. It was a wonderful thing, as all the special torches were with their combustion draft chambers, but more wonderful still was the soft, steady light from the myriad of stars that were suspended like gleaming jewels in the black velvet of the viewports. Collins drank in their beauty with his eyes and then turned toward the captain.
“Sit down, my boy,” the captain said. “I was just having lunch.”
The captain was eating alone at the little table in the center of the control room. His long, snow-white hair was silver in the flickering torchlight and his dark eyes flashed in his hard, deeply-lined face. The captain had strapped himself into his chair and fastened the plate and glass to the nailed-down table. It was far simpler to eat while floating, but the captain refused to do so.
Collins slid into the chair across from him and buckled himself in place. He ate in silence for a moment, swallowing the sticky synthetics without relish and washing them down with drafts of water sucked up through a straw from a closed glass.
“We’ve got to find a way,” Collins said finally.
“Yes. We lost a man.”
“There must be a way.”
“There is no way,” the captain said slowly. “But we must keep trying.”
Collins looked at the captain, his mind tired with worry. The captain was very old now, he thought. Very old, this man who had held them all together for so long. When he was gone—
“They are beginning to slip, my boy,” the captain said. “I don’t know how much longer we can hold them. They are turning into animals like the rest of them. And when that happens, we are through. The fools! Do they believe that the food and water will last forever? Time, time—we must have more time, and it is running out on us.”
Collins shrugged. “We’re losing the fight as it is,” he pointed out. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We need more than time, and dreams won’t change the situation any.”
“You’re young yet, my boy,” the captain said softly. “There will come a time when dreams will be all you have left.”
Collins was nervous, sitting there in the great loneliness with the captain. The turn their conversation had taken worried him, and his worry was tinged with embarrassment. It was not good to sit in on another man’s innermost thoughts; that was why there were barriers between human beings. And the captain was so old, sitting there—a shell of a man with his strength eaten away by long years spent in a futile battle. If there had been but one real victory, rather than an endless slow defeat—
But there hadn’t been—and yet the captain must not give up, for when he went down they all went down. “This is a real problem, sir,” he said, “a problem in science. As such, it has an answer. You’ve told me that all of my life. If it isn’t true—”
“Oh, it’s true, it’s true,” the captain sighed, running a thin hand through his snow-white hair. “It’s true as far as it goes. But it isn’t just a problem in science we have to face here—it’s a problem in human relationships. We have to solve that problem first, and even then I’m no longer sure that we’re capable of solving the other. It’s been so long—”
“It’s impossible,” Collins stated flatly, drawing the captain out. “It just couldn’t have happened. What could have gone wrong? We’ve been over it a thousand times, all of us—studied the plans, the records, the theories. There must be an extra factor somewhere, some strange and unknowable—”
“Rubbish!” exclaimed the captain violently, stung out of his apathy. “Let’s have no metaphysical gibberish, my boy—not in this room.”
“But how did it happen?”
“That’s not the question,” the captain snapped, his eyes flashing again. “The question is, what are we going to do about it? Here we are—accept that. Where do we go from here?”
Collins didn’t answer him, for a good and simple reason. There wasn’t any answer. The two men sat silently at the strange table in the semidarkness, watching the shadows on the walls and the stars beyond. A cold knot of despair gnawed at Collins’ stomach. What chance did they have, really? What were the odds against them? It might be easier to give up, to let yourself drift forever down the soft corridors of thoughtlessness, to forget—
Then he looked at the captain, who watched him wordlessly. He had not quit—he had fought and tried and worked and dreamed until his blood grew slow within him and still had not surrendered to the shadows and the darkness. He had nagged them and ridiculed them and hurt them—but he had kept them men.
Collins unfastened his belt and floated free of the chair.
“I’m going to see the other man I brought in,” he said. “Maybe I can find a lead.”
“Good luck, my boy,” said the captain softly.
Collins pushed off against a brace and swam into the darkness. All life ended in death, that he knew. But it was how you met that death that made the difference, that marked off finally one man from another. When his turn came, as he sensed it was coming now, he wanted to go out the way a man should—and not like a mindless beast that screamed and struggled in a black vault of emptiness, unloved and alone.
The four men eyed each other over the bottle on Captain Kleberg’s private table. All of them occupied chairs, but other than that their positions were remarkably dissimilar. Captain Kleberg sat in a remotely orthodox position, looking, Mark Langston thought, as though his best friend had just strolled in and punched him in the face. Stan Owens, an enigmatic smile playing around the corners of his mouth, had tilted his chair back at a precarious angle and propped his large and unlovely feet up on the table. Jim McConnell, the lanky chief engineer on the Wilson Langford, slouched far down with his long legs extending far underneath the table and his face just about even with the neck of the bottle. Mark Langston had turned his chair backwards and perched on it like a saddle, puffing steadily on a thoroughly venerable pipe and occasionally bombarding all concerned with an ominous cloud of blue smoke.
“Well, gentlemen
,” said Mark Langston, “we seem to have walked smack into a double-dyed purple whiz.”
“You’ve said that before,” Captain Kleberg pointed out gloomily. “I want to know what we’re going to do about it.”
“And just take your time, boys,” Owens said airily. “Kleberg can always find another job. He might become a tramp or something.”
“They’ll grind me up for glue,” Captain Kleberg announced unhappily.
Jim McConnell uncoiled somewhat and cocked a finger, pistollike, at his companions. “I’d just like to point out that this conference is getting nowhere fast,” he said lazily. “Suppose we either get down to business or get out the cards and be done with it.”
“Nice words, Jim,” Mark Langston said. “Back them up with something.”
“O.K.,” agreed McConnell, hanging a cigarette at a miraculous angle out of his mouth, “here’s the way I see it. First of all, we’ve found a derelict. It happens to be the old Viking, but what’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference?” echoed Mark Langston. The first ship, his mind whispered. The first of them all. “If you meant that, it’s a singularly cold remark to make.”
“Agreed,” Jim McConnell nodded, smiling faintly. “If I meant it. I’m just trying to jolt you jokers down to earth, or at least to ship-level. We won’t get anywhere with this ah-the-wonder-of-it-all attitude. That dead ship down there is the Viking, the first of the interstellar ships, the ship that vanished—the ship that was, in fact, an anachronism almost before it got started—but as far as we’re concerned it might just as well be the Mudball X. With reference to this problem, it’s just a ship and the sooner we start looking at it that way the sooner we’ll start getting somewhere. End of speech, protected by copyright.”
“Don’t stop now, Jim,” Captain Kleberg said. “Let’s see where we get.”
McConnell lit a new cigarette from the remnants of its predecessor and shifted his shoulders against the back of the chair until he was comfortable. “Here’s the deal then, as I see it,” he said slowly. “The Viking down there has been unreported for over two hundred years. As far as we can tell, there’s no life on her—or at any rate none that’s capable of handling her technological equipment. The Viking appears to be good and dead. But when she blasted off, back in the year 2100, she carried a crew of two hundred—one hundred men and one hundred women. Every schoolboy knows their story. First question: Is it possible that anyone is still alive on that ship?”