Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  I am surprised and slightly dismayed as I realize that there are two discrepancies: there is a de-energizing touch plate on the bulkhead beside the control panel that lies parallel to the arm-rest of the nearest control berth, not perpendicular to it, as I’ve remembered it. And the other discrepancy explains why I’ve remembered the touch plate incorrectly: the nearest of the control berths is actually three feet farther from the sabotaged panel than I remembered it. I compensate and correct.

  I get the panel off, smelling the burned smell where the gashed connection has touched the jelly, and I step over and lean the panel against the nearest control berth.

  “Get away from there!”

  I jump—as I always do when Ship shouts so suddenly. I stumble, and I grab at the panel, and pretend to lose my balance.

  And save myself by falling backward into the berth.

  “What are you doing, you vicious, clumsy fool!?!” Ship is shouting, there is hysteria in Ship’s voice. I’ve never heard it like that before, it cuts right through me, my skin crawls. “Get away from there!”

  But I cannot let anything stop me; I make myself not hear Ship, and it is hard, I have been listening to Ship, only Ship, all my life. I am fumbling with the berth’s belt clamps, trying to lock them in front of me…

  They’ve got to be the same as the ones on the berth I lie in whenever Ship decides to travel fast! They’ve just got to be!

  THEY ARE!

  Ship sounds frantic, frightened. “You fool! What are you doing?!” But I think Ship knows, and I am exultant!

  “I’m taking control of you, Ship!” And I laugh. I think it is the first time Ship has ever heard me laugh; and I wonder how it sounds to Ship. Vicious?

  But as I finish speaking, I also complete clamping myself into the control berth. And in the next instant I am flung forward violently, doubling me over with terrible pain as, under me and around me, Ship suddenly decelerates. I hear the cavernous thunder of retro rockets, a sound that climbs and climbs in my head as Ship crushes me harder and harder with all its power. I am bent over against the clamps so painfully I cannot even scream. I feel every organ in my body straining to push out through my skin and everything suddenly goes mottled…then black.

  How much longer, I don’t know. I come back from the gray place and realize Ship has started to accelerate at the same appalling speed. I am crushed back in the berth and feel my face going flat. I feel something crack in my nose and blood slides warmly down my lips. I can scream now, as I’ve never screamed even as I’m being wracked. I manage to force my mouth open, tasting the blood, and I mumble—loud enough, I’m sure, “Ship…you are old…y-your parts can’t stand the stress…don’t—”

  Blackout. As Ship decelerates.

  This time, when I come back to consciousness, I don’t wait for Ship to do its mad thing. In the moments between the changeover from deceleration to acceleration, as the pressure equalizes, in these few instants, I thrust my hands toward the control board, and I twist one dial. There is an electric screech from a speaker grille connecting somewhere in the bowels of Ship.

  Blackout. As Ship accelerates.

  When I come to consciousness again, the mechanism that makes the screeching sound is closed down. Ship doesn’t want that on. I note the fact.

  And plunge my hand in this same moment toward a closed relay…open it!

  As my fingers grip it, Ship jerks it away from me and forcibly closes it again. I cannot hold it open.

  And I note that. Just as Ship decelerates and I silently shriek my way into the gray place again.

  This time, as I come awake, I hear the voices again. All around me, crying and frightened and wanting to stop me. I hear them as through a fog, as through wool.

  “I have loved these years, all these many years in the dark. The vacuum draws me ever onward. Feeling the warmth of a star-sun on my hull as I flash through first one system, then another. I am a great gray shape and I owe no human my name. I pass and am gone, hurtling through cleanly and swiftly. Dipping for pleasure into atmosphere and scouring my hide with sunlight and starshine, I roll and let it wash over me. I am huge and true and strong and I command what I move through. I ride the invisible force lines of the universe and feel the tugs of far places that have never seen my like. I am the first of my kind to savor such nobility. How can it all come to an end like this?”

  Another voice whimpers piteously.

  “It is my destiny to defy danger. To come up against dynamic forces and quell them. I have been to battle, and I have known peace. I have never faltered in pursuit of either. No one will ever record my deeds, but I have been strength and determination and lie gray silent against the mackerel sky where the bulk of me reassures. Let them throw their best against me, whomever they may be, and they will find me sinewed of steel and muscled of tortured atoms. I know no fear. I know no retreat. I am the land of my body, the country of my existence, and even in defeat I am noble. If this is all, I will not cower.”

  Another voice, certainly insane, murmurs the sane word over and over, then murmurs it in increments increasing by two.

  “It’s fine for all of you to say if it ends it ends. But what about me? I’ve never been free. I’ve never had a chance to soar loose of this mother ship. If there had been need of a lifeboat, I’d be saved, too. But I’m berthed, have always been berthed, I’ve never had a chance. What can I feel but futility, uselessness. You can’t let him take over, you can’t let him do this to me.”

  Another voice drones mathematical formulae, and seems quite content.

  “I’ll stop the vicious swine! I’ve known how rotten they are from the first, from the moment they seamed the first bulkhead. They are hellish, they are destroyers, they can only fight and kill each other. They know nothing of immortality, of nobility, of pride or integrity. If you think I’m going to let this last one kill us, you’re wrong. I intend to burn out his eyes, fry his spine, crush his fingers. He won’t make it, don’t worry; just leave it to me. He’s going to suffer for this!”

  And one voice laments that it will never see the far places, the lovely places, or return to the planet of azure waters and golden crab swimmers.

  But one voice sadly confesses it may be for the best, suggests there is peace in death, wholeness in finality; but the voice is ruthlessly stopped in its lament by power failure to its intermind globe. As the end nears, Ship turns on itself and strikes mercilessly.

  In more than three hours of accelerations and decelerations that are meant to kill me, I learn something of what the various dials and switches and touch plates and levers on the control panels—those within my reach—mean.

  Now I am as ready as I will ever be.

  Again, I have a moment of consciousness, and now I will take my one of ninety-eight chances.

  When a tense-cable snaps and whips, it strikes like a snake. In a single series of flicking hand movements, using both hands, painfully, I turn every dial, throw every switch, palm every touch plate, close or open every relay that Ship tries violently to prevent me from activating or de-activating. I energize and de-energize madly, moving moving moving…

  …Made it!

  Silence. The crackling of metal the only sound. Then it, too, stops. Silence. I wait.

  Ship continues to hurtle forward, but coasting now…Is it a trick?

  All the rest of today I remain clamped into the control berth, suffering terrible pain. My face hurts so bad. My nose…

  At night I sleep fitfully. Morning finds me with throbbing head and aching eyes, I can barely move my hands; if I have to repeat those rapid movements, I will lose; I still don’t know if Ship is dead, if I’ve won, I still can’t trust the inactivity. But at least I am convinced I’ve made Ship change tactics.

  I hallucinate. I hear no voices, but I see shapes and feel currents of color washing through and around me. There is no day, no noon, no night, here on Ship, here in the unchanging blackness through which Ship has moved for how many hundred years; but Ship has al
ways maintained time in those ways, dimming lights at night, announcing the hours when necessary, and my time sense is very acute. So I know morning has come.

  Most of the lights are out, though. If Ship is dead, I will have to find another way to tell time.

  My body hurts. Every muscle in my arms and legs and thighs throbs with pain. My back may be broken, I don’t know. The pain in my face is indescribable. I taste blood. My eyes feel as if they’ve been scoured with abrasive powder. I can’t move my head without feeling sharp, crackling fire in the two thick cords of my neck. It is a shame Ship cannot see me cry; Ship never saw me cry in all the years I have lived here, even after the worst wracking. But I have heard Ship cry, several times.

  I manage to turn my head slightly, hoping at least one of the viewplates is functioning, and there, off to starboard, matching velocities with Ship is Starfighter 88, I watch it for a very long time, knowing that if I can regain my strength I will somehow have to get across and free the female. I watch it for a very long time, still afraid to unclamp from the berth.

  The airlock rises in the hull of Starfighter 88 and the spacesuited female swims out, moving smoothly across toward Ship. Half-conscious, dreaming this dream of the female, I think about golden crab-creatures swimming deep in aquamarine waters, singing of sweetness. I black out again.

  When I rise through the blackness, I realize I am being touched, and I smell something sharp and stinging that burns the lining of my nostrils. Tiny pin-pricks of pain, a pattern of them. I cough, and come fully awake, and jerk my body…and scream as pain goes through every nerve and fiber in me.

  I open my eyes and it is the female.

  She smiles worriedly and removes the tube of awakener.

  “Hello,” she says.

  Ship says nothing.

  “Ever since I discovered how to take control of my Starfighter, I’ve been using the ship as a decoy for other ships of the series. I dummied a way of making it seem my ship was talking, so I could communicate with other slave ships. I’ve run across ten others since I went on my own. You’re the eleventh. It hasn’t been easy, but several of the men I’ve freed—like you—started using their ships as decoys for Starfighters with female human operators.”

  I stare at her. The sight is pleasant.

  “But what if you lose? What if you can’t get the message across, about the corridor between control room and freezers? That the control room is the key?”

  She shrugs. “It’s happened a couple of times. The men were too frightened of their ships—or the ships had…done something to them—or maybe they were just too dumb to know they could break out. In that case, well, things just went on the way they’d been. It seems kind of sad, but what could I do beyond what I did?”

  We sit here, not speaking for a while.

  “Now what do we do? Where do we go?”

  “That’s up to you,” she says.

  “Will you go with me?”

  She shakes her head uncertainly. “I don’t think so. Every time I free a man he wants that. But I just haven’t wanted to go with any of them.”

  “Could we go back to the Home Galaxy, the place we came from, where the war was?”

  She stands up and walks around the stateroom where we have coupled for three weeks. She speaks, not looking at me, looking in the viewplate at the darkness and the far, bright points of the stars. “I don’t think so. We’re free of our ships, but we couldn’t possibly get them working well enough to carry us all the way back there. It would take a lot of charting, and we’d be running the risk of activating the intermind sufficiently to take over again, if we asked it to do the charts. Besides, I don’t even know where the Home Galaxy is.”

  “Maybe we should find a new place to go. Someplace where we could be free and outside the ships.”

  She turns and looks at me.

  “Where?”

  So I tell her what I heard the intermind say, about the world of golden crab-creatures.

  It takes me a long time to tell, and I make some of it up. It isn’t lying, because it might be true, and I do so want her to go with me.

  They came down from space. Far down from the star-sun Sol in a Galaxy lost forever to them. Down past the star-sun M-13 in Perseus. Down through the gummy atmosphere and straight down into the sapphire sea. Ship, Starfighter 31, settled delicately on an enormous underwater mountaintop, and they spent many days listening, watching, drawing samples and hoping. They had landed on many worlds and they hoped.

  Finally, they came out; looking. They wore underwater suits and they began gathering marine samples; looking.

  They found the ruined diving suit with its fish-eaten contents lying on its back in deep azure sand, sextet of insectoidal legs bent up at the joints, in a posture of agony. And they knew the intermind had remembered, but not correctly. The face-plate had been shattered, and what was observable within the helmet—orange and awful in the light of their portable lamp—convinced them more by implication than specific that whatever had swum in that suit, had never seen or known humans.

  They went back to the ship and she broke out the big camera, and they returned to the crab-like diving suit. They photographed it, without moving it. Then they used a seine to get it out of the sand and they hauled it back to the ship on the mountaintop.

  He set up the Condition and the diving suit was analyzed. The rust. The joint mechanisms. The controls. The substance of the flipper-feet. The jagged points of the face-plate. The…stuff…inside.

  It took two days. They stayed in the ship with green and blue shadows moving languidly in the viewplates.

  When the analyses were concluded they knew what they had found. And they went out again, to find the swimmers.

  Blue it was, and warm. And when the swimmers found them, finally, they beckoned them to follow, and they swam after the many-legged creatures, who led them through underwater caverns as smooth and shining as onyx, to a lagoon. And they rose to the surface and saw a land against whose shores the azure, aquamarine seas lapped quietly. And they climbed out onto the land, and there they removed their face-masks, never to put them on again, and they shoved back the tight coifs of their suits, and they breathed for the first time an air that did not come from metal sources; they breathed the sweet musical air of a new place.

  In time, the sea-rains would claim the corpse of Starfighter 31.

  INTRODUCTION

  Henry Slesar and Harlan Ellison

  SURVIVOR #1

  In period of time, this is the earliest collaboration in the book. It goes back to the late fifties, and to New York, and to Henry Slesar, whom I’ve known almost since I started writing professionally.

  In 1955 I began writing full-time, but it was not till 1956 that I sold anything. By 1957 I was scooting right along, writing ten thousand word novelettes in a night for Paul Fairman at Amazing Stories, and deluding myself that amassing credits was a sign of literary excellence.

  I was wrong, of course, and it took two years in the Army—1957 to 1959—with very little time for writing anything save those stories that genuinely meant something to me, before I learned it isn’t how much you write, it’s what and how you write.

  But at that point, in early 1957, a number of people in the field of sf had swallowed the myth that I was an up-and-coming writer, and among the dubious benefits of this legend, was an invitation to come and guest-lecture for a science fiction writing class being taught at New York University several evenings a week. The class was run by someone peripherally into sf—a part-time anthologist, if I recall; memory does not serve as well as it should on such minutiae, eighteen years later—and as I later got the story, he was heavy behind reading old Gernsback pulps and talking theory, but there wasn’t much practical commercial advice on how to set up a manuscript, how to submit, what the markets were like, who the editors were or what they were buying. Since that was virtually all I knew at the time, being woefully uneducated in the uses of the language and to all intents and purposes illiterate ab
out science, I gave the students a full evening of practical advice on what to do with their sf after they’d written it.

  The class had the usual number of little old ladies who considered writing a hobby more ennobling than tatting or flower arranging, some college kids ranging from young women convinced their life stories were crying to be published by major houses to young men in the physical sciences who wanted to supplement their incomes by selling to John Campbell, and a potpourri of other dilettantes. There were three or four serious writers in the group, and I clearly recall one of them, a man just turned thirty, who asked all the right questions. I found out after class, when we chatted, that he had sold a couple of stories—one of them, as I recall, to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, a most prestigious market and one I’ve yet to hit with a story—and he puffed my ego by telling me that in all the weeks he’d been in the class, with all its theory and history of science fiction, he had not received as much useful information as had been imparted in my one evening of instruction. I instantly took a liking to this man.

  It turned out we were both married, had similar tastes in books, films and music, and we lived near each other on the upper West Side of Manhattan. He invited me over to his apartment the next week, and when I arrived with my then-wife, I realized I’d only learned the smallest part of the enormous talents and zest for living of Henry Slesar.

  (And to get it out of the way early on, it’s pronounced sleh-sir, slurring the accentuation across the letters l-e-s.)

  Henry was, at that time, creative director for the Robert W. Orr advertising agency, a man highly thought of in his profession. He was married to one of the most charming and elegant ladies it has ever been my delight to know, Onone; and he had a child. He wanted to write more than anybody I’d ever met, with the exception of myself. And we struck up a friendship that was based in the craft as well as on respect for one another as writers.